God bless America! And spare me.

Ambrose did not. I drove home too dazed by all these obscure comings-together to bother rechanging into go-go garb. My lover was cross, unreasonable. Of course I might go where I pleased — to Chautaugua, to London, to Hell — but why hadn’t I notified him? He was not at all surprised that A. B. Cook might be involved in Prinz’s film, inasmuch as your Sot-Weed Factor novel involves the Cookes and Burlingames, and the film has a retrospective as well as a prospective aspect. What did surprise him was that I would be as it were unfaithful to him with “old Cook.” Never mind the accident of Cook’s not being there: I had slipped out, slipped into my Old Lady clothes, slipped across the Bay on pretext (at best a pretext to myself) of verifying those patently concocted letters, to a chap whose obvious interest to me was his possible connexion with my erstwhile lover…

Jolly enough of that! I shot back. That day’s driving had been a shlep, not a slip, and made for good if futile cause. Those letters were not obviously false, though very possibly tampered with. Those Old Lady clothes were a welcome respite for this old lady, in whose neck moreover that A. B. Cook had been almost as considerable a pain as present company. And even if I had pursued him for his connexion with the grandest pain in the arse of all, my erstwhile lover, lifetime tormentor, and father of my lost child — even if I’d bedded the bloke in hopes of solving that nasty little riddle — well and bloody good, and he Ambrose ought to bloody aid and pity me instead of bloody banging a weary old lady on the head with his bloody mad jealousies and petty despotisms, et farking cetera!

In short, a little lovers’ quarrel. It did not last long. I was weary; am; and Ambrose knows how to play me. Under my fatigue I liked it that he was jealous; knew he knew I liked it; even liked knowing he knew, etc. God and my sisters forgive me!

He made me doff the O.L. oufit instanter; tupped me a good one. As I lay propped after for the sake of his low-motiles, he announced more agreeably that whilst I’d been taking French leave that morning, he’d solved with his diagrams a tricky problem in the plan of his Perseus story, and authorised me to pass the info on to you if I was still writing these weekly one-way letters. I begged him fill that blank another time; I was too weary. And speaking of blanks, I mentioned my blank informant at Chautaugua. Ambrose was not interested.

I asked him whether he thought André Castine of Castines Hundred and Andrew Burlingame Cook of Chautaugua could possibly be the same man. He crisply replied, to my surprise, that he thought the question as academic, under the circumstances, as that of the authenticity of those 1812 letters: the skill and subtlety of those circumambient impostures over so many generations, the welter of obscure purposes and cross-purposes, made a kind of radical positivism the only possible approach to, or bridge over, the vertiginous quicksand of history, including my own past. Much moved, I sprang to hug him. He gruffly bade me look to my insemination; gave me liberty to explore the matter as I would whilst we were in Ontario and west New York, up to the point of physical infidelity: should there be even the slightest possibility of my impregnation’s being attributable to another, we were kaput; if on the other hand I managed despite all to conceive, and indisputably by himself… then he hoped we might marry.

Ontario? West New York? Marry? Flabbergastment! Arrant presumption!

A. shrugged: did I think he’d permit me to go uninseminated for the week and more he’d be there? The very middle of my month? They would be shooting background footage at Forts Erie and Niagara, at the Falls, perhaps at the old Chautauqua Institution and at Lily Dale, a spiritualist centre in the area. Prinz’s intentions were as usual unclear. There had even been mention of a rôle for me, following upon a remark I’d made about Mme de Staël’s pleading on the one hand with Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin to forestall the 1812 War on behalf of Britain’s struggle against Napoleon, and on the other her subsequent intriguing with the emperor during the 100 Days. A. B. Cook might play his own ancestor Ebenezer Cooke, the virgin poet, and/or his other ancestor the antivirgin Henry Burlingame III. And there was to be an intensification of the rivalry between himself and Prinz for the favour of Bea Golden, whom they had more or less persuaded to play the rôle of herself playing the role of several younger women in your fiction. Prinz had warned him to be on his guard; he now passed the same warning on to me. We would return in time for the Marshyhope commencement exercises, which Prinz also wants to film for use in the campus sequences — whether the dreary little teachers college in End of the Road or the universal university of Giles Goat-Boy, Ambrose couldn’t say: both, neither. I was not, absolutely, to take along my Old Lady clothes: he would pack my bag himself.

Would he, now!

We go tomorrow (I packed my own bag): by car back across the Bay Bridge to Washington National Airport, thence by plane to Buffalo and by rented car to Niagara Falls. It will be no honeymoon. I am properly intrigued by the reflection that as we fly along the axis of the War of 1812, from Chesapeake Bay to the Niagara Frontier, you may well be doing likewise, en route home from D.C.; that we might — improbably en route, but not so improbably during the business ahead — meet. Or do you take as little notice of the film-in-progress as of these letters?

I do not even mention my emotions at the prospect of revisiting the little town of Fort Erie, Ontario, where not so very long ago — though it seems a world away already! — this aging uterus having Done Its Thing yet again with the high-motile, unerring sperm of André, André, I underwent a different sort of D.C…

André. Who, mon Dieu, may be there too, somewhere about! Then why do we not rendezvous, you three (or four) gentlemen and the lady whose tormenting is your common pleasure? At the “farm” of that nameless Doctor, say, for Prinz’s cameras, let us do a scene, not from your writings, but from de Sade’s: you, Ambrose, André, A. B. Cook — strip me of my ridiculous mini, bind me fast, and take turns with literal whip and brands instead of figurative!

Enough. My office work is done; I must back to 24 L lest my master’s jealous ire be reprovoked. By now you are, I presume, an official doctor of letters, as Ambrose will be a fortnight hence. Look to your patient, sir; ’ware malpractice; if you will not presume to save her, leave her at least no worse than you found her: as played out, worked over, tricked up, but withal still fecund as (let us pray)

Your patient

G.

I: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage continues. Filmmaking at Niagara Falls and Old Fort Erie. Dismaying encounters at the Remobilization Farm.

Erie Motel

Old Fort Erie

Ontario, Canada

14 June 1969

Dear J.?

It’s eerie, right enough: this foul and ghostly lake that must once have been so fair, but now regurgitates dead smelts and ripe green eutrophy; bleak, blasted Buffalo across the way, coughing up steel and cars and breakfast cereals in clouds of smog; flat frozen Canada, just now blanketed in flowers — how all countries except yours glory in flowers! — but ever mindful, in its dour domestic architecture and glacier-scraped terrain, of the cold that never leaves this dominion, but only withdraws a bit, and briefly, to its northern reaches.

Eerier yet your absence — as well say nonexistence! — and my presence here amid the caricatures of your characters. I have not read all your works, sir; I begin now to think I shan’t, lest I find myself cast up for keeps upon this charmless shore with the other flotsam; doomed like the skeletal constellations to a reiterative danse macabre, a spooky rerun — ever less intelligible — of the story of my life. Somewhere over there you plug away at your trade, stringing letters into words, words into sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters. Between us the international boundary surges past to flush itself over Niagara Falls, called by Canadians the toilet bowl of America.