Ambrose Mensch, Concerned
TO:
Yours Truly
CONCERNING:
Your message to me of May 12, 1940
Old messenger:
It’s another anniversary (Jacob Horner has got us all doing it): of the birth of Joshua Reynolds in 1723, King Gustaf of Sweden in 1858, Stan Laurel in 1890; of the capture by Boston soldiers of French forts in Nova Scotia in Year 2 of the Seven Years’ War; of young Werther’s letter in 1771 reporting his having first met Charlotte several days earlier; of the lifting in 1812 of the British blockade of European ports to American shipping (but the news won’t reach Congress in time to forestall a declaration of war two days from now); of the invention of the squeeze play in baseball in 1894; of Leopold Bloom’s odyssey through James Joyce’s Dublin in 1904. And of the descent upon me 39 years ago, in 1930, at Andrea King Mensch’s breast as we dozed in a hammock near the hollyhocks in the backyard of the old Menschhaus on a flawless forenoon, of a swarm of golden bees.
Eloquence, Uncle Konrad predicted: the boy will grow up to be a Sophocles, a Plato. But it’s silence I’m stung into, zapped by history. Tides! The past is a holding tank from which time’s wastes recirculate. Nothing lost, alas; all spirals back, recycled. Once-straight Joe Morgan, freaked out on psychedelics, sweetly promises to kill Jake Horner unless history can be redreamed, his dead wife reborn. Horner himself, that black hole in the human universe, that fossil from the early 1950’s, has not altered since he dropped out of giaduate school eighteen years ago: a penman after my own heart, he claims to have “published” his first book by leaving the typescript behind in a rooming house for others to discover, or for the Allegheny Reservoir to drown. His “writing” since, I gather, has been the therapeutic compilation of what he calls his Hornbook: a catalogue of notable cuckolds of myth, literature, and history arranged alphabetically from Agamemnon to Zeus.
May I? I asked him yesterday, turning to the M’s. Horner shrugged, thinly smiled, assured me he knew no more than what was inferrable from “the fiction.” But there we all were, between Menelaus and Minos of Crete (and before Morgan, Joseph), followed left to right by columns headed Wife, Lover(s), Remarks. Not only
Cuckold
Wife
Lover(s)
Remarks
Mensch, Hector
King, Andrea
a. Erdmann, Willy (?)
b. Mensch, Karl(?)
c. Mensch, Konrad (?)
issue: Mensch, Peter (?) &/or Ambrose
but also, after Hector,
Mensch, Peter
Giulianova, Magda
Mensch, Ambrose
a. May 12, 1947
b. 1967-69
no issue
How had Horner come by that information, written nowhere but in my jettisoned Amateur manuscript? Did the tides of the Choptank circulate somehow through Lake Erie? The answer was plain, of course, in the entry just prior to Hector’s. Cuckold: Mensch, Ambrose. Wife: Blank, Marsha, followed in the third column by a very long list of names including Mensch, Peter, and in the fourth, after that name, by the remark: issue: Mensch, Angela Blank. Sorry, says Horner: Pocahontas insisted, and we try to be therapeutic. She’d wanted him to list as well her more recent conquests at the Remobilization Farm, he declared — from Casteene, M. through Joseph, Saint to X, Tombo—but he’d stoutly refused, therapy or no therapy, on the grounds that divorce exempts the cuckold from further horns.
Some of those names, Yours, I didn’t even know! The dates might have stung more if my memory were better — So that’s what you were doing in Philadelphia that weekend, etc. — and I could perhaps have made use of the list when Marsha’s lawyers were working me over. But now I neither despised nor pitied the woman, only tisked my tongue, resolved to stay clear of her, and sighed at the regurgitative habit of History that had brought her up in my life again.
In this instance, however, the dramaturge was in all likelihood not Clio but Reg Prinz, who seems as bent on redreaming my history as “St. Joseph” his own. The man wants some sort of showdown, clearly, and not only for his show. I expected to discover he’d photographed my tête-à-tête with Horner yesterday; indeed, lest there be hidden cameras in the Progress and Advice Room of the Remobilization Farm, I showed even less emotion than I felt at sight of those entries in Horner’s Hornbook: I simply fetched forth my Mightier-Than-Etc. and, in the interest of accuracy, put a (?) after Angie’s name.
Marsha, for pity’s sake! Well hear this, Y.T.; you too, Clio — and you, R.P., if your cameras are even now peeking over my shoulder: there is a limit to what I’ll swallow the second time around! As of my last to you I’d rescrewed Magda (Peter & Germaine forgive us), on the 12th anniversary of my virgin connection with her and the 19th of your water message. Very possibly I shall be in “Bibi’s” bibi ere our tale is told: Prinz seems to be setting us up, and Bea looks more golden in her glitterless “Rennie Morgan” role than she’s looked since we tumbled in her rumble seat back in the forties. My treatment of Milady A. has been unspeakable; I do not speak of it. Que sera etc. But I will not reenact my marriage! Salty Marsha, you shall not fuck me over over! Closed-circuit history is for compulsives; Perseus and I are into spirals, presumably outbound.
The question of the plot is clear: How transcend mere reenactment? Perseus, in his life’s first half, “calls his enemy to his aid,” petrifying his adversaries with Medusa’s severed head. In its second half — his marriage to Andromeda broken, his career at an impasse — he must search wrongheadedly for rejuvenation by reenactment, and some version of Medusa (transformed, Germaine: recapitated, beautiful!) must aid him in a different way: together they must attain “escape velocity”; open the circle into a spiral that unwinds forever, as if a chambered nautilus kept right on until it grew into a galaxy. The story must unwind likewise, chambered but unbroken, its outer cycles echoing its inner. Behind, the young triumphant Perseus of Cellini’s statue; ahead, the golden constellations from which meteors shower every August; between, on the cusp, nonplussed middle Perseus, stopped in his reiterative tracks, yet to discover what alchemy can turn stones into stars.
The planning, Yours, goes well; the writing is another matter. When I discover Perseus’s secret for him, I think you’ll hear from me no more; until I do, I pursue these ghosts in circles, beastly, buffaloed, and in these circles am by them pursued.
Beset, too, by metaphors, as by geriatric furies: the dry Falls; this tideless lake; old Chautauqua fallen out of time; this antique, improbable hotel, named after the place named after the city named after the gray-eyed goddess, Perseus’s wise half sister. The elders rock on the porches; bats flitter through the Protestant twilight; the water does not ebb and flow.
Waiting our arrival here this afternoon, a note from Magda: Mother’s condition grave. Will call if it grows critical. Angle sends love. Drop her a postcard from the Falls. M
No period, I note, after the initial. Mere inadvertence: coded signals are not Magda’s way of messaging. Even so, given History’s heavy hand with portents, I’m dismayed: there’s another scene must never be replayed.