John Barth - Letters

We would be five, then.

I had expected to feel some contempt for a man so readily gulled; but my strong and immediate intuition, in Peter’s presence, was that he was not gulled, only endlessly patient of exploitation by those he cared for. A change of clothes (and barbers) and he could be physically most attractive. And his great unclever easiness, his guileless goodwill… I liked him.

So too, clearly, did Damaged Angela, who leaned against him as against a building whilst we spoke, her brown eyes never moving from my face. Unions are undone; their fruit remains and grows, for better or worse. Ambrose’s angel is a heavy, dim fourteen, short and thick, big-breasted already. There is no visible trace of my lover in her, nor (he replied to my later question) of La Blank, who was slender, fair, and hazel-eyed. Peter thinks her the image of a dear late aunt of theirs; Ambrose shrugs. She is alleged to have made great progress under Magda’s patient tutelage; Peter too spends hours with her — and they both claim (but I’m ahead of myself) that it’s Ambrose who’s responsible for her advancement from virtually autistic beginnings. An eighth grader by age, she does fifth-grade work in the sixth grade amongst twelve-year-olds in the local junior high school. Her nubility is a problem: moronic young men roar past the Lighthouse in horrid-looking autos for her benefit, and she grins and waves. The Mensches fear she’ll be taken sexual advantage of, and wish there were proper special-education facilities in the county; they weigh the possible advantages of residential therapy in Philadelphia against its shocking cost—$12,000 a year and rising annually — and the negative effects of her separation from them.

We are introduced. To my surprise Angie is quite friendly, at once shy and inquisitive: like a young primitive she fingers my costume jewelry, holds onto my hand after we shake, remarks smilingly on my “accent.” She has indeed been done well by; there is even a chance she may be able to lead a reasonably independent life. “Don’t want her to git too independent,” Peter teases, “or we won’t have nobody to warsh dishes.” The brothers are gentle with each other, gentle with her; there is much touching, taking of arms.

I am touched, too: I see my lover’s reclusiveness and mild eccentricity in a different light. Great reserves of patient energy must have gone into this girl’s raising, of a sort that comes less naturally to him than to his brother, perhaps to his brother’s wife. Lucky unlucky Angela! I cannot imagine her better off in any other situation — yet find myself curbing my skepticism of expensive “residential therapy situations” except where the home life is poisonous or the patient unmanageable. I am not the self-sacrificing sort, and in our new “Stage” I am protective of my lover’s freedom. Not to mention the guilt I feel in face of so much ungrudging responsibility!

We approach the house; we approach the house. Angela still grasps my hand (I can’t use the ironic epithet any longer) as if I were an old and trusted friend of the family. On this soft ground my heart sinks, too. Peter wants to show me the camera obscura yet before dinner; Angela has been promised I will inspect the family totem, a certain German Easter egg with a scene inside. The house is suddenly intimidating as a castle indeed: the Misses Stein and Toklas scarcely inspired such trepidation in me as does the prospect of its mistress…

“This here’s Maggie,” Peter says of her who now comes from kitchen to foyer; and to her, in a mock whisper: “Turns out we call her Germaine, like anybody else.”

What had I expected? L’Abruzzesa is just past forty, younger than her husband and older than her erstwhile lover, now mine. She looks not of this century, really: her face is round and rather pale for one not naturally fair-skinned, perhaps in contrast to her dark eyes and her hair, worn up in a bun. It is a good face: the skin is fine, the eyes are large and clear and liquid, the nose and chin are delicate. Dear “Juliette” taught me to appraise women sexually: she would admire Magda Giulianova’s lips, meant for sucking kisses, and her fine long neck, the nape especially provocative with its soft hairs curling from below the bun. Good shoulders, good arms (she wore a sleeveless top), good full small breasts (no bra) — one would never suppose her to have suckled twins now twenty years old! The rest was less troubling: heavy hips and slack behind; legs scarred from shaving but stubbled nonetheless; clothes ill chosen from the local shops. I am no beauty (and have raised no children), but I think myself more trim at the end of my forties than she at the commencement of hers, and better turned out too.

Finally, if Ambrose has found her “primal”—and I see what he means: the heavy grace, the husky somnolent voice, the intense serenity; she is awfully female — I fear I found her, like some other primal things, rather dull. No doubt I looked to; no doubt too the visit was a strain for her as well as me. I’m sure I “came on” too donnishly about camerae obscurae as Ambrose demonstrated the one they’d turned the tower into some years since — but then I happen to know something about them! (Theirs is mechanically interesting, I might say here, with its rotating vertical ground-glass screen; but on the whole I prefer the flat circular detached-screen type like the one above the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh, where visitors stand in a ring about the scene and need not move as the picture moves. The main drawback to the Mensch instrument, however, is not the projection arrangement but the scenic material: the county hospital is no Edinburgh Castle; the Choptank River, its low bridge and flat environs, are not the Firth of Forth and its dramatic ditto. In any case, the list of the tower is already binding the mechanism so that only with difficulty can it be moved past the empty spread of new sand where once the seawall was. The device will be out of commission before it pays for itself.)

“Anyhow,” says Peter, “that’s a right pretty sight, all them sailboats.” And so it was. I took my lover’s arm, pointed out “our” restaurant across the river, where Stage Four had been initiated. Magda gravely reported that the management was looking to sell the place. Angela named all the sails on (all) the sailboats and scored respectably on Ambrose’s quiz upon their points of sailing: which were beating, which reaching, which running. I compared the general scene and situation — innocently, I swear, though there may have been unwitting mischief in the impulse — to that famous passage in book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid where the hero, still in the midst of his adventures, finds their earlier installments already rendered into art: Dido’s Carthaginian frescoes of the Trojan War, in which Aeneas discerns the likenesses of his dead companions and (hair-raising moment!) his own translated face.

“Is that a fact, now,” Peter said. I felt a fool, then a bitch as I recalled Ambrose’s comparison of Magda to luckless Dido. He glanced at me— quizzically, I believe you writers say. I did not score well; in my embarrassment I gushed fulsomely over the celebrated Easter egg, fetched down now by Daughter Angela on its carved wood stand: a battered, faded brummagem, nothing special to begin with, mere family junk or joking relic. I could see nothing inside.

“No castle?” Ambrose demanded, I could not tell in what spirit. “No Lorelei?” I mumbled that microscopes and telescopes never worked for me either. Already in retrospect this moment seems to me a signal one. Something disquieting announced itself here: not a Fifth Stage, but (I fear) the true aspect— a true aspect — of the Fourth. I shall return to it.