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.”
Also, that A. B. Cook was waxing heavy on the 1812 business, which — especially in the forepart of August, up your way — is to be coordinated with the “Mating Flight” and “Conception” sequences. He did not wish to speak further of it, though he might very well require my assistance. However—“especially now” and “given our poor showing on the pregnancy front”—I probably ought to look for things to get even worse between us before they get better. It All Depended.
O John: damn the fellow! And myself for merely damning instead of getting shed of him! I did at least tell him — when he said we-all would be “echoing the Battle of Niagara” in the ball park next evening (i.e., yesterday, Military & Veterans Day), and that Bea and Cook and perhaps J. Bray would be involved — that he would have to fight that battle himself, as I was scheduled to spend the P.M. with his ailing family. He… regarded me, and left to “go over the shots” with his confreres.
