John Barth - Letters

“Going to build her myself as I get the money,” Peter said firmly. “After the war. Any of you can chip in that wants to. It’ll be an advertisement for the company.”

Hector snorted. “Some advertisement, when it sinks into the Cornlot. You crazy, Karl?”

But Uncle Karl reminded him that the hospital itself was holding up well enough on the sandy soil, and Peter declared he’d already learned from Karl and Willy Erdmann what was required in the way of piers and footings, and was prepared to lay out the site.

Suddenly Mother set down both coffee and cigarette and looked from Magda to Peter with a new expression. “Peter Mensch! Are you and Magda married?”

Rosa rocked and hummed. Father rubbed his nose as if possessed. Karl twiddled his wineglass and grinned. I myself was nearly ill with envy at Peter’s initiative. He began to color again. “Nope.”

“Engaged, then. Is that so, Magda?” There was affection in Mother’s voice, still mixed with amusement — the tone with which she sang to torment Peter — and he blushed as miserably as on those sporting occasions.

“We’re not engaged or anything.” Magda was as devoid of wit as was my brother, but immune to teasing. Her eyes would grow even larger and more serious, her voice more quiet, and she never rose to our bait. “We don’t have any plans.”

“Well, we do,” Peter objected, remarkably red. “But they’re a ways off. After the war. And nothing definite.”

“A stone house on the Cornlot,” Father reported to Mother. Rosa hummed and chortled, her hands clasped across her apron. Karl clapped Father’s shoulder and called Peter a chip off the old block. As soon as the hubbub began to subside, Peter left to walk Magda home. I went as far as the entrance hall with them.

“Boy oh boy, Peter…” My heart was full; he and Magda both smiled. “Are you going to put crenelations on the house, do you think? Those scallops that they used to shoot arrows from?”

“I guess none of those, Amb. Sounds too expensive.”

Now it was I who blushed. “I sure will help you build it!”

“That’s good.”

“We can transplant our grapevines even before we build! And put in some real wine grapes.”

“It’s our land,” Peter said. “We can do whatever we want.”

I began to realize that a piece of land was more exciting to own than any of the things I’d thought of. “How about a tower? We could have one round tower, on a corner…”

“Yeah, well. We’ll have to think about a tower, all right.” I saw he was reddening again, and so said them good night, but declared: “It’d be great if you all did get married, and it was your house we were living in!”

With an easy motion Magda turned my face toward hers and kissed me, lightly and solemnly, on the lips. I understood that she and Peter must be habitually making love.

“Good night, Amby,” she said.

Back in the parlor Father was betting the Groaner that Peter expected to be supplied with free building materials.

“Well, now,” Mother said good-humoredly. “He did say the house was for all of us.”

Father entreated suffering Laocoön with his arm. “She actually believes —”

“So let’s give him the Baltimore rocks,” Karl suggested.

“He don’t need them,” Father declared. “You’ve all got bigger ones in your heads.”

Aunt Rosa whooped.

I stayed out of it and got to bed as soon as possible.

“He’s feeling that Rhine wine,” I heard Mother remark, and she said more truly than she knew: it was the Rhine of Aunt Rosa’s egg whose wine possessed me. For hours I tossed at the mercy of two ideas: that Peter’s property ran clear to the center of the earth (its volume I calculated next day, by the law of prisms, to be seven and twelve one-hundredths cubic miles), and that an older girl like Magda, whether or not she recalled a certain quarter hour in our toolshed four years past, was… more interesting than the giddy teases I had “dates” with.

K

Konrad’s comparison was with certain Tin Pan Alley songs, whereof the catchy title is dreamed up first and the tune composed to fit: so the motto of Mensch Masonry preceded the firm itself, which was established on its strength. One early fall morning in 1932 (so Mother tells the story, shaking her head), before he’d got himself back into the school system after his discharge from the asylum, Father was sitting in the “office” corner of the Mensch Memorial Monument Company, nursing one of the headaches that dated from his cure and regarding a block of fractured Carrara. A hurricane some weeks previously had washed out a clapboard home on Holland Island, out in the Bay, and taken the life of the lady of the house; her husband, an oyster tonger, had contracted for a modest stone at the head of her vault, which by marsh-country custom (owing to the scarcity of dry ground) was “buried” in a slight excavation in his dooryard, the concrete lid aboveground. Grandfather was offering him a list of popular inscriptions from which he might choose.

“Look at this here: ‘He giveth His beloved sleep.’ ” The verse from Psalms was, in fact, his pet inscription: he loved to cut Gothic H ’s. “And here’s Jeremiah: ‘Her sun is gone down while it was yet day.’ Very nice sentiment, eh?”

But his client waved the list away. “I already decided, Mister Mensch.” He had sold his tongboat and joined the company of old men who sulked on sunny benches before the courthouse. “ ‘Build not your house upon the shifting sand’ is what I want. You put that on there.”

“Ja ja,” Grandfather assented. Customers, for some reason, brought out his German. “ ‘Built not your haus upon the zhiftink zandt.’ My own self, I see that raised on black granite. Very nice sentiment.”

The deal was struck. When the widower went, Father repeated the injunction a number of times.

“Now that is damned clever, considering. ‘Build not your house upon the shifting sand.’ ”

The more he reflected on it, the more it amused him, until at length migraine was flown, battered marble forgot. By lunchtime he had resolved to enter the field of foundation building and general stonemasonry, as a contractor. Within a week he had borrowed what capital he could, on Grandfather’s credit and despite his skepticism, from the failing banks; ordered tools and materials; apprised the local building firms of our availability. Before the first snow fell and Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, the firm of Mensch and Son, Foundations and Stonemasonry (changed on Karl’s return to Mensch Masonry Contractors), had received its first subcontract. And the newly lettered office door, together with the drays and the flatbed wagon, enjoined their beholders to build not upon the shifting sand.

Alas for any who took to heart our motto and engaged our services in those days: he built twice over on the sand he fled. Not alone because our foundations resled ineluctably on ihe loam of the Eastern Shore, but because Hector, once he’d abandoned the Muse for Mammon, resorted to every economy known to corner-cutting builders, to the end of meeting his notes. If the contract (particularly in the private sector, where there were few building inspections) specified a twelve-inch concrete footing under a brick pier, he would tamp the ground extra well and make do with eight. His mortar (as well I knew, having mixed it in my youth till my hands were callused and my spine near cracked) was inordinately rich in sand, wherein the county abounded, with cement enough barely to bind the grains that were to bind the bricks. Finally, in order to make his deadlines he would lay stone and brick in every winter weather; despite his heating both sand and mix-water, his economical mortar not infrequently froze before it set, and when it was dry one could crumble it between one’s fingers. In time that same sand shifted indeed, carrying flag and fieldstone with it; what with out-of-court settlements and court-ordered repairs, Mensch and Son, by the time of Karl’s return, found themselves with little money, few contracts in hand, and a yard full of building stones and flagstones too small to make monuments of and too large to forget about.