Letters полностью

She was indeed stirring; had to be restrained lest she disconnect the plumbing they ought mercifully to have disconnected long since anyroad. When she began to speak deliriously of Napoleon and “the Kings of Beverly” (her ancestral family in the neighbouring county, from whom our friend took his former nom de plume), Ambrose observed the irony of its being St Helena’s Day. He fell silent when his mother — who we doubt recognised us at any point — commenced to speak less disconnectedly of her late brothers-in-law Karl and Konrad (after whom Magda’s twins are named, their initials Romanised): specifically, of her late husband’s (Hector’s) brief deranging jealousy of the former, whom he suspected of fathering Ambrose “even though it’s Peter that’s the image of poor Karl.” We hung upon her words: was that famous marriage-bed mystery, as in a Victorian novel, about to have a deathbed resolution? But her voice gave out. Ambrose took her free hand (Magda had been holding the other from the start) and called the name Karl to her. His mother smiled, closed her eyes, and spoke her last words: “He was right smart of a cocksman, that Karl.”

It took her body three hours more to complete the unsavoury work of dying, which she did not interrupt for further comment. And so, while all signs point to an intramural adultery, that little question, and a fortiori the question of Ambrose’s paternity, remains open, presumably forever.

We buried her on the Wednesday in the family plot, rich in Thomas and Wilhelm Mensch’s funerary oeuvre. Peter attended in a wheelchair and, together with Ambrose, pointed out to me their grandfather’s sturdy Gothic revivalisms and the more baroque flights of the uncle they never knew, which really were rather surprising. Also that sculptor’s own unmarked marker, which Hector Mensch, one-armed, had struggled obsessively and in vain to cut to his satisfaction. (St Helena still on his mind, Ambrose remarked that Napoleon’s tombstone on that island reads simply HERE LIES, his French attendants unyielding in their demand that the verb’s object be simply Napoleon, his British gaolers equally insistent that it be Napoleon Buonaparte.) The Mensches being at least three generations of shrug-shouldered agnostics, Andrea’s funeral service was brief as an epitaph, and at our unanimous insistence Peter went even more directly from cemetery to hospital than his mother had gone vice versa.

There he has remained since, awaiting with us the results of his “tests.” Ambrose meanwhile, not for nothing a Johns Hopkins alumnus, has “worked up” the presenting symptomatology on his own and confided to me his fearful tentative diagnosis: osteogenic sarcoma consequent upon Paget’s disease. The latter is a chronic skeletal disorder of unknown etiology, afflicting perhaps 3 % of adults over 40. Often asymptomatic, its pathology is marked by excessive resorption of bone and chaotic compensatory replacement thereof by structurally inferior “pagetic” bone, which sometimes leads to deformity (bowed legs, enlarged facial bones), altered gait, pathologic transverse fractures in the weight-bearing bones, and sundry of Peter’s complaints. It is as if (Ambrose’s dark trope) thieves stole good stonework systematically from a building’s foundation and concealed their theft with slapdash masonry: after a time the building settles, cracks, and in rare instances even collapses. Among the complications of Paget’s disease (luckily in no more than a small percent of cases) is bone cancer.

On this subject my lover would not enlarge, though given the familial disposition you may be sure he is a ready amateur oncologist. We must await, he says, the measurement of Peter’s plasma alkaline phosphatase level and the reading of the X rays, both promised for this afternoon or evening.

We have done our waiting à trois (plus Angela), in strange sad harmony in Mensch’s Castle, in order to be close to Peter, to help calm Angela, and to lend support to Magda — who however is as much our supporter as we hers. How did I ever feel for that woman the vulgar emotion of jealousy? When now I so admire her tranquil strength, her stoicism so far from unfeeling, and am at the same time so secure with Ambrose in our late connexion, I think I should scarcely mind if…

But, needless to say, the conjunction of our sorrows and of the stages of our Stages, so to speak, has in all senses chastened this 3rd week of “mutuality.” The three of us hold hands in reciprocal succour and stare at the no longer revolvable camera obscura, fixed for keeps upon the county hospital, the broken seawall, the river of incongruous pleasure boats. Angie, always with us, eyes her egg. One will not be surprised if our Week of Abstinence extends beyond the week.