Letters

by John Barth

  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 t
hat 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.

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  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.

  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 plann
ed 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…