Middle C (16 page)

Yet it was true that when he had first arrived and had begun to settle in, his colleagues had been kind and friendly; he had listened to a little history on the width of railroad ties from his newfound friend Professor Rinse, who also knew what kind of clinkers bedded best and where they came from. Moreover, Professor Carfagno—who, with Rinse, had to endure a great deal of name play and consequently brought forward the figure of Castle Cairfill out of the haze of history to which he had been insufficiently consigned—Professor Carfagno seemed most attentive to Joseph, almost, it might have been fair to say, hanging on Joseph’s every word, and naturally this was flattering to a new recruit who saw everyone as a likely top sergeant, especially since he was fearful of being found out. They will know immediately, he felt. They will see the way I walk, and know. They will listen to me answer even an idle question, and know. They will trip me up without trying, licensed (as they all are) from tony schools far away; and his musical colleagues will be phenomenal prodigies, play rings around him, sight-read, have scores by the score shelved in their heads; and they will know. Instantly.

Actually it took them four decades. In the meantime, Clarence Carfagno died. A few others moved on. A number retired. The bleak sentence appeared. It became a yearly habit for a dozen datura to bloom and fill the south porch with their languishing flutes and heavy scent. The yew hedge grew. Nita disappeared behind her shrubbery.

Of course when a wit is witty at another’s expense, you must wonder when the wit will be at yours. After rinse came wring. And the devotions of Carfagno were those of a cultural toady, me-too, and mimic. If Skizzen indiscreetly professed a fondness for Berlioz, Clare boned up on bios, suggested recordings released that morning or those that were impressively out of press, would suddenly observe that “Au Cimetière” was really written for a tenor; and if you admired an article on “The Pines of Rome,” as unlikely as that might seem, he would be around next day with his annotations. Skizzen had hardly defined himself in terms of his own preferences before Carfagno had made these choices his—except that Clare’s announcement of them was a lot louder. So Skizzen said he loved Delius and watched his tormentor consume the Englishman’s drizzly confections instead of preempting one of Skizzen’s real passions.

During former times, when he and Miriam regularly had dinner
together, he would bring up his disappointments, but she was never helpful, only forceful, chewing while she still had a mouthful of advice.

Professor Joseph Skizzen had a number of worries, chief of which was the fear that the human race might yet survive, a concern that had supplanted his previous wish that they might perish well past toenails, hair, and bones
.

You have to listen harder than the jokes, Joey, his mother would admonish, and look where they pop from, and hear what the joker says when he jokes, not what the joke says when it’s said. You are so smart it makes them shiver in their skeletons when they see your smartness dressed for a party. So don’t tremble to them. They get brittle in their brains and fend you off with obscure facts and lapdog loyalty and such. Was it the width of the Thames at the Tower that the silly man wanted to show off about? Think how it must feel for them to have to study up a book just to tap-dance past your mastery of music one more time. You are a Schoenbuggy man, and who knows he but you?

That’s why Skizzen had chosen Uncle Arnold in the first place. To be his trophy wife. In a faculty such as the one Skizzen was likely to find at Whittlebauer, Schoenberg’s fearful name would be known, but not his music, the techniques of his teaching, or the import of his ideas. However, there were other reasons: not only was Skizzen now an Austrian, his life’s loyalties, if musically inverted, matched the strategies Joey’s father had set for his son, inasmuch as Schoenberg was a chameleon who had been born a Jew yet brought up a Catholic in a Vienna crowded with folks devoted to their beads. At eighteen, out of typical teenage rebelliousness, Skizzen supposed, Schoenberg turned himself into a Protestant, not the best way of leveling the path of one’s life, but splendid as a punch-in-the-eye for Mom and Pop and the smug burger-coffeehouse bunch—if they cared. Many years later, when Hitler came to power and Schoenberg was dismissed from his post in Berlin, he reclaimed the Jew the Nazis knew he was and fled to the United States—to teach in LA alongside other exiles—Adorno, Brecht, and Mann—and live in a yarded white stucco mini-manor in Brentwood with a small house for his setter built behind it and an Irish dog inside.

Joey felt his father felt—in the thirties waiting for catastrophe—the way Vienna felt to its artists and writers in the century’s early years, waiting for catastrophe, too—loathing the city as Karl Kraus did and fearing war, or bored with the
Zeit
’s complacent
Geist
as Georg Heym was, who wanted the greasy peace to end and welcomed strife and chaos that would clean the sewers and give swift passage to the shit of life. Sharing Karl Kraus’s apprehensions gave his father’s cheap violining a little class and his motives, so mysterious, some respect. Nita said his father said he smelled the carnage coming. Musil smelled it. And I smell it now, Joey told his mother. Ach, it’s my manure, she laughed, showing him her hands.

A man, Miriam said, should change his coat, if he must, only to do the world’s business, not for his family or for his friends to whom he is fastened by feeling. That is not so easy to do, Joseph answered, because she was actually asking a question. Hard or not, that’s what Rudi ought to have done. Ought, Joey exclaimed. Ought? You, too, don’t forget, Mother, were supposed to be as converted as Rudi was—Joey laughed because he needed the practice—you were supposed to be a newly pregnant Jewish mother. But I was the same, Miriam insisted, the same, the same, all Rudi did was change my name—and even then only my name when it was written, not when I heard it spoken to me, not when I thought about myself, not when I remembered my life or his once or twice tenderness to me concerning which I say no more, no more, no more, because, though I now stand silent, I stand on my own path, amid my own rocks and grass, my tears do not spill from a false face, and I do not get my flushed forehead from a paint box but from kneeling on the ground.

At first Professor Skizzen thought the world would not put up with our monkeyshines for another hundred years and would throw mankind aside as a mistake the way it had so many other species, a rejection we no doubt deserved; but now he feared for the world—a world that was alone in the universe as far as he knew—the only earth—which he cared for more than he cared for himself
.

10

Augsburg Community College was not a community college. It received no support from either state or city. Its misleading name came from a settlement called the Augsburg Community, a Utopian farm founded in 1822 by some heretical Lutherans most of whom ran away like unhappy slaves within the founding year, leaving two buildings and a few inadequately fenced fields. Utopia had not lasted long enough to fail or allow its tenants time to grow at least an imposing pumpkin. Two families remained behind, hoeing a plot, scavenging berries, and feeling more like squatters than founders. Much is made, in the history of the school, of the early struggles and the eventual success of these sweaty settlers. God smiled upon them, and they built a stone barn. God smiled again, and up went a spire. The two farms became four, ten families turned into a town, and the town, before everything fell down, became a college—the town square the college quad, the stone barn a dorm. There were more reassuring miracles here than Jesus had performed, not excluding Lazarus or the baking of loaves and the seining of fishes.

For a brief spell it served as a finishing school for milkmaids and put the name
AUGSBURG ACADEMY
on stationery it could scarcely afford. On warm days girls, aspiring to be ladies, in flowing white garments, could be seen dotting the lawns with sketch pads and easels. Local youths liked to imagine the academy was a huge whorehouse where every attending girl was free, easy, and scrumptious. To support this myth, they made up others, relating stories of fleshy revels that everyone enjoyed though no one bothered to believe. The faculty comprised old men whose privates were presumed to be long past erection and maiden aunts whose charges had died and left them unemployed. The academy’s sole published catalog began, “In a quiet sylvan environment” and bragged that in its precincts even the offspring of deer were safe. All that remained, now, of those daisy days were a few signs, one in a parking lot, another, directional, toward a stream that had dried up, and a third, partly hidden by shrubs, that read, confusingly,
AUGSBURG COMMUNITY ACADEMY
. After a short time the finishing school returned to Lutheran arms and virtue’s camp where no one gave its coeds the compliment of slander.

Augsburg Community College did not pay its students for their chores. If you clerked in the bookstore, mowed the lawn, or washed the dinner trays, you might get a break on your board bill or free books in exchange, a slight reduction in your tuition, a cut in your room rent, or, more likely, a waiver of student fees. Joey hoped to get out of phys ed, but he couldn’t cut a deal. We’ve given you a room, that should be quite enough, he was rather severely told. He didn’t know America that well, and at first accepted the system as standard, only to find out later how unusual it was to have half the student body on work-study, which included painting, sweeping, and tuck-pointing. An answer to the question, What’s your major? might be Latin and lawn care. Augsburg, Joey decided, was either a very progressive artsy-craftsy school or a license-plate prison.

So he never had any money to speak of and was living, in consequence, a good Lutheran life. His innocence forbade him to notice how often the poorer pupils augmented (only they called it Augsburging) their income by doing favors for those better off, another clever way Augsburg had of readying its students for the world. Some stole exams; some altered records; some sold sections of themselves for sex; some swiped candy from the commissary. Joey thought he was being original, acting like a criminal, when he slipped a few small packages of flower seeds from the groundskeeper’s shed; easy enough to do, the door was often open, and guarding a few ageratum packets was no one’s urgency.

Joey didn’t know which to feel worse about—his empty pockets or his criminal pursuit—but he needed a token gift for his mother’s birthday, and he was confident a few small packages of seed would not be missed. Untutored pilferator that he was, he did not consider that the seeds could be out of spritz and as old as Nita’s memories. His gift was meager, his mother forgave him that (there were exactly half-a-dozen common annuals, all edgers); it was also a surprise to her habits, since she had shown no interest in either their dismal yard or absent garden; but she understood her son’s circumstances and did appreciate the gesture the way the cliché said she should, so she let only her eyebrows rise when she undid the thin green string and pressed flat its flimsy wrapping. The seeds went in a dresser drawer where, if they were lifeless, they grew even more inanimate.

Among the flaws in Joey’s character, which, at this age, he was quick to reveal, was his adolescent’s demand for praise and reassurance before
doing anything more meritorious than exist. Everyone he knew was as stupid as a brick, and he pitied his plight: that he had to pretend to be another brick packed in a stack stuck among them.

Joey practiced keening on the organ—faithfully, which meant religiously—and tried to carry away a few things from his classes; but his teachers were largely wizened one-note relics from the bottom of the barrel, bent by holy poses into zeros. He believed that the world despised them whenever it thought about thinking of them at all; they despised one another; mostly they despised themselves. They were noticed because they were so unremarkable, and this Joey took note of: do not fall so low as to be treadable, because people tend to watch where they step, curse when they stumble, and tromp upon supines and other grovelers. Never fail, merely pass. Slip by. Don’t miss the class photo but, if short, find a place in the middle of the back row. However, he did learn from the texts each course required—even the shabby ones, used ones, out-of-date ones, boring ones, schoolbookish, double-columned ones with dictionary-sized archival photos spotted about like illustrations of things no longer made and for uses no longer remembered—he learned not to highlight every other line or deface margins with doodles or smart remarks, dog-ear pages or enlist a paper clip or rubber band to do the work of a ribbon, because these practices reduced the books’ resale value. And you would never have any further use for
Amo Amas Amat
, the Latin first reader, or
A Concise History of Lutheran Thought
, required for all students, or
Biology for Believers
, a junior elective. Copies circled endlessly like stratospheric trash.

Madame Mieux’s laughter preceded her like a warning siren. She taught French in a loud raucous voice that went with that language as smoothly as wool with silk, though her gutturals were okay and her
r
’s rolled like dice. Madame Mieux had breasts, and breasts bothered Joey. He preferred them hidden under clothes that billowed. Madame Mieux used makeup, and that was disapproved of; she wore tight skirts, and that was frowned on; she hennaed her hair in a style she said was à la française, and that was widely thought vulgar; she collected bracelets on her wrists, and that was deemed tasteless; she hobbled about on open-toed high heels that made her look ridiculous; she put her hand on your arm when she spoke, her eyes widened as if to swallow your ears; and her accent was so fraudulent as to mock your meager understanding of
la patrie
and
la parole
.

She appeared to take a fancy to Joey, who had initially enrolled in
enfant
French in order to avoid Latin for at least another semester. He was told that Latin would help his English, but it was Latin that was dead. German was the other tongue that the academy was prepared to make you wag with some proficiency, but when, during his application interview, he saw that knowledge of German was, in his case, assumed, he kept contentedly quiet and let them believe what he had only let on. It was a technique he would perfect. So to graduate he had to have French. Madame Mieux was a spilling handful, however, and he began to have doubts that he would make it. At first Joey appreciated her apparently genuine vulgarity in such a crowd of stodges. As it proved, she was a deceiver, too. She came from some coarse place in New York City; she was an old maid and not an old madame; her hair wasn’t hennaed, she wore a red wig; and she yelled in her classes and stood close to talk because she was hard of hearing. Every student of hers eventually discovered these things—it was what they learned.