Middle C (40 page)

[…………………………………………….…]

On days of calm, Joseph watched white coils of smoke rise slowly from the coal fires still popular in a town so close to the mines. They were soothing, the way they grew, as if to hurry anywhere would be simply gauche. All over hillside, in icy air, the gray soot steamed straight as a palm until it cooled and gradually smeared the upper sky. The world was coming down with the cold.

Yes, there were so many causes for everything that nothing could be conjectured with any certainty. The apparently hollow firmament was a rush of rivers, streams, creeks, trickles of air, and frequencies of transmission, the earth itself was quietly shifting in its sleep, and through uncountable homes and firesides shivers of pleasure or apprehension were vibrating like the strings of an instrument. At twilight the intensity of every color became an outcry, and a step on the street an announcement as leaves rushed to be crushed by someone’s feet. Every evening, Joey watched the lights come on in much the same order: first in the house with the widow’s walk, then in the yellow cottage and the hired rooms of the bed-and-breakfast; door lights were notes in an expectant score, kitchens warmed the lower floors, while late at night bathrooms played at shining like a second sky. Yet the general scene was solemn, silent; the world went about its customary affairs as it had in other ages, other times. On the page of a picture book there could be peace.

[…………………………………………….…]

You will never gain weight, Joey, even if I were to put you to bed and feed you
Würstelbraten
by the fat forkful, Miriam said. You’d kick the covers and fever your fingers pretending to play the piano.

If the sausages you thread through the beef were the size of
Faschingskrapfen
, I wouldn’t need to sit stiller than my chair. Joey used the German to please her. She believed immobility encouraged one’s body fats to cool.

Joey, you ought to practice curling up in cold weather like the squirrels and bears do. For Christmas I will fry you some fritters if I can find a brick of white lard, but here … in this country …

Goose grease, Mother, Joey said, is the answer to everything.

Ach, who can afford a goose … in this country … it is chickens, chickens, chickens. Frozen in bags. In plastic. Their guts in cellyphane like gumdrops. Here everything is plastic, my job is plastic, spoons are plastic. They pretend they’ve made them from beans.
Lieber Gott …
raincoats are plastic. Old days, we had deer from the woods, ducks from the lakes, grouse, is it? sheep. We had geese.

You had plenty of chickens, too, Mother, didn’t you? dirtying the yard.

What would you know? hah! Britisher! we had chickens, but never chickens, chickens, chickens.

Well, dear, anyhow, the
Braten
was delicious.

It was all right, though the gravy could have used a plop of yogurt. Still, in this country …

[……………………………………………….]

Miriam was somewhat reconciled to the fact that her son had a job in another town, though she frequently complained of his absence and his enslavement to civic virtue, since Joey had presented his occupation as a kind of social work, a contribution to his adopted country. To Miriam they had been kidnapped by Arabs, held captive in a leaky hold, and were now slave labor. It was Joey’s fault his poor mother had to be picked up Sundays like the sickly were and driven to mass. She believed that he had not tried hard enough to seek better-paying employment and accused him of finding a position that allowed him more leisure than work. I don’t have enough education to get a good job, he told her repeatedly, but I shall remedy that in time, he assured her just as frequently. He now had a diploma that awarded him a bachelor of arts and another that gave him a music degree, though he thought that he would save such good news and make her a gift of it later. Then she would praise him and wonder how he did it—to be so busy and still devoted to his studies. He worked, he drove, he could go into debt because he had what they called a charge account: that seemed to Joey quite sufficient for the present. And in contrast to the way he spent his time at college, now he only listened to what he liked, read what he liked, looked at what he liked, consequently he had the skills he was willing to have and knew only what he was willing to know.

Weekend had followed weekend with happy monotony until at last
Miriam, who had kept her news in her purse for two months, as she confessed, told Joey he’d be—what was it?—an uncle. He hated the funnel then as much as his mother did. And the smug look of pregnant women. The contented pride contained in Debbie’s swollen sweater. He could see Miriam skewering the roast and then slowly patiently pushing sausage into the soft holes she’d made in the meat and feel his own belly swelling—not with sympathy, not with something he’d eaten—milk
mit
cookies—but with a kind of living wind, a palpable pushy balloonishness. Entire buildings, his car, his library, grew larger; their sides bulged with unwanted life. And now, Miriam said, I shall need to go out—go out often to the country—to see her. To see how she is faring. To hear first movements. To feel the child kicking. To press the button and touch the baby through her mommy’s belly. To press the button like you’ve come to call. It is all recovered to me now, you and your sister, how it felt when I was walking with you all the way to England, leaning back to stay upright, you, Joey, heavier than groceries. So your car needs to sit nearby me, Joey, and you can’t live at the dark bottom of a funnel either,
nein
to that because now I must get out in the country to see Debbie and the baby, since she has been such a stranger to us, gone as if to another part of the world, across seas of soybeans and fields of potatoes. It’s only a few miles, Joey said. That’s far if you’ve got to walk. That’s far if you’re a granny.

She seemed so fine about the idea of being a granny that Joey wondered how she would feel when she actually became one, and the bell began its toll; for that’s how she’d go to the grave, as a granny, wrapped in a shawl of mother-love, smiling up through the dark box, the thrown dirt, the stone post, at the next generation as if she were fertilizing its future and content to be manure. Joey was reluctant to change the image of his sister he treasured and kept safe as though by a locket: her body in the air, legs wide, her open mouth shouting Rah! And in the background, bleachers loud with cheers.

[…………………………………………….…]

Sometimes, deep in the quiet shaded avenues of the stacks, Joey would lean against a row of books on finance or fishing with another in his hand that he meant to shelve and give daydream time to his desires, a rather new thing with him, since he hadn’t thought a great deal about his future before. During so much of his past he had been helpless and in
the hands of fate or strangers, always leaving wherever-he’d-been behind and taking a bus or a train or a steamship into some unwanted shelter or unknown port, inevitably changing his name and his nation, his language, his church; only the dry bagged sandwich or the thin soup and its tin spoon the same, his groaning mother carrying him like another sack, his sister eyeing his every forkful as though it should have been hers, and he eating with a reluctant show of hunger as if his food had been previously chewed by another set of teeth.

To his surprise, books had been a bigger stimulant than music when it came to fanning his fantasies, and when he put it that way—“fanning his fantasies”—he realized the image had its origin in an illustration taken by his memory from a Rubaiyat—of a sultan at ease in his harem—a picture that for him had Hazel holding a huge frond above her own broad person. He had imagined once a Christmas tree decorated with strings of variously sized—though all small—lights that would compose a score when read in a spiral around its branches—“Heilige Nacht,” perhaps—a ditty tuneful, seasonal, and trite. He thought something like that was what astronomers must do, singing the night sky’s song, their instruments like flutes through which far-distant spaces blew.

He had it in his head that he ought to complete his father’s business—to escape the world’s moral tarnish—because his father had most certainly failed, leaving his family in the lurch, running off with money he rightly should have spent on his kin. Of course there were extenuating circumstances, there were always those, in particular the fact that when he did disappear he had not been his real self but a Raymond Scofield, one of his characters of concealment. Abandonment, as well as the other charges, had to be lodged against this impersonation not its impersonator, just as you wouldn’t arrest the actor who played Hamlet for the death of Polonius. In that case, though, the murder being made up, villain and victim invented, blame would have to be imaginary, too. Perhaps it was—all of it—theatrical. And the notices of harm that cluttered the papers were like reviews, recounting for people who hadn’t been there what had happened in the play. “When I murdered my wife I was not myself.” So all the world is a stage. That had come out of his book of quotations. Well, it was the library’s book of quotations, which he must remember to return before the Major sensed its absence and accused Miss Moss of its detainment.

But if all the world were a stage, what was backstage, what lurked in the wings, and where were the actors and the actresses when they weren’t on, and why did everybody talk all at once, and the people playing at war shout their lines while the people playing at peace were trying to read theirs, and why were only some shows sold out to an audience more often than not anxiously fanning their faces and drinking booze, because wouldn’t they be participants, too? And would there be music coming from the pit? Backstage, to be sure, was a deity devising the lines, and a whole host of angels, devils perhaps, imps and fairies, raising curtains and dressing persons, contriving designs and prompting the forgetful. Every performance would have to be a play about a play within a play. It was a daze-inducing thought.

He did dream of strolling naked as Adam through a garden filled with music the plants made. No … rethink that … he would be more naked than Adam, leafless as a winter tree, untroubled by any companion, Eve or angel. Yes … he would be freestanding the way a column can’t be because a column implies a building—the ruin—of which it was a part. No … re … rethink … he’d have no navel … as naked as Adam after all … he’d be born without parents like a god, even speaking a language only he … only he … the Adam of this figment … understood. He’d be free to do whatever he chose to do, to his blame or to his credit, but he would be relieved of the burden of worldly opinion by the absence of any mouth from which even praise might issue. Joey, Joey had hoped, would become such a released Prometheus. He would grow old in these surroundings, unlike ivy but like oak, sustained by his own roots in a soil that was silent about its disposition. After all, he had no father; he had had no sister; his mother was becoming an exotic plant that he no longer was expected to water; except that the sister had come back to life in someone else’s service, and now his mother wanted him to shift the car she scorned into the sphere of her desires; by now the Major had him under her thumb; he was indebted to Miss Moss for help with things he should be ashamed of; and Hazel Hawkins took him for a laughingstock.

Yes. To be a good king you would have to forswear having subjects. The moment you moved to rule would be the moment of your undoing. Other people’s flaws—and flaws were the yeast that let their loaves rise—would weaken your will. They would oppose it; they would
cajole, they would seduce it. They would want so much—for themselves, for their families, for their friends and all those who they believed wished them well. Be good—to me, to mine—oh great and perfect Being. Joey believed Adam had eaten the forbidden fruit only as a favor. I have taken a bite, just as you begged me to, but only to make you shut up, so hush and let me be thoughtful now, alone in the peaceful shade. But Eve was busy getting pregnant.

27

Finally (after a few weeks during which Joey’s blameless spirit grew a loincloth and knee-high stockings, and in an increasingly material form began to sit about like the most contemptible functionary), Joey readied himself for the first day of his employment as his mother’s chauffeur. He winced when he recognized the romantic source of the resemblance. At whose court was he expecting to appear? He did not own a hankie, let alone a scented one, and the language of its use was truly foreign to him. So were Adam and Eve. So was the society of sultans, fans, and Negroes. So was the cultivation of crops.

Nor did Joey quite understand his aversion to Debbie’s blessed event. Why had he hated the idea of her marriage in the first place? Why should he care if she reproduced her kind, or mind that their mother, whose love he should have expected to share with his sis but had never really had to, was so delighted by her role as a person of whom society unanimously approved. Perhaps it was precisely because of that approval. Still, Joey had not sensed much rebellion in his nature—a great deal of quiet grief, some self-pity, a touch of envy, and an attitude of passive endurance toward a wrongheaded world—yes—but … all right … some unearned feelings of superiority, which he had already decided he must mask … yes, but not as a reveler does at a dance, rather as a surgeon does, shrouding his mouth not his eyes, before he performs his rites.

He disapproved of her husband and their rustic life, her workaday world, her smooth and easy accommodation to American ways, her enviable disposal of the past, yet what sort of level of living did he enjoy? Was there any lock he felt he would fit? one whose opening would make him a pasha, a gallant, a piano player, even? He had never felt he needed a reason for his distaste of Debbie’s showy ways, her saddle shoes, her short skirt, her letter sweater, her

beaux ………………………………………………

her ………………………………………………

her attachment to something so shallow as a school……………

her………………………………………………

careless glee …………………………………………

Debbie’s soybean and potato farm did not enjoy a traditional white two-story clapboard house with its mandatory wraparound porch. Its managers had settled for a prefab ranch: low, sprawling, and painted a color Joey’s mother had described as “dying daffodil.” A concrete slab was its only connection with the earth. The front windows were as wide as the draw of their drapes and faintly bayed like a distant dog, though curtains clouded the view, such as the view was: of plastic chairs idling in the yard, an empty road in front of an empty field, a postbox lonesome as a sentry. With its requisite rusty grill, a picnic table rotted in the rear. Because of a heavy overhang, the house appeared to be wearing a hat and seemed to have strayed from a suburb that, in turn, had strayed from its city. Now it sat in the middle of a flatness that also belonged to another state, shaded by its one big tree and encircled by a lawn of winter-yellow grass that made it seem in the beam of a theatrical spot.