Letters (149 page)

Monday, 1 September 1969

Dear (dead) Art:

My friend Germaine Pitt will be transcribing this
(and editing it to her pleasure, and interpolating the odd parenthesis of her own)
from a tape I’m taping this torrid forenoon on the beach below Mensch’s Castle, where once I took delivery of a water message from Yours Truly. Out of that bottle, genielike,
you
sprang: Arthur Morton King, filler-in of blanks, whom I recorked at last last month and sent over Niagara Falls.
(Then why this?)

How we shall address and mail the transcription I don’t know. Where do
noms de guerre
go in peacetime?
Noms de plume
when their bearers cannot bear a pen? My right hand’s in cast and sling, thanks to Reggie’s work last week with the palm of Fame. But today is both Labour and St Giles’ Day, patron of cripples—Hire the Handicapped!—with which saint’s blessing we salvaged this dictaphone from the wreck of Mensch Masonry, Inc. May we suppose that “Arthur Morton King” has gone to dwell with “Yours Truly,” to whom I addressed the whole First Cycle of my life? Then perhaps, to inaugurate the Second, we shall bottle this up, Germaine and I, on our wedding day a fortnight hence
(!)
and post it into the Patapsco from Fort McHenry.
(No! You’re supposed to have done with this sort of thing, love…)

Meanwhile, we enjoy in the Menschhaus a tranquil apocalypse between those Cycles: an entr’acte of calm calamity. Monday noon last we returned from the grand set-to on Bloodsworth Island and went straight next door to have my wrist X-rayed and set (no assault charges brought; the score was even) and to learn how things stood with Peter. What we learned is that my brother will not likely stand again. He is scheduled for “ablative operative therapy” later this week: the left leg off for sure, almost to the hip; the right probably as well, to the knee. And even that but a sop to the Crab that has him in its manifold pincers. Peter is a dead man.

Magda was (and remains) as we’d left her: serenely wiped out. The twins, with their boy- and girlfriends, are in the house always, laying on the filial support, keeping things high-spirited, even (we suspect) making covert financial contributions to the sinking ship. Stout Carl’s a working stonemason now, riding high on the school-construction boom and
not
in business for himself; pert Connie is a clerk-typist at the Maryland State Hospital (we no longer call it the asylum) where her grandpa was once interned. Their fiancé(e)s, high-school steadies of long standing, are also busily careered: he a feed-corn and soybean farmer, she a dietician’s assistant in the county school system. The lot of them sublimely unlettered and unconcerned about the world: patriotic, mildly Methodist, innocent of Culture, full of sunny goodwill and good humour, strong-charactered, large-hearted, intensely familial and utterly dependable, God bless them! The household has never run so smoothly. Angie still clutches the egg at night, but basks in all that love; Germaine and I can find little to do that hasn’t already been done.

Despite all which, Art, things are grim. M. M. Co. is irretrievable: all assets attached; no hope of limping on without Peter; state litigation still pending on our contribution to the Tower of Truth. The only bright notes are that the Menschhaus (through nice legal-eagling by Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews) has been rescued from its parlous inclusion in our corporate assets, and that not even John Schott’s D.C. lawyers (counsel for the state university) can litigate blood from a stone.

Peter’s chief wish is that the tower were undone: it is, in his view, a monumental reproach to the whole family. One does not remind him that the reproach is merited—certainly not upon
his
honest head, but upon our father’s, our uncle’s, our grandfather’s, back to the seawall buried under this sand whereon I sit. Upon
my
head, too, though I had no hand in the tower: its flaws are of a piece with those of our settling house and our stuck camera obscura. In vain I invoke, for Peter, the Pisan campanile, the fine skewed towers of San Gimignano; I quote him Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty”:
“All things counter, original, spare, strange… / He fathers-forth.
…” Need Truth, I ask rhetorically, be plumb as a surveyor’s bob?

Pained, he replies: “I just wish the durn thing was down.”

We are about broke. Ambrose Mensch,
in propria persona,
has taken your place as “author” of what remains of the
FRAMES
screenplay, authorised to authorship, not by Reg Prinz, but by
his
regents (Bruce & Brice), who seem to us to be being directed now by A. B. Cook. The two remaining scenes, “resolution” and “wrap-up,” are the Fort McHenry & Wedding scene, for which I have ideas, and The Destruction of Barataria, for which I gather
they
have ideas. Beyond that
(i.e.,
16 September, when in 1814 the U.S. Navy drove the
frères
Lafitte off Grande-Terre Island) I have no plans nor any project—save my (honorary) membership in the race aforecited, which pays no wage.

Nor is Milady gainfully employed
(Though she has not one but
two
new projects in the works, Arthur old chap: (a) a study—suggested to her by of all people A. B. Cook VI!—of “The Bonapartes in Fiction and the Fictions of the Bonapartes.” Right up her alley, what? For which she is hopeful of Tidewater Foundation support, via her friends Jane Mack and Todd Andrews. And (b) the grand, the resplendent, the overarching, the unremunerative but tip-top-priority project on-going—dare we yet believe?—in her half-century-old womb. Ah, Art! Ah, Ambrose! Ah, humanity! But why this letter?)
Magda, preparing straightforwardly for widowhood, begins work this month in the hospital kitchens, the most convenient job she can find. In her absence, at least during Peter’s terminality, Germaine and I shall look after Angie and the patient. It is Magda’s hope that we shall stay on in the Menschhaus “even afterwards”: that Germaine will be reinstated at Marshyhope (there’s talk of that) and I find a fit and local enterprise for the Second Half of my Life. Though she will of course understand if we etc.

But Art! All this is not what all this is about!
(What, then, Ambrose?)
Between his late diagnosis and his pending amputation, Peter has been, is, at home in a ménage too apocalyptic for normal inhibition. We, uh,
love
one another, we four. The only literal coupling—
N.B.,
Germaine—has been quasi-connubial, between us betrotheds, who in our fourth week of Mutuality have gently reenacted the Fourth Phase of our affair (that’s 16 May—4 July, Art: the “marriage” phase), itself an echo of my nineteen years with you-know-whom, of whom more anon. But these “marital” couplings are as it were the
bouquet garni
in a more general
cassoulet:
a strong ambience of loving permission among the four of us. Dear Peter, though impotent, sick, scared, and shy, hungers rather desperately for physical affection, and is fed. His love for Magda is what it always was, absolute, only fiercer; his love for me, never earned, is scarcely less strong; his love for Germaine (now her Englishness and the rest have ceased to frighten him) is a marvel to behold. In turn, my fiancée’s love
(Say it again, Ambrose: your
fiancée’s
love)
comprehends the household. And Magda—beneath our calm catastrophe powerfully sexed, a stirring Vesuvia—Magda, devoted to us all, does not go wholly unconsoled.

Entendu?
Quietly and without fuss, by all hands, everyone’s needs and wants have been being more or less attended. Now: today begins, for G. & me, Week 5 of our affair-within-our-affair, duly echoing Phase 5 (July) of the original, itself an echo of sweet painful 1967/68, when, here in the Menschhaus…

(Entendu.
But this letter…)

With all this circumambient love—and let’s speak no more of it—has gone a sort of reticent candour, wherewith certain sore history has been resurrected (by Peter) in order to be laid to final rest before
he
is: Magda’s old “infidelities” to him, with me, in the excavation of this house; Peter’s single adultery years later, with score-settling Marsha; Magda’s mighty extramarital but intramural passion of ’67/68. Matters all of them quietly broached, quickly acknowledged
entre nous quatre,
and dismissed forever with a touch, a kiss.

Then why rementioned here?
(Art’s very question.)
Why, in order to explain the fizzle of what we take to have been meant to be a bombshell, in the post of Saturday last. Germaine and I were hosting a family cook-in (too sultry outdoors to leave the air conditioning)—steamed hard crabs and champagne to celebrate Peter’s furlough from hospital and the passage of another full moon (the Sturgeon, 27 August, penumbrally eclipsed) without Milady’s menses—when there arrived, amid the bills and ads and medical-insurance matters, a first-class to me from Fort Erie, Ontario, in a hand I knew. My heart winced in the old way, equal parts resentment and apprehension, at sight of that stenographic penmanship, still recognisable though as strung out from its erstwhile tightness as was the penwoman at our last encounter (Fort Erie Assault & 2nd Conception scene). Why
would
Marsha not leave off, that indefatigable exacter of penalties? I fished her letter from the pile and pocketed it, not to becloud the feast; but Magda had recognised it too, and smiled at my exasperation
(even G. sensed something was up, luv),
and
my
feast was beclouded anyhow. I stepped down into the camera obscura room—the party was upstairs—and read it. Germaine followed promptly; Magda soon after; no way for Peter to manage the stairs, or he’d’ve been there too.

A declaration:
Angela is not your daughter, ha ha.
Full and plausible description: the circumstances of her engenderment on a certain night fifteen years since, in a period when, over and above my limited fertility, my then considerable potency was in relative abeyance by reason of marital quarrels. Graphic and sarcastic account of Marsha’s rousing to adultery my fertile but indifferently potent brother. Et cetera. No occasion given for the writer’s tendering this news now, which I passed on to Germaine, and she to Magda, without comment.

Peter wondered merrily from the kitchen what we were up to: the champagne was losing its cool. Magda kissed first me, then Germaine, and took the liberty of shredding the letter. “Poor bitch,” she said, and left us. Angie squealed at her Uncle Peter’s popping of the cork. Milady wondered, with a sigh, Must we really reenact
this
stage? I suggested we wed without waiting for either further tidings from her uterus or clearer economic weather;
(she agreed, Art, right readily, and)
we went upstairs to announce the news. Angie hugged us all noisily, her wont, and was noisily hugged back. Embraces and the bubbly all around.

There remained the matter of date. Germaine herself proposed Saturday, 13 September, as being by her reckoning the 6th day of what would be the 6th week of the 6th Stage of our affair. I concurred. As to the hour, she was less certain: ought it to be 6 A.M.? 6 P.M.? Or (dividing the 24 hours into half a dozen equal periods) sometime between 8 P.M. and midnight?

About 10:17 A.M., said I. Or about 5:08 P.M. Your choice.

(About?!)

Let’s say tennish that morning or fivish that afternoon.

Um. She didn’t get it.
(Doesn’t yet, at this point in her transcription.)

Depending, you see, on whether our wedding should commence the fourth or the sixth period of that day:
i.e.,
the “Marsha/Marriage” Period or the “We-Ourselves” Period.

Oh, the We-Ourselves, definitely
(said Germaine).
Sixes all the way, luv.

Done, then: 13 Sept., fivish.

But, um.

Um?

Yes. When Germaine
elle-même
divides 24 hours by 6
(went on Germaine),
she gets a day whose 6th Period commences at 8 P.M sharp

Aye.

Is her arithmetic wrong
(she wants to know)?

Not her arithmetic.

Well. She had been patient, had she not, my fiancée asked, with my exasperating schedules and programmes? Patient and more than patient? And it was, was it not, in a spirit of loving accommodation thereto that she
(right readily)
put by whatever qualms the probably and delicately pregnant might, if even slightly superstitious, entertain about marrying on the 13th?

Aye.

Then she lovingly requests of her hopeful impregnator
(you understand, Art; we’ve not seen Dr Rosen yet)
and willful fiancé a full farking outline of what we’re up to, that she may judge for herself whether certain tacit understandings have all along been tacit misunderstandings,
e.g.,
her betrothed’s hexaphilia. Call it an engagement gift.

Okay. Up to a point.

What point?

The sixth point.

O
shit,
Ambrose!
(Aye! Aye!)

Leave a double space here in the transcript, Germaine: we come now to the business of this letter.

But she was, as
(almost)
always, patient, and I herewith honour her request, up to the farthest point that I myself could see as of, say, 4 August: the date of that final letter to Yours Truly and the end, as I saw and see it, of my life’s first cycle and the career of “A. M. King.”

The mistake, my love, was not in your arithmetic, but in your understandable choice of divisor. Hexaphile I am; but 7, not 6—so I saw when I outlined my life for old Yours Truly—is the number that finally rules us. Thus our wedding time: 24 hours -=- 7 periods = 3.4285714 hours per period x 5 periods gives us a 6th period commencing at 17.142856 hours,
i.e.,
about 5:08 P.M. Happy hour! A 7th then runs from about 8:34 P.M. to midnight: but in
it
we hexaphiles take no interest, nor have we foresight of it.