“Whole front end of the Cornlot,” Peter said carefully. “Hundred and fifty feet along the seawall and a hundred deep.”
The Jungle too! I guessed with fresh disappointment that Magda had been in on the secret: her smile was knowing; her great eyes flashed when Peter winked at her.
Father besought the Groaner with an expression not dissimilar to that fellow’s wretched own. “He’s going to raise tomatoes. We’ll pay the rent on our crusher with beefsteak tomatoes.”
Aunt Rosa pressed with both hands her abdomen. “Ja, ja, Hector! Peter ein Bauer ist!”
“He’ll undermine Morton’s canning house,” Father declared. “The colonel’s good as bankrupt.”
“Ja dock!” Aunt Rosa crowed. “Ah! Gott!”
My old hypothesis regarding Peter’s parentage sprang back to mind.
“I’m going to help farm it,” I announced. “Aren’t I, Peter.”
My brother set the egg back in its place. “We can make a garden. But I didn’t buy the Cornlot to farm it.”
“He didn’t buy the Cornlot to farm it,” Father informed the Groaner.
Karl chuckled. “Sure he didn’t. He wants a place of his own to set and watch the speedboat races.”
After his first remark, Peter had addressed himself principally to Mother. Now, though it was still to her he smiled, he rested his free hand lightly first on Father’s shoulder and then upon his chair back, and winked at Uncle Karl. “I’m going to build a stone house there for all of us to live in.”
For the second time Hector’s sarcasm failed him — which is to say, he could make no reply at all — and Peter took the opportunity to explain his intention. The Cornlot (so named by East Dorset children, though tomatoes and turnips as often grew there) was a field of seven acres at the foot of our street, adjacent to the hospital grounds; not two weeks previously our ailing neighbor Willy Erdmann — loser of the battle of the bees and a sinking dipsomane — had declared his intent to parcel it into building lots, and there being little demand yet for new housing in East Dorset, for a small consideration had given Peter a thirty-day option on one waterfront plot. Now that Mensch Masonry appeared to be in no pressing need of capital, Peter was resolved to purchase the lot outright for eleven hundred dollars (Erdmann’s price) and erect a commodious stone house there for the family. More, with Uncle Karl’s help — who, we now learned, had been Peter’s agent in the transaction — he had persuaded Erdmann, a quondam realtor and builder, to include in the deal a set of blueprints from his files, and was already dickering with him and another contractor for a basement excavation.
“Don’t look at me,” Karl growled, almost merrily. “Boy made me swear not to tell.”
“Stone costs a fortune!” Mother exclaimed. “There’s not a stone house in East Dorset!”
“Going to build her myself as I get the money,” Peter said firmly. “After the war. Any of you can chip in that wants to. It’ll be an advertisement for the company.”
Hector snorted. “Some advertisement, when it sinks into the Cornlot. You crazy, Karl?”
But Uncle Karl reminded him that the hospital itself was holding up well enough on the sandy soil, and Peter declared he’d already learned from Karl and Willy Erdmann what was required in the way of piers and footings, and was prepared to lay out the site.
Suddenly Mother set down both coffee and cigarette and looked from Magda to Peter with a new expression. “Peter Mensch! Are you and Magda married?”
Rosa rocked and hummed. Father rubbed his nose as if possessed. Karl twiddled his wineglass and grinned. I myself was nearly ill with envy at Peter’s initiative. He began to color again. “Nope.”
“Engaged, then. Is that so, Magda?” There was affection in Mother’s voice, still mixed with amusement — the tone with which she sang to torment Peter — and he blushed as miserably as on those sporting occasions.
“We’re not engaged or anything.” Magda was as devoid of wit as was my brother, but immune to teasing. Her eyes would grow even larger and more serious, her voice more quiet, and she never rose to our bait. “We don’t have any plans.”
“Well, we do,” Peter objected, remarkably red. “But they’re a ways off. After the war. And nothing definite.”
“A stone house on the Cornlot,” Father reported to Mother. Rosa hummed and chortled, her hands clasped across her apron. Karl clapped Father’s shoulder and called Peter a chip off the old block. As soon as the hubbub began to subside, Peter left to walk Magda home. I went as far as the entrance hall with them.
“Boy oh boy, Peter…” My heart was full; he and Magda both smiled. “Are you going to put crenelations on the house, do you think? Those scallops that they used to shoot arrows from?”
“I guess none of those, Amb. Sounds too expensive.”
Now it was I who blushed. “I sure will help you build it!”
“That’s good.”
“We can transplant our grapevines even before we build! And put in some real wine grapes.”
“It’s our land,” Peter said. “We can do whatever we want.”
I began to realize that a piece of land was more exciting to own than any of the things I’d thought of. “How about a tower? We could have one round tower, on a corner…”
“Yeah, well. We’ll have to think about a tower, all right.” I saw he was reddening again, and so said them good night, but declared: “It’d be great if you all did get married, and it was your house we were living in!”
With an easy motion Magda turned my face toward hers and kissed me, lightly and solemnly, on the lips. I understood that she and Peter must be habitually making love.
“Good night, Amby,” she said.
Back in the parlor Father was betting the Groaner that Peter expected to be supplied with free building materials.
“Well, now,” Mother said good-humoredly. “He did say the house was for all of us.”
Father entreated suffering Laocoön with his arm. “She actually believes—”
“So let’s give him the Baltimore rocks,” Karl suggested.
“He don’t need them,” Father declared. “You’ve all got bigger ones in your heads.”
Aunt Rosa whooped.
I stayed out of it and got to bed as soon as possible.
“He’s feeling that Rhine wine,” I heard Mother remark, and she said more truly than she knew: it was the Rhine of Aunt Rosa’s egg whose wine possessed me. For hours I tossed at the mercy of two ideas: that Peter’s property ran clear to the center of the earth (its volume I calculated next day, by the law of prisms, to be seven and twelve one-hundredths cubic miles), and that an older girl like Magda, whether or not she recalled a certain quarter hour in our toolshed four years past, was… more interesting than the giddy teases I had “dates” with.
K
Konrad’s comparison was with certain Tin Pan Alley songs, whereof the catchy title is dreamed up first and the tune composed to fit: so the motto of Mensch Masonry preceded the firm itself, which was established on its strength. One early fall morning in 1932 (so Mother tells the story, shaking her head), before he’d got himself back into the school system after his discharge from the asylum, Father was sitting in the “office” corner of the Mensch Memorial Monument Company, nursing one of the headaches that dated from his cure and regarding a block of fractured Carrara. A hurricane some weeks previously had washed out a clapboard home on Holland Island, out in the Bay, and taken the life of the lady of the house; her husband, an oyster tonger, had contracted for a modest stone at the head of her vault, which by marsh-country custom (owing to the scarcity of dry ground) was “buried” in a slight excavation in his dooryard, the concrete lid aboveground. Grandfather was offering him a list of popular inscriptions from which he might choose.
“Look at this here: ‘He giveth His beloved sleep.’ ” The verse from Psalms was, in fact, his pet inscription: he loved to cut Gothic H’s. “And here’s Jeremiah: ‘Her sun is gone down while it was yet day.’ Very nice sentiment, eh?”