New crisis?
About the foundation work for the Marshyhope Tower, which was already showing such unexpected, impermissible signs of settling that there was real doubt whether construction could continue. Bankruptcy loomed, larger than usual. Peter was at a loss to account for the phenomenon: it appeared that the analyses of his test borings had actually been falsified to give optimistic results, on the basis of which he had made the winning low bid! He had already, at his own cost, exceeded the specifications of his contract when actual excavation had revealed a ground situation at variance with his predictions; someone had bribed the building inspectors not to disclose the truth earlier; to correct the problem now, with the superstructure so far along, he had not the resources.
What was more — and this alarmed l’Abruzzesa more than any threat of poverty or the disagreeable reappearance of Marsha Blank — Peter himself was not well. He had lately had difficulty walking; had developed a positive limp in his left leg, which he’d been as loath to acknowledge to her as he’d been to acknowledge that it was his own late father who, almost certainly, had falsified those core samples from Redmans Neck. But their family doctor had confided to her privately that X rays had been made and Tests taken; that, though Peter had sworn him to silence, he felt it a disservice to his patient and to her not to tell her that her husband had cancer of the bone in his lower left leg. Inasmuch as Peter would not consent, whilst his mother lay dying, to the prompt surgery his own condition called for, the doctor had to hope that his elder and terminal patient would get on with it before his younger became terminal too.
Well! Having been down that horrid road with my Jeffrey, I was able genuinely to sympathise, if not to help. We had our Good Cry. The ice broken and Magda so obviously harbouring me no ill will, I acknowledged that things were indeed less than blissful between Ambrose and me. Further, I candidly apprised her of the Pattern business: how, starting from that play upon the opening letters of the New England Primer in his first love letter to me, Ambrose had come to fancy a rough correspondence between the “stages” of our affair and the sequence of his major prior connexions with women. How this correspondence had so got hold of his imagination that he could no longer say, concerning the subsequent course of our love, what was cause and what effect.
Magda was sharply interested; I reviewed for her the four “stages” thus far, as I understood them, (a) The period of our first acquaintance, in the fall semester of 1968, through Ambrose’s unexpected declaration after Harrison’s funeral, to his mad overtures of March and our first coition in the ad hoc committee room — which-all he compared to his youthful admiration of Magda as rendered in his abandoned novel, The Amateur. The ardour then (I wistfully recalled) had been altogether his, merely tolerated and at length yielded to by its object, (b) That month of frenetic copulation, with no great love on either side, from early April to early May, which put him in mind of his late-teen fucking bouts with the Messalina of the Chesapeake, Jeannine Mack, (c) Our odd and gentle sexless first fortnight of May, when we both had felt stirrings of real love, and Ambrose had flabbergasted me with intimations of his wish to make a baby. In his mind this was not unlike the period of his second, innocent “connexion” with Magda, by then Mrs Peter Mensch; the resemblance is not obvious to me. (d) That disagreeable “husbandly” period just ended, during which, alas for me, my ardor exceeded his, and our physical connexion was sedulously procreative in intent, if not in issue. All I could say of this interval was that, if it really did resemble Ambrose’s marriage, I’m surprised the thing lasted fifteen months, not to mention fifteen years; and unless I was confusing cause and effect, I quite sympathised with Marsha’s busy infidelities. But I could not imagine that chilly individual’s permitting for a fortnight the highhandedness I’d indulged for a month already. Those ridiculous costumes! His insulting attentions to Bea Golden! What’s more (and more’s the pity for me), I loved him despite that degrading nonsense; loved him still and deeply, damn it. I could not imagine Ms. Blank’s entertaining that emotion for anyone.
Be that as may, we were by A.‘s own assertion done with d and entering e. Inasmuch as he had declared to me in his Ex-hor-ta-ti-on of 3 March that I was the 6th love of his life, and as the evidence was that he had come to me from a painful third connexion with Magda, I urged her now to tell me what I must look forward to from Our Friend in Stage #5.
More tears. Then she told me, in two longish, earnest installments: one then and there, the other this morning, both punctuated with the good womanly embraces aforementioned. Ah, the Italians! Only her suicide convinces me that Carthaginian Dido was of Phoenician and not Italian Catholic origins. God damn me if I go that route! Which, Kleenexed and synopsised, appears to have been this: In 1967, when their marriage was officially kaput, Marsha ran off to Niagara Falls with the lover whose subsequent early rejection of her had fetched her to the Remobilisation Farm and the sexual-clerical employ of “Monsieur Casteene”/Cook. Ambrose, at Peter’s urging, had reluctantly moved back into Mensch’s Castle with his daughter; he had finished the conversion of the Lighthouse into a camera obscura, and — not at his own particular initiative, I gather — had become party to a tacitly acknowledged ménage à trois, the guilty background whereof we have had hints in an earlier letter. Look it up: as Ambrose says, that’s what print’s for.
Magda again, then. But with a difference! At a Ambrose had been a callow, adoring amateur; there’d been no sex till the end, 1947, when in Peter’s absence Magda had bemusedly (and fatefully) accommodated the boy’s ardours as the stone house rose up about them. At c—1949 and after — their feelings had been reciprocal but for the most part unspoken; they did not couple, nor did Magda question her heart’s commitment to Peter and their newborn twins. This time ’round (1967), worse luck for her, Ambrose was passive, aloof, still shaken by the wreck of his marriage; whereas Magda found herself possessed, for the first time in her 38 years, by unreserved, overriding, self-transcending (and self-amazing) passion: a possession so complete as to make her wonder whether, after all, the man Ambrose was not as much its occasion as its cause and object. She knew him thoroughly; she saw and did not admire his faults; she found altogether more to respect in her husband; her contempt for mere adventurous adultery, Marsha-style, was profound — and none of those considerations mattered. She was Swept Away!
I was impressed with the woman’s understanding of what had happened to her; how judiciously she assessed the contributions of Peter, Ambrose, and herself to the experience. She’d been near forty, heavier than at c (and than she is now); it turns out that Peter — despite his being an affectionate, strong, and devoted husband — was, no doubt still is, an indifferent lover: perfunctory, unskillful, often impotent though decidedly fertile, withal Not Very Interested in That. Magda had never managed orgasm, except solo. Of this she’d been aware, in a general way: a more vigorous erotic life, like a larger income, she could imagine to be agreeable if it didn’t bring problems with it. But she’d felt content, sufficient, and had not thitherto been tempted to infidelity.