Despite some lurking allegory, which I regret, “Ambrose His Mark” gains in artistic tidiness from its reconception of the family described in my chapter G. And the narrative viewpoint, a nipple’s-eye view as it were, is piquant, though perhaps less appropriate to the theme of ontological ambiguity than the “first-person anonymous” viewpoint of A. M. King’s version. No matter. “Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose!” the narrator intones at the end, watching to see what the name calls: “Regard that beast, ungraspable, most queer, pricked up in my soul’s crannies!”

I like that.

H

Here was the “Water-Message” episode from my eleventh year, whereof it disconcerts me still to speak, yet which occasions all this speech, these swarming letters. In his retelling our Author retains my third-person viewpoint, omniscient with Ambrose, but drops that authorial “I” of sections A through F. The year is 1940; Grandfather is five years dead, his prostatic cancer having metastasized in 1935. There is no mention of Uncle Karl, who however returned to direct the firm that same year, apparently made his peace with Hector, and hired a bachelor flat down near the yacht basin. Nor of Konrad and Rosa, who also now rent an apartment of their own, across the corner from the Menschhaus, residence then only of Hector and Andrea, Peter and me. Gentle Konrad is still teaching fifth grade in East Dorset Elementary School, tuning pianos, and bicycling the streets of Dorset on behalf of the Grolier Society’s Book of Knowledge, whose contents he knows by heart. He and Rosa are childless. Ardent fisher off the “New Bridge” as well as cyclist, Konrad has skin cancer and a year to live. None of this is in the published version, nor of Hector’s arm, withered now like the late kaiser’s (his limp is mentioned), nor of his gradual self-reestablishment, after Karl’s return to the firm, in the county public school system: he is principal now of East Dorset Elementary, the smallest in the city and the poorest except for its Negro counterpart. Ambrose (on with the story) is a timid fourth grader, uneasy in his skin, fearful of his fellows, saturated with the Book of Knowledge, broodily curious about the Book of Life, abjectly dreaming of heroic transfiguration. All done in images of mythic flight: seaward-leaning buoys, invocations of Odysseus, foreshadowings of dark illumination, etc.

Thus the “ground situation.” The “vehicle” of the plot is Ambrose’s desire to plumb the mysteries of the Occult Order of the Sphinx, a gang of preadolescent boys loosely led by Peter, which “meets” after school in a jerry-built hut along the river shore in a stand of trees called the Jungle. “It was in fact a grove of honey locusts, in area no larger than a schoolyard, bounded on two of its inland sides by Erdmann’s Cornlot and on the third by the East Dorset dump. But it was made mysterious by rank creepers and honeysuckle that covered the ground and shrouded every tree, and by a labyrinth of intersecting footpaths. Junglelike too, there was about it a voluptuous fetidity; gray rats and starlings decomposed where BB’d; curly-furred retrievers spoored the paths; there were to be seen on occasion, stuck on twig ends or flung amid the creepers, ugly little somethings in whose presence Ambrose snickered with the rest…” You get the idea. Exiled by the older boys — who after surprising a pair of lovers in their clubhouse, gleefully enter it for what one guesses to be ritual masturbation — Ambrose wanders the beach with smelly, feisty little Perse Golz, a third grader whom he tries to impress by pretending to receive and transmit coded messages from the Occult Order.

Very painful to remember, these classic humiliations of the delicately nerved among the healthy roughnecks of the world, whom, like Babel his Cossacks or Kafka his carnivores, I still half love and half despise. A message, a message — the heart of such a child longs for some message from the larger world, the lost true home whereof it vaguely dreams, whereto it yearns from its felt exile. “You are not the child of your alleged parents,” is what he craves to hear, however much he may care for them. “Your mother is a royal virgin, your father a god in mortal guise. Your kingdom lies to west of here, to westward, where the tide runs from East Dorset, past cape and cove, black can, red nun,” et cetera.

And mirabile, mirabile, mirabile dictu: one arrives! Lying in the seaweed where the tide has left it: a bottle with a note inside! “Past the river and the Bay, from continents beyond… borne by currents as yet uncharted, nosed by fishes as yet unnamed… the word had wandered willy-nilly to his threshold.” By all the gods, Germaine: I still believe that here is where Ambrose M. drops out of life’s game and begins his career as Professional Amateur, one who loves but does not know: with the busting, by brickbat, of that bottle; with receipt of that damning, damned blank message, which confirms both his dearest hope — that there are Signs — and his deepest fear — that they are not for him. Cruel Yours Truly falsely mine! Take that, and this, and the next, and never reach the end, you who cut me off from my beginning!

I

I’m lost in thefunhouse, Germaine. The I of this episode isn’t I; I don’t know who it is.

In fact I was once briefly lost in a funhouse, at age twelve or thirteen, and included the anecdote in section I of this Amateur manuscript. But it happened in Asbury Park, New Jersey, not Ocean City, Maryland; I was with Mother and Aunt Rosa (lately widowed, whom the excursion was intended to divert); neither Father nor Uncle Karl was with us; I got separated from Peter in a dark corridor, wandered for a few minutes in aimless mild alarm, met another young wanderer with whom I made my way to the exit, where Peter waited — and found my companion to be a black boy. In those days (circa 1943) such a dénouement was occasion for good-humored racist teasing, of which there was full measure en route home. The point of Arthur Morton King’s anecdote was the sentimental-liberal one of Ambrose’s double awakening: to the fact of bigotry among those he loves, which he vows never to fall into; and to his budding fictive imagination, which recognizes that such experiences as that in the funhouse are symbolically charged, the stuff of stories. In short, an intimation of future authorship as conventionally imagined: the verbal transmutation of experience into art.

I don’t know how to feel about our friend’s rerendering, by far the most extravagant liberty that he’s taken with what I gave him. It goes without saying that I’ve no objection to even the most radical rearrangement of my experience for his literary purposes; my gift of these episodes was a donnée with no strings attached. All the same…

Oh well: I simply can’t be objective about either my lostness in the funhouse or his story, which, while very different from the facts, is perhaps truer and surely more painful. In that version, the ride to “Ocean City,” seen omnisciently through young A’s sensibility, is all covert dramatic irony and dark insinuation. On the front seat of the car are Hector (driving) and Uncle Karl, between them Andrea; on the back seat Peter (about fifteen) sits behind Hector, Ambrose behind Uncle Karl, and behind Andrea, “Magda G—, age fourteen, a pretty girl… who lived not far from them on B——Street in the town of D—, Maryland.”

The insinuations come to this: that Andrea may have had or be having an affair with Karl; that Peter, at least, may be in fact Karl’s son instead of Hector’s; and that not only Hector but young Ambrose may at least half-sense this possible state of affairs!