Letters

We have been making love, as you will have imagined, in recapitulatory fashion: i.e.,

on the Monday Ambrose was scarcely potent, and I awkward and unresponsive (it was midmorning at 24 L; we were both distracted with Last Things); on the Tuesday his potency returned in spades, but I was wondering whatever happened to Bea Golden and managed no more than a partial orgasm; on the Wednesday we were chaste: Magda insisted we go forward not only with our marriage but with our wedding, and we agreed on condition that she and Angie take part in it (I spent the day drafting the preceding pages of this letter). This morning therefore Ambrose warmly reproposed marriage to me; I accepted; we sealed the compact with an “A.M. quickie” and drove up to Baltimore for a story conference.

The Baratarians were already at McHenry, minus Reg Prinz, Merope Bernstein, Jerome Bray (who however was, it seems, somehow not blitzed after all on Bloodsworth), and of course Bea Golden. Bruce, Brice, and A. B. Cook were in clear charge, the laureate commuting to the scene like ourselves but from nearer by: that house of his down near the Bay Bridge. Drew was on hand with his gang (we have learned that he and his lovely black wife are divorcing; no details). Below us in the harbour was moored the yacht Baratarian,

lent us again — by Mack Enterprises? — for water shots, for ferrying gear and personnel between Baltimore and Bloodsworth Island (75 sea miles to south of us), and for limited overnight accommodation. No one was aboard except the hired skipper. Such is the power of the movie-camera lens, at which Ambrose and I still shake our heads, that the U.S. Park Service and the city of Baltimore had obligingly put the fort and the old U.S.F. Constellation (in process of being restored in the city’s inner harbour) at our limited disposal for as long as we required them.

Two days of preparation and one of principal shooting, we estimated, and set about making plans. Since the “D.C.” fracas, Ambrose’s authority seems to have waxed. Prinz’s return is more or less expected tomorrow or Saturday, but is far from certain (Merope, Cook declares, is unbelievably reconciled with Bray and has returned to live with him in Lily Dale!) Bruce & Brice make technical suggestions, but take their orders from Cook; and Cook and my fiancé, believe it or not, are in surprising general rapport on what the scene is to comprise. The historical text is still what they are calling the Ampersand Letter of A. B. Cook IV — the ciphered original begins with that character — which describes not only the operation against Washington but the move on Baltimore. As to the casting: Cook as before will play his ancestor; Ambrose (his cast and sling now exchanged for a wrist bandage) will take the part of F. S. Key, watching through the night from the decks of Baratarian

—renamed Surprize after Admiral Cochrane’s temporary command-ship — to say whether he can see etc. In default of other leading ladies, I have agreed to play Britannia one last time, “still mourning the loss of her colonies in ’76 and making her final effort to repossess them.” What had been projected as a “Third Conception scene” has been rescripted as the Wedding scene: our actual nuptials, but evocative (not my adjective) of the Treaty of Ghent and the new harmony to follow between Britannia and Columbia.

What about British support of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War only 40 years later, I innocently enquire? A mere marital squabble, Cook replies. He then congratulated me, most

warmly, on my Delicate Condition, and proposed that it be made somehow to betoken the parturition of America from Britain. Also, that our wedding march be “God Save the Queen,” sung thus by the “British” and as “My Country ’Tis of Thee” by the Yankees. Finally, to symbolise the birth of a nation truly independent of both Britain and France, the bridegroom Ambrose/Key will draft, and all hands sing, “The Star-Spangled Banner”! There remains to be worked out the inclusion, in this armistitial farrago, of the reconciliation of Word and Image, fiction and film. It is my fiancé’s deadpan hope that Reg Prinz will appear in time for consultation on that score. Otherwise we shall “wing it.”

The constituency of the wedding party, too, has yet to be decided; we shall settle all that tomorrow.

But now it is tomorrow, Friday, 12 September, celebrated in this state as Defender’s Day by reason of the foregoing. It is in fact late evening, properly showering (as in 1814) and cooler, a wet touch of autumn. I did not, it turns out, go up to Baltimore today. Angie was rambunctious, Magda feeling down; I stayed behind to look after things. Now Ambrose has returned and reported; likewise shall I.