Lost in the Funhouse (4 page)

My birth—more exactly, Hector’s notion that someone other than himself had fathered me; his mad invasion of the delivery room; his wild assertion, as they carried him off, that the port-wine stain near my eye was a devil’s mark—all this commotion, naturally, ended the quest. Not, however, the general project. Out of scrap pine Grandfather fashioned a box-hive of his own, whitewashed and established it among the lilacs next to the goat-pen, and bade Uncle Konrad keep his eyes open for a migrant swarm, the season being opportune.

His expectation was not unreasonable, even though East Dorset was by 1930 a proper residential ward with sidewalks, sewers, and streetlights. To maintain a goat might be judged eccentric, even vulgar, by neighbors with flush toilets and daily milk service; chickens, likewise, were
non grata
on Seawall Street (if not on Hayward or Franklin, where roosters crowed
to the end of the Second World War); but there was nothing unseemly about a stand of sweetcorn, for example, if one had ground enough, or a patch of cucumbers, or a hive of bees. These last, in fact, were already a feature of our street’s most handsome yard: I mean Erdmann’s, adjacent but for an alley to our own. Upon Willy Erdmann’s three fine skeps, braided of straw and caned English-fashion, Grandfather had brooded all winter. Two were inhabited and prosperous; the third, brand new, stood vacant against the day when a swarm would take wing from the others in search of new quarters.

Lilac honey, Grandfather declared, was more pleasing than any other to his taste; moreover it was essential that the hive be placed as far as possible from the house, not to disturb the occupants of either. Though no one pressed him to explain, he insisted it was for these reasons only (one or both of which must have been Erdmann’s also) that he located his hive in the extreme rear corner of our property, next to the alley.

Our neighbor plainly was unhappy with this arrangement. Not long from the Asylum himself, whither he’d repaired to cure a sudden dipsomania, Erdmann was convalescing some months at home before he reassumed direction of his business. Pottering about his yard he’d seen our box-hives built and situated; as April passed he came to spend more time on the alley-side of his lot—cultivating his tulips, unmulching his roses, chewing his cigar, glaring from his beehives to ours.

“Yes, well,” Grandfather observed. “Willy’s bees have been for years using our lilacs. Have I begrutched?”

He made it his tactic at first to stroll hiveward himself whenever Erdmann was standing watch: he would examine his grape-canes, only just opening their mauve-and-yellow buds; he would make pleasantries in two tongues to Gretchen the goat; Erdmann soon would huff indoors.

But with both Hector and Karl away, Grandfather was obliged to spend more time than usual at the stoneyard, however slack the business; throughout whole weekday mornings and afternoons his apiary interests lay under Erdmann’s scrutiny.

“
A swarm in May is worth a load of hay,
” Uncle Konrad recalled:

May was cool, the lilacs and japonica had never blossomed so; then June broke out on the peninsula like a fire, everything flowered together, in Erdmann’s skeps the honey-flow was on.

“What you need,” Grandfather said to Andrea, “you need peace and quiet and fresh air this summer. Leave Rosa the housework; you rest and feed your baby.”

“What the hell have I
been
doing?” Mother asked. But she did not protest her father-in-law’s directive or his subsequent purchase of a hammock for her comfort, an extraordinary munificence. Even when his motive was revealed to be less than purely chivalrous—he strung the hammock between a Judas tree and a vine post, in view of the alley—she did not demur. On the contrary, though she teased Grandfather without mercy, she was diverted by the stratagem and cooperated beyond his expectation. Not only did she make it her custom on fine days to loll in the hammock, reading, dozing, and watching casually for a bee-swarm; she took to nursing me there as well. Aunt Rosa and certain of the neighbors murmured; Uncle Konrad shook his head; but at feeding-times I was fetched to the hammock and suckled in the sight of any. At that time my mother had lost neither her pretty face and figure nor her wanton spirit: she twitted the schoolboys who gawked along the fence and the trashmen lingering at our cans; merrily she remarked upon reroutings and delays on the part of delivery wagons, which seldom before had used our alley. And she was as pleased as Grandfather, if for not the same reason, by the discomfiture of Mr. Erdmann, who now was constrained to keep what watch he would from an upstairs window.

“Willy’s bashful as Konrad,” she said to Rosa. “Some men, I swear, you’d think they’d never seen anything.”

Grandfather chuckled. “Willy’s just jealous. Hector he’s got used to, but he don’t like sharing you with the trashman.”

But Mother could not be daunted by any raillery. “Listen to the pot call the kettle!”

“
Ja
sure,” said Grandfather, and treated her to one of the pinches for which he was famed among East Dorset housewives.

Mr. Erdmann’s response to the hammock was a bee-bob: he threaded dead bees into a cluster and mounted it on a pole, which he then erected near his skeps to attract the swarm.

“He knows they won’t swarm for a naughty man,” Grandfather explained. “It wonders me he can even handle them.” In the old country, he declared, couples tested each other’s virtue by walking hand in hand among the hives, the chaste having nothing to fear.

Mother was skeptical. “If bees were like that, not a man in Dorset could keep a hive. Except Konrad.”

My uncle, as if she were not fondling the part in the middle of his hair, began to discourse upon the prophetic aspect of swarming among various peoples—
e.g.
, that a swarm on the house was thought by the Austrians to augur good fortune, by the Romans to warn of ill, and by the Greeks to herald strangers; that in Switzerland a swarm on a dry twig presaged the death of someone in the family, et cetera—but before ever he had got to the Bretons and Transylvanians his wife was his only auditor: Andrea was back in her magazine, and Grandfather had gone off to counter Erdmann’s bee-bob by rubbing the inside of his own hive with elder-flowers.

The last Sunday of the month but one dawned bright, hot, still. Out on the river not even the bell-buoy stirred, whose clang we heard in every normal weather; in its stead the bell of Grace M.-P. Southern, mark of a straiter channel, called forth East Dorseters in their cords and worsteds. But ours was a family mired in apostasy. There was no atheism in the house; in truth there was no talk of religion at all, except in Hector’s most cynical moods. It was generally felt that children should be raised in the church, and so when the time came
Peter and I would be enrolled in the Sunday-school and the Junior Christian Endeavor. More, Grandfather had lettered, gratis,
In Remembrance of Me
on the oak communion table and engraved the church cornerstone as well. We disapproved of none of the gentlemen who ministered the charge, although Grace, not the plum of the conference, was served as a rule by preachers very young or very old. Neither had we doctrinal differences with Methodism—Southern or Northern, Protestant or Episcopal: Aunt Rosa sometimes said, as if in explanation of our backsliding, “Why it is, we were all Lutherans in the old country”; but it would have been unkind to ask her the distinction between the faiths of Martin Luther and John Wesley. Yet though Konrad, with a yellow rosebud in his lapel, went faithfully to Bible class, none of us went to church. God served us on our terms and in our house (we were with a few exceptions baptized, wed, and funeraled in the good parlor); for better or worse it was not in our make-up to serve Him in His.

By eleven, then, this Sunday morning, Aunt Rosa had brought Peter home from Cradle Roll, Konrad was back from Bible class, and the family were about their separate pleasures. Grandfather, having inspected the bee situation earlier and found it not apparently changed, had settled himself on the side porch to carve a new drive-wheel for Peter’s locomotive; my brother watched raptly, already drawn at three to what would be his trade. Rosa set to hammering dough for Maryland biscuits; Konrad was established somewhere with the weighty
Times
; Mother was in her hammock. There she had lazed since breakfast, dressed only in a sashless kimono to facilitate nursing; oblivious to the frowns of passing Christians, she had chain-smoked her way through the Sunday crossword, highlight of her week. At eleven, when the final bell of the morning sounded, I was brought forth. Cradled against her by the sag of the hammock, I drank me to a drowse; and she too, just as she lay-mottled by light and leaf-shadow, lulled by my
work upon her and by wafting organ-chords from the avenue—soon slept soundly.

What roused her was a different tone, an urgent, resonating thrum. She opened her eyes: all the air round about her was aglint with bees. Thousand on thousand, a roaring gold sphere, they hovered in the space between the hammock and the overhanging branches.

Her screams brought Grandfather from the porch; he saw the cloud of bees and ducked at once into the summerkitchen, whence he rushed a moment later banging pie-tin cymbals.

“Mein Schwarm! Mein Schwarm!”

Now Rosa and Konrad ran at his heels, he in his trousers and BVD’s, she with flour half to her elbows; but before they had cleared the back-house arbor there was an explosion in the alley, and Willy Erdmann burst like a savage through our hollyhocks. His hair was tousled, expression wild; in one hand he brandished a smoking shotgun, in the other his bee-bob, pole and all; mother-of-pearl opera glasses swung from a black cord around his neck. He leaped about the hammock as if bedemoned.

“Not a bee, Thomas!”

Aunt Rosa joined her shrieks to Andrea’s, who still lay under the snarling cloud. “The
Honig!
Ai!” And my brother Peter, having made his way to the scene in the wake of the others, blinked twice or thrice and improved the pandemonium by the measure of his wailings.

Uncle Konrad dashed hammockward with rescue in his heart, but was arrested by shouts from the other men.

“
Nein
, don’t dare!” Grandfather cautioned. “They’ll sting!”

Mr. Erdmann agreed. “Stay back!” And dropping the bee-bob shouldered his gun as if Konrad’s design was on the bees.

“Lie still, Andy,” Grandfather ordered. “I
spritz
them once.”

He ran to fetch the garden hose, a spray of water being, like a charge of bird-shot, highly regarded among bee-keepers as a means to settle swarms. But Mr. Erdmann chose now to let go at blue heaven with his other barrel and brought down a shower of Judas leaves upon the company; at the report
Grandfather abandoned his plan, whether fearing that Konrad had been gunned down or merely realizing, what was the case, that our hose would not reach half the distance. In any event his instructions to Mother were carried out: even as he turned she gave a final cry and swooned away. Mercifully, providentially! For now the bees, moved by their secret reasons, closed ranks and settled upon her chest. Ten thousand, twenty thousand strong they clustered. Her bare bosoms, my squalling face—all were buried in the golden swarm.

Fright undid Rosa’s knees; she sat down hard on the grass and wailed,
“Grosser Gott! Grosser Gott!”
Uncle Konrad went rigid. Erdmann too stood transfixed, his empty weapon at portarms. Only Grandfather seemed undismayed: without a wondering pause he rushed to the hammock and scooped his bare hands under the cluster.

“Take the
Honig
,” he said to Konrad.

In fact, though grave enough, the situation was more spectacular than dangerous, since bees at swarming-time are not disposed to sting. The chiefest peril was that I might suffocate under the swarm, or in crying take a mouthful of bees. And even these misfortunes proved unlikely, for when Grandfather lifted two handfuls of the insects from my head and replaced them gently on another part of the cluster, he found my face pressed into Mother’s side and shielded by her breast. Konrad plucked me from the hammock and passed me to Aunt Rosa, still moaning where she sat.

“Open the hive,” Grandfather bade him further, and picked up half the swarm in one trailing mass. The gesture seemed also to lift Mr. Erdmann’s spell.

“Now by God, Tom, you shan’t have my bees!”

“Your bees bah.” Grandfather walked quickly to the open hive to deposit his burden.

“I been watching with the glasses! It’s my skeps they came from!”

“It’s my girl they lit on. I know what you been watching.” He returned for the rest of the bees. Erdmann, across the
hammock from him, laid his shotgun on the grass and made as if to snatch the cluster himself—but the prospect of removing it bare-handed, and from that perch, stayed him.

Seeing the greatest danger past and his rival unnerved, Grandfather affected nonchalance. “We make a little gamble,” he offered benignly. “I take all on her right one, you take all on her left. Whoever draws the queen wins the pot.”

Our neighbor was not amused. He maintained his guard over the hammock.

“Ordinary thievery!”

Grandfather shrugged. “You take them then, Willy. But quick, don’t they’ll sting her.”

“By damn—” Mr. Erdmann glowered with thwart and crest-fall. “I got to have gloves on.”

“Gloves!” My father’s father feigned astonishment. “
Ach
, Andy don’t care! Well then, look out.”

Coolly as if packing a loose snowball he scraped up the second pile. Mother stirred and whimpered. Only isolated bees in ones and twos now wandered over her skin or darted about in quest of fellows. Konrad moved to brush them away, murmured something reassuring, discreetly drew the kimono together. I believe he even kissed my mother, lightly, on the brow. Grandfather lingered to watch, savoring his neighbor’s agitation and his own indifference to the bees. Then he turned away in high humor.

“
Alle Donner!
Got to have an opera glass to see her and gloves on to touch her! We don’t call you bashful no more, Konrad, after Willy! Wait till Karl hears!”