Letters (106 page)

To this last (I mean the sexual cobweb) a new strand has been added. Contrary to what a nameless informant informed me in a nameless place on a night I shall not name, it seems that young Merope Bernstein is
not
attached to “Monsieur Casteene”; at least not enough to prevent her having conceived an attachment to Reg Prinz, under the banner of bringing the Revolution to the Media That Matter. Our Director, in his way, neither encouraged nor discouraged this attachment, but at once incorporated it into the story. Bea Golden, you may imagine, was not pleased: indeed, it wants small wit to fancy her not only jealous of this new rival (her own ex-stepdaughter!) but frightened, inasmuch as Ambrose’s “pursuit” of her had been merely and clearly per script since their Baratarian interlude, for which (even if he directed it) Prinz seems not quite to have pardoned her. Follows that she will now eagerly ally herself with the Director against the Author in our Scajaquada Scuffle, right? At once to reingratiate herself with Prinz, to score points against her competition, and to defend herself from her only current
real
pursuer, the lecherous Lily Dale lunatic.

Got all that? Well, our Author’s projected reenactment was to go as follows: Buffalo’s Delaware Park would serve both as the battle site (which it is) and as Municipal Park in Cambridge, which it decidedly is not; the park pavilion both as the American general headquarters and as the
Original Floating Theatre II.
Bea, in red-white-&-blue wrapper, would represent, let’s say, Columbia, being interviewed before the pavilion in early movie newsreel-style, by the Director, on the American position in the War of 1812. Myself to make my cinematical debut (we do not count Prinz’s surreptitious and/or illegitimate footage) in the role of Britannia, being interviewed concurrently upon the same subject as I cross Scajaquada Creek by rented rowboat just prior to the battle. My interviewer of course to be the Author, fastidiously transcribing my polished periods with a quill pen for publication in the London press. Enter by helicopter (just as A. & I reach the pavilion) the Medium of the Future—in form of J. B. Bray cast as a network television reporter!—who makes off with both willing subjects and leaves the Battle of Scajaquada Creek to be fought, not by Britain and the U.S., but by Author and Director. Weapons and outcome ad libitum, except that the famous mike boom would somehow be worked in.

Thus the scenario. I protested to Ambrose that neither Bea nor I was jolly likely to take a helicopter ride with Jerome Bray. He imagined Bea would do anything her Director asked of her at this juncture, but insisted I follow my own inclinations once the cameras were rolling: that was the Point. And Merry Bernstein? Ambrose wasn’t sure, but believed she was to begin the episode as some flower-childish avatar of his daughter (they’d not been able to lay hands on a MARYLAND IS FOR CRABS T-shirt in Buffalo, but had found one blazoned BUFFALO IS FOR LOVERS) and end it with a Revolutionary Statement made Godard-like to the camera as the ’copter reascends and the Obsolete Media slug it out.

She
had
been warned, though, Merope B., that her nemesis Bray was to be there? Well, Ambrose hoped so: that was really Prinz’s department; she was
his
hanger-on. Himself was too busy anticipating what the Director might have up his sleeve in the ad-lib assault way to bother with such niceties: he did not fancy another concussion. On that score, I was to stay clear when things got sticky between him and Prinz: he had a couple of rabbits in his own fedora if push came to shove, and not for anything would he have me endanger our just-possible You Know What.

It is evening when we commence. The park brims with floodlights, searchlights, portable electric generators, and the Buffalo curious, whom (true to form) Prinz does nothing to keep back, but often turns his cameras upon. Traffic on the Scajaquada Expressway makes its contribution to the light and sound track. Somewhere overhead a chopper chops. I do not get to hear, alas, Bea Golden’s extemporisings upon American policy objectives in the Second War of Independence: A. and I are busy yonder in our skiff, across the pond. Nor do I get to extemporise myself (I’d given the matter some thought, and concluded that Fatigue was the finally regnant factor on the British side of the negotiating table at Ghent, as it may one day be for you Americans in Vietnam: more than we wanted what we claimed we wanted, we wanted Out): the Script calls for our transit of Delaware Park Lake to be shot in flickering silent film-style, our Q & A to be transcribed into subtitles—but no one is there.

Our wigs and tights and crinolines, quill pens and Union Jacks, amuse the bystanders until, muttering that Prinz has scored again, Ambrose seizes the oars and rows us out on the dark pond toward the bright pavilion, where a Newswatch Traffkopter has already landed. Buffalonians commandeer other park rowboats and follow us. Prinz has missed a good shot: we are a proper little invasion flotilla! I wave my U.J. wanly; am even moved to attempt “Rule, Britannia” against the pavilion loudspeakers, whence softly issues “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Ambrose does my harmony, and not badly: I am touched.

At our
never shall be slaves
(which coincides neatly with the loudspeakers’
free-ee and the bray-ave),
we attain the landing and are instantly floodlit: score another for R.P., who has monitored our approach and gets fine footage now of the surprisers surprised! In plus fours and reversed cap, hand-cranking some relic from the Eastman Kodak museum, he grins from a camera crane; Bea frowns beside him in her Stars-and-Stripes drapery, looking more like a Chenango Street hippie than like Liberty. Between us, looking merely confused, Merope Bernstein, her uniform blue denims unaccountably exchanged for honey-coloured leotard plus the aforementioned T-shirt, a
tiara,
of all things, in her teased-out hair, and
wings,
John—those same Tinkerbell pterons that erst graced the Golden scapulae (on
Gadfly III)
before Bea fell from favour. Hence, no doubt, her frown. Wings!

We disembark, some of us feeling mighty silly. The music stops. Moths commit enthusiastic suicide in the kliegs. The Author blinks, shades his eyes, cons the scene for light and mike booms. Prinz turns to Bea and asks in a startlingly clear, amplified, and mocking voice: “What do you think of Senator Randolph’s Quids?” No less than Columbia, we are as surprised by the articulation as by the question. I am all ears for her reply; I search for an opinion of my own about the maverick Virginian’s anti-Federalist splinter party; decide to approve it as a manifestation of Randolph’s prevailing Anglophilia… and again do not get my moment in the limelight.

For Merry Bernstein, with a shriek of nonsimulated fright, upstages us all. The spot is on her—and, clearly, vice versa; Fay Wray-like (but that tiara, those
wings!)
she looks up from the landing into the darkness with an expression of Terrified Disbelief. She screams again… Now a smaller spot obligingly searches the pavilion balcony, passing over grips, sound crewmen, waving bystanders, until it fixes on Jerome Bonaparte Bray. He stands
outside
the balcony railing, balancing who knows how; he wears no wings, but his famous cape is spread like a flying squirrel’s between his outspread arms and legs. He smiles, well, nuttily. He cries a name (not Merry’s; sounds to me like
Morgana);
he reaches for his crotch; he leaps into thin air; and in flickering, odd slow motion—Prinz must have wired him up!—he lands upon poor Tinkerbell.

I mean
upon
her. Merry is knocked flat; her wings are squashed; Bray’s cloak entirely covers the pair of them, who look to be wrestling or humping under a blanket. The girl squeals and squeals.

Prinz and Bea are nearest by, but up on their rigs. Ambrose and I, the closest on foot, dash to pull Bray off. Not as difficult a job as one would expect: he is extraordinarily light, or else somehow half suspended still by a wire I can’t see. He comes up squeaking, buzzing, clicking, salivating; no Dracula marks on Merope’s throat, but the lap of her leotard is soiled as if by axle grease. She scrambles whimpering from under like a half-swatted dragonfly. Light as he is, Bray is hard to hold on to, something about the material of that cape. He slips silkily from my grip; Ambrose still has him fairly fast, but as I make to resnatch him I see Bea Golden dollying grimly in as if to do the mike-boom trick again!

I prevent her. By 1814, Columbia may have been the new Gem of the Ocean, but Britannia was still its boss. We went at it on that dolly, then on the quayside proper, like a pair of fishwives, she wasting her breath on insults and obscenities, me settling the score not only for 4 July but as it were for all I’d put up with at Ambrose’s hands on her account till the past few days. Unfair, surely; paradoxical, too (since it was Ambrose I was fighting
for!)
—but mighty satisfying all the same. She snatches my hair: ha ha, ’tis Britannia’s wig!
Hers
is Dolly Homespun’s genuine article, which I lay hold of to good effect. My crinolines and whalebone corseting are dandy armor against her nails; if she rips one petticoat through, there’s another beneath. But
her
bit of bunting is all she’s got, and while it still waves at the scuffle’s end (in fact more than at the outset, for I’ve clawed it half off her) it sorely needs a Mary Pickersgill to restitch Stars to Stripes.

All this, of course, whilst cameras roll merrily and spectators cheer. Not all of them for Old Glory, either—there must have been a few Canadians in the crowd—though I grant the applause at my most telling blow might have been as much for B.G.‘s jugs as for the stroke that bared them. Comes my Author now to “relieve” me, just when I’m in position to strike Columbia’s colours altogether.
Balls!
cry I, when he scolds me for so exerting myself in my Condition—but enough I suppose is enough. We step out of the light, still fixed on Columbia as she regroups. Merry B. meanwhile, in proper hysterics, has fled to her Director’s arms—anyroad to his camera crane, where he coolly comforts her whilst she bawls and swipes at her lap. Somehow reascended to the balcony, Bray shrills imprecations upon us all, in particular upon Ambrose, who he ominously vows shall Pay. The crowd applauds him to the waiting Newswatch helicopter, which promptly buzzes off—to Lily Dale? (We’ve not seen him since).

Now bedraggled Bea sees what’s what on that camera crane and, her knockers rewrapped in the St Sp B, makes to turn the Eagle’s talons on Tinkerbell, who to my further satisfaction (her leotard mopped and her dander up) lays the same order of insults on her that were lately laid on me: M-F’ing Old Bag, & cet. The Director has his hands full keeping them apart. Britannia and weary Literature retire arm in arm from the scene, not much the worse for wear and withal fairly pleased with ourselves, as well as mightily entertained. In this reenactment at least, the redcoats might not have
won
the Scajaquada Scuffle, but Brother Jonathan surely seems to’ve come off second best.

Having been in her position myself, I was even able then to feel a certain sympathy for Bea, as aforementioned; especially next day, when word came that filming will not be resumed until Friday next, at Fort Erie. Our Director appears to have withdrawn with Tinkerbell to New York City; Ms Golden,
very
distraught, to the Remobilisation Farm, whether to rejoin the company on 15 August or not, we don’t know.

I
worry about J. Bray, whose psychopathology I take seriously—Merry Bernstein’s hysterics I regard as entirely in order!—but Ambrose only shrugs and speculates, with further amusement, on Bray’s likely reaction upon returning to Lily Dale and discovering that Marsha too (per Joe Morgan’s report) has thrown him over. At Prinz’s departure some sort of payment was disbursed to all hands; Ambrose’s share, unaccountably, was generous (to me, even
that
seemed ominous). We decided to make a little vacation tour of the Niagara Frontier until the 15th—and here we are at Kissing Bridge: a low-rise ski-platz, August-empty, fit for lovers.

So much for the chronicling (the good people of Buffalo are baffled as I am by the Meaning of All This, which however they found at least as diverting as the pop art at the Albright-Knox); now for the News. As you will have gathered, my menstrual period’s nearly a fortnight overdue. Surely,
surely
at my age this signifies nothing. I am fifty, John: fifty, fifty! I will not, I dare not hope…

What I must acknowledge would
be
a real hope now, not a bitter one. Till today, Ambrose and I had not made love since Saturday morning last; yet this has been a week the reverse of loveless: reminiscent rather of our chaste May, even more so of our first courtship. We are in accord as to the probabilities—but he is all gentleness and, especially since the Battle of Conjockety,
Ad-mi-ra-ti-on
for my conduct on that occasion. Admiration, it would seem, for my history and character in general, and I am either vain enough or bruised enough by the season’s humiliations to find his attitude convincing as well as therapeutic. He cannot thank me sufficiently for enduring and indulging his early importunities in my office and elsewhere, his excesses and sentimentalities; his programmatical later abstinence followed by yet more programmatical inseminations; his couturial and other demands; his outrageous behaviour at the Marshyhope commencement ceremonies; his infidelities and other unkindnesses. Quite a catalogue! He declares all that to have been the purgation by reenactment (a variety of catharsis not mentioned by Aristotle) of sundry immaturities and historical hang-ups long laid on him like a spell. He declares that my love and forbearance have dispelled that spell, set him free to love me truly and properly for what I am, have been, shall be—this without regard to what’s what womb-wise, though nothing could more crown his Ad-mi-ra-ti-on than Ge-ne-ra-ti-on. Part of why we’re here, indeed (I mean why we’ll do Toronto and Stratford and, if he has his way, even Castines Hundred), is the returning of a few corners in my own intimate biography: once the Movie’s “in the can” and my Condition is established one way or the other—and his mother’s done dying, and his brother’s prognosis is clearer—he hopes we can revisit Coppet, Capri, London, Lugano, Paris, Geneva—Scenes I Have Been Knocked Up In.