Of late she has become a complainer, speaks of the republic’s decline in the tone of one hectoring a foolish husband. But at eighteen and nineteen she brooded stoically upon grand problems; her pessimism was cosmic and impersonal, a tidewater Tragic View. I read her the science page of the Sunday Times, which moved her even more than Housman’s verse. The population was increasing past our means to support it. The planet’s skin of vital topsoil was washing into the sea. The century would see the end of our fossil fuel reserves. Our science had thwarted natural selection, with the result that our species degenerated year by year. Our antibodies were breeding supergerms, our insecticides superinsects, and poisoning the waters as well. The incidence of violent crime was soaring. Half the entering class at Columbia University would not distinguish Hagia Sophia from the Taj Mahal.
“We’re adding so much carbon dioxide to the air that the winters are getting warmer,” I read to her. “A little more will melt the polar ice cap, and the whole Eastern Shore will be under water.”
We would be sitting under the willow tree or leaning against the new foundations of the Castle on a Sunday morning, while our elders were in church. Magda’s legs, stubbled or razor-nicked, would be crossed, the large calves flattened in their nylon sheaths. She would shake her head soberly at the river and observe: “You can’t just sit by. But every single thing you do costs more than it’s worth.”
Those brown eyes saw what general truths were implied by particulars. “Here’s an anthropologist,” I reported, “who defends the idea of national characters. He says the Germans are the most ingenious people in Europe and the most barbarous, and that the two go together.”
Magda concurred: “We’ve every one of us got the vices of our virtues.”
And on the day we first put my penis into her vagina, she having stood naked and unwound her hair for me quite as I’d imagined, and I lamented that our pleasure must be at my brother’s cost, she sighed unsmilingly: “Every silver lining has a cloud.”
This was in late spring 1947, and by way of a commencement gift. While work on the Castle had resumed and was progressing rapidly, the family’s fortunes, so bright not very long before, had fallen to their lowest point since the year of my birth and Hector’s confinement. Had Peter not managed a construction loan through an army friend whose father was a local banker, and hired Mensch Masonry to complete the house, our firm would have been all but idle. Several fresh misfortunes had beset us, not least of which was Father’s resigning his principalship in 1945 and devoting his energies full-time to the company. Carting and cleaning the Baltimore rocks for reuse as exterior masonry had proved finally more costly than buying fresh stone from the mainland quarries; in the end they had to be sandblasted on all six surfaces, and even then, despite their historical interest, our customers usually preferred new stone. What was perhaps our last chance to use them profitably came early in the year, when fire destroyed a wing of East Dorset Grace Methodist Protestant Southern Church: Mensch Masonry bid to rebuild the facade with the Baltimore rocks, many of which approached the hue of the original granite. Father pled the poetry of saving East Dorset souls with what had once preserved East Dorset property; of building as it were for Zion with the rubble of Babylon. But by that time we were so discredited in the town that the lay leaders rejected our bid and raised instead a brick-veneered structure in the modern fashion, to our minds (but we are neither architects nor true believers) devoid of spirituality.
The cause of our latest disfavor was again the seawall, which by V-J Day, before we’d completed its improvement, had in places already cracked, and was all but breached when Magda relieved me of my sexual virginity. Two hurricanes had pounded at the seam between the old wall and the new; nor’easters had driven water into every crevice, which frozen had heaved and humped the concrete. Damage was especially heavy along the Cornlot, from which the Baltimore rocks had been entirely cleared, and in those portions of the wall where we had piled them as filler when our crusher broke. Great chunks of concrete came away entirely; twenty-foot lengths of wall leaned out of plumb; the spring tides broached them and dissolved the land behind into muddy depressions; salt water then killed the grass, and the soil washed out with remarkable celerity. Along with rose pollen and cottonwood poplar seeds, litigation was in the air: owners of waterfront lots, who had paid their assessments and confidently invested in tons of fill, were closing ranks against the city council, which in turn was preparing an action against Mensch Masonry. There was talk of collusion between us and the mayor to defraud our town. That latter worthy, a Dixiecrat, charged the “liberal” Democratic councilmen with fabricating issues for the ’48 elections. In fact, no suits were finally filed, but the publicity served us ill, as did the repairs we undertook at our own cost — extensive repairs, but mainly cosmetic — in the interest of improving our public image and forestalling litigation.
Finally, despite Colonel Morton’s and the shipyard’s government contracts (now expired), many Dorset families moved in the war years to work in the steel mills and the aircraft factories across the Bay. Erdmann and the other general contractors were fairly busy, but the demand was for low-cost stock-design houses with concrete slab foundations and walkways, even concrete patios, in our judgment an eyesore. After the first flush of war prosperity, people lost interest in flagstone terraces, stone chimneys, marble headstones: they bought government bonds against the day when automobiles and electrical appliances would return to the market. By the time they did, along with such fresh diversions as television, everything made-do-with during the war was worn out or obsolete and had to be replaced.
I had thought of working at the shipyard that summer, between high school and college, to put by money for books and board. Instead I replaced without wages one of our laborers. A master mason (Uncle Karl), a journeyman carpenter, one other laborer, and myself: while Father brooded once again in the stoneyard, trying to sculpt with the sandblaster, we raised the shell of Peter’s house.
“It’s our own place, says Brother Pete,” Hector had early declared. “We’ll use the Baltimore rocks in her. Consolidate our follies.”
Karl shrugged. I suggested that in the absence of specific mention of those same rocks in the contract, Peter ought to be consulted. He was in Germany with the occupation forces; his return to us and marriage to Magda were anticipated for the fall. Mother agreed. Father’s nose began to itch.
“He wants it for an advertisement, doesn’t he? Well, damn-foolishness is our stock-in-trade.”
But he made no further move to use the rocks until Peter, despite my account to him of our problems with the seawall, gave epistolary consent. In the weeks that followed I also restrained the company’s liberality in the matter of sand by mixing as much as possible of the mortar myself, in the proportion of no more than three parts sand to one of Portland. But I had not the heart to protest Karl’s directive, which Father seconded, that we take the sand directly from “our own” beach frontage instead of buying it: the convenience and economy of the beach variety, I had to hope, might partly offset its coarseness and impurity.
I do not ask myself why I made love to Peter’s fiancée, nor have I much examined Magda’s reasons for inviting me. But when we sat in the Cornlot clover on Sunday mornings or strolled down the listing wall—“dressed up” from Sabbath habit despite our nonbelief — our motives, like the scent of talcum, shaving lotion, and delicate sweat, hung about us in the humid air. As Peter was our bond, we spoke of him often, warmly enlarging on his generosity, his strength of character. I would take Magda’s hand and wish with her for his speedy and safe return. We talked together of many things. I felt that Magda spoke more easily with me than with my brother; I came to believe as well that I appreciated as he could never what was of value in her. I had become an atheist by age fifteen; by sixteen a socialist. I discoursed with energy on the madness of nationalism, the contradictions of capitalism, the brotherhood and dignity of man, the rights of women and Negroes (I’d learned to capitalize the n), the grand challenges of ignorance, poverty, disease. But my zeal was a toy boat on the dark sea of Magda’s fatalism. To her the Choptank itself was a passing feature of the landscape; the very peninsula (which I had informed her was slowly sinking) ephemeral: alone among Dorseters she shrugged her shoulders at the broken wall.