Letters полностью

Beyond it, I suppose, lie some sort of “husbandly” 4th week and “tyrannical” 5th, followed by the climax of the Climax and then by who knows what dénouement. This is no time or place to speculate on that, or on the fact that well ere then — indeed, by this time next week — another moon will have filled (the Sturgeon Moon!) and begun to empty, and I shall either have remenstruated after all or determined that I am, despite all odds and whatever the issue, pregnant, pregnant, pregnant.

And beyond our Lighthouse, our chaste hand-holding? Well, we gather that the director and company of Frames (!) have not stood still for our grave interlude. They returned to Maryland not long after us and have been busy down at “Barataria” and over in D.C., preparing sets and selecting locations for the film’s climactic scenes: the Burning of Washington and the Bombardment of Baltimore. Tomorrow being the 155th anniversary of that former — and the company having sometime since Resorbed and Chaotically Redeposited Jacob Horner’s penchant for anniversaries — we look for shooting to commence then on the Big Scene. Starring Merry Bernstein, we presume (as Dolley Madison?), but presumably not involving a resumption of the feud between Director and Author, unless someone new has been assigned the latter role. It seems to us that “Bruce” and his counterpart (Brice? I mean Audio and Video, you know: T-Dum and T-Dee) are now the acting dramaturges, regents for the Regent…

But our curiosity about these matters is understandably much tempered. Ambrose remains on the company’s payroll (thank heaven), but nothing’s being asked of him beyond his presence on the set tomorrow if our circumstances permit: we’re to hear tonight whether “the set” is Bloodsworth Island or Bladensburg. We’ll decide tomorrow whether to go: perhaps take Magda and Angie with us to distract them, if the news we await from down the hall does not distract us from all distraction.

The other large Meanwhile is that Ambrose, in part to distract himself, has, since rearriving at the Lighthouse, plunged almost fervidly into that new project I mentioned in my last. (Where is his pretty Perseus piece? Medusa’d forever, I fear; and there’s a pity, for I believe us to have been in it, he and I, properly estellated into Art. Moreover, I now trust him to have got us down Right.) What began as rather a joke, not the best joke in the world either, has become, if not a fair obsession, Ambrose’s preemptive literary concern. It will not surprise me, and now shall not you, if he really does solicit for his purposes your copies of these weekly letters (by my estimate this is the 22nd consecutive Saturday I’ve addressed you!).

A month ago I’d have been appalled at the notion of his even reading them, not to mention using them. Now… I find I don’t really mind. They do spell out something of a story, don’t they, with a sort of shape to it? Wanting perhaps in climax and dénouement, but fetching its principals withal at least to this present gravely tranquil plateau.

Yes. I think I’m granting you my permission, who never after the first time deigned to respond to me, to respond as you please to Ambrose, should he in fact make such a request of you. Always assuming that you received #‘s 2 through 22 in the first place and (here I complete — and forever put behind me! — my six months’ self-abnegation) perchance preserved them, those epistles from

Germaine

P.S. (7:00 P.M.): Laboratory and X-ray findings in, and A.‘s lay worst-case diagnosis confirmed in dreadful particular: Paget’s disease, of sufficient standing to have involved pelvic bones, femurs, lower spine, and temporal bone. “Explosive” phosphatase level. Strong roent-genographic evidence of multicentric osteo-sarcoma: apparent lesions at least in right distal femur and left proximal tibia; apparent metastasis already at least to one lung. The doctor will not speak yet of prognosis, but to Ambrose he needn’t: it’s Very Poor indeed, even with massive radiation and radical “ablative operative therapy”—i.e., multiple amputation. In all likelihood, a few hellish months.

O poor Peter! Poor Magda! Poor tumorous humankind!

E: Todd Andrews to his father. 13 R, a visit from Polly Lake, a call from Jeannine.

Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Friday, August 8, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Old Progenitor,