My interest was caught too (should have been even more so, but other scales had not yet fallen from my eyes) by the coincidence that her former lover’s name was André Castine: I recalled, before she invoked, the Castine-Burlingame intrigues in the
The committee were mightily entertained. I was not, and objected as strenuously as I was able both to the distribution of the letter in the first instance and to its abridgment in the second. Schott replied that we were not a judicial body: he had excerpted and put before us evidence of Professor Pitt’s moral turpitude by way of justifying to us his demand for her resignation, a demand he was in fact under no legal obligation to justify. I responded that my objection was moral, not legal, and all the stronger for his being not legally obligated to justify his action. Schott countered — cleverly for him — that his obligation was moral, too. As for the abridgment, Cook now put in, he would attest that it was mainly in the interest of moral — he smiled: Perhaps he should say immoral? — relevance and consideration for our valuable time; but also (and this is why he himself had been shown the “original”) his good friend President Schott had seen fit to delete references to a matter Cook would now reluctantly acknowledge, and which would explain Lady Amherst’s including him among her “tormentors.” One of the novels written by the addressee of the letter involved his, Cook’s, ancestor, the original poet laureate of Maryland, as well as an early New-Frenchman from whom (for example) the town of Castine, Maine, takes its name. Among the regrettable aberrations of Lady Amherst — for whom otherwise Cook professed esteem — was her persuasion that there must therefore be some connection between himself and that former French-Canadian lover of hers. She had, embarrassingly, gone so far as to fancy that his son by the late Mrs. Cook might be her own illegitimate child by that early romance! The missing portions of the letter, then, included her account of an expedition earlier in June to his house in Anne Arundel County, in pursuit of this aberration. Fortunately he had not been at home: his former secretary-housekeeper had reported the visit of a strange Englishwoman who claimed to have urgent business with him. Aware of Lady Amherst’s delusion and its origins, he had avoided her, and she’d not bothered him since.
Schott gruffly declared that he himself never read novels. Neither, said Provost Carter, did he. A great pity, Cook cordially chided: though his own muses were those of poetry and history, he believed that fiction, and in particular the novel, was your great mirror up to life. A dark mirror sometimes, to be sure, in which nevertheless, and whether transfigured or merely disfigured — here he gave me a surprising, meaning wink — we could best recognize our world and ourselves.
Perhaps he meant what I took him to mean by that wink: that he had read the novels in which the Macks and I — and Schott and Carter — are severally “figured.” Or perhaps the wink was no more than a sort of conspiratorial self-irony: “You and I see through these high-minded clichés, eh?” It might even have been a mere tic. But my mind had wandered from poor Germaine Pitt to Jane Mack and the young fellow in the beige Arrow shirt in 1921; from the
