Letters полностью

But A. and I are too amused, aroused, and exhausted to sleep. Showered and pajama’d, we praise each other’s scrappiness; we shake our heads at the rueful irony of his injured writing hand and wonder about Merope and Bray and A. B. Cook. (I wonder too whether we are sharing the same bed in which — but never mind.) We decide that the Word-versus-Image subplot really has gone far enough, at least in its hostile aspect. Presently we sleep, only to be waked well after midnight by a single final mighty bang out in the marshes. It seems to have come from the direction of the firing zone; but there is no sound of planes, and the storm has passed to occasional silent lightning flickers in the east. Has Bruce, we wonder, slipped out after all to do the navy yard? Or has luckless Napoleon stumbled upon a bit of unexploded ordnance and blown himself to kingdom come? In any case, I sleepily observe, it is indeed past midnight: i.e., it is Monday, 25 August, 1st day of Week 4 etc. We may put by our programmatic abstinence. We do.

Next morning all hands compare notes on that last explosion. B. & B. disclaim responsibility, but wish they’d “caught” it. Merope is still stoned, Prinz is still fed up, with her and all of us. A. B. Cook has been up betimes: navy search-craft are on their way, he reports, and adds that inasmuch as he has been being pressured to yield title to Barataria Lodge to the federal government, we may expect some interrogatory harassment from navy intelligence and security people concerning trespass into the Prohibited Area. We are to cooperate respectfully (There are cries of “Off the pigs!”) — but if anyone happens to possess marijuana or other illegal material, it were well to dispose of it. Laughter, hoots, further obscenities, and much busy disposal.

Ambrose’s wrist is sorer and sorer, and our business is done. Even so, we dally till nearly noon out of curiosity to watch the search and speak to sober-faced but polite military people. Ambrose uses Cook’s typewriter to peck out his left-handed letter to you, and remarks afterward that he can now sympathise with his late father’s one-armed attempt at memorial sculpture. No trace of Jerry Bray. Still bluff and cheerful, Cook nonetheless expresses concern that the Department of Defense may use this unfortunate accident to justify condemnation proceedings against him.

There is one final small crisis. On the first available boat after breakfast, Reg Prinz leaves for the mainland, for his rented car (how can he drive without his glasses?), and for Manhattan, with not even a good-bye to Merry B. She is not too “zonked” to get the message, with suitable abandoned outcry. I do my best and then leave her to her friends, who agree that the fellow is a fink, maybe even a nark. Cook urges us to stay for lunch, thanks us for our assistance as if he were the film’s producer (who knows?), and heartily hopes we’ll “see things through to the final frame.”

The former invitation we decline. The latter, in its cinematographic aspect, involves two more scenes: Fort McHenry and Barataria. We shall see. Between ourselves, I happily report, Ambrose and I are indeed inclined to See Things Through et cetera — though there has arisen, since the Burning of Washington, a certain question about the number of frames to go.

Of that question I shall not speak here: see his, our, letter to “A. M. King,” attached. We were ferried back in style to Bishops Head aboard one of the small navy craft (Ambrose pointed out a skipjack entering the strait under sail from seaward and wondered whether it was Mr Andrews’s), retrieved our car, and drove home — History at the wheel, perforce — to the sinking Menschhaus.

A bittersweet interval, the next few days: see that same letter. Our original 4th Stage, you may remember (I surely do), was something sorry, as was our 5th: that degrading latter May and June and July. A good side of the bad coin of Peter’s crisis is that — along with our growing love — it set aside all but the tenderest echoes of those reenactments of, respectively, Ambrose’s marriage to Marsha Blank and the ménage à trois with Peter and Magda which immediately preceded our own affair. I can therefore summarise. Even as we got Ambrose’s wrist fracture set and cast in the hospital emergency room, Peter was discharged into our care to await his radical surgery: the last ten days, as it turned out, of his life. On 27 August the full Sturgeon Moon rose out of the upper Choptank, sailed over Mensch’s Castle, and set in Chesapeake Bay without the aid of Germaine Gordon Pitt’s menstruation. Magda wept and kissed me. Peter called for champagne. Ambrose hugged his daughter, his sister-in-law, and his fiancée, and soberly toasted the health of… the six of us. On the Saturday (30 August) a letter arrived from Marsha, meant to shock us: Peter, she declared, not Ambrose, was Angela’s father. It did not. More champagne. See A.‘s letter.