Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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7

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E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Explaining her fortnight’s silence. The Burning of Washington. Two more deaths and a memorial service. Preparations for the Bombardment of Fort McHenry and for her wedding.

“Mensch’s Folly”

Saturday, 13 September 1969

Dear Mr B.,

Enclosed, if I remember to enclose it when this is done, is a copy of my transcript of Ambrose’s taped letter of 1 September to (the late) “Author Morton King,” with whom we are no longer concerned. It will explain to you, more or less, a vertiginous business of 6’s and 7’s that I myself intend to think no more of, though it still directs our lives as did astronomy the ancient Mayans’.

Today, for example, is not really Saturday, 13 September; it is Wednesday 10th. But having written you faithfully for 21 sixth days straight (21 Sabbaths if you’re Jewish or 7th-Day Adventist) and then – for very good reason! – having missed the past two Saturdays together with another menstrual period, I’ve so much and mattersome to catch you up on that I’m starting this letter three days early. And I shall be lucky, even so, to get it up to the “present” and posted by its letterhead date.

My wedding day!

But there I spring already into the future, doubtless in flight from the shocks of the three weeks since my last: a period of being at sixes and sevens indeed. Then we had just got the horrid news of Peter’s bone cancer and were wondering whether or not to go down to “Barataria” for the “Burning of Washington.” Already an age ago, another world. Peter Mensch is dead, John! And Joe Morgan is dead! (And maybe Mr Jerome Bray, and for all we know Bea Golden. And, to be sure, Mr Ho Chi Minh.) “Washington” is in ashes; Baltimore’s about to take its lumps – and the Menschhaus is in deep mourning, and Mensch Masonry’s office has been burglarised, and we’re pretty sure I’m pregnant, and Magda is amazing, and A. B. Cook is being strangely friendly, and Marsha Blank has declared that Peter is (was, was) Angie’s father, and nobody (but Marsha) cares a damn about that one way or the other, and Ambrose and I will marry at Fort McHenry at 5:08 EDST this coming Saturday, Rosh Hashanah!

See A.‘s letter for explanation, more or less, of that specific hour and date: the 6th something of the 6th something else of the 6th 6th 6th 6th what-have-you.

Peter, Peter, Peter! and poor Joe!

Bloodsworth Island. We went down there after all on that Sunday morning, 24 August, after I’d reported to you the bad news of Peter’s diagnosis and Ambrose had telephoned you, much distraught, late that Saturday night, in reply to your letter. (On the matter of your writing to him, after half a year’s silence to me, I shall not speak.) And as he mentioned in his subsequent letter from Barataria on the Monday morning – typed with his left hand because his right was out of action and I was too busy with hysterical Merry Bernstein to do his writing for him – a lively time was had by all.

Ambrose was, you understand, feeling as emptied—by his mother’s death, by Peter’s crisis, by M. M. Co.‘s final bankruptcy, by his abandonment of that lovely Perseus project and his longtime pseudonymity – as I, in the 3rd loving week of our “mutuality,” was feeling filled. We went down there, despite our then distress, for the same reason that we will go forward with our wedding plans despite our even greater bereavement now: because Magda (and, back then, dear Peter) insisted. We wound down through your endless marshes – still, steaming, buggy – across the labyrinth of shallow waterways and distant loblolly pines in Backwater Wildlife Refuge, where I saw my first American eagle, down past Crapo and Tedious Creek to Bishops Head, at the lonely tail of Dorchester County. I thought uncomfortably of Ambrose’s having brought Bea Golden through these same marshes in July, at the beginning of hateful Stage 5, to roger her up and down the beach whilst I stewed and fretted in my flapper drag up in Dorset Heights… A hundred years ago!

But clearly, and fortunately, nothing of the sort was on my lover’s mind. I distracted him as best I could with bird and marsh plant and movie questions, but his eyes kept filling at the thought of poor Peter, poor Magda. We left our little car at the road’s end, where nothing is but a fisherman’s shack and pier, open water on three sides, and, across a mile-wide strait, low-lying, marshy Bloodsworth. Several other empty cars were parked there, among them a black limousine I knew to be Jane Mack’s – but no one was about. We wondered. Presently a lad puttered up in a “Hooper’s Island workboat” (A.’s designation) full of crab pots, and ferried us across to Cook’s lodge: a cheerful young Charon who would not accept our proffered fare.

So this, thought I, is where they fucked. Well well. There was in fact no beach, only tidal mud flats, spartina grass, cattails. A brown “gut” of water marked with stakes led to Cook’s dock; “Barataria” was a modest but comfortable white frame house, a small caretaker’s cottage, a flagpole, grass doing badly on a sandy lawn. A few crabbing skiffs and a runabout were tied at the pier; a few untidy young people loitered about (refugees from the Remobilisation Farm, they looked to me); a few mosquitoes and biting green flies said hello to us.

Where was the movie? It would arrive after lunch, Cook’s caretaker told us: a wizened, brown-burnt, friendly local whose “down-county” accent defied my ear and whose employer was off with Prinz & Co. The grips – they were indeed from Fort Erie – showed us crude sets of which they were inordinately proud, meant to represent the U.S. Capitol and the President’s House in 1814. “Gonna burn them fuckers, come dark,” etc. We were given lunch. The main company of Frames, it seemed, were shooting across the Bay, where the British had landed and reboarded after their remarkable expedition. They would return by boat sometime that afternoon.

Nothing to do but sip iced tea, worry about Peter, watch the hippies smoke dope, and wish we hadn’t come so early, or at least had brought along the Times. We were, you remember, winding up our week of ritual Abstinence, the Echo of our Reenactment of et cetera. We agreed that Monday would be welcome, family crisis or no. I found in Cook’s library a Mr Glen Tucker’s Poltroons & Patriots: A Popular Account of the War of 1812 in two volumes (1954) and did a spot of homework. Ambrose made desultory notes on his scenario.

Not till afternoon’s end did the others finally arrive, in a fine big motor yacht named Baratarian. It belonged, we assumed, to the lord of Barataria Lodge: the laureate poet and new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope State University. He was in any case conspicuously aboard, along with a paid captain and a crowd of others, including Reg Prinz, our old chums Bruce and Brice, and that Rising Young Starlet Merope Bernstein, of Fort Erie and Scajaquada fame.

They were late, Cook explained (after a bluff, booming welcome to us as the Shameless Lovebirds of Liberal-Land, who however, despite our egregious political and moral error, were to regard his Barataria as ours) because of a fortuitous encounter with Mr Todd Andrews’s cruising boat across the Bay; they had made good use of it to film Baratarian under way and had filmed it in turn for “establishing footage,” it being a renovated old oyster-dredging sailboat. And they had stopped off at Bishops Head to unload another pair of lovebirds: Jane Mack and her fiancé, “Lord Baltimore.” It turns out that the yacht is hers, or theirs; they had kindly lent it to the Frames company for the weekend, but had themselves returned to Cambridge.

I have neglected to mention that this ruddy, fulsome nemesis of mine was rigged out in period costume; made up as, and bent on playing, his ancestor and namesake Andrew Burlingame Cook IV, of whom you know from my reports of a certain painful project whereof I long since washed my hands. The fellow had been a double agent, Cook maintained, in the British Chesapeake expedition of 1814 (news to me), and indeed was allegedly killed at Ft McH., though subsequent letters over his signature are said to have reached his widow at Castines Hundred. Be that as it may (the mere mention of that fateful place-name, and of ancestral letters, gave me a proper heartache, which Ambrose perceived, and squeezed my hand), his descendant seemed very much in charge of Prinz, B. & B., the whole business. Fresh from Mr Tucker’s history, I was struck by Cook’s likeness in face and manner, not to his forebear, of whom there are no extant portraits, but to Admiral Sir George Cockburn, Scourge of the Chesapeake, whom he had better played. Reggie framed and filmed; Bruce and Brice did their audiovisual things; Merope slouched about with wary eye, doubtless on the lookout for Jerome Bray – but Cook ran the show, in high-spirited (and high-handed) collaboration with my quondam Doctor of Letters, whose undoctoring, and my dismissal, he himself had advocated!

What to make of him? Neither André nor “Monsieur Casteene,” he was the hale, unpredictable fellow I’d first encountered, along with Joe Morgan, in the Maryland Historical Society back in 1961: back-slapper and back-stabber, yet disarmingly “up front” about both and particularly forceful. Unrepentant for having sided with John Schott against Morgan, and later against Ambrose and myself, Cook nonetheless managed, whilst improvising with my friend a whole new scenario for the evening’s shooting, to intimate to me that he was having second thoughts about his Marshyhope appointment: he had urged Schott to sound me out on possible reinstatement! “Of course,” he went so far as to add, “you’ll want to tell him where to get off. But we must have a chat about Germaine de Staël and the Bonapartes, especially between Elba and St Helena. Fascinating!”

As, one must acknowledge, is he, whoever he is. For all my urge to keep him at arm’s length (I curbed my urge to press him about his ancestor’s letters to his unborn child, and reacted neither way to the mention of my reappointment), I found myself involved – if only because Ambrose was, with a clearly therapeutic relish that warmed my heart – in the most preposterous bit of business yet mounted in this absurd production. We are a long way, John, from where we started in March, with a “motion picture based on your latest work, but echoing its predecessors”!

Are you ready? As thunderclouds pile up out over the Bay (and a pleasant buffet supper is spread by our host), Cook recounts in the first person to all assembled, from memory, his ancestor’s “posthumous” description of the burning of Washington. The man is a raconteur of some talent and has obviously absorbed his Poltroons & Patriots; whether Andrew IV’s letter is real or not, Andrew VI gives us a convincing “eyewitness” account of the events of 24 August 1814. And the shtik (to borrow Ambrose’s tidewater Yiddish) is that as he chronicles the destruction – for us and for the microphone and cameras – we move outdoors from set to set and, approximately, reenact it.

Not forgetting, alas, the ongoing subplot, what’s left of it: the War Between Image and Word, a.k.a. Director and Author. Nature cooperates with approaching lightning bolts and thunderclaps as the “Capitol’s” canvas doors are battered down and “Andrew Cook IV” answers aye to “Admiral Cockburn’s” motion to fire the building. The hippies set to with a will; Cook’s caretaker brings umbrellas for the ladies, none of whom, save myself, minds getting drenched. Merry B. is inclined to huddle against Reg P. from the flames and the lightning, which are indeed impressive; but that silent fellow has been waiting his moment, and when we move now, in a pause in the downpour, behind the burning flat to a row of dripping bookshelves representing the Congressional Library, he breaks away from her to do a surprising, dangerous thing. Ambrose has of course been cast momentarily as the librarian, reading aloud from Tucker’s history of this episode; Bruce and Brice stand by, a-filming; suddenly an eight-foot case of “books” (actually painted rows of spines, but the case itself is a heavy wooden thing) comes tumbling upon them, pushed by the Director, from an angle such that to avoid it they must spring toward the flames!

I am astonished (it will later be surmised that Prinz’s real targets, ever more ascendant, were B. & B., not A.; he had better gone after C.). My betrothed, however, seems scarcely surprised: in the same motion with which he leaps clear, he whales Tucker Vol. 1 at Reggie’s head, and seeing either that his aim is off since the famous First Conception scene or that Tucker’s history is a less accurate missile than Richardson’s novel, unhesitatingly he pulls half of the burning flat itself – a flimsy thing which the storm is breaking loose from its supports – down upon his adversary, knocking him into the mud!

No injuries on either side. Merope and I restrain our macho mates from further such exchanges. Right on, the hippies cry. Cook applauds and resumes his recitation. T-Dum and T-Dee exchange meaning glances and take up their stations.

I pass over other such notable moments to sing their culmination. The mise en scène is a flat representing the Tripoli Monument in the Washington Naval Yard, whose original was defaced by a British demolition team. We are to turn its (painted) sculptures into the following tableau vivant: Merry B. to represent Fame, as indicated by a great bronze palm; myself to represent History, wielding a similarly impressive pen (these props Cook claims to be the originals, long in his family’s possession and much coveted by the Smithsonian). At a certain signal, “Director” and “Author”—both of whom have long since been usurped of their functions! – to see which can snatch what.

Places, everybody? But wait: I have not mentioned that our signal is to come, not from A. B. Cook, IV or VI, or any other of us, no, but from the United States Navy itself. Bloodsworth Island – as everyone seems to know except me – is mainly an aerial gunnery target, uninhabited below Barataria except by very intrepid herons and muskrats. At 2200 hours there is to commence a night-firing exercise in the Prohibited Zone, just south of us; there will be helicopters and patrol boats to insure that the area is clear before the fighters roar in from Patuxent Air Station, across the Bay. It is half after nine already; there they are now, the choppers, blinking and flashing and raising a frightful racket, obviously interested in our floodlights and smoking scenery. Cook waves at their searchlights. The hippies raise clenched fists and shout obscenities. The cameras roll. We take our places.

Am I mistaken in remembering our last sight of Jerome Bray (not counting the sound of him at the Ft Erie Magazine Explosion) to have been his departure by Newswatch helicopter, early in August, from Delaware Park in Buffalo? Well, sir: as if reinvoked by these awesome, clattering navy machines (we do not know how in fact he arrived; Cook alone seemed surprised to see him), just as Fame and I take our rain-soaked places, and Reggie and Ambrose toe the mark some metres off, and Cook makes ready to flag the start, a Union Jack in one hand and the Stars & Bars in t’other – it is 2155; it is 2156; we await the roar of jets—

Yup. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, on top of our trompe-l’oeil monument. Had anyone doubted the man is mad? Then picture him now, as Brice’s cameras do, in archetypal madman’s garb: his alleged ancestor’s tricorn hat; the cutaway coat with turned-up collar and epaulets; the waistcoat under; and, yes, the wearer’s right hand tucked in above the third button. He has escaped from Elba, Bray declaims, to aid the U. States against G. Britain: also from St Helena, to establish his Second Empire in America! He claims for himself both palm and pen, in token of his “conquest of letters by numbers.” Able was I, he concludes, and I swear I quote him exactly: Able was I… er…

Here the chopper drowns him out; the fighter planes blast in at heart-stopping low altitude to fire tracer shells and heaven knows what else into the marsh below us; the storm has paused but not passed, and contributes its own apocalyptic sound-and-light background. Taken aback by Bray’s appearance (in both senses) and by the racket, we are spellbound – all save Merope, who at first sight of him shrieks, flings away the palm, and runs. Reg Prinz jumps the gun and dashes for her trophy. Bray comes down at me, loony-eyed; it is the pen he wants (thank God), and I find myself, despite my alarm, in a proper tug-o’-war: plain limey stubbornness, I suppose. Wham! Here come the planes again, taking all our breaths. Ambrose rushes to my assistance: everyone is shouting over the din, myself included; Bruce and Brice impede my lover with lights and dollies; Prinz trips him up, swings at him with that palm. But like Perseus at the wedding feast, Ambrose wades through all obstacles to my side and snatches up the pen. Bray flees at once, behind or over the Tripoli flat, whither lately flew Fame.

Had we thought this subplot done? Reggie regroups and reassaults, catching A. a stiff clout on the shoulder: these symbols are no tokens, but heroic-scale bronzes weighing half a stone each! Perfectly furious, Abmrose deals him in reply a pen-stroke that might have split his directorial head, but happily only smashes once again his spectacles. Prinz gives a cry and comes down with the palm on Ambrose’s wrist. The pen falls (I grab it); Author tackles Director; they thrash like schoolboys in the mud; the planes roar out as the storm moves back in – and at this appropriate moment the electrical generator fails.

Enough, A. B. Cook and History agree. Brice and Bruce are with us. We separate the soiled combatants: Reggie’s cheek is cut and bruised; Ambrose’s wrist (we shall learn) is fractured. Both are mucky and disabled; neither is in terrible pain. There is a general move toward shelter, but Cook and I – and Ambrose, when he gets his breath – are concerned for Merope, who is not to be found with the others back in the lodge. Nor, ominously, is the Emperor of the French. A search must be mounted: if the storm re-retreats, Cook informs us, the navy might well resume their firing exercise.

I am forbidden to join the party. Not male chauvinism, Ambrose explains (holding his right wrist), but reasonable concern for my condition. I yield; it is awfully messy out there. Prinze declines the invitation: true, he can scarcely see without his glasses, but he seems to us not much to care. Indeed, he appears if anything disgusted with his protégée for having thrown in the palm and bolted (our host has retrieved both emblems, tisking his tongue at their misuse). In the end it is Cook, Ambrose, and three of the hippies – comrades of Merope’s from the Marshyhope commencement bust – who sally out into the swamp with ponchos and pocket torches.

They find no trace of the abdicated emperor. There is some concern that he may have strayed into the Prohibited Zone, since at its perimeter (marked with large warnings of unexploded ordnance) they discover poor bedraggled Fame. She is intact, not apparently injured, but quite dazed, sitting in a puddle in the marshy path, propped against the warning sign. They wonder whether she has been raped: Her jeans are open, and there is a fresh bruise on her bum. Nope, she says, dopily; she “took a leak” and then “sort of zonked out.” I shall wonder later, as I tend to her back in the lodge, whether she did in fact take some sort of drug, voluntarily or otherwise: one of her comrades, a black girl named Thelma, intimates surprisingly that Bray is involved in the narcotics trade! In any case, our starlet is most certainly woozy. We put her to bed.

I am obliged to speak well of Mr Cook’s management of this wacky emergency. Despite his incongruous and now mud-spoiled costume, he is all authority and good sense in his organisation of the search and his solicitude for Ms. Bernstein. He now insists that Author and Director declare, if not a truce, at least a cease-fire for the duration of their visit to Barataria. He will telephone the navy at once concerning Bray; given the weather, he does not believe that firing will be resumed; on the other hand, he thinks it useless to pursue the search for Bray before morning. We should all go to bed. The filmists as usual will bunk about the floors and porches of the lodge; we lovebirds are to do him the honour of using the guest apartment in the caretaker’s cottage. The man even bandages, and expertly, my lover’s wrist, which is now sore and swelling, accompanying his first aid with ribald innuendo. Tweedledee remarks that we did not really “do” the accidental explosion of the navy yard, per Andrew IV’s letter. Andrew VI opines that we have enough big-bang footage to serve, and bids us good night.

But A. and I are too amused, aroused, and exhausted to sleep. Showered and pajama’d, we praise each other’s scrappiness; we shake our heads at the rueful irony of his injured writing hand and wonder about Merope and Bray and A. B. Cook. (I wonder too whether we are sharing the same bed in which – but never mind.) We decide that the Word-versus-Image subplot really has gone far enough, at least in its hostile aspect. Presently we sleep, only to be waked well after midnight by a single final mighty bang out in the marshes. It seems to have come from the direction of the firing zone; but there is no sound of planes, and the storm has passed to occasional silent lightning flickers in the east. Has Bruce, we wonder, slipped out after all to do the navy yard? Or has luckless Napoleon stumbled upon a bit of unexploded ordnance and blown himself to kingdom come? In any case, I sleepily observe, it is indeed past midnight: i.e., it is Monday, 25 August, 1st day of Week 4 etc. We may put by our programmatic abstinence. We do.

Next morning all hands compare notes on that last explosion. B. & B. disclaim responsibility, but wish they’d “caught” it. Merope is still stoned, Prinz is still fed up, with her and all of us. A. B. Cook has been up betimes: navy search-craft are on their way, he reports, and adds that inasmuch as he has been being pressured to yield title to Barataria Lodge to the federal government, we may expect some interrogatory harassment from navy intelligence and security people concerning trespass into the Prohibited Area. We are to cooperate respectfully (There are cries of “Off the pigs!”) – but if anyone happens to possess marijuana or other illegal material, it were well to dispose of it. Laughter, hoots, further obscenities, and much busy disposal.

Ambrose’s wrist is sorer and sorer, and our business is done. Even so, we dally till nearly noon out of curiosity to watch the search and speak to sober-faced but polite military people. Ambrose uses Cook’s typewriter to peck out his left-handed letter to you, and remarks afterward that he can now sympathise with his late father’s one-armed attempt at memorial sculpture. No trace of Jerry Bray. Still bluff and cheerful, Cook nonetheless expresses concern that the Department of Defense may use this unfortunate accident to justify condemnation proceedings against him.

There is one final small crisis. On the first available boat after breakfast, Reg Prinz leaves for the mainland, for his rented car (how can he drive without his glasses?), and for Manhattan, with not even a good-bye to Merry B. She is not too “zonked” to get the message, with suitable abandoned outcry. I do my best and then leave her to her friends, who agree that the fellow is a fink, maybe even a nark. Cook urges us to stay for lunch, thanks us for our assistance as if he were the film’s producer (who knows?), and heartily hopes we’ll “see things through to the final frame.”

The former invitation we decline. The latter, in its cinematographic aspect, involves two more scenes: Fort McHenry and Barataria. We shall see. Between ourselves, I happily report, Ambrose and I are indeed inclined to See Things Through et cetera – though there has arisen, since the Burning of Washington, a certain question about the number of frames to go.

Of that question I shall not speak here: see his, our, letter to “A. M. King,” attached. We were ferried back in style to Bishops Head aboard one of the small navy craft (Ambrose pointed out a skipjack entering the strait under sail from seaward and wondered whether it was Mr Andrews’s), retrieved our car, and drove home – History at the wheel, perforce – to the sinking Menschhaus.

A bittersweet interval, the next few days: see that same letter. Our original 4th Stage, you may remember (I surely do), was something sorry, as was our 5th: that degrading latter May and June and July. A good side of the bad coin of Peter’s crisis is that – along with our growing love – it set aside all but the tenderest echoes of those reenactments of, respectively, Ambrose’s marriage to Marsha Blank and the ménage à trois with Peter and Magda which immediately preceded our own affair. I can therefore summarise. Even as we got Ambrose’s wrist fracture set and cast in the hospital emergency room, Peter was discharged into our care to await his radical surgery: the last ten days, as it turned out, of his life. On 27 August the full Sturgeon Moon rose out of the upper Choptank, sailed over Mensch’s Castle, and set in Chesapeake Bay without the aid of Germaine Gordon Pitt’s menstruation. Magda wept and kissed me. Peter called for champagne. Ambrose hugged his daughter, his sister-in-law, and his fiancée, and soberly toasted the health of… the six of us. On the Saturday (30 August) a letter arrived from Marsha, meant to shock us: Peter, she declared, not Ambrose, was Angela’s father. It did not. More champagne. See A.‘s letter.

The which he taped, and I transcribed, on the Monday, 1 September, Labour Day. In and by it Ambrose proposed to marry me on Saturday 13th (the date of this, though we are not there yet); and I accepted despite certain apprehensions therein registered. We did not know, as we played with our sixes and sevens and scheduled climaxes within climaxes, that Joe Morgan up in Fort Erie was shooting himself through the head, and that Marsha Blank Mensch had (reluctantly, I’m sure) relieved Ambrose of further alimony payments by marrying Jacob Horner! And that dear Peter had but four more days to live.

Those days – the first four of our 5th week of Mutuality – are too near and dear and painful to recount. I am not a weak woman. I have myself watched a husband die (and lost a previous lover, and a son). But I do not fathom the strength and serenity, or the capaciousness of heart, of Magda Giulianova. I quite love that woman! We four (five, six) quite loved one another. I can say no more. See etc.

On the 4th, a Thursday, Peter reentered hospital for amputation of both legs, one to the hip, the other to the knee, with every likelihood even so of surviving less than five years. A confusion of schedules kept the orthopedic surgeon, a weekly visitor from Baltimore, up in the city a day longer than expected; the operation was postponed till next afternoon. That Thursday night someone broke into the closed office of Mensch Masonry, rifled the files (sealed by court-appointed receivers), and stole copies of the design specifications and foundation blueprints of the Marshyhope Tower of Truth. No clues yet; suspicion falls heavily and kindlessly upon Ambrose, who was in fact with me and/or Magda uninterruptedly. On the Friday morning, sometime before dawn, Peter took a massive dose of Tylenol and ended his life. Suspicion there, too, falls upon the Menschhaus, more mildly but in this case accurately. Though there will be no investigation beyond the routine enquiry required to clear the hospital of liability, the fact is that Magda and Ambrose supplied Peter with pills, at his request, on the Wednesday or Thursday, precisely in case he should change his mind about seeing things through to the final frame.

Why Tylenol? Because, Ambrose explained, aspirin, barbiturates, Seconal, and the like can be promptly pumped out, especially when their taker is already in hospital, without fatal results. But Tylenol, in large doses, besides being easier to lay hands on than prescription chemicals, quickly does irreversible and lethal liver damage. Peter thus became, along with his sculpting Uncle Wilhelm, the only member of the family known not to have died of cancer. We buried him last Saturday beside that uncle and the others, all his limbs attached.

(Angie has been difficult to manage since. The loss seems to have sickened her physically: she wakes up vomiting.)

That same Saturday came the shocking news of Morgan’s accident or suicide (word reached the local newspaper on the Wednesday, but we in the Lighthouse were too distracted to read the newspapers): specifically, that his gunshot wound had been ruled self-inflicted and Jacob Horner cleared of implication, and that the body had been returned from Fort Erie to our neighbouring town of Wicomico for burial on the same day we buried Peter (Morgan’s late wife is buried over there; we have since learned that Horner and his bride accompanied the casket from Ontario to Maryland, along with Morgan’s sons). The funeral having been a private affair, there was to be a memorial service next day in the chapel of Marshyhope State University. We decided that I should attend, as having been closest of the family to Morgan. Ambrose would stay with Magda and Angie.

It was a fairly nauseating ceremonial, not however without its comic touches. I should pass over it except that so many of “your characters” were there, and that it gives to this narrative of my affair with Ambrose Mensch an almost novelistic symmetry: we “began” with the service for Harrison Mack on Redmans Neck in February, and in effect we “end” (our premarital courtship, not our connexion!) with another such service in the same general geography.