Peter and Ambrose are drawn to their camera obscura no less strongly than the visitors. They linger in the darkened basement when customers are gone, regarding whatever image has chanced upon the glass. Stout Peter’s voice goes husky.

“Damned old seawall,” he remarks, as if years instead of minutes had gone by since he viewed it firsthand. And Ambrose sighs and tisks his cheek — for there it stretches, cracked, gleaming.

Little Angela, on the other hand, is not interested. In the chamber of her mind, perhaps, things glow with that light unaided. In any case, she prefers the vanished country of the Easter egg. What sights she sees through that blank window, we cannot suppose.

D

During all his first thirty years, A. waited for one among us to make a sound, move a hand, blow cigarette smoke in a certain way that would tell him we understood everything, so that between us might be dispensed with this necessity of words.

Signs to us he made past number. Earnest professors: when you discoursed upon Leibnitz and the windowless monads, did you not see one undergraduate, ill groomed and ill at ease, tap his pencil thus-and-so upon his book — which is to say, upon your window? Had you then flung up that sash with gesture of your own. But Brussels sprouts (he daresays) had thrust upon you a flatulence unnerving at the lectern; intent at once upon the syntax of your clause and the tonus of your sphincter, you missed his sign. Auburn beauty whom he stared at in the train-coach mirror thirteen years ago, from New York to North Philadelphia: you saw him touch his necktie such-a-way. If you had answered in kind and made him know. Bad luck for him your dirndl bound you out of countenance; bad luck for you you passed New Brunswick praying for your menses, when already Gold the casting agent’s sperm had had its way with your newest ovum. Et cetera.

You fidget. I too, and blush to think how lately A. has left this madness. Your forbearance and embarrassment for his sake I appreciate. The telescope at his window, the sculpture ’round about, the very lamp and ink bottle on his desk I see withdrawn into themselves and hiding their expressions: tender of his feelings, relieved to see he understands at last — yet uneasy all the same, lest out of habit he commence to stare again, or press them once more to give up truths about themselves. Never fear. The eyes shall sooner ask the fingers for a sign, the fancy supplicate the bowels, than Ambrose tax us further in that old way.

E

Everybody in that family dies of cancer! The only variable is its location: Grandfather’s was in his prostate, Grandmother’s in her bloodstream. Of their four children only Uncle Wilhelm was spared, by dying in France of influenza in 1918. Aunt Rosa’s was in her uterus; her husband Konrad’s was in his skin. Uncle Karl’s was in his liver. Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother Andrea, like Konrad a Mensch by marriage only, has nonetheless had radical mastectomy; her husband Hector’s nine-month madness in 1930, thought merely the effect of jealousy, is now revealed to have been associated with a tumor that feasts upon his brain.

When his sons went to visit him in Dorset Hospital, Hector stroked his nose and said, “What’s killing me will kill you too.” Already on Ambrose’s chest, constellations flourish of blue nevi whose increase in size and number I follow with interest — though it is from his birthmark that he looks for eventual quietus. Hence his inability to share Magda’s concern over radioactive fallout: with or without strontium 90 in their milk, her children must meet the family nemesis and perish.

Peter’s explanation is that, stonecutters and masonry contractors, the family have always worked and dwelt among rocks, which, he has heard, reflect more than normal cosmic radiation. This theory (with which somehow he also accounts for both Ambrose’s potent sterility and his own fertile impotence) is clever for Peter; more characteristic is his refusal to consider moving out of Mensch’s Castle, cosmic rays or no cosmic rays.

Excepting the mode of their demise, nothing more typifies that line than this persistence: with them, every idea becomes a fixed idea, to be pursued though it bring creation down ’round their shoulders. Had it not been for Grandfather’s original obstinacy, for example, they would not now be living (on the verge of bankruptcy) in America at all. One version has it he was the elder son of a Rhenish vintner; that the scene in Rosa’s egg was his future estate, or one not unlike it; but that he got a serving-girl in trouble, and instead of making arrangements to conceal the little scandal, as his father proposed, renounced his patrimony to immigrate to Maryland with her. Another legend, on the contrary, says his forebears were the rudest peasants, almost animals, from Herrkenwalde in Altenburg; that his emigration and establishment of the family firm was no decline but an extraordinary progress. Granting either version, it appears that he was a determined fellow and that the family has come a considerable way, for better or worse, in a short time.

Of Grandfather’s fathering, then, nothing certain is known. Whether from ignorance, spite, indifference, or a bent to regard himself as unmoved mover, Thomas Mensch all but refused to speak of his origins, and thus deprived his parents of existence as effectively as if he’d eaten them. But whatever his prehistory, we know that in 1880, still in his late teens, he appeared in Baltimore as an apprentice stonecutter; married there in ’84; moved with his bride to Dorset the following year to work as a mason and tombstone cutter, and liked the place enough to stay. In 1886 Aunt Rosa was born, in 1890 Uncle Karl, in ’94 the twins Hector and Wilhelm. Grandfather was obliged to find new irons for his fire: in addition to his backyard tombstone-cutting he became the local ticket agent for North German Lloyds, which during the great decades of immigration sailed regularly between Bremerhaven and Baltimore; and in this capacity he arranged for the passage to America of numbers of the relatives of his German friends. Twenty dollars for a steerage crossing, bring your own food, except for the barrels of salt herring and pickles supplied by the steamship line, which scented the new Americans for some while after. Moreover, as the would-be homesteaders straggled back to the Germantowns of Baltimore and Philadelphia from ruinous winters in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Grandfather helped and profited from them again as a broker of wetland real estate, the only acreage they could afford in Maryland’s milder climate. They drained marshes by the hundreds of acres; throve and prospered on what they turned into first-class arable land — and on their weekend trips to town they made the Menschhaus in East Dorset a little center of the county’s German community until the First World War.

Just before the turn of the century, Thomas Mensch did his most considerable piece of business: while it lasted, the most successful of the family’s enterprises to date. Concerned by the Choptank’s inroads into several newly settled neighborhoods, the town commissioners authorized construction of a retaining seawall along several blocks of East and West Dorset; Grandfather bid low for the contract, hired laborers and equipment as a one-man ad hoc company, and in 1900 completed the wall — which like an individual work of art he signed and dated at each end in wet concrete.

With the capital acquired from this and his other enterprises he established a proper stoneyard, the Mensch Memorial Monument Company, and employed laborers and apprentices. These latter included, as they came of age, all three of his sons, who seem also to have apprenticed themselves to their father’s obstinacy. Karl, to begin with, so loved the yard — the blocks of marble in their packing frames, the little iron-wheeled carts, the tin-roofed cutting and polishing shed with its oil-smelling winches and hoists, the heavy-timbered horses and potbellied stove, the blue-shirted black laborers and white-shirted, gray-aproned masters, the cutting tools arrayed like surgical instruments on the working face, the stone-dust everywhere — that he could not be kept in school. At sixteen he dropped out to work with the stone all day, for which he had a natural feel though he lacked any particular gift for lettering and embellishment. By his twentieth year he was the firm’s master mason and second in charge, supervisor of roughing and polishing the stones and their erection in the county’s graveyards; it was his greater interest in construction than in carving that, along with Hector’s restlessness, would fatefully extend the firm’s activities to include foundation laying and general masonry. A swarthy, hirsute, squat, and powerful man, Karl never married, though like Grandfather he was regarded in East Dorset as a ladies’ man. Stories were told of women brokenheartedly wedding others…