Letters

With an easy motion Magda turned my face toward hers and kissed me, lightly and solemnly, on the lips. I understood that she and Peter must be habitually making love.

“Good night, Amby,” she said.

Back in the parlor Father was betting the Groaner that Peter expected to be supplied with free building materials.

“Well, now,” Mother said good-humoredly. “He did say the house was for all of us.”

Father entreated suffering Laocoön with his arm. “She actually believes—”

“So let’s give him the Baltimore rocks,” Karl suggested.

“He don’t need them,” Father declared. “You’ve all got bigger ones in your heads.”

Aunt Rosa whooped.

I stayed out of it and got to bed as soon as possible.

“He’s feeling that Rhine wine,” I heard Mother remark, and she said more truly than she knew: it was the Rhine of Aunt Rosa’s egg whose wine possessed me. For hours I tossed at the mercy of two ideas: that Peter’s property ran clear to the center of the earth (its volume I calculated next day, by the law of prisms, to be seven and twelve one-hundredths cubic miles), and that an older girl like Magda, whether or not she recalled a certain quarter hour in our toolshed four years past, was… more interesting than the giddy teases I had “dates” with.

K

Konrad’s comparison was with certain Tin Pan Alley songs, whereof the catchy title is dreamed up first and the tune composed to fit: so the motto of Mensch Masonry preceded the firm itself, which was established on its strength. One early fall morning in 1932 (so Mother tells the story, shaking her head), before he’d got himself back into the school system after his discharge from the asylum, Father was sitting in the “office” corner of the Mensch Memorial Monument Company, nursing one of the headaches that dated from his cure and regarding a block of fractured Carrara. A hurricane some weeks previously had washed out a clapboard home on Holland Island, out in the Bay, and taken the life of the lady of the house; her husband, an oyster tonger, had contracted for a modest stone at the head of her vault, which by marsh-country custom (owing to the scarcity of dry ground) was “buried” in a slight excavation in his dooryard, the concrete lid aboveground. Grandfather was offering him a list of popular inscriptions from which he might choose.

“Look at this here: ‘He giveth His beloved sleep.’ ” The verse from Psalms was, in fact, his pet inscription: he loved to cut Gothic H’s. “And here’s Jeremiah: ‘Her sun is gone down while it was yet day.’ Very nice sentiment, eh?”

But his client waved the list away. “I already decided, Mister Mensch.” He had sold his tongboat and joined the company of old men who sulked on sunny benches before the courthouse. “ ‘Build not your house upon the shifting sand’ is what I want. You put that on there.”

“Ja ja,” Grandfather assented. Customers, for some reason, brought out his German. “ ‘Built not your haus upon the zhiftink zandt.’ My own self, I see that raised on black granite. Very nice sentiment.”

The deal was struck. When the widower went, Father repeated the injunction a number of times.

“Now that is damned clever, considering. ‘Build not your house upon the shifting sand.’ ”

The more he reflected on it, the more it amused him, until at length migraine was flown, battered marble forgot. By lunchtime he had resolved to enter the field of foundation building and general stonemasonry, as a contractor. Within a week he had borrowed what capital he could, on Grandfather’s credit and despite his skepticism, from the failing banks; ordered tools and materials; apprised the local building firms of our availability. Before the first snow fell and Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, the firm of Mensch and Son, Foundations and Stonemasonry (changed on Karl’s return to Mensch Masonry Contractors), had received its first subcontract. And the newly lettered office door, together with the drays and the flatbed wagon, enjoined their beholders to build not upon the shifting sand.