But presently Father would dream up a new way to sculpt his dead twin’s headstone with one arm. A fresh block of alabaster would appear in his office, or in the toolshed, or in the art room of Dorset High; new tools of his design would be forged by Joe Voegler the oyster-dredge builder down by the creek; Uncle Konrad (before Karl returned from Baltimore) would drop by on his book-laden bike, find Father engrossed in sketching and chipping, and ask permission to straighten out the files a bit. Sooner or later a contract would appear for a random-rubble chimney or a patio of Pennsylvania flag; for a time we’d hear no more of the Receivers.
Our enthusiasm for the seawall project, then, and for Karl and Hector’s resourceful management of it, was commingled with relief, for it seemed to herald a general improvement of our fortunes. War production was at its peak: Colonel Morton’s canneries made army rations around the clock; “rescue boats” of white oak and cypress, beautiful before they were painted battleship gray, were being built by the Dorset Shipyard, erstwhile boatwrights to the oyster fleet. The citizenry had more means for patios, terraces, tombstones — and of our materials, unlike some, there was no great shortage. No longer did we polish headstones with wet sand and railroad iron, or letter them by hand with maul and chisel: they were bought wholesale — already shaped, polished, and decorated in stock patterns — from a national concern by whom we were enfranchised; the inscriptions, stenciled out of sheet rubber, were quickly and perfectly sandblasted onto the face. With the nozzle in one hand and his mind on Erdmann’s Cornlot, Peter could execute in a minute the H’s with which Grandfather had used to take such loving pains, and do them just as well. Father installed a secondhand water heater in our summer kitchen and no longer rubbed his nose when Mother spoke of radiators and indoor toilets — though, to be sure, such frivolities were not available in wartime.
All summer we worked on the wall, under Karl’s supervision, Hector gimping down from school or stoneyard from time to time to inspect our progress. To their joint resourcefulness there was no end. When it became clear that cleaning the Baltimore rocks by hand was ruinously expensive (it took me half an hour, with the best will in the world, to scrape the moss from one), Father rented and experimented with, in vain, equipment to spray them with boiling water or live steam, or soak them in a weak solution of hydrochloric acid, or air-dry and sand-clean them: all either ineffective or inefficient. In the end, not to throw good money after bad, we carted them to the yard as they were, hoping they might clean up more readily when long dry. They did not. When our crusher broke beyond immediate repair on what looked to have once been the quoin of a major Baltimore bank, and we were forced to buy commercial smallstone for our concrete, Karl softened our loss by loading the forms with whole boulders, moss and all, before we poured. And when the city council belatedly challenged our removing the Baltimore rocks at all, and the mayor shamefully refused to acknowledge any previous verbal agreement about a municipal bathing area, Father demanded and received permission, in order to forestall an action against us, to take out at least the ones from our own frontage on the Cornlot.
I voiced my opinion of these expedients to Peter, who upon his graduation had assumed the foremanship of our yard in order to free Karl for the wall. But my brother, then as now, though he deplored poor workmanship like ill character, could attend to but one thing at a time, and was entirely preoccupied with our house. In July he finished purchasing the lot; in August he hired his excavator; and between us, working evenings and weekends with advice from Karl and head-shakings from Father, we put up the forms and poured the basement floor and walls. Magda came down every evening to watch, often with Mother and Aunt Rosa and bottles of home brew in a galvanized bucket. For the first time my body grew as brown and tough as Peter’s; I prized my muscles and my right to drink the yeasty beer. All day I toted boulders for the seawall, all evening barrowed concrete for the house; but so agreeable was it to be fifteen and strong that when dusk ended our labors I would wrestle with my brother in the clover. Our hard flesh smacked; our grunting hushed the crickets. When the last of our strength was spent we would tumble, washed in dew, at Magda’s feet, there to bathe further in her grave smile before our final rinse in the nettled river.
The last twenty dollars of his inheritance Peter spent on a tree and two rosebushes.
“A weeping willow tree,” Father reported to Aunt Rosa. “Twenty feet tall. It will shed many a tear before Peter gets his towers up.”
Aunt Rosa grabbed her gut.
“Mensch’s Folly isn’t built yet,” Father went on. “But when the receivers take this house away from us, we’ll all go down to the Cornlot and sleep under Peter’s willow tree.”
“Ach! No more, Hector!”
If it was my brother’s hope that the family would take up where his legacy left off, he was disappointed: work on the house ceased with the August meteor showers. In September Peter announced his engagement to Magda and enlisted in the Corps of Engineers. I had our bedroom to myself; no longer needed to masturbate under the covers when my brother, I hoped, was asleep. Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth smiled from the walls, hung too with plane spotters’ silhouettes of Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs, Heinkels. But it was Magda Giulianova I dreamed of, by me rescued from the holocaust that incinerated all dear obstacles to our love. In the shelter of the unfinished basement of the unbuilt castle, we mourned our losses in each other’s arms.
M
“Mulch Peter’s rosebushes, better, against the Onion Snow.”
Aunt Rosa’s final words, as reported by Mother. She never rested under our tree, though in her last weeks she enjoyed looking down from the hospital solarium upon its bare young withes. From her uterus the cancer spread like an ugly rumor; it was the willows of the Dorset Cemetery she soon slept under, beside her Konrad. Her small estate she had long since conveyed to Father except for her third of Mensch Masonry, divided equally between him and Uncle Karl, and the ancient egg, expressly devised to Peter and me.
But I, I rested often under Peter’s tree in nineteen forties five and six and seven, as the nation finished its war, my brother his term of military enlistment, Mensch Masonry its seawall project and the foundations of Mensch’s Castle, and I my high school education.
Say, rather, my education at high school age: not much book learning was accomplished in rural Southern public schools at that time, when ablebodied male teachers were in the military and many of the married women left to follow their husbands. What passed for schooling one could dispatch with the left hand; my right ransacked the public library, no treasure house either in those days. But in the shade of our willow I contrived to read Sophocles and Schopenhauer, and bade farewell to my youthful wish to be an architect. There too, with Magda, I read John Keats, Heinrich Heine, and her beloved rueful Housman, and in time said good-bye to boyhood.
Magda’s face is round, her complexion white: not my preference. But her eyes and mouth are rich, her nose is finely cut, her voice deep, soft, stirring. She has grown heavy in motherhood; at forty she’ll look like an Italian peasant; even at eighteen she was displeased with her hips, her backside, her legs — too large by modern standards, but (as I learned to remind her) the ideal in other centuries, especially combined with her graceful neck and shoulders, her delicate breasts. When I appraised her — I was seventeen — it was not in the lustful humor with which one sized up the slim tan girls of beach and boardwalk. The frivolity of her summer cottons was belied by that grave voice and figure; those thighs and buttocks were serious as her eyes. Magda played no sports; was self-conscious in slacks or shorts or swimsuit; wore her dark hair long and straight or wound handsomely in a bun when all the fashion was for short and curly. Yet one guessed her able to stand unclothed before a lover with perfect ease, unbinding that hair for him without joke and tease and giggle. Similarly, one could imagine an affair with Magda, but no flirtation. And the affair, one understood, would be nothing sportive…