Letters

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 zi

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, Yvo

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 Te

If you knew that flower’s cra

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 i

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 Yvo

Of Jea

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 Yvo