William Gass - Middle C

For a brief spell it served as a finishing school for milkmaids and put the name AUGSBURG ACADEMY on stationery it could scarcely afford. On warm days girls, aspiring to be ladies, in flowing white garments, could be seen dotting the lawns with sketch pads and easels. Local youths liked to imagine the academy was a huge whorehouse where every attending girl was free, easy, and scrumptious. To support this myth, they made up others, relating stories of fleshy revels that everyone enjoyed though no one bothered to believe. The faculty comprised old men whose privates were presumed to be long past erection and maiden aunts whose charges had died and left them unemployed. The academy’s sole published catalog began, “In a quiet sylvan environment” and bragged that in its precincts even the offspring of deer were safe. All that remained, now, of those daisy days were a few signs, one in a parking lot, another, directional, toward a stream that had dried up, and a third, partly hidden by shrubs, that read, confusingly, AUGSBURG COMMUNITY ACADEMY. After a short time the finishing school returned to Lutheran arms and virtue’s camp where no one gave its coeds the compliment of slander.

Augsburg Community College did not pay its students for their chores. If you clerked in the bookstore, mowed the lawn, or washed the dinner trays, you might get a break on your board bill or free books in exchange, a slight reduction in your tuition, a cut in your room rent, or, more likely, a waiver of student fees. Joey hoped to get out of phys ed, but he couldn’t cut a deal. We’ve given you a room, that should be quite enough, he was rather severely told. He didn’t know America that well, and at first accepted the system as standard, only to find out later how unusual it was to have half the student body on work-study, which included painting, sweeping, and tuck-pointing. An answer to the question, What’s your major? might be Latin and lawn care. Augsburg, Joey decided, was either a very progressive artsy-craftsy school or a license-plate prison.

So he never had any money to speak of and was living, in consequence, a good Lutheran life. His innocence forbade him to notice how often the poorer pupils augmented (only they called it Augsburging) their income by doing favors for those better off, another clever way Augsburg had of readying its students for the world. Some stole exams; some altered records; some sold sections of themselves for sex; some swiped candy from the commissary. Joey thought he was being original, acting like a criminal, when he slipped a few small packages of flower seeds from the groundskeeper’s shed; easy enough to do, the door was often open, and guarding a few ageratum packets was no one’s urgency.

Joey didn’t know which to feel worse about — his empty pockets or his criminal pursuit — but he needed a token gift for his mother’s birthday, and he was confident a few small packages of seed would not be missed. Untutored pilferator that he was, he did not consider that the seeds could be out of spritz and as old as Nita’s memories. His gift was meager, his mother forgave him that (there were exactly half-a-dozen common annuals, all edgers); it was also a surprise to her habits, since she had shown no interest in either their dismal yard or absent garden; but she understood her son’s circumstances and did appreciate the gesture the way the cliché said she should, so she let only her eyebrows rise when she undid the thin green string and pressed flat its flimsy wrapping. The seeds went in a dresser drawer where, if they were lifeless, they grew even more inanimate.

Among the flaws in Joey’s character, which, at this age, he was quick to reveal, was his adolescent’s demand for praise and reassurance before doing anything more meritorious than exist. Everyone he knew was as stupid as a brick, and he pitied his plight: that he had to pretend to be another brick packed in a stack stuck among them.

Joey practiced keening on the organ — faithfully, which meant religiously — and tried to carry away a few things from his classes; but his teachers were largely wizened one-note relics from the bottom of the barrel, bent by holy poses into zeros. He believed that the world despised them whenever it thought about thinking of them at all; they despised one another; mostly they despised themselves. They were noticed because they were so unremarkable, and this Joey took note of: do not fall so low as to be treadable, because people tend to watch where they step, curse when they stumble, and tromp upon supines and other grovelers. Never fail, merely pass. Slip by. Don’t miss the class photo but, if short, find a place in the middle of the back row. However, he did learn from the texts each course required — even the shabby ones, used ones, out-of-date ones, boring ones, schoolbookish, double-columned ones with dictionary-sized archival photos spotted about like illustrations of things no longer made and for uses no longer remembered — he learned not to highlight every other line or deface margins with doodles or smart remarks, dog-ear pages or enlist a paper clip or rubber band to do the work of a ribbon, because these practices reduced the books’ resale value. And you would never have any further use for Amo Amas Amat , the Latin first reader, or A Concise History of Lutheran Thought , required for all students, or Biology for Believers , a junior elective. Copies circled endlessly like stratospheric trash.

Madame Mieux’s laughter preceded her like a warning siren. She taught French in a loud raucous voice that went with that language as smoothly as wool with silk, though her gutturals were okay and her r ’s rolled like dice. Madame Mieux had breasts, and breasts bothered Joey. He preferred them hidden under clothes that billowed. Madame Mieux used makeup, and that was disapproved of; she wore tight skirts, and that was frowned on; she hennaed her hair in a style she said was à la française, and that was widely thought vulgar; she collected bracelets on her wrists, and that was deemed tasteless; she hobbled about on open-toed high heels that made her look ridiculous; she put her hand on your arm when she spoke, her eyes widened as if to swallow your ears; and her accent was so fraudulent as to mock your meager understanding of la patrie and la parole .

She appeared to take a fancy to Joey, who had initially enrolled in enfant French in order to avoid Latin for at least another semester. He was told that Latin would help his English, but it was Latin that was dead. German was the other tongue that the academy was prepared to make you wag with some proficiency, but when, during his application interview, he saw that knowledge of German was, in his case, assumed, he kept contentedly quiet and let them believe what he had only let on. It was a technique he would perfect. So to graduate he had to have French. Madame Mieux was a spilling handful, however, and he began to have doubts that he would make it. At first Joey appreciated her apparently genuine vulgarity in such a crowd of stodges. As it proved, she was a deceiver, too. She came from some coarse place in New York City; she was an old maid and not an old madame; her hair wasn’t hennaed, she wore a red wig; and she yelled in her classes and stood close to talk because she was hard of hearing. Every student of hers eventually discovered these things — it was what they learned.

However, in addition, Joey acquired this: among Madame Mieux’s affectations was a love of French music, and indeed she could do a good imitation of Edith Piaf growling the verses of “La Vie en Rose.” One day, on a portable player that Mr. Hirk would have listened to without complaint, she played for the class a song by Hector Berlioz. Listen to the diction, she admonished them. The song was called “Absence” and was sung by Eleanor Stebber, of whom Joey had dimly heard. Now he understood what was meant by “the long line.” He was transfixed. Here was a purity, a beauty, of which he knew too little to dream.