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This was last week. Our meeting ended with a sort of vote: two-nothing in favour of your nomination, Dr Carter abstaining. To my surprise, the acting president’s reaction, relayed through both Dr Carter and Miss Stickles, is cautious nondisapproval, and today I am authorised to make the invitation.

You are, then, sir, by way of being a compromise candidate, who will, I hope, so far from feeling therein compromised, come to the aid of your friend, your native county, and its “largest single economic [and only cultural] entity” by accepting this curious invitation. Moreover, by accepting it promptly, before the opposition (some degree of which is to be expected) has time to rally. That Schott even tentatively permits this letter implies that A. B. Cook VI has been sounded out and, for whatever mysterious reasons, chooses not to exercise his veto out of hand. But Ambrose informs me, grimly, that there is a “Dr Schott” in some novel of yours, too closely resembling ours for coincidence, and not flatteringly drawn: should he get wind of this fact (Can it be true? Too delicious!) before your acceptance has been made public…

Au revoir, then, friend of my friend! I hold your first novel in my hand, eager to embark upon it; in your own hand you may hold some measure of our future here (think what salubrious effect a few well-chosen public jibes at the “Tow’r of Truth” and its tidewater laureate might have, televised live from Redmans Neck on Commencement Day!). Do therefore respond at your earliest to this passing odd epistle, whose tail like the spermatozoon’s far outmeasures its body, the better to accomplish its single urgent end, and — like Molly Bloom at the close of her great soliloquy (whose author was, yes, a friend of your friend’s friend) — say to us yes, to the Litt.D. yes, to MSU yes, and yes Dorchester, yes Tidewater, Maryland yes yes yes!

Yours,

GGP(A)

B: Todd Andrews to his father. The death and funeral of Harrison Mack, Jr.

Dorset Hotel

High Street

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

March 7, 1969

Mr. Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot # 1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear Father:

Brrr! Old fellow in the cellarage, what gripes you? Every night since Tuesday’s full moon you’ve crawled about (in your Sunday best) under the stage of my drifting dreams… like me some 30 years ago under the stage of Captain Adams’s showboat, trying unsuccessfully to turn myself off. Last night I left a particularly good dream to investigate the noise (in the dream it was a certain August afternoon 37 years past; I and the century were 32 and off weekending with my friends the Macks in their Todds Point summer cottage; Harrison Mack, alive and happily uncrowned, had gone for ice; I was napping; so was the century; Jane Mack—26 again and naked! — was just about to slip in from the kitchen and take me by the sweetest surprise of my life…), and there you swung, Father mine, blackfaced and belted ’round the neck as in February 1930, not a smudge on you. No returning to my Floating Theatre then! And tonight, soixante-neuf once more with this kinky crone of a century, here in my old hotel room — that’s not a March draft I feel on my hackles; those clunks and clanks aren’t sclerosis of the heat pipes or Captain Adams retuning his calliope: it’s you, old mole! Come to join the party? Come to watch through the keyhole while your old son (older than his dad now!) tries to get it up for Grandma Mack?

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.