Letters

Our enthusiasm for the seawall project, then, and for Karl and Hector’s resourceful management of it, was commingled with relief, for it seemed to herald a general improvement of our fortunes. War production was at its peak: Colonel Morton’s canneries made army rations around the clock; “rescue boats” of white oak and cypress, beautiful before they were painted battleship gray, were being built by the Dorset Shipyard, erstwhile boatwrights to the oyster fleet. The citizenry had more means for patios, terraces, tombstones — and of our materials, unlike some, there was no great shortage. No longer did we polish headstones with wet sand and railroad iron, or letter them by hand with maul and chisel: they were bought wholesale — already shaped, polished, and decorated in stock patterns — from a national concern by whom we were enfranchised; the inscriptions, stenciled out of sheet rubber, were quickly and perfectly sandblasted onto the face. With the nozzle in one hand and his mind on Erdmann’s Cornlot, Peter could execute in a minute the H’s with which Grandfather had used to take such loving pains, and do them just as well. Father installed a secondhand water heater in our summer kitchen and no longer rubbed his nose when Mother spoke of radiators and indoor toilets — though, to be sure, such frivolities were not available in wartime.

All summer we worked on the wall, under Karl’s supervision, Hector gimping down from school or stoneyard from time to time to inspect our progress. To their joint resourcefulness there was no end. When it became clear that cleaning the Baltimore rocks by hand was ruinously expensive (it took me half an hour, with the best will in the world, to scrape the moss from one), Father rented and experimented with, in vain, equipment to spray them with boiling water or live steam, or soak them in a weak solution of hydrochloric acid, or air-dry and sand-clean them: all either ineffective or inefficient. In the end, not to throw good money after bad, we carted them to the yard as they were, hoping they might clean up more readily when long dry. They did not. When our crusher broke beyond immediate repair on what looked to have once been the quoin of a major Baltimore bank, and we were forced to buy commercial smallstone for our concrete, Karl softened our loss by loading the forms with whole boulders, moss and all, before we poured. And when the city council belatedly challenged our removing the Baltimore rocks at all, and the mayor shamefully refused to acknowledge any previous verbal agreement about a municipal bathing area, Father demanded and received permission, in order to forestall an action against us, to take out at least the ones from our own frontage on the Cornlot.

I voiced my opinion of these expedients to Peter, who upon his graduation had assumed the foremanship of our yard in order to free Karl for the wall. But my brother, then as now, though he deplored poor workmanship like ill character, could attend to but one thing at a time, and was entirely preoccupied with our house. In July he finished purchasing the lot; in August he hired his excavator; and between us, working evenings and weekends with advice from Karl and head-shakings from Father, we put up the forms and poured the basement floor and walls. Magda came down every evening to watch, often with Mother and Aunt Rosa and bottles of home brew in a galvanized bucket. For the first time my body grew as brown and tough as Peter’s; I prized my muscles and my right to drink the yeasty beer. All day I toted boulders for the seawall, all evening barrowed concrete for the house; but so agreeable was it to be fifteen and strong that when dusk ended our labors I would wrestle with my brother in the clover. Our hard flesh smacked; our grunting hushed the crickets. When the last of our strength was spent we would tumble, washed in dew, at Magda’s feet, there to bathe further in her grave smile before our final rinse in the nettled river.

The last twenty dollars of his inheritance Peter spent on a tree and two rosebushes.

“A weeping willow tree,” Father reported to Aunt Rosa. “Twenty feet tall. It will shed many a tear before Peter gets his towers up.”

Aunt Rosa grabbed her gut.

“Mensch’s Folly isn’t built yet,” Father went on. “But when the receivers take this house away from us, we’ll all go down to the Cornlot and sleep under Peter’s willow tree.”

“Ach! No more, Hector!”