Letters (36 page)

Aunt Rosa’s final words, as reported by Mother. She never rested under our tree, though in her last weeks she enjoyed looking down from the hospital solarium upon its bare young withes. From her uterus the cancer spread like an ugly rumor; it was the willows of the Dorset Cemetery she soon slept under, beside her Konrad. Her small estate she had long since conveyed to Father except for her third of Mensch Masonry, divided equally between him and Uncle Karl, and the ancient egg, expressly devised to Peter and me.

But I, I rested often under Peter’s tree in nineteen forties five and six and seven, as the nation finished its war, my brother his term of military enlistment, Mensch Masonry its seawall project and the foundations of Mensch’s Castle, and I my high school education.

Say, rather, my education at high school age: not much book learning was accomplished in rural Southern public schools at that time, when ablebodied male teachers were in the military and many of the married women left to follow their husbands. What passed for schooling one could dispatch with the left hand; my right ransacked the public library, no treasure house either in those days. But in the shade of our willow I contrived to read Sophocles and Schopenhauer, and bade farewell to my youthful wish to be an architect. There too, with Magda, I read John Keats, Heinrich Heine, and her beloved rueful Housman, and in time said good-bye to boyhood.

Magda’s face is round, her complexion white: not my preference. But her eyes and mouth are rich, her nose is finely cut, her voice deep, soft, stirring. She has grown heavy in motherhood; at forty she’ll look like an Italian peasant; even at eighteen she was displeased with her hips, her backside, her legs—too large by modern standards, but (as I learned to remind her) the ideal in other centuries, especially combined with her graceful neck and shoulders, her delicate breasts. When I appraised her—I was seventeen—it was not in the lustful humor with which one sized up the slim tan girls of beach and boardwalk. The frivolity of her summer cottons was belied by that grave voice and figure; those thighs and buttocks were serious as her eyes. Magda played no sports; was self-conscious in slacks or shorts or swimsuit; wore her dark hair long and straight or wound handsomely in a bun when all the fashion was for short and curly. Yet one guessed her able to stand unclothed before a lover with perfect ease, unbinding that hair for him without joke and tease and giggle. Similarly, one could imagine an
affair
with Magda, but no flirtation. And the affair, one understood, would be nothing sportive…

Of late she has become a complainer, speaks of the republic’s decline in the tone of one hectoring a foolish husband. But at eighteen and nineteen she brooded stoically upon grand problems; her pessimism was cosmic and impersonal, a tidewater Tragic View. I read her the science page of the Sunday
Times,
which moved her even more than Housman’s verse. The population was increasing past our means to support it. The planet’s skin of vital topsoil was washing into the sea. The century would see the end of our fossil fuel reserves. Our science had thwarted natural selection, with the result that our species degenerated year by year. Our antibodies were breeding supergerms, our insecticides superinsects, and poisoning the waters as well. The incidence of violent crime was soaring. Half the entering class at Columbia University would not distinguish Hagia Sophia from the Taj Mahal.

“We’re adding so much carbon dioxide to the air that the winters are getting warmer,” I read to her. “A little more will melt the polar ice cap, and the whole Eastern Shore will be under water.”

We would be sitting under the willow tree or leaning against the new foundations of the Castle on a Sunday morning, while our elders were in church. Magda’s legs, stubbled or razor-nicked, would be crossed, the large calves flattened in their nylon sheaths. She would shake her head soberly at the river and observe: “You can’t just sit by. But every single thing you do costs more than it’s worth.”

Those brown eyes saw what general truths were implied by particulars. “Here’s an anthropologist,” I reported, “who defends the idea of national characters. He says the Germans are the most ingenious people in Europe and the most barbarous, and that the two go together.”

Magda concurred: “We’ve every one of us got the vices of our virtues.”

And on the day we first put my penis into her vagina, she having stood naked and unwound her hair for me quite as I’d imagined, and I lamented that our pleasure must be at my brother’s cost, she sighed unsmilingly: “Every silver lining has a cloud.”

This was in late spring 1947, and by way of a commencement gift. While work on the Castle had resumed and was progressing rapidly, the family’s fortunes, so bright not very long before, had fallen to their lowest point since the year of my birth and Hector’s confinement. Had Peter not managed a construction loan through an army friend whose father was a local banker, and hired Mensch Masonry to complete the house, our firm would have been all but idle. Several fresh misfortunes had beset us, not least of which was Father’s resigning his principalship in 1945 and devoting his energies full-time to the company. Carting and cleaning the Baltimore rocks for reuse as exterior masonry had proved finally more costly than buying fresh stone from the mainland quarries; in the end they had to be sandblasted on all six surfaces, and even then, despite their historical interest, our customers usually preferred new stone. What was perhaps our last chance to use them profitably came early in the year, when fire destroyed a wing of East Dorset Grace Methodist Protestant Southern Church: Mensch Masonry bid to rebuild the facade with the Baltimore rocks, many of which approached the hue of the original granite. Father pled the poetry of saving East Dorset souls with what had once preserved East Dorset property; of building as it were for Zion with the rubble of Babylon. But by that time we were so discredited in the town that the lay leaders rejected our bid and raised instead a brick-veneered structure in the modern fashion, to our minds (but we are neither architects nor true believers) devoid of spirituality.

The cause of our latest disfavor was again the seawall, which by V-J Day, before we’d completed its improvement, had in places already cracked, and was all but breached when Magda relieved me of my sexual virginity. Two hurricanes had pounded at the seam between the old wall and the new; nor’easters had driven water into every crevice, which frozen had heaved and humped the concrete. Damage was especially heavy along the Cornlot, from which the Baltimore rocks had been entirely cleared, and in those portions of the wall where we had piled them as filler when our crusher broke. Great chunks of concrete came away entirely; twenty-foot lengths of wall leaned out of plumb; the spring tides broached them and dissolved the land behind into muddy depressions; salt water then killed the grass, and the soil washed out with remarkable celerity. Along with rose pollen and cottonwood poplar seeds, litigation was in the air: owners of waterfront lots, who had paid their assessments and confidently invested in tons of fill, were closing ranks against the city council, which in turn was preparing an action against Mensch Masonry. There was talk of collusion between us and the mayor to defraud our town. That latter worthy, a Dixiecrat, charged the “liberal” Democratic councilmen with fabricating issues for the ’48 elections. In fact, no suits were finally filed, but the publicity served us ill, as did the repairs we undertook at our own cost—extensive repairs, but mainly cosmetic—in the interest of improving our public image and forestalling litigation.

Finally, despite Colonel Morton’s and the shipyard’s government contracts (now expired), many Dorset families moved in the war years to work in the steel mills and the aircraft factories across the Bay. Erdmann and the other general contractors were fairly busy, but the demand was for low-cost stock-design houses with concrete slab foundations and walkways, even concrete patios, in our judgment an eyesore. After the first flush of war prosperity, people lost interest in flagstone terraces, stone chimneys, marble headstones: they bought government bonds against the day when automobiles and electrical appliances would return to the market. By the time they did, along with such fresh diversions as television, everything made-do-with during the war was worn out or obsolete and had to be replaced.

I had thought of working at the shipyard that summer, between high school and college, to put by money for books and board. Instead I replaced without wages one of our laborers. A master mason (Uncle Karl), a journeyman carpenter, one other laborer, and myself: while Father brooded once again in the stoneyard, trying to sculpt with the sandblaster, we raised the shell of Peter’s house.

“It’s our own place, says Brother Pete,” Hector had early declared. “We’ll use the Baltimore rocks in her. Consolidate our follies.”

Karl shrugged. I suggested that in the absence of specific mention of those same rocks in the contract, Peter ought to be consulted. He was in Germany with the occupation forces; his return to us and marriage to Magda were anticipated for the fall. Mother agreed. Father’s nose began to itch.

“He wants it for an advertisement, doesn’t he? Well, damn-foolishness is our stock-in-trade.”

But he made no further move to use the rocks until Peter, despite my account to him of our problems with the seawall, gave epistolary consent. In the weeks that followed I also restrained the company’s liberality in the matter of sand by mixing as much as possible of the mortar myself, in the proportion of no more than three parts sand to one of Portland. But I had not the heart to protest Karl’s directive, which Father seconded, that we take the sand directly from “our own” beach frontage instead of buying it: the convenience and economy of the beach variety, I had to hope, might partly offset its coarseness and impurity.

I do not ask myself why I made love to Peter’s fiancée, nor have I much examined Magda’s reasons for inviting me. But when we sat in the Cornlot clover on Sunday mornings or strolled down the listing wall—“dressed up” from Sabbath habit despite our nonbelief—our motives, like the scent of talcum, shaving lotion, and delicate sweat, hung about us in the humid air. As Peter was our bond, we spoke of him often, warmly enlarging on his generosity, his strength of character. I would take Magda’s hand and wish with her for his speedy and safe return. We talked together of many things. I felt that Magda spoke more easily with me than with my brother; I came to believe as well that I appreciated as he could never what was of value in her. I had become an atheist by age fifteen; by sixteen a socialist. I discoursed with energy on the madness of nationalism, the contradictions of capitalism, the brotherhood and dignity of man, the rights of women and Negroes (I’d learned to capitalize the
n),
the grand challenges of ignorance, poverty, disease. But my zeal was a toy boat on the dark sea of Magda’s fatalism. To her the Choptank itself was a passing feature of the landscape; the very peninsula (which I had informed her was slowly sinking) ephemeral: alone among Dorseters she shrugged her shoulders at the broken wall.

“Six years or six hundred; it’s soon over.”

Schopenhauer was supplanted by Spengler, Spengler by Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiasticus by Magda. At the vernal equinox I was postpolitical; by the summer solstice I had given up reading altogether. For all it was my freshman-year professors, some months later at the university, who taught me the second law of thermodynamics, Magda had brought its meaning home to my soul already that summer. It was Independence Day. Earlier that evening, families had gathered along the shore to watch the fireworks shot off from Long Wharf: punk sticks glowed and smoked against mosquitoes; citizens chuckled at the squibs and chasers; they murmured at the rockets that thudded skywards, flowered green and copper, and broadcast reverberating jewels; they held ears and breaths against the ground-shaking mock Bombardment of Fort McHenry at the climax, applauded the final set-pieces of Old Glory and (for some reason) Niagara Falls, and went home. A great moon rose from the Atlantic. Magda and I lingered behind, drank beer from bottles at world temperature, slapped at mosquitoes.

She observed: “You don’t go out with girls anymore.”

“No.”

“I wonder is that my fault.”

In the moonlight I saw the perspiration that often beaded her upper lip, and through her blouse the stout straps of her undergarments. I told her for the hundredth time how much I esteemed my brother. “But you know, I can’t believe he sees what
I
see in you. Peter hasn’t got an awful lot of… imagination.”

“And you’ve got too much.” Magda turned to me beaming and kissed my lips as on that evening in the foyer of the Menschhaus. But I was three long years older: we leaned into the clover and opened our eyes and mouths.

Presently I declared: “I think more of you than he does.”

She chuckled. “Peter loves me, Ambrose.”

“How about you?”

“Oh, well, me.” An amazing smile. My weight on her meant nothing; she plucked absently at my collar point as at a daisy. “It’s your brother I love. He’s
better
than you, don’t you think?”

But as I recoiled she caught my sleeve, and with the same smile led me into Peter’s house. Its stone walls were raised now to the level of first-floor windows; partition studs were up and rafters strung across the framing, but as yet we were not roofed. The moon grew smaller, brighter, harder. At length, striped in shadows and white light, I lay spent and began to taste the wormwood of our deed. But Magda lay easily as I had imagined, naked on the rough subflooring—large legs apart, hands under her head—contemplated the moon through our angled beams, and calmly said: “They say the whole universe is winding down.”

Daily I labored on the house; at night it was our trysting place, though I was not frequently permitted copulation. Magda was no tease: when the urge was on her she would initiate embraces or respond to mine with an ardor that half alarmed me, and if I did not bring her to orgasm she would earnestly complete the job herself. When she did not feel erotic and I did—rather more than half the time—she would say so and quickly “relieve” me by hand or mouth so that we could talk, or walk, or quietly count meteors. She did not mind the taste of semen, I was astonished to learn, so long as it was chased with Coca-Cola. (Yes, she did recall that afternoon in the toolshed seven years earlier, but only with a shrug: “Kids, I swear.”) But when she guessed, and she was never wrong, that my lust was as it were hypothetical, “caused” by no more than the possibility of its own satisfaction, a wish to be aroused rather than an actual arousal—then nothing doing. She seemed to me to know herself uncannily well; in her company I felt myself to be at worst a concentricity of pretensions, at best a succession of improvisations and self-ignorances. Unerringly—and unfailingly, and never disagreeably—she pointed them out. In moments of pique I was moved to retaliate, and finding nothing with which to tax her in the moral sphere, I would suggest that she lose some weight, or crudely complain that women’s crotches were ill odored.