Letters

Alas for any who took to heart our motto and engaged our services in those days: he built twice over on the sand he fled. Not alone because our foundations resled ineluctably on ihe loam of the Eastern Shore, but because Hector, once he’d abandoned the Muse for Mammon, resorted to every economy known to corner-cutting builders, to the end of meeting his notes. If the contract (particularly in the private sector, where there were few building inspections) specified a twelve-inch concrete footing under a brick pier, he would tamp the ground extra well and make do with eight. His mortar (as well I knew, having mixed it in my youth till my hands were callused and my spine near cracked) was inordinately rich in sand, wherein the county abounded, with cement enough barely to bind the grains that were to bind the bricks. Finally, in order to make his deadlines he would lay stone and brick in every winter weather; despite his heating both sand and mix-water, his economical mortar not infrequently froze before it set, and when it was dry one could crumble it between one’s fingers. In time that same sand shifted indeed, carrying flag and fieldstone with it; what with out-of-court settlements and court-ordered repairs, Mensch and Son, by the time of Karl’s return, found themselves with little money, few contracts in hand, and a yard full of building stones and flagstones too small to make monuments of and too large to forget about.

“One more epitaph we got to pick out,” Grandfather said. “For Hector’s company. But we can’t afford to bury it.”

Time and again it seemed certain we must fail, even after Uncle Karl cut down the corner-cutting: the phrase “pass into the hands of the receivers,” dimly ominous, haunts my memory of the Menschhaus. At first I fancied the Receivers to be of a family with that troll who was so nearly the death of the Billy Goats Gruff, and to live therefore in the neighborhood of the Dorsel Creek Bridge, which I could not be induced to cross thenceforward without Peter at my side, and which still twinges me on wee-hour walks with Angie. Grandfather’s dealh in 1935 modified this fancy. Peter sneaked me in to survey him, laid out in the Good Parlor. As always the room smelled of coal oil from the space heater — to light which, for the comfort of the forenoon’s mourners, was Peter’s errand. Grandfather lay drawn and waxen upon the daybed. I cannot recall his face, but I know that although his white mustache still bore, like seasoned meerschaum, the familiar stain of much tobacco, his great nose was red no more: it was pinched, and as glazy ivory yellow as the keys of our player piano or Wilhelm’s plaster castings, the permanent tenants of the room. I contemplaled this detail.

Peter meanwhile was absorbed in the Easter egg. After a time I whispered: “Dare me to touch him?”

“Sure I dare you. Better not.”

The muscled ivory panther, couchant atop the mantel, prepared to spring upon me if I moved a hair; the Groaner raised sightless eyes to Heaven in plaster anguish at the thought.

“Dee double dare you,” Peler offered, and solemnly pinched Grandfather’s cheek. Surely he must snort and toss his head as he had done on many a napful Sunday; look ’round him vainly for his cane, and, knowing we were hid somewhere about, call upon Gott in Himmel to witness how His latest creatures prepared their place in Hell. But he did not stir even when, dee-double-diddly-die-dared, I drew my finger across his folded hands and found them — not soaked in perspiration like my own, but scarcely any colder. He slept on undisturbed, as I was not to do for many a night after; and the naked Biscuit Thrower in the foyer (my corruption of Wilhelm’s discus’d Greek Athlete) turned from me as we left; and when Miss Stocker expressed her sympathy next day in school, I declared to her and to the first-grade class in general my conviction that Grandfather was more to be envied than mourned, he having been by that hour joyfully received by the Receivers. I’ll not describe what fears beset me as to the nature of my own reception on the day when, without Peter to shield me, I too should pass into their waiting hands.

But presently Father would dream up a new way to sculpt his dead twin’s headstone with one arm. A fresh block of alabaster would appear in his office, or in the toolshed, or in the art room of Dorset High; new tools of his design would be forged by Joe Voegler the oyster-dredge builder down by the creek; Uncle Konrad (before Karl returned from Baltimore) would drop by on his book-laden bike, find Father engrossed in sketching and chipping, and ask permission to straighten out the files a bit. Sooner or later a contract would appear for a random-rubble chimney or a patio of Pennsylvania flag; for a time we’d hear no more of the Receivers.