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.
“Not years, dear Liza,” the king would say — or “Germaine” if he was calling himself “Harrison” at the moment. “You and Todd will bury me next Groundhog’s Day.”
And we did. I daresay it took some enterprise in the inner sanctums of Harrison Mack’s incorporated psyche to bring about his first stroke in mid-January and hold off the second till the month’s end. The first fetched Jane home from her adventures and left her husband blind (“Why not 1813 and seven years to go?” I asked Lady A., having checked the history books on G. III’s blindness. But she declared, in tears, he was another king now, old broken Lear, and she no longer “Elizabeth Pembroke” but a superannuate Cordelia). The second stroke killed him. On your deathday — which Harrison still remembered as the cause of my endless Inquiry, my presence in this hotel, my old Floating Opera story, these epistles to the dead-letter file in the Cambridge P.O., the whole bearing of my life — we put him under in their family plot at Tidewater Farms.
It’s a plot of which “Farmer George” (so G. III and H.M. II liked to call themselves) is the sole identified tenant: long before there was a Maryland it had been an Algonquin burial ground; from George I the First to George III the Second, that aboriginal fertilizer had nourished crop after crop for English and American planters: tobacco, cotton, corn, tomatoes. Harrison acquired it (and the rest of Redmans Neck) from old Colonel Morton in 1955, when Mack Enterprises picked up Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes. The burial ground he reclaimed for its original crop; the other 1,999 acres he put into soybeans, stables, mansion-houses, the Mack Enterprises Research and Development Facility, the Tidewater Foundation, and Tidewater Technical College. This reclamation, or recycling, was more or less the theme of my eulogy, which I delivered at Jane’s request. Harrison—my Harrison, back when Jane was our Jane (Spanish Civil War days, Roosevelt days, sweet days of last night’s dream, that Depressioned you to death and brought me to life!) — Harrison would’ve got a kick out of it. My text was the motto of Marshyhope State University College: Praeteritas futuras fecundant, which the Undergraduate Bulletin approximates as “The future is enriched by the past.” As befits a good agribusiness school, Tidewater Tech (on which we first bestowed the motto) used to misrender it “The past is the seedbed of the future.” But we knew what we meant, Harrison and I: not fecundant even in the sense of “fertilizes,” but stercorant: The past manures the future.