Letters Page 13

  In all this, of course, and much that I have not mentioned, I see mainly the reenactment of a certain earlier drama: the stercoration of the present by the past. And the prospect of refloating that particular opera gives me, let’s say, a sinking feeling.

  Which almost, but not quite, brings me to your request. It is not to tease you with off-the-record confidences that I mention my current relations with the surviving Macks. It is to spell out, literally, the implications of your proposal, the better to reach some genuine accord. “You have invited me and engaged to pay me,” Thoreau used to tell his lecture audiences, “and I am determined that you shall have me, though I bore you beyond all precedent.” It is Good Friday morning, an office holiday, promising to warm up enough by afternoon for me to turn to a bit of fitting out of my old boat, but meanwhile cool enough to keep me in my room here in the Dorset Hotel—not my sole home any longer as in years praeteritas, but still my Cambridge pied-à-terre and the seat of my ongoing Inquiry—with little to do (that inquiry being presently stymied) besides respond at length, whether yea or nay, to your letter. Henry James, as I remember, used to want not to hear too much of an anecdote of which he wished eagerly to hear a certain amount, for imaginative purposes. But his brother William astutely remarks that to get enough of anything in nature, one has to take too much.

  I wonder that your letter makes no mention of New Year’s Eve 1954, inasmuch as two of the three things of some moment that happened to me that night are known to you. Here in my room, around ten in the evening of that day, I finished drafting my memoir about not committing suicide aboard Capt. James Adams’s showboat in 1937—a story I’d been writing since the previous March as one facet of my old Inquiry—and prepared to resume the inquiry itself, together with the even older Letter to My Father of which it is a part. But to reward myself for completing the showboat narrative, I strolled down to the New Year’s Eve party in progress at the Cambridge Yacht Club. The Macks were settled in Baltimore at this time; I never saw or heard from them. But I was delighted to find Jeannine there with her (first) husband, Barry Singer, and I spent some time chatting with them. The marriage had caused a tiny stir in the old Guilford/Ruxton society in which the Macks moved, where anti-Semitism perhaps enjoys a prolonged half-life even today. But Singer was the son of Judge Joseph Singer of the Maryland Appellate bench, who had ruled with the majority in Harrison Mack’s favor in our great estate battle of 1938; Singer was moreover a proper Princetonian, and if his part-ownership of a chain of small-town movie houses was regarded by some as “Jewish,” they were pleased enough to meet at his parties the film and stage people among his friends. Barry himself was an engaging, quiet, cultured chap who should have been a lawyer and who certainly should have chosen a more stable bride, goyish or not.

  But he could scarcely have chosen a lovelier. Jane Mack’s daughter was about 21 then and a beauty, with a St. Croix suntan to set off her honey-blonde hair and a smashing backless, nearly frontless gown to set off the suntan. Already she was a confirmed overdrinker (it was Singer who, that same evening, amiably corrected my misapprehension that the Yiddish term shicker described a Jewish man who, like himself, consorted with shiksas) and fatally bitten by the theatrical bug. But the booze hadn’t marked her yet, and given her looks, her youth, and her small connection with the Industry—which was still dominated by Hollywood in those days—Jeannine’s aspirations didn’t seem bizarre, at least at a party. She was happy to remeet her parents’ old and once close friend, the efficient cause of their wealth. She wondered why I didn’t see them more often, and why they chose to stay on in stuffy old Guilford, in broken-down Baltimore. Her own axis was Manhattan/Montego Bay, but they were thinking about chucking “the East Coast thing” altogether and moving to Los Angeles, if Barry could get the right price for his share of the movie-house chain. The Industry itself was no longer running scared about the TV threat, I was to understand, which it had effectively co-opted; but either such news took a while to reach the insular East, or (more likely) prospective buyers were invoking the past to keep the market down: 90 thou was high bid thus far.

  We danced (the mambo!); Jeannine introduced me to a woman-friend of theirs: a handsome, fortyish New Yorker undergoing divorcé, who’d come down with the Singers to our darling town for respite from litigation, and to have a look at Barry’s string of funky little flea-traps in case the settlement gave her a bit to play with. Her tan (Martinique) was even darker than Jeannine’s; she pretended to be afraid of being lynched by mistake; she demanded I loosen my collar so that she might examine firsthand whether I was a red-neck; she expressed her belief that a female divorce lawyer, which she planned to become, would be even less scrupulous than we males. We danced (early rock ’n’ roll!). As always, Jeannine was thick with the musicians, a group imported for the evening at triple scale from Across the Bay. The drummer, we agreed, was the weak sister; she now informed me that it was not their usual and regular drummer we’d judged, but a local lad who knew some of the band members and had asked to sit in for one set. Upon his being relieved we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, young Ambrose Mensch, who, obviously smitten with Jeannine (I believe they had been high school lovers), was by way of appending himself and his then wife to our little party.

  Thus we met, you and I; and knowing your family I recognized your name, but you did not mine (there are scads of Andrewses in the area; ours is the oldest plot in the cemetery). You told me that as a would-be writer you hoped someday to publish fictions set in this area; that having lately seen an Aubrey Bodine photograph of Capt. James Adams’s Original Floating Theatre, you had a vague notion of a novel in the format of the old blackface minstrel shows—a “philosophical minstrel show,” I believe you called it—and had come down to Cambridge during your university’s Christmas recess in order to do a bit of local research on that showboat. You were aloof but not incordial; it took some pressing to get the foregoing out of you—but I know how to press.

  As Jeannine and Mrs. Upper West Side were off to the Ladies, I told you what I knew of the old Chesapeake showboat myself. Moreover, without actually mentioning my own adventure thereupon in 1937 or my just-completed memoir, I observed that the vessel had been equipped with two sets of stage- and houselights: one electric for landings with available power, such as Cambridge, one acetylene for landings without. And I remarked that, given the volatility of acetylene on the one hand, and on the other that old staple of riverboat programs, the sound-effects imitation of famous steamboat races and explosions, one could imagine a leaky valve’s effecting a cataclysmic coincidence of fiction and fact, or art and reality.

  You were amused. You extemporized on my conceit, bringing the portentous name of the boat and its impresario into your improvisation. We got on.

  My age allows me to confess without embarrassment that I have always admired the novelist’s calling and often wished I had been born to it. My generation is perhaps the only one in middle-class America that ever took its writers seriously: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passes are my contemporaries; with the latter two, during their Baltimore residences, I was socially acquainted. Nowadays the genre is so fallen into obscure pretension on the one hand and cynical commercialism on the other, and so undermined at its popular base by television, that to hear a young person declare his or her ambition to be a capital-W Writer strikes me as anachronistical, quixotic, as who should aspire in 1969 to be a Barnum & Bailey acrobat, a dirigible pilot, or the Rembrandt of the stereopticon. Even on the last day of 1954 and the first of 1955 it struck me thus, though I saw no point in so remarking to you. But in the 1920’s and ’30’s, even into the ’40’s, there was still a heroism in your vocation such as I think there will never be again in this country; a considerable number of us had rather been Hemingway than Gary Cooper or Charles Lindbergh, for example.

  It was this reflex of respect that interested me enough in you to draw you out on your ambition (at your then age and stage, neither
more nor less realistic than Jeannine’s) and to pursue the coincidence of our preoccupation with the Floating Theatre. Before I left the yacht club with the Singer party, you and I were discussing the philosophical implications of suicide (I was surprised you’d not yet read Sartre or Camus, not to mention Kierkegaard and Heidegger, so fashionable on the campuses then). I went so far as to confide to you the nature of my Letter to My Father—you’d mentioned Kafka’s to his, which I’d not heard of—and my Inquiry: the one setting forth my precarious heart condition and my reasons for not apprising Father of it; the other investigating his suicide in 1930. I don’t remember saying good night.

  The third notable thing that happened to me before morning was that my celibacy—imperfectly maintained since the end of my old romance with Jane Mack, and more a passive habit than an active policy—took its worst beating in seventeen years at the hands so to speak of Mrs. Upper West Side at the Tidewater Inn, across the Choptank in Less Primitive Talbot County, where the Singers were stopping. Their friend had, it developed, a Thing about Courtly Southern Gentlemen (Oedipus Rhett?). It was a blow to her to hear from me that Maryland had officially sided with the Union in the Civil War; that grits and hominy and live oaks and Spanish moss are not to be found in our latitude; that Room Service listed no mint juleps among their nightcaps. I consoled her with promises of terrapin chowder and a pressed wild-duck sandwich come morning, and the news that our part of Maryland had been staunchly Confederate, and Loyalist before that, and had enjoyed its latest Negro lynching well within her lifetime. I believe she had half hoped to find a slave whip under my vest, boll weevils in the bed; I in turn was expected to be titillated by such exotica as that she was fourteen years my junior, an aggressive fellationist and stand-up copulator, and a Jewess (her term, which she despised, hissed seductively through perfect teeth). I professed to be astonished that her tuchas bore no Cabalistic emblems, her pipik no hidden diamonds—only, lower down, a much tidier cesarean scar than could readily be left by our small-town surgeons. She declared herself dumbfounded that I had no tattooed flag of Dixie on my foreskin—nay, more, no foreskin! We laughed and humped our heads off for some days into the new year, in her hotel and mine, the Singers having long since smiled good-bye to us at the Easton airport.

  Sharon’s husband-on-the-way-out, I learned, was the actor Melvin Bernstein. His real name had been Mel Miller; as an apprentice borscht-circuit comic he’d changed it to sound more Jewish; later, when he moved into “straight” acting, he regretted not having kept the low-profile original, but couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice the small and no longer quite appropriate celebrity of his stage name. To the consequent ambiguity of his scope and unambiguity of his name he attributed his failure to succeed as a leading man; but his career as a character actor was established in New York, and he was beginning to pick up similar roles in films. He was compulsively promiscuous, Sharon testified, and addicted to anal copulation, which she found uncomfortable and distasteful as well as, on the testimony of her proctologist, conducive to hemorrhoids. Hence the action for divorce, despite Mel’s engaging to offer to lubricate his vice with shmaltz. I was to muse upon this information six years later, when Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer, still the hopeful pre-starlet, flew out to Los Angeles via Reno to become the next Mrs. Melvin Bernstein.

  Well.

  About your Floating Opera novel, which appeared the following year, I understandably have mixed feelings. On the one hand it was decidedly a partial betrayal on your part of a partial confidence on mine, and though you altered names and doctored facts for literary effect, some people hereabouts imagined they saw through to the real thing, with consequent minor inconvenience to my law practice and my solitary life. It was not long after, for example, that I exchanged my regular room in the Dorset for a certain goose-hunting retreat out on Todd’s Point, down the river, and commissioned a local boatbuilder to convert me a skipjack to live aboard in Cambridge in the summer, when the hotel gets too warm. On the other hand, my old love of fiction, aforementioned, was gratified to see the familiar details of my life and place projected as through a camera obscura. What’s more, Harrison Mack read the novel too, found in it more to praise than to blame despite the unflattering light it cast him in, and was prompted to reopen a tentative correspondence with me, which soon led to the chaste reestablishment of our friendship and my retention as counsel for Mack Enterprises on the Eastern Shore. For this indirect and unintended favor, I’m your debtor.

  The company had bought out old Colonel Morton’s farms and canneries, including the Redmans Neck property, and was replacing the tomatoes with more profitable soybeans. Harrison was just beginning to fancy himself George III of England and Jane to display the business acumen of her forebear and ideal, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. I did not know then—what I learned only last month—that Jane’s managerial activity, doubtless like Betsy’s, coincided with the termination of her menses by hysterectomy and, by her own choice, of her sexual life. Just prior to her surgery, in 1949, Jane had permitted herself the second extramarital affair of her biography, this time without Harrison’s complaisance: a brief wild fling in London and Paris with Sir Jeffrey William Pitt, Lord Amherst, now deceased, then husband of that same Lady Amherst you mention in your postscript and descendant of the Lord Jeff of French and Indian War celebrity. More anon.

  Under Jane’s direction, Mack Enterprises throve and prospered. From chemical fertilizers and freeze-dried foods they branched into certain classified research in the chemical-warfare way, over the protests of myself (by then a stockholder) and son Drew, a political science undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. The Macks bought, built, and moved to Tidewater Farms; I became a trustee, then executive director of their Tidewater Foundation; Jeannine married Mel Bernstein; Drew scandalized his parents by going off to do graduate work at Brandeis, along with Angela Davis, under Herbert Marcuse. The Tidewater Foundation implemented, in addition to Tidewater Tech, dozens of lesser Mack philanthropies, some whimsical, not all with the unanimous consent of the trustees: a quack health farm in west New York and Ontario, not unlike the one described in your End of the Road novel (I opposed it; Jane and Harrison approved it for the sake of Jeannine, a sometime patient there); the Jerome Bonaparte Bray Computer Center at Lily Dale, N.Y. (he’s the crank you ask about in your letter, whom also I opposed; but both Macks were impressed by the Bonaparte connection, and Drew, to their surprise, also approved the project, for reasons not entirely clear); the Annual Greater Choptank July 4th Fireworks Display (this was a prickly one, as it offended both Harrison in his George III aspect and Drew in his radical antichauvinism. We pacified the father with a private Guy Fawkes Day display out on Redmans Neck; Drew’s demand for an equal-candlepower May Day celebration was then outvoted). Among our current unanimous beneficiaries are the upcoming Dorchester Tercentenary and a floating summer repertory theater on the Cambridge-Oxford-Annapolis circuit: a larger replica of Captain Adams’s showboat, it bears the paradoxical name Original Floating Theatre II. Never mind that Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, (as of 1963, when she left old Mel for Louis Golden, a producer of B—and blue—movies) exploited this charity to play roles she never could have won on her own: the productions, alternating with old flicks, are by far the best in the area, and this venture led the foundation into other cultural philanthropies: a media department at Tidewater Tech (now Marshyhope College), for example, and the subsidizing of young artists dealing with the local scene. E.g., as perhaps you know, “Bea Golden’s” latest lover (Louis having gone the way of his predecessors in 1968), the formidable Reggie Prinz, whose film-in-the-works of your new book is partially backed by foundation money.

  I’m ahead of myself. Lord and Lady Amherst stopped at Tidewater Farms in 1961 and were, excuse me, royally entertained by the Macks, whether because Harrison and Lady A. knew nothing of Jane’s old affair (Jane herself, I am bemused to learn, has a positive genius for repressing unwelcome memories), or because Harrison’s royal
delusion by then insulated him from jealousy (George III never wondered about Queen Charlotte). More likely, bygones were simply bygones. It was during this visit that Harrison first associated Germaine Pitt Amherst with the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Elizabeth Spencer: a new and fateful stage of his madness, partly responsible for her later invitation to MSUC. I first met her then, too, and liked her better than I liked her husband.

  Meanwhile, up in Waltham, Mass., Andrews Mack has become fashionably but by no means insincerely radicalized. Having disappointed his parents in the first place by choosing Hopkins and Brandeis as his soul mothers rather than Princeton and Harvard, he now quite exasperates them by dropping his doctoral studies in ’63 to assist in the Cambridge (Maryland) civil rights demonstrations—quite as his father had picketed his own father’s pickle factories back in the thirties. When the July 4th fireworks were canceled that year on account of the race riots, Harrison followed the family tradition of disowning his son, though not by formal legal action. Drew responded by promptly marrying one of his ex-classmates, a black girl from Cambridge.

  I do not suggest that he married her solely as a gesture of protest: Yvonne Miner Mack is a striking young woman, Brandeis-bright, less radical than her husband but well to the left of Bobby Kennedy, for example, in whose office in the Justice Department the Cambridge riots were temporarily adjudicated; Drew loved her and had been living with her for some time. But unlike his friend and apparent mentor “H. C. Burlingame VII” (don’t ask), young Mack is simplistic by policy as well as ingenuous and sincere by nature, and lives largely in ardent symbols. Moreover, he’d been opposed to marriage thitherto on the usual radicalist grounds. They have two sons now: bright, handsome little chaps whom Drew instructs in their African heritage and Yvonne takes to hear Leonard Bernstein’s children’s concerts. Sinistral but nowise sinister, long-haired and ascetic, Drew Mack looks to me less a hippie than a Massachusetts Minuteman in his denims, boots, and homespun shirts, his hair tied neatly back with a rubber band. I would bet my life on his integrity; not a nickel on his subtlety or diplomacy—and I think the Established Order has more to fear from him than from all the H. C. Burlingames and A. B. Cooks together, for he lives his beliefs down to the finest print he can understand.