by John Barth
Do you pray too, silent author of the novel I am still in midst of, and which still pleasantly distracts me when I am less distraught. Pray that your friend will not conceive the inconceivable upon your poor
Germaine!
P.S.: #2, I learned at breakfast (the mistress, not the miracle), was none other than our Bea Golden, then sixteen and busily about it under her “maiden” name, Jeannine Mack: all over the back roads of Baltimore County, the back rooms of yacht clubs right ’round the Chesapeake regatta circuit, the back seats of autos at 60 mph on the highway or parked on the roads aforementioned or garaged or driven into drive-ins or en route across the water aboard that same ferryboat (then unstranded, as the Bay was then unspanned; this was 1948-49) whereon I’d ventured over rockfish what we ought. Bea was a fresh young woman then; A. a freshman at the university: by the time their rut had run its alphabet he had gone from A’s to F’s in half his courses, and she was being serviced by upper-class underclassmen up and down the Ivy League. They had scarcely seen each other in the twenty years since, until Harrison’s funeral in February. Her rearrival here with the film company this month, coinciding as it did with the close of our own salty Second Stage, Ambrose found (and I quote) “piquant”: as if our recapitulating coupling had reconceived and rebirthed her. I find myself piqued that he finds it so, and I review uneasily his growing involvement in Prinz’s film. That water-message sequence on the beach: it seemed in his telling rather a rivalry, and she the prize. Did Dante’s Beatrice, I wonder, lay for the part? Is Ambrose really in conference with his brother as I sit here on his sperm?
P.P.S.: Shame on me: if I am mad, let it not be with jealousy. He has just telephoned (I’m back indoors now), not from his camera obscura but from the county hospital next door. The crisis, it develops, is not alone with Mensch Masonry, Inc.—which however is beset by problems enough—but with Ambrose and Peter’s mother, who underwent mastectomy last year but whose cancer has evidently metastasized and brought her down again, in all likelihood terminally. It is time, he suggests, I met what remains of his family: he has spoken of me to his brother, to l’Abruzzesa, to the D. D’d D. He would have his mother meet the potential mother of a grandchild she will never see (May she live forever and not see it!). Tomorrow, as Apollo-10 takes off to orbit the moon, I am to visit the hospital, then take lunch en famille at Mensch’s Castle! I am nervous as a new bride; they will think me too old for him; it is all madness.
P.P.P.S.: Bent on locking the barn door after the horse is stolen, I go belatedly to douche—and find as it were the barn door stolen too! My pessary of pages past (I believe you call them diaphragms?) is vanished from its perch above the aspirin, nor can I find it anywhere upon the premises. What amorous tyranny is this? And why does it excite (as well as truly annoy) your surely (but not yet entirely) demented
G.?
E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her introduction to the Menschhaus.
24 L, 24 May
J.,
Even as I imagined this time last week, A.‘s #4 was his ex, present whereabouts unknown, mother of the d. d’d daughter, for whom I gather she shucked responsibility two years past when they shucked their marriage. Who am I to criticise, who did not assume my own responsibility in the first place? Nor shall I presume to judge the marriage: not only is one chap’s meat another’s poison, but what nourishes at twenty may nauseate at forty, and vice versa.
It was her name, Ambrose now maintains, most drew him to her twenty years ago, when he was an undergraduate apprentice and she a young typist at his university. Marsha Blank, mind and character to match, descended from a presumably endless line of Blanks going back to nowhere. So declares our not entirely reliable narrator, adding that she was possessed of a fetching figure and a face with the peculiar virtue of being so regularly, generally pretty as to defy particular description, even by a young writer whose then ambition it was to render the entire quotidian into prose. A. claims he cannot so much as summon her features to memory; never could in their seventeen years together; that her comeliness was at once considerable and, precisely, nondescript. And her personality matched her face; and there she sat, nine-to-fiving those reams of empty paper through her machine day after day, like a stenographic Echo, giving back the words of others at 25¢ the page plus 5¢ the carbon. Thither strayed my lover, who claims to have set himself even then the grand objective, since receipt of that wordless message nine years previously, of filling in the whole world’s blanks. In hand—longhand—was his virgin effort in the fiction way: the tale of a latter-day Bellerophon lost in the Dorchester marshes, “far from the paths of men, devouring his own soul,” who receives a cryptic message washed up in a bottle…
Voilà: a marriage made in the heaven of self-reflexion. Our Narcissus claims to have glimpsed at first sight of her the centre of this typist’s soul, unconscious counterpart of his conscious own: what nature abhors and “Arthur Morton King” finds irresistible. But we remember too that this was 1949: my lover has wound up—better, has been wound down by—his sexual calisthenics with young Jeannine Mack and is endeavouring to curb, for his brother’s sake, his reawakened love for l’Abruzzesa, now wed to Peter Mensch and big with the twins she will give birth to ere the year is out. Harry Truman is back in the White House (and Jane Mack is misbehaving with my Jeffrey in Paris, whilst I finish my edition of Germaine de Staël’s correspondence and am flirted with by Evelyn Waugh); American college campuses are burgeoning with married veterans of the Second War, educating themselves and supporting their families in prefab villages on the G.I. Bill of Rights: they set the style, for younger male undergraduates like Ambrose, of marrying very early, at eighteen and nineteen and twenty, and promptly engendering children upon their late-adolescent brides…
But why am I telling you this, who not only were there then but had been my lover’s fellow labourer upon the Lighthouse project that same sexual summer? Because, of course, it’s all news to me, disclosed since Sunday last, when I met the Mensch ménage “on location”: i.e., in that same Lighthouse—now cracked as the House of Usher and out of plumb like the Pisan campanile—and the adjacent county hospital, where the last of the pre-Ambrosian generation of Mensches lies a-wasting of the family cancer.
To deal first and lightly with that pitiable person, whom nature is dealing with so hardly: Andrea King was her maiden name; she descends from the King family of nearby Somerset County, whose ancestors a century and a half ago conspired on behalf of their friend Jérôme Bonaparte to spirit Napoleon from St Helena to Maryland. From her (and the possibly fancied ambiguity of his siring) Ambrose takes his fanciful nom de plume, as well as his love for word games. From her the surgeons last summer took the seventy-year-old breast my lover once suckled beneath a swarm of golden bees. Andrea herself made this connexion, remarking further (which delighted Ambrose) that just as all the bees but one had been removed by Grandfather Mensch on that momentous occasion, and the one he’d missed had stung her, so now etc., and here she was: it took only one. Did I happen to know the British word for the terminal character of the alphabet, three letters beginning with z?
That was about the limit of her interest in Yours Truly, for which (limit) I was grateful. She had been something of a beauty, Ambrose told me; several men besides his late father had loved her. A neighbour had driven himself to drink on her account; her husband’s brother—Ambrose’s late Uncle Karl—had perhaps slept with her (intramural adultery seems a family custom!), was not impossibly Ambrose’s begetter, or his brother Peter’s… All dead now: the neighbour by his own hand, the uncle of liver cancer, the father—who on an evil day first proposed the Tower of Truth to Harrison Mack and John Schott—of a brain tumour. And their femme fatale now potbellied, shrunken, half deaf, gone in the teeth—a sweetless hive of swarming cells, not expected to survive the summer. Crude and blasted as she was, I rather liked her: some tough East Anglian country stock showed through. She was in pain; feared she’d need drugging before she finished the puzzle i
n that day’s Times.
“Zed,” her son suggested.
We then adjourned to Mensch’s Castle, Folly, Leuchtturm, whatever, where I was to meet and lunch with his brother, with his twin niece and nephew, with his dear damaged daughter, and with the first, third, and fifth loves of his life: Magda Giulianova. I was in no great haste, am in none now, to get to her, whom I fancied watching us through that camera obscura as we crossed from the hospital toward the Menschhaus. We toured the grounds, yclept Erdmann’s Cornlot after its former use and owner: a square of zoysia grass landscaped with azaleas, roses, mimosa, weeping willows, and well-tended grapevines, fronting on the Choptank. Where once had been a seawall on the river side is now a brand-new sandy point, whereof here is the sorry history:
Were you aware, when you worked that summer for Mensch Masonry, of the fraud Peter Mensch’s house was being built on? The poor chap had been left a small sum by another uncle (cancer of the skin) and resolved to build a house for the family, whose fortunes were as always parlous. He bought Erdmann’s Cornlot, went off to war, and left the job of construction to the family firm—which is to say, to the liver-cancered uncle and the brain-tumoured father, who (the latter in particular was, it seems, a cranky rascal) proceeded to shortchange their benefactor at every opportunity. The seawall had been protected by riprap of quarried stone: this they removed to complete the repairing of the hospital’s seawall, itself crumbling because some years earlier they’d removed its riprap for other purposes! The footings for Peter’s house were laid to skimpier specifications than he’d called for; the mortar you mixed that summer was systematically overloaded with sand, to save money; the stone used for construction was that same riprap removed from before the hospital wall, still too barnacled and mossed to bond properly with the mortar, especially with that mortar. Ambrose knew of these things (which he now candidly rehearses as we stroll the grounds) and loved his brother, but could not protest—did not protest—because of his own sore culpability: his virgin tryst and subsequent occasional coupling with La Giulianova, which he believed Mensch père to have espied!
Thus did they all take ill advantage of the earnest young man they all professed devotion to and acknowledged as the pillar of the clan; who so loved them that upon his return to firm and family, when his mason’s eye must have detected straight off the adulterated mortar if not the dittoed fiancée (whose adulterator I begin to write like), he said not a word, but went on cheerfully with the construction and the marriage. In ’49, house and tower were complete; the newlyweds moved in, the twins were born. In ’54 Ambrose and wife Marsha came down from Baltimore and moved in too, he having given up teaching to try his fortune as a free-lancer. In 1955 (birth year of the damaged daughter) major cracks first appeared in both the masonry and Ambrose’s marriage; by ’56 several doors had to be shaved and sashes rehung: Ambrose and Marsha shifted to a flat near the boat harbour, the liver uncle went to his reward, and Peter assumed direction of Mensch Masonry (“the family infirm,” my lover calls it). By 1960 the Menschhaus was measurably out of plumb, as were Ambrose’s marriage and career alike: Ms Blank, not regarding herself as empty, resented his efforts to fill her in: his major literary endeavour (a chronicle of the sinking family) was bogged in bathos. He half attempted suicide—and, he declares, half succeeded. Traditional narrative he gave up for “concrete prose” (the mason in him, one supposes) and occasional retaliatory adulteries: for some time, it seems, his had not been the only filler in the Blank. The celebrated seawall, meanwhile, had quite collapsed: the directors of the hospital were justly incensed; Erdmann’s Cornlot was washing rapidly into the river; once again Mensch Masonry verged upon bankruptcy.
This last in part because Hector Mensch, P. & A.‘s father, had also retired from the county school system by this time (the tumour was enlarging) and turned all his ruinous energies to the firm; also because Peter would no more acknowledge that the man was crackers (and ignore his business advice) than that his house’s list was owing as much to bad foundations as to bad ground. The company did foundation work at Tidewater Tech in ’62 and ’63, in the course of which Hector made the acquaintance of Harrison Mack; John Schott he already knew from his alma mater, Wicomico Teachers College. Among the three of them was somehow hatched, in 1966, the notion of Marshyhope College’s Tower of Truth.
Which fetches us to our literal point, whereon my friend and I still strolled as he regaled me with this exposition. MSUC is built on the drained and filled marshes of Redmans Neck; as Joe Morgan had warned, high-rise construction on that ground was at best problematical. Contractors’ bids on the tower were correspondingly high; it seemed almost as though “we” might win the day by default. Alas, it became Hector Mensch’s strategy to save the company by underbidding all competitors for the foundation work, even if that meant doing the job at a considerable loss, thereby so inclining John Schott in their favour (by thus abetting his campaign against Morgan) that when Schott became president and launched the great expansion of MSU, Mensch Masonry’s fortunes would be made at last. And so far has this strategy succeeded that while Harrison Mack and Hector Mensch now sleep six feet under the loam of Dorset, poor Peter toils in it sleeplessly deeper each semester. The tower’s foundation is laid, almost a year behind schedule and at enormously greater cost than originally estimated, thanks both to inflation and to the ground situation at Redmans Neck. Mensch Masonry’s Dun & Bradstreet has sunk lower than the piles Peter had to drive to find bedrock. Ambrose is persuaded that, like the Menschhaus, the Tower of Truth is rising from a lie: that among their father’s last official acts on behalf of the firm—whilst contracts were still being negotiated with the state, and various political campaign funds still being contributed to—was the falsification of certain crucial test borings supposedly taken at the site, to persuade Peter that the project was less unfeasible than it seemed. The tower is presently scheduled for completion next year (just enough of it is raised at this writing to permit next fall the cornerstone ceremonies originally scheduled for next month); by 1976, Ambrose maintains, it will have to be abandoned, if not dismantled.
Meanwhile, to bail out the firm, appease the directors of the county hospital, and delay the disappearance of Erdmann’s Cornlot, Peter contracted with a firm of engineers dredging out the ship channel into Cambridge Creek to dump the dredge spoil, thousands of cubic yards of it, before those two properties—especially the Cornlot, which is now enlarged by more than an acre. The seawall that founded the foundered firm is buried beneath this as yet uncharted point (“Cancer Point,” Ambrose has dubbed it), and the Lighthouse lists and settles some hundred yards farther from the water than when you helped build it.
We approach the house. I have glimpsed it before, from the distances of Long Wharf and the Choptank River bridge. From closer up it is less prepossessing than its builder, who now strolls out with the d.d.d. to greet us as we stroll in from the point.
One would not take Peter and Ambrose Mensch for brothers. Handsomer but coarser than my lover, Peter Mensch is dark-eyed and -browed, swarthy, massive, older-looking than his forty-some years: raw Saxon-Thuringian peasant stock, says A., direct from Grandmother Mensch, unleavened by the wilier Rhenish genes of her husband and the English DNA of the Somerset Kings. His voice is surprisingly high and gentle, his speech full of broguish right smart’s and purt’ near’s. His movement, too, seems gentle, considering his weight and apparent strength; he is not fat, but thick, heavy, powerful-looking: no doubt he still cuts and hefts the stone himself. He shakes my hand elaborately, right pleased to meet me. He has just returned from Bible class at the nearby Methodist church and is still dressed in shiny blue chain-store suit and black shoes, but in deference to the warming day has loosened his two-dollar tie, held in place with a gilt crab tie-tac. He is sorry that the twins won’t be home for dinner: young Carl and his girl friend are surf-fishing “down to Ocean City”; young Connie is helping her husband-to-be, a local farmer, set out tomato plants. It ain’t no keeping um hom
e at their age.
We would be five, then.
I had expected to feel some contempt for a man so readily gulled; but my strong and immediate intuition, in Peter’s presence, was that he was not gulled, only endlessly patient of exploitation by those he cared for. A change of clothes (and barbers) and he could be physically most attractive. And his great unclever easiness, his guileless goodwill… I liked him.
So too, clearly, did Damaged Angela, who leaned against him as against a building whilst we spoke, her brown eyes never moving from my face. Unions are undone; their fruit remains and grows, for better or worse. Ambrose’s angel is a heavy, dim fourteen, short and thick, big-breasted already. There is no visible trace of my lover in her, nor (he replied to my later question) of La Blank, who was slender, fair, and hazel-eyed. Peter thinks her the image of a dear late aunt of theirs; Ambrose shrugs. She is alleged to have made great progress under Magda’s patient tutelage; Peter too spends hours with her—and they both claim (but I’m ahead of myself) that it’s Ambrose who’s responsible for her advancement from virtually autistic beginnings. An eighth grader by age, she does fifth-grade work in the sixth grade amongst twelve-year-olds in the local junior high school. Her nubility is a problem: moronic young men roar past the Lighthouse in horrid-looking autos for her benefit, and she grins and waves. The Mensches fear she’ll be taken sexual advantage of, and wish there were proper special-education facilities in the county; they weigh the possible advantages of residential therapy in Philadelphia against its shocking cost—$12,000 a year and rising annually—and the negative effects of her separation from them.