But, needless to say, the conjunction of our sorrows and of the stages of our Stages, so to speak, has in all senses chastened this 3rd week of “mutuality.” The three of us hold hands in reciprocal succour and stare at the no longer revolvable camera obscura, fixed for keeps upon the county hospital, the broken seawall, the river of incongruous pleasure boats. Angie, always with us, eyes her egg. One will not be surprised if our Week of Abstinence extends beyond the week.
Beyond it, I suppose, lie some sort of “husbandly” 4th week and “tyrannical” 5th, followed by the climax of the Climax and then by who knows what dénouement. This is no time or place to speculate on that, or on the fact that well ere then — indeed, by this time next week — another moon will have filled (the Sturgeon Moon!) and begun to empty, and I shall either have remenstruated after all or determined that I am, despite all odds and whatever the issue, pregnant, pregnant, pregnant.
And beyond our Lighthouse, our chaste hand-holding? Well, we gather that the director and company of Frames (!) have not stood still for our grave interlude. They returned to Maryland not long after us and have been busy down at “Barataria” and over in D.C., preparing sets and selecting locations for the film’s climactic scenes: the Burning of Washington and the Bombardment of Baltimore. Tomorrow being the 155th anniversary of that former — and the company having sometime since Resorbed and Chaotically Redeposited Jacob Horner’s penchant for anniversaries — we look for shooting to commence then on the Big Scene. Starring Merry Bernstein, we presume (as Dolley Madison?), but presumably not involving a resumption of the feud between Director and Author, unless someone new has been assigned the latter role. It seems to us that “Bruce” and his counterpart (Brice? I mean Audio and Video, you know: T-Dum and T-Dee) are now the acting dramaturges, regents for the Regent…
But our curiosity about these matters is understandably much tempered. Ambrose remains on the company’s payroll (thank heaven), but nothing’s being asked of him beyond his presence on the set tomorrow if our circumstances permit: we’re to hear tonight whether “the set” is Bloodsworth Island or Bladensburg. We’ll decide tomorrow whether to go: perhaps take Magda and Angie with us to distract them, if the news we await from down the hall does not distract us from all distraction.
The other large Meanwhile is that Ambrose, in part to distract himself, has, since rearriving at the Lighthouse, plunged almost fervidly into that new project I mentioned in my last. (Where is his pretty Perseus piece? Medusa’d forever, I fear; and there’s a pity, for I believe us to have been in it, he and I, properly estellated into Art. Moreover, I now trust him to have got us down Right.) What began as rather a joke, not the best joke in the world either, has become, if not a fair obsession, Ambrose’s preemptive literary concern. It will not surprise me, and now shall not you, if he really does solicit for his purposes your copies of these weekly letters (by my estimate this is the 22nd consecutive Saturday I’ve addressed you!).
A month ago I’d have been appalled at the notion of his even reading them, not to mention using them. Now… I find I don’t really mind. They do spell out something of a story, don’t they, with a sort of shape to it? Wanting perhaps in climax and dénouement, but fetching its principals withal at least to this present gravely tranquil plateau.
Yes. I think I’m granting you my permission, who never after the first time deigned to respond to me, to respond as you please to Ambrose, should he in fact make such a request of you. Always assuming that you received #‘s 2 through 22 in the first place and (here I complete — and forever put behind me! — my six months’ self-abnegation) perchance preserved them, those epistles from
Germaine
P.S. (7:00 P.M.): Laboratory and X-ray findings in, and A.‘s lay worst-case diagnosis confirmed in dreadful particular: Paget’s disease, of sufficient standing to have involved pelvic bones, femurs, lower spine, and temporal bone. “Explosive” phosphatase level. Strong roent-genographic evidence of multicentric osteo-sarcoma: apparent lesions at least in right distal femur and left proximal tibia; apparent metastasis already at least to one lung. The doctor will not speak yet of prognosis, but to Ambrose he needn’t: it’s Very Poor indeed, even with massive radiation and radical “ablative operative therapy”—i.e., multiple amputation. In all likelihood, a few hellish months.
O poor Peter! Poor Magda! Poor tumorous humankind!
E: Todd Andrews to his father. 13 R, a visit from Polly Lake, a call from Jeannine.
Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys
Court Lane
Cambridge, Maryland 21613
Friday, August 8, 1969
Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d
Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery
Cambridge, Maryland 21613
Old Progenitor,
Events recircle like turkey buzzards, from whose patient orbits — eccentric, even retrograde, but ever closing — we determine their dead sun. Seven weeks have passed since 12 R, my Second Dark Night. A full month since the subsequent illumination of 13 R: my recognition that their target is yours truly. What prompts my pen today is neither another such night nor another such dawning, but a long and oddly clouded afternoon, my last here in the office before my August vacation cruise — an afternoon which I’m moved to prolong yet further by writing you about it, in hopes of glimpsing what’s behind those clouds.
13 L, Dad (see my letter to you of May 16 last), was your son’s resolve on the morning of June 21 or 22, 1937, to live that summer day as routinely as possible and kill himself at its close. Its counterpart in my life’s recycling, 13 R, was what A. B. Cook’s mid-sentence wink — possibly alluding to the Floating Opera? — opened my eyes to, four Fridays past: a replay of 13 L in slower motion (as befits the Suddenly Old), but with a more final finale. Not jubilantly this time, but serenely, I recognized in that Marshyhope committee room what all those goodbyes were about: how my future had indeed been fertilized by my past, attained full growth with but a little cultivation, and was ripe now for harvesting. Instead of a summer’s day, the summer season, lived out as normally as possible in face of such extraordinaries as the loss of Polly Lake and the miraculous regaining (and relosing) of Jane. For the summer solstice, the autumnal equinox should serve, or thereabouts; keep late September clear on your appointment calendar, Dad, for our too long postponed reunion.
In the six or seven weeks till when, I mean to make a final single-handed circuit of my favorite Chesapeake anchorages and watch the Perseid meteors for the last time from Osborn Jones. I hope too to wind up a deal of unfinished business before my deadline: principally the matter of Harrison’s estate, but also my Inquiry into your suicide; my Letter; the little mystery of Jane’s blackmailing; and the still-unbridged crevasse, so narrow yet so deep, between me and Drew (who has avoided me entirely since his rare overtures of July).
But I do not conceive 13 R to be necessarily either a detailed rerun of 13 L or a tidy wrap-up of my life. If differences remain unreconciled, distances unbridged, mysteries unresolved, businesses unfinished by (say) 9/21 or 22, so be it, Dad: I’ll keep our appointment.
By what vehicle? The Original Floating Theatre II is too obvious to be ruled out, given our Author’s want of subtlety. But I do not consider myself bound to the letter of His crude scenarios; the choice of vehicle I regard as matter of small, if not of no, importance. I shall not, however, attempt this time to take others with me, I think; at least not Innocent Bystanders — though I am unrepentant for having so attempted last time around, and would without compunction destroy certain of the world’s Dreadfuls along with myself if such a happy dénouement could be arranged. Alas, no one conveniently to hand is to my knowledge wicked enough: not even our elected rulers over on the banks of the Potomac. My final crossing, like my final cruise, looks to be a solo voyage.