Okay: I like it that his Robespierre’s gone to guillotine at last. Though I believe life to be no more probable in my old womb than Tuesday’s Mariner-6 photographs show it to be on Mars, and though the season’s maiden tropical storm (Lady Anna) is moving our way from the Caribbean, I am much gratified by this serene “developement” and look forward with appropriate interest to learning what the character of the Sixth Stage—our stage! — of our affair will be. (I would be tempted to wonder, with your Menelaus, how Proteus can ever be confidently known to be “himself again, having been all those other things — but a mad experience last night has shown me how.) I still truly love Ambrose, don’t ask me why; daresay I shall even if he comes ’round to loving me, as he most certainly appeared to do from March through May.

Nevertheless, sir, and though my late behaviour argues contrariwise, I am not by disposition a hand puppet, whether it’s Ambrose’s or even André’s hand under my midlengths. Mr Mensch’s apparent abdication of his tyranny has not ipso facto cancelled my resentment of so extended and public a humiliation as mine since spring: the loss of my job, my “self-image,” my self-respect. When in my last I threatened reciprocal infidelity — a rum sort of retaliation, that, and retaliation itself a rum sort of game — I was only half-serious. I.e., I was half-serious! I came back up here with Ambrose because I do still love him; but I did in fact try to ring you up, no doubt with mixed motives, but principally I’m sure with a view to terminating all tyrannies, including this insulting one of our one-way correspondence. I learned among other things that you’ve vacated this city to live year-round in your Chautauqua cottage… whereupon I lost interest in your pursuit, realising I’d prefer after all not to discuss with you what I have at such immoderate length confessed. Hence my salutation.

I even imagined myself ready to kick this habit, my Saturday epistolary “fix,” whatever the withdrawal pains. Then came last night’s dreamlike adventure, which, though I was its victim, I am still far from understanding.

As we have seen, all doors open for the maker of movies. Reg Prinz & Co. had preceded us to Buffalo, and a bit of judicious PR had evidently preceded him. Both local campuses of the state university, I don’t have to tell you, have modest but active departments of film, and I gather the city prides itself generally on its hospitality to new art. A word to the right people that Prinz will be “echoing” the Scajaquada Creek Battle of 1814 has put at his disposal, with attendant fanfare, as much of Delaware Park (through which Scajaquada Creek runs, I learned yesterday, dammed now to form Delaware Park Lake but memorialised by an eponymous expressway) as he needs for as long as he needs it, plus the resources of the flanking institutions: the Erie County Historical Society and the Albright-Knox Museum of Art. Plus more graduate-student volunteer helpers than he can sort out, all eager to improve their credentials, and at least half of them (so it seems to me) stoned out of their American minds.

We were scarcely checked into this unpronounceable motel (accent on the antepenultimate) before being whisked off last evening to a cocktail buffet in the Park Pavilion, hosted by the directors of the institutions aforecited. Hello from a cultural attaché of the mayor. Welcoming statements from the two curators, praising what they took to be our combination, in this Belligerently Antihistorical Decade, of the historical foretime and the avant-garde present, a combination nowhere more aptly symbolised than in the architecture and the collection of the museum beside us: half Greek revival and half front-edge contemporary. Trustees and local patrons of the arts turned out spiffily in evening clothes among the jeans and patches of the with-it young. Whatever justice there may be in the proverbial put-downs of Buffalo, N.Y., I found it agreeable indeed to be back in a genuine city, among what appeared to be genuinely civilised folk: the black-tie crowd and the blue-jean crowd on easy terms; the night balmy; the catering not bad at all; the sweet smell of Cannabis sativa mixed with that of roses, pipe tobacco, and chafing-dish chicken tetrazzini; taped rock music on the pavilion P.A. Add Ambrose’s new mildness, the contrast with Dorset Heights, the being back in my own clothes, even the absence of humidity and mosquitoes — I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Joe Morgan was there! Come over from the Farm as historical consultant (A. B. Cook, it seems, remained behind in Maryland), he was more conventionally dressed than at last sight, but still long-haired, necklaced, somewhat crazed-appearing about the eyes. In the spirit of the evening I was delighted to see him; we hugged hello and had a good talk. Crazed or not, Morgan has still his low-keyed, quick-smiling, intense, but almost boyish authority, once so appealing to his students and colleagues. He has I gather rather taken over the Farm, by his natural leadership, since the Doctor’s death, but we didn’t speak of that. We talked History for a bit, apropos of the occasion, two ex-professionals reminiscing: How a pathetic remnant of the Iroquois League, some 100 warriors, fought on the American side under General Brown in these last engagements on the Niagara Frontier, hoping to retain what was left of their reservations in western New York. How underrated by historians was the influence of anti-British sentiment among French Canadians generally throughout the war, and the particular Anglophobia of wealthy French refugees from the Terror, who like Mme de Staël had bought huge landholdings along Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, but who unlike her had emigrated, raised impressive châteaux in the forests, and after 1814 confidently expected fallen Napoleon to appear among them and establish a sovereign French-Canadian state. Et cetera.

When Ambrose and Bea — separately — joined us, the talk turned to gossip. My lover had been dancing with, of all people, Ms. Merope Bernstein — remember? — who, her bum apparently mended, had come over from the Farm with Morgan and their polyglot comrades: a large black girl, a somewhat sinister-looking Latin, and an echt Manhattan greaser of indeterminate ethnicity. Her quondam stepmother had been dancing with this last, looking alas neither unattractive nor out of place in a boutique redskin outfit — Tuscarora mod? — and came to our table clearly to flirt with Morgan in demonstration of her indifference to us. I paid her no mind. Ambrose merely smiled. Joe indulged her lap-perching and osculatory effusions with mild indifference. Bea soon went off to find her Reggie.

Ms. Bernstein, Ambrose reported, was relieved to find her erstwhile protector Bray nowhere in evidence. She and her colleagues had come armed with unspecified weapons against possible menace from him, whom they regard as a dangerous lunatic and counterrevolutionary. Their attitude gave Ambrose to wonder, temperately, about the physical welfare of his ex-wife, last seen (we recall) on 4 July in Bray’s company aboard the O.F.T. II. Thereby, it turns out, hung a little tale, which discreet Saint Joseph had been going not to tell, as not particularly our business, but now judged it best to:

Seems your ex-protagonist (and Morgan’s old antagonist), creepy Jacob Horner, has conceived some sort of—love? — for Marsha Blank (we laughed at once, derisively; Morgan did not), and in his way was Much Concerned at her failure to reappear at the Farm after Independence Day. Especially when Bea Golden came back from Maryland with the glib report that “Pocahontas” had gone off with Bray to his Lily Dale goat ranch, presumably as Merope Bernstein’s successor, Horner grew distressed.

Ambrose and I are grinning guiltily; the whole business is bizarre! But Bray is a lunatic. Ambrose takes my hand; heart-stirred (yet still resentful) I squeeze his. Now: in the Doctor’s absence, and as part of some larger, ongoing project of his own, Joe Morgan has assumed the role of Jacob Horner’s therapist and spiritual advisor: the Director, as he put it, of a sort of personal “remake.” In this capacity, fast and loose with their text as Reg Prinz with his, he cancelled whatever had been Horner’s therapeutic programme and prescribed instead that he sally forth from the Farm, make his way to Lily Dale, determine whether Marsha is there with Bray and if so whether voluntarily, take whatever action seemed appropriate to that determination, and report back to his therapist.