He spoke, in this instance, on a Saturday evening some days after we’d begun repairing the municipal seawall, whose original construction had laid the firm’s foundation. After the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, tons of granite rubble purchased by the town at salvage prices from the burnt-out city were fetched down the Chesapeake on barges and dumped as “rip-rap” before the wall for additional protection: Grandfather’s idea, and a sound one. But age and ice and hurricane had so far had their way with the concrete in the forty years since, undone and undermined it, that in spring tides it was more breakwater than retaining wall, with virtual harbors behind it. Moved by citizens whose real estate thus silted every tide, the Dorset City Council let bids to repair the wall and increase its height; after long cost-cutting computations by Hector (who, in addition to his principaling, still owned one-third of the company) in conference with Karl (who directed it) and Rosa (owner of the third third), Mensch Masonry submitted the low bid.
The contract bolstered our sagging fortunes, which only the general wartime prosperity had kept from definitive collapse. Extra carpenters, masons, and cement finishers were engaged; our flatbed truck was repaired on credit; from somewhere a rock crusher and a second main mixer were leased. And in the interest of civic economy, Hector informed us, we would use not a stone from the company yard! The day we first surveyed the job he had scraped algae with his left hand from some of the “Baltimore rocks” in the shallows where Peter and I had used to play pirates and net soft crabs, and had shaken his head at what he saw.
“Good brownstone and granite,” he’d declared to Karl and Peter. “Already squared, most of it. What a waste.”
Uncle Karl agreed, and so every day after school and all day Saturday I worked with the gang of Negroes they set to manhandling the Baltimore rocks. At first we fed them indiscriminately to the crusher, moss and all, thence to the mixer, while Father watched with a frown that deepened every time another nicely masoned stone was reduced to chips.
“A crying shame.”
Karl sniffed and chewed his unlit cigar. “That one there was Tennessee rose marble, looked like.”
The upshot was, one Friday at supper they announced an agreement made that forenoon with the mayor and city counciclass="underline" in return for all the squared stones, to be carted to our yard at our own expense, Mensch Masonry would clear away “Grandfather’s” Baltimore rocks altogether and present the city with a usable bathing area in front of the exposed seawall. Hector was enormously proud of the plan (his own), which he felt no ordinary businessman, but only a business artist as it were, could have hatched. What especially pleased him was that our removing, for profit, what Grandfather had for profit placed there was a kind of echo of Grandfather’s benevolent profiting from the immigrants both going and coming.
He grinned at my aunt. “There is style in this piece of business.”
Uncle Karl said merely, “Think what Willy could of done with them pink ones.”
Aunt Rosa had the highest opinion of Hector, whom she still regarded, twenty-five years after the fact, as a shattered young hero of the war, the intellectual counterpart of his artist twin. She laid her hand on her lower abdomen — where all unknown to us her cancer flowered — and cried, “If Konrad just was here once!”
Tears then were shed for Uncles Konrad and Wilhelm, and for the family’s imminent prosperity. Even Mother must have been impressed, for she made no protest when Father sent me to light the Good Parlor stove and brought two bottles of New York Rhenish from the cold-pantry for a celebration.
The room was as chilly as its statues, and smelled of coal oil. Aunt Rosa wept again — the last parlor function had been Konrad’s funeral — but the cold wine warmed and cheered us. Family history was rechronicled; we sang “Happy Days Are Here Again” and teased Peter (who had fetched Magda from around the corner) for missing his chance to save the firm or put plumbing in the house before our fortunes changed. Mother even sat in Father’s lap and tipped his glass so that he could embrace her with his arm. In uneasy glee I called, “Get a load of the lovers!” and made everyone laugh by kissing “the Groaner” (so we had dubbed an anguished Greek head of heroic proportion, on a pedestal by the daybed: Wilhelm’s copy of Laocoön, whom the family mistook for Christ crucified) in imitation of Mother.
Only Peter was not merry, though he regarded our festivity with pensive goodwill from his station before the mantelpiece and murmured gravely, smilingly, to Magda. While Hector blushed at something Mother whispered in his ear, Rosa hummed her favorite sipping song, “Wir wöllen unser alien Kaiser Wilhelm wiederhaben.” I perched on her lap and crooned into her white-fuzzed ear: “Come with me to the Casbah!” Whereat she wrinkled over and pushed me away—Verrückte!”—flattered all the same by my attentions. Peter crimsoned more than Father: embarrassed perhaps by his own embarrassment, he took up the Easter egg from its grapewood stand between the cupids, aimed it at the white light globe that hung from the ceiling on three chains, and addressed himself to the miracle inside. Magda, beside him on a needlepoint chair, took his hand.
Mother ignored me. I could not of course remain forever on Aunt Rosa’s aproned lap. “Do you really think it’s okay to move those stones from in front of the seawall?”
Father could not easily with his single arm both embrace Mother and rub his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Now. What might you mean by that?”
I grinned and shrugged. “I only wondered. Undermining and all? Wasn’t that why Grandpa put them there to begin with?”
“Well. I beg your pardon, sir. It’s easier to wonder about undermining than to think about undermining.” Peter removed the egg from his eye.
“Lord a mercy,” Mother said. “It’s nearly nine.” As if reminded, the hall clock whirred and began to toll that hour. “I’ll put coffee on.”
“The wall’ll be three foot higher,” Father said. “Do you know what that means?” I did not, in detail. “Two hundred sixty-six cubic yards of reinforced concrete, that the waves won’t touch a dozen times a year! A hundred extra tons of weight!”
“And that’s just the stretch by the hospital,” Karl reminded me. Father helped himself to another glass. “He wonders about undermining.”
I chose not to wonder further. “Is it really Grandpa’s castle in the egg?”
Aunt Rosa kindly frowned. “Rest his soul, he used to say so.”
“Fooey,” Father said.
Karl chuckled. Rosa’s eyes filled up again. “Konrad bought me that in Oberammergau in nineteen and ten,” she explained to Magda, not for the first time. “On our honeymoon.”
“She knows,” I protested.
“There was this peddler, an old Greek or Jew, that had a raft of different ones for sale by the passion play. He showed Konrad some with naughty pictures inside, and Konrad pretended this was one like that. He wouldn’t let me peek in till we got it home.”
“He was a godawful tease, was Konrad,” Karl allowed.
For some reason I suddenly saw my father’s brother as a distinct human being, with an obscure history of his own, apart from ours, and who would one day die. I realized that I had not especially despised him recently, and pondered this realization.
Peter now surveyed us with a great smile and squeezed Magda’s hand. “If I didn’t think we’d do the seawall right,” he declared as if to me, “I wouldn’t of bought the front of Willy Erdmann’s Cornlot.”
It took a while to realize what had been said. Hector’s sarcasm was undermined by surprise. “You wouldn’t of which?”
“Grosser Gott!” Aunt Rosa chuckled, uncertain of the drift. Uncle Karl’s grin was more knowing.
My own first feeling was sharp disappointment: there would be, then, neither sailboat nor five-inch telescope, and my counsel in the matter, so far from being followed, had not even been solicited. But it was joined at once by admiration for Peter’s daring.
Mother hurried in from the kitchen. Cigarette and coffee cup. She was as startled as Hector, but her face showed amusement too. “You what?”