Letters

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?