Despite some lurking allegory, which I regret, “Ambrose His Mark” gains in artistic tidiness from its reconception of the family described in my chapter G. And the narrative viewpoint, a nipple’s-eye view as it were, is piquant, though perhaps less appropriate to the theme of ontological ambiguity than the “first-person anonymous” viewpoint of A. M. King’s version. No matter. “Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose!” the narrator intones at the end, watching to see what the name calls: “Regard that beast, ungraspable, most queer, pricked up in my soul’s crannies!”
I like that.
H
Here was the “Water-Message” episode from my eleventh year, whereof it disconcerts me still to speak, yet which occasions all this speech, these swarming letters. In his retelling our Author retains my third-person viewpoint, omniscient with Ambrose, but drops that authorial “I” of sections A through F. The year is 1940; Grandfather is five years dead, his prostatic cancer having metastasized in 1935. There is no mention of Uncle Karl, who however returned to direct the firm that same year, apparently made his peace with Hector, and hired a bachelor flat down near the yacht basin. Nor of Konrad and Rosa, who also now rent an apartment of their own, across the corner from the Menschhaus, residence then only of Hector and Andrea, Peter and me. Gentle Konrad is still teaching fifth grade in East Dorset Elementary School, tuning pianos, and bicycling the streets of Dorset on behalf of the Grolier Society’s Book of Knowledge, whose contents he knows by heart. He and Rosa are childless. Ardent fisher off the “New Bridge” as well as cyclist, Konrad has skin cancer and a year to live. None of this is in the published version, nor of Hector’s arm, withered now like the late kaiser’s (his limp is mentioned), nor of his gradual self-reestablishment, after Karl’s return to the firm, in the county public school system: he is principal now of East Dorset Elementary, the smallest in the city and the poorest except for its Negro counterpart. Ambrose (on with the story) is a timid fourth grader, uneasy in his skin, fearful of his fellows, saturated with the Book of Knowledge, broodily curious about the Book of Life, abjectly dreaming of heroic transfiguration. All done in images of mythic flight: seaward-leaning buoys, invocations of Odysseus, foreshadowings of dark illumination, etc.
