Letters

Everybody in that family dies of cancer! The only variable is its location: Grandfather’s was in his prostate, Grandmother’s in her bloodstream. Of their four children only Uncle Wilhelm was spared, by dying in France of influenza in 1918. Aunt Rosa’s was in her uterus; her husband Konrad’s was in his skin. Uncle Karl’s was in his liver. Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother Andrea, like Konrad a Mensch by marriage only, has nonetheless had radical mastectomy; her husband Hector’s nine-month madness in 1930, thought merely the effect of jealousy, is now revealed to have been associated with a tumor that feasts upon his brain.

When his sons went to visit him in Dorset Hospital, Hector stroked his nose and said, “What’s killing me will kill you too.” Already on Ambrose’s chest, constellations flourish of blue nevi whose increase in size and number I follow with interest — though it is from his birthmark that he looks for eventual quietus. Hence his inability to share Magda’s concern over radioactive fallout: with or without strontium 90 in their milk, her children must meet the family nemesis and perish.

Peter’s explanation is that, stonecutters and masonry contractors, the family have always worked and dwelt among rocks, which, he has heard, reflect more than normal cosmic radiation. This theory (with which somehow he also accounts for both Ambrose’s potent sterility and his own fertile impotence) is clever for Peter; more characteristic is his refusal to consider moving out of Mensch’s Castle, cosmic rays or no cosmic rays.

Excepting the mode of their demise, nothing more typifies that line than this persistence: with them, every idea becomes a fixed idea, to be pursued though it bring creation down ’round their shoulders. Had it not been for Grandfather’s original obstinacy, for example, they would not now be living (on the verge of bankruptcy) in America at all. One version has it he was the elder son of a Rhenish vintner; that the scene in Rosa’s egg was his future estate, or one not unlike it; but that he got a serving-girl in trouble, and instead of making arrangements to conceal the little scandal, as his father proposed, renounced his patrimony to immigrate to Maryland with her. Another legend, on the contrary, says his forebears were the rudest peasants, almost animals, from Herrkenwalde in Altenburg; that his emigration and establishment of the family firm was no decline but an extraordinary progress. Granting either version, it appears that he was a determined fellow and that the family has come a considerable way, for better or worse, in a short time.

Of Grandfather’s fathering, then, nothing certain is known. Whether from ignorance, spite, indifference, or a bent to regard himself as unmoved mover, Thomas Mensch all but refused to speak of his origins, and thus deprived his parents of existence as effectively as if he’d eaten them. But whatever his prehistory, we know that in 1880, still in his late teens, he appeared in Baltimore as an apprentice stonecutter; married there in ’84; moved with his bride to Dorset the following year to work as a mason and tombstone cutter, and liked the place enough to stay. In 1886 Aunt Rosa was born, in 1890 Uncle Karl, in ’94 the twins Hector and Wilhelm. Grandfather was obliged to find new irons for his fire: in addition to his backyard tombstone-cutting he became the local ticket agent for North German Lloyds, which during the great decades of immigration sailed regularly between Bremerhaven and Baltimore; and in this capacity he arranged for the passage to America of numbers of the relatives of his German friends. Twenty dollars for a steerage crossing, bring your own food, except for the barrels of salt herring and pickles supplied by the steamship line, which scented the new Americans for some while after. Moreover, as the would-be homesteaders straggled back to the Germantowns of Baltimore and Philadelphia from ruinous winters in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Grandfather helped and profited from them again as a broker of wetland real estate, the only acreage they could afford in Maryland’s milder climate. They drained marshes by the hundreds of acres; throve and prospered on what they turned into first-class arable land — and on their weekend trips to town they made the Menschhaus in East Dorset a little center of the county’s German community until the First World War.

Just before the turn of the century, Thomas Mensch did his most considerable piece of business: while it lasted, the most successful of the family’s enterprises to date. Concerned by the Choptank’s inroads into several newly settled neighborhoods, the town commissioners authorized construction of a retaining seawall along several blocks of East and West Dorset; Grandfather bid low for the contract, hired laborers and equipment as a one-man ad hoc company, and in 1900 completed the wall — which like an individual work of art he signed and dated at each end in wet concrete.