Letters полностью

This talk pleased her; she climbed off me, smiling. I’ve done an immoral thing, Ambrose, she said then, and I don’t care what you or anybody thinks. I thought she meant this anniversary reenactment of our original infidelity, and waved it away; reminded her wryly I’d been doing retakes all weekend. Not that, she said. All those months I begged you to make me pregnant, and you said No, it wouldn’t be right, I never once tried to trick you. I wanted everything we did to be together, 100 %. The IUD was in there, every time, even when you’d forget to remind me.

Magda.

But you were so selfish yourself, completely selfish. I’m not blaming you. You can’t make a person love another person. You can only pray for it…

Mag?

And I won’t bother you, Ambrose. I love you, always will, and I wish you well. I even know you love me, in your way. But I want that baby. So tonight I cheated. I wasn’t even going to tell you.

I closed my eyes. You know I’m practically sterile.

Not absolutely. When was your last ejaculation?

Hum. Not counting this one? This morning.

That hurts a bit. But you filled me up. And I’m ovulating; I can tell.

Not a Chinaman’s chance, Mag.

I’ve never understood that saying, she said. There are so many Chinese. Anyhow, we Catholics believe in miracles. Don’t be angry. If nothing comes of it I’ll settle for grandchildren, like you said. I’m going up to bed now, so it won’t all run out.

And having come, with a smile and a little tossed kiss she went.

Truly, Yours, I am back not where I started but where I stopped: restranded on the beach of Erdmann’s Cornlot, reading your water message; relost in the funhouse — as if Dante, in the middle of life’s road, had made his way out of the dark wood, gone down through Hell and up Mount Purgatory and on through the choirs of Heaven, only to find himself back in the dark wood, the right way as lost and gone as ever.

Jeannine. Germaine. Magda. Longest May 12 on record. No copy of this one to milady. What would it spell, deciphered?

Ambrose His Story.

S: The Author to Jacob Horner. The story of a story called What I Did Until the Doctor Came.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

U.S.A.

Sunday, May 11, 1969

Jacob Horner

c/o Remobilization Farm

Fort Erie, Ontario

CANADA

Dear Mr. Horner:

Some years ago — fourteen, when I was a young college instructor in Pennsylvania — I wrote a small novel called The End of the Road. Its “hero,” an ontological vacuum who shares your name, suffers from attacks of futility manifested as literal paralysis, to cure which he submits to the irrational therapies of a nameless doctor at an establishment (on the Eastern Shore of Maryland) called the Remobilization Farm. In the course of his treatment, which includes teaching prescriptive grammar at a nearby state teachers college, Horner becomes involved in and precipitates the destruction of the marriage of one of his colleagues, a morally intense young historian named Joe Morgan. Mrs. Morgan, “caught” between her hyperrationalist husband, whom she loves, and her antirationalist “lover,” whom she abhors, finds herself pregnant, submits to an illegal abortion at the hands of the Doctor, and dies on the operating table. Her husband, in a state of calm shock, is quietly dismissed from his post. Jacob Horner, contrite and reparalyzed, abdicates from personality and, with the Doctor and other patients, removes to an unspecified location in the wilds of Pennsylvania. The narrative conceit is that he writes the story some years later, from the relocated Farm, as a first-person exercise in “Scriptotherapy.”

If I were obliged to reimagine the beginnings of The End of the Road, I might say that in the fall of 1955, having completed but not yet published my first novel, I began making notes toward its companion piece: a little “nihilist tragedy” to complement the “nihilist comedy” of The Floating Opera. At twenty-five I was married, had three young children, was getting by on the four thousand a year I was paid for grading one hundred freshman themes a week, and moonlighting in local dance bands on the weekends. As there was seldom money in those years for an evening’s baby-sitter, much less a genuine vacation from responsibility, I now invent and grant myself retroactively this modest holiday: