John Barth - Letters

Tears then were shed for Uncles Konrad and Wilhelm, and for the family’s imminent prosperity. Even Mother must have been impressed, for she made no protest when Father sent me to light the Good Parlor stove and brought two bottles of New York Rhenish from the cold-pantry for a celebration.

The room was as chilly as its statues, and smelled of coal oil. Aunt Rosa wept again — the last parlor function had been Konrad’s funeral — but the cold wine warmed and cheered us. Family history was rechronicled; we sang “Happy Days Are Here Again” and teased Peter (who had fetched Magda from around the corner) for missing his chance to save the firm or put plumbing in the house before our fortunes changed. Mother even sat in Father’s lap and tipped his glass so that he could embrace her with his arm. In uneasy glee I called, “Get a load of the lovers!” and made everyone laugh by kissing “the Groaner” (so we had dubbed an anguished Greek head of heroic proportion, on a pedestal by the daybed: Wilhelm’s copy of Laocoön, whom the family mistook for Christ crucified) in imitation of Mother.

Only Peter was not merry, though he regarded our festivity with pensive goodwill from his station before the mantelpiece and murmured gravely, smilingly, to Magda. While Hector blushed at something Mother whispered in his ear, Rosa hummed her favorite sipping song, “Wir wöllen unser alien Kaiser Wilhelm wiederhaben.” I perched on her lap and crooned into her white-fuzzed ear: “Come with me to the Casbah!” Whereat she wrinkled over and pushed me away— Verrückte!” —flattered all the same by my attentions. Peter crimsoned more than Father: embarrassed perhaps by his own embarrassment, he took up the Easter egg from its grapewood stand between the cupids, aimed it at the white light globe that hung from the ceiling on three chains, and addressed himself to the miracle inside. Magda, beside him on a needlepoint chair, took his hand.

Mother ignored me. I could not of course remain forever on Aunt Rosa’s aproned lap. “Do you really think it’s okay to move those stones from in front of the seawall?”

Father could not easily with his single arm both embrace Mother and rub his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Now. What might you mean by that?”

I grinned and shrugged. “I only wondered. Undermining and all? Wasn’t that why Grandpa put them there to begin with?”

“Well. I beg your pardon, sir. It’s easier to wonder about undermining than to think about undermining.” Peter removed the egg from his eye.

“Lord a mercy,” Mother said. “It’s nearly nine.” As if reminded, the hall clock whirred and began to toll that hour. “I’ll put coffee on.”

“The wall’ll be three foot higher,” Father said. “Do you know what that means?” I did not, in detail. “Two hundred sixty-six cubic yards of reinforced concrete, that the waves won’t touch a dozen times a year! A hundred extra tons of weight!”

“And that’s just the stretch by the hospital,” Karl reminded me. Father helped himself to another glass. “He wonders about undermining.”

I chose not to wonder further. “Is it really Grandpa’s castle in the egg?”

Aunt Rosa kindly frowned. “Rest his soul, he used to say so.”

“Fooey,” Father said.

Karl chuckled. Rosa’s eyes filled up again. “Konrad bought me that in Oberammergau in nineteen and ten,” she explained to Magda, not for the first time. “On our honeymoon.”

“She knows,” I protested.

“There was this peddler, an old Greek or Jew, that had a raft of different ones for sale by the passion play. He showed Konrad some with naughty pictures inside, and Konrad pretended this was one like that. He wouldn’t let me peek in till we got it home.”

“He was a godawful tease, was Konrad,” Karl allowed.

For some reason I suddenly saw my father’s brother as a distinct human being, with an obscure history of his own, apart from ours, and who would one day die. I realized that I had not especially despised him recently, and pondered this realization.

Peter now surveyed us with a great smile and squeezed Magda’s hand. “If I didn’t think we’d do the seawall right,” he declared as if to me, “I wouldn’t of bought the front of Willy Erdmann’s Cornlot.”

It took a while to realize what had been said. Hector’s sarcasm was undermined by surprise. “You wouldn’t of which?”

“Grosser Gott!” Aunt Rosa chuckled, uncertain of the drift. Uncle Karl’s grin was more knowing.

My own first feeling was sharp disappointment: there would be, then, neither sailboat nor five-inch telescope, and my counsel in the matter, so far from being followed, had not even been solicited. But it was joined at once by admiration for Peter’s daring.

Mother hurried in from the kitchen. Cigarette and coffee cup. She was as startled as Hector, but her face showed amusement too. “You what?”

“Whole front end of the Cornlot,” Peter said carefully. “Hundred and fifty feet along the seawall and a hundred deep.”

The Jungle too! I guessed with fresh disappointment that Magda had been in on the secret: her smile was knowing; her great eyes flashed when Peter winked at her.

Father besought the Groaner with an expression not dissimilar to that fellow’s wretched own. “He’s going to raise tomatoes. We’ll pay the rent on our crusher with beefsteak tomatoes.”

Aunt Rosa pressed with both hands her abdomen. “Ja, ja, Hector! Peter ein Bauer ist!”

“He’ll undermine Morton’s canning house,” Father declared. “The colonel’s good as bankrupt.”

“Ja dock!” Aunt Rosa crowed. “Ah! Gott!”

My old hypothesis regarding Peter’s parentage sprang back to mind.

“I’m going to help farm it,” I announced. “Aren’t I, Peter.”

My brother set the egg back in its place. “We can make a garden. But I didn’t buy the Cornlot to farm it.”

“He didn’t buy the Cornlot to farm it,” Father informed the Groaner.

Karl chuckled. “Sure he didn’t. He wants a place of his own to set and watch the speedboat races.”

After his first remark, Peter had addressed himself principally to Mother. Now, though it was still to her he smiled, he rested his free hand lightly first on Father’s shoulder and then upon his chair back, and winked at Uncle Karl. “I’m going to build a stone house there for all of us to live in.”

For the second time Hector’s sarcasm failed him — which is to say, he could make no reply at all — and Peter took the opportunity to explain his intention. The Cornlot (so named by East Dorset children, though tomatoes and turnips as often grew there) was a field of seven acres at the foot of our street, adjacent to the hospital grounds; not two weeks previously our ailing neighbor Willy Erdmann — loser of the battle of the bees and a sinking dipsomane — had declared his intent to parcel it into building lots, and there being little demand yet for new housing in East Dorset, for a small consideration had given Peter a thirty-day option on one waterfront plot. Now that Mensch Masonry appeared to be in no pressing need of capital, Peter was resolved to purchase the lot outright for eleven hundred dollars (Erdmann’s price) and erect a commodious stone house there for the family. More, with Uncle Karl’s help — who, we now learned, had been Peter’s agent in the transaction — he had persuaded Erdmann, a quondam realtor and builder, to include in the deal a set of blueprints from his files, and was already dickering with him and another contractor for a basement excavation.

“Don’t look at me,” Karl growled, almost merrily. “Boy made me swear not to tell.”

“Stone costs a fortune!” Mother exclaimed. “There’s not a stone house in East Dorset!”