Letters (4 page)

We fetch one body to the boneyard; a hearseful of ghosts hitches home with us.

Very well, groundhog: I’m late with the letter for your 39th deathday, and better the dead father should hear from the son than vice versa. February 2, it happens, was the day we buried Harrison Mack, His Majesty having died by his own design (but not by his own hand) four days earlier, to no one’s surprise. Harrison’s “identification” with George III, as his doctors called it, had gone beyond even my description in last February’s letter. Everyone at Tidewater Farms went about in Regency getup—except Harrison himself, for the reason I’ve mentioned before (which will make the contest over
his
estate even livelier than the fight over his father’s): that the more
accurate
his madness became, so to speak, the more he fancied himself, not George III sane, but George III
mad;
a George III, moreover, who in
his
madness believed himself to be Harrison Mack sane. Thus in the end he pretended to think everyone in the house crazy for wearing 1815 costume—and managed his business affairs with more clarity and good sense than at any time since the onset of his “madness” in the latter 1950’s.

Jane spared herself (no way she could’ve known it was his final year) by going off to England in pursuit of chimeras of her own. Who can blame her? In her absence, Lady Amherst (Germaine Pitt, from the college) took charge of the household, luckily for Harrison. Drawing on her acquaintance with British history and manners—and the admirable tolerance of the English for eccentricity, especially among the gentry—she directed the masquerade with skill, even with good taste. She herself took the role of “Lady Elizabeth Pembroke,” the king’s early friend and focus of his senile dreams, the love of his life: they gave his biography a happy ending by coming back to each other’s arms “in his latter years,” as they put it, since they could not agree what year it was. In “Lady Liza’s” pretended view, Harrison being 73, 1968 was 1812 at the latest, and he had at least eight more years to live. To this, George III would reply that “Harrison Mack” was but a figment of his mad imagination, whose age had no bearing on his own; that inasmuch as he dated his irrevocable madness from the death of his daughter and his retirement from the throne
(i.e.,
his disowning of Jeannine Mack after her first divorce, his retirement from Mack Enterprises, and his moving to Redmans Neck—all in 1960), “1968” was actually 1819: he would be 81 on June 4 and would die next January 29. Lady Amherst would point out that if events were to determine dates rather than vice versa, he had even longer than eight years to live, for the Regency had yet to be established. Did he really believe that his son was running Mack Enterprises and the Tidewater Foundation?

Thus she explained Harrison’s old quarrel with Drew Mack, not with any ill will toward the boy (she’s a decent sort, Lady A.; even Jane still admires her; no malice in her that I can see toward anyone but Schott & Co., who deserve it), but to keep Harrison from reasoning himself into your country before his time. In the same vein, with a kind of dark understanding between them that I can only half follow myself (and half is too much by half on this subject), she’d remind him that the Revolution itself was still some years to come: 1968 could well be 1768, and himself in the prime of his career! But Harrison would answer with a rueful smile that he was not so easily gulled, even by those dear to him: she knew as well as he that the “revolution to come” would be not the First but the Second, and that its direction was neither in his hands, who had lost America in 1776, nor in his “self-styled son’s,” who had nearly lost Canada in 1812, but in hands more powerful and adroit than either’s.

With uneasy glances at me—how many of these history lessons, so tender and so serious, yet so lunatic, I audited!—Lady A. could rejoin only that Harrison was forsaking fact for speculation: if he put off dying until the commencement of that “Second Revolution,” he had at least a hundred fifty years to live.

“Not years, dear Liza,” the king would say—or “Germaine” if he was calling himself “Harrison” at the moment. “You and Todd will bury me next Groundhog’s Day.”

And we did. I daresay it took some enterprise in the inner sanctums of Harrison Mack’s incorporated psyche to bring about his first stroke in mid-January and hold off the second till the month’s end. The first fetched Jane home from her adventures and left her husband blind (“Why not 1813 and seven years to go?” I asked Lady A., having checked the history books on G. III’s blindness. But she declared, in tears, he was another king now, old broken Lear, and she no longer “Elizabeth Pembroke” but a superannuate Cordelia). The second stroke killed him. On your deathday—which Harrison still remembered as the cause of my endless
Inquiry,
my presence in this hotel, my old
Floating Opera
story, these epistles to the dead-letter file in the Cambridge P.O., the whole bearing of my life—we put him under in their family plot at Tidewater Farms.

It’s a plot of which “Farmer George” (so G. III and H.M. II liked to call themselves) is the sole identified tenant: long before there was a Maryland it had been an Algonquin burial ground; from George I the First to George III the Second, that aboriginal fertilizer had nourished crop after crop for English and American planters: tobacco, cotton, corn, tomatoes. Harrison acquired it (and the rest of Redmans Neck) from old Colonel Morton in 1955, when Mack Enterprises picked up Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes. The burial ground he reclaimed for its original crop; the other 1,999 acres he put into soybeans, stables, mansion-houses, the Mack Enterprises Research and Development Facility, the Tidewater Foundation, and Tidewater Technical College. This reclamation, or recycling, was more or less the theme of my eulogy, which I delivered at Jane’s request. Harrison—
my
Harrison, back when Jane was
our
Jane (Spanish Civil War days, Roosevelt days, sweet days of last night’s dream, that Depressioned you to death and brought me to life!)—Harrison would’ve got a kick out of it. My text was the motto of Marshyhope State University College:
Praeteritas futuras fecundant,
which the
Undergraduate Bulletin
approximates as “The future is enriched by the past.” As befits a good agribusiness school, Tidewater Tech (on which we first bestowed the motto) used to misrender it “The past is the seedbed of the future.” But we knew what we meant, Harrison and I: not
fecundant
even in the sense of “fertilizes,” but
stercorant:
The past manures the future.

I’d proposed it as the Mack family motto in 1935—Floating Theatre days!—when we learned that Harrison’s father, in his last years, had caused his poop to be preserved in pickle jars. In ’37, when we used those jars (I mean the gardener’s
misuse
of them as fertilizer for Mrs. Mack’s zinnias) to win Harrison the family estate, I proposed it again, in English, to Jane—but the Macks had tired by then of our
ménage à trois
and were beginning to lose their sense of humor. Imagine my surprise, as they say, in 1957 or thereabouts (Eisenhower days! Middle middle age!), when they and I resumed our acquaintance and I learned (a) that Mack Pickles, now known as Mack Enterprises, was diversifying into soya-oil plastics, chemical fertilizers, artificial preservatives, and frozen-food plants;
(b)
that Jane herself was more and more the guiding force of the company; and
(c)
that as Harrison willingly gave way to her and to his new eccentricities, his old sense of humor began to return, and
Praeteritas futuras stercorant
(soberly given by their P.R. people as “The future grows out of the past”) was the corporation motto! Above it, on letterhead, label, and billboard, an elderly gentleman in muttonchop whiskers, pince-nez spectacles, and Edwardian greatcoat, standing in a newly furrowed field amid a horse-drawn plow, a three-masted ship, and a single-stacked factory, shook hands across the generations with a horn-rimmed, crew-cut, gratefully grinning young man (not
futuras
after all, but the
praesentis
of the 1950’s) waist-deep in soybeans, diesel tractors, propellor-engined airliners, and half a dozen smoking stacks.

Even in his next-to-last year, when Jane vetoed the effluent-purifiers and electrostatic precipitators urged upon Mack Enterprises by the new environmentalists, Harrison was capable of sighing slyly, “The past craps up the future.” And so my eulogy turned Ecclesiastes into a prophet of industrial recycling and rebirth control, as who should say to scrap metal, “Out of Buicks art thou come; to Buicks thou shalt return”; or compare my friend’s body in the Indian graveyard to those fish (I worked in the resurrected Christ somewhere along here) that Squanto taught the Pilgrim fathers to plant with their corn.

Praeteritas futuras fecundant:
The king is dead; long live the king!

Lady Amherst, a better Latinist than I, detected the irony, but took it as it was intended and without offense. Her new friend Ambrose Mensch was all grins; but people regard him as an oddball anyhow. The widow was moved, not indecorously, and thanked me afterward, with no detectable irony of her own, for “a lovely tribute to the Harrison we both loved so.” The rest of the company either took my words at face value or paid them no attention. Drew Mack was there, stony-faced, with his handsome wife, Yvonne, both in dark dashikis for the occasion. His sister—now Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, by my count; “Bea Golden” on last summer’s programs of
The Original Floating Theatre II
—was supported in her grief and gin (so the recipe smelt to me, flavored with latakia and too much of something by Givenchy) by the remarkable “Reggie Prinz”: his Jewish Afro more formidable than Yvonne Mack’s
Afro
Afro, his wire-rimmed eyeglasses harking back to Old Man Praeteritas in the picture, his hands (despite himself, I trust) framing hypothetical cinema-shots of ourselves, the house, the grave, nearby Marshyhope Creek and College. Of him, no doubt, more later. Who else? The ubiquitous but elusive Laureate of Maryland, A. B. Cook, read off a poem for the occasion, the closing alexandrines of which—

brought stifled groans from Lady A. and young Mensch and pursed the lips of Cook’s even more elusive son, introduced to me later as Henry Burlingame VII. John Schott, however, was moved to single-handed applause, as it were, and triumphant red-faced glare. As for Jerome Bray, the final graveside guest—a madder chap in my estimation than poor Harrison at his dottiest, and whose presence there no one could account for—his face was impassive as a visitor’s from another country, or planet.

How comes A. B. Cook VI, you ask, to have a son named Henry Burlingame VII? So did I, of the ever-smiling laureate himself, at the reception after the funeral, and was answered by Lord Tennyson paraphrased:

Overhearing which, Lady Amherst commented with just-audible asperity, “We’d know of more than one marshy plot too, I daresay.” Schott harrumphed; Cook bowed to his critic; Ambrose Mensch, at her side, wondered as if innocently whether “royal dreams” was in good eulogistic taste, considering. “Not to mention the play on
interred,”
Lady A. added coolly. At the time I thought she referred merely and cleverly to the
stercorant
business in my tribute.

To all such jibes the Maryland Laureate was deaf. His son (who, one now discovered, spoke English with a heavy
Québécois
accent) politely asked Lady A. to explain the pun; Mensch volunteered for that duty and led the lad aside, out of earshot of Jane, who was listening with strained but ever cool expression to Schott’s hearty condolences while, as it seemed to me, trying to catch my attention. “Bea Golden” was in smoky conversation and transaction with the bartender, while managing simultaneously to keep an eye on her current lover and, if I’m not mistaken, on Ambrose Mensch as well, whom she’d greeted earlier with a string of
Dahlings
effusive even for her. Drew and Yvonne Mack consulted each other; Mr. Bray, himself. Reggie framed us all in his imaginary camera.

Of Jeannine Mack’s paternity, Father of mine, I’m still in doubt, 35 years after the fact. If she’s Harrison’s daughter, she’s a throwback to some pickle farmer earlier than her grandsire. What
I
see in her, alas for “Bea Golden,” is our own progenitors, yours and mine: the drawling, cracker Andrewses from down-county. Misfortunate child, her red-neck genes never at home in those blue-blood boarding schools and hunt clubs! For all her
mahvelouses,
put her in any pahty and it’s the help she’ll be most at home with: the barkeep, the waiters and musicians. No question she’d’ve flourished as a down-home Andrews, drinking beer and making out at fifteen and sixteen in the back seats of Chevrolets; left to herself she’d ’ve been impregnated at seventeen by some local doctor’s boy during the Choptank Yacht Regatta and settled down happily somewhere in the county to raise a family; by now their kids would be off to college; they themselves would be tired of weekend adulteries with the local country-clubbers; they’d be buckled down comfortably for a boozy but respectable middle age, he in waterfront real estate and Annapolis politics, she on the school board and tercentennial committee. As is, she’s staler at 35 than her mother at 63. The very obverse of her brother, Jeannine has, I am confident, never in her incoherent life voluntarily read a newspaper, much less a book, or been moved by a work of art or a bit of history, reflected on life beyond her own botch of it, felt compassion for the oppressed, or loved a fellow human being. I’m told she’s divorcing again, and feels the charmless Prinz to be her great chance…

Ach, Hebe Tochter, mein Herz schmerz!

Drew Mack, on the other hand, is altogether his father’s son, the more so with every fresh rebellion. How could Harrison ever have wondered? Underneath the beard and jeans and dashiki, Drew’s as sleek and ample as a prize Angus; the same steak-fed, Princeton-radical Harrison whom I first met in Baltimore in ’25, beaten up by Mack Senior’s strikebreakers for teaching the “Internationale” to his fellow pickle-pickets. Drew it was who revealed to me, without himself realizing it, the
real
sense of that pun Lady Amherst saw and groaned at. To his mother’s visible distress, and my surprise, when I made to leave for Cambridge at the end of the funeral festivities, he and Yvonne insisted on driving me (I’d come out with young Mensch); we’d no sooner squeezed into his discreetly battered Volvo wagon than he announced—