Not very graciously, you ask whether those letters are authentic. How am I to reply, when (a) you do not mention which texts you read or how you came by them (the originals, authentic indeed, are in my possession, awaiting your firsthand examination; I have copied them only twice: once for a certain historian, again for a certain novelist; we shall see which you saw), and (b) you do not give me a return address? I must hope that this latter omission means that you’re en route to Maryland to reput your queries in person — and less brusquely. Meanwhile, like Andrew Cook IV in 1812, I am too full of things to say to you to await your arrival; I must address you as it were in utero and begin to explain not only our ancestor’s “prenatal” letters to Henry and Henrietta Burlingame V but also his “posthumous” epistles to his “widow” (Andrée Castine II), which neither that historian nor that novelist has yet seen. May you interrupt me, here at our family’s second seat — close and breathless this time of year as the womb itself, and as humid, and as saline: a better season for Castines Hundred! — before I end this paragraph, this letter…
At least, before I shall have indited this series of letters, my second such since we saw each other last on Redmans Neck in February, at Harrison Mack’s funeral.
Dear Henry: The undisguised, unbecoming suspicion of your note prompts me to rebegin with a confession. A.C. IV’s four letters are genuine; my transcriptions of them — first for Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, whom you may remember from that funeral, later for the author of The Sot-Weed Factor, a historical novel, with whom I am collaborating on a new project — are faithful. But my motive for providing those two with copies of the letters was, while I hope defensible, not without a measure of guile. So be it: the originals await you. Lady A. and I have no further business. (Mr. B. and I do: was it he whose path somehow crossed yours, and who showed you what I neither granted nor explicitly denied him permission to share? I should like to know. Indeed, as I plan to send him summaries of these “posthumous” letters too, I here ask him directly: Are you, sir, in some sort of correspondence with my son, Henry Burlingame VII? If you sent him the four “prenatal” epistles, will you kindly forward this as well, and the ones perhaps to follow? And tell me where he is!)
Revelation of the Pattern, Henry: that was to be the first stage of your conversion of my cause. As it has been revealed to you willy-nilly, by whatever agency, I attach a copy of my letter of June 18 last to the aforementioned author, summarizing the consequences — rather, the pitiful inconsequence! — of its revelation to Andrew Cook IV, and of his revelation of it to his heirs. I pray you pause and review that letter now. All the man wanted, Henry, was to clear the generational decks: better, to unstack the deck of History and deal “Henry or Henrietta” a free hand. Weep with me for the Cooks and Burlingames!
And having wept, let us proceed — straightforwardly, sans ruse or stratagem — to the second stage of your conversion. No need to rehearse to you, of all people, what our Revolution is about, or wherein lies its peculiarly revolutionary character: I know you know it intimately well, and I well know you oppose it utterly. But I know too that while it may well come to pass without your aid — even despite your best efforts to thwart it — I have small interest in its realization, the consummation of our history, if you are not its Consummator-in-Chief.
My son, I love you. You are 29, about to commence your second “Saturnian revolution.” You approach that point—“nel mezzo del cammin,” etc. — where many a journeyer before you has strayed right off the map, to where (Homer tells us) “East and West mean nothing,” nor any other opposites. What follows is propaganda, meant to win you to me. How franker can I be? But it is as loving propaganda as ever was penned. I do not expect you to take this letter on faith: you are a Burlingame! But read it, read it — and come to Bloodsworth Island for confirmation!
Read what? (I stall. I dawdle. Why do you not appear in midst of this parenthesis, as you have more than once astonished me by appearing, without sound or apparent vehicle, as if materialized from ether, with your mother’s eyes, your mother’s accent?) Why, read my digest of my decipherment of the first of Andrew Cook IV’s “posthumous” letters: three removes from an original (before me) whose author’s own wife would not accept it as bona fide!
