William Gass: Middle C

Earlier versions of some chapters in this novel have appeared as fictions in Conjunctions , a magazine for whose loyalty I am deeply indebted through all of its history and much of mine. “The Apocalypse Museum,” in no. 37, 2001; “The Abandonment of the Family,” in no. 40, 2003; “The Piano Lesson,” in no. 44, 2005; “A Little History of Modern Music,” in no. 47, 2006, as well as in The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2008 (New York: Anchor, 2008); “Garden,” in no. 49, 2007; “Professor Skizzen Gets the Word,” in no. 53, 2009. I have pilfered a few lyrics from some old-time tunes from a quaint book called Songs That Never Grow Old by Anonymous (New York: Syndicate Publishing, 1909).

Miriam, whom Joey Skizzen thought of as his mother, Nita, began to speak about the family’s past, but only after she decided that her husband was safely in his grave. His frowns could silence her in midsentence; even his smiles were curved in condescension, though at this time in his absence, her beloved husband’s virtues, once admitted to be many, were written in lemon juice. He had a glare to bubble paint, she said. Her recollection of that look caused hesitations still. She would appear alarmed, wave as if she saw something gnatting near her face, and stutter to a stop. Joey was helped to remember how, at suppertime, for only then was the family gathered as a group, the spoon would become still in his father’s soup, his father’s head would rise to face the direction of the offending remark, his normally placid look would stiffen, and fires light in his eyes. His stare seemed unwilling to cease, although it probably was never held beyond the lifetime of a minute. But a minute … a minute is so long. Certainly it continued until his daughter’s or his wife’s uneasy expression sank into the bottom of her bowl, and the guilty head was bowed in an attitude of apology and submission.

When the soup was a clear broth, as it often impecuniously was, Joey could occasionally see his face floating in a brown dream, and he thought of his mother’s real self submerged in a brown dream too, beyond the reach of life. His father sent his spoon to the bottom, and they could hear it scrape as he ladled, faster and faster as the level dropped. He was a noisy eater because he felt noise signified relish and appreciation. Whenever a meal was especially skimpy, Yankel, as he insisted he was, slurped his soup, he sucked his teeth, and he exclaimed Aaah! after a set of swallows. When they had bread, he would strenuously rend it just above the surface of the soup so that flecks of crust would fall as snow might on a pond. Then he’d allow the torn piece to follow after, his hands aiming it somewhat like a bomb. His father would watch the hunk slowly tan, gradually sog, and finally sink. Joseph knew he had to finish his bowl, whose basin would have to seem licked, but he hated to put his own implement down there in the dream and see it thrust through his own moist eye or quivery cheek because down there his thin bit of all-purpose tableware suddenly became his father’s wide one, ready to scoop up his nose or chin and inhale him spoon by spoon the way, later, he read that the Titan who was called Saturn had swallowed his children.

They had reached London by then, where Joseph was born Yussel, and where his father finally got a job printing leaflets for the army; leaflets that were to be dropped on the Germans to threaten or cajole. Yankel was proud of the errors he had caught in the texts. He laughed the way stout Austrians would laugh at anything inauthentic. He often described the leaflets for the family, demonstrating the size of the sheets, summarizing their messages, enacting the way they would flutter out of the sky. Heads will turn and hearts will fail, he said, spinning like a waltzer. Each littering page is hastening your father back from exile — thanks to the RAF and the government’s printing offices — back to Vienna, perhaps even to Graz. His wide hands wavered for each leaf — a wiggle here, a wobble there — and then he would bend down to show, on the floor, how they’d land and even how they’d blow about the street. Already a bit of me is back, he bragged. They will pick up each piece. You know how neat we are. For the mayor he made a face that was puffed as a frog’s; for the mayor he mimed a body bent to hold its belly from the ground; and, for the mayor, he pretended to read a quivering sheet in a quaking voice: Citizens of Graz …

The Fixels endured the Blitz as so many others did, huddled in cellars, but Joseph could bring back from those damage-filled days nothing specific now, only a nighttime world of noise and fear and fire. As well as the warmth of friendly arms. His sister, older by two years, also remembered with fondness hours of being held by one parent or other, though they both preferred their mother, who cradled them while gently rocking her arms, whereas their father squeezed them as if, any minute, they might break free and run away, when it was the squeeze that inclined them to scoot. The dents in their skins, they both vividly recalled, were made by his metal coat buttons.

A long way from Graz, his father would mutter many times a day. A long way. His head was close-cropped, already gray, his clothes simple to the point of penury. They made their lodging more in a pile of rubble than in a building, for one wall of the tenement was down, some stairs had collapsed, and many windows were broken. There is nothing here the Germans would want to bomb, Miriam remembered he often said when they sat at their single table in the middle of a ruined room to dine on dreams and reassurance. For their meals they set fires like tramps, and the shell of many a house in their sector was consumed by soup being warmed long before the incendiaries could get back to bomb them again.

Yankel, as he was officially known then, felt he had to keep the family’s spirits up, especially those of Joseph’s sister, who was inclined to mope and who simply refused to call or even think of herself as Dvorah, the name Yankel had picked out to harmonize with his; so, to do so, to keep their courage, he would uncase his cheap pinewood fiddle (as Miriam reminded Joseph, when they were both in a story mood) and scrape through a few jolly reminiscent peasant tunes. Ach, he was so bad he couldn’t play gypsy, was the line she repeated when, in her tale, the fiddle’s moment came. But she never referred to the instrument as a pinewood box while they were Jews because, as a Jew, Yankel was the head of the household the way, he felt, as a Jew, he ought to be: as completely in charge as any Austrian husband, but with the full backing, now, of Jehovah. All that Austrians have, he said sadly, shaking his head, all that Austrians have got is God; the Jews have Yahweh. Well, which is it, Jehovah or Yahweh, Miriam asked him once. Jews are not permitted to pronounce his name, Yankel said, so they are constantly changing it. I thought they had just one God, like most people, Miriam said, in receipt of a glower. Ha! just like you used to have when you were a Catholic, her husband replied angrily. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Mother Mary, the Four Evangelists, Gabriel and an army of angels, perhaps the pope, all the saints, more than the mind can count. Miriam stuck to her guns: One God ought to be one God, no more, no less. Even busy as he was. With a reach wide enough to attend his chores. Worship Allah, then … Allah is one God, Yankel would answer, triumph in his voice.