William Gass - Middle C

What Mr. Hirk hated most about Joey was his forearm. Do not move the forearm. Forget the forearm. From side to side from the wrist the fingers find their way, kneading the notes — your hands must be big slow spiders out for a walk.

Early on Mr. Hirk had grasped Joey’s hands with his voice. Show me your nails! Show me! They’re bitten! Look at them, poor babies. That is no way. Are you a beaver in a trap to be gnawing at yourself? Nails should never be long — short is wise — never so long they click on the keys, so they interfere with your stroke — no — but not bitten, a bad bad habit — they are not to be chewed like a straw. Nails are to be nurtured, nicened. Yes. Filed with your mother’s file. Not long like a lady’s but smooth, short, and smoothly rounded like the moon that is in them. That is the way. Remember. Short, round, smooth. Better if they’re polished like flute keys. Hooh, he would conclude, exhausted.

Dressing Debbie was getting expensive, and Miriam felt that Joey’s progress was being hampered by Mr. Hirk’s physical impediments. To the point of pointlessness, she thought. Joey looked forward now to his miniconcerts, but he could not protest his mother’s decision even if it was not adequately based or sincerely made. Joey was to inform Mr. Hirk on Saturday next that the present lesson was to be the final one. This, Joey had no desire to do. You hired him, you should fire him, he told his mother in the most aggrieved tone he could muster. It makes no sense for me to make a special trip just to do that, she answered in what would be her last reasonable voice. You send him his money by mail, Joey argued, why not end it the same way? That would be cold and unfeeling, she said sternly, that would be inconsiderate and impolite, even rude. Shame on you, she said. On me? Joey was unusual in his anger. Mr. Hirk is a sick old man! He has no income! He hasn’t even one Czerny. He lives mostly in the dark waiting for me to come and play. I give him that relief. This was said with pride. Now you want to take his single pupil and his only pleasure away. Joey was embarrassed by his own heat. Such novel opposition was quite beyond Miriam’s understanding. It made her furious. She blamed his poor upbringing on America. As someone who had been browbeaten, she could browbeat now with assurance, and she could be furious with Joey without worry because, though Joseph Skizzen was of the male sex, he was still a Joey. Ah, how you overcount yourself. How do you know what that man’s pleasures are! Joey’s stiff face told her that his certainties were unchanged. Then say nothing, just don’t go again, you obstacle, she shouted. Whatever you do, I won’t mail another fee. She ended the argument but not the issue by leaving the room in a huff that would have seemed more genuine if it hadn’t had wheels.

Joey knew now that the singers on Mr. Hirk’s old records were ghosts in truth, though he did not love them less for that. And Mr. Hirk had begun telling him of other singers, such as Marcella Sembrich, whom Joey had not heard, and how she had studied for years with an old piano teacher who discovered and developed her voice by taking her, willy-nilly, to the best teachers. Mr. Hirk was a bike tire turning in gravel — hard to understand — but Joey listened to his history of Marcella Sembrich as if she were a star of film, an actress of dangerous beauty. Indeed, Marcella Sembrich was her stage name, not her real name, Mr. Hirk told him. Her real name was Marcellina Kochanska — Kochanska — as a name Kochanska would not do — and she came from a part of Poland the Austrians owned. I know the place, Mr. Hirk said proudly. Lem. Berg. It runs in families like my arthritis does. The gift, I mean. I know a lot of similar histories. Her father — her father taught himself to play — from hell to hallelujah — half the instruments. So she knew notes by the time she said daddy. She was sitting up to the piano by four. Perched on a Bible. I know. It’s as if I was there. And she was playing a violin her father made for her when she was six. Six! In ringlets. It’s so. It’s not even unusual. That same father — the father of her — taught his wife the violin. Yes. True. By seven … you just linger on the number, boy, linger on her age … by seven she was playing in the family string quartet with her brother, who was born before her, a cello’s child. Then an old man who heard her, when the family minstrelized around the country to make ends meet, sponsored her for the Conservatory because he loved her as she should have been loved. In Lem. Berg. I know the building. I know the halls.

Joey had read of worms that glowed in the dark. Mr. Hirk was glowing. Like one of the plant’s leaves, his face was glowing, and his voice cleaned itself up as if it were going to church.

When Marcella went to him — to Stengl, her teacher, sent by one lover to another — she was about your age — how Stengl must have adored her little fingers — with a waist that didn’t require a corset. Though in later years … Mr. Hirk spoke of Marcella Sembrich as if she were an old friend. He spoke and he glowed. Yes, yes, Marcella stayed with him — with Stengl, stern as he was — studying — she stayed despite his sternness for eleven years. Joey heard the word “stayed” with a pang. Eleven years of piano. Mr. Hirk made a point of it. Not eleven years of voice, not five. No. Though she sang in some community choruses during that time and was thought to have a pretty soprano. Mr. Hirk always stood to talk, because scrunched up he was short of breath, but his voice was aimed at the floor. She married the old man, Stengl, eventually, after he’d kissed her fingers often, growing old in his role as her teacher, and after she, who had arrived as a bud, became a blossom. He had taken her to Italy to study singing, because he believed there was more to her “pretty” voice than prettiness, that inside her small light soprano there was something big and dark. Oh yes, he did hear a darkness. And that “big” voice was born there too, in sunny Italy, like a baby born to a giant. Then he swept her off to London without even telling her why. He had said to his young wife one day, We are going away to London. Why? She wanted to know of course. It was natural to want to know. You shall see, her husband said. It will be for the best. And Stengl figured out a way to get her heard there. Not just heard there … heard well. She sang a selection from Lucia with the Covent Garden Orchestra accompanying her. Imagine. The entire orchestra playing, she singing. Just imagine. You have heard of Covent Garden? On that legendary stage. She sang. There, where the great Patti had just rehearsed. She sang. Marcella Sembrich sang. Well, they rose, the violins first, to applaud her performance. They said she sang like a violin — and in fact she played that instrument, though not as well as the piano. After that the happy couple — wouldn’t they have been a happy couple? — his wisdom and her fingers, her figure and her voice, his worship and his passion — traveled to Russia and Spain and America, too. Where she was an astonishment. In Lucia . At the Met. In I Puritani , in La Sonnambula . What vocal calligraphy! You know about the Met? You should have heard her in The Magic Flute . Such a queen — such dark power — with her voice — she invoked it. Like a setting sun calls forth the night. For a moment Mr. Hirk was proud of his age. A piano teacher had flown the soprano to these great heights: an old man was her wings, as well as her lover, and saw her soar.

Joey knew then that he would not be able to tell Mr. Hirk he was fired, that the lessons were over—“terminated,” a word Miriam had learned at work to fear — now that Mr. Hirk was finally reaching out — only figuratively, of course — to his pupil, and opening his heart’s attic to him, unwrapping his enthusiasms, and — young Joey recognized — confronting the death of his hopes, the ruins of his life. Mr. Hirk, after all, lived in a small dark leaf-lit room; he was no one who had ever played or sung before the public; he had probably never even taught another who might, then, have gone on to earn acclaim. And for a pittance, for pity, he was beating booktime to a boy who was only, at best, a mime, a faker who had never faked a measure of Chopin, and didn’t even know what a Czerny was.