Letters

Oh well: I simply can’t be objective about either my lostness in the funhouse or his story, which, while very different from the facts, is perhaps truer and surely more painful. In that version, the ride to “Ocean City,” seen omnisciently through young A’s sensibility, is all covert dramatic irony and dark insinuation. On the front seat of the car are Hector (driving) and Uncle Karl, between them Andrea; on the back seat Peter (about fifteen) sits behind Hector, Ambrose behind Uncle Karl, and behind Andrea, “Magda G—, age fourteen, a pretty girl… who lived not far from them on B——Street in the town of D—, Maryland.”

The insinuations come to this: that Andrea may have had or be having an affair with Karl; that Peter, at least, may be in fact Karl’s son instead of Hector’s; and that not only Hector but young Ambrose may at least half-sense this possible state of affairs!

Which brings us to the back seat, where, in addition to dealing with these shocking possibilities, A. is vainly mustering his nerve to touch Magda, Peter’s girlfriend, with whom our amateur has imagined himself in love since one late afternoon in September 1940, when, it is implied, she surprised him with a blow job in the Menschhaus toolshed. See B’s text for rhetoric and details. Magda’s attitude toward him is cordially patronizing; she is holding hands with Peter; Ambrose doubts that she even remembers the incident in the toolshed (for him a watershed).

The action proceeds between these suppressed bourgeois-domestic hang-ups, scandals, and volatilities in the foreground and, in the background, implications of the larger bourgeois violence of World War II: crude oil on the beach from torpedoed tankers, “browned-out” streetlights, shooting galleries full of swastikas and rising suns. Ambrose glimpses human copulation for the first time, under the boardwalk; he catches sight of the aureole of Magda’s nipple, trembles at the power and ubiquity of the sex drive, entertains preadolescent doubts of his masculinity, suffers pangs of jealousy and desire, approaches a nausea compounded of these plus the tensions in the family, his ambivalent feelings for his father and himself, and a candied apple that sits ill on his stomach. The three youngsters at last enter the funhouse; Ambrose takes a wrong turn and fancies himself wandering those corridors forever, telling himself stories in the dark, perhaps including the story “Lost in the Funhouse.”