Letters

It was her name, Ambrose now maintains, most drew him to her twenty years ago, when he was an undergraduate apprentice and she a young typist at his university. Marsha Blank, mind and character to match, descended from a presumably endless line of Blanks going back to nowhere. So declares our not entirely reliable narrator, adding that she was possessed of a fetching figure and a face with the peculiar virtue of being so regularly, generally pretty as to defy particular description, even by a young writer whose then ambition it was to render the entire quotidian into prose. A. claims he cannot so much as summon her features to memory; never could in their seventeen years together; that her comeliness was at once considerable and, precisely, nondescript. And her personality matched her face; and there she sat, nine-to-fiving those reams of empty paper through her machine day after day, like a stenographic Echo, giving back the words of others at 25¢ the page plus 5¢ the carbon. Thither strayed my lover, who claims to have set himself even then the grand objective, since receipt of that wordless message nine years previously, of filling in the whole world’s blanks. In hand—longhand — was his virgin effort in the fiction way: the tale of a latter-day Bellerophon lost in the Dorchester marshes, “far from the paths of men, devouring his own soul,” who receives a cryptic message washed up in a bottle…

Voilà: a marriage made in the heaven of self-reflexion. Our Narcissus claims to have glimpsed at first sight of her the centre of this typist’s soul, unconscious counterpart of his conscious own: what nature abhors and “Arthur Morton King” finds irresistible. But we remember too that this was 1949: my lover has wound up — better, has been wound down by — his sexual calisthenics with young Jeannine Mack and is endeavouring to curb, for his brother’s sake, his reawakened love for l’Abruzzesa, now wed to Peter Mensch and big with the twins she will give birth to ere the year is out. Harry Truman is back in the White House (and Jane Mack is misbehaving with my Jeffrey in Paris, whilst I finish my edition of Germaine de Staël’s correspondence and am flirted with by Evelyn Waugh); American college campuses are burgeoning with married veterans of the Second War, educating themselves and supporting their families in prefab villages on the G.I. Bill of Rights: they set the style, for younger male undergraduates like Ambrose, of marrying very early, at eighteen and nineteen and twenty, and promptly engendering children upon their late-adolescent brides…

But why am I telling you this, who not only were there then but had been my lover’s fellow labourer upon the Lighthouse project that same sexual summer? Because, of course, it’s all news to me, disclosed since Sunday last, when I met the Mensch ménage “on location”: i.e., in that same Lighthouse — now cracked as the House of Usher and out of plumb like the Pisan campanile — and the adjacent county hospital, where the last of the pre-Ambrosian generation of Mensches lies a-wasting of the family cancer.

To deal first and lightly with that pitiable person, whom nature is dealing with so hardly: Andrea King was her maiden name; she descends from the King family of nearby Somerset County, whose ancestors a century and a half ago conspired on behalf of their friend Jérôme Bonaparte to spirit Napoleon from St Helena to Maryland. From her (and the possibly fancied ambiguity of his siring) Ambrose takes his fanciful nom de plume, as well as his love for word games. From her the surgeons last summer took the seventy-year-old breast my lover once suckled beneath a swarm of golden bees. Andrea herself made this connexion, remarking further (which delighted Ambrose) that just as all the bees but one had been removed by Grandfather Mensch on that momentous occasion, and the one he’d missed had stung her, so now etc., and here she was: it took only one. Did I happen to know the British word for the terminal character of the alphabet, three letters beginning with z?