Letters Read online

  “He doesn’t have to spend it on the family at all,” I would declare. “He can do anything he wants with it.”

  “Indeed he may; indeed he may.” Hector’s nose itched when he was opposed; he would massage it with left thumb and forefinger. “Let him buy a nice Hampton sailboat. When the company goes into receivership, we’ll all go sailing.”

  It will seem odd that none consulted Peter’s inclinations; in his presence the subject never came up. The truth is, though we were all more sophisticated than my brother, he had already at seventeen assumed a certain authority in our house, stemming it may be from nothing more than his difference from us. Presume as we did that our judgment was sounder, our imagination keener than his, we seemed to understand that his resolve was beyond cajolery. The very futility of our debate lent it sarcastic heat; a variety of awe, more than tact, silenced it when he came upon us. I am reminded of Peter by Homer’s Zeus; indeed, our later ménage in the Lighthouse was something like that deity’s in this respect: Magda might complain like Hera; I chafe and bristle like Poseidon or Hades; Marsha carp and wheedle and connive like Aphrodite—but there were finally no quarrels, for when Peter speaks, though the grumbling may continue, his will is done.

  He spoke, in this instance, on a Saturday evening some days after we’d begun repairing the municipal seawall, whose original construction had laid the firm’s foundation. After the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, tons of granite rubble purchased by the town at salvage prices from the burnt-out city were fetched down the Chesapeake on barges and dumped as “rip-rap” before the wall for additional protection: Grandfather’s idea, and a sound one. But age and ice and hurricane had so far had their way with the concrete in the forty years since, undone and undermined it, that in spring tides it was more breakwater than retaining wall, with virtual harbors behind it. Moved by citizens whose real estate thus silted every tide, the Dorset City Council let bids to repair the wall and increase its height; after long cost-cutting computations by Hector (who, in addition to his principaling, still owned one-third of the company) in conference with Karl (who directed it) and Rosa (owner of the third third), Mensch Masonry submitted the low bid.

  The contract bolstered our sagging fortunes, which only the general wartime prosperity had kept from definitive collapse. Extra carpenters, masons, and cement finishers were engaged; our flatbed truck was repaired on credit; from somewhere a rock crusher and a second main mixer were leased. And in the interest of civic economy, Hector informed us, we would use not a stone from the company yard! The day we first surveyed the job he had scraped algae with his left hand from some of the “Baltimore rocks” in the shallows where Peter and I had used to play pirates and net soft crabs, and had shaken his head at what he saw.

  “Good brownstone and granite,” he’d declared to Karl and Peter. “Already squared, most of it. What a waste.”

  Uncle Karl agreed, and so every day after school and all day Saturday I worked with the gang of Negroes they set to manhandling the Baltimore rocks. At first we fed them indiscriminately to the crusher, moss and all, thence to the mixer, while Father watched with a frown that deepened every time another nicely masoned stone was reduced to chips.

  “A crying shame.”

  Karl sniffed and chewed his unlit cigar. “That one there was Tennessee rose marble, looked like.”

  The upshot was, one Friday at supper they announced an agreement made that forenoon with the mayor and city council: in return for all the squared stones, to be carted to our yard at our own expense, Mensch Masonry would clear away “Grandfather’s” Baltimore rocks altogether and present the city with a usable bathing area in front of the exposed seawall. Hector was enormously proud of the plan (his own), which he felt no ordinary businessman, but only a business artist as it were, could have hatched. What especially pleased him was that our removing, for profit, what Grandfather had for profit placed there was a kind of echo of Grandfather’s benevolent profiting from the immigrants both going and coming.

  He grinned at my aunt. “There is style in this piece of business.”

  Uncle Karl said merely, “Think what Willy could of done with them pink ones.”

  Aunt Rosa had the highest opinion of Hector, whom she still regarded, twenty-five years after the fact, as a shattered young hero of the war, the intellectual counterpart of his artist twin. She laid her hand on her lower abdomen—where all unknown to us her cancer flowered—and cried, “If Konrad just was here once!”

  Tears then were shed for Uncles Konrad and Wilhelm, and for the family’s imminent prosperity. Even Mother must have been impressed, for she made no protest when Father sent me to light the Good Parlor stove and brought two bottles of New York Rhenish from the cold-pantry for a celebration.

  The room was as chilly as its statues, and smelled of coal oil. Aunt Rosa wept again—the last parlor function had been Konrad’s funeral—but the cold wine warmed and cheered us. Family history was rechronicled; we sang “Happy Days Are Here Again” and teased Peter (who had fetched Magda from around the corner) for missing his chance to save the firm or put plumbing in the house before our fortunes changed. Mother even sat in Father’s lap and tipped his glass so that he could embrace her with his arm. In uneasy glee I called, “Get a load of the lovers!” and made everyone laugh by kissing “the Groaner” (so we had dubbed an anguished Greek head of heroic proportion, on a pedestal by the daybed: Wilhelm’s copy of Laocoön, whom the family mistook for Christ crucified) in imitation of Mother.

  Only Peter was not merry, though he regarded our festivity with pensive goodwill from his station before the mantelpiece and murmured gravely, smilingly, to Magda. While Hector blushed at something Mother whispered in his ear, Rosa hummed her favorite sipping song, “Wir wöllen unser alien Kaiser Wilhelm wiederhaben.” I perched on her lap and crooned into her white-fuzzed ear: “Come with me to the Casbah!” Whereat she wrinkled over and pushed me away—Verrückte!”—flattered all the same by my attentions. Peter crimsoned more than Father: embarrassed perhaps by his own embarrassment, he took up the Easter egg from its grapewood stand between the cupids, aimed it at the white light globe that hung from the ceiling on three chains, and addressed himself to the miracle inside. Magda, beside him on a needlepoint chair, took his hand.

  Mother ignored me. I could not of course remain forever on Aunt Rosa’s aproned lap. “Do you really think it’s okay to move those stones from in front of the seawall?”

  Father could not easily with his single arm both embrace Mother and rub his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Now. What might you mean by that?”

  I grinned and shrugged. “I only wondered. Undermining and all? Wasn’t that why Grandpa put them there to begin with?”

  “Well. I beg your pardon, sir. It’s easier to wonder about undermining than to think about undermining.” Peter removed the egg from his eye.

  “Lord a mercy,” Mother said. “It’s nearly nine.” As if reminded, the hall clock whirred and began to toll that hour. “I’ll put coffee on.”

  “The wall’ll be three foot higher,” Father said. “Do you know what that means?” I did not, in detail. “Two hundred sixty-six cubic yards of reinforced concrete, that the waves won’t touch a dozen times a year! A hundred extra tons of weight!”

  “And that’s just the stretch by the hospital,” Karl reminded me. Father helped himself to another glass. “He wonders about undermining.”

  I chose not to wonder further. “Is it really Grandpa’s castle in the egg?”

  Aunt Rosa kindly frowned. “Rest his soul, he used to say so.”

  “Fooey,” Father said.

  Karl chuckled. Rosa’s eyes filled up again. “Konrad bought me that in Oberammergau in nineteen and ten,” she explained to Magda, not for the first time. “On our honeymoon.”

  “She knows,” I protested.

  “There was this peddler, an old Greek or Jew, that had a raft of different ones for sale by the passion play. He showed Konrad some with naughty
pictures inside, and Konrad pretended this was one like that. He wouldn’t let me peek in till we got it home.”

  “He was a godawful tease, was Konrad,” Karl allowed.

  For some reason I suddenly saw my father’s brother as a distinct human being, with an obscure history of his own, apart from ours, and who would one day die. I realized that I had not especially despised him recently, and pondered this realization.

  Peter now surveyed us with a great smile and squeezed Magda’s hand. “If I didn’t think we’d do the seawall right,” he declared as if to me, “I wouldn’t of bought the front of Willy Erdmann’s Cornlot.”

  It took a while to realize what had been said. Hector’s sarcasm was undermined by surprise. “You wouldn’t of which?”

  “Grosser Gott!” Aunt Rosa chuckled, uncertain of the drift. Uncle Karl’s grin was more knowing.

  My own first feeling was sharp disappointment: there would be, then, neither sailboat nor five-inch telescope, and my counsel in the matter, so far from being followed, had not even been solicited. But it was joined at once by admiration for Peter’s daring.

  Mother hurried in from the kitchen. Cigarette and coffee cup. She was as startled as Hector, but her face showed amusement too. “You what?”

  “Whole front end of the Cornlot,” Peter said carefully. “Hundred and fifty feet along the seawall and a hundred deep.”

  The Jungle too! I guessed with fresh disappointment that Magda had been in on the secret: her smile was knowing; her great eyes flashed when Peter winked at her.

  Father besought the Groaner with an expression not dissimilar to that fellow’s wretched own. “He’s going to raise tomatoes. We’ll pay the rent on our crusher with beefsteak tomatoes.”

  Aunt Rosa pressed with both hands her abdomen. “Ja, ja, Hector! Peter ein Bauer ist!”

  “He’ll undermine Morton’s canning house,” Father declared. “The colonel’s good as bankrupt.”

  “Ja dock!” Aunt Rosa crowed. “Ah! Gott!”

  My old hypothesis regarding Peter’s parentage sprang back to mind.

  “I’m going to help farm it,” I announced. “Aren’t I, Peter.”

  My brother set the egg back in its place. “We can make a garden. But I didn’t buy the Cornlot to farm it.”

  “He didn’t buy the Cornlot to farm it,” Father informed the Groaner.

  Karl chuckled. “Sure he didn’t. He wants a place of his own to set and watch the speedboat races.”

  After his first remark, Peter had addressed himself principally to Mother. Now, though it was still to her he smiled, he rested his free hand lightly first on Father’s shoulder and then upon his chair back, and winked at Uncle Karl. “I’m going to build a stone house there for all of us to live in.”

  For the second time Hector’s sarcasm failed him—which is to say, he could make no reply at all—and Peter took the opportunity to explain his intention. The Cornlot (so named by East Dorset children, though tomatoes and turnips as often grew there) was a field of seven acres at the foot of our street, adjacent to the hospital grounds; not two weeks previously our ailing neighbor Willy Erdmann—loser of the battle of the bees and a sinking dipsomane—had declared his intent to parcel it into building lots, and there being little demand yet for new housing in East Dorset, for a small consideration had given Peter a thirty-day option on one waterfront plot. Now that Mensch Masonry appeared to be in no pressing need of capital, Peter was resolved to purchase the lot outright for eleven hundred dollars (Erdmann’s price) and erect a commodious stone house there for the family. More, with Uncle Karl’s help—who, we now learned, had been Peter’s agent in the transaction—he had persuaded Erdmann, a quondam realtor and builder, to include in the deal a set of blueprints from his files, and was already dickering with him and another contractor for a basement excavation.

  “Don’t look at me,” Karl growled, almost merrily. “Boy made me swear not to tell.”

  “Stone costs a fortune!” Mother exclaimed. “There’s not a stone house in East Dorset!”

  “Going to build her myself as I get the money,” Peter said firmly. “After the war. Any of you can chip in that wants to. It’ll be an advertisement for the company.”

  Hector snorted. “Some advertisement, when it sinks into the Cornlot. You crazy, Karl?”

  But Uncle Karl reminded him that the hospital itself was holding up well enough on the sandy soil, and Peter declared he’d already learned from Karl and Willy Erdmann what was required in the way of piers and footings, and was prepared to lay out the site.

  Suddenly Mother set down both coffee and cigarette and looked from Magda to Peter with a new expression. “Peter Mensch! Are you and Magda married?”

  Rosa rocked and hummed. Father rubbed his nose as if possessed. Karl twiddled his wineglass and grinned. I myself was nearly ill with envy at Peter’s initiative. He began to color again. “Nope.”

  “Engaged, then. Is that so, Magda?” There was affection in Mother’s voice, still mixed with amusement—the tone with which she sang to torment Peter—and he blushed as miserably as on those sporting occasions.

  “We’re not engaged or anything.” Magda was as devoid of wit as was my brother, but immune to teasing. Her eyes would grow even larger and more serious, her voice more quiet, and she never rose to our bait. “We don’t have any plans.”

  “Well, we do,” Peter objected, remarkably red. “But they’re a ways off. After the war. And nothing definite.”

  “A stone house on the Cornlot,” Father reported to Mother. Rosa hummed and chortled, her hands clasped across her apron. Karl clapped Father’s shoulder and called Peter a chip off the old block. As soon as the hubbub began to subside, Peter left to walk Magda home. I went as far as the entrance hall with them.

  “Boy oh boy, Peter…” My heart was full; he and Magda both smiled. “Are you going to put crenelations on the house, do you think? Those scallops that they used to shoot arrows from?”

  “I guess none of those, Amb. Sounds too expensive.”

  Now it was I who blushed. “I sure will help you build it!”

  “That’s good.”

  “We can transplant our grapevines even before we build! And put in some real wine grapes.”

  “It’s our land,” Peter said. “We can do whatever we want.”

  I began to realize that a piece of land was more exciting to own than any of the things I’d thought of. “How about a tower? We could have one round tower, on a corner…”

  “Yeah, well. We’ll have to think about a tower, all right.” I saw he was reddening again, and so said them good night, but declared: “It’d be great if you all did get married, and it was your house we were living in!”

  With an easy motion Magda turned my face toward hers and kissed me, lightly and solemnly, on the lips. I understood that she and Peter must be habitually making love.

  “Good night, Amby,” she said.

  Back in the parlor Father was betting the Groaner that Peter expected to be supplied with free building materials.

  “Well, now,” Mother said good-humoredly. “He did say the house was for all of us.”

  Father entreated suffering Laocoön with his arm. “She actually believes—”

  “So let’s give him the Baltimore rocks,” Karl suggested.

  “He don’t need them,” Father declared. “You’ve all got bigger ones in your heads.”

  Aunt Rosa whooped.

  I stayed out of it and got to bed as soon as possible.

  “He’s feeling that Rhine wine,” I heard Mother remark, and she said more truly than she knew: it was the Rhine of Aunt Rosa’s egg whose wine possessed me. For hours I tossed at the mercy of two ideas: that Peter’s property ran clear to the center of the earth (its volume I calculated next day, by the law of prisms, to be seven and twelve one-hundredths cubic miles), and that an older girl like Magda, whether or not she recalled a certain quarter hour in our toolshed four years past, was… more interesting than the giddy t
eases I had “dates” with.

  K

  Konrad’s comparison was with certain Tin Pan Alley songs, whereof the catchy title is dreamed up first and the tune composed to fit: so the motto of Mensch Masonry preceded the firm itself, which was established on its strength. One early fall morning in 1932 (so Mother tells the story, shaking her head), before he’d got himself back into the school system after his discharge from the asylum, Father was sitting in the “office” corner of the Mensch Memorial Monument Company, nursing one of the headaches that dated from his cure and regarding a block of fractured Carrara. A hurricane some weeks previously had washed out a clapboard home on Holland Island, out in the Bay, and taken the life of the lady of the house; her husband, an oyster tonger, had contracted for a modest stone at the head of her vault, which by marsh-country custom (owing to the scarcity of dry ground) was “buried” in a slight excavation in his dooryard, the concrete lid aboveground. Grandfather was offering him a list of popular inscriptions from which he might choose.

  “Look at this here: ‘He giveth His beloved sleep.’ ” The verse from Psalms was, in fact, his pet inscription: he loved to cut Gothic H’s. “And here’s Jeremiah: ‘Her sun is gone down while it was yet day.’ Very nice sentiment, eh?”

  But his client waved the list away. “I already decided, Mister Mensch.” He had sold his tongboat and joined the company of old men who sulked on sunny benches before the courthouse. “ ‘Build not your house upon the shifting sand’ is what I want. You put that on there.”

  “Ja ja,” Grandfather assented. Customers, for some reason, brought out his German. “ ‘Built not your haus upon the zhiftink zandt.’ My own self, I see that raised on black granite. Very nice sentiment.”