Middle C (4 page)

The young priest who heard her confession became solicitous. He dropped round. Unlike the Jews who had confronted Yankel, this priest had no face fuzz; you could see his smooth red cheeks and red lips, always moist as if they were sides of a stream. He had a properly soft voice, full of concern, and he tried to joke with the children, though it was clear, Miriam said, it was Miriam who interested him. Her round flat Slav face seemed huge where it perched like a lollipop above her now bone-thin body. Her dark hair was already flicked with gray. Miriam began to worry about what she wore because she could feel his eyes fixed on her in far from a fatherly way, and this attraction did her more good than baskets of fruit. She smiled for him while Dvorah glared.

It would be so romantic, Miriam thought, if her beauty pulled this priest from his church like a cork from a bottle. She longed to hear him say: I cannot help myself; I must have you; you have enslaved me; for you I give up Communion, I give up Confession, I give up Latin, I give up God, and so on, though she had no interest whatever in responding to such amorous advances beyond tittering and smiling and saying the equivalent of “pshaw” in her Austrian. Her devotion to the Deity did not prohibit a daydream flirtation with one of his representatives. In another age and class she would have rapped Father’s knuckles with her fan and laughed like bubble-risen wine. Nor could she maintain this fantasy in front of the mirror in her mind. Maybe, she thought, like a farmer, he sees how I would look when properly fattened for the market. The image gave her hope: that one day she would be.

Already angry at the flight of her father, Dvorah was jealous and outraged and shamed by her mother’s little play. Which she dimly understood was only a dance. It was as if, for a moment, with this woman, the priest was allowing himself another life … and not merely that he was, for a change, an unemasculated man but that he was actually a rowdy one, preying upon a poor abandoned refugee woman, as so many did, a Romeo without scruple or regard. He had a way of running a pale shiny-nailed hand up his black-sleeved arm—she told Joseph often of it
in the after years—a gesture that told her he was wishing her stockings were just as dark and felt the same. Years and repetitions later, she knew that caress would feel like the path of a barky stick.

Finally, the priest managed to pry her story from her, so when she said she believed that her husband—what’s the rascal’s name now?—had probably been an
Opfer
, the victim of foul play, having been seen coming into money by a lot of lowlifes; or when she said she believed her husband had simply preceded them to the New World—the New World where they would begin again, each self as new as a store shoe—and that he would in a while send for his family to live decently in some hilly Austrian part of that far-off Yankel country, moreover in a sharply peaked cottage at the end of a rocky flower-dotted lane—Oh, we are almost there, she said—to a house with curtains in the summer, shutters in the winter, and an open gate; not an absconder, Miriam maintained, not a fugitive from their marriage, a runaway who had left her with two young children to seek his own good luck in America just because he’d won a wager on a horse. When she went on, her eyes closed and dreamy-faced, through the possibilities, the priest simply said, Yes, yes, I understand, but remember he left your country, as you say, suddenly, and he was just that abruptly no longer an Austrian, just that cruelly a Jew, a refugee, a Scofield who could enter Canada as easily as he could place a bet where he worked, and so, dear lady, he could leave you.

This was not endearing. The priest, however, while he wished to win her to his side, meant only—we must imagine—to the side of religion. You must return to the church, you must purge yourself of every taint of Jewishness, no matter how feigned; for it was sacrilegious to have behaved as your husband did; did she realize he had endangered their souls, the souls of her children as well as her own? I wouldn’t wear a wig, Miriam said in her defense. I never really kept kosher. I didn’t eat with noise. I didn’t hide money under pillows. I had no family, no friends. My husband—I didn’t walk behind. I didn’t learn jokes or how to tell them. She remembered Yankel’s favorite, though, which he had memorized for her use, and whose form he had carefully explained, failing to realize that it was never the women who told them. It seemed there were ladies having tea at a fine house. That was the setting, the situation, he said, ladies, tea, fine house. The hostess, a woman rather well off in the baking business, is passing and repassing a huge plate of butter
cookies. That was the action, the send-off, passing and repassing the cookies, he insisted, the joke is now on its way. I already ate three, one of her visitors is supposed to say, sighing as she eyes the full fan of delicacies the cookies form on the plate being held out to her. That cocked the pistol, it was the setup, he explained. Excuse me, her hostess then says, you’ve had five, but take another, who’s counting? That, Miriam instructed the priest in her turn, was the clincher, the blow, the snapper. She remembered, and her voice was full of satisfaction. The joke, he said, was clearly not Catholic.

The priest could hear how Miriam’s heart remained faithfully beating in her husband’s chest, and perhaps it was then that he decided to desist from his social attentions and help her as her confessor should, instead of watching her face in wonder as he might the moon. Miriam must join her husband in America, retie her family ties, and give the absconder one great big surprise. Because Raymond Scofield had obligations: he had mouths to feed, children to raise, and a wife to instruct. The trouble was, no one knew where he was, who he might be at the moment, or whether he was even alive.

Oh, how I wish we were ordinary, Dvorah wailed whenever she was given the opportunity. Couldn’t we be common? just plain people? normal even? Only in Austria, her mother always answered in tones of such triumphant outrage that Dvorah shut up and went into a sulk so severe a little wailing would have been a comfort.

The magic formula that determined Miriam’s frequent appeals to numerous authorities went this way: Miriam and the children needed to join her husband and their father, whom she retained in his role as a Jew for strategic reasons she saw no advantage to mention. Reuniting families was a holy and patriotic duty. So Miriam and the children, now some years later, set sail for the New World, perhaps not as their husband and father had, in flight from a contaminating present, but to secure a past that had seemed to Miriam to have been at peace. This world may be new, she told Debbie and Joey, but we shall remain as we were, as old as an Alp. Remember that.

3

The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure
.

Joseph Skizzen caught himself looking at the sentence as if he were seeing his face in his shaving glass. Immediately, he wanted to rewrite it.

The fear that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear that it will survive
.

Now he saw that the balance of the first fear with the second was too even—what did one say? Steven—even steven—so he gingerly removed a small amount of meaning from the right pan. This move saved the first “that” at the expense of the second.

Skizzen swung his foot at the soda can but missed it.

The fear that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive
.

Was it fear, or was it merely worry; was it the sort of anxiety a sip of sherry and a bit of biscuit should allay? He liked the words “might” and “race” where they were, and “succeed” was sufficiently ironic to make him smile, though mildly, as he was at heart a modest man, though not in the realm called his mind.

How could he have missed? The can was in perfect position. A remedial kick struck the tin a bit high so that it clipped the top of the target box at the other end of the attic.

The first “fear” was a fear all right, but a fear measured by the depth of concern inside it and by its abiding presence, not one of surprise or sudden fright as at a snake or burglar in the night; whereas the second “fear” was a fear like that for death—the ominous color of a distant cloud. Nonsense, he shouted. Professor Skizzen spoke harshly to himself—to his “you”—as he was frequently forced to do, since his objectified “other” often required correction. You are thinking nonsense again! You are a dim head! A buffo boy! A mere spear bearer! He
could shout quite safely. Even when practicing to be an Austrian whose small mistakes might be endearing—“spear” instead of “cup bearer,” for instance. His secrets were safe. No one would hear him. He could kick the can like a kid on the street. Mother lived like a toad in the garden, far away and well beyond the house’s walls, among bushes, behind the red wild bee balm, and was somewhat deaf to boot. So he shouted at himself, as if he were a bit deaf too. Well, he must be deaf; did he listen? Did he heed?

What he hated most was fetching the missed shots back to their launch site.

The comparison with death was incorrect—inadequate—inaccurate, because the fear in question was for life itself—life—human life was the threat: multitudinous, voracious, persistent, pitiless as a plague … of army ants … Japanese beetles … of locusts, the insect Joseph Skizzen thought we most resembled; yes, it spread itself out, life did, and assumed the shape of a swarm. We devoured one another, then the world, and we were many … many; we darkened even the day sky; our screams resembled stridulations. The professor could have howled like Mr. Hyde. There he was … there … seeing himself in his shaving glass. He took inadequate aim. He altered, yet
he
remained
he
. Austrian to a T. Mustached. Goateed.

One’s concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive
.

“One”? A word that distanced responsibility. A cowardly word, “one.” Why not another number? Why not the can in a corner pocket? “It” … “it” was the concern of not one but three monkeys, or was “it” that of “sixty-five”? “Five hundred thirty-two citizens of Oakland, California, said they were worried that their neighbors might survive the next fire.” A cowardly word, “one,” because it refused to choose: anybody, whoever, what’s the diff? Okay, so perhaps write “our worry” instead. What did the pen—the page—the sentence think? Yes, the difference between “concern” and “worry,” “worry” and “fear,” “fear” and “apprehension,” “anxiety” and “unease,” must be respected—represented.

Professor Skizzen made his way slowly toward the north end of the attic where cans that missed their cardboard goal could be found. On the
way back he would imagine he was a damp dog and shake his sentence free from his wet ruff. Then he would kick that damn thing through the wall.

If “one” was merely an elision whose omitted matter might be restored, would sense be thereby achieved? By substituting “Someone’s concern that the human race …”? perhaps “Anyone’s concern that the human race …”? or “No one’s concern that the human race …”? Absurd. Absurd. You will never understand this language. Skizzen spoke aloud in his own space. You will never understand this language, even though it is your nearly native tongue.

The dent in the side of the can fit his shoe. He had nearly kicked one curve through its converse. There were two others, somewhere, under the slanting roof. Now and then their bruised aluminum would wink.

One’s worry that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive
.

Not yet. “Worry” was the wrong word. Too busy. Too ordinary. Too trivial. White rabbits worry. White rabbits dither. White rabbits scurry. Moreover, “our” was the opposite of “one.” “Our” was complicit and casually cozy. Who else has had this problem? This worry? Is it widespread enough to justify “our”? Possibly only Professor Joseph Skizzen owned up to it. The professor wasn’t wide; was short, slim, trim, fit, firm of tummy; wore a small sharp beard upon his chin below a thin precise line; and was quite noticeably alone in his opinions.

“Concern” suggested a state maintained with some constancy in our consciousness like low heat under a pan. When we worry, our thoughts rush hither and yon and then thither again like Alice’s rabbit. But when we are concerned, our thoughts sit quietly in a large chair and weigh the seat, configure the bottom of their bowl. Strictly speaking, though the designations are often misused, we can properly worry only about ourselves; language allows us, however, to have concerns for others. And he, Joseph Skizzen, as well as the rest of us alive right now, wouldn’t be around for Armageddon when it came, in any case. So not to worry.

An important kick was coming up. Keep it low. The box lay on its side and yawned.

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death,
IT would come: Armageddon. There would be—without exaggeration—a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man … —no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty— … there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts—the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic—hydrogen—neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we’d expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless—that last faith lost—the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we’re fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing, we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another—coming—making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There’d be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot of speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we’d hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we’d see the
last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we’d feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we’d be witnessing a world that’s come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we’d hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place—well—not of rest—of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.