Letters полностью

All this last, John, truly spoken as though in italics, and if any doubt remained of whose particular lunacies Bea’s voice was iterating, that doubt was blown away by her closing words: The revolutionary future belongs neither to Pen nor to Camera, but to one… two…

On three a hollow boom boomed either from the loudspeaker or from the magazine itself, whence billowed now a great puff of white smoke, and from out of that smoke a presumably recorded male laugh that could be none but Jerome Bray’s, and a great many flittering sheets of paper, as if a post office had exploded.

We all withdrew a safe distance (except Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank, who went on exercycling as if hypnotised), till the air cleared of everything save the ubiquitous lake flies. Even Prinz leapt back from his chair at the blast, and his lieutenants from their microphones and cameras. Merry Bernstein sat on the ground not far from where Ambrose and I had jumped to, drawing her clothes tight about her and verging reasonably upon hysterics.

Much shaken myself, I did what I could for her whilst the men gingerly investigated. First back at their stations were Dum and Dee, to record the last wisps of smoke and leaves of paper. Morgan demanded to know what was going on and where his missing patient was: Prinz and Ambrose both disclaimed responsibility for and foreknowledge of the stunt; indeed, each was inclined grudgingly to credit his rival with a bravura special effect. The papers, blowing about now in a mild breeze off the river, proved to be covered with printed numbers, meaningless to us. The magazine, upon inspection, yielded a portable tape machine, an auxiliary loudspeaker, and an empty canister, presumably a spent smoke bomb. No sign of Bray or Bea Golden.

Jacob Horner volunteered from his mechanical mount that it was in fact the name day of the Bonaparte family and 200th birthday of their most celebrated member, who took his Christian name from a saint martyred under Diocletian in the 4th Century. Birthday too of Princess Anne, Ethel Barrymore, Thomas De Quincey, Edna Ferber, T. E. Lawrence, and Walter Scott. Deathday of Wiley Post and Will Rogers in plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. Likewise, traditionally, of the Virgin Mary, whose passing is referred to as her Dormition. Repeated Marsha: Better her than me. And on they pedalled, going nowhere.

I know for fairly certain, John, that Ambrose had no foreknowledge of the Great Magazine Explosion, and we’re fairly persuaded that it took Prinz by surprise as well. His signal had been for a tape made a few hours earlier by Marsha, whose bedraggled arrival by bus from Buffalo had inspired this more modest surprise for Ambrose. The tape — we heard it shortly after — reveals that she had indeed gone voluntarily, with Bea Golden, to Bray’s Lily Dale establishment a few days since, and returned when her unspecified business there was done. That Bea, unhappy at the Remobilisation Farm since the Doctor’s death, has chosen to stay on in Lily Dale. That coaxial television is a minor technological innovation, not a revolutionary new medium. Et cetera.

Unless, then (what we briefly considered), Prinz’s assistants have taken over the Movie (Frames!), it would appear that neither he nor Ambrose but Jerome Bray carried the field in the Assault on Fort Erie, turning all the rest of us into Withdrawing Britishers — and that he has had his revolting, nefarious Way with both Marsha and Bea. Merry Bernstein is scared out of her knickers, as well she might be. I think the New York State Police ought to be dispatched at once to Lily Dale to see what’s what, but I can interest no one in Bea Golden’s fate enough to take action (I shall ring up Morgan before we leave, and prod Ambrose again when he wakes up).

Can the Epical Feud between Author and Director have run its course, one wonders, now that the Prize is flown and nobody cares to pursue it? If so, ’twas a Conflict with much Complication and no Climax! But the two parted company last night downright cordially. And my lover is sleeping through this morning because — as excited Authorially by the day’s events as were Prinz & Co. Directorially, and liberated by our new Abstinence Week from a night of making love — he sat up happily till dawn turning St Neapolus’s Day into sentences. Not, praise be, another of those regressive epistles to Yours Truly, but (so he teases, and I’m honoring my promise not to peek) a fiction in the form of a letter or letters to the Author from a Middle-aged English Gentlewoman and Scholar in Reduced Circumstances, Currently Embroiled in a Love Affair with an American Considerably Her Junior.