Middle C (17 page)

However, in addition, Joey acquired this: among Madame Mieux’s affectations was a love of French music, and indeed she could do a good imitation of Edith Piaf growling the verses of “La Vie en Rose.” One day, on a portable player that Mr. Hirk would have listened to without complaint, she played for the class a song by Hector Berlioz. Listen to the diction, she admonished them. The song was called “Absence” and was sung by Eleanor Stebber, of whom Joey had dimly heard. Now he understood what was meant by “the long line.” He was transfixed. Here was a purity, a beauty, of which he knew too little to dream.

The rows of impassive faces alongside him—listening to the diction, he supposed—made him realize how lucky he was that he could hear what was being sung and how unlucky he was that he could neither sing nor write nor critique but simply be moved by this poignant work whose words he understood only through the sound of the song itself, having let his attention to the diction slip. It was his solace, his secret delight, his cherished difference, and because his expression was probably as wooden as the others’, his response was as hidden as a bee in a blossom. Yet Madame Mieux had caught something. Her quest for a protégé had sharpened her faculties. She had seen light like the shadow of a cloud cross his face. It was no doubt on account of the diction.

When the song was over, she said to the class: This lady was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. If she can speak French, so can you. Wheeling,
West Virginia, Joey thought, running the words back and forth between his ears, what a paradisal place the name must designate. A number of years had to be disposed of before Joey discovered that the divine singer was Eleanor Steber, pronounced “Steeber,” not the Stebber of Madame Mieux’s mangling. Marcella Sembrich, Eleanor Steber: worth a caress.

Madame Mieux scribbled a note to Joey on one of his examination papers. It was a vapid vocabulary and conjugation test that she had decided to award a C even though a minus should have been added—her note said. Your classroom demeanor shows promise, she wrote, beginning to pencil her observation in French, a gesture that she then thought better of and crossed out. Joey knew what “demeanor” meant. It meant she had designs. Had she, in class, been more properly dressed, this thought would not have crossed his mind, for he was not vain about his person or interested in hers. She asked Joey to fetch books from the library for her. Delivering them to her office, he was requested to fill a vase with water from the bubbler in the hall to refresh a few flowers she was rearranging. At receipt of them she grabbed him and delivered a peck to each cheek. She saw how red her busses left him, and this encouraged her. See you in class, she said to his retreating back in a tone she usually reserved for speaking to her cat. An angora, it lay its swollen body down to sleep in a basket that Madame Mieux parked on the windowsill in her office. There it could look out without opening its eyes.

Sundays he would sometimes hitch a ride into town to see his mother. They’d have dinner together and chat. Miriam would tend to fall into reminiscence if Joey did not keep his hold firmly on their present life. Madame Mieux was useful for that. As Madame was presented to her, Miriam could only be amused, and she asked detailed questions about the teacher’s dress, questions that sharpened Joey’s eye for such things. Miriam concluded that Madame Mieux favored autumnal colors—rust, plum, ocher, tan, mauve—because they complimented her henna dye job. Miriam, whose hair had been jet as a Jew, and blond when English, insisted that, though it was true that Europeans, the French in sad particular, used henna as if it were soap, nothing whatever went with it but the dance hall.

And Miriam wanted to know what the flowers were, and was the vase nice? However, Joey had not done his homework. He had paid no
attention, disappointing still one more expectation. Well, it’s better to have your teacher sweet on you than you sweet on your teacher. Maybe you can get a B out of her. Joey wondered—not aloud—what it would take to reach an A. Nor did he say he didn’t want a B, because that would relight an old argument. His mother did not understand her son’s preference for mediocrity. At first she thought he must be basically a plodder and was pretending to be aiming at what he couldn’t miss. It’s smart to want to be dumb if dumb is all you can do, she said, but where was his ambition? where was his pride? how did he feel when Debbie brought home Bs? and was so bubbly inside when he was so sober? because she did dates and all the things that teensters were supposed to do—examined herself in all the mirrors, felt wounded by the wind, would sulk in her room if the phone that rang wasn’t ringing for her, loved the drumstrum music kids liked at her age … while Joey’s lugubrious preferences were for distant English horns or Saturday orgies at the opera … at least a little
Fledermaus
, Miriam thought, a bit of
Gypsy Baron
, would be a relief.

Madame Mieux was hard to pin down, and Joey appreciated that. Her name wasn’t her name, her hair wasn’t her hair, her cat was on loan, her house was a rent, the flowers in her little vase would die, not to be replaced, and her knowledge of French was suspicious. The difficulty? she was now defined by these deceptions. Her love of music appeared to be genuine, although Joey gradually realized that all the composers she was possibly pretending to admire were French: Berlioz foremostly, Erik Satie had surprised Joey by turning up, Debussy and Rameau, Gabriel Fauré. Fauré? Then he made a mistake. He was young and new at the game that, on this occasion, was his Hide and her Seek. He made a mistake. He told Madame Mieux that he had begun reading Berlioz whom he understood had quite a reputation as a writer. On the alleged basis of that encouragement, he was invited to Madame Mieux’s house to listen to music. There would be a sofa and sweets, he suspected, but a better Victrola than Mr. Hirk had. She promised him Berlioz—a trombone concerto. What could that be? He made a mistake. He accepted her invitation. And on the appointed night, he went.

Joey rang the bell and was startled to hear her laughter enlarging as she approached the door. She seemed ever so short and was dressed in a fulsome robe. Her head wore mist like a mountain. The smoke
smelled sweet. In order to get in—Come in, she’d commanded—he had to squeeze by a deep loopy sleeve and avoid the red end of her cigarette. Smoking was frowned upon at Augsburg. It was spring, so she didn’t have to take his coat. He saw a rose-colored room. There were pillows everywhere. Piles of pillows that glistened or glittered. Little pillows. Large fat smothery pillows. Paunchy pillows. Pillows with hortatory mottoes. Joey swallowed his own laugh—one of apprehension. He thought maybe a nearby pile was heaped upon one of those currently popular beanbag chairs, but it was pillows, all pillows. None of them, as far as he could see, were bed pillows, but they did feel as much at home as they would in a boudoir. There were pillows with tassels; there were scalloped pillows; there were embroidered pillows; there were patchwork pillows. There were round, rectangular, three-pointed, long, flat, cubular pillows. He followed a path to the center of the room and slowly turned to see where he might go next. Make yourself comfy, he couldn’t believe she said. The lid from a large tin lay on the floor in the middle of a barren moment. It bore a drink and received ash as if there would be anything left of Madame Mieux’s roach but the afterglow. Where, Joey wondered. Anywhere, she said, and flung herself down in front of him as far as her brief length would. In a mirror Joey saw her burnt head floating above a sea of cloth.

On the walk where he had fled Joey tried to draw air from the stars, his ribs closing on his lungs like the doors of a cage. He realized already that he was not embarrassed or repulsed, he was terrified, and that terror was not the appropriate response: amusement maybe, disdain perhaps, a sense of superiority or a feeling of pity: any one of these might have saved the situation. Instead, he had humiliated himself, fleeing from Madame Mieux’s pillow party. But it was iniquity’s den. And she was the den’s mother.

11

Mother … (a formal address for a serious subject) … Mother, perhaps my father was a ’fraidycat.

He was brave enough to risk England.

He was just fleeing from the Nazis.

Your father was a good Austrian; he had nothing to fear from the Nazis.

Then he had no reason to skelter away to England.

If you do something without good reason, Joey, does that make you feig?

I guess it’s what you run from without a good reason. My father said he was avoiding evil by shunning the wicked—always a good reason.

No, Joey, sometimes you have to confront crooks with their crookedness.

It didn’t do, did it? to confront Nazis.

Nazis? no … but your father only claimed—aloud and at length—he claimed that the fruit of fascism would poison its tree and that the roots of such a tree would contaminate the earth and that the evilized earth would seep through our boots and travel up our legs and—well—damage our desires, curdle our blood, and beat out our brains, but saying so doesn’t print it in the paper; he just said that: said it—said it—louder didn’t improven the noise—he couldn’t know he was right at least as far as the roots—their poison—went; how could anyone know such a thing, how could anyone even guess? he invented it—the danger like the lightbulb—even if it would become—okay—sort of true eventually on account of Austria’s bad luck in living nearby Germans; he pretended to see dark clouds, and if it rained like he said it would, if it came down as it did sometimes at home in strings, even if the ground drowned, it wouldn’t change the fact that he imagined clouds before there were real ones.

Maybe my father had foresight; didn’t he say so?

Say so—
sie sagen
—say so—is say so, so? no, Joey, his foresight was a boast like the butt of a nanny.

Mother, maybe getting out of a bad place isn’t such a bad idea and can’t be called cowardly—careful at worst, prudent perhaps.

He didn’t take me out of a bad place, Joey, he took me out of my homeland and lovehouse and marched me off to war; we went where the bombs would be; where we—I include you—would see people burned—skin and bones, worst of all, hair, like celluloid, nails; where only cats had the sense and slither to be safe.

I want to think my father ran away from more than blame, Mother; that he tried to do no harm when harm was a universal habit.

He harmed you, didn’t he? We lived on water for weeks, maybe you were too young to remember—just as well—and slept in the same clothes the livelong day, day in and day out, as if they covered us like bark; and he hurt your sister, holding her so hard when we sat in—what in hebe do they say?—the Tube, adding our stink to the stink of the sewer, to the smell of other smellers; and the bricks shook from the bombs, and the lights dimmed from the bombs, and people screamed or fainted, fearing to die in the middle of their complaints as if their complaints were dinner.

But Father thought, I imagine, that London would be a safe and civilized place, that England would be accommodating and out of the reach of brutes; he couldn’t know that bombs would follow and fall upon you.

Where was his foresight then, Joey, where was all of that moral wisdom he was full of when it was really needed for his family? Didn’t he know—he was just a fiddle-playing fellow—didn’t he know that trouble follows and falls upon Jews, that as soon as he pinned that silly hat to his hair the cooties were collecting? Jews are the wind that lets evil in; Jews have brought damn bad luck from the beginning because they crucified Jesus, not a chance for them after that.

Mother, you and Father weren’t Jews for very long.

Rudi was denounced, that’s why we weren’t Jews for very long.

But he never planned to stay Jewish, to …

He wanted me to wear a wig, to call myself Miriam …

You still do—call yourself Miriam.

The USA, too, they preferred us as Jews; they wanted no Austrians in their country; they processed us the way I box up rubber dishpans.

It isn’t so bad here, is it? decent enough?

My hometown town was a town; there were mountains, a river, good bread; these towns are chicken coops; these towns are slower than ooze; they have no inner character.

You mean no binding beliefs, Mother, don’t you?

No binding beliefs, that’s right.

Just like parochial Catholicism, Mother, like anti-Semitism, Mother—they bind more than sheaves.

Joey, you are American and have no convictions.

I was almost arrested.

But not convicted.

I was blamed. A blame not unremembered, Mother. Anyway, Joey said, it’s the binding I can’t bear—the joining, the brotherly embrace—because if one anti-Semite is a curiosity, three in a room are a zoo, and any more than that are a plague.

Joey, what do you see in Jews they shouldn’t be singled out?

Not any more than in anybody.

Still, she said, someone should be singled out.

Then let it be your Jesus. He wanted to be singled out.

Ach, you have gone so far to the bad in your beliefs …

In my disbeliefs, dear, little and light like puffballs from the cotton trees.

Dandelions, you mean, Miriam said with satisfaction, and they’re weeds.

So, Mother, why do you think he left us?

For none of the usual reasons.

You mean he didn’t leave us for a woman?

Not for a woman, not for a life of crime, not for freedom from his duties.

You’re sure?

He wasn’t a man’s man or a ladies’ man; he was a soft sweet steady man; we held hands; he didn’t walk fast; a lot of the time he smelled of ink, not bad; but then he changed, became an actor on the stage; we weren’t who we’d been to him, or he to us either, because he became afraid, and we were safe in the theater, maybe, he thought, because the audience was going to play out the tragedy, not the actors; anyway, we were better off being somebody else—imagine, Joey—being somebody else.

Maybe, Mother, it was money.

Gelt? why?

I mean, maybe he was ready to go off a lot of times, just as he left your land for England it seemed all of a sudden, but maybe, the way he
thought about it, it had been in his mind for months or years, he just hadn’t known what to do till he found out how the Jews were leaving, and maybe he took us with him because at first when the wanderlust overwhelmed him he didn’t know it was so private a feeling, so personal a journey; he didn’t know that taking us made his hope impossible to realize like trying to fashion a fresh look to surprise a mirror while still wearing the same old hat and coat; so naturally when he ran away to England he took us with him only to find out after he’d been there awhile that it was the family all along he was running from, not Jew haters, not Germans, but the hat, the scarf, the dog, the coat, the sound of some voices—you know—always there, the same voices saying the same things in his ear, maybe, and then money all of a sudden came along, fit in his pocket like a bar of candy, so he could completely and entirely go, do what he’d always wanted to do, leave his self behind like a footprint in the snow … where they have real snow … in Austria.