My birth — more exactly, Hector’s notion that someone other than himself had fathered me; his mad invasion of the delivery room; his wild assertion, as they carried him off, that the port-wine stain near my eye was a devil’s mark — all this commotion, naturally, ended the quest. Not, however, the general project. Out of scrap pine Grandfather fashioned a box-hive of his own, whitewashed and established it among the lilacs next to the goat-pen, and bade Uncle Konrad keep his eyes open for a migrant swarm, the season being opportune.
His expectation was not unreasonable, even though East Dorset was by 1930 a proper residential ward with sidewalks, sewers, and streetlights. To maintain a goat might be judged eccentric, even vulgar, by neighbors with flush toilets and daily milk service; chickens, likewise, were non grata on Seawall Street (if not on Hayward or Franklin, where roosters crowed to the end of the Second World War); but there was nothing unseemly about a stand of sweetcorn, for example, if one had ground enough, or a patch of cucumbers, or a hive of bees. These last, in fact, were already a feature of our street’s most handsome yard: I mean Erdmann’s, adjacent but for an alley to our own. Upon Willy Erdmann’s three fine skeps, braided of straw and caned English-fashion, Grandfather had brooded all winter. Two were inhabited and prosperous; the third, brand new, stood vacant against the day when a swarm would take wing from the others in search of new quarters.
Lilac honey, Grandfather declared, was more pleasing than any other to his taste; moreover it was essential that the hive be placed as far as possible from the house, not to disturb the occupants of either. Though no one pressed him to explain, he insisted it was for these reasons only (one or both of which must have been Erdmann’s also) that he located his hive in the extreme rear corner of our property, next to the alley.
Our neighbor plainly was unhappy with this arrangement. Not long from the Asylum himself, whither he’d repaired to cure a sudden dipsomania, Erdmann was convalescing some months at home before he reassumed direction of his business. Pottering about his yard he’d seen our box-hives built and situated; as April passed he came to spend more time on the alley-side of his lot — cultivating his tulips, unmulching his roses, chewing his cigar, glaring from his beehives to ours.
“Yes, well,” Grandfather observed. “Willy’s bees have been for years using our lilacs. Have I begrutched?”
He made it his tactic at first to stroll hiveward himself whenever Erdmann was standing watch: he would examine his grape-canes, only just opening their mauve-and-yellow buds; he would make pleasantries in two tongues to Gretchen the goat; Erdmann soon would huff indoors.
But with both Hector and Karl away, Grandfather was obliged to spend more time than usual at the stoneyard, however slack the business; throughout whole weekday mornings and afternoons his apiary interests lay under Erdmann’s scrutiny.
“A swarm in May is worth a load of hay,” Uncle Konrad recalled:
“A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon.
But a swarm in July is not worth a fly.”
May was cool, the lilacs and japonica had never blossomed so; then June broke out on the peninsula like a fire, everything flowered together, in Erdmann’s skeps the honey-flow was on.
“What you need,” Grandfather said to Andrea, “you need peace and quiet and fresh air this summer. Leave Rosa the housework; you rest and feed your baby.”
“What the hell have I been doing?” Mother asked. But she did not protest her father-in-law’s directive or his subsequent purchase of a hammock for her comfort, an extraordinary munificence. Even when his motive was revealed to be less than purely chivalrous — he strung the hammock between a Judas tree and a vine post, in view of the alley — she did not demur. On the contrary, though she teased Grandfather without mercy, she was diverted by the stratagem and cooperated beyond his expectation. Not only did she make it her custom on fine days to loll in the hammock, reading, dozing, and watching casually for a bee-swarm; she took to nursing me there as well. Aunt Rosa and certain of the neighbors murmured; Uncle Konrad shook his head; but at feeding-times I was fetched to the hammock and suckled in the sight of any. At that time my mother had lost neither her pretty face and figure nor her wanton spirit: she twitted the schoolboys who gawked along the fence and the trashmen lingering at our cans; merrily she remarked upon reroutings and delays on the part of delivery wagons, which seldom before had used our alley. And she was as pleased as Grandfather, if for not the same reason, by the discomfiture of Mr. Erdmann, who now was constrained to keep what watch he would from an upstairs window.
“Willy’s bashful as Konrad,” she said to Rosa. “Some men, I swear, you’d think they’d never seen anything.”
Grandfather chuckled. “Willy’s just jealous. Hector he’s got used to, but he don’t like sharing you with the trashman.”
But Mother could not be daunted by any raillery. “Listen to the pot call the kettle!”
“Ja sure,” said Grandfather, and treated her to one of the pinches for which he was famed among East Dorset housewives.
Mr. Erdmann’s response to the hammock was a bee-bob: he threaded dead bees into a cluster and mounted it on a pole, which he then erected near his skeps to attract the swarm.
“He knows they won’t swarm for a naughty man,” Grandfather explained. “It wonders me he can even handle them.” In the old country, he declared, couples tested each other’s virtue by walking hand in hand among the hives, the chaste having nothing to fear.
Mother was skeptical. “If bees were like that, not a man in Dorset could keep a hive. Except Konrad.”
My uncle, as if she were not fondling the part in the middle of his hair, began to discourse upon the prophetic aspect of swarming among various peoples—e.g., that a swarm on the house was thought by the Austrians to augur good fortune, by the Romans to warn of ill, and by the Greeks to herald strangers; that in Switzerland a swarm on a dry twig presaged the death of someone in the family, et cetera — but before ever he had got to the Bretons and Transylvanians his wife was his only auditor: Andrea was back in her magazine, and Grandfather had gone off to counter Erdmann’s bee-bob by rubbing the inside of his own hive with elder-flowers.
The last Sunday of the month but one dawned bright, hot, still. Out on the river not even the bell-buoy stirred, whose clang we heard in every normal weather; in its stead the bell of Grace M.-P. Southern, mark of a straiter channel, called forth East Dorseters in their cords and worsteds. But ours was a family mired in apostasy. There was no atheism in the house; in truth there was no talk of religion at all, except in Hector’s most cynical moods. It was generally felt that children should be raised in the church, and so when the time came Peter and I would be enrolled in the Sunday-school and the Junior Christian Endeavor. More, Grandfather had lettered, gratis, In Remembrance of Me on the oak communion table and engraved the church cornerstone as well. We disapproved of none of the gentlemen who ministered the charge, although Grace, not the plum of the conference, was served as a rule by preachers very young or very old. Neither had we doctrinal differences with Methodism — Southern or Northern, Protestant or Episcopaclass="underline" Aunt Rosa sometimes said, as if in explanation of our backsliding, “Why it is, we were all Lutherans in the old country”; but it would have been unkind to ask her the distinction between the faiths of Martin Luther and John Wesley. Yet though Konrad, with a yellow rosebud in his lapel, went faithfully to Bible class, none of us went to church. God served us on our terms and in our house (we were with a few exceptions baptized, wed, and funeraled in the good parlor); for better or worse it was not in our make-up to serve Him in His.