Middle C (49 page)

Variations on a theme.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

– – – – – – – – –

Your mother is even on a committee.

Is that what has made you nervous? There’s more German in your speech when you are nervous.

Which is it going to be—too fine English or too much German?

I thought you said this Leonard taught geography? … sells furniture? Maybe he’s living in a gift house like us.

That’s what Mr. Three Chins said when I asked him. He said he
taught geography at the college and owned the furniture store. Nothing from him about free rent. Three Chins knew the exact number of miles from here to Columbus, anyway. It came up in conversation. And how far our speaker will have to come from Urichstown. She is staying overnight with Maybelle. Old friend maybe.

Not Gwynne Withers.

I have no idea.

Gwynne Withers sings. It was she who wanted the piano tuned, remember? Well, how many miles is it to Columbus?

I am a member of one of our committees.

Funny. I’ve never seen or heard of him. Odd combination—fat, furniture, and maps—maps and manicures. I shall have to look into it. Maybe he was just leading you on. I don’t think we even teach geography anymore. At the college, I mean. That’s what he said?

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

So … ah … Your club has committees?

What club doesn’t have committees? They’re the reason for clubs.

Well … I just thought … your society is so small, couldn’t you conduct all your business as a committee of the whole? The twelve disciples were enough for Jesus.

They made a mess of things. They needed a few committees.

Wasn’t the great flood supposed to wash away all committees.

I admit, when we meet, we mostly gabble, but we aren’t replanting the earth. Noah went by twos, we go by threes. I am on the plant exchange committee. They honor me with that. I know how to trade.

Do you dicker then?

– – – – – – – – – – – –

– – – – – –

We are the flowers’ friends. When we have overachieved, we are ready to harvest, so it is easy to give one to get one. I have too many iris, I think. I’ll know those weeks they bloom. So when I dig up the corns I can set some aside for trade. They go in plastic bags labeled
VIOLET
or
WHITE
.

So Mrs. Maybelle will trade her extra glads for what?

No “missus” to Maybelle, ninny. Maybelle Leonard. She is double trouble. No one wants the glads because they are too hard to grow here. You have to dig them every fall, winter them over, plant them again, and
what do you get? flowers for your funeral. Their kids—what do they say … offspring?—feed on their moms. I bet you didn’t know that. That’s how they grow—not in their moms but on them. Like goiters. It gives me the shivers. Glads are picky about soil, glads freeze easy, they want full sun. Want want want. Sniff one—you smell nothing but your own air.

What do you mean? all moms feed their kids.

They do not. Not all moms are as milky as your sis.

– – – – – – – – – – – – I guess, but that’s the intention of nature.

Whoo! Look who knows the intentions of nature. No one knows the intentions of nature. Nature does everything ten tons of times. Nature runs in all directions at once like a blown bomb.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – Okay, Nita, you win. – – – – – What is it I don’t know?

The newborn corn sucks the old one dry. The mother dies of dryness in an earth of plenty.

I believe that’s corm.

– – – – – – – – – – – – Sometimes there are more little corns than one. Then they take two years gnawing on her before growing off on their own.

You could think of it as the old body fashioning a new one for the same mother who just steps from one incarnation to another.

– – – – – – – – –You could think. But not is the fact of it. So everyone offers Maybelle their plants for free—a one-way swap—

I think it’s called a gift.

Like this house? – – – – – – – – – – – – – Anyway Maybelle’s feelings get hurt because of all the excuses she has to hear—you know—excuses: Sorry, I have no room for big plants like glads—or Sorrry, I’m no good at wintering over—or Sorrrry, I can’t compete with your garden, you are the glad-growing lady among us—
und
so she thinks we don’t like her.

And do you like her?

No. We dislike her like a tight shoe. All ten of us toes.

Is that the double in trouble?

Or treble. I lose count. She cheats. She has free brown paper bags of bulbs to hand around like jelly beans, but they are rogues and she knows it.

Rogues …? Colorful idea.

The use is special for gardeners. You wouldn’t want to understand. Her corns are scabbed. She is giving us her diseased stuff. Mrs. Maybelle?
Nein
. Mrs. Stingy, maybe. We like to be nice so we say, Thank you very much, Mrs. Leonard, some other time because I am devoting myself totally to peonies or—I don’t know—to bushes of lilac, to Chinese lanterns, I need dry sticks to stake my peas.

Veggies? Snap peas?

Nein, nein
. Sweet pea, not snappy dragons either. Just a flower. Ha, as she is—May belle—herself … a flower … her daughter wears dandelions braded in her hair, and Mrs. Hursthouse, too, my, what a lady she sells herself for, bosom like a river bridge, she moves about on all fours among her tea roses looking not so grand from the rear and not so nice neither. She says she studied to be a gardener and has a little framed brag-and-lie certificate to prove it. Probably got it by coupon from a catalog, I would bet a posy on its purchase through the post, I could smell violet ink when she held it under my nose, still she has to crawl around like the rest of us, naturally not looking too lovely when dirty-kneed and not dressed in big hats and heavy dresses. She likes to hang strings of things around her neck. I must say, though, her roses are lovely resting in their fancy vases with just a shot or two of fresh mist glistening from the petals on the bouquet that’s always glorifying her buffet when we have meetings at her house—slide shows sometimes, Millicent has a machine, Hildur has the screen—quite a grand place, true as glue and stuck up too, with enough colored glass for a cathedral, including Jesus in a long white robe and upraised palm so serene in the stairwell bidding us be good and peaceful or else. Hursty has a rose in her garden that looks so like one in one of her windows she has to show it off, but she is right in this particular to be proud of the pure light-filled pink petals it has as if lit even in the dark, how did they do it? the workmen? how did God for that matter? always a wonder.

Hild her?

Hil durr. Nice lady most of the time. Unless she feels thwarted. But then, most of us are like that—angry—when things don’t go our way. She is a skinny blond lady who teaches, too, at the high school, didn’t know you, though, came after, teaches numbers of some sort, the ones made of letters,
x
and
y und
so
weiter
.

Does she have a specialty?

Most of us just do our gardens, bit of this, bit of that, a bush, a potted plant, a bed beside a fence, a few vines, more columbine than we need—but I shouldn’t say so—such a lovely flower, columbine. I also believe in the bleeding heart.

I think that is a chapter of the Catholic church.

Order, smarty.

Order is good.

– – – – – – – – – – – – You called me Nita just now.

– – – – – – I guess.

– – – – – – – – – – – – You haven’t called me that in years, since you were a
kinder
.

It’s okay, Mom. Don’t cry.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – I wish I were the Nita that I was.

35

Professor Joseph Skizzen had learned the importance of the chalk tray. When he first took his instructorship he had been handed, like keys for a city, a claw made of chalk sticks held in place by wire that could draw the lines of the staff with a swift swipe across the board. This implement now sat flat on his desk like a symbol of his subject. It took a steady confident hand, though, lest the lines wiggle instead of the notes. In the chalk tray, along with small mounds of white powder, were scattered bits of chalk too small to be of use any longer and a box the size of a pack of cigarettes, full of fresh pieces, as if at leisure, resting in it. Two erasers that badly needed banging lay in the tray as well. Whenever the professor leaned back against the blackboard there was a strong chance that chalk dust would form a line on his bottom. This line, when he turned around to write something important, could provoke a good deal of mostly silent amusement in his students. It proved him a ridiculous
old fool and a figure that deserved their snickers. But to be a ridiculous old fool was not entirely a bad thing. The students might not remember his lecture on the mental deficiencies of notable composers, but they were certain to recall the humorous white line he always left behind when he drew conclusions.

And always good for a chuckle were ole Skizz’s cloth cap and white dice. These were his most recent props, and a great success. The cap could have come from a Fitzgerald novel and looked most at home on the golf course. He kept it wadded like a hankie in a jacket pocket. On the dot of the hour, the professor would position the cap on his head so it shaded his goatee like an eave and enter the classroom with a look that said, I am listening to distant music. He would put down his books and perhaps a record album; then remove the cap, tossing it onto the desk with a negligent gesture. After a moment for a stare around, he would retrieve it, probe under the brim with his fingers, and extract, as smugly as a magician, one pair of bright white dice. These he would roll across the desktop as if shooting craps. Then he would bend forward to see what he had shot, pause to take in their dots and appreciate their significance, and finally begin the hour by saying: Today, it seems, we shall study the passacaglia from the first act of Alban Berg’s opera
Wozzeck
. Instead Professor Skizzen would proceed with a lecture on Mendelssohn’s symphonies … as the students expected.

That was how Joseph Skizzen created his Herr Professor, and a beloved one to boot: by doing silly, often inexplicable, hence memorable things, and in that manner developing, he thought, like a blooming plant, into a charming character, the subject of many an amusing collegiate story. He was a sketch, students said of him at first, but his classes were difficult and music of this elitist kind was … oh … so out of it. He had grown a goatee, purchased a pair of funny trousers, and affected a slight accent. But none of these oddities was sufficient to sustain a semester’s interest.

Life, he had learned, was mostly made of themes and their variations. Skizzen would open by explaining how little we knew about the music of the Greeks. He usually dwelled on the different modes distinguished by Aristotle. He would play a few snatches of this and that. Could the students pick out the military from the dirge, the sad song from the energizing march? They could. The students and their professor also reexamined Albéniz, requested Bach, rethought Chopin, requeried
Debussy, every semester. Joey rolled in at ten. Joseph rolled out at six. Joey immersed his face. Joseph packed his pipe. Joseph boiled an egg. Professor Skizzen read the news, saw an item to be scissored, searched for his equipment. Joey complained until he found it. Professor Skizzen walked to school. He put on his cap to enter class and then entered. The professor tossed his dice; he fingered his chin; he stared out the window; kids coughed or whispered, giggled or shuffled their feet; fell asleep. Repeat. They were never dumb in different ways. Well … almost never. They almost never were dumb in different ways. The important thing was: Joey never left the house.

Another great truth was that Skizzen’s sniggering pupils became alumni despite his low regard for them. They would be sure to remember the time Skizzen brought Saint-Saëns down a peg by quoting Berlioz about the precocious genius, namely that “he knows everything but lacks inexperience,” and it won’t matter much if they get it wrong or its point is lost during recollection. When the little game of reminiscence was played with alumni friends, they would still have a few high cards. Really? you don’t say? a white line like the equator around his rump? Sure, as big as the track of a sailing ship. Actually, for a music teacher, old Skizz wasn’t half bad. Yup … jeez … those were the days.

Even Skizzen thought the classroom seemed a strange choice to represent his professorial career, for he had never been comfortable in one, and certainly wasn’t now, even after many years of playing the part of an offbeat prof renowned for his sharp ear, his clever tongue, his demanding standards, and, with regard to practical everyday matters, habitually bumbling. He could remember in terrible detail how he had taken his first step in local collegiate history. That step had to do with chalk, too, and taught him an important lesson even if his students had learned nothing from it. He could clearly recall the scene and situation, but they were likely to remember only the cloudy outline of an image they now prized like one of those brooches with the faded picture of a parent, girl, or boyfriend closed up inside like a corpse in a casket. Such mementos were occasionally to be peekabooed, and then passed along from one generation to another in place of an honest heirloom.

It was taken—the first step—during Skizzen’s third year as an instructor. He had by this time learned academic routine as well as his ABC’s; that is, he could recite them but do little else but spell out a few elementary
admonitions. One was, unfortunately, that his students should listen with their third ear. Among the lads this had somehow become an obscene joke Skizzen otherwise refused to understand. Moreover, he had advised his few piano pupils to “make love to their instrument” when he knew nothing about that either.

It was spring term, and he had eight students in his Introduction to Music class. This was the department’s bread-and-butter course, yet enrollments had declined from the thirty he had on his baptismal day, a number that had leaked like a rowboat until now, his sixth go-round. At the department’s last meeting, held at the Mullins Hall urinals during a break in the student recitals, Professor Carfagno had called it their bread-and-water course, and then did so. Skizzen had responded, last into action because he wore buttons, by describing it as one of bread and wine, but Morton Rinse had trumped that with tea and biscuit, just before releasing a stream that outlasted the others, at least in noise.