Letters

With the capital acquired from this and his other enterprises he established a proper stoneyard, the Mensch Memorial Monument Company, and employed laborers and apprentices. These latter included, as they came of age, all three of his sons, who seem also to have apprenticed themselves to their father’s obstinacy. Karl, to begin with, so loved the yard — the blocks of marble in their packing frames, the little iron-wheeled carts, the tin-roofed cutting and polishing shed with its oil-smelling winches and hoists, the heavy-timbered horses and potbellied stove, the blue-shirted black laborers and white-shirted, gray-aproned masters, the cutting tools arrayed like surgical instruments on the working face, the stone-dust everywhere — that he could not be kept in school. At sixteen he dropped out to work with the stone all day, for which he had a natural feel though he lacked any particular gift for lettering and embellishment. By his twentieth year he was the firm’s master mason and second in charge, supervisor of roughing and polishing the stones and their erection in the county’s graveyards; it was his greater interest in construction than in carving that, along with Hector’s restlessness, would fatefully extend the firm’s activities to include foundation laying and general masonry. A swarthy, hirsute, squat, and powerful man, Karl never married, though like Grandfather he was regarded in East Dorset as a ladies’ man. Stories were told of women brokenheartedly wedding others…

The twins, for their part, not content merely to embrace the trade they were born to, would transcend it, make an art of it. From early on, Hector and Wilhelm dreamed of being not stonecutters, but sculptors; in their teens they took charge of the artwork on the stones, leaving their father the routine chore of lettering inscriptions. Many a dead Choptank waterman, whose estate could allow him no grander monument than a limestone slab, was sung to his rest by flights of unexpected angels — added gratis by Wilhelm and Hector as an exercise in alto-relievo.

Their ambition was equal; together with warnings from brother Karl that they were not to emulate his truancy, it saw them through the public high school to the point of scholarship examinations for further study, almost without precedent in East Dorset in those days. But their gift, as Hector early acknowledged, was not equal: he could execute with difficulty a plausible acanthus, oak-leaf, or Greek-key border, staples of the tombstone-cutter’s art; his rosettes, sleeping lambs, and beflourished monograms could not be faulted except for the time they took to achieve. But never could he manage, much less with Wilhelm’s grace and speed, the feathered wings, flowing drapery, and lifelike faces of cherubim and seraphim — the latter, often as not, angelic likenesses of Karl, Rosa, Grandfather, or Grandmother; the former mischievous apotheoses of the brothers’ girl friends of the moment, who, fifty years later, could find in the cemeteries of their youth the marble image of its flower.

It was Konrad, their new brother-in-law, who in 1910—the year of his marriage to Rosa and of the twins’ graduation from high school — supplied the family from his fund of learning with the example of the twins of myth, whereof most commonly one was immortal and the other not. Like an insightful Castor, Hesper, Ephikles, or Zethus, Hector urged his brother to apply for a scholarship to the Institute of Art in Baltimore — and himself applied to the Normal School in nearby Wicomico, modestly lowering his aspirations to the teaching of art in local public schools.

For the next four years both young men supported themselves, between studies, with job masonry in their respective cities, Wilhelm characteristically throwing in carved lintels and mantelpieces without extra charge to the row-house builders of Patterson Park and Hampden, who could not have afforded them, as well as to the mansion raisers of Roland Park and Guilford, who could. By 1914, when they graduated, Hector was more interested in school administration than in either making or teaching art; and Wilhelm had filled the Menschhaus with his schoolwork: beaux-arts discus throwers, grimacing Laocoöns, Venuses surprised (which for all her pride in her son’s talent Grandmother Mensch would not permit on the first floor).

Hector moved back into the house — where now lived Rosa and Konrad too — worked as teacher of art and assistant to the principal of Dorset High School, and spent his summers in the stoneyard. But except for occasional visits home (for which the Venuses were fetched down to the Good Parlor and the house prepared as for wedding or funeral, or visit from the kaiser himself), Wilhelm never returned to Dorset. Indeed, his search for stonecutting work that would leave him time and means to do sculpture of his own seemed to lead him ever westward, from Dorset to Baltimore to the remotest counties of the state, high in the Catoctins and Alleghenies.