Letters (30 page)

A.M.

Alhazen of Basra, Gemma-Frisius, Leonardo—from them A. learned to make his great dark camera. But he learned it Plato-wise, as it were by recollection, for that notion—like the tower itself, like Peter Mensch’s entire house—hatched from Aunt Rosa’s Easter egg, that Uncle Konrad gave her in 1910. Before he knew East Dorset was East Dorset and Ambrose Ambrose, he knew the landscape in that egg; his eye was held to it in the cradle. I smile that poor Aunt Rosa, throughout her younger wifehood, railed at Konrad’s seedless testicles and her fruitless womb. Clip and tumble as they might, dine on shellfish, ply the uterine thermometer, she went to her grave unfructified. While lo, as mistress of the egg she is mother of this world we move in: the nymph inside who leans against the Rhine-rock under the
Schloss
; Mensch’s Castle and the camera obscura; seawall, marshes, funhouse, Cornlot; the bees on Andrea Mensch’s breast and Ambrose’s birthmark; the mosquitoes that bite our Maryland lovers; the crabs they eat; the cancers that eat them. Our story is
ab ovo
: nothing here but hatched from there.

Begin again:
A.‘s only child is mad,
et cetera.

Days are hard on Angie. Like her father she is, perhaps, a love child; in truth love streams upon us from her heart, she is a sun of love; but her pale eyes are troubled, she cannot grasp us. Carl and Connie, her twin cousins—their chasing games alarm her, their gentle teases set her wild. Yet “Magda
not
spank Connie-Carl!” she shrieks when Magda has to punish them, and she must be looked for when they cry, for once to end little Connie’s tears she nearly smothered her with a cushion. She is large for her five years, and maladroit. Her hand undoes the twins’ sand castles against her will, and when she croons, “Angie will
hug
Amby,” Ambrose must beware a wrenched neck. Her hours are full of fears: that Magda will put the automobile in reverse; that Peter will neglect to lift her skyward by the elbows after breakfast; that Russians will fire rockets at Mensch’s Castle.

Most of all she fears that Magda will have lost Aunt Rosa’s egg, companion of her nights and crises.

With the Easter egg they control her and ease her days. It is soiled and battered now, peephole cloudy, inner landscape all but gone; but its power has not vanished in the years since Peter and Ambrose would behave all Sunday morning for a glass of dandelion and a view of its wondrous innards. No tantrum or alarum of Angie’s is beyond its virtue: with her eye fast to the window she can weather even the family’s infrequent musicales, which else would set her trembling. For Angie’s own and the house’s tranquillity, Magda must lure her twice daily from their society to “play-nap” in her room; the Easter egg baits her every time. Alone, she converses in peace with storytellers on her phonograph or assembles her picture puzzle with the face down, for the sake of the undistracted pattern on the back.

Often at night, what with all the day’s resting, Angie does not sleep. Though her light is out, she gazes into the egg; Ambrose hears her speak to the faded nymph inside. Her room is beneath his in the tower. If the night is fine, he may leave his books and lenses and help the child into her clothes; hand in hand they stroll the seawall and the sundry streets. The town is abed. Angie has no fear of the dogs that trot in alleys or of policemen uptown, who have got used to her. Indeed it is her town at that hour: she leads her father through its mysteries. They stop to hear the Choptank chuckle at the battered wall, and Angie’s mouth turns up amused. Transformers hum atop their poles along the avenue: “Buzz,” the girl responds. They pause halfway over the Creek Bridge, which Ambrose feared to cross at her age, and regard the moonlit skipjacks moored along the bulkhead. A wandering automobile drives by to whir a note on the grating of the draw, whereat they move uptown content.

Until recently their first stop was the bakery: from a back alley they entered to watch men labor at next day’s bread. The great ovens rumbled, the machines for kneading and wrapping clacked, the air was hot and yeasty. Pasted with flour and sweat, young Negroes slid the pans through cast-iron doors. John Grau the baker, dusty arms akimbo, aproned paunch thrust out, would hail the visitors. “Look who ain’t in bed yet!”

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!

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.

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.

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 normal 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.