“That’s how it is in the myths,” Konrad volunteered. “Always west.”
“A studio he could have right here,” Grandfather complained. “What do we need our big shed, business like it is?”
He sniffed at Hector’s opinion that, to a sculptor, mountains must be more inspiring than marshes, and Konrad’s that travel is broadening. Only Karl’s gruff conjecture made sense to him: that Wilhelm had found somewhere in those hills a better model for his Venuses than the plaster replicas at the institute. But that hypothesis did not console him, far less Grandmother, for the “loss of their son,” despite Konrad and Hector’s testimony that a more or less irregular life was virtually prerequisite to achievement in the fine arts.
“Pfoo,” Grandfather said. “If that’s so, it’s Karl would be the artist.”
Karl grinned around his cigar. “And you’d be Michael Angelo his self.”
Not until 1917, when Wilhelm came home to enlist with his brothers in the American Expeditionary Force, did even Hector learn the truth: that it was no Appalachian Venus that had enthralled the pride of the Mensches, but a wilder, less comprehensible siren, not even whose existence had been acknowledged by the masters of the institute. Through a week of tears and feasts (while the down-county Germans gathered at the Menschhaus with their own patriotic sons, and the kaiser’s picture was turned to the wall and the house draped in Stars and Stripes, and the women wept and laughed and sliced wurst and made black bread and sauerbraten, and the men quaffed homemade beer and tried in high-spirited vain to find Yankee equivalents for their customary drinking songs), Wilhelm tried to explain to his brothers those strange new flights of the graphic and plastic imagination called Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism; the importance of the 1913 Armory Show; the abandonment — by him who in fifteen minutes with the clay or five with the pencil could catch any expression of any face! — of the very idea of representation.
“Sounds right woozy to me, Will,” Hector declared. Karl gruffly advised Wilhelm to stick with tits and behinds if he hoped to turn stone into money. Even Konrad, gentle Platonist, wondered whether any artist who forsook the ancient function of mirroring nature could survive.
“This is 1917!” Wilhelm would laugh. “We’re in the twentieth century!”
A photograph made of the brothers that week by one of his artist-friends from Baltimore — the last but one of Wilhelm in the Mensches’ album — shows scowling Karl with a face like modeled beef; lean-faced Hector with his long artist’s fingers and the eyes already of an assistant principal; and leaner Wilhelm, face like an exposed nerve, his edgy smile belied by eyes that stare as if into the Pit. He was doing no sculpting at all, Hector learned, only heavy masonry, trying to discover “what the rocks
Whatever their feelings about the fatherland, no families were more eager than the immigrant Germans to demonstrate their American patriotism. It was Grandfather’s opinion that Karl, at least, could without disgrace stay home to help run the firm, which was feeling the effects of its founder’s past connection with North German Lloyds and the notoriety of his own house as a weekend Biergarten. But all three of his sons enlisted, and virtually every other young man of German parentage in the county. With the rest of a large contingent of new soldiers, they set out for Baltimore on an April forenoon aboard the side-wheeler
“Ofer dere, ofer dere,
Zent a vert, to be hert
Ofer dere.”
