Letters

As for the eyes. Whoso once feels that he has seen and been seen by them does not forget those eyes; which however, like certain guests we nourish with our substance, may be in time’s unfolding concealed or manifest, acknowledged or abjured.

Thus was altered Ambrose’s initial view of things, and thus he came to call by the name Ambrose not his brother, his mother, or his nanny goat, nor yet (in time) his foot, his voice, or his port-wine mark: only his self, which was held to be none of these, indeed to be nothing Ambrose’s, but solely Ambrose.

What the infant learns in tears, adult suffering must unteach. Did it hurt you, reader, to be born? Dying will be no picnic either.

G

Great good that lesson did: he was called everything but Ambrose!

Dear Yrs. T. and Milady A.: the rest of G, together with all of H and I, are missing from this recension of Arthur Morton King’s Menschgeschichte, having been given years ago as aforetold to your Litt.D. nominee. G came to light as a first-person piece called “Ambrose His Mark”; H first saw print as the story “Water-Message”; I (in my draft but a bare-bones sketch) was fancifully elaborated into the central and title story of B’s Lost in the Funhouse series, where the others rejoin it to make an “Ambrose sequence.”

G is the story of my naming. “Owing to the hectic circumstances of my birth,” the published version begins, “for some months I had no proper name whatever.” Those circumstances themselves are referred to only in passing: “… Hector’s notion that someone other than himself had fathered me; his mad invasion of the delivery room; his wild assertion, as they carried him off (to the Eastern Shore Asylum), that the port-wine stain near my eye was a devil’s mark…” et cetera. Uncle Karl’s withdrawal to Baltimore is discreetly mentioned, and Andrea’s sultry frowardness: “… a photograph made by Uncle Konrad… shows her posed before our Tokay vines, her pretty head thrown back, scarfed and earringed like a gypsy; her eyes are closed, her mouth laughs gaily behind her cigarette; one hand holds a cup of coffee, the other steadies a scowling infant on her hip.” It is alleged that given Hector’s absence and her capriciousness, no name was chosen, and faute de mieux Aunt Rosa’s nickname for me, Honig, became my working title, so to speak, until the great event that climaxes the story.