William Gass - Middle C

Many of Mr. Hirk’s records, which sat in a dusty stack near the Victrola, had, to Joey’s surprise, only one side. Yes, one side was smooth as pine. And they were heavy as plates. Empty plates. But if you got a record turning, a voice, like a faraway bird, high and light and leaping, somersaulting even, certainly atwitter, would come into the room. Amelita Galli-Curci, Mr. Hirk would say hoarsely yet in some awe, as she began. Joey had never heard the pureness of purity before. It was the soul, for sure, or the sound of angels, because weren’t they birds? and didn’t they dwell in a hidden sky? It was called “The Bell Song,” the song she sang, though there was another aria a girl named Gilda was supposed to sing about someone whose very name had smitten her as by a stick — so suddenly — with the stunning blow of love. It was a song that would be overheard just as Joey was hearing it, yet that hearing would be followed, according to Mr. Hirk, by a consternation on the stage quite unlike the contentment that Joey felt during its blissful moments of performance.

The pedals, the pedals were a mystery. They were so far away from the keys, from the strings, from the place the music rose from; they were so hidden and other, that Joey fought them, tromped upon them, kicked them in their sides. Joey thought Mr. Hirk was cursing him at first, but he was saying, “Damp … damp,” to no avail. Finally, he shouted, “Forget the pedals.” “They wet the notes,” he managed to explain. “Play to clear skies. Clear skies.”

The tacky church Miriam took her children to had not a single spear of light, no rebounding shadows, no mystery, no majesty, no music of note. The congregation sang almost as badly as the choir, and cliché determined the selection of hymns. The services were in an inept Latin and the acolytes always a step late, as if they had fallen asleep. Catholics had not prospered here. The county and its seat was filled with Amish, odd Protestants, slow roads, bad organs, and poorer organists.

Mr. Hirk honeyed up to him during Joey’s senior year. Joey would simply show up and play, mostly something he’d heard on the radio or a few things he’d begun by improvising, and then they would both sit in the cool gloom and listen to the Victrola that Joey had begun winding up because Mr. Hirk’s fingers were presently incapable: Emma Calvé, Galli-Curci, the stentorious Caruso, and “Home Sweet Home” by Nellie Melba. Mr. Hirk no longer marked time by banging even a thin book. Now, when Joey left, with a gratitude that exceeded any he had ever felt, he would squeeze Mr. Hirk’s upper arm (because he didn’t dare put pressure on him anywhere else); Mr. Hirk would sigh hoarsely and watch Joey bike, it must have seemed nimbly, away, leaving Mr. Hirk alone in his room with his body’s disability and his machine’s recalcitrance until another Saturday came along. Joey always cranked the Victrola one more time before he left, so a few sides could be managed if Mr. Hirk could spindle a record — hard to do with his crabbed hands growing crabbier by the week. Joey rode off to an era of LPs, vinyl, and other speeds, but only Mr. Hirk had Olive Fremstad and her sound — Calvé’s, Caruso’s sound — sounds — hollow, odd, remote — that created a past from which ghosts could not only speak to admonish and astound, they could sing again almost as they once sang, sang as singing would never be heard sung again, songs and a singing from somewhere outside the earth where not an outstretched arm, not a single finger, could reach or beckon, request or threaten or connive.

If Joseph Skizzen later could imagine his mother, with whom he had lived so much of his life one would think he’d not want to add another sight or an additional thought of her to his consciousness; if he could clearly picture her in her culottes and gloves grubbing in her garden, literally extracting coiled white webworms from the soil and flipping them indifferently into a coffee can filled with flat cheap beer (only one moment of many he might remember), it was partly because, at the commencement of his piano lessons, he had begun envisioning Mr. Hirk, who had also unwittingly given him life, painfully bulked in a bulky chair or doubled up in a daybed he could no longer refold, waiting through the hours for Joey’s bike to skid in the gravel before his door. It was a picture that prompted him not to ignore his pedals but to push hard, hurrying to arrive and kick his kickstand into place, to knock and enter Mr. Hirk’s house all at once, to say “Hiyuh, Mr. Hirk, how goes it?” and slap his happy hand down on the piano bench before sitting there himself to play a new tune he’d heard that week on Your Hit Parade , a song already at number 7 although it was the first time for its appearance on the list. Mr. Hirk would pretend to hate the new stuff — trash and drivel and noise, he said, or treacle and slop and lies — but he would listen as if only his large ears were alive. Joey would then play the new hit from the week before, going back over his own list, making the slim recital last, turning it into his lesson, performing each of the songs on the sheets in the bench, and ending, as the order firmed itself, with “Danny Boy,” as if he knew where it belonged, and without being the least embarrassed by its schmaltz, its treacle, or its prevarications.

It had to happen. One Saturday afternoon, searching for a football game, Joey tuned in the Metropolitan Opera’s matinee during a moment when all its throats were rapturous. His mother stood in the doorway, somewhat dazed herself, because her intention had been to ask him to turn down the volume. The voices weren’t of tin but of gold, and the orchestra was full, not a fiddle and a drum or a faint hinky-tink piano. Even Miriam sat and listened, too indifferent to her hands to fold them in her lap, until the evident sadness of events withdrew her. Neither had the slightest idea what was going on until between acts a commentator, with a voice melting over its vowels like dark chocolate, recited the plot as it was about to unfold. The tenor, it turned out, would be in a jail cell awaiting execution, and the act would open an hour before dawn at an artillery emplacement at the walls of a castle overlooking Rome. Rome! The audience will see the Vatican in the distance, the announcer says. Then, after an orchestral interlude, with the song of a shepherd boy barely audible in the distance, the tenor, told he has but an hour left to live, will be brought to the battlements where he will write loving last words to his opera singer while sitting at a wooden desk set to one side of the stage. He writes something splendid, Joey remembered, about the shine of the stars perfuming the world. Of course the tenor would sing the words in the moment that he wrote them. Here, in this magical realm, singing words were all there were.

Joey heard everything happen as it had been foretold. The tenor’s voice soared despite its despair, and Joey felt his own throat ache. It was a moment in which sorrow became sublime and his own misfortunes were, momentarily, on someone else’s mind.

Now when he had a lesson, he would ask Mr. Hirk his opinion of the singers of today, not all of whom Mr. Hirk loathed; indeed, there were a few he praised. Mr. Hirk was impatient with Joey because, after all their sessions, his improvising was not improving anything but his ability to mimic. Although Mr. Hirk formed his sentences with reasonable clarity, his words emerged as if they too were rheumatic, bent a bit, their heads turned toward the ground, their rears reluctant to arrive. No … noth … nothing gained. You are copying the cat as if — that way — you could become one. Shame. You are hitting the keys a bit like my stick here, Mr. Hirk complained, when your fingers — your fingers, young shameful man — should sing; you should feel the song in their tips — on the ball where the ink stain blues it — like a tingle. Your technique — oh God — is terrible. You need to do Czernys … and … and I don’t have any for you, not a page. I am a poor teacher. Naw. Nothing can be gained. I couldn’t sing or whistle them. They are not for copy, the Czernys. They are for the fingers like lifting weights. Which you either do, or you don’t do. Czernys. So you either get strong in the fingers or you remain weak … and if in the fingers, then in the head.