William Gass - Middle C

Marjorie has told me some—

It’s Marjorie? but it’s Miss Moss?

Well—

I don’t doubt. I don’t doubt that she’s told you. I don’t doubt it.

During this instruction, many of Miss Moss’s mannerisms disappeared, and she seemed neither nervous, skittish, nor shy. Nor did she break her words to elongate their vowels. Had she learned her cautions from Marjorie, or had Marjorie learned them from her? A certain malevolent glow suffused her features so that she grew younger and her complexion less blue whenever she spoke about her present position, its obligations, its trials, and its powers. A book, you would think, is not a pocket, a purse, or a wastebasket, but people dispose of their sniffle-filled Kleenex between unexposed pages, their toothpicks, too, dirty where they’ve gripped them while cleaning their teeth — such in-decency — matchbooks with things written on the underside of the flap, usually numbers, of telephones, I suppose; or they leave paper clips and big flat mother-of-pearl buttons — imagine — curls of hair and all sorts of receipts as well as other slips of paper they’ve used to mark the spot where they stopped; and they file correspondence between leaves as if a book were a slide drawer — do they do that to their own books? — or they tuck snapshots, postcards, unused stamps, into them, now and then a pressed bloom — they stain, I’ve seen leaf shadows — one- to five- to ten-dollar bills, you’d never guess, yes, rubber bands, a shoelace, candy and gum wrappers — even their chewed gum that I have to pry out with a putty knife — people — people — I dee-clare — and newspaper clippings, often the author’s reviews, that are among the worst intruders because in time they’ll sulfur the pages where they’ve been compressed the way people who fall asleep on the grass of a summer morning leave their prints for the use of sorcerers like me to make our magic.

I’ve seen those cardboard-colored shadows.

Don’t overload the truck. Her arm, as if it were all cloth, waved over the row of waiting books. When the Ree-shelvers arrive — those that have been out in uncaring public hands — I hold each volume up by its boards and shake it, yes, just as if I were tipping a purse in a hunt for keys — and let the cellophane flutter forth, the strips of foil, all their nasty personal stuff rain down. It is not easy on the books, but their bodies are purged, and they will all be better for it. She gave Joseph an impish look. I talk to them. I do. When I Ree-pair a book I tell it what the operation en-tails and how it won’t hurt. They need to be shown some concern. She paused as if in obedience to a script, as if she’d confessed these things before. They need talking to not just reading from. She paused again. They need con-sool-ation.

With such instructors it didn’t take Joseph long to learn the ropes, and he soon found, as he thought he would, that he had time on his hands. His dedication and energy enabled him to dispose of tasks as they appeared, and even when he looked for work by asking what he should do next, it was often accomplished more effectively than either patrons or staff expected. Through nearly all the hours he found free in his otherwise broken day, he read. Difficult books — those that would compel him to take notes — he checked out on his own card and took back to the garage for concentrated study. This pass — a prized document — had his photo on it and, in hollow red letters, said STAFF. He was rather proud of his place in Carnegie’s palace, even as a mere factotum. When he showed the card to Miriam, it was in such a spirit. Maybe, when the police pull you over, you can flash that in front of them, she said. It was made of stiff pasteboard that he protected with a layer of lamination, and then, at Marjorie’s request, he glorified her card, as well as that of Miss Moss. Without afterthought, he also did the janitor’s, who had been given one as a courtesy, though he had never used it until the lamination gave it class. Now this simple workman took home volumes on hunting, American history, and firearms.

Joseph had looked it up, and so he wondered: How had “factotum” come to mean an oversize capital letter?

Occasionally, when at loose ends, Joseph would carry a chair to the main desk where, in a library empty of everybody but Portho, Marjorie sat reading a magazine; and then, in the privacy only a public place can grant, they would chat. Beneath that whoofy hair she had a receptive ear, and she delivered her opinions, or gave her advice, without any sound of impatience or disapproval in her voice — as if she were thinking with him and not thinking for him. She showed her interest with countless questions, and it was in answering these that Joseph remained cautious, because he feared that his life was too barren and boring as it had been lived and needed a few felicitations to sustain her attention; nevertheless, his additions were minor embroideries, never substantial, except for his father whose character he filled out in the most positive fashion, and whose absence was attributed to an untimely death beneath an apartment beam in bomb-burned London.

Marjorie particularly liked to hear about Joseph’s experiences at the Augsburg Community. She seemed to have a malicious interest in the place. In response to her questions, he found himself recalling more about his studies and his fellow students than he thought he remembered. He could flesh out his accounts as he could not with his mother, for Miriam’s probing often made him uncomfortable and drove him into places where he could not shine, whereas Marjorie’s allowed him to enlarge the part he played in his own history until he could be seen to behave sometimes, with his humility assumed, like a boy wonder. Joseph made her laugh, and her laugh was meltingly musical. What better proof of sincere appreciation was there? He could not turn a phrase as rapidly as she could — hers were spun — but quickly enough so that some of his responses might pass for repartee, a word he had grown to understand and its referent appreciate. “Factotum” meant more than a handyman in uniform. It was a printer’s capital letter. Why?

For Marjorie, in these moments, Joseph played his past, stretching late shadows across the quad, giving Pastor Landau both a lisp and a limp to go with the book he clutched, while emphasizing the pastor’s sly moist eyes. He enlivened his cast of characters in that fashion, changing names to protect them as he broadened their behavior — Madame Mieux made more acceptable as Frau Bertha Haus, until, having been invited to Frau Bertha’s apartment to listen to Richard Tauber records, he flung himself most comically among the pillows, poufs he did not need to multiply, only his panic to reduce and his subsequent suspicions to abridge, in an account that would also mollify his feelings of inadequacy. In short, Joseph made himself the butt of many a mischance without depicting himself as an ass. He steered his stories away from the far too lurid by giving Madame Mieux, a.k.a. Frau Bertha, a dirndl in which to greet him for her performance among the pillows — a dirndl and a stein of beer, a stein which she miraculously did not spill while sinking into swansdown’s arms. Marjorie laughed so hard at this her cheeks and neck grew red.

They gabbled away with such pleasure they quite forgot Portho was in his customary spot near the radiator in the reading room; forgot him until he appeared with fisted beard to demand some quiet for his thoughts, a complaint which outraged Marjorie because Portho was as near to a bum as the town knew, with scraggly locks beneath a red baseball cap that now said only BEER, a beard he raked with uncut nails, and clad in poorly pulled up dirty pants, torn layers of shirt and sweater, and a fuzzy scarf he’d picked up somewhere that hung down his back like more hair; but her anger was also out of guilt, Joseph believed, since they had been rather loud when Marjorie’s amusement at an anecdote became, this time, more than merely rippling. Yet he was a person whose unseemly presence Marjorie had decided to tolerate, even though he came in only to get out of the weather, to warm or cool himself, while pretending to read magazines like Boys’ Life and the Outdoor Companion , even though sound asleep sitting up. Joseph had even seen her put a candy bar on the table beside him while he snoozed, and his heart melted, as the candy’s center might have, had it been placed on the cover of the steam coils.