Letters (5 page)

But I’m ahead of myself, and behind on my sleep. Still to describe is the
ménage
back at Tidewater Farms—Jane and Germaine (the latter scarcely yet moved out from the royal chambers, the former scarcely moved back in) outladying each other at one moment across the funeral baked meats, embracing tearfully the next; Ambrose and Reggie deep in cinematographic argument in the library; “Bea Golden” passed out somewhere upstairs; a raw snow just beginning to come down on Redmans Neck from a sky too leaden to alarm any groundhog with his own shadow…

But the quick must rest, if the dead will not. I’ll finish Calliope’s music another night, now I’ve got the keys tuned: introduce you to the other haunts who’ve dropped in on me lately,
hic et ubique,
and bring you up to date: 52nd anniversary, so I see on my calendar, of my enlistment against the kaiser in 1917.

Back to your hole, old pioner; wane with the Worm Moon! Leave me to deal with the ghosts of the living: that’s work enough for your
Liebes

11 P.M. 3/6/69

Cyrano de Bergerac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ring Lardner, Michelangelo: happy birthday. The Alamo has fallen to Santa Anna; its garrison is massacred. FDR has closed the banks. Franco’s cruiser
Baleares
has been sunk off Cartagena. Napoleon’s back from Elba: we approach Day One of the Hundred Days.

In a sense, you Remain Jacob Horner. It was on the advice of the Doctor that in 1953 you Left the Teaching Profession; for a time you’d Been A Teacher of Prescriptive Grammar at the Wicomico State Teachers College in Maryland, now the Wicomico campus of Marshyhope State University.

The Doctor had brought you to a certain point in your Original Schedule of Therapies (this was October 27, 1953: anniversary of Madison’s Annexation Proclamation concerning West Florida and of Wally Simpson’s divorce, birthday of Captain Cook, Paganini, Theodore Roosevelt, Dylan Thomas, Catherine of Valois), and, as you’d Exceeded his prescriptions by perhaps Impregnating your Only Friend’s Wife, Arranging an illegal abortion which Mrs. Morgan did not survive, and Impersonating several bona fide human beings in the process, he said to you: “Jacob Horner, you mustn’t Work any longer. You will have to Sit Idle for a time.”

You Shaved, Dressed, Packed your Bags, and Called a taxi to fetch you to the terminal, where you were to Join the Doctor’s other patients for the bus ride north. While you Waited for the cab, you Rocked in your Chair and Smoked a cigarette, your Last. You were Without Weather. A few minutes later the cabby blew his horn; you Picked Up your Two Suitcases and Went Out, Leaving your bust of Laocoön where it stood, on the mantelpiece. Your Car, too, since you Saw no further use for it, you Left where it was, at the curb, and Climbed into the taxi.

Interminable, that journey, up the Susquehanna and Juniata, into the cold, dilapidated Alleghenies. You Wintered near the Cornplanter Indian Reservation in northwestern Pennsylvania. In the spring, having learned from his Indian clients that the house he’d rented, together with the village and surrounding countryside, would be under water following the government’s completion of nearby Kinzua Dam, the Doctor reestablished the Farm somewhat closer to the state line, which eventually he crossed to a pleasant site above Lily Dale, New York, Spiritualist Capital of America. There you Remained for a decade before Moving to the present establishment in Canada, at the opposite end of the Peace Bridge from Buffalo.

In the evening of October 25, 1954—100th anniversary of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, 1651st of the beheading of the twin saints Crispin and Crispian, 142nd of Commodore Decatur’s defeat of H.M.S.
Macedonia
off the Azores, 1st of Renée Morgan’s death by aspiration of regurgitated sauerkraut under anesthesia during abortion—the Doctor’s new Seneca Indian assistant performed upon you at your Suggestion a bilateral vasectomy to render you sterile: a doctored male. In the evening of October 4, 1955, two years before
Sputnik,
happy birthday Frederic Remington, as an exercise in Scriptotherapy you Began an account of your Immobility, Remobilization, and Relapse, entitled
What I Did Until the Doctor Came.
By means that you have not yet Discovered (your Manuscript was lost, with certain of the Doctor’s files, in the move from Pennsylvania to New York), this account became the basis of a slight novel called
The End of the Road
(1958), which ten years later inspired a film, same title, as false to the novel as was the novel to your Account and your Account to the actual Horner-Morgan-Morgan triangle as it might have been observed from either other vertex.

Not long after first publication of that book, its narrative mainspring, coiled like the Chambered Nautilus or Lippes Loop, was rendered quaint as
Clarissa Harlowe’
s by the development, legalization, and general use of oral contraceptive pills, together with the liberalization of U.S. abortion laws. Rennie Morgan, however, and her unborn child, perhaps legitimate, remained dead.

Of the subsequent history of Joseph Morgan you Had No Inkling; of your Own there was none, virtually, in the fifteen years between 1954 and this evening. South Vietnamese Premier Ky walked out of the Paris peace conference to protest “the bombardment of his nation’s cities by North Vietnamese artillery”; U.S. Astronaut Schweickart took a space walk from the orbiting Apollo-9 vehicle; at the State University of New York at Buffalo a protest “teach-in” against U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia continued, but most classes went on as usual. You had Prepared your almanac card for the day and were Rocking in your Chair on the porch of the Remobilization Farm after dinner, along with Pocahontas, Monsieur Casteene, Bibi, and other of the patients, Regarding the foul rush of Lake Erie from under the ice toward Niagara, when Tombo X, the Doctor’s Chief Medical Assistant (and son) announced the arrival of a new patient: middleaged mothafuckin paleface hippie look like Tim Leary after a bad trip, two mothafuckin honky cats with him, go tell um get they paleface asses back to the U.S.M.F.A. As the Doctor’s Administrative Assistant, you Went to the Reception Room, accompanied by M. Casteene.

Tressed and beaded, buckskinned, sere, Joe Morgan regarded you with manic calm.

“You’re going to Rewrite History, Horner,” he declared: the same clear, still voice that had terminated your Last Conversation with him, in 1953. “You’re going to
Change the Past.
You’re going to Bring Rennie Back to Life.”

As before, you Could Not Reply. Gracious, ubiquitous Monsieur Casteene, frowning Tombo X, and the two impassive young men—Morgan’s
sons,
dear God!—led him off toward the Progress and Advice Room for his preadmission interview, and you Returned here to the porch to Write this letter.

Tomorrow, Luther Burbank Day, Madame de Staël will flee Paris to Coppet, her Swiss estate, before Napoleon’s advance. Franco will bomb Barcelona, killing 1,000. The Germans, in violation of the Locarno Pact, will occupy the Rhineland, and U.S. troops will cross the Rhine at Remagen Bridge. Jacob Horner, you Like to Imagine, will Step into the poisoned river and Sweep beneath the flaking bridge; past the poisonous plants of Ford and the intakes of the sources of their power; down the cold rapids by Goat Island; over the crumbling, tumbling American Falls at last.

5 March 1812

Dearest Henry or Henrietta Burlingame V,

Dreary, frozen weather the fortnight past; half a foot of new wet snow, the wind off Lake Ontario shaking the house. Then this morning, ere dawn, a cracking thunderstorm, 1st of the year, after which the skies clear’d, the wind turn’d southerly, from off Lake Erie, & wondrous warm. By dawn ’twas spring; by noon, summer! And so all day your mother & I stroll’d and play’d along the heights by Queenstown, hearing the ice crack like artillery & watching the snow go out in miniature Niagaras. A magical day; I do not wonder you flail’d about in Andrée’s belly, a-fidget to be out & on with it in such weather, till we had to sit on a rock, under the guns of Fort Niagara across the way, and sing you back to sleep in midafternoon.

Evening & chill again now, the autumn of this one-day year. ’Tis your sweet mother I’ve sung to sleep, with a Tarratine lullaby learnt from another Andrée Castine, ancestor of us all. No more playing ’twixt the featherbeds for us till after you’re born—hasten the day! She sleeps. You too, I trust: by simple love engender’d ’mid plots & counterplots enough to spin the head. The old house is still, but the fire burns on; I feel my lifetime pulsing out like blood from an artery. Day before yesterday ’twas 1800: I was fresh from France with the Revolution under my belt, and Father (perhaps) was ushering in the century by running for vice-president of the U. States under the name of Aaron Burr, denying even to me he was the 4th Henry Burlingame. Where did the dozen years go? Now I am 36, racing pell-mell to the grave;
ma petite cousine
your mother is a full-blown woman of 23. Bonaparte’s bleeding Europe white; the Hawks in Washington see their chance to snatch the Canadas & the Floridas; by summer we shall be at such a war as to disunite the States of America. Cities will burn & thousands die ere you’re wean’d, my precious—and this in no small part your greatgrandfather’s doing, & your grandfather’s. Aye, and your father’s as well, God forgive us! Yet I have never been more happy, more alive & more at peace, nay nor more in love than at this parlous hour.

Little woman or man to be: what blood runs in your veins! Blood of Castines, Cookes, & Burlingames whose histories, more intricate than History, are interlaced as capillaries. ’Tis a tale I knew but partially till this fortnight, when, perforce sequester’d here for a time with Andrée’s parents whilst the world looks in vain for the impostor “Comte de Crillon,” I have had both leisure & opportunity to search thro certain documents of our family. Nay, more, your mother & I have studied them with amazement, & have espied in them a Pattern, so we believe, that bids to change the course of our lives. It is to fix this pattern for ourselves that I mean to draw it out now for you, in the hope it may spare you half a lifetime of misdirected effort. For we firmly believe, Andrée & I, that ours has been a line of brilliant failures, and that while it may be too late for ourselves to do more than cancel out, in the latter half of our lives, our misguided accomplishments in the earlier,
you
may be the 1st true winner in the history of the house.

’Tis the house of Burlingame & Cook I speak of: the English side of the family, by contrast to which the French, or Castine, side has been a very model of consistency. The Barons Castine still inhabit St. Castine in Gascony, as they have for centuries: the American branch of the family descends from the 1st adventurous baron of the line, a young André Castine who came to Canada toward the end of the 17th Century. He took to wife a Tarratine Indian whom tradition declares to have been the daughter of “Chief Madocawando,” and from whom we Cooks & Burlingames inherit one half of the Indian blood that has served so many of us so well.

This “Monsieur Casteene,” as he was known to the English colonials, became a much-fear’d figure in the provinces of New York & New England in the 1690’s; even as far south as Maryland it was thot that he & the “Naked Salvages of the North” might sweep down & drive the English back into the sea. Amongst the children of André Castine & Madocawanda (a gifted woman who added French & English to her Indian dialects, & so master’d European manners that she quite charm’d the skeptical Gascoignes upon her one visit to St. Castine) was a daughter, Andrée, who married Andrew Cooke III and grandmother’d both the present Andrée & myself.

All subsequent male Castines have follow’d the peaceful example of their Gascon forebears and contented themselves with hunting, farming, timbering, & the breeding of handsome 1st cousins for the Cookes & Burlingames to wed. These
belles cousines
share their husbands’ penchant for political intrigue: a penchant that so marks our line, its genealogy, on the Burlingame side especially, is as tangled as the plots we’ve been embroil’d in.

To deal 1st with the simpler Cooks (or Cookes, as we then spelt it): Of the 1st Andrew Cooke we know nothing, save that he & someone begot Andrew II, of the Parish of St. Giles in the Fields, London. Andrew II was a tobacco factor in the Maryland plantations, who in the middle 17th Century acquired from Lord Baltimore patent to “Malden on the Chesapeake,” now call’d Cooke’s Point. Upon his wife Anne Bowyer he got twins, Anna & Ebenezer, of whom more anon. Upon his mistress from the neighboring point—a well-born French girl, disown’d by her father, Le Comte Cécile Édouard, for an earlier
amour
—he got a natural daughter, Henrietta, who bore her mother’s later married name of Russecks. Now, since
my
mother, Nancy Russecks Burlingame, was descended from this same Henrietta, ’twas but a partial pretence when I took the name Comte de Crillon for my recentest adventure: you spring from a Huguenot count on one side & a Gascon baron on the other, not to mention Tarratine royalty from Madocawanda Castine and Ahatchwhoop royalty from the Burlingames, whom I’ve yet to get to!

Thus Andrew II. His son Ebenezer Cooke is of no great interest to us, despite his claim to have been Poet Laureate of Maryland. He seems to have lost the family estate thro bumbling innocence, & to have regain’d it in some fashion by marrying a prostitute. An unsuccessful tradesman gull’d of his goods, he could make no more of his misfortunes than a comical poem,
The Sot-Weed Factor.
No better in the bed than at the writing desk, he got but one child, which died a-borning and fetcht its mother off into the bargain—and that ends the tale of your only artist ancestor.