The baron advises them to demand an interview at Castines Hundred, but the twins seem as attracted by the prospect of travel as by the possibility that the letter is authentic. They insist; their guardian shrugs his shoulders and returns to his bucolic pursuits. They set out for Baltimore — and there they live, in obscure circumstances and with much travel intermixed, until the Civil War.

Of the fate of “Ebenezer Burling” and their connection with him, there is no record (the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad opened on Andrew IV’s birthday in 1828, horse-drawn); the source of their income is unknown. From references in later letters — exchanged during the twins’ separation by the Civil War — one infers that there was much coming and going between Baltimore and Washington, Baltimore and Boston, Baltimore and Buffalo. They remember having encouraged “E.B.‘s” young poet-friend, during his own residency in their city (1831-35), to give up alcohol and poetry for short prose tales readable at a single sitting, and not to hesitate to marry his 13-year-old cousin. On the other hand, having read the young novelist Walt Whitman’s maiden effort (Franklin Evans, or, the Inebriate), they urged its author to switch to verse. Perhaps presumptuously, they take credit for passing on to Whitman Henry Burlingame III’s “cosmophilism”; Henry V opines, however, that the scandalous pansexualism of Leaves of Grass is entirely rhetorical, the author being in fact virtually celibate. With Longfellow they could do nothing, beyond suggesting that Edgar charge him with plagiarism; no more could they with Mrs. Stowe. With Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson they were content, except as the latter two strayed into verse. None could be persuaded to make literature out of their father’s Algerian adventure or their mother’s reenactment, in reverse, of the story of her ancestor Madocawanda the Tarratine. (They did not live to groan at Longfellow’s versification of it in 1871 as “The Student’s Second Tale” in Part Second of his tiresome Tales of a Wayside Inn:

…a fatal letter wings its way

Across the sea, like a bird of prey…

Lo! The young Baron of St. Castine,

Swift as the wind is, and as wild,

Has married a dusky Tarratine,

Has married Madocawando’s child!

et cetera.)

On October 24, 1861, when the first transcontinental telegraph message links sea to shining sea and replaces the Pony Express, Henrietta Burlingame, 49, gives birth to my grandfather, Andrew Burlingame Cook V. The father is unknown: it is not necessarily Henrietta’s brother. The perfectly ambiguous facts are that just nine months earlier the twins had either quarreled or pretended to quarrel seriously for the first time in their lives — not, ostensibly, over some transgression of the former limits of their intimacy or the election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent secession of the Southern states, but over the merits of Karl Marx’s thesis (in his essay The 18th Brumaire and the Court of Louis Napoleon) that great events and personages in history tend to occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce — and separated. Henry (who agreed with the second proposition but not the first, given the multiple repetitions in their own genealogy) moved to Washington; Henrietta (who believed that the recurrences were as often tragic as the originals, e.g., Tecumseh’s reenactment of Pontiac’s conspiracy) to the Eastern Shore, where in April — as Baltimoreans reenacted in 1861 their bloody riots of 1812—she found herself unambiguously three months pregnant, and remained in seclusion until her child was born.

Once the separation is effected, their letters become entirely fond, insofar as one can decipher their private coinages and allusions and sort out reciprocal ironies. In addition to the literary reminiscences already mentioned, they chaffingly criticize each other’s positions vis-à-vis the war so long ago predicted in Joel Barlow’s Columbiad; also vis-à-vis their father’s prenatal letters to them. Neither twin has anything to do with the fighting. Henry declares or pretends to declare for the Union, Henrietta for the Confederacy. Henry’s reading of their father’s letters is that they were disingenuous: that Andrew IV exhorted them not to rebel against him exactly in order to provoke their rebellion — i.e., to lead them to work against the sort of stalemate he “pretended to hope for in the 1812 War” and for “the Manifest Destiny he actually believed in.” Henrietta in her turn maintains that their father’s exhortation was perfectly sincere.

Of course it is quite possible that the twins were secretly in league. They are together in New York City at the time of the great draft riots of July 1863, in which 100 people are killed; they are together in Ford’s Theater in April 1865, when Lincoln is assassinated by the erratic son of their old friends the Booths of Baltimore. The Union is preserved, however sorely; the slaves are emancipated, if not exactly free. The Dominion of Canada is about to be established; the first U.S. postcard will soon be issued. Where are Henry and Henrietta?

Why, they are once more in their true womb, Castines Hundred. There the new baron and baroness have been killed in an unfortunate carriage accident, leaving a baby son named Henri Castine IV (they have their own Pattern, of no concern to us here). The twins sell their Baltimore property and die to the world; not even literature much engages them now. They raise the young cousins with benign indifference. Andrew V displays a precocious interest in the family history; they neither foster nor discourage it. He is shown the “1812 letters” of his grandsire and namesake, the other documents of the family, his great-grandfather’s pocketwatch; but his insistent questions — especially concerning his parents’ own activities (he does not shy from referring to the twins thus) — are answered with a smile, a shrug, an equivocation.

The boy decides, for example, that their obscure movements during the war were a cover for certain exploits in the Great Lakes region: the establishment (and/or exposure) of the Cleveland-Cincinnati relay of the Confederacy’s Copperhead espionage system; the institution (and/or disruption) of a white Underground Railroad to Canada for Confederate agents and escapees from Union prison camps. Whose scheme was it, if not theirs, to ship bales of Canadian wool contaminated with yellow-fever bacilli to all U.S. Great Lakes ports, by way of avenging the bacteriological warfare waged against Pontiac’s Indians a century before? And who masterminded the Fenian invasion of Fort Erie by New York Irish “bog trotters” in 1866, he wanted to know, just a year after the Burlingames’ official return to Castines Hundred? The Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood’s objective might have been to seize and hold the Welland Canal until Britain granted independence to Ireland; but was it not the twins’ idea to provoke another U.S.-Canadian war (which of course the British and the ruined Confederacy would welcome) while the wounds of the Civil War were still open? Or contrariwise (what actually happened) to bind the reluctant Canadian provinces, as disinclined to confederation as were Tecumseh’s Indians, into a Dominion of Canada united against U.S. aggression?

“You are more Burlingame than we are,” his parents contentedly reply. They live into their eighties, the first Cooks or Burlingames to achieve longevity. By the time of their death in 1898, the son of their middle age will be nearing the classical midpoint of his own life (well past its actual midpoint in his case); he will have married an educated Tuscarora Indian from Buffalo, sired children of his own — first among them my father, Henry Burlingame VI — and already cut his revolutionary teeth in the Canadian Northwest Rebellion of ’85, the Chicago Haymarket Riot, and the Carnegie and Pullman labor-union battles.