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.
The egg from which this vision hatched — bought by Uncle Konrad for Aunt Rosa at the Oberammergau Passion Play in 1910—lay in permanent exhibition between two of Uncle Wilhelm’s cupids on the mantelpiece of our Good Parlor, which in the old fashion was opened only for holidays, funerals, and company. Peter no less than myself deemed it worthwhile as a boy to behave himself long enough on such occasions to be rewarded with a glass of Grandfather’s wine and a view into that egg, but for years I assumed that its magical interior, like Wilhelm’s student statuary, was no more than a curiosity to him. Not until he was seventeen, and I fifteen, did I learn otherwise.
Uncle Konrad, upon his death in 1941, left in trust for each of his nephews two thousand dollars, into which we were to come upon our graduation from Dorset High. Mine was earmarked already by the family for my further education. Peter, I believe, was expected to invest his in the uncertain fortunes of Mensch Masonry Contractors, where like Uncle Karl he’d worked as an apprentice every spare moment of his youth. Father and Karl spoke warmly, as Peter’s graduation day approached, of his good fortune in being able to “do something” for the business at last — as though his having done a journeyman mason’s work at a boy’s wage for the two years past were not itself a baronial contribution.
“Bread cast upon the waters,” Hector would say to the family in general, sniffing and arching his brows. “Famous percentage yield. Throw in a slice, fish out a loaf.”
“Well, he doesn’t have to put it in the company,” Mother declared. She wore her housecoat the day long, as if she understood the word to mean a coat for keeping house in. The years had begun to frizz her hair, spoil her teeth, lower her jowls, undo her breasts, pot her belly: the sight of her holding court from her couch, cigarette between her lips and coffee cup in hand, did not move one in the same way as formerly. “It’s his money.”
“Who said it wasn’t? Let him put plumbing in the house for you.”
That was not what she meant, Mother replied. But it was. Hector’s sole concession to modernity, since buying out Karl’s and Rosa’s shares of the Menschhaus in 1936, was a cold-water tap let into the kitchen sink. It was still pitchers and basins on marble washstands in all the bedrooms, and as we had no heat either beyond the kitchen and parlor stoves, there’d be ice on those pitchers on winter mornings. We were, moreover, the only family in East Dorset who still used the privy built into the row of whitewashed sheds behind our summer kitchen. The prospect there was not unlovely: a walk of mossy bricks led under the grape and wisteria arbors which screened the sheds. But it was so shocking cold in winter, so beloved of wasps and bees in summer, that I remained more or less constipated until college.
Yet however legitimate her yen for domestic convenience, I felt Andrea had no more right than Hector to influence Peter’s choice, and vigorously so argued. The very prudence of their resolve as to my inheritance (which resolve Peter had affirmed so stoutly that I couldn’t disagree) increased my jealousy for the independence of his, and led me by some logic to feel it should be spent imprudently. Not “thrown away,” mind, in the evanescent joys of riotous living, nor yet exchanged for objects of useless beauty: the notion of the spree was alien to our Protestant consciences, and I cannot imagine Hector or even the unknown Wilhelm, for example, paying money for a piece of art. My fancy equated carefree expenditure with the purchase of hard goods, the equipment of pleasure: if Peter hesitated to commit himself, I assumed his problem to be the choice between, say, a red Ford roadster, a racing sailboat, a five-inch reflecting telescope.
“He doesn’t have to spend it on the family at all,” I would declare. “He can do anything he wants with it.”
“Indeed he may; indeed he may.” Hector’s nose itched when he was opposed; he would massage it with left thumb and forefinger. “Let him buy a nice Hampton sailboat. When the company goes into receivership, we’ll all go sailing.”
It will seem odd that none consulted Peter’s inclinations; in his presence the subject never came up. The truth is, though we were all more sophisticated than my brother, he had already at seventeen assumed a certain authority in our house, stemming it may be from nothing more than his difference from us. Presume as we did that our judgment was sounder, our imagination keener than his, we seemed to understand that his resolve was beyond cajolery. The very futility of our debate lent it sarcastic heat; a variety of awe, more than tact, silenced it when he came upon us. I am reminded of Peter by Homer’s Zeus; indeed, our later ménage in the Lighthouse was something like that deity’s in this respect: Magda might complain like Hera; I chafe and bristle like Poseidon or Hades; Marsha carp and wheedle and connive like Aphrodite — but there were finally no quarrels, for when Peter speaks, though the grumbling may continue, his will is done.