Letters

How we shall address and mail the transcription I don’t know. Where do noms de guerre go in peacetime? Noms de plume when their bearers cannot bear a pen? My right hand’s in cast and sling, thanks to Reggie’s work last week with the palm of Fame. But today is both Labour and St Giles’ Day, patron of cripples — Hire the Handicapped! — with which saint’s blessing we salvaged this dictaphone from the wreck of Mensch Masonry, Inc. May we suppose that “Arthur Morton King” has gone to dwell with “Yours Truly,” to whom I addressed the whole First Cycle of my life? Then perhaps, to inaugurate the Second, we shall bottle this up, Germaine and I, on our wedding day a fortnight hence (!) and post it into the Patapsco from Fort McHenry. (No! You’re supposed to have done with this sort of thing, love…)

Meanwhile, we enjoy in the Menschhaus a tranquil apocalypse between those Cycles: an entr’acte of calm calamity. Monday noon last we returned from the grand set-to on Bloodsworth Island and went straight next door to have my wrist X-rayed and set (no assault charges brought; the score was even) and to learn how things stood with Peter. What we learned is that my brother will not likely stand again. He is scheduled for “ablative operative therapy” later this week: the left leg off for sure, almost to the hip; the right probably as well, to the knee. And even that but a sop to the Crab that has him in its manifold pincers. Peter is a dead man.

Magda was (and remains) as we’d left her: serenely wiped out. The twins, with their boy- and girlfriends, are in the house always, laying on the filial support, keeping things high-spirited, even (we suspect) making covert financial contributions to the sinking ship. Stout Carl’s a working stonemason now, riding high on the school-construction boom and not in business for himself; pert Connie is a clerk-typist at the Maryland State Hospital (we no longer call it the asylum) where her grandpa was once interned. Their fiancé(e)s, high-school steadies of long standing, are also busily careered: he a feed-corn and soybean farmer, she a dietician’s assistant in the county school system. The lot of them sublimely unlettered and unconcerned about the world: patriotic, mildly Methodist, innocent of Culture, full of sunny goodwill and good humour, strong-charactered, large-hearted, intensely familial and utterly dependable, God bless them! The household has never run so smoothly. Angie still clutches the egg at night, but basks in all that love; Germaine and I can find little to do that hasn’t already been done.

Despite all which, Art, things are grim. M. M. Co. is irretrievable: all assets attached; no hope of limping on without Peter; state litigation still pending on our contribution to the Tower of Truth. The only bright notes are that the Menschhaus (through nice legal-eagling by Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews) has been rescued from its parlous inclusion in our corporate assets, and that not even John Schott’s D.C. lawyers (counsel for the state university) can litigate blood from a stone.

Peter’s chief wish is that the tower were undone: it is, in his view, a monumental reproach to the whole family. One does not remind him that the reproach is merited — certainly not upon his honest head, but upon our father’s, our uncle’s, our grandfather’s, back to the seawall buried under this sand whereon I sit. Upon my head, too, though I had no hand in the tower: its flaws are of a piece with those of our settling house and our stuck camera obscura. In vain I invoke, for Peter, the Pisan campanile, the fine skewed towers of San Gimignano; I quote him Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty”: “All things counter, original, spare, strange… / He fathers-forth. …” Need Truth, I ask rhetorically, be plumb as a surveyor’s bob?

Pained, he replies: “I just wish the durn thing was down.”

We are about broke. Ambrose Mensch, in propria persona, has taken your place as “author” of what remains of the FRAMES screenplay, authorised to authorship, not by Reg Prinz, but by his regents (Bruce & Brice), who seem to us to be being directed now by A. B. Cook. The two remaining scenes, “resolution” and “wrap-up,” are the Fort McHenry & Wedding scene, for which I have ideas, and The Destruction of Barataria, for which I gather they have ideas. Beyond that (i.e., 16 September, when in 1814 the U.S. Navy drove the frères Lafitte off Grande-Terre Island) I have no plans nor any project — save my (honorary) membership in the race aforecited, which pays no wage.