William Gass - Middle C

And when a bloom closed in upon itself, brown and wrinkled, its petals now like a body bag, his mother pinched it from its stem. She deadheaded it … listen to that … L’homme . Fearful word, now fearful phrase: dead head. Dead head. Dead head.

In the center of the garden a vine, glossy and vibrant and leafed like the sea, clung to the trunk of a great beech with such intimacy it seemed a skirt, meanwhile other tendrils streamed so prolifically out along the tops of the beech’s upper branches — running every twig as though they were channels, doubling the greenery, putting a leaf inside a leaf — that the birds forsook the tree to nest inside the thick entwinement. Was this rampant plant a garland or a garrote? Surely the beech would die. And afterward, its lover would be — wedded to a corpse. What was the diff? It could climb brick.

After the Fixels arrived in New York, they were handed over to New Jersey until they could be relocated in a small town in Ohio. Miriam, at first more discombobulated than she had ever been, was reassured by the fact that nearby their college community there were Amish living a modest rural life. She began to work in a plastics plant with the word “rubber” in its misleading household name. The serene streets slowly brought her serenity again. And the people of the town were kind. Americans love to feel sorry for others and are happy to have someone worthy of their concern. Routines took over like overlooked weeds. Yussel and Dvorah were sent to school as Joseph and Deborah, a change that officials welcomed as a sign of good adjustment. In no time, they were no more Jewish than they had ever been. The boy, Joseph, began to imagine he was as Austrian as his father and, of course, his mother was as Austrian as anybody. Joseph had his father’s apish gifts and an ear for accents. Soon his English was perfect, yet with a charming, reassuringly distant, Germanic shadow.

Gone, his father had seemed distressingly present, but after a time, during which Middle America distracted Joseph from his history and its wounds, Rudi Skizzen receded into harmless anecdote, and Joseph and his sister could grow apart as good kids should. Deborah disappeared into majorettehood, dating the better automobiles, and dancing through gyms in her socks. Her grades were ladylike Bs while his were gentlemanly Cs, averages adorned with pluses, most often as afterthoughts. Joseph was careful not to draw attention to himself, he made no effort to hold on to his German, and it, too, waned, leaving behind a few words to be treasured like curious shells. In what proved to be due course Deb married a nice-looking boy, nearly Catholic, who would almost enter Yale. The ceremony meant she would move a mile or two away, though it was still far enough never to be she who was seen again, even if, occasionally in town, a missighting would be made.

So Deborah made her escape by fashioning herself like someone on a magazine cover — American health, curls, and cleanliness — just as her father would have wished her to do. Joseph was sadly certain that she would feed her husband wieners and bear babies, but in the USA way. Her house would wear tricycles, aluminum awnings, and a big glass grin. Of her past there would be not a trace, but she had longed to be ordinary, and it looked like her husband would help her to achieve negligibility.

Joseph’s aloof, slightly exotic air could have given him girls if he had not feared he might have to present a certain self to their inclinations, a self some of them might fancy, and tend not only to expect but to desire. He abbreviated his time in life, solely as a youth, to a boy he called Joey, a kid who hated sports but could ride a bicycle. Days, for him, went by like the windows of a jerky train. For how many months of his short life had he been poorly dressed, hungry, and generally uncomfortable, sometimes seriously sick, full of fear for the future, scrunched in a crowded railroad car, staring out of smudged windows at dim meadows, distant cows, poles in regimented lines like those on rulers; or how many hours had he passed standing in the aisles of buses under the elbows of adults or spent being borne about in a blanket, eyes on an unrecognized sky, helpless and in ignorance of every outcome?

Not to mention the heaving sea, the spray that affronted his face, and the creaking speech of the bunks and walls and covered pipes, which he recalled with the vividness of nightmare, although these memories were more continuous and complete than those he retained of London under the Blitz or of Britain during the bland baconless days of victory and reclamation. The only positive spaces were the spaces of the church where Miriam brought them for mass after Rudi ran off, memorable because they felt made of the music that filled them. Mostly, when he recalled parental faces, he saw anguished eyes and swollen cheeks, voices tired beyond terror — flat, dry, hoarse — bodies that could scarcely bear their clothes: these were the companions of his every moment, and their figures became faintly superimposed upon the interested eager jolly features of his teachers whose feigned enthusiasms were no more encouraging to him than the false hopes his mother had — over and over — held out to him, even when she wished he’d cry and carry on the way his sister did instead of sitting silently, as if his wish to be elsewhere, in his small case, were a success, and he was.

A sack of groceries would remind him of a bit of body he had encountered in the rubble when he was barely able to walk, a coated shape lying in a soft soilous heap he hadn’t recognized of course but had held in his head for labeling later. Then the ghost of a bathtub he’d mistaken for a corpse, when his eye caught — beneath wallpaper tatters, wallboard shatter, and plaster dust — a gleaming porcelain rim, rounded like an arm, humanly smooth, bloodlessly pale. And something smelly he’d been asked to eat would push his present plate away as if it were a threat to his life.

Why, he would wonder, had his father thought this nightmare world of bees that buzzed before they bombed was better than Austria’s woodsy hillside peace, especially when his mother would speak about the land they — at least she — had been taken from, with its quiet village, comfy cottage, its honest close-knit farming life. She painted cockcrow and sunset on a postcard and mailed it to their imaginations. She made them hear fresh milk spilling in the pail. Woodpiles grew orderly and large while they listened. Flowers crowded the mountain trails and deer posed in glades cut by streams whose serene demeanor was periodically shattered by leaps of trout that only lacked for lemon.

Later on, when the family was living in its small sterile London reclamation box, he saw on a walk his mother made him take (because, though walks were Austrian, they were also British), black and outrageously out of place in the middle of the street, an abandoned piano that he now knew was an upright, warped and weathered, whose scattered, broken keys he struck again when he began his lessons from Miss Lasswell, as if he were returning them to their tune and time and harmonic order.

His approach to playing was like that of someone trying to plug always fresh and seemingly countless leaks — his fingers were that full of desperation — so Miss Lasswell was soon out of patience with him. Easily, easily … softly, softly …, she would croon, her voice moving smoothly and quietly and slowly at first but soon running up the scale of her own impatience toward staccato and the shriek. She told Miriam, whose idea the lessons had been, that Joey was hurting her instrument, and she couldn’t allow that, think of all the other children who had to learn upon it how to court and encourage the keys, although they were black and white now because they’d taken a beating.