John Barth - Letters

There is a shock I didn’t need, John, on my wedding eve. Angie “watched” them from an upper window through her egg, as if it were a telescope; I unabashedly tried Ambrose’s telescope — but “my son” was on the far side of the car. Drew himself was using binoculars, trained not on me but on the Choptank bridge, and seemed to be explaining something. Presently they left; moments later I saw their car pass over that same bridge, presumably towards Baltimore.

Well. By Ambrose’s return I was composed enough not to show my dismay or even, for the present, mention this encounter. I shall tell him when things are calmer, perhaps in “Stage Seven.” I held him tightly and then kept him talking of the day’s news, our wedding plans, as we made dinner. Todd Andrews, he reported, had been at McHenry, looking in vain for Drew Mack: Bea Golden is officially a Missing Person, of whom no trace has been found since she left the Remobilisation Farm in mid-August to visit Jerome Bray! Mr Andrews confided to Ambrose his fear that she may be a victim of her growing alcoholism, or have been victimised in her dependency. Police have been alerted in New York, Maryland, and California; Bray’s premises have been searched in vain (no explanation of his resurrection from the Prohibited Area!). Andrews is also concerned — Ambrose thinks unnecessarily — that young Mack’s divorce and other factors may be leading him from radicalism toward terrorism.

Never mind, I said, so long as he doesn’t terrorise our wedding. What had been decided in that line? Perhaps to chuck the whole McHenry circus and slip off to the nearest J.P.?

He kissed me. Nope. After Peter’s death, Ambrose had considered asking you, sir, to be his best man — your rejection of our honorary doctorate and your subsequent silence having played no small part in bringing him and me together. Given the exigencies of the movie “wrap-up,” however — and the erstwhile Director’s reappearance after all on the set today — it was decided that Reg Prinz, newly spectacled, will serve in that capacity! Now darling, I began — but then thought of Henry/Henri Burlingame VII, and other things. Well, I said, it’s the groom’s choice. But let there be no stunts or surprises on our wedding day. No stunts, Ambrose pledged; and if there are surprises, they won’t come from him. Prinz had agreed: let armistice and harmony prevail! Magda and Angie to be matron of honour and bridesmaid, respectively? Done. A. B. Cook, the double agent of 1814, to give the bride away? Well… done (I reported Schott’s call: the doctorate not after all to be revoked; the spectre of Jacob & Mrs Horner on the horizon. Ambrose agreed, to my immense relief, that if Angie could handle it we should all vacate this scene as soon as humanly feasible. Hurrah!). The MSU chaplain, faute de mieux, to officiate. We were to be on the set by noon.

Done, done, done! We kissed our bridesmaids and each other good night, agreed not to make love (we’ve plenty of that to do tomorrow), and for the sport of it bedded down separately, he in the basement, I in the Lighthouse, where I pen this. The casements are open; some quirk of acoustics makes audible the horn of the Choptank River Light, ten miles downstream: an unlikely shofar heralding the Jewish new year and my new life to come…

Now at last it is the letterhead date: half after nine Saturday morning, 13 September 1969. My (second) wedding day. Partly cloudy, 50 % POP. The family are piling into two cars below: Carl, Connie, and their betrotheds into a camperbus, Magda and Ambrose and Angie (egg in hand) into our little car.

At 1:45 this morning, precisely, Ambrose came upstairs to me. Sleepily we coupled, a tergo, on our sides, and returned to sleep. I record these things for a particular reason.

At 5:10 (he’d set the alarm) I kissed him awake and erect; “went down”; etc.

At 8:35, reroused by him from sleep, I climbed atop my husband-to-be, attained myself a lightsome climax but, by A.‘s own report, “drained him dry.” Douched, breakfasted with all, dressed, made ready, and wrote these paragraphs, perhaps my last to you.

Off now to Fort McHenry, marriage, perhaps maternity. To a certain string of 7’s. To a hundred unknowns.

O John, wish me well!

G.

L: Lady Amherst to the Author.Her wedding day and night. The Dawn’s Early Light sequence and the Baratarian disasters. Her vision of the Seventh Stage.

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

Saturday, 20 September 1969

Dear John,

“Lady Amherst” is no more. I am Germaine Mensch now, Mrs. Ambrose: my third and presumably last last name. But as this will be my last letter to you (I’d thought my last was; then arrived — at last! — your greeting, your marriage blessing, your alphabetical prayer for us; this is my thanks to you for that, in kind), let it be for certain the last from the author of its two-dozen-odd predecessors: the former Lady A.

Today concludes my maiden week, so to speak, as Ambrose’s wife and my first week of classes at Marshyhope State University! Tomorrow ends our seventh (and last?) week of “usness”: this sweet Sixth Stage of our love affair. Monday was to have initiated our Seventh (and last?) Stage, as yet undefined: we had thought my gynecological appointment, scheduled for that day, would help define it. But the Monday being Yom Kippur and my doctor gently Jewish, we shall not learn until the Tuesday — when the sun enters Libra and tilts Maryland towards autumn — whether I am, as I hope and believe, not menopausal but pregnant.

And not until the spring of the new year, the new decade, shall we know, Ambrose and I, what this old womb and those exhausted sperm have combined to make. All my intuitions tell me that the seven months between now and then, the no doubt delicate balance of my pregnancy, will be our Seventh Stage, whatever the issue and whatever follows. But we three — Magda knows, of course, our crazy calendrics — officially and lovingly declare otherwise: that Stage Seven, like the outer arc of some grand spiral, will curve on and out at least beyond our sight.

May it be so.

You cannot not have heard, even in your upland, inland retreat, what the Baltimore and Washington newspapers have been full of: A. B. Cook’s “accidental” death at Fort McHenry the morning after our wedding there; the “accidental” deaths two days later of Reg Prinz and three others on Bloodsworth Island when that navy drone aircraft crashed into Barataria Lodge; the discovery yesterday of the motor yacht Baratarian: abandoned, half swamped, adrift in the Atlantic just off the Virginia Capes, her captain, her owner, and her owner’s “nephew” all missing and presumed “accidentally” lost at sea.

Her owner? Baron André Castine of Castines Hundred, Ontario! His “nephew”? Henry Cook Burlingame VII!

My son Henri.

Where will these accidents end? To what “final frame” must I see things through? (In case you’ve wondered: my husband and I have reviewed the several hazards of pregnancy at my age and have discussed, and rejected, therapeutic abortion.) And where do I begin, who ought by rights to be destroyed by that final news item above, but who find myself, Magda-like, unaccountably, it would seem almost reprehensibly, serene?

I shall begin where last I ended: leaving the Menschhaus that mild Saturday forenoon sennight since, our wedding day — when so many now dead were yet alive! The postman strolled up just as we left, took my letter to you, and handed Angie the mail: condolences for Magda, mostly, which she refused to open till another day; a few worrisome bills; my copy of the lease on this apartment, which I had renewed… and the letter from you addressed to Mr & Mrs Ambrose Mensch, which Mister fished out and tucked away in his coat before I saw it, intending a later surprise. Following Carl and Connie’s van, we crossed Choptank River and Chesapeake Bay, both as alive with bright hulls and sails as a Dufy watercolour, and shortly before noon arrived at Fort McHenry, showing our Frames passes to the park guards for admittance.