Letters

Prinz was aboard in his displaced-person getup, Jane Mack’s daughter in what I believe the children call a “grannie” dress: the former glassless, the latter taking on gin and tonic by the imperial pint as she traded “wisecracks” with the barkeep. Indeed, but for the presence of a few film extras, and the absence of John Schott and A. B. Cook… and his son… we were February’s mourners reconvened in May: a fair season here indeed, when the mosquitoes have yet to hatch, the stinging sea-nettles yet to foul the estuaries, the heat and damp of summer yet to pressure-cook the peninsula. Everywhere flowering dogwoods, tulips, crab apples, lilacs, japonicas, and brilliant azaleas, the bougainvillaea of middle latitudes. But if there was tension among the gathered then, it was between Jane and me on the one hand, and within myself with respect to my “son” on the other: now it was visibly between the Macks mère et fils, who (rumour had it) were about to litigate over Harrison’s estate. Where “Bea Golden” stands in the matter I don’t know, unless the family’s disposition on deck was a bit of symbolical choreography: Drew and Yvonne Mack stood as far forward as one could without climbing out upon the bowsprit, Jane was on the extreme afterdeck with a little group of Tidewater Foundation trustees (and the steering wheel), and Ms Golden square amidships. There too, of course, was the bar, crossed by neither mother nor son; and thither strayed from time to time my lover’s eyes, not necessarily in search of drink.

This much I remarked, with a small pang like the Wednesday’s on first hearing l’Abruzzesa’s voice. But I did not remark much more, for Ambrose’s query and his portentous Deeper Pattern, together with the tale of his week’s adventures with the film crew, quite preempted my attention. What ought we now? With spring so gorgeously exploding in every bush, the very air a scented kiss, the intemperate sap full-risen to green the temperate zone, what ought we now? The only question was, Why had he put it as a question, if not that to him the answer was not obvious? And if it wasn’t… had Bea Golden of Marshyhope Productions (Prinz’s paper corporation for receiving Tidewater Foundation subsidies) turned his head? Or was his erstwhile leading lady, Magda Giulianova Mensch (whose initials just now roar out at me from this page), making a comeback for “Arthur Morton King’s” sake?

What was clear to me after all, then, was merely what I would, not what I ought. I ought… never to have left Castines Hundred and my baby in 1940; never to have gone to Paris in ’39 to sit at the feet of Stein and Joyce; I ought never to have been begot by those dreadful fuddling dears my parents, thanks to whom the very enterprise of letters will ever in my memory’s nostrils redole of green tea, stale tobacco, book dust, and damp woollens in untidy flats. Ambrose — sweeper-away of all this, together with Yours Truly — I love you! God help me — and God knows what we ought!

Presently we disembarked from cocktails and motored over the creek bridge and the “New Bridge” to reembark at our restaurant: a large ferryboat lately beached on the river’s north shore and converted for dining. I remarked upon the American passion for conversion wondering whether it stemmed from the missionary energies of the early Puritans and later revivalists or the settlers’ need, born of poverty and dearth of goods, to find new uses for things worn out or obsolete — a need become mere paradoxical reflex in a people notorious for waste. Ambrose pleasantly replied that while the practice was in his opinion not particularly American — Orientals were even more ingenious about it, for example, and the Spanish, Greeks, and Germans were no slouches either — the inclination to see in it a national trait, especially one to be criticised, was American indeed. He pretended to fear for my cultural identity; he reminded me (taking my hand across the table) that it was in my “full Britannic aspect” he had come to love me…

I thought to tell him I did not care to rule the waves just then, but ride them with him. Skin, skin! His hand restirred the juice of April in me, when I’d have freely bid us abandon both of these vessels-going-nowhere and stand full sail bedward. But his damned question, What ought we now? — that he had put it put me off, stayed my hand from more than meeting his.