Letters

But lo, my white, my tidy, where is he gone? Into blue boxer swimtrunks, their owner already halfway to the door. Ambrose? A sheepish headshake from my erstwhile ram: too tired. Bit of a drain, he guesses, the family thing, his mother’s condition. Anyroad, we’d “made it” only the morning before. Chop chop now; into my suit if I was going to; he’d meet me à la piscine.

Well! That “morning before” was the 17th, last Saturday. Today is the 24th. We have been together at least part of every one of those seven days and nights, which in lusty April would have seen our bacon bumped a dozen times over — and we have congressed exactly thrice, counting the morn of the confiscated contraceptive! Once on the Tuesday, once yesterday; and I mean once. They were firm, they were ardent enough, those couple of couplings, if not exactly passionate; they were… conjugal, yes. And they were two in number, not counting the aforementioned Saturday.

They were also, both of them, uncontracepted. Sir, I am no longer urged against precautionary measures: I am enjoined from them! Let the odd monsignor, even archbishop, soften his line on contraception; my lover is become intransigent as the pope. Birth-control devices are prohibited at 24 L St! Tyra

I jest, but am truly somewhat disquieted, not alone at the possibility of my actually conceiving again, with whatever consequences, but equally at this not altogether playful domination by my lover — that inclination I noted pages back, at di

Ambrose is, I trust I made clear, not boorish in all this, but Quietly Firm, like an Edwardian husband. If our Fourth Stage corresponds to his 4th affair—i.e., his wooing and wedding of Marsha Blank — then I infer of that alliance that she was the more ardent partner, he the more dominant. I reflect on the course of their co

Well!

G.

P.S.: A long letter, this. I remember, wryly, how in the years when I aspired to fiction I would sit for hours blocked before the inkless page. And my editorial, my critical and historical writing, has never come easily, nor shall I ever be a ready dictator of sentences to Shirley Stickles. Even my personal correspondence is usually brief. But this genre of epistolary confession evidently Strikes some deep chord in me: come Saturday’s Dear J., my pen races, the words surge forth like Ambrose’s etc., I feel I could write on, write on to the end of time!

E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Not pregnant. The “prenatal” letters of A.B. Cook IV.

24 L Street

31 May 69

John,

End of May, Ember day; full moon come ’round again. My calendar dubs it the Invasion Moon, no doubt because a quarter-century ago it lit the beaches of Normandy. I was 24 then: had been Jeffrey’s mistress in Italy and England; had conceived André’s child in Paris and borne it in Canada; had had done with Hesse and aborted his get in Lugano; was chastely waiting out the war near Coppet, researching the life of Germaine de Staël. It seems ages past, that moon: my uterus is an historical relic! But ember as in Ember days means recurrent, not burnt to coals: what’s waned will wax, waxed wane…

Well, I’m menstruating. No Johnstown Flood, but an unambiguous flow. Astonishing, that old relic’s new regularity; you could correct your calendar by it. What to think? Ambrose is almost angry at this repulse of his wee invaders. I would remind him that who menstruates a fortiori ovulates; my plumbing’s in order, let him look to his! But on this head he is not humorous. Indeed, he has turned a carper: my outfits lately are too old-fashioned; my ma

Dear Reader: I am a mite frightened. My calendar (the one on my desk which names the full moons, not the one in my knickers that marks them) notes that in France on this date in 1793 the Reign of Terror began — though the Revolutionary Tribunal had been established in the August of ’92, and my eponym had nearly lost her head in the September. If Ambrose should become my Robespierre, who will be my Napoleon?

Add odd ironies: my master’s master’s essay was entitled Problems of Dialogue, Exposition, and Narrative Viewpoint in the Epistolary Novel. You knew?

On the Monday and the Thursday since my last, he and I made love: both times in bed, in the dark. Tomorrow’s, I’ll wager, will be forgone as pointless. In April it would not have been. Tomorrow’s! We are come to that!

Well: with so much unwonted free time on my hands, I have at least finished your Sot-Weed Factor novel. Mes compliments. Since my friend and I these evenings read even in bed, I look to dispatch with more dispatch your other “longie,” #4, the goat-boy book. Of SWF I will say no more, both because my monthly flow cramps my verbal, and because while I am done with your words I am not with your plot. Rather, with your plotter, that (literally) intriguing Henry Burlingame III. By scholarly reflex, even before Monday’s momentous special delivery was delivered to 24 L, I had “checked out” enough of your historical sources in the regional-history section of the Marshyhope library (its only passable collection) to verify that while the name Henry Burlingame appears on Captain John Smith’s roster of his crew for the exploration of Chesapeake Bay in 1608, there is no further mention of him in Smith’s Generall Historie, and none at all in the Archives of Maryland, through which bustle the rest of your dramatis personae. I therefore assume — with more hope than conviction — that “Henry Burlingame III,” his protean character and multifarious exploits, are your invention; that the resemblance between this fictitious 17th-Century intrigant and the Burlingame/Castine/Cook line of 20th-century Ontario, A

This letter will not be long. I’ve scarcely begun to assimilate, and am still entirely distracted by, that aforementioned special delivery: a packet of four very long letters, plus a covering note. The mails, the mails! The packet is postmarked Fort Erie, Ontario, 21 May 1969 (a Wednesday); the cover note is dated Wednesday, 14 May, same year; the letters proper are dated 5 March, 2 April, 9 April, and 14 May — but all Thursdays—and all in 1812! 157 years from Castines Hundred (so all are headed, in “Upper Canada”) to Dorset Heights: a very special delivery indeed!