John Barth - Letters

Uncle Konrad, upon his death in 1941, left in trust for each of his nephews two thousand dollars, into which we were to come upon our graduation from Dorset High. Mine was earmarked already by the family for my further education. Peter, I believe, was expected to invest his in the uncertain fortunes of Mensch Masonry Contractors, where like Uncle Karl he’d worked as an apprentice every spare moment of his youth. Father and Karl spoke warmly, as Peter’s graduation day approached, of his good fortune in being able to “do something” for the business at last — as though his having done a journeyman mason’s work at a boy’s wage for the two years past were not itself a baronial contribution.

“Bread cast upon the waters,” Hector would say to the family in general, sniffing and arching his brows. “Famous percentage yield. Throw in a slice, fish out a loaf.”

“Well, he doesn’t have to put it in the company,” Mother declared. She wore her housecoat the day long, as if she understood the word to mean a coat for keeping house in. The years had begun to frizz her hair, spoil her teeth, lower her jowls, undo her breasts, pot her belly: the sight of her holding court from her couch, cigarette between her lips and coffee cup in hand, did not move one in the same way as formerly. “It’s his money.”

“Who said it wasn’t? Let him put plumbing in the house for you.”

That was not what she meant, Mother replied. But it was. Hector’s sole concession to modernity, since buying out Karl’s and Rosa’s shares of the Menschhaus in 1936, was a cold-water tap let into the kitchen sink. It was still pitchers and basins on marble washstands in all the bedrooms, and as we had no heat either beyond the kitchen and parlor stoves, there’d be ice on those pitchers on winter mornings. We were, moreover, the only family in East Dorset who still used the privy built into the row of whitewashed sheds behind our summer kitchen. The prospect there was not unlovely: a walk of mossy bricks led under the grape and wisteria arbors which screened the sheds. But it was so shocking cold in winter, so beloved of wasps and bees in summer, that I remained more or less constipated until college.

Yet however legitimate her yen for domestic convenience, I felt Andrea had no more right than Hector to influence Peter’s choice, and vigorously so argued. The very prudence of their resolve as to my inheritance (which resolve Peter had affirmed so stoutly that I couldn’t disagree) increased my jealousy for the independence of his, and led me by some logic to feel it should be spent imprudently. Not “thrown away,” mind, in the evanescent joys of riotous living, nor yet exchanged for objects of useless beauty: the notion of the spree was alien to our Protestant consciences, and I cannot imagine Hector or even the unknown Wilhelm, for example, paying money for a piece of art. My fancy equated carefree expenditure with the purchase of hard goods, the equipment of pleasure: if Peter hesitated to commit himself, I assumed his problem to be the choice between, say, a red Ford roadster, a racing sailboat, a five-inch reflecting telescope.

“He doesn’t have to spend it on the family at all,” I would declare. “He can do anything he wants with it.”

“Indeed he may; indeed he may.” Hector’s nose itched when he was opposed; he would massage it with left thumb and forefinger. “Let him buy a nice Hampton sailboat. When the company goes into receivership, we’ll all go sailing.”

It will seem odd that none consulted Peter’s inclinations; in his presence the subject never came up. The truth is, though we were all more sophisticated than my brother, he had already at seventeen assumed a certain authority in our house, stemming it may be from nothing more than his difference from us. Presume as we did that our judgment was sounder, our imagination keener than his, we seemed to understand that his resolve was beyond cajolery. The very futility of our debate lent it sarcastic heat; a variety of awe, more than tact, silenced it when he came upon us. I am reminded of Peter by Homer’s Zeus; indeed, our later ménage in the Lighthouse was something like that deity’s in this respect: Magda might complain like Hera; I chafe and bristle like Poseidon or Hades; Marsha carp and wheedle and connive like Aphrodite — but there were finally no quarrels, for when Peter speaks, though the grumbling may continue, his will is done.

He spoke, in this instance, on a Saturday evening some days after we’d begun repairing the municipal seawall, whose original construction had laid the firm’s foundation. After the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, tons of granite rubble purchased by the town at salvage prices from the burnt-out city were fetched down the Chesapeake on barges and dumped as “rip-rap” before the wall for additional protection: Grandfather’s idea, and a sound one. But age and ice and hurricane had so far had their way with the concrete in the forty years since, undone and undermined it, that in spring tides it was more breakwater than retaining wall, with virtual harbors behind it. Moved by citizens whose real estate thus silted every tide, the Dorset City Council let bids to repair the wall and increase its height; after long cost-cutting computations by Hector (who, in addition to his principaling, still owned one-third of the company) in conference with Karl (who directed it) and Rosa (owner of the third third), Mensch Masonry submitted the low bid.

The contract bolstered our sagging fortunes, which only the general wartime prosperity had kept from definitive collapse. Extra carpenters, masons, and cement finishers were engaged; our flatbed truck was repaired on credit; from somewhere a rock crusher and a second main mixer were leased. And in the interest of civic economy, Hector informed us, we would use not a stone from the company yard! The day we first surveyed the job he had scraped algae with his left hand from some of the “Baltimore rocks” in the shallows where Peter and I had used to play pirates and net soft crabs, and had shaken his head at what he saw.

“Good brownstone and granite,” he’d declared to Karl and Peter. “Already squared, most of it. What a waste.”

Uncle Karl agreed, and so every day after school and all day Saturday I worked with the gang of Negroes they set to manhandling the Baltimore rocks. At first we fed them indiscriminately to the crusher, moss and all, thence to the mixer, while Father watched with a frown that deepened every time another nicely masoned stone was reduced to chips.

“A crying shame.”

Karl sniffed and chewed his unlit cigar. “That one there was Tennessee rose marble, looked like.”

The upshot was, one Friday at supper they announced an agreement made that forenoon with the mayor and city council: in return for all the squared stones, to be carted to our yard at our own expense, Mensch Masonry would clear away “Grandfather’s” Baltimore rocks altogether and present the city with a usable bathing area in front of the exposed seawall. Hector was enormously proud of the plan (his own), which he felt no ordinary businessman, but only a business artist as it were, could have hatched. What especially pleased him was that our removing, for profit, what Grandfather had for profit placed there was a kind of echo of Grandfather’s benevolent profiting from the immigrants both going and coming.

He grinned at my aunt. “There is style in this piece of business.”

Uncle Karl said merely, “Think what Willy could of done with them pink ones.”

Aunt Rosa had the highest opinion of Hector, whom she still regarded, twenty-five years after the fact, as a shattered young hero of the war, the intellectual counterpart of his artist twin. She laid her hand on her lower abdomen — where all unknown to us her cancer flowered — and cried, “If Konrad just was here once!”