Letters

Well. That loose-toga’d lady with the five-stringed lyre on the bench in the picture on the El Producto cigar box full of stone chisels on the shelf in the toolshed under the wisteria between the woodhouse and the privy behind the Menschhaus — whom Ambrose regarded with awed impersonality while Magda mouthed him in 1940—may have taken up her instrument and sung to my scribbling friend; she has not yet to me. That candied apple still sticks in my throat; Magda and Peter are still each other’s; and I—

But I can’t speak further of this story, this episode, these events. An end to I!

J

Just at this point, Germaine, my Amateur rebegins in the first person, Ambrose speaking, as if in losing himself in that funhouse he’d found his voice, at least, at last. No use my apologizing for the voice he found, which “Arthur Morton King” soon after abandoned: it was the way he spoke back then.

I myself, before I found it was myself was lost, thought Peter a foundling.

We discussed the possibility at length in our bedroom, and I will admit that my protestations — that I loved him regardless of his origins — were as experimental as sincere, and that there was more fascination than affection in the zeal with which I conjectured (he had not the imagination for it) the identity and station of his real parents. Were they gypsies of the sort who kept a house trailer on the edge of town, out past the tomato cannery, and read Mother’s palm for half a dollar? Were they residents of our very block — Erdmanns, Ziegenfusses — who now watched their shame grow up before their eyes? Our street ran down to Dorset Hospital, where most of the county’s babies drew first breath; no speculation was too wild to entertain. But my favorite was that Colonel Morton himself, who owned the cannery and several seafood-packing houses and had been mysteriously shot in the leg a few years past, had fathered Peter upon a European baroness during one of his sojourns abroad. The outraged baron had attempted to murder his rival and would have killed the child as well had not the colonel, foreseeing danger, paid Hector and Andrea to raise his natural son as their own. As for the baroness, she had by no means forgotten the issue of her star-crossed passion: she waited only for her old husband to die, whereupon she would join her true lover in America (I had never seen the president of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes) and claim Peter for her own.

“Aw, Amb, that’s nuts.” But I’d hear my brother rise on one elbow in the dark. “You don’t believe no such a thing. Do you.”

I would consider the play of shadows on the ceiling, where the streetlamp shone through catalpa leaves. As a matter of fact I did not see on my brother’s nature the stamp of colonels and baronesses, but the possibility stirred my heart. One day the baroness would drive up in a Daimler-Benz car, with a chauffeur and a veil, and take Peter back to be master of the castle. But first she’d buy out Mensch Masonry and take us around the world. Perhaps she would appoint Hector manager of Peter’s estate until my brother’s seniority, and we’d all live there: I, Magda, Peter, Mother, Father, Aunt Rosa.

On nights when raw nor’easters howled down the Eastern Shore and swept luckless sailors into the Chesapeake, the valley of the Rhine (where I located the baroness) appeared to me peaceful, green, warm, luminous: the emerald landscape of Aunt Rosa’s egg. The gray-green castle turrets were velveted with lichen; dusty terraces of vines stepped down to the sparkling river; a Lorelei, begauzed and pensive, leaned back against her rock and regarded some thing or person, invisible from where we stood, among the sidelit grapes of the farther shore.