Letters (135 page)

Thus much for the Dawn’s Early Light, by which now (I mean roughly half after eight, when the basic outlines of the above are coming clear to us late arrivals) it occurs to Ambrose that the “F. S. Key” letter given him by Cook had been described by its giver as “in fact a letter to [his] son,” which he would want back. Perhaps it will, if not prove the key to these mysteries, at least cast some light upon them? He hurries to the dressing room barracks for his costume coat (my heart is aflutter; what will Cook be saying to his “son,” and where are the yacht and that young man?) and finds that Cook’s letter is no longer in it: only yours—its envelope neatly slit, its return address neatly snipped—which we shall read shortly, over breakfast. Bruce calls to us: Missing, is it? We are being filmed and recorded on hand signals from Prinz, flanked by his sturdy Tweedles. Yeah, missing, the Author glowers at the Director. Prinz cues Brice, who remarks (Voice Over): No doubt it will wash up in a bottle somewhere. See you at Barataria on Tuesday. Cue now to Brice, who adds: Mister Cook would want us to see things through to the final frame.

Prinz: Cut.

And
The End,
for us, of the Dawn’s Early Light scene; for me, of the whole bloody movie, which as you know turned bloodier on that same fell Tuesday. There was no more for us to do. A search was ordered for
Baratarian.
Rodriguez and his colleagues were hauled off to be charged next day in the U.S. District Court with conspiring to destroy government property; they pled innocent, repeated their countercharge against the F.B.I., were released on bail, and went fatally down to Bloodsworth Island. On the strength of Andrews’s statement, Drew Mack was not arraigned; he too, and his defender—who seems to have become his shadow!—returned to Cambridge and anon to Barataria Lodge. Merope Bernstein, one hears, went back to spend Yom Kippur at Lily Dale with Jerome Bray: an atonement beyond our fathoming. And we old newlyweds, likewise, still shaken, returned to the Eastern Shore.

First, however, stopping for breakfast at a coffee shop near Fort McHenry, and there at last reading your surprise blessing from
Ye Hornbooke of Weddyng Greetynge.
Thank you, and Amen to it!

That same Sunday evening, at the Menschhaus, came another call from John Schott: Would I
please,
in view of this Great Tragedy, set aside my just grievance against him, accept his congratulations on my marriage, and
meet Mr Cook’s classes?
I said yes: we could use the money; I could use the distraction. I met them next day (the Maryland flag at MSU was at half-staff for A. B. Cook), again on the Wednesday, and again yesterday: The Fiction of the Bonapartes and the Bonapartes of Fiction, an “advanced” seminar of half a dozen amiable “pink-necks” with aspiration to graduate school.

That Monday began, as aforedescribed, our 7th week of Mutuality. Unknown to us (until just recently) it also brought to Todd Andrews a troubled phone call from Jane Mack: She has not seen her fiancé since before the excitement at Fort McHenry, where he had planned to rendezvous with “his favorite nephew” and go rockfishing. She is of course distressed by Mr Cook’s fatal accident; but she is even more alarmed that the combined effort of the U.S. Coast Guard and the Maryland Marine Police have turned up no sign of the yacht
Baratarian…

Tuesday 16th brought the Bloodsworth Island catastrophe. I stayed home to prepare my unexpected lectures at 24 L and help keep an eye on things at the Menschhaus. Ambrose, against my inclination but with my consent, went down to observe the “final frames,” meant to echo the destruction of Jean Lafitte’s pirate headquarters in 1814. There had been, after all, no real hostilities between Author and Director since the D.C. Burning; A. was content to leave this “wrap-up” to Reggie; he had not even drafted a scenario for it; it would be their last personal connexion; any further communication Ambrose had resolved would be by letter; it was time he looked to what he will do next, with his pen, with his life.

His distraction, in this last respect, may have
saved
his life. Twice, en route to Bishops Head through a sticky drizzle, he stopped the car to jot down notes of some sort; when he arrived there he was too late for the runabout scheduled to ferry him across Hooper Strait, and had to wait in hope of its return. He had just espied it, and was waving his pocket handkerchief, when the “accident” occurred, of which you will have read.

It is simply too slick, John, and it scares the bejesus out of me, even without yesterday’s sequel! Or it
would
so scare
me,
but for that calming gravity whose centre seems to be my womb. What a frightful game, André’s “Game of Governments”! We have heard already A. B. Cook’s contention that the navy wanted him off Bloodsworth Island. We have heard the charge that Cook himself was an F.B.I. counteragent. It is a fact that another of those routine gunnery exercises, this one involving pilotless target aircraft, had been scheduled and announced for that morning long in advance, and that, as in the Washington scene, Prinz had meant to make use of it for “the contemporary tie-in”; had even stationed Bruce and Brice outdoors at the ready to “catch the action” whilst he and the company organised their plans for the day. But where are the rackety helicopters, the warning patrol craft? Standing over on Bishops Head, Ambrose sees and then hears a single, sleek, wicked-looking little “drone” aircraft or missile shoot from the overcast and plunge out of sight into Bloodsworth Island. He hears the crash—no explosion this time—and sees black smoke rise; it appears closer to him than the Prohibited Area. The bearded skipper of the runabout is peering sternwards too, alarmed; he picks Ambrose up and runs back to Barataria, wondering where the planes are and what the fuck…

Too slick! It is one thing for Drew Mack (pulled injured from the flaming cottage by Todd Andrews—what
is
he doing there?) to accuse the navy of deliberately targeting what they knew was a headquarters of the antiwar movement: Rodriguez, Thelma, and the other chap under arraignment would doubtless have said the same had they survived the crash; Reg Prinz’s position we shall never know. But Andrews himself—no radical, surely, and a man not given to paranoia—agrees that the pilotless aircraft, which he caught sight of from where B. and B. were poised, and pointed out to them, neither swerved nor faltered nor “flamed out,” but zipped as if on wires out of nowhere (read Patuxent Naval Air Station), unaccompanied and unpursued, straight into Barataria Lodge.

Four killed. Three others badly burned. Drew Mack slightly so, and ankle-sprained. About half of the
Frames
footage (and History’s pen, and Fame’s palm) destroyed in the fire along with the Director; the rest salvaged by B. & B., who, with Mr Andrews and now with horrified Ambrose and others, pull the injured from the flames.

Fishier yet, you may have read Andrews’s contention that the film shot by Bruce and Brice of the event itself ought to attest, if not the navy’s culpability, at least the fact that the drone did not “unaccountably swerve off course” as reported by a government spokesman—but the film has been impounded by the Pentagon on the grounds that the craft was a prototype of a classified experimental weapon, unauthorised photography whereof is strictly
verboten.
They will Thoroughly Investigate the Regrettable Accident; they stand ready to compensate where compensation is called for, including the estate of the late A. B. Cook; but the film is classified material. Andrews intends to file suit for the victims and will attempt to subpoena the film. B. & B., for their part, mean to do their best to complete
Frames,
reenacting where possible and necessary the missing scenes. But their budget, like the decade, is about exhausted: they plan for example to film the dedication of the Tower of Truth next Friday, but given Nixon’s announcement today of “at least” 35,000 more U.S. troop withdrawals from Vietnam by year’s end, no student demonstrations are anticipated.

Slick, slick, slick! Then yesterday the
literal
slick of diesel oil in the Atlantic off Ship Shoal Inlet (another Restricted Area!), in midst of which the Coast Guard finds at last the derelict
Baratarian.
All hands missing and presumed dead. Hijacking by narcotics runners Considered Unlikely But Not Ruled Out. Nothing material aboard except,
mirabile dictu,
a letter from the late Andrew Burlingame Cook VI to his son, dated 17 September 1969
(i.e.,
four days
after
the so-called Key Letter bestowed upon Ambrose and then purloined; but—witness my last to you of “13 September”—letters can be postdated)… the contents whereof the U.S.C.G. is withholding pending the location of Mr Cook’s next of kin!

We are more or less stunned. Jane Mack, understandably, is beside herself—indeed, she is in shock and under sedation. Todd Andrews does his best to console her
(there,
in my strangely tranquil but not tranquillised view, would be a good match; but I am no matchmaker). Everybody is Investigating.

Everybody, that is, except Mr & Mrs Ambrose Mensch, who, come Tuesday, have a different matter to investigate. Then autumn will commence, and our 7th Stage; by the light of the (full Harvest) moon we shall see… what we shall see. Perhaps one day I shall tell Jane Mack about her, my, our André Castine; perhaps not. (Perhaps one day I shall learn the “truth” about him myself!) Meanwhile…

My husband loves me devotedly, I believe. And I him, though (since my little Vision) with a certain new serene detachment, which I can imagine persisting whatever Dr Rosen finds on Tuesday.

That “vision”: I cannot say whether it is the cause of my serenity or whether it was a vision
of
serenity. Doubtless both. Should Ambrose one day cease to love me; should he go to other women, I to other men; should our child miscarry or turn out to be another Angela—worse, another “Giles” like Mme de Staël’s, an imbecile
“Petit Nous”;
should my dear friend come even to deny (God forfend!) that he
ever
loved me, even that he ever
knew
me… I should still (so I envision) remain serene, serene.

As I remain—though, you having after so long silence spoken, you shall hear no more from me—ever,

September 5, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d
Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery
Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Father.

Fictitious forebear,
I was about to call you, wondering once again (with Anger, child of Exhaustion and Frustration) whether you ever existed. But of course you did: that your death has proved more important to me than your life—indeed, than
my
life—argues that you died; that you died (by your own hand, Groundhog Day 1930, dressed for the office but suspended from a cellar beam of our house: just another casualty of the Crash, one was odiously obliged to infer, in the absence of suicide note, ill health, sexual impropriety, or other contraindication) is prima facie evidence that you lived. Fastidious widower. Respected attorney. Survived by one child, then 29, who for nearly ten years already—nearly 50 now!—had been trying to Get Through to you, first by speech, then by endless unmailed letter, to tell you a thing he had been told about his heart: that it might, at any moment, stop. Who on your decease commenced an
Inquiry
into its cause, the better to understand himself; closed that
Inquiry
on June 21 or 22, 1937, with his own resolve to suicide; reopened it a few hours later (and his Letter to the late you) when he found himself for certain reasons still alive; and sustained thereafter, in fits and starts and with many a long pause, but faithfully indeed since March last, both
Inquiry
and “correspondence.”

Forty-nine years.

The first letter, or first installment of the Letter, is dated September 22, 1920 (I have it before me, with all the others, most of them returned to sender from the Cambridge Cemetery. Its salutation is simply
Father:
not, like some later ones’, Dear, Damned, Deaf, Dead, or Distant Dad. Just
Father).
This is the last.

I’m at the cottage, sir: mystified, chagrined, and pooped from a three-week Final Vacation Cruise that turned into a wild-goose chase, followed by a week of fruitless floundering up and down the Atlantic flyway. The weekend forecast’s clear, in both senses; any other year I’d be out sailing. But I’m done with that, as with many another thing. I’ll spend the weekend having done with this.

My last to you (8/8) closed with the phone call I’d been waiting for as I wrote, in my office, having snubbed Polly Lake for reasons you remember and cleared my desk for the Last Cruise of
Osborn Jones,
only to be delayed by that distress signal from Jeannine. I was impatient: no place for
her
in 13 R that I could see; my deliberate rudeness to dear Polly was getting to me; Ms. Pond’s insinuations made me cross; and I did not feel up to the three-hour haul to Baltimore or Washington airport and back. Hello. I truly hoped she was in Buffalo, or back in Ontario, her impulse passed. Toddy? But it was an awfully clear connection: I could hear gin, vermouth, and panic, 5:1:5. Where are you, Jeannine?

Just around the corner, it turned out, in the lobby of the Dorset, wondering why in the world she’d come. Sit tight, I told her; but when I got there she was standing loose, looking lost and a whole lot younger than 35: not the fuddled lush I’d feared (though she’d had a few), but a frightened version of the Sailboat Girl in that Arrow Shirt ad, vintage ’21, reproduced on the card Polly’d sent me. Peasant blouse instead of middy blouse, hippie beads instead of black neckerchief, but braless as her predecessor, like her gold-braceleted, her gold curls piled and bound with the same silk saffron. Suitcase at her side; cigarette, in holder, in hand. She started forward uncertainly, eyes welling up (Had she seen me, I tried to recall, since my Sudden Aging?) and hand held out. When I hugged her instead, she let the tears come and wondered chokily again Why the hell et cetera. Marian watched from the check-in desk with interest. Jeannine’s good breasts felt perfectly dandy, Dad, through my light seersucker; my odd response to the push of them—file this under Irony for the sequel—was paternal-tender. I had, after all, very possibly sired them.