by John Barth
And Jeannine’s?
I hoped the dim light concealed my blush. 50-50. Drew hmm’d, regarded his wineglass, then me; then he smiled and raised the glass in slight salute. It was time, he said, he made peace with that sister, or half sister. He was distressed by her latest set-down and the news of her reaggravated alcoholism; they’d never been close, but perhaps now that his own life was turning a corner, he could help her turn one too.
Profoundly to be wished, said I. Very discreetly, then, so as not to spoil our new rapport, I brought up the names of his prospective stepfather and of Andrew Cook; also the nature of his own involvement in Reg Prinz’s film. On the former matter Drew would say nothing except that while he did not believe me to be a C.I.A. or F.B.I: informer, I had gravely thwarted him once before, in the matter of the Choptank River Bridge, and he was determined not to be thus thwarted again (which was, it seemed to me, saying a great deal!). As for the film: suffice it to say that the media’s tactic of co-opting the revolution was, so to speak, a coaxial business: they in turn could be co-opted, subverted without their even knowing it. The hearts and minds of the American middle class, especially the kids’, could be won in neighborhood movie theaters and on national networks, under the sponsorship of Anacin and Geritol…
He began to say more, caught himself up with a grim smile, said he’d had too much to drink, emptied his glass, and bid me good night.
A big southwesterly next morning kept the sky cloudy, but as the P.O.P. was favorable, we made a fast beam reach of the 24 miles down and across the Bay to Bloodsworth Island. Drew loved the ride; he smoked cigars (properly mindful of sparks against the Dacron sails) and railed animatedly against those “fingerprints of the Hand of Death” on our navigation chart (1224): Targets. Prohibited Area. Unexploded Bombs: Keep Clear. Navy Maintained. Prohibited. Restricted. He chuckled at the radio news report that exhumation of Mary Jo Kopechne’s body was regarded as doubtful; the Pentagon’s projection of an all-volunteer army for Viet Nam escalated his chuckle to a derisive laugh. For all his contempt of such capitalist toys as cruising sailboats, he handled the skipjack deftly while I made lunch. By one o’clock we were in the straits between lower Dorchester County and Bloodsworth Island—flat, featureless marshes both—whence Drew threaded us expertly through an unlikely-looking maze of stakes marking a channel not given on the chart, to a pier in a cove on the island’s north shore (Barataria Bight, Drew called it). He rounded up smartly alongside Castine’s Baratarian at the ample dock, where we made fast with spring lines and fenders.
Much activity was afoot: a brace of Drew’s shaggy cohorts caught our heaving lines admiringly while he gave the raised-fist salute; others moved about the white clapboard lodge and buildings nearby. Skiffs and motor launches—some painted battleship gray and manned by uniformed navy people—buzzed about; a big navy helicopter blasted low over us (fortunately all sails were down) and inland, toward where from some miles out we’d seen smoke rising; official-looking folk in summer suits and navy suntans came from the lodge to meet us, filmed by one of Prinz’s assistants. No sign of Jane, the baron, or Marshyhope’s new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English, who owns the spread. The Stars and Stripes flapped northeastwards from a pole in the sandy dooryard.
Navy Intelligence and F.B.I., Drew’s friends alerted us cheerfully, adding that we’d missed some crazy footage the night before.
I don’t know yet exactly what-all happened, Dad; but it seems that the half-ad libitum “Burning of Washington,” filmed on the Sunday night, had got out of hand. Lady Amherst and her friend Ambrose Mensch were involved—both returned now to the mainland, as were Jane and Baron Castine before the whole thing started. The scenario had involved some manner of personal combat, allegorical I presume, between Mensch and Reg Prinz (also now flown, leaving his assistants in charge of the filming), each of whom had, in the event, done physical injury to the other. As the thunderstorms moved in after dark, the sets representing the Capitol and the President’s House had been fired, coincident by design with a night aerial gunnery exercise on nearby Pone Island (regarded as contiguous with Bloodsworth and maintained by the navy as a target area). While nature’s fireworks combined with the navy’s and Reg Prinz’s, the Bernstein girl had run off the set into the marshes, toward the Prohibited Area, pursued by (of all people, and don’t ask me why he was there) Jerome Bonaparte Bray, the madman of Lily Dale, cast aptly in the role of “Napoleon escaped from Elba”! In time Ms. Bernstein was retrieved, in shock but apparently unmolested, on the margin of an Absolutely Prohibited Zone sown with unexploded naval ordnance. She’d been fetched back to the lodge, where she remained under medical supervision—her distress augmented, this same Monday morning, by Prinz’s deserting her as he’d deserted Jeannine. Sic transit!
Bray, however, never had been found. It was feared he had strayed into the Target Area and lost his way; was possibly a casualty of that gunnery exercise: hence the massive navy presence at Barataria Lodge. After midnight, squally weather had suspended both the firing exercise and the search; the latter had been resumed at dawn, without result, and was just now about to be abandoned.
Drew’s people took for granted that the operation was mainly an exercise for the “Intelligence Types” to harass and scrutinize their activities: two young men had indeed been arrested as known draft evaders and one as a Marine Corps deserter, on warrants conveniently preprepared. I was impressed by Drew’s good-humored ease in conversation with these same “Intelligence Types”; neither intimidated nor provocative, he was altogether in command of himself. He had, clearly, turned some important corner in his life. A. B. Cook VI, on the other hand, protested indignantly that Mr. Bray had made his way safely out of the marsh, if he had ever been there; had appeared in Cook’s office in the lodge not two hours since to bid him good-bye, and was gone now back to the mainland with the rest. That the U.S. Navy was to its discredit harassing him, a man whose patriotism and conservatism were celebrated and unimpeachable; had been harassing him for years to surrender his title to Barataria, the last such private holding on the island.
Andrew Burlingame Cook VI: that florid fellow came down now from cottage to dock to greet us, protesting flamboyantly (but not, I thought, in very genuine outrage) as he came. He welcomed Drew and me with equal ebullience, regretting we’d missed yesterday’s entertainment and today’s luncheon. He cordially identified Drew to the Intelligence Types as a flaming commie they’d do better to bother with than himself; me as a misguided pinko liberal whose heart however was in the right place. Drew grinned around his cigar; the I.T.‘s were unmoved. I wondered. Now that I had seen Jane’s Baron Castine, Cook’s resemblance to him struck me as real but slight: one would neither guess them to be half siblings on that basis nor much question the allegation. Drew thanked me for the ride and excused himself to confer with “his people”; Cook expansively showed me about his property and the still-smoldering remains of the movie set (little more than a few charred “flats”), recounting in his fashion the events of the night before. Mosquitoes swarmed. Why he’d ever lent himself and his premises to such a cockeyed project, staffed by godless free-loving commie dope fiends, would be a mystery to him, Cook declared, were it not that he knew too well his penchant for theatricals. What’s more, he was a leading spirit of the Maryland 1812 Society. Therefore he had not only offered his property and his historical expertise to the filmmakers, but had been pleased to play the role of his own ancestor and namesake, Andrew Cook IV, a participant in the Battle of Bladensburg and a casualty of the 1814 assault on Baltimore. But the film was a farce, a travesty! Look what he had brought upon himself (he waved with a laugh at a passing helicopter, on its way back to the Patuxent Naval Air Station)! He would think twice before accepting their invitation to “do” the Fort McHenry scene in September!
We returned to the lodge through a cleanup detail supervised by Drew, observed by the last contingent of Intelligence Types, and filmed by Prinz’s cameraman. Cook’s place was spa
cious, airy, simple, comfortable; I was invited to stay for dinner and the night. No hard feelings, he trusted, about our disagreement in the Marshyhope affair? Clearly he bore no grudges: witness his hospitality to the disrupters, whose shameful behavior on Commencement Day he nonetheless still deplored. With Lady Amherst and her friend Mensch, too, he had for his part made his peace: they’d spent last night as his guests in the caretaker’s cottage, where he hoped I’d oblige him by staying tonight. He was satisfied that “those lovebirds” had been properly disciplined for their misdemeanors, and was ready now to support their reinstatement to the faculty.
We sipped Canadian ale in his long screened porch and regarded the activity outside. I said I understood that Baron André Castine was his near relative: half brother, was it? So he likes to claim, Cook jovially replied: one wouldn’t guess it from our faces or our politics, eh? And the truth, alas, was buried with their parents. But again, he bore that chap no ill will—though he’d be relieved when he and his were gone from Barataria, and the navy stopped breathing down his neck!
Hm. Castine, then, was some sort of political radical? One of your high-society lefties, Cook affirmed: cast in the mold of FDR and Averell Harriman, but without their money—he winked—at least till his coming remarriage, eh?
I wondered aloud whether Jane Mack was aware of her fiancé’s politics. Cook laughed: his cousine was no fool; I might rest assured there was nothing about her groom-to-be that she did not know. Anyhow, added Drew (who here stepped casually out from the cottage living room, ale in hand), only such a crusted troglodyte as our host would call Roosevelt and Harriman radicals. Cook saluted with his glass: only such a card-carrying subverter of Old Glory as Harrison Mack’s misguided son would regard the Red Baron as a moderate liberal.
Such affability. Castine, then, I inquired, had not himself been present at all during the Burning of Washington? Cook winked again: the lucky fellow had seen his betrothed back to Cambridge instead; but he would return tonight or tomorrow, Cook devoutly hoped, to retrieve his yacht and begone to the upper Severn, where Drew’s mother was buying property in expectation of a favorable settlement of her late husband’s estate.
This last was an obvious but not ill-humored gibe; Drew merely saluted with his glass again. Where, I wondered, was my short-fused young adversary of old? What was all this amiable ecumenicism? I asked Drew his immediate plans. He’d be staying there at least until Castine returned, he supposed; they had “wrap-up” shots and other business to finish (Monkey business, Cook snorted) before moving on to “the home of the Home of the Brave” for more footage on Defenders Day, Sept. 12, anniversary of the British attack on Baltimore. The Tidewater Foundation, after all, had a large investment in the film; he felt a responsibility to monitor the expenditure of his father’s money. Hah, said Cook. And your mother knows all about these things? I pressed. Drew shrugged: Mack Enterprises had its own Intelligence Types, whose competence however he could not vouch for.
I did in fact stay for dinner—a cold buffet for the whole remaining company, served by Cook’s cook and caretaker—and the night, hoping I’d see Castine again and ask him a few polite questions. The caretaker’s cottage included a guest apartment—a clean and welcomely air-conditioned respite from O.J.—where but for brief confused dreams of the “Red Baron” and Jeannine, I slept more soundly than one ever does, or should, single-handed on a sailboat.
And next morning (Tuesday 8/26, a blazing, airless, equatorial day) I lingered about the premises till near noon, making a long business out of odd-job maintenance on the boat, in hopes of remeeting the owner of Baratarian. Who, however, did not appear. The man makes his own timetables, Drew said, and he Drew makes his. How about mine?
It was a plain, albeit cordial, invitation to leave; and indeed it was time I got on with, back to, done with my much-disrupted voyage de bon voyage. He and Cook, still chaffing each other, bid me farewell—Drew’s handshake was solid and serious, his expression gratified as mine by our new, not altogether clear rapprochement—and aided my undocking, calling advice about shoals and bush markers as I swung clear of Castine’s trawler and powered gingerly out. I waved good-bye to the people on the wharf, to the lodge, the limp unmoving flag, Bloodsworth Island generally and Drew Mack in particular—but began to suspect already that my quietus might have to be postponed till I’d seen that young man again (perhaps at Fort McHenry?) and I learned What Was Going On.
I had meant to bid adieu to certain tributaries of the Potomac—St. Inigoes on the St. Mary, for instance, near where white Marylanders first landed—but I had digressed too long and too far with the heirs of Harrison Mack. Through binoculars I could just make out, as I entered the Bay, Point No Point Lighthouse, ten miles to west-southwestward, and I felt another proper pang, not unmixed with exhilaration, as I turned northwest instead, back up the Chesapeake, toward home. Goodbye, Point No Point, fit title for the story of my life. Good-bye to all things south of Bloodsworth: I shall not pass your way again.
No breeze but what came under the awning from our headway. Trolling a Hopkins Spoon for bluefish (I caught only one; we were moving too fast), I motored all day through glass-calm water, past Hoopers, Barren, and Taylors islands, 30 miles up the Bay and ten more into the Little Choptank to Church Creek, in whose mouth I anchored at sundown. There was neither light nor water enough to go the mile and a half farther to my destination, near the creek’s head; anyhow there were fewer bugs and more air where I was. Perspiring through my insect repellent every hour or so, I spent the evening trying vainly to draw the connections that had teased me through the day’s navigation, and found myself at bedtime with no more than a list of names—Harrison Jane Castine Cook Drew Jeannine Bray—between which I made less meaningful associations than between the dinner entries in my log: cold artichoke broiled bluefish French bread rosé.
After breakfast I dinghied up to Old Trinity Churchyard and said good-bye to that tranquil place (maintained in part by foundation funds) which presently my remains shall say hello to. I will not join the family, Dad, in Plot #1. If I cannot manage to recycle my body to the crabs and fishes on which it has so long and gratefully fed, it will go into this venerable, quiet ground, so near their haunts that I heard the minnows plashing from my grave.
I had dreamed again that night. Through the day—an easy glide on prevailing southerlies out of the Little, and into the Great, Choptank, my river—I mused upon those dreams. They had been local geographical teasers, inspired no doubt by Point No Point. That name figured in them, as did Ragged Point, Cooks Point, Todds Point, which-all I left to starboard during the day: my subconscious is as unsubtle as our Author. There now lay home, so close I could scan the property with binoculars; but I had two bases more to touch, and planned anyhow to end my cruise and the week in Cambridge, with a stop at the office, before coming full circle to Todds Point. The mild breeze died in midriver, at slack tide, just off the Choptank Light. I lowered sail, kicked the engine on, and chugged up the wealthy Tred Avon past Oxford to my parking place: snug and unspoiled Martin Cove, not named on Chart 551.
After shower and dinner, finishing a soft Bordeaux under a fine full moon, I turned last night’s name-list into a list of questions. For what reason could Castine and Drew be friends, who were by way of being rival contenders for Harrison’s money, if not that they were in political collusion to swindle Jane, perhaps Jeannine as well? Did not Drew’s position vis-à-vis “the media”—i.e., co-opting the co-opters—account for his easy new detente with A. B. Cook, perhaps even with me, and his expressed wish, however apparently sincere, for reconciliation with his sister? Disagreeable speculation! But unto death I am a lawyer. How account, though, for Cook’s affability, which seemed to me to go substantially beyond his former and famous mercuriality? Could there be anything to Joseph Morgan’s old supposition, that behind that flag-waving poetaster was a closet radical? How useful it might have been for this old trial lawyer to watch him and Castine together! Could Drew be planning to t
urn the Fort McHenry film scene into a terrorist demolition stunt? Or could Cook, say (or Castine, for possibly different reasons), be setting Drew up for such a stunt in order to thwart and arrest him? Perhaps Cook, rather than Castine, was an Intelligence Type!
Et cetera, vertiginously, till near midnight, while my last full moon (the Sturgeon) whitened, crossed Martin Cove, and penumbrally eclipsed. Herons squawked. My conjectures bored me; I was spinning them out, I began to suspect (just as I’ve spun out this last letter to you), in the way Dante tells us that Florentine assassins, placed headfirst into holes in the ground and condemned to live burial, spun out their last confessions to the bending priest—inventing, to delay their end, even more sins than they’d committed. My concern was real—for Jane, for Drew, for Jeannine, for (for that matter) the Star-Spangled Banner and suchlike national symbols—but it was limited. What’s more, at that hour in that private place where a certain old friend and I had watched many a moon sail westwards, I missed her awfully. I was in fact fairly seized by horny, lonely boredom, to the point where (at age 69, Dad!) I fished out my penis to masturbate—but ended by pissing over the taffrail instead, and turning in. Good night, Polly.
They might all, of course, be conning me. An elaborate conspiracy among Jane, Drew, and Jeannine, assisted by Cook and Castine, to eliminate me (i.e., the T.F.) from the Mack sweepstakes. Why not? With secondary plots against one another once I’m out of the running. I considered this possibility through the Thursday—another dull scorcher, with fitful breezes that made sailing a slow but busy business. My last anchorage, in Trappe Creek (La Trappe on the chart, but no Eastern Shoreman ever called it that), was a mere eleven miles down the Tred Avon and up the Choptank. To kill time I reviewed and adieu’d the other elegant Tred Avon creeks—Peachblossom, Maxmore, Goldsborough, Plaindealing—and tied up at Oxford for lunch and supplies before tacking out into my river for the afternoon and running into Trappe Creek for the evening. By when I found it hard to care who was conning whom.