Yup. Forth issued into the failing light the former Mrs Ambrose Mensch: dazed, sullen, and much the worse for whatever wear she’d been at. Marsha’s complexion was flushed and mottled, her gait unsteady; her eyes were wide and glassy, her hair and frock a wreck, as if she’d been in dire clutches indeed. But she was smiling, albeit loonily, as she wandered our way, waving a tiny American flag.
Ambrose squeezed my arm. Jacob Horner cried her name and hurried (for him) from the shadows behind us — we’d not seen him there — to her side. Marsha blinked and flagged him wanly off, as if he were a lake fly. Merope wondered to the Director whether it was okay to put her clothes back on — but Prinz was watching us watch Marsha. Though Ambrose’s concern was evident from his grip, he said and did nothing, sensibly leaving to Horner the anxious interrogation of His Woman.
He got not much out of her — or of Prinz, whom he understandably pressed to tell where she’d come from, where been, and doing what with whom. She’d been to “the other farm,” Marsha woozily acknowledged, and now was back at this one; bugger the rest of it. She declined to be taken to the infirmary, or home to bed. She managed after all a sort of smirk of recognition at Ambrose and me. The cameras rolled.
Joe Morgan, expressionless, appeared beside Prinz, who tersely called for “the Exercycles.” Grips at once fetched forth from the magazine a pair of those machines and placed them side by side before the Director, who clearly had prepared this odd business in advance. Docile Marsha mounted as readily as she could manage, saying Ouch, wow, I’m still sore, and began pedalling. Frowning Horner joined her on the other. Merope (dressed now) resumed her chair and lost interest in the spectacle.
It’s the Horseback-Riding scene, Tweedledum explained to a microphone held by his comrade. How can that be? that chap dutifully enquired. In the original it’s “Rennie Morgan” who gives “Jacob Horner” his riding lessons. Where’s Ms Golden?
It was her or me, Marsha muttered. What on earth, I whispered to Ambrose. He shook his head, touched my hand, replied that it looked to him very much as if his ex-wife was stoned out of her mind. Marsha was pedalling now more industriously; one would say almost grimly. Horner reached over to dab her brow with his handkerchief. Looking straight at Ambrose she enounced: You’ll get yours, too.
Prinz signalled Audio Tweedle (so it appeared to us), and, a moment after, there issued from some loudspeaker in the magazine — unnaturally clear, even strident, but as whacked-out mechanical as Marsha’s was whacked-out narcotic — the voice of Bea Golden, delivering what sounded like a pronunciamento: As of yesterday, “Phi-point of the calendar year and of LILYVAC’s Five-Year Plan,” the Mating Season was closed. Today—“St Neapolus’s Day and Bicentennial of the Emperor’s birth”—began “the Fall Work Period of Year E: i.e., Year Four of the Five-Year Plan.” Which, however, in the light of “the Perseid Illuminations,” might well prove to be “Year N, the first of a new Seven-Year Plan.” Et cetera, and don’t ask me! To be fertile matters little, Bea’s voice went on; to be fertilised, little more (this, John, addressed as if directly to Ambrose and me!): What matters is the bringing to term and the successful delivery of that Hero who is both Saviour and Golden Destroyer. Germaine Gordon Pitt, Lady Amherst: nota bene! Morgana Le Fay: your turn will come! The New Golden Age will commence April 5, 1977!
All this last, John, truly spoken as though in italics, and if any doubt remained of whose particular lunacies Bea’s voice was iterating, that doubt was blown away by her closing words: The revolutionary future belongs neither to Pen nor to Camera, but to one… two…
On three a hollow boom boomed either from the loudspeaker or from the magazine itself, whence billowed now a great puff of white smoke, and from out of that smoke a presumably recorded male laugh that could be none but Jerome Bray’s, and a great many flittering sheets of paper, as if a post office had exploded.
We all withdrew a safe distance (except Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank, who went on exercycling as if hypnotised), till the air cleared of everything save the ubiquitous lake flies. Even Prinz leapt back from his chair at the blast, and his lieutenants from their microphones and cameras. Merry Bernstein sat on the ground not far from where Ambrose and I had jumped to, drawing her clothes tight about her and verging reasonably upon hysterics.
Much shaken myself, I did what I could for her whilst the men gingerly investigated. First back at their stations were Dum and Dee, to record the last wisps of smoke and leaves of paper. Morgan demanded to know what was going on and where his missing patient was: Prinz and Ambrose both disclaimed responsibility for and foreknowledge of the stunt; indeed, each was inclined grudgingly to credit his rival with a bravura special effect. The papers, blowing about now in a mild breeze off the river, proved to be covered with printed numbers, meaningless to us. The magazine, upon inspection, yielded a portable tape machine, an auxiliary loudspeaker, and an empty canister, presumably a spent smoke bomb. No sign of Bray or Bea Golden.
Jacob Horner volunteered from his mechanical mount that it was in fact the name day of the Bonaparte family and 200th birthday of their most celebrated member, who took his Christian name from a saint martyred under Diocletian in the 4th Century. Birthday too of Princess Anne, Ethel Barrymore, Thomas De Quincey, Edna Ferber, T. E. Lawrence, and Walter Scott. Deathday of Wiley Post and Will Rogers in plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. Likewise, traditionally, of the Virgin Mary, whose passing is referred to as her Dormition. Repeated Marsha: Better her than me. And on they pedalled, going nowhere.
I know for fairly certain, John, that Ambrose had no foreknowledge of the Great Magazine Explosion, and we’re fairly persuaded that it took Prinz by surprise as well. His signal had been for a tape made a few hours earlier by Marsha, whose bedraggled arrival by bus from Buffalo had inspired this more modest surprise for Ambrose. The tape — we heard it shortly after — reveals that she had indeed gone voluntarily, with Bea Golden, to Bray’s Lily Dale establishment a few days since, and returned when her unspecified business there was done. That Bea, unhappy at the Remobilisation Farm since the Doctor’s death, has chosen to stay on in Lily Dale. That coaxial television is a minor technological innovation, not a revolutionary new medium. Et cetera.
Unless, then (what we briefly considered), Prinz’s assistants have taken over the Movie (Frames!), it would appear that neither he nor Ambrose but Jerome Bray carried the field in the Assault on Fort Erie, turning all the rest of us into Withdrawing Britishers — and that he has had his revolting, nefarious Way with both Marsha and Bea. Merry Bernstein is scared out of her knickers, as well she might be. I think the New York State Police ought to be dispatched at once to Lily Dale to see what’s what, but I can interest no one in Bea Golden’s fate enough to take action (I shall ring up Morgan before we leave, and prod Ambrose again when he wakes up).
Can the Epical Feud between Author and Director have run its course, one wonders, now that the Prize is flown and nobody cares to pursue it? If so, ’twas a Conflict with much Complication and no Climax! But the two parted company last night downright cordially. And my lover is sleeping through this morning because — as excited Authorially by the day’s events as were Prinz & Co. Directorially, and liberated by our new Abstinence Week from a night of making love — he sat up happily till dawn turning St Neapolus’s Day into sentences. Not, praise be, another of those regressive epistles to Yours Truly, but (so he teases, and I’m honoring my promise not to peek) a fiction in the form of a letter or letters to the Author from a Middle-aged English Gentlewoman and Scholar in Reduced Circumstances, Currently Embroiled in a Love Affair with an American Considerably Her Junior.