Letters (48 page)

We would be five, then.

I had expected to feel some contempt for a man so readily gulled; but my strong and immediate intuition, in Peter’s presence, was that he was
not
gulled, only endlessly patient of exploitation by those he cared for. A change of clothes (and barbers) and he could be physically most attractive. And his great unclever easiness, his guileless goodwill… I liked him.

So too, clearly, did Damaged Angela, who leaned against him as against a building whilst we spoke, her brown eyes never moving from my face. Unions are undone; their fruit remains and grows, for better or worse. Ambrose’s angel is a heavy, dim fourteen, short and thick, big-breasted already. There is no visible trace of my lover in her, nor (he replied to my later question) of
La Blank,
who was slender, fair, and hazel-eyed. Peter thinks her the image of a dear late aunt of theirs; Ambrose shrugs. She is alleged to have made great progress under Magda’s patient tutelage; Peter too spends hours with her—and they both claim (but I’m ahead of myself) that it’s Ambrose who’s responsible for her advancement from virtually autistic beginnings. An eighth grader by age, she does fifth-grade work in the sixth grade amongst twelve-year-olds in the local junior high school. Her nubility is a problem: moronic young men roar past the Lighthouse in horrid-looking autos for her benefit, and she grins and waves. The Mensches fear she’ll be taken sexual advantage of, and wish there were proper special-education facilities in the county; they weigh the possible advantages of residential therapy in Philadelphia against its shocking cost—$12,000 a year and rising annually—and the negative effects of her separation from them.

We are introduced. To my surprise Angie is quite friendly, at once shy and inquisitive: like a young primitive she fingers my costume jewelry, holds onto my hand after we shake, remarks smilingly on my “accent.” She has indeed been done well by; there is even a chance she may be able to lead a reasonably independent life. “Don’t want her to git
too
independent,” Peter teases, “or we won’t have nobody to warsh dishes.” The brothers are gentle with each other, gentle with her; there is much touching, taking of arms.

I am touched, too: I see my lover’s reclusiveness and mild eccentricity in a different light. Great reserves of patient energy must have gone into this girl’s raising, of a sort that comes less naturally to him than to his brother, perhaps to his brother’s wife. Lucky unlucky Angela! I cannot imagine her better off in any other situation—yet find myself curbing my skepticism of expensive “residential therapy situations” except where the home life is poisonous or the patient unmanageable. I am
not
the self-sacrificing sort, and in our new “Stage” I am protective of my lover’s freedom. Not to mention the guilt I feel in face of so much ungrudging responsibility!

We approach the house; we approach the house. Angela still grasps my hand (I can’t use the ironic epithet any longer) as if I were an old and trusted friend of the family. On this soft ground my heart sinks, too. Peter wants to show me the camera obscura yet before dinner; Angela has been promised I will inspect the family totem, a certain German Easter egg with a scene inside. The house is suddenly intimidating as a castle indeed: the Misses Stein and Toklas scarcely inspired such trepidation in me as does the prospect of its mistress…

“This here’s Maggie,” Peter says of her who now comes from kitchen to foyer; and
to
her, in a mock whisper: “Turns out we call her
Germaine,
like anybody else.”

What had I expected?
L’Abruzzesa
is just past forty, younger than her husband and older than her erstwhile lover, now mine. She looks not of this century, really: her face is round and rather pale for one not naturally fair-skinned, perhaps in contrast to her dark eyes and her hair, worn up in a bun. It is a good face: the skin is fine, the eyes are large and clear and liquid, the nose and chin are delicate. Dear “Juliette” taught me to appraise women sexually: she would admire Magda Giulianova’s lips, meant for sucking kisses, and her fine long neck, the nape especially provocative with its soft hairs curling from below the bun. Good shoulders, good arms (she wore a sleeveless top), good full small breasts (no bra)—one would never suppose her to have suckled twins now twenty years old! The rest was less troubling: heavy hips and slack behind; legs scarred from shaving but stubbled nonetheless; clothes ill chosen from the local shops. I am no beauty (and have raised no children), but I think myself more trim at the end of my forties than she at the commencement of hers, and better turned out too.

Finally, if Ambrose has found her “primal”—and I see what he means: the heavy grace, the husky somnolent voice, the intense serenity; she is awfully female—I fear
I
found her, like some other primal things, rather dull. No doubt I looked to; no doubt too the visit was a strain for her as well as me. I’m sure I “came on” too donnishly about camerae obscurae as Ambrose demonstrated the one they’d turned the tower into some years since—but then I happen to
know
something about them! (Theirs is mechanically interesting, I might say here, with its rotating vertical ground-glass screen; but on the whole I prefer the flat circular detached-screen type like the one above the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh, where visitors stand in a ring about the scene and need not move as the picture moves. The main drawback to the Mensch instrument, however, is not the projection arrangement but the scenic material: the county hospital is no Edinburgh Castle; the Choptank River, its low bridge and flat environs, are not the Firth of Forth and its dramatic ditto. In any case, the list of the tower is already binding the mechanism so that only with difficulty can it be moved past the empty spread of new sand where once the seawall was. The device will be out of commission before it pays for itself.)

“Anyhow,” says Peter, “that’s a right pretty sight, all them sailboats.” And so it was. I took my lover’s arm, pointed out “our” restaurant across the river, where Stage Four had been initiated. Magda gravely reported that the management was looking to sell the place. Angela named all the sails on (all) the sailboats and scored respectably on Ambrose’s quiz upon their points of sailing: which were beating, which reaching, which running. I compared the general scene and situation—innocently, I swear, though there may have been unwitting mischief in the impulse—to that famous passage in book 2 of Virgil’s
Aeneid
where the hero, still in the midst of his adventures, finds their earlier installments already rendered into art: Dido’s Carthaginian frescoes of the Trojan War, in which Aeneas discerns the likenesses of his dead companions and (hair-raising moment!) his own translated face.

“Is that a fact, now,” Peter said. I felt a fool, then a bitch as I recalled Ambrose’s comparison of Magda to luckless Dido. He glanced at me—
quizzically,
I believe you writers say. I did not score well; in my embarrassment I gushed fulsomely over the celebrated Easter egg, fetched down now by Daughter Angela on its carved wood stand: a battered, faded brummagem, nothing special to begin with, mere family junk or joking relic. I could see nothing inside.

“No castle?” Ambrose demanded, I could not tell in what spirit. “No Lorelei?” I mumbled that microscopes and telescopes never worked for me either. Already in retrospect this moment seems to me a signal one. Something disquieting announced itself here: not a Fifth Stage, but (I fear) the true aspect—
a
true aspect—of the Fourth. I shall return to it.

Rather, proceed to it, for there is little more of pertinence to tell of my introduction to the Mensches. Magda’s dinner was a surprise: I had expected the relentlessly plain cuisine that American countryfolk take such pride in: baked ham, fried chicken, mashed white potatoes, lima beans, and ice water—your spiceless, sauceless English Protestant heritage. But La Giulianova knew her way around both Italian and German cookery: a fish soup called
brodetto
was followed by an admirable Wurst-und-Spätzle dish
(Himmel und Erde,
I do believe), a Caesar salad, home-baked sour rye bread, and an almond sweet called
confetti.
Cold Soave with the soup, dark Lowenbrau with the sausage, espresso and Amaretto with dessert. My best meal since Toronto: unpretentious, perfectly done, served without fuss, and all of it delicious. No cook myself (and still overcompensating for my earlier gaffe) I rained compliments upon the chef. Peter beamed; Ambrose smiled a small smile; Magda quietly remarked that good ingredients were not easily found so far from the city. I supposed that she had learned her art from her parents and the elder Mensches? Another faux pas.

“Ma never cooked worth a dime,” Peter scoffed cheerfully around his cigar. “And Mag’s mother didn’t know what good Eyetalian cooking was till Mag taught her. This here’s out of the Sunday
Times
magazine, I bet.”

Magda shook her head, but was pleased. Angela peered into the egg. I was smitten with jealousy; found myself (at nearly fifty!) wishing my breasts were less full, my features softer, my voice less assertive. What rot, the old female itch to be… not
mastered,
God forfend, but ductile, polar to the male, intensely complemental. Lord! Am I to come off my loathing of D. H. Lawrence?

The talk at dinner, between my nervous panegyrics, was of dying Andrea and the disposition of the original Menschhaus up the street, now vacant and fast deteriorating. My lover (I heard for the first time) was toying with the idea of remodelling and moving into it himself! I found that notion both appealing and appalling: out of the
ménage à trois et demi,
yes, but why into a drab frame house on a dreary street in a dull provincial town (excuse me)? Why not Rome, Paris, London, New York? At least Boston, San Francisco, even Washington or Philadelphia, even
Baltimore!
Who ever spun the globe around and, having considered Lisbon, Venice, Montreal, Florence, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Madrid—the list is endless!—put his finger on marshy Dorset and declared: “That’s for me”?

Well, Ambrose, for one. My only comfort was the chilling one that he was
not
yet after all proposing that I move in with him, if indeed he makes the move at all, and the somewhat warmer one that the measured tone of his consideration of the idea, and of Peter’s and Magda’s responses, suggested that they understood Ambrose and me to be a
couple,
or on the verge of becoming one, and that they accepted, if not quite embraced, the idea. Peter was full of hearty instructions to his brother and his wife: Tell her ’bout the time you got lost in the funhouse and come out with that coloured boy. Tell her how Pa used to try and cut stone with one hand and one foot. Tell her ’bout Grandma seeing Uncle Wilhelm’s naked statues. Magda quietly “expected I’d heard all that”; Ambrose quietly affirmed that I had. No one solicited counteranecdotes from me: How I Was Deflowered With a Capped Fountain Pen; My Several Abortions and Miscarriages; The Amherst Phallic Index to Major British and Continental Novelists of the Early 20th Century, With Commentary.

I was reluctantly permitted, at Ambrose’s insistence, to help the other womenfolk clear table and do dishes whilst our men continued the conversation; my own proposal—that the chef alone be excused from scullery work in gratitude for her earlier labours—was passed over like an embarrassing joke. And I found myself perversely aroused to be doing Woman’s Work with the woman I’d displaced in my lover’s bed. His daughter asked me what a
Lady
was. “Angie,” Magda quietly reproved her. In my case, I declared, a Lady was simply a lady who married a Lord. Then would Daddy be a Lord one day? “Angie!” And to my surprise,
l’Abruzzesa
(no, I can’t use
that
ironic epithet any longer, either) then gave me so understanding a smile, warm and droll and—and womanly, all together, that I wanted to kiss her; did in fact touch her arm, as the Mensches seemed forever to be touching one another’s. Dear “Juliette Récamier” seems to have started something: it’s still men I crave (one man), but I am learning, late, truly to love my fellow woman. I kissed Angela instead, and said, “Don’t bet on it.” (But they are, properly, never ironic with her: my reply was explained straightforwardly to mean that my title would not pass to a second husband, should I take one.)

Ainsi man dimanche.
After dinner A. drove me back to 24 L, filling in what I took to be the last remaining blanks in his psychosexual history. No doubt, he averred, his deep continuing attraction to Magda in the 1950’s, albeit entirely chaste and largely unexpressed, had got his marriage off to a lame start, so that by the time it had been quite supplanted by commitment to his wife, her resentment was past mollifying. And they never had been more than roughly suited: two healthy young provincial WASPs of the middle class playing house in the Eisenhower era. He did not believe, in retrospect, that they had deeply loved each other. Neither had had the requisite emotional equipment; call it soul. But they had surely
liked
each other until their separate adulteries poisoned their connexion; the failure of their marriage had been a considerable shock to his spirit as well as to his ego…

Egad,
you Americans! The most sentimental people in the history of the species! Can one imagine a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a Welshman, a Sicilian, a Turk carrying on so? (I hear Ambrose saying, “Sure.”) To change the subject somewhat, I registered my favourable impression of his brother, of Magda, of his daughter; my relief that they had seemed not to dislike me. I ventured further to express my particular gratification at that one smile of Magda’s in the kitchen: the
acceptance
I thought I saw in it of our situation.

A. considered this. She was in truth a great accepter, he replied: had for example accepted in 1955 the news, confessed by Peter, that Marsha’s list of conquests included himself, who that same year, in an unguarded hour, had permitted himself to fall under the sway of her vindictiveness: she was “getting even” for Ambrose’s obvious feeling for Magda, which Peter knew in his bones to be innocent. Not to keep her husband unfairly in ignorance, Magda had then confessed what otherwise she’d not have troubled him with, since it had no bearing on her love for him: that at one point, when he was overseas and she very lonely, her affection for his younger brother had departed from its prior and subsequent innocence. Not impossibly Ambrose had reported this bit of past history to his wife (but Magda could not imagine why: what was one to
do
with such information? I quite agreed with this position, as Ambrose reported it; so did he, but he acknowledged that he
had
made a foolish “clean breast of things” to his bride) and so prompted her retaliation. Magda had then assured Peter of her confidence in his love and advised against his confessing the adultery to Ambrose, for the sound reason aforestated. But Marsha herself, a great exacter of retributions, made her own “confession” and insisted they remove from the Lighthouse, which they did. These several sordid disclosures left no lasting scars on either Peter and Magda’s marriage or the brothers’ affection for each other; but the rift between Ambrose and Marsha became a breach never successfully closed thereafter.