Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Текущая страница: 66 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

1. Cook’s on the boat.

2. Lunch aboard.

The action – rather, the inaction – Ambrose explained to us as we went up through the milling curious to the ramparts and down to where Baratarian was tied up. It represented that frustrating day 155 years before when the McHenry garrison had had to take their punishment without reply, Admiral Cochrane’s gun and rocket ships firing from beyond the fort’s cannon range. The entire British fleet was being played incongruously by the frigate Constellation (a controversial bit of casting among patriotic Baltimoreans), towed from her berth to anchor in midharbour, and surrounded by a flotilla of pleasure craft as well as by the docks and towers of the city. Puffs of smoke and appropriate boom-booms issued desultorily from her ports, followed by smoke canisters all about us. Baratarian likewise flew the Union Jack and sported her new name-boards (Surprize), but had suspended bombardment to host our prenuptial luncheon.

I looked about and was relieved not to see among the festive “garrison” Drew Mack or his young companion of the day before. The company in general were picnicking among the bastions, barracks, and redoubts or out on the star-shaped ramparts; the shipboard fete was restricted to the eight of us in the Menschhaus party (Ambrose & myself, Magda & Angie, Carl & Connie & their steadies), our remarkably pacific Director, the MSU chaplain, Bruce & Brice (who made a working lunch of it, as did Buck, the hired skipper), and our host.

I.e., A. B. Cook VI, done up again as his ancestor, who piped us aboard with a bosun’s whistle and added his hearty, faintly patchouli-fragrant kisses to our best man’s. Angie giggled at his outfit; he charmed her by wielding her Easter egg as if it were an admiral’s glass. No Jane Mack? I wondered aloud and innocently. Were the yacht’s owners never aboard? You understand that I still knew, of Jane’s engagement, no more than that it was for some reason a romantic little mystery. Even after the Burning of Washington I knew her fiancé’s nom d’amour only: “Lord Baltimore.” I was not to learn his real name till that night.

Madam President of Mack Enterprises sends her best wishes and her regrets, Cook replied, and produced a note to that effect from Jane: Frightfully busy with the business and with plans for her own wedding later in the month; love to us both, and her particular fond gratitude for my “loyal services” to her in the recent past. Oddly regal phrase! But then, just as I was about to put aside my ladyship, Jane was, so one understood, about to assume hers; and any such expression at once of gratitude and of remembrance was a happy rarity from that source.

What’s more, by way of wedding gift she offered us a week’s loan of yacht and skipper, all expenses paid – so Cook apprised us now – either immediately, for honeymoon, or at our later convenience. Finally, Cook had interceded on her behalf with the Maryland Historical Society to lend me one of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s gowns to be married in (not Mme B.‘s own wedding dress, which would fit only the daring 18-year-old who had shocked Baltimoreans by wearing “nearly nothing,” but a handsome green silk from her maturity, meant to impress the emperor’s family). It awaited my pleasure in the guest stateroom; our host hoped I might wear it to the luncheon, and that we would make use of that same stateroom for our wedding night.

I was touched (Cook, I should add, was now “almost certain” that he could not accept the Marshyhope appointment). Ambrose declined the wedding-night invitation: some thoughtful PR man for the Society to Restore the U.S.F. Constellation had been inspired to offer us the captain’s quarters of that historic vessel, he now informed me – an arrangement my groom thought would be, and I quote, “groovier”—but he and Magda both urged me to try the gown. His F. S. Key outfit, alas, was ashore, in the barracks being used for actors’ dressing rooms; he would don it after lunch. As for that honeymoon offer, we Would See (knowing who the yacht’s real owner was, Ambrose had of course no intention of accepting Jane’s gift; but he and I had not yet exchanged our guilty little secrets).

I needed no urging: the whole scene was so festive, as if all Baltimore celebrated our wedding! Besides, it was now noon: Ambrose and I had a certain schedule to maintain. Armed with champagne and teased by the party, we withdrew to “have a look at the gown,” I promising happy-teared Magda to call her in shortly for the fitting. B. & B. filmed our exit; Chaplain Beille liberally grinned; we winked as broadly as possible and shut the cabin door.

Sex #4. We’d been paying no mind, we realised, to the style of our coitions – trouble enough to keep to our timetable! #3, for example, ought to have been impossible: how couple in a manner representative of abstinence? Now it occurred to us, fleetingly, that this fourth coming together ought to be the “Marsha/marriage” one, though we were not yet wed… Oh fuck it, Ambrose said. Thank you, Marsha Horner!

Then we fetched Magda and Angie in to dress me – a touch snug, that gown of Betsy’s, but a smasher all the same – and went above for luncheon. Antipasto and Asti spumante, minestrone, cold melons and spumoni, all lightered across the harbour from Baltimore’s Little Italy by order of the (Italian-American) mayor, who would be joining us at the reception! Magda was in gastronomic heaven. Salutes to the bride-and-groom-to-be, including one from A. B. Cook oddly premonitory of your own: an alphabet toast handed down from the time of James II which had served as a code for Jacobites:

ABC! (A blessed Change!)

DEF! (Drive every Foreigner!)

GHI! (Get Home, [J]amie!)

KLM! (Keep loyal Ministers!)

NOP! (No oppressive Parliaments!)

QRS! (Quickly return Stuarts!)

TUW! (Tuck up Whelps!)

XYZ! (‘Xert your Zeal!)

Oh, well: the wine and prosciutto were first-rate.

After lunch the Constellation was towed back to its berth in the inner harbour; it was the time of day when, in 1814, Cochrane’s fleet had briefly moved in closer, and the gunners of McHenry had at last been able to return their fire. Baratarian’s role therefore was to move out into that position (Buck alone on board) and open up with the little brass “sunset gun” mounted on her coach roof; ours was to go ashore and make ready for the wedding ceremony whilst the fort’s cannoneers raised a happy racket and Angie held her ears. Now I espied Drew (with Merope’s ex-comrades Thelma, Rodriguez, et al., but not, I thanked heaven, with “Henri Burlingame”), cheerily manning a great 24-pounder. There was Todd Andrews – had he joined the Frames company? – in what looked to be serious cross-examination of a hostile witness: Merope Bernstein herself! Prinz looked on, bemused, from a safe distance, framing us and them with his fingers as in days gone by. No sign, thank heaven again, of J. B. Bray.

Now the big guns blasted away with their blank black-powder charges. Time for Ambrose to don his costume. Things were being filmed, he said, “not necessarily in sequence”—understatement of the season! As the full sunshine, for example, was apt for the Wedding scene but wrong for the rainy “twilight’s last gleaming” of 13 September 1814, we were pretending that today was tomorrow; tonight and tomorrow we would shoot today with the aid of fireboats and wind and rain machines. Certain scripted statements, too – not very meaningful to us lit’ry types – were delivered face-on to the camera, Godard-style, some of them by Author and Director standing shoulder to shoulder. E.g.:

AUTHOR:

This film begins with a shot of the opening pages of my novel.

DIRECTOR:

The novel opens with a sequence from my film.

Or:

AUTHOR:

And the Word shall have the last word.

DIRECTOR:

Cut.

DREW MACK:

The Novel is a cop-out. The Film is a cop-out. But the Movement is not a cop-out. Until now the media have killed us with accommodation. Now we will fight them on their grounds, with their weapons. We will make use of them without their knowing it—

DIRECTOR:

Cut.

And how about this, read by Prinz’s erstwhile protégée?

MEROPE:

The Author knows very little of the Movement; his rendering of it in the novel is naive, as is the Director’s rendering of the novel into film. But real revolutionaries can make use of such ingenuous mimicries.

Or, finally, this, delivered to me (Ambrose’s hands upon my shoulders) and meant to be the wrap-up shot not only of the Word-versus-Image theme but of the whole cockamamie film:

AUTHOR:

Make no mistake about it, my darling: We will have the final word! We will triumph over our natural enemy in—

The scene ended at the dash. I asked him where the last two words were. Oh, well, you see, he said, they’re to be superposed in block capitals on the film…

Enough of that, yes? Getting on to half after three now, and up we trip to the dressing-room barracks, where A. strips to become Francis Scott Key, transferring your unopened letter, of the existence whereof the bride has not yet been apprised, to the waistcoat pocket of his dandy Federal-period togs. Then – well, it’s that time again, and #5, R.I.P., was his Reign of Terror – before dressing he bends me forward over a barracks-bed footboard, ups B.P.B.‘s green gown and white petticoats and downs her drawers, and, his potency more than restored by that Asti spumante, merrily puts it to me (your indulgence, sir) like a ramrod up the breech.

Wedding time! And, Zeus be praised, no hitches to our hitching! Once for the cameras: Do I, Britannia, and do you, America? We did. God Save the Queen! My Country, ’Tis of Thee! Once more for real. Who gives this woman? Andrew Burlingame Cook, sir: Chief Singer of the Old Line State, / Bell ringer for our new fine fate, etc. Did he Ambrose take this woman to be etc.? He did. And did I Germaine ditto? I did, I did! If there be any present who etc., let them speak now or etc…

(We held our breaths. Bray? Marsha? Merope? Magda? André? One could hear the soft whirr of cameras, the flap and crack of the great fort flag, a mockingbird practising gorgeously our epithalamion…)

We were then pronounced Husband and Wife. Off went the guns! Kisses from Ambrose, from Magda and the family! Shy gift from Angie of her treasure beyond price, that Easter egg! Bear hug from Chief Singer/Bell Ringer! (Did I espy, behind his winks, traces of a tear?) A bronze wedding band (I forgot to say) more precious than gold, because fashioned from a bit of the nib of the very pen of History: gift of A. B. Cook to me via our Director/Best Man (who framed us once through it before passing it to Ambrose) and my groom, who slipped it with a kiss upon my finger! Key to the city from the jolly mayor himself, a bit late arriving but better late etc.: Mr & Mrs Key, I give you the key! A grave blessing from Mr Andrews; a tongue-tisking one from Drew Mack, who disavows the institution on ideological grounds but wishes us the best anyroad. And a rousing chorus by all hands, standing hats off and palms over hearts (a few raised fists among the hippies), of what else but “O Say Can You See”!’

What with our late bereavement, my uncertain status at MSU, and the filming yet to be finished, we’d planned no honeymoon trip; this whole 6th Stage had been our honeymoon! At six we bade good-bye to Magda & Co., who were returning in the van; we would see them on the morrow. Then we ourselves retired for a short while from the scene. Rather, the scene moved with us (Brice, Bruce, Prinz) around the harbour to the Constellation: the “3rd Conception scene” after all, which – we made jolly sure – consisted on film of no more than our climbing the gangplank, descending to the captain’s quarters in the stern, and tossing my bridal bouquet into the harbour from one of the aft windows. A newlywed wave to the cameras and cheerers on the dock… and then we closed and latched that window, drew shut the curtains kindly provided for our privacy, and secured the door.

And made 6th love. Shall I tell it all? First my groom proposed it to me, ardently, and found his bride (it had been a long day) a touch cool and, well, dry. Second he kissed me, and then I him, and we moved from kiss to touch. Ambrose rose; I was stirred. Third we undressed and laid on hands, the bride running like a river now. Fourth we soixante-neuf’d it to my first orgasm (of this session), a little skipperoo. Fifth he entered in good old Position One, and I recame at his first full stroke. Sixth he struck again, and again, and again, and again – are you counting, John? – and again, and on this you-know-which stroke ejaculated with a cry above the ground-groan of my Big O, a plateau I had been skating out of my skull upon since way back at Stroke One. And then he struck again, and on this last and seventh had himself a vision.

Yup: a Vision. I could see him having it, that vision, as if he’d held Angie’s Easter egg to his eye (he will, a bit farther on). I had one myself, as a matter of fact, no doubt not awfully different from my groom’s: a vision of Sevens, the dénouements that follow climaxes. I have not queried my husband upon this head, nor he me. No need.

Seventh he fell limp into my arms, and we held each other until a big clock somewhere onshore tolled the hour.

Meanwhile, back at the fort (we return there now, seven-thirtyish, subdued and pensive; good as their word, B. & B. & R.P. have left us alone and gone back already; the Constellation’s guards smile and nod as we disembark; some vulgar fellow calls, “D’ja get in?” and Ambrose gives him the finger), the movie party is still in swing. Fireboats and pump trucks are hosing up for the Twilight’s Last Gleaming. Baratarian is still anchored out among the former, with Drew Mack evidently somehow aboard, for we overhear – indeed, we are filmed overhearing – a curious exchange upon that subject between Todd Andrews and A. B. Cook.

The laureate has bestowed upon Ambrose, on camera, the “Francis Scott Key Letter”: i.e., the one allegedly given Key by Andrew Cook IV back in 1814. It is in fact, Cook remarks with a chuckle, an unfinished personal letter to his son, which he’ll want back when the filming’s done, but ’twill do for the purpose. Ambrose duly pockets it unread, as F.S.K. is supposed to have done – and that ends our part in the shooting until the Dawn’s Early Light routine, to be filmed from Constellation’s deck in the morning. But as we newlyweds withdraw to change out of our costumes and slip into town for a late supper (Captain Buck has kindly brought my street clothes ashore), we hear Mr Andrews demanding to be put aboard the yacht, and Mr Cook cheerily refusing. They are making ready, declares the latter, for the “Diversion sequence,” to be filmed somewhere after dark; it is not convenient to shuttle extras back and forth or bring Baratarian to shore. On whose authority, Andrews wants to know, does Cook give and withhold such permission? Is the boat his? Is he Mrs Mack’s fiancé?

Et cetera: I caught no more, for Ambrose drew me dressingroomwards, out of earshot. I record the exchange now, which at the time I only mildly attended, in view of subsequent events. What was all that? I asked my husband. Probably in the script, he replied, though not his script. Nota bene.

Leaving our costumes behind (and your letter, which we are now entitled to open and read, but which has slipped A.‘s mind despite his having just stuffed Cook’s in beside it), we find a quiet place for dinner: no small trick on a Saturday night, but Ambrose knows the city. I am inclined to speak to him of having seen Henri the day before, and of my little vision of some paragraphs ago; but I do not, just yet. Ambrose, unbeknownst to me, is likewise inclined, and likewise abstains. It is a muted first-meal-of-our-marriage, after which (it’s nearly ten o’clock) we return for the night to our floating bridal suite. Fireworks salute us from down at the fort; the fireboats are no doubt putting on a show; it would be fun to watch, but we are weary.

In the neighbourhood of half ten we complete our sexual programme with a final, brief, rather gingerly connexion: the both of us are tender, in both senses, and our ardour is altogether spent. Oh shit, Ambrose says after: there’s a letter for both of us back in the dressing room I’d meant to open after dinner and forgot. Bit of a surprise. Have to wait now till the Dawn’s etc. We are lying thoughtful in the dark in our Spartan but snug little quarters. We review the history of our affair with appropriate chuckles, sighs, kisses; we are happy that it has led to this day’s consummation, and that the day is done. Even now we do not speak of those Visions – but I tell him of my soul-troubling recent sight of the young man very possibly, oh almost certainly, my son by André Castine.

Ambrose embraces and hears me out (he had of course long since been apprised by me of that mattersome history); he vows he knows nothing of the fellow’s connexion with Drew Mack or the Frames company, but will press Drew upon the matter and do his best to arrange a reunion if my son is indeed in the neighbourhood. I ask for time to consider whether I am up to such a reunion. Then, carefully, Ambrose discloses his own secret: sometime between the Burning of Washington and the Assault on Fort McHenry, in course of “working conversations” with A. B. Cook and others, he has learned that the true name of Jane Mack’s “Lord Baltimore,” and the owner of Baratarian, is one Baron André Castine of Castines Hundred in Ontario!

Had I not been bedded, I were floored. Appropriately whispered O Dear Lords and the like. I want to laugh; I want to weep; I do a bit of both, a bit more of mere shivering. Impossible! And yet… of course! Ambrose squeezes me and tisks his tongue; begins the necessary labour of conjecture: How in the world, etc.? I find myself shushing him: time for all that in the morning, in all the mornings ahead. A peculiar serenity that had first signalled to me back at Vision-time now takes fair hold of my spirit, a hold it happily has yet to relinquish as I pen these lines. It is all, truly, too much: Jane’s one prior fling, with my late husband; my half-reluctant role as Harrison’s “Lady Elizabeth”; and now “André’s” surfacing (“Monsieur Casteene’s”?) as Jane’s fiancé, together with Henri’s reappearance, like an erratic comet, in our little sky… Who could assimilate it?

We agree not to speak, to Jane or anyone, of my old connexion with her baron: Jane is a powerful and canny woman, nowise foolish, who may well already know all about “us,” and more about “André” than I know; her fiancé’s absence from every gathering where I am present—e.g., the Morgan memorial service – whatever the explanation, is no doubt no coincidence. One thing only is certain: as soon as the Menschhaus can spare us, we must remove elsewhere!

On this note, and feeling now – in my Vast Serenity, mind – almost giggly, I kiss my husband good night and fall quickly, soundly asleep. The obscure horrific happenings of the next day and the whole week since have removed the urgency of these wedding-night resolves, but not our commitment to them.

We were to be woken about 5:00 A.M. to make ready for the Dawn’s Early Light sequence (sunrise would be at 6:44 EDST on that fateful day: New Year’s Day 2281 by the “Grecian” calendar of the Seleucidae, 7478 of the Byzantine era; such “Hornerisms” were now written into A.’s scenario). In fact we were woken rather earlier by an explosion from down-harbour. We made sleepy jokes about what was by now the Big Bang Motif; we pretended to assume that Jerry Bray had signalled his arrival; still subdued by what we’d told each other the night before – not to mention by our separate Visions, as yet unshared – we made drowsy, contented love (adieu, adieu, 7th day of 6th week of sweet Stage Six!) and rose to dress: street clothes until A. can retrieve his F. S. Key outfit.

Even as we gather our gear and tokens – our key to Baltimore, the Easter egg which we shall of course return to Angie – we hear, then see, police cars, ambulances, fire engines screaming past us towards McHenry, and begin to wonder. It is growing light. We crave breakfast. No sign of the filmsters. We ask ourselves merrily whether Prinz is reenacting his “Scajaquada trick” of early August, when we rowed across Delaware Park Lake into his filmic clutches. Darker apprehensions already assail us: apprehensions of we are not sure just what. Sunrise approaches. We drive over to the fort.

Reporters, mobile telly crews! Serious accident! Our passes pass us through police lines. We see Merry Bernstein, shrieking again, but this time not hysterically; accusations, imprecations, directed it seems against whom we had thought her comrades: Rodriguez, Thelma, et alii. These latter are being held and questioned by police. We see other police questioning – can it be that they’re holding? – Mr Todd Andrews and Drew Mack! From a passing hippie we hear that “that pig Cook got it”; Merope shrieks her regret that Reg Prinz didn’t Get His as well. Prinz himself is on hand, calmly directing Bruce and Brice to film the television people filming all the foregoing, over which (he gets the odd shot of this as well) Old Glory serenely flaps, as does my heart.

Oh yes: and the Dawn’s Early Light reveals (it is a quarter to seven; the sun’s upper limb appears on schedule over the smoky piers and railyards to eastward) that while your flag is still there, the yacht Baratarian is not. Details to follow.

In as jigsaw fashion as a Modernist novel, the story emerges: I shall give it to you straight, though by no means all the pieces have yet been found. In the very wee hours, tipped off by Mr Andrews, who had in turn it seems been tipped off by Merry Bernstein, the park police apprehended Sr Rodriguez in the act of planting, near that famous flagpole, not the little smoke bombs “we” were using to simulate bombshell hits, but a considerable charge of serious explosives. They arrested him at once, radioed for a bomb squad from the Baltimore Police Department, and ordered the area cleared (and the filming suspended) for a general search. Just about this time a second alarm comes from Mr Andrews (don’t ask us what he is doing there at that hour): watching from the ramparts with his night-glasses, he has seen – what it must be he had reason to anticipate – the yacht Baratarian raise anchor and move slowly up the Patapsco’s East Branch towards the inner harbour, where the Constellation, and ourselves, are moored. No names are named, but Andrews urgently warns the park police that certain other “radicals” aboard that yacht may be about to attempt the demolition of that historic vessel (and its contents!).

Merope seconds the alarm. A Maryland Marine Police boat is radioed for; it quickly hails, halts, and boards Baratarian, then radios presently back that no one is aboard save the captain (i.e., good Buck, a professional Chesapeake skipper of established reputation, known to the officers personally) and a young guest of his named Henry Burlingame. They are merely shifting the vessel into position for the Dawn’s Early Light sequence; the police search the craft thoroughly and find nothing incriminating. Andrews presses for more information: There is no Drew Mack aboard? No A. B. Cook? Nope: Buck volunteers that those two have disembarked in the yacht’s tender some time earlier, on movie business of their own.

Andrews claps his brow (bear with me; I am reconstructing, as we historians must). Of course: it is the Diversion sequence! Captain Napier’s valiant diversion of McHenry’s gunners, as described – and thwarted – by A. B. Cook IV in the Ampersand Letter! Only played as it were in reverse, Baratarian diverting attention to itself in the East Branch whilst her tender (a Boston Whaler with a hefty outboard engine) runs up the West, the Ferry, Branch, on its unspecified but surely nefarious errand.

The park police grow skeptical, impatient: is this a bunch of movie tomfoolery, and do “we” realize the gravity of such tomfoolery in a national monument? Their misgivings are reinforced by the appearance now from the barracks of Prinz and the Tweedles, all equipment operating. But at Andrews’s urging they move to have a look at the far side of the fort, where the original diversion occurred. En route, Rodriguez gives a shout of warning, not to them; a figure scurries up and away from – shades of old Fort Erie – the powder magazine, supposed by all but the fort’s commandant in 1814 to be bombproof! The police light out after the disappearing figure, drawing their pistols (where else but in America do park police carry guns?) and calling Halt. Andrews himself dashes for the magazine, suspecting it to be mined: a remarkable gesture!

He is stopped at its entrance by the man he was seeking when last we saw him, and just now enquiring after: Drew Mack, evidently put ashore. He pushes past him into the magazine. Shouting oaths, Drew follows after. Sure enough, an explosion follows – the one that woke us across the harbour – but not, Zeus be praised, from the magazine: it is down below the ramparts on the West Branch side. In the magazine itself, however, there is found another mighty charge of explosives, all set to be blown by a wireless detonator. Mr Andrews is already contending to the police that Drew Mack discovered and defused the device, perhaps saving thereby Fort McH. and the lives of all present. Drew says nothing. The police set about taking statements, clearing the area, calling again for the bomb squad.

687

Alongshore, meanwhile, down where Captain Napier did his gallant thing, the police who’d kept on in that direction find the grim debris of our wake-up explosion: the shattered fibreglass remains of the Boston Whaler – most revealingly a piece of her transom bearing the last four letters of the name Surprize: one can imagine with what significance to the revolutionaries! – and the equally shattered remains of an adult male body, clothed in early-19th-century costume and bearing a miraculously undamaged 18th-Century pocketwatch, still ticking.

I.e., we must presume, A. B. Cook VI, late self-styled Laureate of Maryland, Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope State U., and… heaven knows what else. Though no portion of him suitable for positive identification could be found, neither has the laureate been since; no reason to doubt it was he went to smithereens where his ancestor did, but less equivocally. How that came to pass, however, is fittingly uncertain. The official explanation soon became that Cook was killed either accidentally by explosives meant to simulate Napier’s diversion, or in an heroic attempt to disarm explosives planted by Rodriguez & Co. to destroy the patriotic shrine. He is by way of becoming already, in the media, a martyr to the Star-Spangled B., as well he might have been. Rodriguez and Thelma, on the other hand and interestingly enough, maintain that Cook was an F.B.I, agent out to blow them up, or plant the McHenry demolition to rouse public opinion against them and, by association, against the antiwar movement! (Merope Bernstein, they allege, had become his companion-in-infiltration-and-subversion.) This explanation too, Ambrose at least believes, while admittedly farfetched, is by no means impossible. I turn my wedding ring upon my finger, and agree. A. B. Cook! We shake our heads.

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.