Letters (109 page)

All this last, John, truly spoken as though in italics, and if any doubt remained of whose particular lunacies Bea’s voice was iterating, that doubt was blown away by her closing words:
The revolutionary future belongs neither to Pen nor to Camera, but to one… two…

On
three
a hollow boom boomed either from the loudspeaker or from the magazine itself, whence billowed now a great puff of white smoke, and from out of that smoke a presumably recorded male laugh that could be none but Jerome Bray’s, and a great many flittering sheets of paper, as if a post office had exploded.

We
all
withdrew a safe distance (except Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank, who went on exercycling as if hypnotised), till the air cleared of everything save the ubiquitous lake flies. Even Prinz leapt back from his chair at the blast, and his lieutenants from their microphones and cameras. Merry Bernstein sat on the ground not far from where Ambrose and I had jumped to, drawing her clothes tight about her and verging reasonably upon hysterics.

Much shaken myself, I did what I could for her whilst the men gingerly investigated. First back at their stations were Dum and Dee, to record the last wisps of smoke and leaves of paper. Morgan demanded to know what was going on and where his missing patient was: Prinz and Ambrose both disclaimed responsibility for and foreknowledge of the stunt; indeed, each was inclined grudgingly to credit his rival with a bravura special effect. The papers, blowing about now in a mild breeze off the river, proved to be covered with printed numbers, meaningless to us. The magazine, upon inspection, yielded a portable tape machine, an auxiliary loudspeaker, and an empty canister, presumably a spent smoke bomb. No sign of Bray or Bea Golden.

Jacob Horner volunteered from his mechanical mount that it was in fact the name day of the Bonaparte family and 200th birthday of their most celebrated member, who took his Christian name from a saint martyred under Diocletian in the 4th Century. Birthday too of Princess Anne, Ethel Barrymore, Thomas De Quincey, Edna Ferber, T. E. Lawrence, and Walter Scott. Deathday of Wiley Post and Will Rogers in plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. Likewise, traditionally, of the Virgin Mary, whose passing is referred to as her Dormition. Repeated Marsha: Better her than me. And on they pedalled, going nowhere.

I know for fairly certain, John, that Ambrose had no foreknowledge of the Great Magazine Explosion, and we’re fairly persuaded that it took Prinz by surprise as well. His signal had been for a tape made a few hours earlier by Marsha, whose bedraggled arrival by bus from Buffalo had inspired this more modest surprise for Ambrose. The tape—we heard it shortly after—reveals that she had indeed gone voluntarily, with Bea Golden, to Bray’s Lily Dale establishment a few days since, and returned when her unspecified business there was done. That Bea, unhappy at the Remobilisation Farm since the Doctor’s death, has chosen to stay on in Lily Dale. That coaxial television is a minor technological innovation, not a revolutionary new medium. Et cetera.

Unless, then (what we briefly considered), Prinz’s assistants have taken over the Movie
(Frames!),
it would appear that neither he nor Ambrose but
Jerome Bray
carried the field in the Assault on Fort Erie, turning all the rest of us into Withdrawing Britishers—and that he has had his revolting, nefarious Way with both Marsha and Bea. Merry Bernstein is scared out of her knickers, as well she might be.
I
think the New York State Police ought to be dispatched at once to Lily Dale to see what’s what, but I can interest no one in Bea Golden’s fate enough to take action (I shall ring up Morgan before we leave, and prod Ambrose again when he wakes up).

Can the Epical Feud between Author and Director have run its course, one wonders, now that the Prize is flown and nobody cares to pursue it? If so, ’twas a Conflict with much Complication and no Climax! But the two parted company last night downright cordially. And my lover is sleeping through this morning because—as excited Authorially by the day’s events as were Prinz & Co. Directorially, and liberated by our new Abstinence Week from a night of making love—he sat up happily till dawn turning St Neapolus’s Day into sentences.
Not,
praise be, another of those regressive epistles to Yours Truly, but (so he teases, and I’m honoring my promise not to peek) a fiction in the form of a letter or letters to the Author from a Middle-aged English Gentlewoman and Scholar in Reduced Circumstances, Currently Embroiled in a Love Affair with an American Considerably Her Junior.

Ho hum, said I, and toddled off to sleep. Whereupon that simpleminded dramaturge, my subconscious, contrived to dream that
all
my letters to you after the first one—not excluding this, whose sentences were already forming in my mind as I fell asleep—are in fact from the pen of our common friend Ambrose Mensch, whose Middle-aged English Et Cetera does not exist!

Good old subconscious. But now it’s
I
am awake, and he asleep: rest assured these pages are not from our Ambrose, but from,

P.S.: Speaking of authors: I have I believe now gone quite through your published
oeuvre,
sir, per program: a book a month since March. What am I to read in August? In September?

23 August 1969

Dear J.,

Vanitas vanitatum,
etc. Our “mutuality” persists, thank God, Ambrose’s and mine, but our Niagara idyll seems already washed a world away by the flood of domestic emergencies we came home to. As Hurricane Camille douched Dixie (with Debbie supersaturating right behind her), so any concern of ours for “Bea Golden” and Marsha Blank, Jerome Bray and Reg Prinz, was first drowned by Ambrose’s mother and then redrowned by his brother.

I write this from the waiting room of Dorchester General Hospital, lately our home away from home. What the four of us presently await (Magda and Angie are here too) are the final laboratory-test results and diagnosis of Peter’s case. He has been confined here since Wednesday. We wish he had let us fetch him to Johns Hopkins instead, but are relieved that he is—at least and at last—in hospital. The news we await cannot be good; we may hope only for less than the worst. That Peter is here at all, you understand, implies—

Grief drops the stitches of my story. We flew home last Saturday evening, went directly to the Menschhaus, learned that Mensch
mère
was comatose next door in the D.G.H., found Peter chairbound with immobilising pain in both his legs (for which he would take nothing stronger than aspirin), Angela frightened into such regression that only the family totem and pacifier of her childhood, the famous Oberammergau Easter egg, kept her from bouncing off the Lighthouse walls—and Magda serene, serene, serene.

She embraced me first, her eyes all one question (Nope, no period yet. Yup, a few other signs). Serenely weeping, she made us tea and briefed us on the family crises: Andrea had lapsed into coma the day before and was not expected to revive; her death was anticipated hourly, but Mensch’s Castle being so close by, her nurses had agreed to send instant word across the street when her vital signs took their final turn. Peter’s condition, whatever it is, had worsened at an alarming rate: from a slight hobble in his left leg, to a severe one with hip and knee pain, to disabling pain in both limbs, all since the first of the month. Peter himself growled good-humouredly of “arthuritis,” his stubbled face taut. But could mere arthritis proceed so rapidly, in a man not 45? And there was backache, and dull headache; even (so Magda thought, serenely tearful) some loss of hearing. Yet he held fast to his resolve, to “wait for Ma.”

On St Helena’s Day (Monday last, the 18th), whilst Camille was levelling Mississippi, Andrea King Mensch died. As it happened, we were all present except Peter and Angela: when in the forenoon her life signs took an unanticipated upward swing and she seemed stirring from her coma, we had been summoned. Andrea had of course that Edvard Munch look of the terminally cancerous, together with the complications of inanition: she was shrunk and waxy, nearly hairless, bedsored, foul-odoured from necrosis, all I.V. and air pipes going in and catheters coming out—it was poor Jeffrey in ’65, at once heartbreaking and gorge-raising.

She was indeed stirring; had to be restrained lest she disconnect the plumbing they ought mercifully to have disconnected long since anyroad. When she began to speak deliriously of Napoleon and “the Kings of Beverly” (her ancestral family in the neighbouring county, from whom our friend took his former nom de plume), Ambrose observed the irony of its being St Helena’s Day. He fell silent when his mother—who we doubt recognised us at any point—commenced to speak less disconnectedly of her late brothers-in-law Karl and Konrad (after whom Magda’s twins are named, their initials Romanised): specifically, of her late husband’s (Hector’s) brief deranging jealousy of the former, whom he suspected of fathering Ambrose “even though it’s
Peter
that’s the image of poor Karl.” We hung upon her words: was that famous marriage-bed mystery, as in a Victorian novel, about to have a deathbed resolution? But her voice gave out. Ambrose took her free hand (Magda had been holding the other from the start) and called the name Karl to her. His mother smiled, closed her eyes, and spoke her last words: “He was right smart of a cocksman, that Karl.”

It took her body three hours more to complete the unsavoury work of dying, which she did not interrupt for further comment. And so, while all signs point to an intramural adultery, that little question, and
a fortiori
the question of Ambrose’s paternity, remains open, presumably forever.

We buried her on the Wednesday in the family plot, rich in Thomas and Wilhelm Mensch’s funerary
oeuvre.
Peter attended in a wheelchair and, together with Ambrose, pointed out to me their grandfather’s sturdy Gothic revivalisms and the more baroque flights of the uncle they never knew, which really were rather surprising. Also that sculptor’s own unmarked marker, which Hector Mensch, one-armed, had struggled obsessively and in vain to cut to his satisfaction. (St Helena still on his mind, Ambrose remarked that Napoleon’s tombstone on that island reads simply
HERE LIES,
his French attendants unyielding in their demand that the verb’s object be simply
Napoleon,
his British gaolers equally insistent that it be
Napoleon Buonaparte.)
The Mensches being at least three generations of shrug-shouldered agnostics, Andrea’s funeral service was brief as an epitaph, and at our unanimous insistence Peter went even more directly from cemetery to hospital than his mother had gone vice versa.

There he has remained since, awaiting with us the results of his “tests.” Ambrose meanwhile, not for nothing a Johns Hopkins alumnus, has “worked up” the presenting symptomatology on his own and confided to me his fearful tentative diagnosis: osteogenic sarcoma consequent upon Paget’s disease. The latter is a chronic skeletal disorder of unknown etiology, afflicting perhaps 3% of adults over 40. Often asymptomatic, its pathology is marked by excessive resorption of bone and chaotic compensatory replacement thereof by structurally inferior “pagetic” bone, which sometimes leads to deformity (bowed legs, enlarged facial bones), altered gait, pathologic transverse fractures in the weight-bearing bones, and sundry of Peter’s complaints. It is as if (Ambrose’s dark trope) thieves stole good stonework systematically from a building’s foundation and concealed their theft with slapdash masonry: after a time the building settles, cracks, and in rare instances even collapses. Among the complications of Paget’s disease (luckily in no more than a small percent of cases) is bone cancer.

On
this
subject my lover would not enlarge, though given the familial disposition you may be sure he is a ready amateur oncologist. We must await, he says, the measurement of Peter’s plasma alkaline phosphatase level and the reading of the X rays, both promised for this afternoon or evening.

We have done our waiting
à trois
(plus Angela), in strange sad harmony in Mensch’s Castle, in order to be close to Peter, to help calm Angela, and to lend support to Magda—who however is as much our supporter as we hers. How did I ever feel for that woman the vulgar emotion of jealousy? When now I so admire her tranquil strength, her stoicism so far from unfeeling, and am at the same time so secure with Ambrose in our late connexion, I think I should scarcely mind if…

But, needless to say, the conjunction of our sorrows and of the stages of our Stages, so to speak, has in all senses chastened this 3rd week of “mutuality.” The three of us hold hands in reciprocal succour and stare at the no longer revolvable camera obscura, fixed for keeps upon the county hospital, the broken seawall, the river of incongruous pleasure boats. Angie, always with us, eyes her egg. One will not be surprised if our Week of Abstinence extends beyond the week.

Beyond
it,
I suppose, lie some sort of “husbandly” 4th week and “tyrannical” 5th, followed by the climax of the Climax and then by who knows what dénouement. This is no time or place to speculate on that, or on the fact that well ere then—indeed, by this time next week—another moon will have filled (the Sturgeon Moon!) and begun to empty, and I shall either have remenstruated after all or determined that I am, despite all odds and whatever the issue, pregnant, pregnant, pregnant.

And beyond our Lighthouse, our chaste hand-holding? Well, we gather that the director and company of
Frames
(!) have not stood still for our grave interlude. They returned to Maryland not long after us and have been busy down at “Barataria” and over in D.C., preparing sets and selecting locations for the film’s climactic scenes: the Burning of Washington and the Bombardment of Baltimore. Tomorrow being the 155th anniversary of that former—and the company having sometime since Resorbed and Chaotically Redeposited Jacob Horner’s penchant for anniversaries—we look for shooting to commence then on the Big Scene. Starring Merry Bernstein, we presume (as Dolley Madison?), but presumably
not
involving a resumption of the feud between Director and Author, unless someone new has been assigned the latter role. It seems to us that “Bruce” and his counterpart (Brice? I mean Audio and Video, you know: T-Dum and T-Dee) are now the acting dramaturges, regents for the Regent…