John Barth - Letters

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.