Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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After the armistice the coffin was shipped home with others from an army burial ground in France: by troopship to Norfolk, Virginia, thence by Bay Line packet to Baltimore and aboard the Emma Giles to Long Wharf. Grandfather, Karl, Hector, and Konrad took delivery with the stoneyard dray. They stopped at the cutting shed for Grandfather to open the box, briefly, alone, and verify its contents; there were stories of the army’s carelessness in such matters. But “It’s Willy,” he growled when the lid had been rescrewed. They then installed it, closed, in the Good Parlor, among the mock Phidiases, the Barye-style lions, the Easter egg on its stand, to be tersely memorialized for burial.

Andrea King attended the funeral. Hector showed her two versions of her merry face on the cemetery headstones; Karl pretended that Wilhelm had modeled the backside of a third, more nubile cherub upon his memory of a night swimming escapade she had joined them in during their final furlough.

Said pretty Andrea: “You’re a darn tease, Karl.”

“What gets me,” Hector remarked to the company, “is, it’s your immortal one died. You know, Konrad? And your mortal one didn’t.”

“He was a cutter, was Willy,” Konrad agreed. “Where he might’ve got to, it can’t none of us guess.”

Grandfather painfully declared: “Those mountains was his mistake. He could’ve had half our cutting shed for his self.”

Even Karl was moved to say, “I told him. Remember, Heck?”

Presently Hector vowed: “Arm or no arm, I’m going to cut him a proper stone.”

And he began a program as fatefully obstinate as any in the family. All that spring, summer, fall – in fact, intermittently for the next twenty years – in the stoneyard, in what passed for the art room of Dorset High (where since his wounding he did only administration and substitute teaching), and in a whitewashed toolshed behind the Menschhaus, Hector addressed the problem of cutting stone with his good left arm. He would set the chisel for Karl or Grandfather to hold, and swing the mallet himself; he would hold the chisel and try to tell others how to strike. In 1920, he and Andrea married: there were eight in the house until 1927, when Peter was born and Konrad and Rosa moved next door to make room for the new grandchild. He experimented with ingenious jigs, positioning devices, chisel-headed hammers of his own devising. He bound his almost useless right arm to force himself into independence; he even tried to employ his foot as an extra hand. All in vain: it wants two strong arms like Peter’s to shape the rock, and a knowing eye, and a temper of mind – well, different from Ambrose’s, who was born the year this folly made room for a larger.

The year before, in 1929, leukemia fetched Grandmother to lie beside her unmarked son: a simple Vermont granite stone, lettered by the new sandblasting process that was killing the family’s business with easy competition, identifies her grave. Karl suddenly moved out of house and town to lay bricks in Baltimore. Konrad, Rose, and their Easter egg reinstalled themselves, to help everyone deal with Hector’s growing rages. The nation’s economy collapsed. So must the Mensch Memorial Monument Company without Karl’s foremanship: its founder widowed, weary, and deprived of his income from the immigration business; its angel risen to the company of Michael and the others; its mortal mainstay trying in vain to carve high-relief portraits with a left-handed sandblaster, and approaching madness as Ambrose approached birth.

Upon his “cure” and discharge in 1931 from the Eastern Shore Asylum, Hector mounted at his dead twin’s head an unlettered, unpolished, rough-cut stone fresh from the packing case as in the old days, reasoning nicely that unfinished marble was more in keeping anyhow with Wilhelm’s terminal aesthetics. Konrad compared it to the Miller’s Grave in Old Trinity Churchyard at Church Creek, marked by a pair of uninscribed millstones.

Having laid waste without success, en route to this insight, a deal of granite and alabaster, Hector now turned like Bellerophon to laying waste his soul instead, and succeeded quite. He had become principal of Dorset High before his twin obsessions and nine-month “commitment” led to his suspension. Not even Andrea held his jealous furies against him, once they passed; all assumed it was the celebrated “twin business” had deranged him, with which the whole town sympathized. Karl’s exit, nearly everyone agreed, was merely diplomatic; he would return when Hector was himself again, and Hector would reestablish himself with the school board, which had charitably arranged an unpaid furlough instead of accepting his resignation. In the meanwhile – and more, one feels, from the frustration of his sculpting than from his passing certainty that he was not his new son’s father – Hector turned, not to alcohol or opium, but to acerbity, dour silence, and melancholia, scarcely less poisonous in the long run; and to business, which, whether or not one has a head for it, may be addictive as morphine, and as deleterious to the moral fiber. To the summer of his death, even after the manpower shortage of World War II returned him to the principalship of Dorset High, Hector’s passion turned from the firm back to his brother’s beloved marble, and back to the firm again; and he ruined both, but would abandon neither.

Yet most obstinate of all is brother Peter, because more single-minded. Not that he resembles the family (excepting Karl) in other respects. Short and thick where they are tall and lean, black and curly where they are blond and straight, slow of wit, speech, movement where they are quick, devoid equally of humor and its sister, guile – how did the genes that fashion Mensches fashion him? As probable as that a potato should sprout on their scuppernong arbor, or that the wisteria, gorgeous strangler of their porch, should give out one May a single rose.

“Our foundling,” Andrea called him, before such jokes lost their humor. And wouldn’t he stammer when that lovely indolent bade him sit and talk upon the couch whence she directed the Menschhaus! Wouldn’t he redden when she questioned him with a smile about imaginary girl friends! Go giddy at the smell of lilac powder and cologne (which Ambrose can summon to his nostrils yet), and at the kiss-cool silk of her robe! And if, best sport of all, she held his head against her breast, stroked those curls so blacker by contrast, and sang in her unmelodious croon “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” wouldn’t the tears come! Aunt Rosa would reprove her to no avail; Hector and Konrad would shake their heads and smile in a worldly way; Grandfather’s chuckles would grow rattlier and more thick until they burst into gunshot hocks of phlegm, and he would blow his great nose, he would wind his great pocketwatch with vigor to recompose himself.

“So kiss me, my sweet,

And then let us part;

And when I grow too old to dream,

That kiss will live in my heart.”

Unthinkable prospect! Ambrose too would laugh until his jaw hinge ached and the belly muscles knotted; laugh and weep together at his brother’s misery, who longed to run but must embrace his adored tormentor. Her tease never worked with Ambrose: he would stiffen in her arms, tickle her ribs, mimic her words – anything not to amuse the company at cost of his dignity. But with Peter it never failed: even when he was in high school, vowing like his Uncle Karl to drop out and work full-time at the stoneyard, she could make him cry with that song for the sport of it, break him down entirely – then turn upon her audience for being entertained and declare, “Peter’s the only one loves me. He’s got a heart, he has.” Or, about as often, would push him away, almost recoil in mid-refrain as though from some near-human pet with whom she’d been disporting, and scold him for mussing her dress.

Ambrose, finally: is there a thing to him besides this familiar tenacity? Persistent amateur, novice human: much given to sloth and revery; full of intuition and odd speculation; ignorant of his fellows, canny of himself; moderately learned, immoderately harassed by dreams; despairing of his powers; stunned by history – and above all, dumbly dogged. His head holds but one idea at a time: be it never so dull and simple he can’t dismiss it for another but must tinker at it, abandon and return to it, nick and scratch and chip away until at last by sheer persistence he frets it into something fanciful, perhaps bizarre, anyhow done with.

Thus these Mensches.

F

For a time, though centered in a baby lying on the front-porch glider, A. was also what he compassed. How describe this. If for instance I declare that through a breathless August forenoon a cottonwood poplar whispered from the dooryard, dandled its leaves on squozen petioles when not a maple stirred, you’ll see past that syntax? Tree and baby were not then two unless in the manner of mouth and ear: he in the poplar addressed to him in the glider not truths but signs. Coded reassurances. Recognitions.

Ambrose ranged from crab to goat. Upon a wicker porch-chair, in shallow boxes seaweed-lined, olive soft crabs were stacked edgewise like crullers in a tray. One peered at A. from eyestalks; crab and baby bubbled each a froth, but as right and left hands may play together separately: one performer, one performance. Baby could not yet turn to see what bleated from a backyard pen, nor needed to. In those days crab did not leave off and goat begin: that odored nan, her milk, the child who throve upon it were continuous; Ambrose was not separate from things. Whisper, bubble, bleat made one music against a ground-sound at once immediate and remote: pulse of his blood, hum of his head, chop of his river, buzz of his bees, traffic on all his streets and waterways. Panambrosia. It was his lullaby, too; did it end when Ambrose slept?

That name was his first word: it meant everything. “Say Mama, Ambrose. Mah-mah?”

“Ah-bo.”

“There, he said it.”

“In Plattdeutsch yet.”

“O, did he tease the baby boy! Who’s this, Ambrose? Say Grandpa.”

“Ah-bo.”

Peter, four, taught him otherwise, with the aid of Aunt Rosa’s egg and their mother’s hand mirror, both smuggled one afternoon into the place where Ambrose napped. Egg was held briefly to baby’s eye; Ambrose became a green and rivered landscape which would with the cry “Peter!” give way to grinning brother’s face.

“Ah-bo.”

“Not Ambrose. Peter! Here’s Ambrose…” The green landscape would envelop all once more, give way now to the reflection of its viewer’s face in the hand mirror. “Ambrose!”

“Ah-bo.”

Laughter and laughter. Egg again then; again the earlier face.

“Peter!”

“Ah-bo.”

They played so until teacher, losing patience, found a forcefuller demonstration: went behind the crib head as if for hide-and-seek, and upon next removal of the egg, presented his own face upside down.

“Peter!” that strange countenance demanded. “Peter Peter Peter Peter!”

Family history maintains it was some antic mugging of Peter’s, together with his scolding tone, frightened Ambrose. How so, when it had been his custom to amuse with every noise and grimace he could achieve? No, the mere inversion of features was no matter: right side up, upside down, Ambrose knew that face and called it by his all-purpose name. What it was, it was the eyes, that they seemed not inverted at all; it was that those eyes were right side up still in Peter’s face and were hence not any eyes one knew! Something alien peered out from Peter’s head; independent of eyebrows, nose, mouth, those eyes watched neutrally, as through a mask, or through peepholes from another world.

Tears dissolved all forms together. Ambrose’s shriek fetched grown-ups from below: Peter hugged his brother at once through the crib bars and joined the wail. Mirror and Easter egg were rescued, teacher was spanked, pupil comforted – who is said to have called Peter Peter from that hour.

As for the eyes. Whoso once feels that he has seen and been seen by them does not forget those eyes; which however, like certain guests we nourish with our substance, may be in time’s unfolding concealed or manifest, acknowledged or abjured.

Thus was altered Ambrose’s initial view of things, and thus he came to call by the name Ambrose not his brother, his mother, or his nanny goat, nor yet (in time) his foot, his voice, or his port-wine mark: only his self, which was held to be none of these, indeed to be nothing Ambrose’s, but solely Ambrose.

What the infant learns in tears, adult suffering must unteach. Did it hurt you, reader, to be born? Dying will be no picnic either.

G

Great good that lesson did: he was called everything but Ambrose!

Dear Yrs. T. and Milady A.: the rest of G, together with all of H and I, are missing from this recension of Arthur Morton King’s Menschgeschichte, having been given years ago as aforetold to your Litt.D. nominee. G came to light as a first-person piece called “Ambrose His Mark”; H first saw print as the story “Water-Message”; I (in my draft but a bare-bones sketch) was fancifully elaborated into the central and title story of B’s Lost in the Funhouse series, where the others rejoin it to make an “Ambrose sequence.”

G is the story of my naming. “Owing to the hectic circumstances of my birth,” the published version begins, “for some months I had no proper name whatever.” Those circumstances themselves are referred to only in passing: “… Hector’s notion that someone other than himself had fathered me; his mad invasion of the delivery room; his wild assertion, as they carried him off (to the Eastern Shore Asylum), that the port-wine stain near my eye was a devil’s mark…” et cetera. Uncle Karl’s withdrawal to Baltimore is discreetly mentioned, and Andrea’s sultry frowardness: “… a photograph made by Uncle Konrad… shows her posed before our Tokay vines, her pretty head thrown back, scarfed and earringed like a gypsy; her eyes are closed, her mouth laughs gaily behind her cigarette; one hand holds a cup of coffee, the other steadies a scowling infant on her hip.” It is alleged that given Hector’s absence and her capriciousness, no name was chosen, and faute de mieux Aunt Rosa’s nickname for me, Honig, became my working title, so to speak, until the great event that climaxes the story.

Grandfather covets the bee swarms of our neighbor Willy Erdmann, who also seems to have had an interest in my mother. He builds an empty beehive near where our lot joins Erdmann’s, and installs Andrea in a hammock there to nurse me and to watch for a migrant swarm. Apiary lore and tribal naming customs are laid on, via Uncle Konrad; the family’s straitened circumstances during the Great Depression and the near failure of the firm are sketched in too. Willy Erdmann fumes at Grandfather’s clear intention to rustle his bees; stratagems and counterstratagems are resorted to, while I suck busily in the hammock and Andrea works the crossword puzzles in the New York Times. At last, on a still June Sunday, the long-awaited swarm appears, and slapstick catastrophe ensues: Grandfather bangs pie tins to draw the bees his way; Willy Erdmann fires a shotgun to attract them himward (and to warn off would-be poachers). Grandfather counters with a spray from the garden hose; Willy replies with a brandished bee-bob. Konrad and Rosa stand by transfixed; Peter bawls in terror; Andrea swoons.

And then the bees, “thousand on thousand, a roaring gold sphere… moved by their secret reasons, closed ranks and settled upon her chest. Ten thousand, twenty thousand strong they clustered. Her bare bosoms, my squalling face – all were buried in the golden swarm.” Grandfather boldly lifts them off with ungloved hands and bears them to his waiting hive. Erdmann strikes with the bee-bob; Konrad grapples with him; they fall into the hammock, which parts at the headstring and dumps us all into the clover. Rosa disrupts baptismal services at a nearby church with her cries for aid; raging Grandfather hurls the bee swarm down upon us all; Andrea is stung once on the nipple (and thereafter abandons breast-feeding and relinquishes my care to Rosa); Willy Erdmann is led off crying imprecations of my illegitimacy; Konrad and the Methodist minister endeavor to restore the peace of the neighborhood. Aunt Rosa, subsequently, likens my birthmark to a flying bee; Konrad reviews legendary instances of babies swarmed by bees: Plato, Sophocles, and Xenophon are invoked – and finally St. Ambrose, erstwhile bishop of Milan, after whom I am in time denominated. The episode ends with the adult “Ambrose’s” ambivalent reflections on the phenomenon of proper names: “I and my sign… neither one nor quite two.” Et cetera.

Despite some lurking allegory, which I regret, “Ambrose His Mark” gains in artistic tidiness from its reconception of the family described in my chapter G. And the narrative viewpoint, a nipple’s-eye view as it were, is piquant, though perhaps less appropriate to the theme of ontological ambiguity than the “first-person anonymous” viewpoint of A. M. King’s version. No matter. “Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose!” the narrator intones at the end, watching to see what the name calls: “Regard that beast, ungraspable, most queer, pricked up in my soul’s crannies!”

I like that.

H

Here was the “Water-Message” episode from my eleventh year, whereof it disconcerts me still to speak, yet which occasions all this speech, these swarming letters. In his retelling our Author retains my third-person viewpoint, omniscient with Ambrose, but drops that authorial “I” of sections A through F. The year is 1940; Grandfather is five years dead, his prostatic cancer having metastasized in 1935. There is no mention of Uncle Karl, who however returned to direct the firm that same year, apparently made his peace with Hector, and hired a bachelor flat down near the yacht basin. Nor of Konrad and Rosa, who also now rent an apartment of their own, across the corner from the Menschhaus, residence then only of Hector and Andrea, Peter and me. Gentle Konrad is still teaching fifth grade in East Dorset Elementary School, tuning pianos, and bicycling the streets of Dorset on behalf of the Grolier Society’s Book of Knowledge, whose contents he knows by heart. He and Rosa are childless. Ardent fisher off the “New Bridge” as well as cyclist, Konrad has skin cancer and a year to live. None of this is in the published version, nor of Hector’s arm, withered now like the late kaiser’s (his limp is mentioned), nor of his gradual self-reestablishment, after Karl’s return to the firm, in the county public school system: he is principal now of East Dorset Elementary, the smallest in the city and the poorest except for its Negro counterpart. Ambrose (on with the story) is a timid fourth grader, uneasy in his skin, fearful of his fellows, saturated with the Book of Knowledge, broodily curious about the Book of Life, abjectly dreaming of heroic transfiguration. All done in images of mythic flight: seaward-leaning buoys, invocations of Odysseus, foreshadowings of dark illumination, etc.

Thus the “ground situation.” The “vehicle” of the plot is Ambrose’s desire to plumb the mysteries of the Occult Order of the Sphinx, a gang of preadolescent boys loosely led by Peter, which “meets” after school in a jerry-built hut along the river shore in a stand of trees called the Jungle. “It was in fact a grove of honey locusts, in area no larger than a schoolyard, bounded on two of its inland sides by Erdmann’s Cornlot and on the third by the East Dorset dump. But it was made mysterious by rank creepers and honeysuckle that covered the ground and shrouded every tree, and by a labyrinth of intersecting footpaths. Junglelike too, there was about it a voluptuous fetidity; gray rats and starlings decomposed where BB’d; curly-furred retrievers spoored the paths; there were to be seen on occasion, stuck on twig ends or flung amid the creepers, ugly little somethings in whose presence Ambrose snickered with the rest…” You get the idea. Exiled by the older boys – who after surprising a pair of lovers in their clubhouse, gleefully enter it for what one guesses to be ritual masturbation – Ambrose wanders the beach with smelly, feisty little Perse Golz, a third grader whom he tries to impress by pretending to receive and transmit coded messages from the Occult Order.

Very painful to remember, these classic humiliations of the delicately nerved among the healthy roughnecks of the world, whom, like Babel his Cossacks or Kafka his carnivores, I still half love and half despise. A message, a message – the heart of such a child longs for some message from the larger world, the lost true home whereof it vaguely dreams, whereto it yearns from its felt exile. “You are not the child of your alleged parents,” is what he craves to hear, however much he may care for them. “Your mother is a royal virgin, your father a god in mortal guise. Your kingdom lies to west of here, to westward, where the tide runs from East Dorset, past cape and cove, black can, red nun,” et cetera.

And mirabile, mirabile, mirabile dictu: one arrives! Lying in the seaweed where the tide has left it: a bottle with a note inside! “Past the river and the Bay, from continents beyond… borne by currents as yet uncharted, nosed by fishes as yet unnamed… the word had wandered willy-nilly to his threshold.” By all the gods, Germaine: I still believe that here is where Ambrose M. drops out of life’s game and begins his career as Professional Amateur, one who loves but does not know: with the busting, by brickbat, of that bottle; with receipt of that damning, damned blank message, which confirms both his dearest hope – that there are Signs – and his deepest fear – that they are not for him. Cruel Yours Truly falsely mine! Take that, and this, and the next, and never reach the end, you who cut me off from my beginning!

I

I’m lost in thefunhouse, Germaine. The I of this episode isn’t I; I don’t know who it is.

In fact I was once briefly lost in a funhouse, at age twelve or thirteen, and included the anecdote in section I of this Amateur manuscript. But it happened in Asbury Park, New Jersey, not Ocean City, Maryland; I was with Mother and Aunt Rosa (lately widowed, whom the excursion was intended to divert); neither Father nor Uncle Karl was with us; I got separated from Peter in a dark corridor, wandered for a few minutes in aimless mild alarm, met another young wanderer with whom I made my way to the exit, where Peter waited – and found my companion to be a black boy. In those days (circa 1943) such a dénouement was occasion for good-humored racist teasing, of which there was full measure en route home. The point of Arthur Morton King’s anecdote was the sentimental-liberal one of Ambrose’s double awakening: to the fact of bigotry among those he loves, which he vows never to fall into; and to his budding fictive imagination, which recognizes that such experiences as that in the funhouse are symbolically charged, the stuff of stories. In short, an intimation of future authorship as conventionally imagined: the verbal transmutation of experience into art.

I don’t know how to feel about our friend’s rerendering, by far the most extravagant liberty that he’s taken with what I gave him. It goes without saying that I’ve no objection to even the most radical rearrangement of my experience for his literary purposes; my gift of these episodes was a donnée with no strings attached. All the same…

Oh well: I simply can’t be objective about either my lostness in the funhouse or his story, which, while very different from the facts, is perhaps truer and surely more painful. In that version, the ride to “Ocean City,” seen omnisciently through young A’s sensibility, is all covert dramatic irony and dark insinuation. On the front seat of the car are Hector (driving) and Uncle Karl, between them Andrea; on the back seat Peter (about fifteen) sits behind Hector, Ambrose behind Uncle Karl, and behind Andrea, “Magda G—, age fourteen, a pretty girl… who lived not far from them on B–Street in the town of D—, Maryland.”

The insinuations come to this: that Andrea may have had or be having an affair with Karl; that Peter, at least, may be in fact Karl’s son instead of Hector’s; and that not only Hector but young Ambrose may at least half-sense this possible state of affairs!

Which brings us to the back seat, where, in addition to dealing with these shocking possibilities, A. is vainly mustering his nerve to touch Magda, Peter’s girlfriend, with whom our amateur has imagined himself in love since one late afternoon in September 1940, when, it is implied, she surprised him with a blow job in the Menschhaus toolshed. See B’s text for rhetoric and details. Magda’s attitude toward him is cordially patronizing; she is holding hands with Peter; Ambrose doubts that she even remembers the incident in the toolshed (for him a watershed).

The action proceeds between these suppressed bourgeois-domestic hang-ups, scandals, and volatilities in the foreground and, in the background, implications of the larger bourgeois violence of World War II: crude oil on the beach from torpedoed tankers, “browned-out” streetlights, shooting galleries full of swastikas and rising suns. Ambrose glimpses human copulation for the first time, under the boardwalk; he catches sight of the aureole of Magda’s nipple, trembles at the power and ubiquity of the sex drive, entertains preadolescent doubts of his masculinity, suffers pangs of jealousy and desire, approaches a nausea compounded of these plus the tensions in the family, his ambivalent feelings for his father and himself, and a candied apple that sits ill on his stomach. The three youngsters at last enter the funhouse; Ambrose takes a wrong turn and fancies himself wandering those corridors forever, telling himself stories in the dark, perhaps including the story “Lost in the Funhouse.”

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.

So eloquent would I wax before this spectacle, I could sometimes exact from Peter promises of rooms for myself in one of the towers, and a private vineyard hard by the postern gate, before he remembered to protest that Mother was all the baroness he craved, our poor house the only castle. I could not of course propose outright that in that case he make over his inheritance to me; but I would go to sleep confident that Peter recognized my qualifications for the baronetcy and would abdicate in my favor when the time came.