Letters (31 page)

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.

“Sounds right woozy to me, Will,” Hector declared. Karl gruffly advised Wilhelm to stick with tits and behinds if he hoped to turn stone into money. Even Konrad, gentle Platonist, wondered whether any artist who forsook the ancient function of mirroring nature could survive.

“This is 1917!” Wilhelm would laugh. “We’re in the twentieth century!”

A photograph made of the brothers that week by one of his artist-friends from Baltimore—the last but one of Wilhelm in the Mensches’ album—shows scowling Karl with a face like modeled beef; lean-faced Hector with his long artist’s fingers and the eyes already of an assistant principal; and leaner Wilhelm, face like an exposed nerve, his edgy smile belied by eyes that stare as if into the Pit. He was doing no sculpting at all, Hector learned, only heavy masonry, trying to discover “what the rocks
themselves
want to be…” In the issues of the war, painfully debated in two languages in the Menschhaus, he took no interest; if he was impatient to get to France it was to carry on the battle in himself, between his natural gift for mimesis and his new conviction (learned as much in the mountains as in the avant-garde art journals) that every stroke of the chisel falsified the stone.

Whatever their feelings about the fatherland, no families were more eager than the immigrant Germans to demonstrate their American patriotism. It was Grandfather’s opinion that Karl, at least, could without disgrace stay home to help run the firm, which was feeling the effects of its founder’s past connection with North German Lloyds and the notoriety of his own house as a weekend Biergarten. But all three of his sons enlisted, and virtually every other young man of German parentage in the county. With the rest of a large contingent of new soldiers, they set out for Baltimore on an April forenoon aboard the side-wheeler
Emma Giles.
As its famous beehive-and-flower paddle box churned away from Long Wharf towards the channel buoy and the Bay, they were serenaded by a chorus of their red-faced fathers, ramrod-straight and conducted by Thomas Mensch with a small American flag:

There was one furlough home before they shipped to France. Rather, separate and overlapping furloughs for the three, during which the twins rewooed an old high-school flame, Andrea King of the neighboring county. Grandmother Mensch wept at her sons’ uniforms. Wilhelm sketched her likeness and carved for his sister Rosa a little stand for her Easter egg, out of a curious grape crotch that caught his eye as he helped prune and tie the family vines. A mere playful heightening of the wood’s natural contours into a laughing grotesque whose foolscap supports the egg, it is our only evidence of what might have been the artist’s next direction. Karl was stationed in Texas with a company of engineers. Hector saw action in the Argonne Forest, took German shrapnel in his right arm and leg, came home a gimping hero, and resumed his courtship of Miss King. Wilhelm, to the family’s relief, was assigned to a headquarters company near Paris, well away from the fighting; he did layout and makeup for the divisional newspaper,
Kootie.
His postcards were full of anticipation of reaching the city: he spoke of staying on in Europe after the armistice, of traveling to Italy and Greece, perhaps even Egypt, of going forward by going back to the roots and wellsprings of his art. “Back and back until I reach the future,” his last postcard reads, “like Columbus reaching East by sailing West.” On the face, a view of the Louvre, with which he had apparently made some armistice of his own. Before he saw it he was hospitalized by the influenza which swept that year through ruined Europe. A few days later he died. The army’s telegram reached Dorset before his postcard.

After the armistice the coffin was shipped home with others from an army burial ground in France: by troopship to Norfolk, Virginia, thence by Bay Line packet to Baltimore and aboard the
Emma Giles
to Long Wharf. Grandfather, Karl, Hector, and Konrad took delivery with the stoneyard dray. They stopped at the cutting shed for Grandfather to open the box, briefly, alone, and verify its contents; there were stories of the army’s carelessness in such matters. But “It’s Willy,” he growled when the lid had been rescrewed. They then installed it, closed, in the Good Parlor, among the mock Phidiases, the Barye-style lions, the Easter egg on its stand, to be tersely memorialized for burial.

Andrea King attended the funeral. Hector showed her two versions of her merry face on the cemetery headstones; Karl pretended that Wilhelm had modeled the backside of a third, more nubile cherub upon his memory of a night swimming escapade she had joined them in during their final furlough.

Said pretty Andrea: “You’re a darn tease, Karl.”

“What gets me,” Hector remarked to the company, “is, it’s your immortal one died. You know, Konrad? And your mortal one didn’t.”

“He was a cutter, was Willy,” Konrad agreed. “Where he might’ve got to, it can’t none of us guess.”

Grandfather painfully declared: “Those
mountains
was his mistake. He could’ve had half our cutting shed for his self.”

Even Karl was moved to say, “I told him. Remember, Heck?”

Presently Hector vowed: “Arm or no arm, I’m going to cut him a proper stone.”

And he began a program as fatefully obstinate as any in the family. All that spring, summer, fall—in fact, intermittently for the next twenty years—in the stoneyard, in what passed for the art room of Dorset High (where since his wounding he did only administration and substitute teaching), and in a whitewashed toolshed behind the Menschhaus, Hector addressed the problem of cutting stone with his good left arm. He would set the chisel for Karl or Grandfather to hold, and swing the mallet himself; he would hold the chisel and try to tell others how to strike. In 1920, he and Andrea married: there were eight in the house until 1927, when Peter was born and Konrad and Rosa moved next door to make room for the new grandchild. He experimented with ingenious jigs, positioning devices, chisel-headed hammers of his own devising. He bound his almost useless right arm to force himself into independence; he even tried to employ his foot as an extra hand. All in vain: it wants two strong arms like Peter’s to shape the rock, and a knowing eye, and a temper of mind—well, different from Ambrose’s, who was born the year this folly made room for a larger.

The year before, in 1929, leukemia fetched Grandmother to lie beside her unmarked son: a simple Vermont granite stone, lettered by the new sandblasting process that was killing the family’s business with easy competition, identifies her grave. Karl suddenly moved out of house and town to lay bricks in Baltimore. Konrad, Rose, and their Easter egg reinstalled themselves, to help everyone deal with Hector’s growing rages. The nation’s economy collapsed. So must the Mensch Memorial Monument Company without Karl’s foremanship: its founder widowed, weary, and deprived of his income from the immigration business; its angel risen to the company of Michael and the others; its mortal mainstay trying in vain to carve high-relief portraits with a left-handed sandblaster, and approaching madness as Ambrose approached birth.