Well, Ambrose, for one. My only comfort was the chilling one that he was not yet after all proposing that I move in with him, if indeed he makes the move at all, and the somewhat warmer one that the measured tone of his consideration of the idea, and of Peter’s and Magda’s responses, suggested that they understood Ambrose and me to be a couple, or on the verge of becoming one, and that they accepted, if not quite embraced, the idea. Peter was full of hearty instructions to his brother and his wife: Tell her ’bout the time you got lost in the funhouse and come out with that coloured boy. Tell her how Pa used to try and cut stone with one hand and one foot. Tell her ’bout Grandma seeing Uncle Wilhelm’s naked statues. Magda quietly “expected I’d heard all that”; Ambrose quietly affirmed that I had. No one solicited counteranecdotes from me: How I Was Deflowered With a Capped Fountain Pen; My Several Abortions and Miscarriages; The Amherst Phallic Index to Major British and Continental Novelists of the Early 20th Century, With Commentary.

I was reluctantly permitted, at Ambrose’s insistence, to help the other womenfolk clear table and do dishes whilst our men continued the conversation; my own proposal — that the chef alone be excused from scullery work in gratitude for her earlier labours — was passed over like an embarrassing joke. And I found myself perversely aroused to be doing Woman’s Work with the woman I’d displaced in my lover’s bed. His daughter asked me what a Lady was. “Angie,” Magda quietly reproved her. In my case, I declared, a Lady was simply a lady who married a Lord. Then would Daddy be a Lord one day? “Angie!” And to my surprise, l’Abruzzesa (no, I can’t use that ironic epithet any longer, either) then gave me so understanding a smile, warm and droll and — and womanly, all together, that I wanted to kiss her; did in fact touch her arm, as the Mensches seemed forever to be touching one another’s. Dear “Juliette Récamier” seems to have started something: it’s still men I crave (one man), but I am learning, late, truly to love my fellow woman. I kissed Angela instead, and said, “Don’t bet on it.” (But they are, properly, never ironic with her: my reply was explained straightforwardly to mean that my title would not pass to a second husband, should I take one.)

Ainsi man dimanche. After dinner A. drove me back to 24 L, filling in what I took to be the last remaining blanks in his psychosexual history. No doubt, he averred, his deep continuing attraction to Magda in the 1950’s, albeit entirely chaste and largely unexpressed, had got his marriage off to a lame start, so that by the time it had been quite supplanted by commitment to his wife, her resentment was past mollifying. And they never had been more than roughly suited: two healthy young provincial WASPs of the middle class playing house in the Eisenhower era. He did not believe, in retrospect, that they had deeply loved each other. Neither had had the requisite emotional equipment; call it soul. But they had surely liked each other until their separate adulteries poisoned their connexion; the failure of their marriage had been a considerable shock to his spirit as well as to his ego…

Egad, you Americans! The most sentimental people in the history of the species! Can one imagine a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a Welshman, a Sicilian, a Turk carrying on so? (I hear Ambrose saying, “Sure.”) To change the subject somewhat, I registered my favourable impression of his brother, of Magda, of his daughter; my relief that they had seemed not to dislike me. I ventured further to express my particular gratification at that one smile of Magda’s in the kitchen: the acceptance I thought I saw in it of our situation.

A. considered this. She was in truth a great accepter, he replied: had for example accepted in 1955 the news, confessed by Peter, that Marsha’s list of conquests included himself, who that same year, in an unguarded hour, had permitted himself to fall under the sway of her vindictiveness: she was “getting even” for Ambrose’s obvious feeling for Magda, which Peter knew in his bones to be innocent. Not to keep her husband unfairly in ignorance, Magda had then confessed what otherwise she’d not have troubled him with, since it had no bearing on her love for him: that at one point, when he was overseas and she very lonely, her affection for his younger brother had departed from its prior and subsequent innocence. Not impossibly Ambrose had reported this bit of past history to his wife (but Magda could not imagine why: what was one to do with such information? I quite agreed with this position, as Ambrose reported it; so did he, but he acknowledged that he had made a foolish “clean breast of things” to his bride) and so prompted her retaliation. Magda had then assured Peter of her confidence in his love and advised against his confessing the adultery to Ambrose, for the sound reason aforestated. But Marsha herself, a great exacter of retributions, made her own “confession” and insisted they remove from the Lighthouse, which they did. These several sordid disclosures left no lasting scars on either Peter and Magda’s marriage or the brothers’ affection for each other; but the rift between Ambrose and Marsha became a breach never successfully closed thereafter.

And why, I enquired, was I being thus edified? Was Ambrose still subject, twenty years later, to the twenty-year-old bridegroom’s impulse to make a clean breast of things? Quoth my lover: “Yup.”

And then I saw the darker question raised by his confession. This was 1955, he’d said? Yup. The year in which (truly) dear (and not too awfully) damaged Angela had been begot and brought to light? Yup.

Then just possibly…?

Yup. Adultery in early Pisces; birth (premature) late in Virgo.

And the odds? Unlikely, unlikely. These were pre-Pill days, to be sure, and Marsha (like myself) was not always beforehand with pessary and cream; but she was a diligent spermatocidal doucher. What was more, they had resolved upon pregnancy that year, and so against this single furtive illicit coupling stood a great many licit ones. In which, admittedly, contraception had been forgone. And which, admittedly, had borne no fruit in the several months prior, nor would bear any after (the low motility was revealed in the early 1960’s, when in a spell of reconciliation they strove vainly to conceive again). But I was to bear in mind that he was not (quite) sterile; he was simply not vigorously fertile, though vigorously potent. Whereas good Peter — but that was another story. In any event, he’d never seriously doubted his daughter’s paternity; and he would feel no less her father even if it were proved that he was not her sire. Between him and Peter the matter had not once been alluded to; between him and Magda once only, and that en passant and indirectly. Equally, however, knowing his brother, he did not doubt that Peter and Magda’s dedication to the child, and Peter’s urging him to move “back home” two years ago, “for Angie’s sake,” when Marsha kicked over the traces, and went north with a new boyfriend — not to mention what must have been Peter’s complaisance in the ensuing ménage à trois—stemmed in part from a good bad conscience.

Hum. Nay, further: ho hum! We are by now chez moi, late afternoon and warm; the pool is finally filled at Dorset Heights; Ambrose proposes a cool dip; he has a swimsuit in the trunk of his car, which he’d as lief leave at 24 L for future use. All this matter of contraception and pregnancy has stirred me: I readily assume that his cool dip will be preceded by a warmer; indeed, when we step inside to step out of our step-ins, I am stripped and waiting before he has his trousers down, and the only question in my mind is whether to bring up the Case of the Expropriated Pessary before or after. The man disrobes: I admire as ever his youthful body; am excited in particular by the white of his well-shaped buttocks against the tan of the rest of him, and the tidy cluster of his organs in repose. I am in no danger of lesbianism! Hither, hither…