Now the fact of my salvation and my plain need for a pacifier had by this time brought Aunt Rosa to her feet; she alone beheld the whole quick sequence of attack, parry, collapse, and indiscriminating vengeance. But with me and Peter in her care her knees did not fail her: she snatched my brother’s hand and fled with us from the yard.
In Grace meanwhile the service had proceeded despite shotgun-blast and clang of pans, which however were acknowledged with small stirs and meetings of eyes. Through hymn, Creed, and prayer, through anthem, lesson, and Gloria the order of worship had got, as far as to the notices and offertory. There being among the congregation a baby come for christening, the young minister had called its parents and Godparents to the font.
“Dearly beloved,” he had exhorted, “forasmuch as all men, though fallen in Adam, are born into this world in Christ the Redeemer, heirs of life eternal and subjects of the saving grace of the Holy Spirit; and that our Savior Christ saith: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God’; I beseech you to call upon God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of His bounteous goodness He will so grant unto this child, now to be baptized, the continual replenishing of His grace.…”
Here the ritual gave way before a grand ado in the rear of the church: Aunt Rosa’s conviction that the family’s reckoning was at hand had fetched her across the avenue and up the stone steps, only to abandon her on the threshold of the sanctuary. She stood with Peter and me there in the vestibule, and we three raised a caterwaul the more effective for every door’s being stopped open to cool the faithful.
“First-degree murder!” Rosa shrieked, the urgentest alarum she could muster. Organ ceased, minister also; all eyes turned; ushers and back-pew parishioners hurried to investigate, but could not achieve a more lucid account of what ailed us. The names Poppa Tom and Willy Erdmann, however, came through clearly enough to suggest the location of the emergency. Mrs. Mayne, the preacher’s wife, led us from the vestibule toward shelter in the parsonage; a delegation of lay-leaders hastened to our house, and the Reverend Dr. Mayne, having given instructions that he be summoned if needed, bade his distracted flock pray.
Grandfather’s victims had not been long discovering their fresh affliction, for the bees’ docility was spent. Where the cluster fell, none knew for certain, but on impact it had resolved into separate angry bees. There was a howling and a flurrying of limbs. Konrad and Willy Erdmann scrambled apart to flail like epileptics in the grass. Grandfather rushed in batting his hands and shouting “Nein, lieber Gott, sting Willy just!” Only Mother made no defense; having swooned from one fright and wakened to another, she now lay weeping where she’d been dumped: up-ended, dazed, and sore exposed.
But whom neither pain nor the fear of it can move, shame still may. The bees were already dispersing when the Methodists reached our fence; at sight of them the principals fell to accusation.
“Stole my swarm and sicked ‘em on me!” Erdmann hollered from the grass.
“Bah, it was my bees anyhow,” Grandfather insisted. He pointed to Andrea. “You see what he done. And busted the hammock yet!”
My mother’s plight had not escaped their notice, nor did their notice now escape hers: she sprang up at once, snatched together the kimono, sprinted a-bawl for the summerkitchen. Her departure was regarded by all except Erdmann, who moved to answer Grandfather’s last insinuation with a fresh assault, and Uncle Konrad, who this time checked him effectively until others came over the fence to help.
“Thieves and whores!” Erdmann cried trembling. “Now he steals my bees!”
“It’s all a great shame,” Konrad said to the company, who as yet had no clear notion what had occurred. His explanation was cut off by Erdmann, not yet done accusing Grandfather.
“Thinks he’s God Almighty!”
Joe Voegler the blacksmith said, “Nah, Willy, whoa down now.”
Mr. Erdmann wept. “Nobody’s safe! Takes what he pleases!”
Grandfather was examining his hands with interest. “Too quick they turned him loose, he ain’t cured yet.”
“Would you see him home, Joe?” Uncle Konrad asked. “We’ll get it straightened out. I’m awful sorry, Willy.”
“You talk!” Erdmann shrieked at him. “You been in on it too!”
Grandfather clucked his tongue.
“Come on, Willy,” Voegler said. A squat-muscled, gentle man with great arms and lower lip, he led Erdmann respectfully toward the alley.
“What you think drove Hector nuts?” Erdmann appealed. “He knows what’s what!”
“So does Willy,” Grandfather remarked aside. “That’s why the opera glasses.”
The onlookers smiled uncertainly. Uncle Konrad shook his head. “I’m sorry, everybody.”
Our neighbor’s final denunciation was delivered from his back steps as Voegler ushered him to the door. “Brat’s got no more father’n a drone bee! Don’t let them tell you I done it!”
Grandfather snorted. “What a man won’t say. Excuse me, I go wash the bee-stings.”
He had, it seems, been stung on the hands and fingers a number of times—all, he maintained, in those last seconds when he flung the cluster. Konrad, himself unstung, remained behind to explain what had happened and apologize once more. The group then dispersed to spread the story, long to be recounted in East Dorset. Aunt Rosa, Peter, and I were retrieved from the parsonage; Uncle Konrad expressed the family’s regrets to Dr. Mayne, a friend of his and not devoid of wit.
“The Lord shall hiss for the fly that is in Egypt,” the minister quoted, “and for the bee that is in Assyria, and they shall come and rest all of them in the desolate valleys. There’s an omen here someplace.”
At Konrad’s suggestion the two went that afternoon on embassies of peace to both houses. There was no question of litigation, but Dr. Mayne was concerned for the tranquillity of future worship-services, and disturbed by the tenor of Erdmann’s charge.
“So. Tell Willy I forgive him his craziness,” Grandfather instructed them. “I send him a gallon of mead when it’s ready.”
“You don’t send him a drop,” Dr. Mayne said firmly. “Not when we just got him cured. And Willy’s not the first to say things about you-all. I’m not sure you don’t want some forgiving yourself.”
Grandfather shrugged. “I could tell things on people, but I don’t hold grutches. Tell Willy I forgive him his trespasses, he should forgive mine too.”
Dr. Mayne sighed.
Of the interview with Erdmann I can give no details; my uncle, who rehearsed these happenings until the year of his death, never dwelt on it. This much is common knowledge in East Dorset: that Willy never got his bees back, and in fact disposed of his own hives not long after; that if he never withdrew his sundry vague accusations, he never repeated them either, so that the little scandal presently subsided; finally, that he was cured for good and all of any interest he might have had in my mother, whom he never spoke to again, but not, alas, of his dipsomania, which revisited him at intervals during my youth, impaired his business, made him reclusive, and one day killed him.
The extraordinary swarming was variously interpreted. Among our neighbors it was regarded as a punishment of Andrea in particular for her wantonness, of our family in general for its backsliding and eccentricity. Even Aunt Rosa maintained there was more to it than mere chance, and could not be induced to taste the product of our hive. Grandfather on the contrary was convinced that a change in our fortunes was imminent—so striking an occurrence could not but be significant—and on the grounds that things were as bad as they could get, confidently expected there to be an improvement.
Portentous or not, the events of that morning had two notable consequences for me, the point and end of their chronicling here: First, it was discovered that my mother’s bawling as she fled from the scene had not been solely the effect of shame: in her haste to cover herself, she had trapped beneath the kimono one bee, which single-handedly, so to speak
, had done what the thousands of his kindred had refrained from: his only charge he had fired roundly into their swarming-place, fount of my sustenance. It was enflamed with venom and grotesquely swollen; Mother was prostrate with pain. Aunt Rosa fetched cold compresses, aspirins, and the family doctor, who after examining the wound prescribed aspirins and cold compresses.
“And do your nursing on the porch,” he recommended. “Goodness gracious.”
But Andrea had no further use for that aspect of motherhood. Though the doctor assured her that the swelling would not last more than a few days, during which she could empty the injured breast by hand and nurse with the other, she refused to suckle me again; a diet free of butterfat was prescribed to end her lactation. As of that Sunday I was weaned not only from her milk but from her care; thenceforth it was Rosa who bathed and changed, soothed and burped me, after feeding me from a bottle on her aproned lap.
As she went about this the very next morning, while Mother slept late, she exclaimed to her husband, “It’s a bee!”
Uncle Konrad sprang from his eggs and rushed around the table to our aid, assuming that another fugitive had been turned up. But it was my birthmark Rosa pointed out: the notion had taken her that its three lobes resembled the wings and abdomen of a bee in flight.
“Oh boy,” Konrad sighed.
“Nah, it is a bee! A regular bee! I declare.”
My uncle returned to his breakfast, opining that no purple bee ought to be considered regular who moreover flew upside down without benefit of head.
“You laugh; there’s more to this than meets the eye,” his wife said. “All the time he was our Honig, that’s what drew the bees. Now his mark.”
Grandfather entered at this juncture, and while unable to share Aunt Rosa’s interpretation of my birthmark, he was willing to elaborate on her conceit.
“Ja, sure, he was the Honig, and Andy’s the queen, hah? And Hector’s a drone that’s been kicked out of the hive.”
Aunt Rosa lightly fingered my port-wine mark. “What did Willy Erdmann mean about the Honig was a drone-bee?”
“Never mind Willy,” Konrad said. “Anyhow we poor worker-ones have to get to it.”
But all that forenoon as he plied his wrench and dinged his forks he smiled at his wife’s explanation of the swarm; after lunch it turned in his fancy as he pedaled through West End on behalf of The Book of Knowledge. By suppertime, whether drawing on his own great fund of lore or the greater of his stock-in-trade, he had found a number of historical parallels to my experience in the hammock.
“It’s as clear a naming-sign as you could ask for,” he declared to Andrea.
“I don’t even want to think about it,” Mother said. She was still in some pain, not from the venom but from superfluous lactation, which her diet had not yet checked.
“No, really,” he said. “For instance, a swarm of bees lit on Plato’s mouth when he was a kid. They say that’s where he got his way with words.”
“Is that a fact now,” Aunt Rosa marveled, who had enlarged all day to Mother on the coincidence of my nickname, my birthmark, and my immersion in the bees. “I never did read him yet.”
“No kid of mine is going to be called Plato,” Andrea grumbled. “That’s worse than Christine.”
Uncle Konrad was not discouraged. “Plato isn’t the end of it. They said the exact same thing about Sophocles, that wrote all the tragedies.”
Mother allowed this to be more to the point. “Tragedies is all it’s been, one after the other.” But Sophocles pleased her no more than Plato as a given name. Xenophon, too, was rejected, whose Anabasis, though my uncle had not read it himself, was held to have been sweetened by the same phenomenon.
“If his name had been Bill or Percy,” said my mother. “But Xenophon for Christ sake.”
Grandfather had picked his teeth throughout this discussion. “A Greek named Percy,” he now growled.
Aunt Rosa, whose grip on the thread of conversation was ever less strong than her desire to be helpful, volunteered that the Greek street-peddler from whom Konrad had purchased her a beautiful Easter egg at the Oberammergau Passion play in 1910 had been named Leonard Something-or-other.
“It was on his pushcart, that stood all the time by our hotel,” she explained, and not to appear overauthoritative, added: “But Konrad said he was a Jew.”
“Look here,” said Uncle Konrad. “Call him Ambrose.”
“Ambrose?”
“Sure Ambrose.” Quite serious now, he brushed back with his hand his straight blond hair and regarded Mother gravely. “Saint Ambrose had the same thing happen when he was a baby. All these bees swarmed on his mouth while he was asleep in his father’s yard, and everybody said he’d grow up to be a great speaker.”
“Ambrose,” Rosa considered. “That ain’t bad, Andy.”
My mother admitted that the name had a not unpleasant sound, at least by contrast with Xenophon.
“But the bees was more on this baby’s eyes and ears than on his mouth,” Grandfather observed for the sake of accuracy. “They was all over the side of his face there where the mark is.”
“One of them sure wasn’t,” Mother said.
“So he’ll grow up to see things clear,” said Uncle Konrad.
Andrea sniffed and lit a cigarette. “Long as he grows up to be a saint like his Uncle Konrad, huh Rosa. Saints we can use in this family.”
The conversation turned to other matters, but thenceforward I was called Saint Ambrose, in jest, as often as Honig, and Ambrose by degrees became my name. Yet years were to pass before anyone troubled to have me christened or to correct my birth certificate, whereon my surname was preceded by a blank. And seldom was I ever to be called anything but Honig, Honeybee (after my ambiguous birthmark), or other nicknames.
As toward one’s face, one’s body, one’s self, one feels complexly toward the name he’s called by, which too one had no hand in choosing. It was to be my fate to wonder at that moniker, relish and revile it, ignore it, stare it out of countenance into hieroglyph and gibber, and come finally if not to embrace at least to accept it with the cold neutrality of self-recognition, whose expression is a thin-lipped smile. Vanity frets about his name, Pride vaunts it, Knowledge retches at its sound, Understanding sighs; all live outside it, knowing well that I and my sign are neither one nor quite two.
Yet only give it voice: whisper “Ambrose,” as at rare times certain people have—see what-all leaves off to answer! Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose! Regard that beast, ungraspable, most queer, pricked up in my soul’s crannies!
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A Self-Recorded Fiction
You who listen give me life in a manner of speaking.
I won’t hold you responsible.
My first words weren’t my first words. I wish I’d begun differently.
Among other things I haven’t a proper name. The one I bear’s misleading, if not false. I didn’t choose it either.
I don’t recall asking to be conceived! Neither did my parents come to think of it. Even so. Score to be settled. Children are vengeance.
I seem to’ve known myself from the beginning without knowing I knew; no news is good news; perhaps I’m mistaken.
Now that I reflect I’m not enjoying this life: my link with the world.
My situation appears to me as follows: I speak in a curious, detached manner, and don’t necessarily hear myself. I’m grateful for small mercies. Whether anyone follows me I can’t tell.
Are you there? If so I’m blind and deaf to you, or you are me, or both’re both. One may be imaginary; I’ve had stranger ideas. I hope I’m a fiction without real hope. Where there’s a voice there’s a speaker.
I see I see myself as a halt narrative: first person, tiresome. Pronoun sans ante or precedent, warrant or respite. Surrogate for the substantive; contentless form, interestless principle; blind eye blinking at nothing. Who am I. A little crise d’identité for you.
I must compose myself.
Look, I’m writing
. No, listen, I’m nothing but talk; I won’t last long. The odds against my conception were splendid; against my birth excellent; against my continuance favorable. Are yet. On the other hand, if my sort are permitted a certain age and growth, God help us, our life expectancy’s been known to increase at an obscene rate instead of petering out. Let me squeak on long enough, I just might live forever: a word to the wise.
My beginning was comparatively interesting, believe it or not. Exposition. I was spawned not long since in an American state and born in no better. Grew in no worse. Persist in a representative. Prohibition, Depression, Radicalism, Decadence, and what have you. An eye sir for an eye. It’s alleged, now, that Mother was a mere passing fancy who didn’t pass quickly enough; there’s evidence also that she was a mere novel device, just in style, soon to become a commonplace, to which Dad resorted one day when he found himself by himself with pointless pen. In either case she was mere, Mom; at any event Dad dallied. He has me to explain. Bear in mind, I suppose he told her. A child is not its parents, but sum of their conjoinèd shames. A figure of speech. Their manner of speaking. No wonder I’m heterodoxical.
Nothing lasts longer than a mood. Dad’s infatuation passed; I remained. He understood, about time, that anything conceived in so unnatural and fugitive a fashion was apt to be freakish, even monstrous—and an advertisement of his folly. His second thought therefore was to destroy me before I spoke a word. He knew how these things work; he went by the book. To expose ourselves publicly is frowned upon; therefore we do it to one another in private. He me, I him: one was bound to be the case. What fathers can’t forgive is that their offspring receive and sow broadcast their shortcomings. From my conception to the present moment Dad’s tried to turn me off; not ardently, not consistently, not successfully so far; but persistently, persistently, with at least half a heart. How do I know. I’m his bloody mirror!