There, I think, is the term. It has been a week, not really of abject and fulsome apologies, solicitudes, smarms, but of easy reciprocity: two seasoned adults renewing (you know what I mean) their mutual love, which had grown rocky and uneven to say the least.

I like it! And should it (as I pray) persist, and should its persistence (as it may) come to make these weekly communiqués as unnecessary for me as Ambrose’s bottled epistles have become for him — why then, we shall be at our story’s end, you and I, and that will be that.

But we are not there yet. Seven days do not a season make. You are not done with (Ambrose’s)

Germaine

P.S.: Rereading this, I see I left out, unaccountably — I had been going to say one detail, but it struck me even at the time as the key and climax to last Saturday’s skirmishing, perhaps to my whole connexion with Mr Ambrose Mensch. The battle done, as he and I withdrew by rental rowboat back to “Canada,” in midpond our hero shipped his oars and kissed me. More particularly, as we paused there under the windy stars (early P.M. showers having ushered in a clear cool front), he bade me look him straight in the eyes whilst he took my head in his hands, declared he loved me, and kissed my mouth. That’s it. Romantical, what? I hear you ask, indeed, So what? But Britannia here declareth herself stirred to the ovaries by that open-eyed osculation, which bridged, I felt, our every past and present difference; brought us truly for the first time to ourselves with each other; sealed some compact; inaugurated this 6th, this blissful, Stage.

P.P.S.: Oxymoron! The shocking news now comes in (on the Kissing Bridge Motel telly) of the “ritualistic” murders of Sharon Tate & Co. in Roman Polanski’s villa. I think of our erratic Director, of my darling Author, of that madman Bray’s last words to us from the pavilion railing… Zeus preserve us!

O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage continues. The Fort Erie Magazine Explosion and Second Conception scenes.

Erie Motel

Old Fort Erie

Ontario, Canada

16 August 1969

Old pen pal,

Our last day on the Niagara Frontier. We’d meant to stop one more night here in the Erie (a cozy place this second time around; you recall our troubled visit of mid-June, a hundred years ago): it’s a chapter I’d consented to review, as it were, in Ambrose’s dramatised Short History of Us, inasmuch as that story’s dénouement still appears a happy one. But when we telephoned Magda yesterday, as we’ve done periodically through our absence, we learned that Mensch mère has entered what really seems to be her terminal terminality, and that Peter is worse too. (How was I? that remarkable Italiana wanted earnestly to know. Since Ambrose and I agree that the right news would actually be some comfort to her, I confessed that I’ve not menstruated since 29 June. Magda was tearfully ecstatic.)

So we shall return late this afternoon, our film work done till Sunday week hence, when action will resume at Bloodsworth Island, or Washington, D.C., or both.

In short, Zeus has preserved us and our mutuality through the week, as I prayed in my last, though his solicitude has not extended through the family. It’s been a proper honeymoon of a week for Ambrose and me, the sweeter already in retrospect for our knowing what awaits us now in Maryland. As befits what I take to be an Echo of the “Jeannine Mack” or “Bea Golden” stage of our affair — an Echo of a Reenactment, God alone knows or cares how programmatical — my friend and I have fornicated up and down the frontier, from Stratford and Toronto to the Falls and Fort Erie (not including Castines Hundred; I was adamant). A copulatory binge without the urgency of April’s — it is mid-August, even in these high latitudes — but unremittingly ardent, unremittingly thorough: as fleshly an Echo as ever echo’d. Especially on the 11th and 12th, when we hired camp gear and slept out on the shore of Lake Ontario to watch the Perseid meteor shower with the aid of a star guide, an electric torch, and a manual of Positions picked up in a Yorkville skin shop, we counted meteors and ran through the carnal alphabet as if sex were going out of style.

Which, you will be not at all surprised to hear, for the present it has done. I shall explain.

But now it’s history-lesson time! We left the War of 1812 stalemated on the banks of the Niagara in midsummer 1814. Jacob Brown’s plucky U.S. invaders, we recall, having held against us redcoats at Chippewa and won at least a standoff at Lundy’s Lane in July, withdrew to their Fort Erie beachhead: a strategic error, most historians agree, as it returned the military initiative to Britannia. She — after the Scajaquada Scuffle of 1 August — laid siege on 7 August to the Last U.S. Stronghold on Canadian Soil, bombarded it for a week with rockets and cannon, and on the 15th (as Admiral Cochrane’s fleet entered the Chesapeake to move on Washington) attempted to take Fort Erie by main strength. Night assault parties breach the northeast bastion and advance successfully as far as the powder magazine — which, in the fashion of powder magazines throughout this war, inconveniently explodes beneath them. Whether the blast is accidental or adroitly managed by the defending garrison will be much debated, but like the navy yard explosion in Washington ten days later, it knocks the wind out of our attack, which has cost us 905 casualties to the Damned Yankees’ 84 (that epithet is coined by the British General Drummond on this occasion). The survivors withdraw; the siege is maintained for another month, but no further serious attempts are made to storm the fort, nor are massive American reinforcements sent over from Buffalo to lift the siege. After Prevost’s rout at Plattsburgh and Lake Champlain, the besiegers remove downriver (up-map) to Queenston, but the U.S. does not pursue its advantage. By October all the Canadians are back in Canada except the garrison at Fort Niagara, all the Americans back in the U.S. except the garrison at Fort Erie. On Guy Fawkes Day, General Izard blows up what’s left of Fort Erie and ferries his troops back to Buffalo. End of hostilities in this theatre of the war, and end of lesson.

And in our little Theatre of the Preposterous? Just possibly ditto, though we are Wary. Yesterday’s sequence (so Ambrose reported on the Thursday, after a telephone conference with Reg Prinz’s assistants) bore the working title Fort Erie Assault & Explosion; 2nd Conception Scene. It was to commence Friday noon with a (filmed) story-conference luncheon in the mess hall of the Remobilisation Farm, then proceed to the enactment of whatever we saw fit to perpetrate under that title. It was hoped I would take an active role.

I would not, I declared; nor a passive either, unless I were promised that neither “Monsieur Casteene” nor the Medium of the Future would be on hand. The latter I feared for my lover’s sake; the former — but I will not speak of that rose garden! And I was to be counted out if “Fort Erie Assault” or “2nd Conception” involved our doing on camera what we’d been so busy at off.

Ambrose enquired (of Joe Morgan, also by telephone) and was told that Casteene had departed the Farm some days past with Merry Bernstein’s troupe of activists, presumably Remobilised for covert incitement of the Second Revolution. When or whether he would return, no one knew. That Mr Bray had not been seen since Scajaquada, but (according to Mr Jacob Horner, much distraught) had communicated by letter with Bea Golden (a.k.a. “Bibi”), who together with Marsha Mensch (née Blank, a.k.a. “Pocahontas”) had taken French leave from the Farm on Wednesday and not been heard from since. Horner was persuaded they were in Lily Dale, in Bray’s clutches, and was of course immobilised with anxiety on behalf of His Woman.