But A. and I are too amused, aroused, and exhausted to sleep. Showered and pajama’d, we praise each other’s scrappiness; we shake our heads at the rueful irony of his injured writing hand and wonder about Merope and Bray and A. B. Cook. (I wonder too whether we are sharing the same bed in which — but never mind.) We decide that the Word-versus-Image subplot really has gone far enough, at least in its hostile aspect. Presently we sleep, only to be waked well after midnight by a single final mighty bang out in the marshes. It seems to have come from the direction of the firing zone; but there is no sound of planes, and the storm has passed to occasional silent lightning flickers in the east. Has Bruce, we wonder, slipped out after all to do the navy yard? Or has luckless Napoleon stumbled upon a bit of unexploded ordnance and blown himself to kingdom come? In any case, I sleepily observe, it is indeed past midnight: i.e., it is Monday, 25 August, 1st day of Week 4 etc. We may put by our programmatic abstinence. We do.
Next morning all hands compare notes on that last explosion. B. & B. disclaim responsibility, but wish they’d “caught” it. Merope is still stoned, Prinz is still fed up, with her and all of us. A. B. Cook has been up betimes: navy search-craft are on their way, he reports, and adds that inasmuch as he has been being pressured to yield title to Barataria Lodge to the federal government, we may expect some interrogatory harassment from navy intelligence and security people concerning trespass into the Prohibited Area. We are to cooperate respectfully (There are cries of “Off the pigs!”) — but if anyone happens to possess marijuana or other illegal material, it were well to dispose of it. Laughter, hoots, further obscenities, and much busy disposal.
Ambrose’s wrist is sorer and sorer, and our business is done. Even so, we dally till nearly noon out of curiosity to watch the search and speak to sober-faced but polite military people. Ambrose uses Cook’s typewriter to peck out his left-handed letter to you, and remarks afterward that he can now sympathise with his late father’s one-armed attempt at memorial sculpture. No trace of Jerry Bray. Still bluff and cheerful, Cook nonetheless expresses concern that the Department of Defense may use this unfortunate accident to justify condemnation proceedings against him.
There is one final small crisis. On the first available boat after breakfast, Reg Prinz leaves for the mainland, for his rented car (how can he drive without his glasses?), and for Manhattan, with not even a good-bye to Merry B. She is not too “zonked” to get the message, with suitable abandoned outcry. I do my best and then leave her to her friends, who agree that the fellow is a fink, maybe even a nark. Cook urges us to stay for lunch, thanks us for our assistance as if he were the film’s producer (who knows?), and heartily hopes we’ll “see things through to the final frame.”
The former invitation we decline. The latter, in its cinematographic aspect, involves two more scenes: Fort McHenry and Barataria. We shall see. Between ourselves, I happily report, Ambrose and I are indeed inclined to See Things Through et cetera — though there has arisen, since the Burning of Washington, a certain question about the number of frames to go.
Of that question I shall not speak here: see his, our, letter to “A. M. King,” attached. We were ferried back in style to Bishops Head aboard one of the small navy craft (Ambrose pointed out a skipjack entering the strait under sail from seaward and wondered whether it was Mr Andrews’s), retrieved our car, and drove home — History at the wheel, perforce — to the sinking Menschhaus.
A bittersweet interval, the next few days: see that same letter. Our original 4th Stage, you may remember (I surely do), was something sorry, as was our 5th: that degrading latter May and June and July. A good side of the bad coin of Peter’s crisis is that — along with our growing love — it set aside all but the tenderest echoes of those reenactments of, respectively, Ambrose’s marriage to Marsha Blank and the ménage à trois with Peter and Magda which immediately preceded our own affair. I can therefore summarise. Even as we got Ambrose’s wrist fracture set and cast in the hospital emergency room, Peter was discharged into our care to await his radical surgery: the last ten days, as it turned out, of his life. On 27 August the full Sturgeon Moon rose out of the upper Choptank, sailed over Mensch’s Castle, and set in Chesapeake Bay without the aid of Germaine Gordon Pitt’s menstruation. Magda wept and kissed me. Peter called for champagne. Ambrose hugged his daughter, his sister-in-law, and his fiancée, and soberly toasted the health of… the six of us. On the Saturday (30 August) a letter arrived from Marsha, meant to shock us: Peter, she declared, not Ambrose, was Angela’s father. It did not. More champagne. See A.‘s letter.
The which he taped, and I transcribed, on the Monday, 1 September, Labour Day. In and by it Ambrose proposed to marry me on Saturday 13th (the date of this, though we are not there yet); and I accepted despite certain apprehensions therein registered. We did not know, as we played with our sixes and sevens and scheduled climaxes within climaxes, that Joe Morgan up in Fort Erie was shooting himself through the head, and that Marsha Blank Mensch had (reluctantly, I’m sure) relieved Ambrose of further alimony payments by marrying Jacob Horner! And that dear Peter had but four more days to live.
Those days — the first four of our 5th week of Mutuality — are too near and dear and painful to recount. I am not a weak woman. I have myself watched a husband die (and lost a previous lover, and a son). But I do not fathom the strength and serenity, or the capaciousness of heart, of Magda Giulianova. I quite love that woman! We four (five, six) quite loved one another. I can say no more. See etc.
On the 4th, a Thursday, Peter reentered hospital for amputation of both legs, one to the hip, the other to the knee, with every likelihood even so of surviving less than five years. A confusion of schedules kept the orthopedic surgeon, a weekly visitor from Baltimore, up in the city a day longer than expected; the operation was postponed till next afternoon. That Thursday night someone broke into the closed office of Mensch Masonry, rifled the files (sealed by court-appointed receivers), and stole copies of the design specifications and foundation blueprints of the Marshyhope Tower of Truth. No clues yet; suspicion falls heavily and kindlessly upon Ambrose, who was in fact with me and/or Magda uninterruptedly. On the Friday morning, sometime before dawn, Peter took a massive dose of Tylenol and ended his life. Suspicion there, too, falls upon the Menschhaus, more mildly but in this case accurately. Though there will be no investigation beyond the routine enquiry required to clear the hospital of liability, the fact is that Magda and Ambrose supplied Peter with pills, at his request, on the Wednesday or Thursday, precisely in case he should change his mind about seeing things through to the final frame.
Why Tylenol? Because, Ambrose explained, aspirin, barbiturates, Seconal, and the like can be promptly pumped out, especially when their taker is already in hospital, without fatal results. But Tylenol, in large doses, besides being easier to lay hands on than prescription chemicals, quickly does irreversible and lethal liver damage. Peter thus became, along with his sculpting Uncle Wilhelm, the only member of the family known not to have died of cancer. We buried him last Saturday beside that uncle and the others, all his limbs attached.
(Angie has been difficult to manage since. The loss seems to have sickened her physically: she wakes up vomiting.)
That same Saturday came the shocking news of Morgan’s accident or suicide (word reached the local newspaper on the Wednesday, but we in the Lighthouse were too distracted to read the newspapers): specifically, that his gunshot wound had been ruled self-inflicted and Jacob Horner cleared of implication, and that the body had been returned from Fort Erie to our neighbouring town of Wicomico for burial on the same day we buried Peter (Morgan’s late wife is buried over there; we have since learned that Horner and his bride accompanied the casket from Ontario to Maryland, along with Morgan’s sons). The funeral having been a private affair, there was to be a memorial service next day in the chapel of Marshyhope State University. We decided that I should attend, as having been closest of the family to Morgan. Ambrose would stay with Magda and Angie.