They were late, Cook explained (after a bluff, booming welcome to us as the Shameless Lovebirds of Liberal-Land, who however, despite our egregious political and moral error, were to regard his Barataria as ours) because of a fortuitous encounter with Mr Todd Andrews’s cruising boat across the Bay; they had made good use of it to film
I have neglected to mention that this ruddy, fulsome nemesis of mine was rigged out in period costume; made up as, and bent on playing, his ancestor and namesake Andrew Burlingame Cook IV, of whom you know from my reports of a certain painful project whereof I long since washed my hands. The fellow had been a double agent, Cook maintained, in the British Chesapeake expedition of 1814 (news to me), and indeed was allegedly killed at Ft McH., though subsequent letters over his signature are said to have reached his widow at Castines Hundred. Be that as it may (the mere mention of that fateful place-name, and of ancestral letters, gave me a proper heartache, which Ambrose perceived, and squeezed my hand), his descendant seemed very much in charge of Prinz, B. & B., the whole business. Fresh from Mr Tucker’s history, I was struck by Cook’s likeness in face and manner, not to his forebear, of whom there are no extant portraits, but to Admiral Sir George Cockburn, Scourge of the Chesapeake, whom he had better played. Reggie framed and filmed; Bruce and Brice did their audiovisual things; Merope slouched about with wary eye, doubtless on the lookout for Jerome Bray — but Cook ran the show, in high-spirited (and high-handed) collaboration with my quondam Doctor of Letters, whose undoctoring, and my dismissal, he himself had advocated!
What to make of him? Neither André nor “Monsieur Casteene,” he was the hale, unpredictable fellow I’d first encountered, along with Joe Morgan, in the Maryland Historical Society back in 1961: back-slapper and back-stabber, yet disarmingly “up front” about both and particularly forceful. Unrepentant for having sided with John Schott against Morgan, and later against Ambrose and myself, Cook nonetheless managed, whilst improvising with my friend a whole new scenario for the evening’s shooting, to intimate to me that he was having second thoughts about his Marshyhope appointment: he had urged Schott to sound me out on possible reinstatement! “Of course,” he went so far as to add, “you’ll want to tell him where to get off. But we
As, one must acknowledge, is he, whoever he is. For all my urge to keep him at arm’s length (I curbed my urge to press him about his ancestor’s letters to his unborn child, and reacted neither way to the mention of my reappointment), I found myself involved — if only because Ambrose was, with a clearly therapeutic relish that warmed my heart — in the most preposterous bit of business yet mounted in this absurd production. We are a long way, John, from where we started in March, with a “motion picture based on your latest work, but echoing its predecessors”!
Are you ready? As thunderclouds pile up out over the Bay (and a pleasant buffet supper is spread by our host), Cook recounts in the first person to all assembled, from memory, his ancestor’s “posthumous” description of the burning of Washington. The man is a raconteur of some talent and has obviously absorbed his
