Letters

by John Barth

  Then he’d swing Angie onto the loaf cart, adorn her with the square white cap off his Prussian head, roll her across the room.

  “Whoo-hoo,” the child politely called. The Negroes watched, leaning on their racks and paddles.

  The loaf they bought cost twenty cents instead of the five that Ambrose used to pay, but it still burnt his fingers as it did when he and Peter sneaked uptown in their boyhood; steam still poured from it when he broke it into halves, and it tasted faintly and pleasingly of alcohol, as will a loaf not ten minutes old. Now Dorset’s bread comes from big bakeries over the Bay; if the wanderers would eat they must brave knots of young men with capeskin jackets and shining hair who frequent the all-night diner. Then they walk down High Street towards Long Wharf and the municipal basin, chewing. Sporadic autos ripple down the brick; great poplars hiss above their heads.

  At this hour, too late for young lovers, the waterfront park is cool and vacant. Through dew they wander to the wharf where creek joins river, there to perch upon high pilings white with gull dung, bite their bread, sip in turn from the public fountain. Across the creek stands one dark plant of Colonel Morton’s packing house, victim of the failing oyster harvest: they bless it. Upshore above the broken seawall rise the county hospital and nurses’ home: they smile upon the windows lit by suffering. Then Erdmann’s Cornlot juts into the river, where stands Peter Mensch’s house. The lights of the New Bridge run low across the river; beyond them, across another creek, is a second, larger hospital, the Eastern Shore Asylum. Like night-drench, like starlight, Angie’s grace descends upon standpipe and bell buoy, smokestack and boulevard.

  Citizens of Dorset: as we dream, as we scratch, as we copulate and snore, we are indiscriminately shriven!

  C

  Children call the house Mensch’s Castle; their parents and Hector Mensch call it Mensch’s Folly. It is an unprepossessing structure except that, in an area to which building-stone is no more indigenous than gold, the house is made entirely of granite rubble: the only private dwelling in the county so constructed. More surprising, from the northwest corner rises a fat stone turret, forty feet high and slightly tapered, like a short shot-tower. From Municipal Basin Angie points with her bread to the lights of Ambrose’s room in the top. Strangers to Dorset have mistaken Mensch’s Castle for a church, a fort; more commonly, owing to its situation and the lights that burn in Ambrose’s chamber, it is thought to be a lighthouse. Novice mariners, confusing the tower with the channel range on Dorset Creek, have been led into shoal water off the seawall; but wiser pilots, navigating from local knowledge or newer charts, take a second bearing on the tower to reach the basin.

  Some deem this turret the disfigurement of a house otherwise well suited to its site. Others call it the redeeming feature of a commonplace design and lament the fact that it is settling into the sand of Erdmann’s Cornlot rather more rapidly than the rest of Peter’s house. Two years ago, when one was certain the family must fail at last, Ambrose caused the entire tower to be converted into a camera obscura, from which is grossed enough in summer to buy part of the winter’s fuel. Travelers en route to Ocean City are directed to Mensch’s Castle by a number of small signs along the highway at both ends of the New Bridge; upon receipt of a small admission fee, Ambrose or Magda escorts them into the basement of the tower to see scenes projected from outside. The device is simple, for all its size: a long-focus objective lens is mounted on the roof; the image it receives is mirrored down a shaft in the center of the tower, through Ambrose’s room and Angie’s; on the bottom floor it is reflected by another mirror onto a vertical ground-glass pane the size of a large window, let into one side of the shaft. Like a huge periscope the whole apparatus can be turned, by hand, full circle on its rollers.

  Visitors do not come to the Lighthouse in great numbers: Ocean City boasts amusements more spectacular than Leonardo’s, and Magda declares her astonishment that even one person would pay money to see on the screen what can be witnessed for free and real outside. But those curious enough to seek it out find the camera obscura fascinating, and are loath to leave. One understands: the dark chamber and luminous plate make the commonplace enchanting. What would scarcely merit notice if beheld firsthand—red brick hospital, weathered oyster-dredger toiling to windward, dowdy maples and cypress clapboards of East Dorset—are magically composed and represented; they shine serene by their inner lights and are intensely interesting.

  Peter and Ambrose are drawn to their camera obscura no less strongly than the visitors. They linger in the darkened basement when customers are gone, regarding whatever image has chanced upon the glass. Stout Peter’s voice goes husky.

  “Damned old seawall,” he remarks, as if years instead of minutes had gone by since he viewed it firsthand. And Ambrose sighs and tisks his cheek—for there it stretches, cracked, gleaming.

  Little Angela, on the other hand, is not interested. In the chamber of her mind, perhaps, things glow with that light unaided. In any case, she prefers the vanished country of the Easter egg. What sights she sees through that blank window, we cannot suppose.

  D

  During all his first thirty years, A. waited for one among us to make a sound, move a hand, blow cigarette smoke in a certain way that would tell him we understood everything, so that between us might be dispensed with this necessity of words.

  Signs to us he made past number. Earnest professors: when you discoursed upon Leibnitz and the windowless monads, did you not see one undergraduate, ill groomed and ill at ease, tap his pencil thus-and-so upon his book—which is to say, upon your window? Had you then flung up that sash with gesture of your own. But Brussels sprouts (he daresays) had thrust upon you a flatulence unnerving at the lectern; intent at once upon the syntax of your clause and the tonus of your sphincter, you missed his sign. Auburn beauty whom he stared at in the train-coach mirror thirteen years ago, from New York to North Philadelphia: you saw him touch his necktie such-a-way. If you had answered in kind and made him know. Bad luck for him your dirndl bound you out of countenance; bad luck for you you passed New Brunswick praying for your menses, when already Gold the casting agent’s sperm had had its way with your newest ovum. Et cetera.

  You fidget. I too, and blush to think how lately A. has left this madness. Your forbearance and embarrassment for his sake I appreciate. The telescope at his window, the sculpture ’round about, the very lamp and ink bottle on his desk I see withdrawn into themselves and hiding their expressions: tender of his feelings, relieved to see he understands at last—yet uneasy all the same, lest out of habit he commence to stare again, or press them once more to give up truths about themselves. Never fear. The eyes shall sooner ask the fingers for a sign, the fancy supplicate the bowels, than Ambrose tax us further in that old way.

  E

  Everybody in that family dies of cancer! The only variable is its location: Grandfather’s was in his prostate, Grandmother’s in her bloodstream. Of their four children only Uncle Wilhelm was spared, by dying in France of influenza in 1918. Aunt Rosa’s was in her uterus; her husband Konrad’s was in his skin. Uncle Karl’s was in his liver. Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother Andrea, like Konrad a Mensch by marriage only, has nonetheless had radical mastectomy; her husband Hector’s nine-month madness in 1930, thought merely the effect of jealousy, is now revealed to have been associated with a tumor that feasts upon his brain.

  When his sons went to visit him in Dorset Hospital, Hector stroked his nose and said, “What’s killing me will kill you too.” Already on Ambrose’s chest, constellations flourish of blue nevi whose increase in size and number I follow with interest—though it is from his birthmark that he looks for eventual quietus. Hence his inability to share Magda’s concern over radioactive fallout: with or without strontium 90 in their milk, her children must meet the family nemesis and perish.

  Peter’s explanation is that, stonecutters and masonry contractors, the family have always worked and dwelt among rocks, which, he has heard, reflect more than norm
al cosmic radiation. This theory (with which somehow he also accounts for both Ambrose’s potent sterility and his own fertile impotence) is clever for Peter; more characteristic is his refusal to consider moving out of Mensch’s Castle, cosmic rays or no cosmic rays.

  Excepting the mode of their demise, nothing more typifies that line than this persistence: with them, every idea becomes a fixed idea, to be pursued though it bring creation down ’round their shoulders. Had it not been for Grandfather’s original obstinacy, for example, they would not now be living (on the verge of bankruptcy) in America at all. One version has it he was the elder son of a Rhenish vintner; that the scene in Rosa’s egg was his future estate, or one not unlike it; but that he got a serving-girl in trouble, and instead of making arrangements to conceal the little scandal, as his father proposed, renounced his patrimony to immigrate to Maryland with her. Another legend, on the contrary, says his forebears were the rudest peasants, almost animals, from Herrkenwalde in Altenburg; that his emigration and establishment of the family firm was no decline but an extraordinary progress. Granting either version, it appears that he was a determined fellow and that the family has come a considerable way, for better or worse, in a short time.

  Of Grandfather’s fathering, then, nothing certain is known. Whether from ignorance, spite, indifference, or a bent to regard himself as unmoved mover, Thomas Mensch all but refused to speak of his origins, and thus deprived his parents of existence as effectively as if he’d eaten them. But whatever his prehistory, we know that in 1880, still in his late teens, he appeared in Baltimore as an apprentice stonecutter; married there in ’84; moved with his bride to Dorset the following year to work as a mason and tombstone cutter, and liked the place enough to stay. In 1886 Aunt Rosa was born, in 1890 Uncle Karl, in ’94 the twins Hector and Wilhelm. Grandfather was obliged to find new irons for his fire: in addition to his backyard tombstone-cutting he became the local ticket agent for North German Lloyds, which during the great decades of immigration sailed regularly between Bremerhaven and Baltimore; and in this capacity he arranged for the passage to America of numbers of the relatives of his German friends. Twenty dollars for a steerage crossing, bring your own food, except for the barrels of salt herring and pickles supplied by the steamship line, which scented the new Americans for some while after. Moreover, as the would-be homesteaders straggled back to the Germantowns of Baltimore and Philadelphia from ruinous winters in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Grandfather helped and profited from them again as a broker of wetland real estate, the only acreage they could afford in Maryland’s milder climate. They drained marshes by the hundreds of acres; throve and prospered on what they turned into first-class arable land—and on their weekend trips to town they made the Menschhaus in East Dorset a little center of the county’s German community until the First World War.

  Just before the turn of the century, Thomas Mensch did his most considerable piece of business: while it lasted, the most successful of the family’s enterprises to date. Concerned by the Choptank’s inroads into several newly settled neighborhoods, the town commissioners authorized construction of a retaining seawall along several blocks of East and West Dorset; Grandfather bid low for the contract, hired laborers and equipment as a one-man ad hoc company, and in 1900 completed the wall—which like an individual work of art he signed and dated at each end in wet concrete.

  With the capital acquired from this and his other enterprises he established a proper stoneyard, the Mensch Memorial Monument Company, and employed laborers and apprentices. These latter included, as they came of age, all three of his sons, who seem also to have apprenticed themselves to their father’s obstinacy. Karl, to begin with, so loved the yard—the blocks of marble in their packing frames, the little iron-wheeled carts, the tin-roofed cutting and polishing shed with its oil-smelling winches and hoists, the heavy-timbered horses and potbellied stove, the blue-shirted black laborers and white-shirted, gray-aproned masters, the cutting tools arrayed like surgical instruments on the working face, the stone-dust everywhere—that he could not be kept in school. At sixteen he dropped out to work with the stone all day, for which he had a natural feel though he lacked any particular gift for lettering and embellishment. By his twentieth year he was the firm’s master mason and second in charge, supervisor of roughing and polishing the stones and their erection in the county’s graveyards; it was his greater interest in construction than in carving that, along with Hector’s restlessness, would fatefully extend the firm’s activities to include foundation laying and general masonry. A swarthy, hirsute, squat, and powerful man, Karl never married, though like Grandfather he was regarded in East Dorset as a ladies’ man. Stories were told of women brokenheartedly wedding others…

  The twins, for their part, not content merely to embrace the trade they were born to, would transcend it, make an art of it. From early on, Hector and Wilhelm dreamed of being not stonecutters, but sculptors; in their teens they took charge of the artwork on the stones, leaving their father the routine chore of lettering inscriptions. Many a dead Choptank waterman, whose estate could allow him no grander monument than a limestone slab, was sung to his rest by flights of unexpected angels—added gratis by Wilhelm and Hector as an exercise in alto-relievo.

  Their ambition was equal; together with warnings from brother Karl that they were not to emulate his truancy, it saw them through the public high school to the point of scholarship examinations for further study, almost without precedent in East Dorset in those days. But their gift, as Hector early acknowledged, was not equal: he could execute with difficulty a plausible acanthus, oak-leaf, or Greek-key border, staples of the tombstone-cutter’s art; his rosettes, sleeping lambs, and beflourished monograms could not be faulted except for the time they took to achieve. But never could he manage, much less with Wilhelm’s grace and speed, the feathered wings, flowing drapery, and lifelike faces of cherubim and seraphim—the latter, often as not, angelic likenesses of Karl, Rosa, Grandfather, or Grandmother; the former mischievous apotheoses of the brothers’ girl friends of the moment, who, fifty years later, could find in the cemeteries of their youth the marble image of its flower.

  It was Konrad, their new brother-in-law, who in 1910—the year of his marriage to Rosa and of the twins’ graduation from high school—supplied the family from his fund of learning with the example of the twins of myth, whereof most commonly one was immortal and the other not. Like an insightful Castor, Hesper, Ephikles, or Zethus, Hector urged his brother to apply for a scholarship to the Institute of Art in Baltimore—and himself applied to the Normal School in nearby Wicomico, modestly lowering his aspirations to the teaching of art in local public schools.

  For the next four years both young men supported themselves, between studies, with job masonry in their respective cities, Wilhelm characteristically throwing in carved lintels and mantelpieces without extra charge to the row-house builders of Patterson Park and Hampden, who could not have afforded them, as well as to the mansion raisers of Roland Park and Guilford, who could. By 1914, when they graduated, Hector was more interested in school administration than in either making or teaching art; and Wilhelm had filled the Menschhaus with his schoolwork: beaux-arts discus throwers, grimacing Laocoöns, Venuses surprised (which for all her pride in her son’s talent Grandmother Mensch would not permit on the first floor).

  Hector moved back into the house—where now lived Rosa and Konrad too—worked as teacher of art and assistant to the principal of Dorset High School, and spent his summers in the stoneyard. But except for occasional visits home (for which the Venuses were fetched down to the Good Parlor and the house prepared as for wedding or funeral, or visit from the kaiser himself), Wilhelm never returned to Dorset. Indeed, his search for stonecutting work that would leave him time and means to do sculpture of his own seemed to lead him ever westward, from Dorset to Baltimore to the remotest counties of the state, high in the Catoctins and Alleghenies.

  “That’s how it is in the myths,” Konrad volunteered. “
Always west.”

  “A studio he could have right here,” Grandfather complained. “What do we need our big shed, business like it is?”

  He sniffed at Hector’s opinion that, to a sculptor, mountains must be more inspiring than marshes, and Konrad’s that travel is broadening. Only Karl’s gruff conjecture made sense to him: that Wilhelm had found somewhere in those hills a better model for his Venuses than the plaster replicas at the institute. But that hypothesis did not console him, far less Grandmother, for the “loss of their son,” despite Konrad and Hector’s testimony that a more or less irregular life was virtually prerequisite to achievement in the fine arts.

  “Pfoo,” Grandfather said. “If that’s so, it’s Karl would be the artist.”

  Karl grinned around his cigar. “And you’d be Michael Angelo his self.”

  Not until 1917, when Wilhelm came home to enlist with his brothers in the American Expeditionary Force, did even Hector learn the truth: that it was no Appalachian Venus that had enthralled the pride of the Mensches, but a wilder, less comprehensible siren, not even whose existence had been acknowledged by the masters of the institute. Through a week of tears and feasts (while the down-county Germans gathered at the Menschhaus with their own patriotic sons, and the kaiser’s picture was turned to the wall and the house draped in Stars and Stripes, and the women wept and laughed and sliced wurst and made black bread and sauerbraten, and the men quaffed homemade beer and tried in high-spirited vain to find Yankee equivalents for their customary drinking songs), Wilhelm tried to explain to his brothers those strange new flights of the graphic and plastic imagination called Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism; the importance of the 1913 Armory Show; the abandonment—by him who in fifteen minutes with the clay or five with the pencil could catch any expression of any face!—of the very idea of representation.