Do not ask me where, when, or to whom the young man has delivered himself of these opinions, most of which I have at at least second hand from Ambrose. I have indeed, on occasion since, heard him speak, in a voice almost inaudible and invariably in ellipses, shrugs, nods, fragments, hums, non sequiturs, dashes, and suspension points. Ambrose declares that his immediate presence (I must add “except at formal Guy Fawkes Day dinner parties”) is uncommonly compelling; that in it most “issues” and “positions” seem idly theoretical, or simply don’t come up however much one had meant to raise them; that the most outrageous situations are acquiesced in and seem justified by “the wordless force of his personality.” I deny none of the above — though I suspect my lover of some projection! — and I do indeed find Prinz a quietly disquieting, inarticulately insistent fellow: a sort of saxifrage in the cracks of the contemporary, or (to borrow one of Ambrose’s tidewater tropes) a starfish on the oyster bed of art. But one wonders—this one, anyroad — whether that vague antiverbality proceeds from (I had almost said bespeaks) a mindless will or a mere vacuum; whether the man be not, after all, all surface: a clouded transparency, a… film.
If the last, I’d have graded him B at best that November evening, which we are now done with. Today — I don’t know. I left Tidewater Farms no wiser than I’d arrived, but sorely troubled. To Joe Morgan and Todd Andrews, of course, I could say nothing of my deepest concerns; but in the car back to Cambridge from Redmans Neck (Morgan kindly returned us to our addresses) I learned that while my two pleasant bachelor companions agreed that A. B. Cook was an enigma and a charlatan, more subtle and sophisticated than the role he played with Schott and Company, they did not (then) agree on what if anything underlay the oafish masquerade. Andrews was inclined to think him a wealthy, eccentric, heartfelt reactionary whose support (both financial and poetical) of certain Dixiecrat politicians was legitimate if lamentable; whose friendships with Harrison and other civilised right-wingers were genuine, his relations with vulgar red-necks like Schott merely expedient. And his duplicity, in Todd Andrews’s opinion, was probably limited to loudly supporting in the crudest fashion a famously conservative gubernatorial candidate so that a lesser-known but even more conservative could run against him on what pretended to be a liberal platform, and the Tories win in either case. The rest, he declared — Cook’s rumoured paramilitary “club” on or near Bloodsworth Island, his rumoured connexion with the Baltimore chapter of the American Nazi party (all news to me) — was mere liberal-baiting panache.
Morgan disagreed. Through his activities with the historical society he’d had frequent dealings with Cook, who’d been the first to propose him to Harrison Mack for the presidency of Tidewater Tech, as he’d been the first subsequently to propose his resignation from Marshyhope in favour of Schott. Quite apart from any grudge against the man for whatever harm he might do the college (it is a mark of Morgan’s tact that he didn’t mention Cook’s slanderous resurrection, so to speak, of his late wife’s death), Morgan believed him genuinely menacing and perhaps psychopathological. What’s more, he believed there might be some truth in a body of rumour that was news to Mr Andrews as well as to me: that Cook was literally sinister, a threat not from the right but from the left! On this view, his public connexion with right-wing extremists was for the purpose of sabotaging their activities with ostensibly favourable publicity and establishing a creditable “cover” for his real connexions with — not the Far Left, exactly, but a grab bag of terrorists: the F.L.N., the I.R.A., the P.L.O., the Quebec separatists, the farther-out black and Indian nationalists — all of whom, of course, had operatives in Washington.
“Once, ten years ago,” Morgan told us matter-of-factly, “when I first got to know him, Cook offered to arrange a murder for me. Said it was the easiest thing in the world. I didn’t take him up on it, but I didn’t have the impression he was boasting, either.”
We didn’t press; perhaps Andrews, like me, wondered uncomfortably whether the victim was to have been the late Mrs Morgan or someone involved in her death. Given the whispering campaign against him, Morgan’s remark seemed ill-considered — but I took it as a mark of his trust, and was in any case more interested in Cook’s possible connexions with André, perhaps via the Free-Quebec people. And Morgan was so healthy-looking, so cheerfully normal, even boyish of face, it was impossible to imagine him involved in anything clandestine, much less violent. Todd Andrews dismissed the whole “Second Revolution business”—which he assumed was what the rumoured leftism added up to — as another of Cook’s cranky red herrings, and wished only that he wouldn’t feed Harrison’s folly with it. Morgan agreed that it might well be mere crankery, but considered it dangerous crankery withal. And so the evening ended, Andrews remarking as he bade me good night that in his opinion my own unexpected role in his friend’s delusion was more therapeutic, at least palliative, than not. He hoped I would indulge poor Harrison as far as my discretion permitted.
Given two so agreeable alternative candidates, why did I, a month or two later, become Harrison Mack’s mistress? To begin with, after Fort Erie I had resolved, as I’ve explained, to try to put André behind me, for the sake of my own sanity, though of course etc. And I have never been given to celibacy! Had either Andrews or Morgan shown particular interest — but they didn’t. Morgan was perhaps the likelier possibility, though rather young for my taste (i.e., about my own age); but before we came to know each other well enough for me to tell him about André, for example, and explain his relationship to Cook, Morgan had resigned, gone to Amherst, “freaked out,” and disappeared. Andrews I found (and find) attractive too, despite the Eastern Shore brogue and Southern manner; we became and remain affectionate friends. But though a confirmed bachelor, he has, I gather, other, more established female friendships, and in his late sixties is no libertine.
With his urging joined to Jane’s and Doctor #2’s, I spent much time at Tidewater Farms after Jane left, when too Harrison’s manner somewhat altered. As his general condition rapidly declined, he grew at once madder and more lucid. The wife he’d had “when he was in the world,” as he came to phrase it, he pitied, admired, and understood well, in my estimation; he hoped “the real George III” had been as fortunate, on balance, with Queen Charlotte. He was glad Jane was not present in his “final stages,” for both their sakes; they had loved each other, he was certain she still wished him well, as he did her, and he had no doubt that widowhood would be a relief for her. He knew now, more often than not, that he wasn’t “really” George III—“any more than George III was, in his last years”: that he was the victim of a psychopathological delusion, whose cause and possible cure remained mysterious and were of no further interest to him. The world of Harrison Mack, Redmans Neck, 20th-century America, caused him great pain; the world of George III, Windsor, early 19th-century England, was somehow soothing, never mind wherefore. An inoperable patient, he craved now only palliation. With Jane’s long-distance consent we discharged Doctor #1, and left #2 on call merely in the event of some unforeseen lapse of control. He was summoned only once thereafter.