Ho hum, said I, and toddled off to sleep. Whereupon that simpleminded dramaturge, my subconscious, contrived to dream that all my letters to you after the first one — not excluding this, whose sentences were already forming in my mind as I fell asleep — are in fact from the pen of our common friend Ambrose Mensch, whose Middle-aged English Et Cetera does not exist!

Good old subconscious. But now it’s I am awake, and he asleep: rest assured these pages are not from our Ambrose, but from,

As ever, your

Germaine

P.S.: Speaking of authors: I have I believe now gone quite through your published oeuvre, sir, per program: a book a month since March. What am I to read in August? In September?

V: Lady Amherst to the Author. Distress at Mensch’s Castle.

23 August 1969

Dear J.,

Vanitas vanitatum, etc. Our “mutuality” persists, thank God, Ambrose’s and mine, but our Niagara idyll seems already washed a world away by the flood of domestic emergencies we came home to. As Hurricane Camille douched Dixie (with Debbie supersaturating right behind her), so any concern of ours for “Bea Golden” and Marsha Blank, Jerome Bray and Reg Prinz, was first drowned by Ambrose’s mother and then redrowned by his brother.

I write this from the waiting room of Dorchester General Hospital, lately our home away from home. What the four of us presently await (Magda and Angie are here too) are the final laboratory-test results and diagnosis of Peter’s case. He has been confined here since Wednesday. We wish he had let us fetch him to Johns Hopkins instead, but are relieved that he is — at least and at last — in hospital. The news we await cannot be good; we may hope only for less than the worst. That Peter is here at all, you understand, implies—

Grief drops the stitches of my story. We flew home last Saturday evening, went directly to the Menschhaus, learned that Mensch mère was comatose next door in the D.G.H., found Peter chairbound with immobilising pain in both his legs (for which he would take nothing stronger than aspirin), Angela frightened into such regression that only the family totem and pacifier of her childhood, the famous Oberammergau Easter egg, kept her from bouncing off the Lighthouse walls — and Magda serene, serene, serene.

She embraced me first, her eyes all one question (Nope, no period yet. Yup, a few other signs). Serenely weeping, she made us tea and briefed us on the family crises: Andrea had lapsed into coma the day before and was not expected to revive; her death was anticipated hourly, but Mensch’s Castle being so close by, her nurses had agreed to send instant word across the street when her vital signs took their final turn. Peter’s condition, whatever it is, had worsened at an alarming rate: from a slight hobble in his left leg, to a severe one with hip and knee pain, to disabling pain in both limbs, all since the first of the month. Peter himself growled good-humouredly of “arthuritis,” his stubbled face taut. But could mere arthritis proceed so rapidly, in a man not 45? And there was backache, and dull headache; even (so Magda thought, serenely tearful) some loss of hearing. Yet he held fast to his resolve, to “wait for Ma.”

On St Helena’s Day (Monday last, the 18th), whilst Camille was levelling Mississippi, Andrea King Mensch died. As it happened, we were all present except Peter and Angela: when in the forenoon her life signs took an unanticipated upward swing and she seemed stirring from her coma, we had been summoned. Andrea had of course that Edvard Munch look of the terminally cancerous, together with the complications of inanition: she was shrunk and waxy, nearly hairless, bedsored, foul-odoured from necrosis, all I.V. and air pipes going in and catheters coming out — it was poor Jeffrey in ’65, at once heartbreaking and gorge-raising.

She was indeed stirring; had to be restrained lest she disconnect the plumbing they ought mercifully to have disconnected long since anyroad. When she began to speak deliriously of Napoleon and “the Kings of Beverly” (her ancestral family in the neighbouring county, from whom our friend took his former nom de plume), Ambrose observed the irony of its being St Helena’s Day. He fell silent when his mother — who we doubt recognised us at any point — commenced to speak less disconnectedly of her late brothers-in-law Karl and Konrad (after whom Magda’s twins are named, their initials Romanised): specifically, of her late husband’s (Hector’s) brief deranging jealousy of the former, whom he suspected of fathering Ambrose “even though it’s Peter that’s the image of poor Karl.” We hung upon her words: was that famous marriage-bed mystery, as in a Victorian novel, about to have a deathbed resolution? But her voice gave out. Ambrose took her free hand (Magda had been holding the other from the start) and called the name Karl to her. His mother smiled, closed her eyes, and spoke her last words: “He was right smart of a cocksman, that Karl.”

It took her body three hours more to complete the unsavoury work of dying, which she did not interrupt for further comment. And so, while all signs point to an intramural adultery, that little question, and a fortiori the question of Ambrose’s paternity, remains open, presumably forever.

We buried her on the Wednesday in the family plot, rich in Thomas and Wilhelm Mensch’s funerary oeuvre. Peter attended in a wheelchair and, together with Ambrose, pointed out to me their grandfather’s sturdy Gothic revivalisms and the more baroque flights of the uncle they never knew, which really were rather surprising. Also that sculptor’s own unmarked marker, which Hector Mensch, one-armed, had struggled obsessively and in vain to cut to his satisfaction. (St Helena still on his mind, Ambrose remarked that Napoleon’s tombstone on that island reads simply HERE LIES, his French attendants unyielding in their demand that the verb’s object be simply Napoleon, his British gaolers equally insistent that it be Napoleon Buonaparte.) The Mensches being at least three generations of shrug-shouldered agnostics, Andrea’s funeral service was brief as an epitaph, and at our unanimous insistence Peter went even more directly from cemetery to hospital than his mother had gone vice versa.

There he has remained since, awaiting with us the results of his “tests.” Ambrose meanwhile, not for nothing a Johns Hopkins alumnus, has “worked up” the presenting symptomatology on his own and confided to me his fearful tentative diagnosis: osteogenic sarcoma consequent upon Paget’s disease. The latter is a chronic skeletal disorder of unknown etiology, afflicting perhaps 3 % of adults over 40. Often asymptomatic, its pathology is marked by excessive resorption of bone and chaotic compensatory replacement thereof by structurally inferior “pagetic” bone, which sometimes leads to deformity (bowed legs, enlarged facial bones), altered gait, pathologic transverse fractures in the weight-bearing bones, and sundry of Peter’s complaints. It is as if (Ambrose’s dark trope) thieves stole good stonework systematically from a building’s foundation and concealed their theft with slapdash masonry: after a time the building settles, cracks, and in rare instances even collapses. Among the complications of Paget’s disease (luckily in no more than a small percent of cases) is bone cancer.

On this subject my lover would not enlarge, though given the familial disposition you may be sure he is a ready amateur oncologist. We must await, he says, the measurement of Peter’s plasma alkaline phosphatase level and the reading of the X rays, both promised for this afternoon or evening.

We have done our waiting à trois (plus Angela), in strange sad harmony in Mensch’s Castle, in order to be close to Peter, to help calm Angela, and to lend support to Magda — who however is as much our supporter as we hers. How did I ever feel for that woman the vulgar emotion of jealousy? When now I so admire her tranquil strength, her stoicism so far from unfeeling, and am at the same time so secure with Ambrose in our late connexion, I think I should scarcely mind if…