Letters

Often at night, what with all the day’s resting, Angie does not sleep. Though her light is out, she gazes into the egg; Ambrose hears her speak to the faded nymph inside. Her room is beneath his in the tower. If the night is fine, he may leave his books and lenses and help the child into her clothes; hand in hand they stroll the seawall and the sundry streets. The town is abed. Angie has no fear of the dogs that trot in alleys or of policemen uptown, who have got used to her. Indeed it is her town at that hour: she leads her father through its mysteries. They stop to hear the Choptank chuckle at the battered wall, and Angie’s mouth turns up amused. Transformers hum atop their poles along the avenue: “Buzz,” the girl responds. They pause halfway over the Creek Bridge, which Ambrose feared to cross at her age, and regard the moonlit skipjacks moored along the bulkhead. A wandering automobile drives by to whir a note on the grating of the draw, whereat they move uptown content.

Until recently their first stop was the bakery: from a back alley they entered to watch men labor at next day’s bread. The great ovens rumbled, the machines for kneading and wrapping clacked, the air was hot and yeasty. Pasted with flour and sweat, young Negroes slid the pans through cast-iron doors. John Grau the baker, dusty arms akimbo, aproned paunch thrust out, would hail the visitors. “Look who ain’t in bed yet!”

Then he’d swing Angie onto the loaf cart, adorn her with the square white cap off his Prussian head, roll her across the room.

“Whoo-hoo,” the child politely called. The Negroes watched, leaning on their racks and paddles.

The loaf they bought cost twenty cents instead of the five that Ambrose used to pay, but it still burnt his fingers as it did when he and Peter sneaked uptown in their boyhood; steam still poured from it when he broke it into halves, and it tasted faintly and pleasingly of alcohol, as will a loaf not ten minutes old. Now Dorset’s bread comes from big bakeries over the Bay; if the wanderers would eat they must brave knots of young men with capeskin jackets and shining hair who frequent the all-night diner. Then they walk down High Street towards Long Wharf and the municipal basin, chewing. Sporadic autos ripple down the brick; great poplars hiss above their heads.

At this hour, too late for young lovers, the waterfront park is cool and vacant. Through dew they wander to the wharf where creek joins river, there to perch upon high pilings white with gull dung, bite their bread, sip in turn from the public fountain. Across the creek stands one dark plant of Colonel Morton’s packing house, victim of the failing oyster harvest: they bless it. Upshore above the broken seawall rise the county hospital and nurses’ home: they smile upon the windows lit by suffering. Then Erdmann’s Cornlot juts into the river, where stands Peter Mensch’s house. The lights of the New Bridge run low across the river; beyond them, across another creek, is a second, larger hospital, the Eastern Shore Asylum. Like night-drench, like starlight, Angie’s grace descends upon standpipe and bell buoy, smokestack and boulevard.

Citizens of Dorset: as we dream, as we scratch, as we copulate and snore, we are indiscriminately shriven!

C

Children call the house Mensch’s Castle; their parents and Hector Mensch call it Mensch’s Folly. It is an unprepossessing structure except that, in an area to which building-stone is no more indigenous than gold, the house is made entirely of granite rubble: the only private dwelling in the county so constructed. More surprising, from the northwest corner rises a fat stone turret, forty feet high and slightly tapered, like a short shot-tower. From Municipal Basin Angie points with her bread to the lights of Ambrose’s room in the top. Strangers to Dorset have mistaken Mensch’s Castle for a church, a fort; more commonly, owing to its situation and the lights that burn in Ambrose’s chamber, it is thought to be a lighthouse. Novice mariners, confusing the tower with the channel range on Dorset Creek, have been led into shoal water off the seawall; but wiser pilots, navigating from local knowledge or newer charts, take a second bearing on the tower to reach the basin.