Letters (74 page)

At length we got it sorted out: In an earlier incarnation, Bea Golden was Jeannine Bernstein, wife of a minor Hollywood character actor, himself much married and divorced. Bray’s allegedly perfidious assistant (but now he was calling her Morgan le Fay—altogether bonkers!) was this chap’s daughter by a prior mating. Hence…

Jee-
sus!
Ambrose exclaims.

Your wicked stepdaughter ha ha! Mr Bray cries feverishly to the recoiling Bea, with whom he is clearly smitten and whom he fears he has alienated. Footage. He didn’t
hurt
Ms Bernstein, he swears now; he only sort of spanked her for ruining his life’s work; put a bit of a scare into her, don’t you know. After all, she did save his life once; no doubt she was led astray in good faith; oh, they shall pay! He shall not rest till he has made it up to her—to Bea, for whom now he openly declares his adoration—for having chastised her ex-stepdaughter, however deservedly. They must go together, at once, to the Farm: he is a friend of Mr Horner there; he will declare to Ms Bernstein in her former stepmother’s presence that though with the best of intentions she has blighted his life and at least postponed the New Golden Age, and though he durst never trust her again with the LILYVAC programme, he harbours her no ill will and in the blessed name of her (ex-)stepmother forgives her his irreparable betrayal.

I summarise. With the greatest difficulty we got out of there—never did see the famous “printout” Bray claims to have been spoilt by Ms B.—back to Chautauqua; thence, Ambrose and I on the Friday, back Home. I do not envy Bea Golden her new admirer! Bray declares he will Put Things Right for her sake; that he will follow her to Fort Erie, to Maryland, anywhere she goes, let the goats fend for themselves; that with her aid and inspiration he may yet solve the Riddle of LILYVAC II and get the 5-Year Plan back on schedule before the “Phi-Point” of his life…

Ambrose finds him both frightening and fascinating: the Phi-Point, did he say? Point six one eight etc.? Bea finds him merely frightening, and threatens legal action if he attempts to follow her across either Peace Bridge or Bay Bridge. She was never
close
to Mel Bernstein’s daughter, she tells us now, whose mother of course had the custody; she thinks it possible Merry doesn’t even recognise her with her new name, any more than she Bea recognised
her;
but she cannot account for the coincidence. Ambrose cannot either, and worries for the ladies’ safety.

Castine, Castine, I assure him: there is the very god of Coincidence. Bea has but to place herself under his ubiquitous protection, as “Pocahontas” has evidently placed herself under “M. Casteene’s.”

He will thank me, says Ambrose, not to speak of his own prior incarnation. Jee-
sus
, what a week! And though it included that dismaying reencounter with Marsha (Did I see what he’d meant? Those thin-plucked eyebrows; the cold eyes under them; the mean turn of her jaw; the featureless
regularity
of those features he’d once thought attractive, then come to find empty of character, and now saw as the very stage mask of Vindictiveness… I said nothing), not to mention the grave tidings from Magda
re
his mother—despite all, it had been a long while since he’d felt so
potent…

Oh really.

Yes, well, he meant that way too, and we’d see, we’d see. But what he
really
meant was Musewise: the Perseus story was clipping along in first draft; he was delighted with the conceit, equally with the execution; it made him feel Writer enough to more than hold his own with Reg Prinz, whose movie he thought he now quite understood and rather relished. He took my arm (we were on the United flight down from Buffalo to Baltimore): no doubt it had been a rough week for me, on more than one front. Aye, said I. He daresaid there would be rougher weeks ahead. O joy, said I. What he meant was that his new “ascendancy,” whether real or set up by Prinz, would doubtless provoke an escalated retaliation. He told me frankly then what was pretty obvious anyroad: that while he regarded our connexion as Central, and central to it his desire not only to impregnate but to wed me straightway thereupon, he was determined by the way to make conquest of Bea Golden if he could. It was a kind of craziness, no doubt (Yup, says I), a playing of Prinz’s game. Just for that reason he meant to do it; beat the man at his own game; out-Prinz him.

Hum, says I. You could help, you know, says he. Forget it, says I: I’m sorry your mum’s dying; I’m happy you’ve done with that Marsha Blank, and happier yet your muse is singing along. If that gives you a leg up on Prinz and his nutty movie, well and good. But I shan’t pat you on the head for making a fool of me, with Bea Golden or generally; and to suggest I pander to your billygoatery is bloody sick if you ask me.

He liked that: put a great load in me directly we got back to 24 L, another this morning early before he took off for the hospital. But last night it was Bea, Bea, Bea. The
Original Floating Theatre II
is in Cambridge for the weekend; B.G. was to have flown down yesterday to open in their revival of
The Parachute Girl,
but stayed behind to do her “Minstrel Show” at the Remobilisation Farm. She’ll arrive today, worse luck, if Mr Bray hasn’t flown away with her; the rest of the Baratarians too, to recommence the movie after Marshyhope’s commencement. Big things are planned for the 4th of July, but Ambrose hopes to Make His Next Move even before then.

Andrea King Mensch is indeed terminal. Ambrose is taking it hard. La Giulianova is Right There, of course and thank God, ministering to her and being very real and strong and Mediterranean about last things. I must hope—and a slender hope it is—that the Litt.D. business this afternoon will put my friend in mind of our old connexion, in better days, on the Ad Hoc Committee for Honorary Doctoral Nominations.

Time now to robe for the ritual consummation of that committee’s work, which I approach with considerable misgivings—indeed, in a flat-out funk that I’ve tried in vain to smother under these many pages. I haven’t even mentioned that John Schott and Shirley Stickles, when I stopped at my office yesterday, were thick as thieves in hers, and saluted me stiffly indeed, very stiffly.

Hm!

Must run. Jee-
sus!

Saturday, 28 June 1969

John:

Total disgrace!

I’m in this office for the last time, Where it All Began with that wretch of an Ambrose, that
beast
of an Ambrose. Cleaning out the desk he once laid me on. Packing up my personals.

I have been
fired,
John. Sacked! Cashiered! Not only as acting provost, but from the Faculty of Letters altogether! I am unemployed; when my visa expires I shall have to leave or be deported! John Schott has appointed Harry Carter as provost. Marshyhope’s Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English next September will be
A. B. Cook VI
—whose punitive doing, for all I know, this may well be.

Fired!

The commencement ceremonies? A debacle. Drew Mack’s “pink-necks” rioted after all: the last American campus demonstration of the season. They caught “us” completely off “our” guard, lulled by their earlier shows of reasonable apathy. A well-planned caper, assisted surprisingly by
Merope Bernstein
and her crew, who came all the way down from Fort Erie to spray stolen Vietnam defoliants on the elms and ivy of Redmans Neck.

Ambrose was in on it. Seems to have been, anyroad; we don’t talk much. His (unscheduled, unexpected, out-of-order) “acceptance statement” upon receipt of his honorary doctorate appears to have been the demonstrators’ cue. Whilst Prinz’s cameras rolled, and—as provost of his faculty—I cited his “provocative contributions to the life and health of the classical avant-garde tradition in 20th-century letters,” Ambrose appropriated the microphone and launched into a distracted discourse on the mythical-etymological connexions of the alphabet with the calendar and of writing with
trees:
how “the original twelve consonants” each represented a lunar month, the five vowels the equinoxes and solstices
(A
and
I
representing the winter solstice in its aspects of birth and death respectively); how therefore the Moon is the mother of Letters (the man’s mother’s dying is his only excuse); how
spelling
is related to magic, as in
spellbound,
and
author
to
augur,
and
pencil
to
penis;
how
book > M.E. boke >
O.E.
bok
meaning “beech tree,” and
codex >
L.
caudex
meaning “tree-trunk,” and a
leaf
is a leaf in both cases…

“Right on!” cried Merry B. and her Remobilisers, and let go with their herbicides, the others with their raised fists and
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh’s,
before the state police could nab them.

On what grounds does G. get sacked for A.‘s misconduct? (Ambrose was arrested too, but no charges placed; his part-time connexion with MSU is of course terminated; the board of regents will doubtless revoke his degree at their next meeting.) Schott needed no grounds: I was nontenured; my contract was renewable year by year. Even so, there are protocols of due notice; the American Association of University Professors has its rules and guidelines, I don’t have to tell you. Was I inclined to invoke them, Schott wanted to know on the Sunday, when he got ’round to ringing me up? I jolly was! Why then, says he, our grounds will be either Moral Turpitude or Academic Incompetence Stemming from Mental Instability, depending. Depending on bloody what? Why, depending just for one example on whether my behaviour as confessed in my letter to you of 7 June,
of which they had the carbon,
was real or fantasized:
e.g.,
my Living in Sin with Ambrose (Schott actually used that term), my use of illegal drugs, my generally immoral and profligate course of life. If I did not repudiate my letter, Moral Turpitude; if I did, Mental Instability, which my sudden change of manner and costume frankly inclined him to favour. Even the fact that I would type out such a document in my office, to a man I did not know personally, and
make a carbon,
argued the latter. To be sure, the 18-page document was unsigned; but there were emendations in my hand. No one could deny me my day in court, if I was determined to Hang It All Out; but…

I hung it all up. God
damn
writing! This bloody farking scribbler’s itch that you (most recently) seduced me into scratching! (Write > M.E.
writen >
O.E.
writan:
to tear or scratch. Ditto
scribe,
and
pace
Ambrose.) Yes, yes, yes: that one time—when, like this, I was in the office, and for a change not longhanding it—I
made a carbon,
such a relief it was to feel businesslike when Ambrose had begun to make a public arse of me with such a vengeance. It gave my weekly confession at once a more official and (what have I to lose now?) a more
fictitious
aspect: as if I were a writer writing first-person fiction, an epistolary novelist composing—and editing, alas, in holograph—instead of a stateless 50-year-old widow, failed mother, failed writer, and scholar of no consequence, tyrannised and humiliated by a younger “lover” as she enters her menopause with little to look back upon except abortive liaisons with a number of prominent novelists, and
nothing
to look forward to.

And of course it took me no time at all to feel a greater fool yet for making that carbon, for
editing
it, for writing to you in the first place; and I “destroyed” the copy
(i.e.,
wadded and wastecanned it) but posted the letter; and Shirley Stickles got to the wastecan before the custodian did, unless that worthy was in on the plot too; and it was too late to undo the award to Ambrose, they’d just have to hope, but once they were safely past 21 June they’d cut off the pair of us, using my letter as their trump card…

Et voilà!

Well: I
am
at the end of my forties, and the rest. I
have
been carrying on like a madwoman, and madly confessing it by the ream. The crowning irony now occurs to me: that perhaps you too believe, at least suspect, that I’m
making all this up!
Fantasizing! Writing
fiction!

Jee-bloody-farking-
sus!

Alors:
if I am truly turpitudinous, and not hallucinating my tender connexion with Doctor Mensch, then I am now altogether reliant upon that spectacularly unreliable fellow. My “hope” this time last week was that Marshyhope’s commencement might remind him fondly of ours. Ha! Now my only hope is that I’m pregnant, and that conceiving a bastard by that bastard will restore him to me and to his senses. Some hope, whilst he climbs all over Bea Golden (but not yet into her knickers, not yet, not yet) as the Baratarians reenact on Bloodsworth Island Admiral Cockburn’s Rape of Hampton, Virginia, in 1813!

Total, total disgrace, such as my namesake never knew. This dispossessed augur can scratch her poor encausticked penis across these miserable beech leaves no further. Where is the peace Mann promised his ruined

5 July ’69

J.,

Oh, yes: still here. And still scratching.

You recall last Saturday’s last hope? No sooner hoped than hopeless. True, when the Mother of Alphabets rose full on the Sunday (the “Hot Moon,” and it has indeed been sweltering hereabouts), I failed to flow with my recent celestial regularity, and for some moments dared imagine—But it was a cruel false hope: next day, her name day, the last of the sorry month, I began, if not to flow, at least erratically to leak, and have dripped and dribbled this week through in pre-Ambrosian style.