I’d proposed it as the Mack family motto in 1935—Floating Theatre days! — when we learned that Harrison’s father, in his last years, had caused his poop to be preserved in pickle jars. In ’37, when we used those jars (I mean the gardener’s misuse of them as fertilizer for Mrs. Mack’s zinnias) to win Harrison the family estate, I proposed it again, in English, to Jane — but the Macks had tired by then of our ménage à trois and were beginning to lose their sense of humor. Imagine my surprise, as they say, in 1957 or thereabouts (Eisenhower days! Middle middle age!), when they and I resumed our acquaintance and I learned (a) that Mack Pickles, now known as Mack Enterprises, was diversifying into soya-oil plastics, chemical fertilizers, artificial preservatives, and frozen-food plants; (b) that Jane herself was more and more the guiding force of the company; and (c) that as Harrison willingly gave way to her and to his new eccentricities, his old sense of humor began to return, and Praeteritas futuras stercorant (soberly given by their P.R. people as “The future grows out of the past”) was the corporation motto! Above it, on letterhead, label, and billboard, an elderly gentleman in muttonchop whiskers, pince-nez spectacles, and Edwardian greatcoat, standing in a newly furrowed field amid a horse-drawn plow, a three-masted ship, and a single-stacked factory, shook hands across the generations with a horn-rimmed, crew-cut, gratefully grinning young man (not futuras after all, but the praesentis of the 1950’s) waist-deep in soybeans, diesel tractors, propellor-engined airliners, and half a dozen smoking stacks.

Even in his next-to-last year, when Jane vetoed the effluent-purifiers and electrostatic precipitators urged upon Mack Enterprises by the new environmentalists, Harrison was capable of sighing slyly, “The past craps up the future.” And so my eulogy turned Ecclesiastes into a prophet of industrial recycling and rebirth control, as who should say to scrap metal, “Out of Buicks art thou come; to Buicks thou shalt return”; or compare my friend’s body in the Indian graveyard to those fish (I worked in the resurrected Christ somewhere along here) that Squanto taught the Pilgrim fathers to plant with their corn.

Praeteritas futuras fecundant: The king is dead; long live the king!

Lady Amherst, a better Latinist than I, detected the irony, but took it as it was intended and without offense. Her new friend Ambrose Mensch was all grins; but people regard him as an oddball anyhow. The widow was moved, not indecorously, and thanked me afterward, with no detectable irony of her own, for “a lovely tribute to the Harrison we both loved so.” The rest of the company either took my words at face value or paid them no attention. Drew Mack was there, stony-faced, with his handsome wife, Yvonne, both in dark dashikis for the occasion. His sister — now Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, by my count; “Bea Golden” on last summer’s programs of The Original Floating Theatre II—was supported in her grief and gin (so the recipe smelt to me, flavored with latakia and too much of something by Givenchy) by the remarkable “Reggie Prinz”: his Jewish Afro more formidable than Yvonne Mack’s Afro Afro, his wire-rimmed eyeglasses harking back to Old Man Praeteritas in the picture, his hands (despite himself, I trust) framing hypothetical cinema-shots of ourselves, the house, the grave, nearby Marshyhope Creek and College. Of him, no doubt, more later. Who else? The ubiquitous but elusive Laureate of Maryland, A. B. Cook, read off a poem for the occasion, the closing alexandrines of which—

This marshy Indian Plot where sleeping Mack’s interr’d

Shall grow the royal Tow’r his Dreams on us conferr’d—

brought stifled groans from Lady A. and young Mensch and pursed the lips of Cook’s even more elusive son, introduced to me later as Henry Burlingame VII. John Schott, however, was moved to single-handed applause, as it were, and triumphant red-faced glare. As for Jerome Bray, the final graveside guest — a madder chap in my estimation than poor Harrison at his dottiest, and whose presence there no one could account for — his face was impassive as a visitor’s from another country, or planet.

How comes A. B. Cook VI, you ask, to have a son named Henry Burlingame VII? So did I, of the ever-smiling laureate himself, at the reception after the funeral, and was answered by Lord Tennyson paraphrased:

If you knew that flower’s crannies,

You would know what God and man is.

Overhearing which, Lady Amherst commented with just-audible asperity, “We’d know of more than one marshy plot too, I daresay.” Schott harrumphed; Cook bowed to his critic; Ambrose Mensch, at her side, wondered as if innocently whether “royal dreams” was in good eulogistic taste, considering. “Not to mention the play on interred,” Lady A. added coolly. At the time I thought she referred merely and cleverly to the stercorant business in my tribute.

To all such jibes the Maryland Laureate was deaf. His son (who, one now discovered, spoke English with a heavy Québécois accent) politely asked Lady A. to explain the pun; Mensch volunteered for that duty and led the lad aside, out of earshot of Jane, who was listening with strained but ever cool expression to Schott’s hearty condolences while, as it seemed to me, trying to catch my attention. “Bea Golden” was in smoky conversation and transaction with the bartender, while managing simultaneously to keep an eye on her current lover and, if I’m not mistaken, on Ambrose Mensch as well, whom she’d greeted earlier with a string of Dahlings effusive even for her. Drew and Yvonne Mack consulted each other; Mr. Bray, himself. Reggie framed us all in his imaginary camera.

Of Jeannine Mack’s paternity, Father of mine, I’m still in doubt, 35 years after the fact. If she’s Harrison’s daughter, she’s a throwback to some pickle farmer earlier than her grandsire. What I see in her, alas for “Bea Golden,” is our own progenitors, yours and mine: the drawling, cracker Andrewses from down-county. Misfortunate child, her red-neck genes never at home in those blue-blood boarding schools and hunt clubs! For all her mahvelouses, put her in any pahty and it’s the help she’ll be most at home with: the barkeep, the waiters and musicians. No question she’d’ve flourished as a down-home Andrews, drinking beer and making out at fifteen and sixteen in the back seats of Chevrolets; left to herself she’d ’ve been impregnated at seventeen by some local doctor’s boy during the Choptank Yacht Regatta and settled down happily somewhere in the county to raise a family; by now their kids would be off to college; they themselves would be tired of weekend adulteries with the local country-clubbers; they’d be buckled down comfortably for a boozy but respectable middle age, he in waterfront real estate and Annapolis politics, she on the school board and tercentennial committee. As is, she’s staler at 35 than her mother at 63. The very obverse of her brother, Jeannine has, I am confident, never in her incoherent life voluntarily read a newspaper, much less a book, or been moved by a work of art or a bit of history, reflected on life beyond her own botch of it, felt compassion for the oppressed, or loved a fellow human being. I’m told she’s divorcing again, and feels the charmless Prinz to be her great chance…

Ach, Hebe Tochter, mein Herz schmerz!

Drew Mack, on the other hand, is altogether his father’s son, the more so with every fresh rebellion. How could Harrison ever have wondered? Underneath the beard and jeans and dashiki, Drew’s as sleek and ample as a prize Angus; the same steak-fed, Princeton-radical Harrison whom I first met in Baltimore in ’25, beaten up by Mack Senior’s strikebreakers for teaching the “Internationale” to his fellow pickle-pickets. Drew it was who revealed to me, without himself realizing it, the real sense of that pun Lady Amherst saw and groaned at. To his mother’s visible distress, and my surprise, when I made to leave for Cambridge at the end of the funeral festivities, he and Yvonne insisted on driving me (I’d come out with young Mensch); we’d no sooner squeezed into his discreetly battered Volvo wagon than he announced—