He offered to fetch me in from 24 L; I decided to drive instead, I’m not sure why: the portentous announcement of an impending change in our connexion, perhaps, however cheerily put, suggested the precaution of vehicular independence. As it turned out I rode in in Jane Mack’s chauffeured limousine, seldom seen in Dorset Heights since Harrison and I vacated Tidewater Farms. Jane too was to be Mr Andrews’s cocktail guest; she and “dear Toddy,” she apprised me en route to Cambridge, were old old friends, dear dear friends; I wasn’t to be fooled by his down-home manners and modest law practice into underestimating his professional ability: a first-class legal mind, whose counsel she’d prefer in really thorny matters to that of Mack Enterprises’ whole legal department. Did I know that it was his adroitness in the probate courts, some thirty-odd years since, that had rescued her late husband’s inheritance and made possible the firm’s expansion from mere pickle pickling to its present conglomeration of enterprises?
What could I say, John? As levelly as possible I acknowledged that I had read something to that effect somewhere; couldn’t quite recall where. “Fortune magazine, most likely,” Jane asserted; “they ran a feature on us ten years ago, when we first got into freeze-dried foods, and of course they looked around for anything to liven up the story. We thought of suing, but Todd advised against it.” The “we,” we note, is corporate, not familial — and while I feel, in this place among these people, more like an “extra” from your early fiction than the protagonist of my own life story, she has repressed your novelisation of her youth as completely as her middle-aged amour with my Jeffrey! Freud, Ferenczi, you are right: our choice of vocations may be symptomatic as any other of our choices. That chilling woman is your proof, her beauty as frostily preserved as her late husband’s excreta; who rejects from her Deepfreeze of a memory all “unwholesome” items (you may be sure she remembered the volume and number of that magazine, whose publicity had been good for business) as systematically as her quality-control inspectors purge poor peas from prime in her frozen-food factory. Even when the Tidewater Foundation was debating the subsidy of the Original Floating Theatre II, Todd tells me, she batted not an eye at either the paradox or the allusion, which latter made even the proponents of the showboat uncomfortable. Au contraire: she froze them all with embarrassment by merrily demanding of Todd Andrews whether he remembered the fine old times they’d all had back in the thirties on Captain Adams’s floating theatre — and then got briskly down to cost accounting!
So Andrews told me shortly after, amused but still impressed, at the bar set up on the cabin roof of his converted oyster-dredging boat. But remarkable as may be such expurgation, it is not our Second Miracle, no. Neither is the gloss supplied by Ambrose (over breakfast this morning) to his oral memorandum last evening (over martinis on Andrews’s foredeck) when I’d asked sweetly what all this stage-of-the-affair claptrap was about: that in the second postscript of his initial letter to me — a declaration of love with no fewer than seven postscripts — he had remarked that they corresponded not only to the stages of his love for me thence far, but to the predecessors of that love, five in number. At the time of that P.P.S., he declared (This is still the memorandum, not the gloss, and most decidedly not the miracle. We are on said freshly scrubbed and painted foredeck, “wet martinis” in hand — Ambrose and I share a fondness for good vermouth — admiring the balmy evening, the spiffy restoration and conversion of our host’s old skipjack, the dashingly turned-out film contingent among the guests, and each other, whom we have not seen since early in the week. My lover is tanned already from his new medium, which has kept him largely out of the Lighthouse and in the daylight of Ocean City and “Barataria,” the set being built down near Bloodsworth Island. He wears a light-blue denim jacket and trousers over an open-necked madras shirt; he looks boyish, healthy, handsome, American. He is in good spirits. I desire him, can scarcely keep myself from touching his sleeve, his hair), these correspondences were but a glancing whim: he had felt Ad-mi-ra-ti-on for me; he’d found our conversation Be-ne-fi-ci-al; after Harrison’s funeral he had offered me Con-so-la-ti-on and made that surprising Dec-la-ra-ti-on of his feelings for me; followed with an Ex-hor-ta-ti-on to me to reciprocate them and get on to For-ni-ca-ti-on, just as he had admired, benefited from, consoled, etc., other lovers in the past. Not till the coincidence of my recentest menstruation (which had divided Stages Two and Three, as the one just prior had divided One and Two) and certain other happenstances had he recognised a deeper pattern in our progress. Having recognised it, he could no longer honestly distinguish cause and effect: whether the pattern was determining his feelings and thus the “story of our affair,” or our affair innocently rehearsing the pattern. For this reason, among others, he was inclined just now to trust my feelings above his own, and he put me this question, to be responded to at dinner: Having come, in fish-cold March, to making love, and humped all over horny April, and chastely stopped for breath into sweet mid-May… what ought we now? Whither our connexion, if it were my “say-so” and if our inclinations (he knew his own) should agree?
Prinz was aboard in his displaced-person getup, Jane Mack’s daughter in what I believe the children call a “grannie” dress: the former glassless, the latter taking on gin and tonic by the imperial pint as she traded “wisecracks” with the barkeep. Indeed, but for the presence of a few film extras, and the absence of John Schott and A. B. Cook… and his son… we were February’s mourners reconvened in May: a fair season here indeed, when the mosquitoes have yet to hatch, the stinging sea-nettles yet to foul the estuaries, the heat and damp of summer yet to pressure-cook the peninsula. Everywhere flowering dogwoods, tulips, crab apples, lilacs, japonicas, and brilliant azaleas, the bougainvillaea of middle latitudes. But if there was tension among the gathered then, it was between Jane and me on the one hand, and within myself with respect to my “son” on the other: now it was visibly between the Macks mère et fils, who (rumour had it) were about to litigate over Harrison’s estate. Where “Bea Golden” stands in the matter I don’t know, unless the family’s disposition on deck was a bit of symbolical choreography: Drew and Yvonne Mack stood as far forward as one could without climbing out upon the bowsprit, Jane was on the extreme afterdeck with a little group of Tidewater Foundation trustees (and the steering wheel), and Ms Golden square amidships. There too, of course, was the bar, crossed by neither mother nor son; and thither strayed from time to time my lover’s eyes, not necessarily in search of drink.
This much I remarked, with a small pang like the Wednesday’s on first hearing l’Abruzzesa’s voice. But I did not remark much more, for Ambrose’s query and his portentous Deeper Pattern, together with the tale of his week’s adventures with the film crew, quite preempted my attention. What ought we now? With spring so gorgeously exploding in every bush, the very air a scented kiss, the intemperate sap full-risen to green the temperate zone, what ought we now? The only question was, Why had he put it as a question, if not that to him the answer was not obvious? And if it wasn’t… had Bea Golden of Marshyhope Productions (Prinz’s paper corporation for receiving Tidewater Foundation subsidies) turned his head? Or was his erstwhile leading lady, Magda Giulianova Mensch (whose initials just now roar out at me from this page), making a comeback for “Arthur Morton King’s” sake?