Letters (134 page)

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.