Which brings us to the back seat, where, in addition to dealing with these shocking possibilities, A. is vainly mustering his nerve to touch Magda, Peter’s girlfriend, with whom our amateur has imagined himself in love since one late afternoon in September 1940, when, it is implied, she surprised him with a blow job in the Menschhaus toolshed. See B’s text for rhetoric and details. Magda’s attitude toward him is cordially patronizing; she is holding hands with Peter; Ambrose doubts that she even remembers the incident in the toolshed (for him a watershed).
The action proceeds between these suppressed bourgeois-domestic hang-ups, scandals, and volatilities in the foreground and, in the background, implications of the larger bourgeois violence of World War II: crude oil on the beach from torpedoed tankers, “browned-out” streetlights, shooting galleries full of swastikas and rising suns. Ambrose glimpses human copulation for the first time, under the boardwalk; he catches sight of the aureole of Magda’s nipple, trembles at the power and ubiquity of the sex drive, entertains preadolescent doubts of his masculinity, suffers pangs of jealousy and desire, approaches a nausea compounded of these plus the tensions in the family, his ambivalent feelings for his father and himself, and a candied apple that sits ill on his stomach. The three youngsters at last enter the funhouse; Ambrose takes a wrong turn and fancies himself wandering those corridors forever, telling himself stories in the dark, perhaps including the story “Lost in the Funhouse.”
Well. That loose-toga’d lady with the five-stringed lyre on the bench in the picture on the El Producto cigar box full of stone chisels on the shelf in the toolshed under the wisteria between the woodhouse and the privy behind the Menschhaus — whom Ambrose regarded with awed impersonality while Magda mouthed him in 1940—may have taken up her instrument and sung to my scribbling friend; she has not yet to me. That candied apple still sticks in my throat; Magda and Peter are still each other’s; and I—
But I can’t speak further of this story, this episode, these events. An end to I!
J
Just at this point, Germaine, my Amateur rebegins in the first person, Ambrose speaking, as if in losing himself in that funhouse he’d found his voice, at least, at last. No use my apologizing for the voice he found, which “Arthur Morton King” soon after abandoned: it was the way he spoke back then.
I myself, before I found it was myself was lost, thought Peter a foundling.
We discussed the possibility at length in our bedroom, and I will admit that my protestations — that I loved him regardless of his origins — were as experimental as sincere, and that there was more fascination than affection in the zeal with which I conjectured (he had not the imagination for it) the identity and station of his real parents. Were they gypsies of the sort who kept a house trailer on the edge of town, out past the tomato cannery, and read Mother’s palm for half a dollar? Were they residents of our very block — Erdmanns, Ziegenfusses — who now watched their shame grow up before their eyes? Our street ran down to Dorset Hospital, where most of the county’s babies drew first breath; no speculation was too wild to entertain. But my favorite was that Colonel Morton himself, who owned the cannery and several seafood-packing houses and had been mysteriously shot in the leg a few years past, had fathered Peter upon a European baroness during one of his sojourns abroad. The outraged baron had attempted to murder his rival and would have killed the child as well had not the colonel, foreseeing danger, paid Hector and Andrea to raise his natural son as their own. As for the baroness, she had by no means forgotten the issue of her star-crossed passion: she waited only for her old husband to die, whereupon she would join her true lover in America (I had never seen the president of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes) and claim Peter for her own.
“Aw, Amb, that’s nuts.” But I’d hear my brother rise on one elbow in the dark. “You don’t believe no such a thing. Do you.”
I would consider the play of shadows on the ceiling, where the streetlamp shone through catalpa leaves. As a matter of fact I did not see on my brother’s nature the stamp of colonels and baronesses, but the possibility stirred my heart. One day the baroness would drive up in a Daimler-Benz car, with a chauffeur and a veil, and take Peter back to be master of the castle. But first she’d buy out Mensch Masonry and take us around the world. Perhaps she would appoint Hector manager of Peter’s estate until my brother’s seniority, and we’d all live there: I, Magda, Peter, Mother, Father, Aunt Rosa.
On nights when raw nor’easters howled down the Eastern Shore and swept luckless sailors into the Chesapeake, the valley of the Rhine (where I located the baroness) appeared to me peaceful, green, warm, luminous: the emerald landscape of Aunt Rosa’s egg. The gray-green castle turrets were velveted with lichen; dusty terraces of vines stepped down to the sparkling river; a Lorelei, begauzed and pensive, leaned back against her rock and regarded some thing or person, invisible from where we stood, among the sidelit grapes of the farther shore.
So eloquent would I wax before this spectacle, I could sometimes exact from Peter promises of rooms for myself in one of the towers, and a private vineyard hard by the postern gate, before he remembered to protest that Mother was all the baroness he craved, our poor house the only castle. I could not of course propose outright that in that case he make over his inheritance to me; but I would go to sleep confident that Peter recognized my qualifications for the baronetcy and would abdicate in my favor when the time came.
The egg from which this vision hatched — bought by Uncle Konrad for Aunt Rosa at the Oberammergau Passion Play in 1910—lay in permanent exhibition between two of Uncle Wilhelm’s cupids on the mantelpiece of our Good Parlor, which in the old fashion was opened only for holidays, funerals, and company. Peter no less than myself deemed it worthwhile as a boy to behave himself long enough on such occasions to be rewarded with a glass of Grandfather’s wine and a view into that egg, but for years I assumed that its magical interior, like Wilhelm’s student statuary, was no more than a curiosity to him. Not until he was seventeen, and I fifteen, did I learn otherwise.
Uncle Konrad, upon his death in 1941, left in trust for each of his nephews two thousand dollars, into which we were to come upon our graduation from Dorset High. Mine was earmarked already by the family for my further education. Peter, I believe, was expected to invest his in the uncertain fortunes of Mensch Masonry Contractors, where like Uncle Karl he’d worked as an apprentice every spare moment of his youth. Father and Karl spoke warmly, as Peter’s graduation day approached, of his good fortune in being able to “do something” for the business at last — as though his having done a journeyman mason’s work at a boy’s wage for the two years past were not itself a baronial contribution.
“Bread cast upon the waters,” Hector would say to the family in general, sniffing and arching his brows. “Famous percentage yield. Throw in a slice, fish out a loaf.”
“Well, he doesn’t have to put it in the company,” Mother declared. She wore her housecoat the day long, as if she understood the word to mean a coat for keeping house in. The years had begun to frizz her hair, spoil her teeth, lower her jowls, undo her breasts, pot her belly: the sight of her holding court from her couch, cigarette between her lips and coffee cup in hand, did not move one in the same way as formerly. “It’s his money.”
“Who said it wasn’t? Let him put plumbing in the house for you.”