After the armistice the coffin was shipped home with others from an army burial ground in France: by troopship to Norfolk, Virginia, thence by Bay Line packet to Baltimore and aboard the Emma Giles to Long Wharf. Grandfather, Karl, Hector, and Konrad took delivery with the stoneyard dray. They stopped at the cutting shed for Grandfather to open the box, briefly, alone, and verify its contents; there were stories of the army’s carelessness in such matters. But “It’s Willy,” he growled when the lid had been rescrewed. They then installed it, closed, in the Good Parlor, among the mock Phidiases, the Barye-style lions, the Easter egg on its stand, to be tersely memorialized for burial.
Andrea King attended the funeral. Hector showed her two versions of her merry face on the cemetery headstones; Karl pretended that Wilhelm had modeled the backside of a third, more nubile cherub upon his memory of a night swimming escapade she had joined them in during their final furlough.
Said pretty Andrea: “You’re a darn tease, Karl.”
“What gets me,” Hector remarked to the company, “is, it’s your immortal one died. You know, Konrad? And your mortal one didn’t.”
“He was a cutter, was Willy,” Konrad agreed. “Where he might’ve got to, it can’t none of us guess.”
Grandfather painfully declared: “Those mountains was his mistake. He could’ve had half our cutting shed for his self.”
Even Karl was moved to say, “I told him. Remember, Heck?”
Presently Hector vowed: “Arm or no arm, I’m going to cut him a proper stone.”
And he began a program as fatefully obstinate as any in the family. All that spring, summer, fall — in fact, intermittently for the next twenty years — in the stoneyard, in what passed for the art room of Dorset High (where since his wounding he did only administration and substitute teaching), and in a whitewashed toolshed behind the Menschhaus, Hector addressed the problem of cutting stone with his good left arm. He would set the chisel for Karl or Grandfather to hold, and swing the mallet himself; he would hold the chisel and try to tell others how to strike. In 1920, he and Andrea married: there were eight in the house until 1927, when Peter was born and Konrad and Rosa moved next door to make room for the new grandchild. He experimented with ingenious jigs, positioning devices, chisel-headed hammers of his own devising. He bound his almost useless right arm to force himself into independence; he even tried to employ his foot as an extra hand. All in vain: it wants two strong arms like Peter’s to shape the rock, and a knowing eye, and a temper of mind — well, different from Ambrose’s, who was born the year this folly made room for a larger.
The year before, in 1929, leukemia fetched Grandmother to lie beside her unmarked son: a simple Vermont granite stone, lettered by the new sandblasting process that was killing the family’s business with easy competition, identifies her grave. Karl suddenly moved out of house and town to lay bricks in Baltimore. Konrad, Rose, and their Easter egg reinstalled themselves, to help everyone deal with Hector’s growing rages. The nation’s economy collapsed. So must the Mensch Memorial Monument Company without Karl’s foremanship: its founder widowed, weary, and deprived of his income from the immigration business; its angel risen to the company of Michael and the others; its mortal mainstay trying in vain to carve high-relief portraits with a left-handed sandblaster, and approaching madness as Ambrose approached birth.
Upon his “cure” and discharge in 1931 from the Eastern Shore Asylum, Hector mounted at his dead twin’s head an unlettered, unpolished, rough-cut stone fresh from the packing case as in the old days, reasoning nicely that unfinished marble was more in keeping anyhow with Wilhelm’s terminal aesthetics. Konrad compared it to the Miller’s Grave in Old Trinity Churchyard at Church Creek, marked by a pair of uninscribed millstones.
Having laid waste without success, en route to this insight, a deal of granite and alabaster, Hector now turned like Bellerophon to laying waste his soul instead, and succeeded quite. He had become principal of Dorset High before his twin obsessions and nine-month “commitment” led to his suspension. Not even Andrea held his jealous furies against him, once they passed; all assumed it was the celebrated “twin business” had deranged him, with which the whole town sympathized. Karl’s exit, nearly everyone agreed, was merely diplomatic; he would return when Hector was himself again, and Hector would reestablish himself with the school board, which had charitably arranged an unpaid furlough instead of accepting his resignation. In the meanwhile — and more, one feels, from the frustration of his sculpting than from his passing certainty that he was not his new son’s father — Hector turned, not to alcohol or opium, but to acerbity, dour silence, and melancholia, scarcely less poisonous in the long run; and to business, which, whether or not one has a head for it, may be addictive as morphine, and as deleterious to the moral fiber. To the summer of his death, even after the manpower shortage of World War II returned him to the principalship of Dorset High, Hector’s passion turned from the firm back to his brother’s beloved marble, and back to the firm again; and he ruined both, but would abandon neither.
Yet most obstinate of all is brother Peter, because more single-minded. Not that he resembles the family (excepting Karl) in other respects. Short and thick where they are tall and lean, black and curly where they are blond and straight, slow of wit, speech, movement where they are quick, devoid equally of humor and its sister, guile — how did the genes that fashion Mensches fashion him? As probable as that a potato should sprout on their scuppernong arbor, or that the wisteria, gorgeous strangler of their porch, should give out one May a single rose.
“Our foundling,” Andrea called him, before such jokes lost their humor. And wouldn’t he stammer when that lovely indolent bade him sit and talk upon the couch whence she directed the Menschhaus! Wouldn’t he redden when she questioned him with a smile about imaginary girl friends! Go giddy at the smell of lilac powder and cologne (which Ambrose can summon to his nostrils yet), and at the kiss-cool silk of her robe! And if, best sport of all, she held his head against her breast, stroked those curls so blacker by contrast, and sang in her unmelodious croon “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” wouldn’t the tears come! Aunt Rosa would reprove her to no avail; Hector and Konrad would shake their heads and smile in a worldly way; Grandfather’s chuckles would grow rattlier and more thick until they burst into gunshot hocks of phlegm, and he would blow his great nose, he would wind his great pocketwatch with vigor to recompose himself.
“So kiss me, my sweet,
And then let us part;
And when I grow too old to dream,
That kiss will live in my heart.”
Unthinkable prospect! Ambrose too would laugh until his jaw hinge ached and the belly muscles knotted; laugh and weep together at his brother’s misery, who longed to run but must embrace his adored tormentor. Her tease never worked with Ambrose: he would stiffen in her arms, tickle her ribs, mimic her words — anything not to amuse the company at cost of his dignity. But with Peter it never failed: even when he was in high school, vowing like his Uncle Karl to drop out and work full-time at the stoneyard, she could make him cry with that song for the sport of it, break him down entirely — then turn upon her audience for being entertained and declare, “Peter’s the only one loves me. He’s got a heart, he has.” Or, about as often, would push him away, almost recoil in mid-refrain as though from some near-human pet with whom she’d been disporting, and scold him for mussing her dress.
Ambrose, finally: is there a thing to him besides this familiar tenacity? Persistent amateur, novice human: much given to sloth and revery; full of intuition and odd speculation; ignorant of his fellows, canny of himself; moderately learned, immoderately harassed by dreams; despairing of his powers; stunned by history — and above all, dumbly dogged. His head holds but one idea at a time: be it never so dull and simple he can’t dismiss it for another but must tinker at it, abandon and return to it, nick and scratch and chip away until at last by sheer persistence he frets it into something fanciful, perhaps bizarre, anyhow done with.