“Peter!” that strange countenance demanded. “Peter Peter Peter Peter!”
Family history maintains it was some antic mugging of Peter’s, together with his scolding tone, frightened Ambrose. How so, when it had been his custom to amuse with every noise and grimace he could achieve? No, the mere inversion of features was no matter: right side up, upside down, Ambrose knew that face and called it by his all-purpose name. What it was, it was the eyes, that they seemed not inverted at all; it was that those eyes were right side up still in Peter’s face and were hence not any eyes one knew! Something alien peered out from Peter’s head; independent of eyebrows, nose, mouth, those eyes watched neutrally, as through a mask, or through peepholes from another world.
Tears dissolved all forms together. Ambrose’s shriek fetched grown-ups from below: Peter hugged his brother at once through the crib bars and joined the wail. Mirror and Easter egg were rescued, teacher was spanked, pupil comforted — who is said to have called Peter Peter from that hour.
As for the eyes. Whoso once feels that he has seen and been seen by them does not forget those eyes; which however, like certain guests we nourish with our substance, may be in time’s unfolding concealed or manifest, acknowledged or abjured.
Thus was altered Ambrose’s initial view of things, and thus he came to call by the name Ambrose not his brother, his mother, or his nanny goat, nor yet (in time) his foot, his voice, or his port-wine mark: only his self, which was held to be none of these, indeed to be nothing Ambrose’s, but solely Ambrose.
What the infant learns in tears, adult suffering must unteach. Did it hurt you, reader, to be born? Dying will be no picnic either.
G
Great good that lesson did: he was called everything but Ambrose!
Dear Yrs. T. and Milady A.: the rest of G, together with all of H and I, are missing from this recension of Arthur Morton King’s Menschgeschichte, having been given years ago as aforetold to your Litt.D. nominee. G came to light as a first-person piece called “Ambrose His Mark”; H first saw print as the story “Water-Message”; I (in my draft but a bare-bones sketch) was fancifully elaborated into the central and title story of B’s Lost in the Funhouse series, where the others rejoin it to make an “Ambrose sequence.”
G is the story of my naming. “Owing to the hectic circumstances of my birth,” the published version begins, “for some months I had no proper name whatever.” Those circumstances themselves are referred to only in passing: “… Hector’s notion that someone other than himself had fathered me; his mad invasion of the delivery room; his wild assertion, as they carried him off (to the Eastern Shore Asylum), that the port-wine stain near my eye was a devil’s mark…” et cetera. Uncle Karl’s withdrawal to Baltimore is discreetly mentioned, and Andrea’s sultry frowardness: “… a photograph made by Uncle Konrad… shows her posed before our Tokay vines, her pretty head thrown back, scarfed and earringed like a gypsy; her eyes are closed, her mouth laughs gaily behind her cigarette; one hand holds a cup of coffee, the other steadies a scowling infant on her hip.” It is alleged that given Hector’s absence and her capriciousness, no name was chosen, and faute de mieux Aunt Rosa’s nickname for me, Honig, became my working title, so to speak, until the great event that climaxes the story.
Grandfather covets the bee swarms of our neighbor Willy Erdmann, who also seems to have had an interest in my mother. He builds an empty beehive near where our lot joins Erdmann’s, and installs Andrea in a hammock there to nurse me and to watch for a migrant swarm. Apiary lore and tribal naming customs are laid on, via Uncle Konrad; the family’s straitened circumstances during the Great Depression and the near failure of the firm are sketched in too. Willy Erdmann fumes at Grandfather’s clear intention to rustle his bees; stratagems and counterstratagems are resorted to, while I suck busily in the hammock and Andrea works the crossword puzzles in the New York Times. At last, on a still June Sunday, the long-awaited swarm appears, and slapstick catastrophe ensues: Grandfather bangs pie tins to draw the bees his way; Willy Erdmann fires a shotgun to attract them himward (and to warn off would-be poachers). Grandfather counters with a spray from the garden hose; Willy replies with a brandished bee-bob. Konrad and Rosa stand by transfixed; Peter bawls in terror; Andrea swoons.
And then the bees, “thousand on thousand, a roaring gold sphere… moved by their secret reasons, closed ranks and settled upon her chest. Ten thousand, twenty thousand strong they clustered. Her bare bosoms, my squalling face — all were buried in the golden swarm.” Grandfather boldly lifts them off with ungloved hands and bears them to his waiting hive. Erdmann strikes with the bee-bob; Konrad grapples with him; they fall into the hammock, which parts at the headstring and dumps us all into the clover. Rosa disrupts baptismal services at a nearby church with her cries for aid; raging Grandfather hurls the bee swarm down upon us all; Andrea is stung once on the nipple (and thereafter abandons breast-feeding and relinquishes my care to Rosa); Willy Erdmann is led off crying imprecations of my illegitimacy; Konrad and the Methodist minister endeavor to restore the peace of the neighborhood. Aunt Rosa, subsequently, likens my birthmark to a flying bee; Konrad reviews legendary instances of babies swarmed by bees: Plato, Sophocles, and Xenophon are invoked — and finally St. Ambrose, erstwhile bishop of Milan, after whom I am in time denominated. The episode ends with the adult “Ambrose’s” ambivalent reflections on the phenomenon of proper names: “I and my sign… neither one nor quite two.” Et cetera.
Despite some lurking allegory, which I regret, “Ambrose His Mark” gains in artistic tidiness from its reconception of the family described in my chapter G. And the narrative viewpoint, a nipple’s-eye view as it were, is piquant, though perhaps less appropriate to the theme of ontological ambiguity than the “first-person anonymous” viewpoint of A. M. King’s version. No matter. “Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose!” the narrator intones at the end, watching to see what the name calls: “Regard that beast, ungraspable, most queer, pricked up in my soul’s crannies!”
I like that.
H
Here was the “Water-Message” episode from my eleventh year, whereof it disconcerts me still to speak, yet which occasions all this speech, these swarming letters. In his retelling our Author retains my third-person viewpoint, omniscient with Ambrose, but drops that authorial “I” of sections A through F. The year is 1940; Grandfather is five years dead, his prostatic cancer having metastasized in 1935. There is no mention of Uncle Karl, who however returned to direct the firm that same year, apparently made his peace with Hector, and hired a bachelor flat down near the yacht basin. Nor of Konrad and Rosa, who also now rent an apartment of their own, across the corner from the Menschhaus, residence then only of Hector and Andrea, Peter and me. Gentle Konrad is still teaching fifth grade in East Dorset Elementary School, tuning pianos, and bicycling the streets of Dorset on behalf of the Grolier Society’s Book of Knowledge, whose contents he knows by heart. He and Rosa are childless. Ardent fisher off the “New Bridge” as well as cyclist, Konrad has skin cancer and a year to live. None of this is in the published version, nor of Hector’s arm, withered now like the late kaiser’s (his limp is mentioned), nor of his gradual self-reestablishment, after Karl’s return to the firm, in the county public school system: he is principal now of East Dorset Elementary, the smallest in the city and the poorest except for its Negro counterpart. Ambrose (on with the story) is a timid fourth grader, uneasy in his skin, fearful of his fellows, saturated with the Book of Knowledge, broodily curious about the Book of Life, abjectly dreaming of heroic transfiguration. All done in images of mythic flight: seaward-leaning buoys, invocations of Odysseus, foreshadowings of dark illumination, etc.