Letters полностью

The old canal had 25 lift locks: the plan was to dynamite them in quick succession with wireless detonators fashioned by my grandfather. Twenty-five bundles of dynamite were assembled, each fitted with a small wireless receiver tuned to ignite a blasting cap upon receipt of the international Morse code signal for a particular letter of the alphabet; an alternative signal, common to all, could be used to detonate them simultaneously if time was short. No ideological slogan known to the conspirators was alphabetically various enough to do the job; their programmes were anyhow too heterogeneous for agreement: they settled on the standard typewriter-testing sentence, stripped of its redundant characters — THE QUICK BROWN FX JMPD V LAZY G — and reserved as the common signal the only letter missing there from, the one hallowed by Marconi seventeen years before and by James Joyce as the first in the scandalous novel he’d just begun serializing in The Little Review. On the night of September 26 (American Indian Day, Gadfly Junior would have been gratified to know, though it’s also the anniversary of General McArthur’s recapture of Detroit from Tecumseh’s warriors in 1813) the saboteurs in two trucks and a car rendezvoused at the little town of Port Robinson, the midpoint of the canal, and spread out along the 25 miles of its length from Port Colborne on Lake Erie to St. Catherines on Lake Ontario, each to his assigned lock with his charge of explosives. All were to be in place by sunrise, when — just as the British army was breaking the Hindenburg line in the final offensive of the war — my grandfather would transmit on his wireless key the fateful sentence.

I believe that I have neglected to mention that I myself had been born that year, out of wedlock, to my precocious parents: my father, 19, had “supped ere the priest said grace” with the current flower of the Castines, his cousine Andrée III. In this return nearly to the center of the family gene-pool — which A.C. V had commendably eschewed for the health of the line, given the particular consanguinity of his own parents — Henry Cook Burlingame VI betrays (I had better say affirms; he made no secret of it) his affinity for his namesakes Henry and Henrietta. He does not despise his father (who, we remember, apparently put by all revolutionary activities between 1898 and 1918 to raise him, except for the Vera Cruz expedition of 1914); indeed he admires him… as a cunning double agent dedicated to subverting the cause he officially espouses!

In short, we are back to the Pattern, with a vengeance, and the more distressingly in that my father was not a student of the family archives (it was Andrée, rather more of a scholar, who taught him how to overcome the genital shortfall of the Burlingames; I was conceived in their virgin seminar on that subject in 1916). Altogether unaware that he is reviving the classical interpretation of Cooks by Burlingames, Burlingames by Cooks, my father maintains — at the time to my mother, later to me — that Andrew Cook V was all along a closet patriot, an operative of the Canadian Secret Service who infiltrated the saboteurs in order to thwart their designs on the Welland Canal, and succeeded at the expense of both his brother-in-law’s life (Gadfly’s) and his own.

“Your grandfather was an expert in wireless telegraphy,” Dad once explained to me (I was 13; it was during our stint in the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge here in Dorchester County, where “Ranger Burlingame’s” current cover was supervising CCC work during the depression): “It’s suspicious enough that he altered the test sentence”—in which, as everyone knows, THE QUICK BROWN FX JMPS V LAZY DG, touching all 26 alphabetical bases in the process—“and it’s unthinkable that he would reserve as the common detonator the first letter of the international wireless marine distress signal, especially to blow up a ship canal, and choose for its transmission the frequency of 125 kilocycles — the only frequency shared by both naval and merchant vessels at that time.”

My father’s Uncle Gadfly Junior had been his hero and closest friend; at the time of the canal plot Henry was old enough to be included in it, and had begged to share with Gadfly the riskiest assignment: mining the entrance locks at either end of the canal, where security was heaviest. Gadfly had the G at St. Catherines; my father wanted the Port Colborne T. But my grandfather forbade him, as a brand-new father himself, to place any of the explosives, and only reluctantly permitted him to stand watch over the transmitter at Port Robinson while he himself mined Lock N nearby, at the center of the canal.