John Barth - Letters

On the 4th, a Thursday, Peter reentered hospital for amputation of both legs, one to the hip, the other to the knee, with every likelihood even so of surviving less than five years. A confusion of schedules kept the orthopedic surgeon, a weekly visitor from Baltimore, up in the city a day longer than expected; the operation was postponed till next afternoon. That Thursday night someone broke into the closed office of Mensch Masonry, rifled the files (sealed by court-appointed receivers), and stole copies of the design specifications and foundation blueprints of the Marshyhope Tower of Truth. No clues yet; suspicion falls heavily and kindlessly upon Ambrose, who was in fact with me and/or Magda uninterruptedly. On the Friday morning, sometime before dawn, Peter took a massive dose of Tylenol and ended his life. Suspicion there, too, falls upon the Menschhaus, more mildly but in this case accurately. Though there will be no investigation beyond the routine enquiry required to clear the hospital of liability, the fact is that Magda and Ambrose supplied Peter with pills, at his request, on the Wednesday or Thursday, precisely in case he should change his mind about seeing things through to the final frame.

Why Tylenol? Because, Ambrose explained, aspirin, barbiturates, Seconal, and the like can be promptly pumped out, especially when their taker is already in hospital, without fatal results. But Tylenol, in large doses, besides being easier to lay hands on than prescription chemicals, quickly does irreversible and lethal liver damage. Peter thus became, along with his sculpting Uncle Wilhelm, the only member of the family known not to have died of cancer. We buried him last Saturday beside that uncle and the others, all his limbs attached.

(Angie has been difficult to manage since. The loss seems to have sickened her physically: she wakes up vomiting.)

That same Saturday came the shocking news of Morgan’s accident or suicide (word reached the local newspaper on the Wednesday, but we in the Lighthouse were too distracted to read the newspapers): specifically, that his gunshot wound had been ruled self-inflicted and Jacob Horner cleared of implication, and that the body had been returned from Fort Erie to our neighbouring town of Wicomico for burial on the same day we buried Peter (Morgan’s late wife is buried over there; we have since learned that Horner and his bride accompanied the casket from Ontario to Maryland, along with Morgan’s sons). The funeral having been a private affair, there was to be a memorial service next day in the chapel of Marshyhope State University. We decided that I should attend, as having been closest of the family to Morgan. Ambrose would stay with Magda and Angie.

It was a fairly nauseating ceremonial, not however without its comic touches. I should pass over it except that so many of “your characters” were there, and that it gives to this narrative of my affair with Ambrose Mensch an almost novelistic symmetry: we “began” with the service for Harrison Mack on Redmans Neck in February, and in effect we “end” (our premarital courtship, not our connexion!) with another such service in the same general geography.

It was conducted in the Show and Tell Room of MSU’s Media Centre, which doubles as a nondenominational campus chapel until the enormous projected new Hall of All Faiths shall have been raised. So declared the nervous young university chaplain, a new appointee, over the newly installed super-quadraphonic public-address system, out from which the new audiovisual crew had not yet got all the bugs. It also served, he said, this sad convocation, as mournful prelude to a more positive spiritual programme: the new series of “Sunday Raps” to be held every Sabbath morn of the regular semester, commencing with a jazz-rock orientation rap a week hence (tomorrow). Marshyhope’s first president, he was (wrongly) confident, would be pleased. And now, himself not having been fortunate enough to know President Morgan personally, he would relinquish the mike to our current chief executive, who would, so to speak, emcee the rest of the show.

I had slipped in intentionally late, not to have to suffer the condolences of John Schott & Co. or to deal, if I could avoid dealing, with Marsha Blank Mensch Horner, who I feared might be present. From a back seat in the S & T Room I saw that she was: as whacked-out-appearing as her bridegroom, but with a restored grimness of eye and jaw that evoked my image of the Marsha Primordial — and gave me to wonder once again why A. had ever married her. Horner looked paralysed with terror at being off the premises of the Remobilisation Farm; very possibly he was. There were two long-haired, grave-faced young men I took to be Joe’s sons; there was Jane Mack, impassive and apparently alone, her son Drew likewise, and Todd Andrews, looking utterly spent; there was A. B. Cook, who managed an expression somehow both grave and whimsical. Many strangers to me were present as well — representatives, I learned after, of Wicomico State College and the Maryland Historical Society.

Oh, John. Chaplain Beille wound up his introduction with an uncertain comparison of Joe Morgan to the late Bishop James Pike, whose body had that day been found in the desert near the Dead Sea: both men were, well, Seekers, whose Search, um, had led them down Unconventional and Uncharted Paths, but, uh. John Schott took the podium, to Miss Stickles’s scarcely suppressed applause. With what my fiancé would later describe as Extreme Unctuousness, he spoke of having first hired Young Morgan at Wicomico in 1952; of having watched him “make a comeback” from the tragic loss of his wife in ’53 to his brilliant directorship of the historical society, thence to the first presidency of Tidewater Technical College and the supervision of its growth to Marshyhope State College and Marshyhope State University College; of Morgan’s then “returning the favour,” so to speak (a heavy chuckle here, returned by the company), of hiring him to be his vice-president and provost of the Faculty of Letters!

Now Schott’s tone grew solemn. It was no secret that he and “Joe” had differed on many issues. But no one had regretted more than himself his worthy adversary’s departure from MSUC, on the very eve of its becoming MSU! It was a tragedy that the final year in the life of his protégé, as one might well call Morgan, had been as cloaked in obscurity as Bishop Pike’s: both of them, in Schott’s view, Casualties of Our Times! But whatever the contents of that tragic last chapter, it was ended: Joe was with his beloved wife now, on the Eastern Shore he cared so much for; and Schott knew in his heart that whatever his predecessor’s reservations about the Tower of Truth, there was no better loser than Joseph Patterson Morgan! He Schott had wanted him with us at the tower’s dedication, three weeks hence; he knew that Joe would give that edifice and Marshyhope his blessing, from Heaven!

He closed with an equally exclamatory and unbecoming pitch for his own administration: skyrocketing enrollment figures, the massive building program, the great news (which he had been saving for the first university convocation on Monday the 15th, but could not resist leaking to us now) that approval was “all but finalized” in Annapolis for a seven-year plan to make MSU a proper City of Learning by 1976, perhaps even larger than the state’s current main campus at College Park! Morgan had hoped for 7,000 students: how gratified he would be at the prospect of 17,000, 27,000, eventually perhaps twice that number!

On this exquisite perversion of the verb to hope, and as Shirley Stickles sighed orgasmically in her seat, Schott turned the mike over to One Far More Eloquent Than Himself. A. B. Cook ascended the podium. There was a pause to adjust the P.A., which had been squealing as if in protest. Student ushers, deputized from the Freshman Orientation Committee, took the opportunity to seat latecomers, including, to my surprise, Ambrose. His attendance on Magda had been relieved by the twins and their girl- and boyfriends; she had insisted he join me. Looking about the room for me in vain, he was led to a seat just behind the Jacob Horners. Marsha glared and froze; Ambrose likewise, and desperately surveyed the audience again. Appalled, I pushed through to the empty seat next to him. Marsha’s expression could kill an unborn child; A. and I whispered accord on the matter of retreat to a rear seat. But Cook had launched into his versified eulogy and benediction.