William Gass - Middle C

Including … betting on a winning horse. Ray worked six months as a janitor at the betting parlor before he placed a modest sum upon the nose of a long-shot nag, not even in hope, more out of curiosity, and received immodest winnings, winnings which took him by surprise, took him aback, shook him up, shook him so he saw a solution in the sum he suddenly had in hand. This was the sort of shock Miriam later imagined her husband to have had: after a life of undeserving failure, a sudden unmerited success. Once you’ve placed a bet, you’ve made your bed, she said. Once you’ve been bitten by a bet and you’re ahead, you’re dead. Because bettors were mainly men of low principles, she was certain, often at loose ends, frayed in the bargain, men whose knowledge of the world was entirely set in terms of shortcuts, which, if you took enough of them, would allow your journey to zig in a ceaseless circle, to zag without seeing an end. Conceivably he could have lost his money in a game of cards and run shamefully away. To hide from whom, however? He could have gone from sin to sin, his appetites as sharp as razors, if he’d known what sin was or where sins were or how, even, to begin a stretch of sinning; but, though he could spot evil in a rubber stamp, he couldn’t tell a streetwalker from a floor lamp. Eventually, both police and such parlor patrons as confessed to Ray’s acquaintance concluded that he had secretly spent his money on documents, on plans, on bribes, on a steamship ride.

Rudi Skizzen would have said it was God’s will, and certainly Yankel Fixel would have felt that it was Meant: that despite every likelihood he would find himself in just this job, where temptation of some type would lead him to a wager, and where, against extravagant odds, he would come into considerable cash — the purchase of a passage — but for Ray Scofield, a man who had decided to live a life free of divinities — including anything that might be written in the skies — for him it was just luck, it was a sudden advantage, a chance, an unsought, unearned opportunity.

Miriam learned of his expressed attitude toward the bet and its lavish payoff while Ray Scofield’s disappearance was being investigated. The investigation itself was confused, for at first the authorities did not know exactly whom they were looking for: Austrian, Englishman, Jew. Nor did the wife appear to have a clear understanding of the sort of man her husband was. For instance, they learned from people at the betting parlor of Ray Scofield’s success at the track, and in the course of their questions, just how he had taken it: not as a gift from God, not as the final arrival of Good Fortune, nor as a Matter of Course, but simply as an accident, similar to a sudden fall; but his wife would not accept that reaction, for she said her husband would have fallen to his knees and thanked God, after apologizing, first, for the sin in his wager. His suits and sleeves and collar might change, she claimed, but his heart would never alter.

She and the children had come home, if that’s what you could call it, to find not even his customary shadow. Naturally they had worried and fretted for a time before going to the police. Something had befallen her husband, Rudi Skizzen — no, in her nervousness, she seemed unsure — something awful had happened to Yankel Fixel. And he worked where? In the leaflet house, she answered — no, the betting office, not so far. Yet so very far. All those bombs had missed them only to have this — whatever it was — happen, come out of nowhere, to make her Rudi a … what …? a what …? an Opfer , a victim … a runaway. She couldn’t believe it. Do you believe it, she repeatedly asked Dvorah, forgetting that her daughter was supposed to be Deborah now. I’m glad he’s gone, I hate him, his daughter said. You don’t hate him. He changed my name. Maybe he’s hurt somewhere. He took us from our home and changed our names, Dvorah went on relentlessly, repeating the sentence. You were too young really to remember. Graz? I remember. No one is too young to remember. And my name I remember. His horrid beard. He shaved, dear, he shaved. To leave us on a weekend, his daughter said. Miriam howled. Deborah howled. How … how is this possible? But there was no answer from the authorities until many months had passed, months during which Miriam had to fend off foster care for her kids, quit the laundry, try the church, and go on the dole. Then the authorities learned, while apprehending some counterfeiters, of Raymond Scofield’s purchases: a passport, a ticket, a license to drive. Drive? Rudi rode a bike. Drive? That didn’t matter, the authorities explained; it was a useful document. Miriam felt bereaved. Dvorah felt abandoned. Yussel appeared to feel nothing at all.

The young priest who heard her confession became solicitous. He dropped round. Unlike the Jews who had confronted Yankel, this priest had no face fuzz; you could see his smooth red cheeks and red lips, always moist as if they were sides of a stream. He had a properly soft voice, full of concern, and he tried to joke with the children, though it was clear, Miriam said, it was Miriam who interested him. Her round flat Slav face seemed huge where it perched like a lollipop above her now bone-thin body. Her dark hair was already flicked with gray. Miriam began to worry about what she wore because she could feel his eyes fixed on her in far from a fatherly way, and this attraction did her more good than baskets of fruit. She smiled for him while Dvorah glared.

It would be so romantic, Miriam thought, if her beauty pulled this priest from his church like a cork from a bottle. She longed to hear him say: I cannot help myself; I must have you; you have enslaved me; for you I give up Communion, I give up Confession, I give up Latin, I give up God, and so on, though she had no interest whatever in responding to such amorous advances beyond tittering and smiling and saying the equivalent of “pshaw” in her Austrian. Her devotion to the Deity did not prohibit a daydream flirtation with one of his representatives. In another age and class she would have rapped Father’s knuckles with her fan and laughed like bubble-risen wine. Nor could she maintain this fantasy in front of the mirror in her mind. Maybe, she thought, like a farmer, he sees how I would look when properly fattened for the market. The image gave her hope: that one day she would be.

Already angry at the flight of her father, Dvorah was jealous and outraged and shamed by her mother’s little play. Which she dimly understood was only a dance. It was as if, for a moment, with this woman, the priest was allowing himself another life … and not merely that he was, for a change, an unemasculated man but that he was actually a rowdy one, preying upon a poor abandoned refugee woman, as so many did, a Romeo without scruple or regard. He had a way of running a pale shiny-nailed hand up his black-sleeved arm — she told Joseph often of it in the after years — a gesture that told her he was wishing her stockings were just as dark and felt the same. Years and repetitions later, she knew that caress would feel like the path of a barky stick.

Finally, the priest managed to pry her story from her, so when she said she believed that her husband — what’s the rascal’s name now? — had probably been an Opfer , the victim of foul play, having been seen coming into money by a lot of lowlifes; or when she said she believed her husband had simply preceded them to the New World — the New World where they would begin again, each self as new as a store shoe — and that he would in a while send for his family to live decently in some hilly Austrian part of that far-off Yankel country, moreover in a sharply peaked cottage at the end of a rocky flower-dotted lane — Oh, we are almost there, she said — to a house with curtains in the summer, shutters in the winter, and an open gate; not an absconder, Miriam maintained, not a fugitive from their marriage, a runaway who had left her with two young children to seek his own good luck in America just because he’d won a wager on a horse. When she went on, her eyes closed and dreamy-faced, through the possibilities, the priest simply said, Yes, yes, I understand, but remember he left your country, as you say, suddenly, and he was just that abruptly no longer an Austrian, just that cruelly a Jew, a refugee, a Scofield who could enter Canada as easily as he could place a bet where he worked, and so, dear lady, he could leave you.