Letters (87 page)

You’re
bananas,
Prinz cries now (the clearest statement I’ve ever heard from him): that was
footage!
Shove your effing footage, Ambrose replies, I’m done with it. He comes back now for his britches; the three cinéastes withdraw, examining their precious machine for damage and smirking over their shoulders, the two younger ones, and me at my bottomless beau.

So ends the Mating Season Sequence, I presume! Which I might’ve suspected I was set up for, had Ambrose’s outrage not swept all suspicion before it.

And
if Reg Prinz’s riposte today hadn’t so gravely upped the ante. Good as his word (What
shall
we do for money?), Ambrose cut off his connexion with the film company as of that Monday. Inspired perhaps by Richardson as well as by the Battle in the Belfry, he has vowed to commit himself absolutely to the printed word: letters and empty spaces on the page! The whole hot week since, he has rededicated his energies to Perseus, resolved to redraft that piece (and, I daresay, somehow to work Bea Golden into the plot, now he’s been in her knickers). Bastille Day’s humour passed; his obnoxious “5th Stage” behaviour reasserted itself. I spent
my
week daily visiting his mum in hospital, wishing they could let the poor thing die; Magda more often than not was with me, a real friend now I’m in “her” stage, urging upon me patience and Italian old wives’ advice for getting pregnant. Between sickbed and seedbed (daily follow-ups to the Shower of Gold, here at 24 L), we watched Apollo-11 & Co. lift off for the moon (Magda’s one of those who seriously wonder, to Ambrose’s delight, whether it isn’t All Faked by the Television People) and Dorchester County, with proportionate to-do, make ready for last night’s opening of its nine-day tercentenary celebration.

We imagined Prinz’s crew to be on the margins of that latter action, though what exactly he’s up to these days in the Mating Sequence way, we can’t well tell. Yesterday evening we went down to Long Wharf to witness the opening-night activities: proclamations by the mayor and the county commissioners, tugs-o’-war between such civic organisations as the Citgo Bushwhackers and the Rescue Fire Co.‘s Chimney Sweepers, calliope tapes amplified from the
Original Floating Theatre II
at pierside—all amiable provincial entertainment, I don’t mean to belittle it. Most especially we approved the new county flag, a buff field bearing the arms of the 4th Earl of Dorset: supported by twin pards rampant, a shield quarterly or and gules with a bend vair, topped by the earl’s coronet, a fleur-de-lys or, and an Estoile argent of eight wavy points. Under all, the charge
Aut Nunquam Tentes Aut Perfice
(“Finish What You’ve Started,” shall we say), which it pleaseth us to take for our own, vis-à-vis our project of engenderment, and Ambrose for a particular spur to his myth in progress. Sure enough, the filmists were there, footage, footage, though nothing in the mating way was visibly transpiring. With them, if our eyes did not deceive us, was your odd-duck neighbour Jerome Bray, looking
very
strange even in the costumed crowd. No sign of Bea Golden, to my continuing relief, nor of Marsha Blank, ditto. Ambrose studiously ignored them all. Prinz gave us a long, neutral look through his viewer and turned away. This morning’s program, for us and for the tercentenary, was to have been a presentation, from the stage of the showboat, called
Dorchester County in Art & Literature.
But we never got aboard, for as we crossed the municipal park we saw Prinz’s crew setting up their light and sound gear beside that of a mobile television news unit from Baltimore. This latter, alas, was interviewing Ms. Golden—-just flown in, presumably, from the Farm, and unfortunately fetching in early-19th-century crinolines (1669 or not, the committee had tapped her to dramatise the county’s resistance to Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake foraging raids in the War of 1812, so the telly man was explaining to his microphone)—and Ambrose was inclined to Say Hello. Before we could do
that,
however, I luckily espied (to my true dismay) J. Bray again, on the fringes of the crowd, in earnest conference with, of all people on the planet,
Angela!

Magda, Peter, her twin elder cousins—nowhere in sight. What on earth was Angie doing there,
with that person?
Ambrose literally
ran
to snatch his daughter away, once I pointed out to him their tête-à-tête. The pair were passing under Prinz’s mike booms as he overtook them, manned by one of those chaps who’d come to their director’s rescue in the tower. Just as Ambrose collared Angie by her T-shirt top (MARYLAND IS FOR CRABS, with a red claw pinching each prominent nipple) and Bray by his—well, cloak—the boom swept ’round and down and caught him a terrific clout upside the head as aforespecified, dropping him cold as a mackerel to the blacktop.

Bray vanished (no mean trick, you’d think, in that drag, but he manages it); Angie set up a caterwaul; the mike boy was all apologies. One of the twins appeared after all, a husky young replica of Peter who’d only gone for ices; Bea Golden broke off her interview but kept a little distance; the Rescue Fire Co. ambulance crew, standing by, came to our rescue, even giving Carl and Angie a lift home via the hospital emergency room. Magda hurried down from the cancer ward upstairs, Peter over from the Lighthouse next door; it was a regular homecoming.

Ambrose was up by then, but groggy: mild concussion, no detectable fracture of the skull. We were instructed to keep an eye out for nausea and vertigo, barring which, sleep and aspirin ought to do the job; we weren’t to be alarmed at (what now pretty scarily began to manifest itself) his temporary circuit-failure. He was discharged. I overrode P. & M.‘s desire to fetch him
chez lui
for recuperation, but accepted Magda’s help in getting us back to 24 L (Peter’s leg is worse; he no longer drives).

Here we yet abide, sir, still Getting It Together whilst Apollo-11 and Luna-15 zip ’round their moon orbits, and Thor Heyerdahl’s crippled
Ra
limps on toward Barbados, and the strange news trickles in from Martha’s Vineyard of Senator Edward Kennedy’s (also peculiar) accident. It was that fucker Prinz, right? enquires my woozy master. I daresay, luv, say I. And I
do
dare so say, though I never saw him and though the mike boom lad (not the
light
boom, luv) has rung us up twice, in fear of lawsuit no doubt, to ask after his victim’s condition and to swear it was All Accidental.

Bea Golden has phoned too. Somewhat timidly, I am pleased to imagine. No mention, of course, of
their
Mating Season Sequence down on Bloodsworth Island. Magda reports that Angela reports that the Funny-Looking Man only wanted to read her T-shirt and warn her that insect repellents cause cancer.

Well, John! As the Chappaquiddick people put it, much is yet unclear. Marvellous though Coincidence can be, in life as in Uncle Sam Richardson’s novels, we strongly incline to our Ambrose’s view that it was that fucker Prinz’s doing. With the mike boom, dear. Which gives us to worry that on this front too, once he recollects himself, what my Dorchester darling hath begun, he may resolve to finish.

We pray not: I mean my friend Magda and her pro-tem
Doppelgänger,
yr faithful

26 July 1969

John,

Ra’s
in Bridgetown Harbour, the moon men are back on earth and quarantined aboard the
Hornet,
young Mary Jo Kopechne’s in her grave, and Teddy Kennedy’s on probation with a suspended driver’s license. Today’s St Anne’s Day, mother of the Virgin, and—Mother of God!—Dorchester County Day, the windup of “our” tercentenary. “Floats,” high school marching bands (the musicians outnumbered by troupes of strange-looking girls twirling batons), volunteer firemen in procession with their shiny machines, the dénouement of “The Dorchester Story” at the municipal baseball park, and the planting there of a time capsule to be opened in 2069: a sort of letter to the future containing all this news. Whose sender, like myself, may not hope for a reply from the addressee.

Today’s also the 194th anniversary of the inauguration of the U.S. Postal Service. Happy birthday, U.S. Mail! The commencement of dog days. The end (as the full Buck Moon approacheth, and with it no doubt my monthly monthlies) of our unfilmed Mating Season Sequence at 24 L. And, 155 years ago, the day
after
the Battle of Niagara in 1814, also known as the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, our topic for this week’s letter.

That battle (on the Canadian shore of the Niagara River, just below the Falls) was bloody and inconclusive, a sort of stand-off, as was “our” “reenactment” of it yesterday before the cameras. General Jacob Brown’s Americans had crossed the Niagara from Buffalo earlier in the month and captured Fort Erie on 3 July; two days later, led by Winfield Scott, they managed a considerable psychological victory at Chippewa, just
above
the Falls, by driving back the British regulars with heavy casualties. On 25 July, they sallied forth to Lundy’s Lane and met a regrouped and reinforced British army. From 7 to 11 P.M. the fighting was close and sharp, including hand-to-hand bayonet engagements in the dark; each side suffered nearly 900 casualties, about 30% of their actively engaged troops! The Americans won the field, but ill-advisedly withdrew to Chippewa and thence (tomorrow) back to Fort Erie, returning the initiative to the British and abandoning their invasion campaign. Both sides claimed victory.

I rehearse all this to remind myself that I was once an historian of sorts, and to put in what perspective I can the confused, distressing events of yesterday. The “real” historian on the scene this week has been our old friend the new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope, you know whom, who appeared from Redmans Neck or Barataria, all smiles and mellifluous couplets, to volunteer his services as Reg Prinz’s historical consultant, at least until the company returns (next week) to Niagara. Cook’s idea it was—since Prinz had postponed that return in order to film the D. Co. tercentenary—to kill two birds with one stone by exploiting the “1812” episodes of “The Dorchester Story,” that ongoing nightly pageant at the ball park which tonight attains the present and projects the future. There were all the “extras” one could use, more or less in period costume (the same outfits serve for the Colonial, the Revolutionary, and the 1812 episodes), dramatising the exploits of the Marshyhope Blues versus Joseph Whaland’s Picaroons in 1776 and the depredations of the British fleet in 1813/14; more than willing to extend their props and performances gratis to The Movie. Since it is, anyroad, not the
war
we’re interested in but its reenactment—in which 1969 and 1812 (and 1669, 1776, and 1976) are tossed together like salad greens—the historical inaccuracies, the thinness of the sets, the amateurishness of the actors, all play into our hands.

Yup:
ours
again, John.
Aut nunquam tentes
et cetera, exactly as I feared on Saturday last. As soon as his head cleared (Sunday morning), Ambrose was furious with himself for having abandoned like General Brown the field he’d won on Independence Day:
i.e.
(and woe is me), B.C., that all too tangible token of his “victory” over Reg Prinz on the
O.F.T. II.
Bea is, I am to understand, only the Symbol of What’s Being Fought Over (a flesh-and-blood symbol, alas, which can be, which has been, reslept with): the
fight
is the thing now, the armature of a drama which has clearly outgrown its original subject. Your fiction is at most the
occasion
of the film these days; perhaps it was never more than that. One would not be surprised if the final editing removed all reference to your works entirely, which are only a sort of serial cues for Prinz and Ambrose to improvise upon and organise their hostilities around. Those hostilities—between “the Director” and “the Author”—are the subject, a filming-within-the-filming, deadly earnest for all they’re in the “script” and despite Ambrose’s being literally on Prinz’s payroll as of Thursday 24th.

That day, aptly, was Commerce & Industry Day in Dorchester (each day of the tercentenary has had a Theme). On the Wednesday, misfortune resmote the family Mensch, from a most unexpected quarter: with Andrea still a-dying in hospital and Peter imprudently putting off his own treatment till she’s done,
Magda,
poor thing—La Giulianova,
l’Abruzzesa,
whom I so wrongly feared and now feel such connexion to—having felt abdominal discomforts for a secret while and gone at last, bleeding, for gynecological advice, was clapped straightway into surgery, one wing over from her mum-in-law, and hysterectomised.

Fibroid tumour; patient doing well enough physically, but in indifferent psychological case. Over and above her concern for the family (Peter is not immobilised yet or otherwise helpless; the twins are looking after things), Magda is suffering more than usually from the classic female set-down at the loss of her uterine function. The woman loved not only pregnancy, childbirth, and wet-nursing; she loved menstruation, that monthly reminder that she was an egg bearer, a seed receiver, generator and incubator of fetuses. More than any other woman I know, Magda relished the lunar cycle of her body and spirits: the oestrus and
Mittelschmerz
of ovulation, the erratic moods and temperature fluctuations of the menstrual onset, the occasional bad cramps and headaches, even the periodic flow itself. She ought to have borne more children. When I called on her after surgery, she wept and kissed me and said, “Now it’s up to
you.”

No comment.

Among the effects of this turn of events on Ambrose was a sober review, with his brother, of the family’s finances. All bad news, of course. Indeed, their mother’s only cheer in her cheerless terminality is that at last they need no longer fear insolvency, having achieved it. Mensch Masonry has passed officially into receivership, and precious little there is for the receivers to receive (the status of the Lighthouse is moot: in an ill-advised moment the brothers designated the camera obscura as corporation property, thinking to take tax advantage of its unprofitability; it may therefore be claimed by M. M. Co.‘s creditors). On Commerce & Industry Day Ambrose put Perseus aside once more—surely that chap will ossify before Medusa gets to petrify him!—sought out Prinz (I wasn’t there), and grimly informed me afterward that he was on salary again, “no holds barred.”