P.S.: Rereading this, I see I left out, unaccountably — I had been going to say one detail, but it struck me even at the time as the key and climax to last Saturday’s skirmishing, perhaps to my whole connexion with Mr Ambrose Mensch. The battle done, as he and I withdrew by rental rowboat back to “Canada,” in midpond our hero shipped his oars and kissed me. More particularly, as we paused there under the windy stars (early P.M. showers having ushered in a clear cool front), he bade me look him straight in the eyes whilst he took my head in his hands, declared he loved me, and kissed my mouth. That’s it. Romantical, what? I hear you ask, indeed, So what? But Britannia here declareth herself stirred to the ovaries by that open-eyed osculation, which bridged, I felt, our every past and present difference; brought us truly for the first time to ourselves with each other; sealed some compact; inaugurated this 6th, this blissful, Stage.
P.P.S.: Oxymoron! The shocking news now comes in (on the Kissing Bridge Motel telly) of the “ritualistic” murders of Sharon Tate & Co. in Roman Polanski’s villa. I think of our erratic Director, of my darling Author, of that madman Bray’s last words to us from the pavilion railing… Zeus preserve us!
O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage continues. The Fort Erie Magazine Explosion and Second Conception scenes.
Erie Motel
Old Fort Erie
Ontario, Canada
16 August 1969
Old pen pal,
Our last day on the Niagara Frontier. We’d meant to stop one more night here in the Erie (a cozy place this second time around; you recall our troubled visit of mid-June, a hundred years ago): it’s a chapter I’d consented to review, as it were, in Ambrose’s dramatised Short History of Us, inasmuch as that story’s dénouement still appears a happy one. But when we telephoned Magda yesterday, as we’ve done periodically through our absence, we learned that Mensch mère has entered what really seems to be her terminal terminality, and that Peter is worse too. (How was I? that remarkable Italiana wanted earnestly to know. Since Ambrose and I agree that the right news would actually be some comfort to her, I confessed that I’ve not menstruated since 29 June. Magda was tearfully ecstatic.)
So we shall return late this afternoon, our film work done till Sunday week hence, when action will resume at Bloodsworth Island, or Washington, D.C., or both.
In short, Zeus has preserved us and our mutuality through the week, as I prayed in my last, though his solicitude has not extended through the family. It’s been a proper honeymoon of a week for Ambrose and me, the sweeter already in retrospect for our knowing what awaits us now in Maryland. As befits what I take to be an Echo of the “Jeannine Mack” or “Bea Golden” stage of our affair — an Echo of a Reenactment, God alone knows or cares how programmatical — my friend and I have fornicated up and down the frontier, from Stratford and Toronto to the Falls and Fort Erie (not including Castines Hundred; I was adamant). A copulatory binge without the urgency of April’s — it is mid-August, even in these high latitudes — but unremittingly ardent, unremittingly thorough: as fleshly an Echo as ever echo’d. Especially on the 11th and 12th, when we hired camp gear and slept out on the shore of Lake Ontario to watch the Perseid meteor shower with the aid of a star guide, an electric torch, and a manual of Positions picked up in a Yorkville skin shop, we counted meteors and ran through the carnal alphabet as if sex were going out of style.
Which, you will be not at all surprised to hear, for the present it has done. I shall explain.
