John Barth - Letters

Were you aware, when you worked that summer for Mensch Masonry, of the fraud Peter Mensch’s house was being built on? The poor chap had been left a small sum by another uncle (cancer of the skin) and resolved to build a house for the family, whose fortunes were as always parlous. He bought Erdmann’s Cornlot, went off to war, and left the job of construction to the family firm — which is to say, to the liver-cancered uncle and the brain-tumoured father, who (the latter in particular was, it seems, a cranky rascal) proceeded to shortchange their benefactor at every opportunity. The seawall had been protected by riprap of quarried stone: this they removed to complete the repairing of the hospital’s seawall, itself crumbling because some years earlier they’d removed its riprap for other purposes! The footings for Peter’s house were laid to skimpier specifications than he’d called for; the mortar you mixed that summer was systematically overloaded with sand, to save money; the stone used for construction was that same riprap removed from before the hospital wall, still too barnacled and mossed to bond properly with the mortar, especially with that mortar. Ambrose knew of these things (which he now candidly rehearses as we stroll the grounds) and loved his brother, but could not protest— did not protest — because of his own sore culpability: his virgin tryst and subsequent occasional coupling with La Giulianova, which he believed Mensch père to have espied!

Thus did they all take ill advantage of the earnest young man they all professed devotion to and acknowledged as the pillar of the clan; who so loved them that upon his return to firm and family, when his mason’s eye must have detected straight off the adulterated mortar if not the dittoed fiancée (whose adulterator I begin to write like), he said not a word, but went on cheerfully with the construction and the marriage. In ’49, house and tower were complete; the newlyweds moved in, the twins were born. In ’54 Ambrose and wife Marsha came down from Baltimore and moved in too, he having given up teaching to try his fortune as a free-lancer. In 1955 (birth year of the damaged daughter) major cracks first appeared in both the masonry and Ambrose’s marriage; by ’56 several doors had to be shaved and sashes rehung: Ambrose and Marsha shifted to a flat near the boat harbour, the liver uncle went to his reward, and Peter assumed direction of Mensch Masonry (“the family infirm,” my lover calls it). By 1960 the Menschhaus was measurably out of plumb, as were Ambrose’s marriage and career alike: Ms Blank, not regarding herself as empty, resented his efforts to fill her in: his major literary endeavour (a chronicle of the sinking family) was bogged in bathos. He half attempted suicide — and, he declares, half succeeded. Traditional narrative he gave up for “concrete prose” (the mason in him, one supposes) and occasional retaliatory adulteries: for some time, it seems, his had not been the only filler in the Blank. The celebrated seawall, meanwhile, had quite collapsed: the directors of the hospital were justly incensed; Erdmann’s Cornlot was washing rapidly into the river; once again Mensch Masonry verged upon bankruptcy.

This last in part because Hector Mensch, P. & A.‘s father, had also retired from the county school system by this time (the tumour was enlarging) and turned all his ruinous energies to the firm; also because Peter would no more acknowledge that the man was crackers (and ignore his business advice) than that his house’s list was owing as much to bad foundations as to bad ground. The company did foundation work at Tidewater Tech in ’62 and ’63, in the course of which Hector made the acquaintance of Harrison Mack; John Schott he already knew from his alma mater, Wicomico Teachers College. Among the three of them was somehow hatched, in 1966, the notion of Marshyhope College’s Tower of Truth.

Which fetches us to our literal point, whereon my friend and I still strolled as he regaled me with this exposition. MSUC is built on the drained and filled marshes of Redmans Neck; as Joe Morgan had warned, high-rise construction on that ground was at best problematical. Contractors’ bids on the tower were correspondingly high; it seemed almost as though “we” might win the day by default. Alas, it became Hector Mensch’s strategy to save the company by underbidding all competitors for the foundation work, even if that meant doing the job at a considerable loss, thereby so inclining John Schott in their favour (by thus abetting his campaign against Morgan) that when Schott became president and launched the great expansion of MSU, Mensch Masonry’s fortunes would be made at last. And so far has this strategy succeeded that while Harrison Mack and Hector Mensch now sleep six feet under the loam of Dorset, poor Peter toils in it sleeplessly deeper each semester. The tower’s foundation is laid, almost a year behind schedule and at enormously greater cost than originally estimated, thanks both to inflation and to the ground situation at Redmans Neck. Mensch Masonry’s Dun & Bradstreet has sunk lower than the piles Peter had to drive to find bedrock. Ambrose is persuaded that, like the Menschhaus, the Tower of Truth is rising from a lie: that among their father’s last official acts on behalf of the firm — whilst contracts were still being negotiated with the state, and various political campaign funds still being contributed to — was the falsification of certain crucial test borings supposedly taken at the site, to persuade Peter that the project was less unfeasible than it seemed. The tower is presently scheduled for completion next year (just enough of it is raised at this writing to permit next fall the cornerstone ceremonies originally scheduled for next month); by 1976, Ambrose maintains, it will have to be abandoned, if not dismantled.

Meanwhile, to bail out the firm, appease the directors of the county hospital, and delay the disappearance of Erdmann’s Cornlot, Peter contracted with a firm of engineers dredging out the ship channel into Cambridge Creek to dump the dredge spoil, thousands of cubic yards of it, before those two properties — especially the Cornlot, which is now enlarged by more than an acre. The seawall that founded the foundered firm is buried beneath this as yet uncharted point (“Cancer Point,” Ambrose has dubbed it), and the Lighthouse lists and settles some hundred yards farther from the water than when you helped build it.

We approach the house. I have glimpsed it before, from the distances of Long Wharf and the Choptank River bridge. From closer up it is less prepossessing than its builder, who now strolls out with the d.d.d. to greet us as we stroll in from the point.

One would not take Peter and Ambrose Mensch for brothers. Handsomer but coarser than my lover, Peter Mensch is dark-eyed and — browed, swarthy, massive, older-looking than his forty-some years: raw Saxon-Thuringian peasant stock, says A., direct from Grandmother Mensch, unleavened by the wilier Rhenish genes of her husband and the English DNA of the Somerset Kings. His voice is surprisingly high and gentle, his speech full of broguish right smart’s and purt’ near’s. His movement, too, seems gentle, considering his weight and apparent strength; he is not fat, but thick, heavy, powerful-looking: no doubt he still cuts and hefts the stone himself. He shakes my hand elaborately, right pleased to meet me. He has just returned from Bible class at the nearby Methodist church and is still dressed in shiny blue chain-store suit and black shoes, but in deference to the warming day has loosened his two-dollar tie, held in place with a gilt crab tie-tac. He is sorry that the twins won’t be home for dinner: young Carl and his girl friend are surf-fishing “down to Ocean City”; young Connie is helping her husband-to-be, a local farmer, set out tomato plants. It ain’t no keeping um home at their age.