It was a fairly nauseating ceremonial, not however without its comic touches. I should pass over it except that so many of “your characters” were there, and that it gives to this narrative of my affair with Ambrose Mensch an almost novelistic symmetry: we “began” with the service for Harrison Mack on Redmans Neck in February, and in effect we “end” (our premarital courtship, not our connexion!) with another such service in the same general geography.
It was conducted in the Show and Tell Room of MSU’s Media Centre, which doubles as a nondenominational campus chapel until the enormous projected new Hall of All Faiths shall have been raised. So declared the nervous young university chaplain, a new appointee, over the newly installed super-quadraphonic public-address system, out from which the new audiovisual crew had not yet got all the bugs. It also served, he said, this sad convocation, as mournful prelude to a more positive spiritual programme: the new series of “Sunday Raps” to be held every Sabbath morn of the regular semester, commencing with a jazz-rock orientation rap a week hence (tomorrow). Marshyhope’s first president, he was (wrongly) confident, would be pleased. And now, himself not having been fortunate enough to know President Morgan personally, he would relinquish the mike to our current chief executive, who would, so to speak, emcee the rest of the show.
I had slipped in intentionally late, not to have to suffer the condolences of John Schott & Co. or to deal, if I could avoid dealing, with Marsha Blank Mensch Horner, who I feared might be present. From a back seat in the S & T Room I saw that she was: as whacked-out-appearing as her bridegroom, but with a restored grimness of eye and jaw that evoked my image of the Marsha Primordial — and gave me to wonder once again why A. had ever married her. Horner looked paralysed with terror at being off the premises of the Remobilisation Farm; very possibly he was. There were two long-haired, grave-faced young men I took to be Joe’s sons; there was Jane Mack, impassive and apparently alone, her son Drew likewise, and Todd Andrews, looking utterly spent; there was A. B. Cook, who managed an expression somehow both grave and whimsical. Many strangers to me were present as well — representatives, I learned after, of Wicomico State College and the Maryland Historical Society.
Oh, John. Chaplain Beille wound up his introduction with an uncertain comparison of Joe Morgan to the late Bishop James Pike, whose body had that day been found in the desert near the Dead Sea: both men were, well, Seekers, whose Search, um, had led them down Unconventional and Uncharted Paths, but, uh. John Schott took the podium, to Miss Stickles’s scarcely suppressed applause. With what my fiancé would later describe as Extreme Unctuousness, he spoke of having first hired Young Morgan at Wicomico in 1952; of having watched him “make a comeback” from the tragic loss of his wife in ’53 to his brilliant directorship of the historical society, thence to the first presidency of Tidewater Technical College and the supervision of its growth to Marshyhope State College and Marshyhope State University College; of Morgan’s then “returning the favour,” so to speak (a heavy chuckle here, returned by the company), of hiring him to be his vice-president and provost of the Faculty of Letters!
Now Schott’s tone grew solemn. It was no secret that he and “Joe” had differed on many issues. But no one had regretted more than himself his worthy adversary’s departure from MSUC, on the very eve of its becoming MSU! It was a tragedy that the final year in the life of his protégé, as one might well call Morgan, had been as cloaked in obscurity as Bishop Pike’s: both of them, in Schott’s view, Casualties of Our Times! But whatever the contents of that tragic last chapter, it was ended: Joe was with his beloved wife now, on the Eastern Shore he cared so much for; and Schott knew in his heart that whatever his predecessor’s reservations about the Tower of Truth, there was no better loser than Joseph Patterson Morgan! He Schott had wanted him with us at the tower’s dedication, three weeks hence; he knew that Joe would give that edifice and Marshyhope his blessing, from Heaven!
He closed with an equally exclamatory and unbecoming pitch for his own administration: skyrocketing enrollment figures, the massive building program, the great news (which he had been saving for the first university convocation on Monday the 15th, but could not resist leaking to us now) that approval was “all but finalized” in Annapolis for a seven-year plan to make MSU a proper City of Learning by 1976, perhaps even larger than the state’s current main campus at College Park! Morgan had hoped for 7,000 students: how gratified he would be at the prospect of 17,000, 27,000, eventually perhaps twice that number!
On this exquisite perversion of the verb to hope, and as Shirley Stickles sighed orgasmically in her seat, Schott turned the mike over to One Far More Eloquent Than Himself. A. B. Cook ascended the podium. There was a pause to adjust the P.A., which had been squealing as if in protest. Student ushers, deputized from the Freshman Orientation Committee, took the opportunity to seat latecomers, including, to my surprise, Ambrose. His attendance on Magda had been relieved by the twins and their girl- and boyfriends; she had insisted he join me. Looking about the room for me in vain, he was led to a seat just behind the Jacob Horners. Marsha glared and froze; Ambrose likewise, and desperately surveyed the audience again. Appalled, I pushed through to the empty seat next to him. Marsha’s expression could kill an unborn child; A. and I whispered accord on the matter of retreat to a rear seat. But Cook had launched into his versified eulogy and benediction.
Our situation was too off-putting for me to be able now to reconstruct those verses. In his well-amplified baritone Cook made the same connexion (but unrelated to ourselves) that I’d made earlier, between the funeral of Marshyhope’s founder in February and its first president’s now: the predictable September/remember/glowing-ember rhymes. Observing that John Schott’s Fallen Forerunner had been “an historian” (rhymed with “not boring one”!), Cook invoked “what might be called the Anniversary View of History”: surely it was Significant that 7 September Was the birthday of that other J. P. Morgan, as well as of Queen Elizabeth I: wouldn’t our late founder have approved! (Unaware of our presence behind him, or of much else, Jacob Horner added sotto voce “the Comte de Buffon, Taylor Caldwell, Elia Kazan, Peter Lawford”; Marsha poked him.) Surely it was Significant, given Joseph Morgan’s professional interests, that today marked the anniversary of the launching in Baltimore, in 1797, of the frigate Constellation, soon to play a rôle in the cinematical reenactment of our history; that on this date in 1812 Napoleon defeated the Russian army at Borodino, and in 1822 Brazil’s claim of independence began the Portuguese Revolution. (“Right on!” I was surprised to hear Drew Mack say; the morning paper had reported release of fifteen Brazilian leftist political prisoners as ransom for the kidnapped U.S. ambassador.) And 7 September 1940 had marked the peak of the German air war against Great Britain, rhymes with fittin’. Horner nodded vigorously.
None of us, the laureate concluded, is immortal:
The stoutest fort’ll
Fall; the final portal
Open. Death’s the key
Of keys, the cure of cures.
All passes. Art alone endures.
Horner applauded. Marsha whacked him. People shushed. Muttered Ambrose (as the chaplain rose to give a final benediction): “Art passes too.”
Outside there were brief unavoidable stiff encounters; I was relieved not to have to deal with them alone. John Schott harrumphingly gave me to know that other pressing commitments of Mr Cook’s might make it impossible for him to ornament the English faculty after all, and that he Schott, among others, was pressing for my immediate reappointment. That matter would be brought before the provostial Appointments and Tenure Committee at once if I was agreeable; bygones be bygones, etc. Perhaps for the fall semester, I replied, if the university dropped their action to rescind Ambrose’s honorary degree. But never mind the spring: we were expecting a baby in March or April.