Letters

Magda followed me down; stood mutely by as I tucked two bottles of Mumm’s ’62 Extra Dry under one arm, the old jeroboam under the other. Did she recognize that crack in the masonry, down which she numbly ran her finger like some Italian Madeline Usher? No: she realized only that our recentest affair (fifth of my life, Germaine) is truly done, and that she was realizing it in a place where other things had ended, begun, reended, rebegun.

I raised the Jeroboam. “If at first, et cetera.” And knowing I could only compound the injury, tried anyhow to explain that what I meant was that I meant to try again to launch this old chronicle on the tide, and that as I had this cover-letter to write and a dinner engagement at eight, I must get to it. I’ve felt Magda below me since, feeding Angie and the family as I’ve written these pages; she feels me upstairs setting down these words before I go, each letter scored as if into her skin. In the night to come she’ll feel me drinking to the health of my eleven-day-old sixth love-affair and to my birthday; humping hornily in the ruins of the feast; etting all the ceteras lovers love…

A curse upon tides, Yours Truly, that turn, and, turning, return like misdirected letters what they were to carry off! Thought well drowned, our past floats back like Danaë with infant Perseus, to take eventual revenge. Would that the Choptank were that trusty sewer the Rhine, flowing always out, past the Loreleis and castles of our history; mercifully fetching off our dreck to some Nordzee dumping-ground of time — whence nothing returns unless recycled, distilled, laundered as Alpine snow.

But tides are what tides over whom this betides; who gladly now would say adieu but must make do with au revoir: i.e.,

A.M.

cc: Germaine Pitt: encl.

ENCL.

THE AMATEUR,

or,

A Cure for Cancer

by Arthur Morton King

A

Alhazen of Basra, Gemma-Frisius, Leonardo — from them A. learned to make his great dark camera. But he learned it Plato-wise, as it were by recollection, for that notion — like the tower itself, like Peter Mensch’s entire house — hatched from Aunt Rosa’s Easter egg, that Uncle Konrad gave her in 1910. Before he knew East Dorset was East Dorset and Ambrose Ambrose, he knew the landscape in that egg; his eye was held to it in the cradle. I smile that poor Aunt Rosa, throughout her younger wifehood, railed at Konrad’s seedless testicles and her fruitless womb. Clip and tumble as they might, dine on shellfish, ply the uterine thermometer, she went to her grave unfructified. While lo, as mistress of the egg she is mother of this world we move in: the nymph inside who leans against the Rhine-rock under the Schloss; Mensch’s Castle and the camera obscura; seawall, marshes, funhouse, Cornlot; the bees on Andrea Mensch’s breast and Ambrose’s birthmark; the mosquitoes that bite our Maryland lovers; the crabs they eat; the cancers that eat them. Our story is ab ovo: nothing here but hatched from there.

B

Begin again: A.‘s only child is mad, et cetera.

Days are hard on Angie. Like her father she is, perhaps, a love child; in truth love streams upon us from her heart, she is a sun of love; but her pale eyes are troubled, she cannot grasp us. Carl and Connie, her twin cousins — their chasing games alarm her, their gentle teases set her wild. Yet “Magda not spank Connie-Carl!” she shrieks when Magda has to punish them, and she must be looked for when they cry, for once to end little Connie’s tears she nearly smothered her with a cushion. She is large for her five years, and maladroit. Her hand undoes the twins’ sand castles against her will, and when she croons, “Angie will hug Amby,” Ambrose must beware a wrenched neck. Her hours are full of fears: that Magda will put the automobile in reverse; that Peter will neglect to lift her skyward by the elbows after breakfast; that Russians will fire rockets at Mensch’s Castle.

Most of all she fears that Magda will have lost Aunt Rosa’s egg, companion of her nights and crises.

With the Easter egg they control her and ease her days. It is soiled and battered now, peephole cloudy, inner landscape all but gone; but its power has not vanished in the years since Peter and Ambrose would behave all Sunday morning for a glass of dandelion and a view of its wondrous innards. No tantrum or alarum of Angie’s is beyond its virtue: with her eye fast to the window she can weather even the family’s infrequent musicales, which else would set her trembling. For Angie’s own and the house’s tranquillity, Magda must lure her twice daily from their society to “play-nap” in her room; the Easter egg baits her every time. Alone, she converses in peace with storytellers on her phonograph or assembles her picture puzzle with the face down, for the sake of the undistracted pattern on the back.