William Gass - Middle C

Most of the rest of it, yes … most of the rest was the right answer. Nor, at this time, did Joseph know that Morton Rinse professed to be an amateur magician. The high point of his party performance was to play the violin with his tie. My God, Joseph would say to Miriam, am I to pass my life among this lot?

Yet it was true that when he had first arrived and had begun to settle in, his colleagues had been kind and friendly; he had listened to a little history on the width of railroad ties from his newfound friend Professor Rinse, who also knew what kind of clinkers bedded best and where they came from. Moreover, Professor Carfagno — who, with Rinse, had to endure a great deal of name play and consequently brought forward the figure of Castle Cairfill out of the haze of history to which he had been insufficiently consigned — Professor Carfagno seemed most attentive to Joseph, almost, it might have been fair to say, hanging on Joseph’s every word, and naturally this was flattering to a new recruit who saw everyone as a likely top sergeant, especially since he was fearful of being found out. They will know immediately, he felt. They will see the way I walk, and know. They will listen to me answer even an idle question, and know. They will trip me up without trying, licensed (as they all are) from tony schools far away; and his musical colleagues will be phenomenal prodigies, play rings around him, sight-read, have scores by the score shelved in their heads; and they will know. Instantly.

Actually it took them four decades. In the meantime, Clarence Carfagno died. A few others moved on. A number retired. The bleak sentence appeared. It became a yearly habit for a dozen datura to bloom and fill the south porch with their languishing flutes and heavy scent. The yew hedge grew. Nita disappeared behind her shrubbery.

Of course when a wit is witty at another’s expense, you must wonder when the wit will be at yours. After rinse came wring. And the devotions of Carfagno were those of a cultural toady, me-too, and mimic. If Skizzen indiscreetly professed a fondness for Berlioz, Clare boned up on bios, suggested recordings released that morning or those that were impressively out of press, would suddenly observe that “Au Cimetière” was really written for a tenor; and if you admired an article on “The Pines of Rome,” as unlikely as that might seem, he would be around next day with his annotations. Skizzen had hardly defined himself in terms of his own preferences before Carfagno had made these choices his — except that Clare’s announcement of them was a lot louder. So Skizzen said he loved Delius and watched his tormentor consume the Englishman’s drizzly confections instead of preempting one of Skizzen’s real passions.

During former times, when he and Miriam regularly had dinner together, he would bring up his disappointments, but she was never helpful, only forceful, chewing while she still had a mouthful of advice.

Professor Joseph Skizzen had a number of worries, chief of which was the fear that the human race might yet survive, a concern that had supplanted his previous wish that they might perish well past toenails, hair, and bones.

You have to listen harder than the jokes, Joey, his mother would admonish, and look where they pop from, and hear what the joker says when he jokes, not what the joke says when it’s said. You are so smart it makes them shiver in their skeletons when they see your smartness dressed for a party. So don’t tremble to them. They get brittle in their brains and fend you off with obscure facts and lapdog loyalty and such. Was it the width of the Thames at the Tower that the silly man wanted to show off about? Think how it must feel for them to have to study up a book just to tap-dance past your mastery of music one more time. You are a Schoenbuggy man, and who knows he but you?

That’s why Skizzen had chosen Uncle Arnold in the first place. To be his trophy wife. In a faculty such as the one Skizzen was likely to find at Whittlebauer, Schoenberg’s fearful name would be known, but not his music, the techniques of his teaching, or the import of his ideas. However, there were other reasons: not only was Skizzen now an Austrian, his life’s loyalties, if musically inverted, matched the strategies Joey’s father had set for his son, inasmuch as Schoenberg was a chameleon who had been born a Jew yet brought up a Catholic in a Vienna crowded with folks devoted to their beads. At eighteen, out of typical teenage rebelliousness, Skizzen supposed, Schoenberg turned himself into a Protestant, not the best way of leveling the path of one’s life, but splendid as a punch-in-the-eye for Mom and Pop and the smug burger-coffeehouse bunch — if they cared. Many years later, when Hitler came to power and Schoenberg was dismissed from his post in Berlin, he reclaimed the Jew the Nazis knew he was and fled to the United States — to teach in LA alongside other exiles — Adorno, Brecht, and Mann — and live in a yarded white stucco mini-manor in Brentwood with a small house for his setter built behind it and an Irish dog inside.

Joey felt his father felt — in the thirties waiting for catastrophe — the way Vienna felt to its artists and writers in the century’s early years, waiting for catastrophe, too — loathing the city as Karl Kraus did and fearing war, or bored with the Zeit ’s complacent Geist as Georg Heym was, who wanted the greasy peace to end and welcomed strife and chaos that would clean the sewers and give swift passage to the shit of life. Sharing Karl Kraus’s apprehensions gave his father’s cheap violining a little class and his motives, so mysterious, some respect. Nita said his father said he smelled the carnage coming. Musil smelled it. And I smell it now, Joey told his mother. Ach, it’s my manure, she laughed, showing him her hands.

A man, Miriam said, should change his coat, if he must, only to do the world’s business, not for his family or for his friends to whom he is fastened by feeling. That is not so easy to do, Joseph answered, because she was actually asking a question. Hard or not, that’s what Rudi ought to have done. Ought, Joey exclaimed. Ought? You, too, don’t forget, Mother, were supposed to be as converted as Rudi was — Joey laughed because he needed the practice — you were supposed to be a newly pregnant Jewish mother. But I was the same, Miriam insisted, the same, the same, all Rudi did was change my name — and even then only my name when it was written, not when I heard it spoken to me, not when I thought about myself, not when I remembered my life or his once or twice tenderness to me concerning which I say no more, no more, no more, because, though I now stand silent, I stand on my own path, amid my own rocks and grass, my tears do not spill from a false face, and I do not get my flushed forehead from a paint box but from kneeling on the ground.

At first Professor Skizzen thought the world would not put up with our monkeyshines for another hundred years and would throw mankind aside as a mistake the way it had so many other species, a rejection we no doubt deserved; but now he feared for the world — a world that was alone in the universe as far as he knew — the only earth — which he cared for more than he cared for himself.

Augsburg Community College was not a community college. It received no support from either state or city. Its misleading name came from a settlement called the Augsburg Community, a Utopian farm founded in 1822 by some heretical Lutherans most of whom ran away like unhappy slaves within the founding year, leaving two buildings and a few inadequately fenced fields. Utopia had not lasted long enough to fail or allow its tenants time to grow at least an imposing pumpkin. Two families remained behind, hoeing a plot, scavenging berries, and feeling more like squatters than founders. Much is made, in the history of the school, of the early struggles and the eventual success of these sweaty settlers. God smiled upon them, and they built a stone barn. God smiled again, and up went a spire. The two farms became four, ten families turned into a town, and the town, before everything fell down, became a college — the town square the college quad, the stone barn a dorm. There were more reassuring miracles here than Jesus had performed, not excluding Lazarus or the baking of loaves and the seining of fishes.