William Gass - Middle C

Mother … (a formal address for a serious subject) … Mother, perhaps my father was a ’fraidycat.

He was brave enough to risk England.

He was just fleeing from the Nazis.

Your father was a good Austrian; he had nothing to fear from the Nazis.

Then he had no reason to skelter away to England.

If you do something without good reason, Joey, does that make you feig?

I guess it’s what you run from without a good reason. My father said he was avoiding evil by shunning the wicked — always a good reason.

No, Joey, sometimes you have to confront crooks with their crookedness.

It didn’t do, did it? to confront Nazis.

Nazis? no … but your father only claimed — aloud and at length — he claimed that the fruit of fascism would poison its tree and that the roots of such a tree would contaminate the earth and that the evilized earth would seep through our boots and travel up our legs and — well — damage our desires, curdle our blood, and beat out our brains, but saying so doesn’t print it in the paper; he just said that: said it — said it — louder didn’t improven the noise — he couldn’t know he was right at least as far as the roots — their poison — went; how could anyone know such a thing, how could anyone even guess? he invented it — the danger like the lightbulb — even if it would become — okay — sort of true eventually on account of Austria’s bad luck in living nearby Germans; he pretended to see dark clouds, and if it rained like he said it would, if it came down as it did sometimes at home in strings, even if the ground drowned, it wouldn’t change the fact that he imagined clouds before there were real ones.

Maybe my father had foresight; didn’t he say so?

Say so— sie sagen —say so — is say so, so? no, Joey, his foresight was a boast like the butt of a nanny.

Mother, maybe getting out of a bad place isn’t such a bad idea and can’t be called cowardly — careful at worst, prudent perhaps.

He didn’t take me out of a bad place, Joey, he took me out of my homeland and lovehouse and marched me off to war; we went where the bombs would be; where we — I include you — would see people burned — skin and bones, worst of all, hair, like celluloid, nails; where only cats had the sense and slither to be safe.

I want to think my father ran away from more than blame, Mother; that he tried to do no harm when harm was a universal habit.

He harmed you, didn’t he? We lived on water for weeks, maybe you were too young to remember — just as well — and slept in the same clothes the livelong day, day in and day out, as if they covered us like bark; and he hurt your sister, holding her so hard when we sat in — what in hebe do they say? — the Tube, adding our stink to the stink of the sewer, to the smell of other smellers; and the bricks shook from the bombs, and the lights dimmed from the bombs, and people screamed or fainted, fearing to die in the middle of their complaints as if their complaints were dinner.

But Father thought, I imagine, that London would be a safe and civilized place, that England would be accommodating and out of the reach of brutes; he couldn’t know that bombs would follow and fall upon you.

Where was his foresight then, Joey, where was all of that moral wisdom he was full of when it was really needed for his family? Didn’t he know — he was just a fiddle-playing fellow — didn’t he know that trouble follows and falls upon Jews, that as soon as he pinned that silly hat to his hair the cooties were collecting? Jews are the wind that lets evil in; Jews have brought damn bad luck from the beginning because they crucified Jesus, not a chance for them after that.

Mother, you and Father weren’t Jews for very long.

Rudi was denounced, that’s why we weren’t Jews for very long.

But he never planned to stay Jewish, to …

He wanted me to wear a wig, to call myself Miriam …

You still do — call yourself Miriam.

The USA, too, they preferred us as Jews; they wanted no Austrians in their country; they processed us the way I box up rubber dishpans.

It isn’t so bad here, is it? decent enough?

My hometown town was a town; there were mountains, a river, good bread; these towns are chicken coops; these towns are slower than ooze; they have no inner character.

You mean no binding beliefs, Mother, don’t you?

No binding beliefs, that’s right.

Just like parochial Catholicism, Mother, like anti-Semitism, Mother — they bind more than sheaves.

Joey, you are American and have no convictions.

I was almost arrested.

But not convicted.

I was blamed. A blame not unremembered, Mother. Anyway, Joey said, it’s the binding I can’t bear — the joining, the brotherly embrace — because if one anti-Semite is a curiosity, three in a room are a zoo, and any more than that are a plague.

Joey, what do you see in Jews they shouldn’t be singled out?

Not any more than in anybody.

Still, she said, someone should be singled out.

Then let it be your Jesus. He wanted to be singled out.

Ach, you have gone so far to the bad in your beliefs …

In my disbeliefs, dear, little and light like puffballs from the cotton trees.

Dandelions, you mean, Miriam said with satisfaction, and they’re weeds.

So, Mother, why do you think he left us?

For none of the usual reasons.

You mean he didn’t leave us for a woman?

Not for a woman, not for a life of crime, not for freedom from his duties.

You’re sure?

He wasn’t a man’s man or a ladies’ man; he was a soft sweet steady man; we held hands; he didn’t walk fast; a lot of the time he smelled of ink, not bad; but then he changed, became an actor on the stage; we weren’t who we’d been to him, or he to us either, because he became afraid, and we were safe in the theater, maybe, he thought, because the audience was going to play out the tragedy, not the actors; anyway, we were better off being somebody else — imagine, Joey — being somebody else.

Maybe, Mother, it was money.

Gelt? why?

I mean, maybe he was ready to go off a lot of times, just as he left your land for England it seemed all of a sudden, but maybe, the way he thought about it, it had been in his mind for months or years, he just hadn’t known what to do till he found out how the Jews were leaving, and maybe he took us with him because at first when the wanderlust overwhelmed him he didn’t know it was so private a feeling, so personal a journey; he didn’t know that taking us made his hope impossible to realize like trying to fashion a fresh look to surprise a mirror while still wearing the same old hat and coat; so naturally when he ran away to England he took us with him only to find out after he’d been there awhile that it was the family all along he was running from, not Jew haters, not Germans, but the hat, the scarf, the dog, the coat, the sound of some voices — you know — always there, the same voices saying the same things in his ear, maybe, and then money all of a sudden came along, fit in his pocket like a bar of candy, so he could completely and entirely go, do what he’d always wanted to do, leave his self behind like a footprint in the snow … where they have real snow … in Austria.

Miriam sat with her arms over her eyes, the worse to see the world, the better to see the past.

Your father didn’t leave you, Joey, or your sister either; he left me, left me and my soap smell, just because he was unhappy with himself, sleeping, eating with a disinfector, working at a stupid lowlife job with lowlifes coming and going in and out of his own lowlife life, nothing to go to work for, nothing to brag about to the boys, nothing to come home to but a sterilized room in a cinder-block building near a neighborhood where he’d be snubbed every day he was seen, a no-account squalorman himself because he worked in a betting parlor, and lowlife, too, because of me, a laundry lady, the lowest of life, washing dirt off the dirty drawers of dirty people, tired in our legs and in our hearts, when he knew, Joey, what he’d done, how he’d pulled us up out of our own earth so that now we had nowhere to grow, nowhere to flourish, losing our looks, our youth, our energies, our dreams, for nothing, in order to live in other people’s catastrophes as if they were summer camps for the city poor.