Until recently their first stop was the bakery: from a back alley they entered to watch men labor at next day’s bread. The great ovens rumbled, the machines for kneading and wrapping clacked, the air was hot and yeasty. Pasted with flour and sweat, young Negroes slid the pans through cast-iron doors. John Grau the baker, dusty arms akimbo, aproned paunch thrust out, would hail the visitors. “Look who ain’t in bed yet!”
Then he’d swing Angie onto the loaf cart, adorn her with the square white cap off his Prussian head, roll her across the room.
“Whoo-hoo,” the child politely called. The Negroes watched, leaning on their racks and paddles.
The loaf they bought cost twenty cents instead of the five that Ambrose used to pay, but it still burnt his fingers as it did when he and Peter sneaked uptown in their boyhood; steam still poured from it when he broke it into halves, and it tasted faintly and pleasingly of alcohol, as will a loaf not ten minutes old. Now Dorset’s bread comes from big bakeries over the Bay; if the wanderers would eat they must brave knots of young men with capeskin jackets and shining hair who frequent the all-night diner. Then they walk down High Street towards Long Wharf and the municipal basin, chewing. Sporadic autos ripple down the brick; great poplars hiss above their heads.
At this hour, too late for young lovers, the waterfront park is cool and vacant. Through dew they wander to the wharf where creek joins river, there to perch upon high pilings white with gull dung, bite their bread, sip in turn from the public fountain. Across the creek stands one dark plant of Colonel Morton’s packing house, victim of the failing oyster harvest: they bless it. Upshore above the broken seawall rise the county hospital and nurses’ home: they smile upon the windows lit by suffering. Then Erdmann’s Cornlot juts into the river, where stands Peter Mensch’s house. The lights of the New Bridge run low across the river; beyond them, across another creek, is a second, larger hospital, the Eastern Shore Asylum. Like night-drench, like starlight, Angie’s grace descends upon standpipe and bell buoy, smokestack and boulevard.
Citizens of Dorset: as we dream, as we scratch, as we copulate and snore, we are indiscriminately shriven!
C
Children call the house Mensch’s Castle; their parents and Hector Mensch call it Mensch’s Folly. It is an unprepossessing structure except that, in an area to which building-stone is no more indigenous than gold, the house is made entirely of granite rubble: the only private dwelling in the county so constructed. More surprising, from the northwest corner rises a fat stone turret, forty feet high and slightly tapered, like a short shot-tower. From Municipal Basin Angie points with her bread to the lights of Ambrose’s room in the top. Strangers to Dorset have mistaken Mensch’s Castle for a church, a fort; more commonly, owing to its situation and the lights that burn in Ambrose’s chamber, it is thought to be a lighthouse. Novice mariners, confusing the tower with the channel range on Dorset Creek, have been led into shoal water off the seawall; but wiser pilots, navigating from local knowledge or newer charts, take a second bearing on the tower to reach the basin.
Some deem this turret the disfigurement of a house otherwise well suited to its site. Others call it the redeeming feature of a commonplace design and lament the fact that it is settling into the sand of Erdmann’s Cornlot rather more rapidly than the rest of Peter’s house. Two years ago, when one was certain the family must fail at last, Ambrose caused the entire tower to be converted into a camera obscura, from which is grossed enough in summer to buy part of the winter’s fuel. Travelers en route to Ocean City are directed to Mensch’s Castle by a number of small signs along the highway at both ends of the New Bridge; upon receipt of a small admission fee, Ambrose or Magda escorts them into the basement of the tower to see scenes projected from outside. The device is simple, for all its size: a long-focus objective lens is mounted on the roof; the image it receives is mirrored down a shaft in the center of the tower, through Ambrose’s room and Angie’s; on the bottom floor it is reflected by another mirror onto a vertical ground-glass pane the size of a large window, let into one side of the shaft. Like a huge periscope the whole apparatus can be turned, by hand, full circle on its rollers.
Visitors do not come to the Lighthouse in great numbers: Ocean City boasts amusements more spectacular than Leonardo’s, and Magda declares her astonishment that even one person would pay money to see on the screen what can be witnessed for free and real outside. But those curious enough to seek it out find the camera obscura fascinating, and are loath to leave. One understands: the dark chamber and luminous plate make the commonplace enchanting. What would scarcely merit notice if beheld firsthand — red brick hospital, weathered oyster-dredger toiling to windward, dowdy maples and cypress clapboards of East Dorset — are magically composed and represented; they shine serene by their inner lights and are intensely interesting.
Peter and Ambrose are drawn to their camera obscura no less strongly than the visitors. They linger in the darkened basement when customers are gone, regarding whatever image has chanced upon the glass. Stout Peter’s voice goes husky.
“Damned old seawall,” he remarks, as if years instead of minutes had gone by since he viewed it firsthand. And Ambrose sighs and tisks his cheek — for there it stretches, cracked, gleaming.
Little Angela, on the other hand, is not interested. In the chamber of her mind, perhaps, things glow with that light unaided. In any case, she prefers the vanished country of the Easter egg. What sights she sees through that blank window, we cannot suppose.
D
During all his first thirty years, A. waited for one among us to make a sound, move a hand, blow cigarette smoke in a certain way that would tell him we understood everything, so that between us might be dispensed with this necessity of words.
Signs to us he made past number. Earnest professors: when you discoursed upon Leibnitz and the windowless monads, did you not see one undergraduate, ill groomed and ill at ease, tap his pencil thus-and-so upon his book — which is to say, upon your window? Had you then flung up that sash with gesture of your own. But Brussels sprouts (he daresays) had thrust upon you a flatulence unnerving at the lectern; intent at once upon the syntax of your clause and the tonus of your sphincter, you missed his sign. Auburn beauty whom he stared at in the train-coach mirror thirteen years ago, from New York to North Philadelphia: you saw him touch his necktie such-a-way. If you had answered in kind and made him know. Bad luck for him your dirndl bound you out of countenance; bad luck for you you passed New Brunswick praying for your menses, when already Gold the casting agent’s sperm had had its way with your newest ovum. Et cetera.
You fidget. I too, and blush to think how lately A. has left this madness. Your forbearance and embarrassment for his sake I appreciate. The telescope at his window, the sculpture ’round about, the very lamp and ink bottle on his desk I see withdrawn into themselves and hiding their expressions: tender of his feelings, relieved to see he understands at last — yet uneasy all the same, lest out of habit he commence to stare again, or press them once more to give up truths about themselves. Never fear. The eyes shall sooner ask the fingers for a sign, the fancy supplicate the bowels, than Ambrose tax us further in that old way.
E
Everybody in that family dies of cancer! The only variable is its location: Grandfather’s was in his prostate, Grandmother’s in her bloodstream. Of their four children only Uncle Wilhelm was spared, by dying in France of influenza in 1918. Aunt Rosa’s was in her uterus; her husband Konrad’s was in his skin. Uncle Karl’s was in his liver. Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother Andrea, like Konrad a Mensch by marriage only, has nonetheless had radical mastectomy; her husband Hector’s nine-month madness in 1930, thought merely the effect of jealousy, is now revealed to have been associated with a tumor that feasts upon his brain.