Madame Mieux—there! he’d invoked her—name, naughty thoughts, and all—now he’d brought the weird one into view—what were you up to when you asked me over to listen to a piece by Berlioz you knew he’d never written? why didn’t you pick up your pillows, they make a sorry scene, quite tasteless and unsettling? and to come to the door in a drug-induced daze to greet a young and simple pupil? in billowy belongings that didn’t seem quite fastened on you? Seeing you in school standing in front of us in your tight hips and tall shoes; hearing you shout French as if you were on an unreliable telephone … well, Madame, seeing you, hearing you, did not entice any of us to touch or smell or taste Mieux, too; no, did not tempt us to come closer than we had to, loll on one of your souvenir pillows, our noses full of pot smoke, and—who knows? after music, after chocolates—to be done to.
On gray days, when the light was soft and the grass was greener than seemed possible, Joey would often see Professor Pastor Ludens crossing the quad in his customary black suit, stiff-legged, too, like a crow, a bit pompous, bearing two dark books, each held against his chest into which they disappeared—a Bible and the hymnal, Joey guessed. He appeared especially often on autumn evenings when the sun was low and hid behind the treetops as well as in the clouds, possessing so little strength it could not lend the pastor a shadow to precede him on the path to the chapel from whose loft windows Joey would observe him approaching so that, suitably warned, he might slip swiftly from the choir himself, as if his practice were concluded, to sit in his basement room sheltered by the sort of careful silence that signified he wasn’t there even when he was.
After a canny edit of the details, Joey told Miriam about his interview with Rector Luthardt. She was ready to hit the rector with her purse. How could that man and his renegade church possibly object to Joey’s playing for Saint Agatha? Joey had found a word for Luthardt’s complaint—miscegenation—and Miriam embraced it. It was better, both thought, than “syncretism,” which sounded barbarous. In her eyes, nothing could have justified Joey’s suggestion that he leave Augs more readily than his account of the moon-faced rector’s remonstrances and the suspicion that spying had to be their cause; however, if he were to decamp (as he subjunctively put it to her, though he had made up his mind already), he would need to find work, since her income scarcely kept her afloat; she didn’t need his weight in the boat. In the settlement’s infrequent newspaper, the Woodbine Twines (a name of uncustomary originality unsupported by its content), Joey read that a librarian was wanted in Urichstown, a community squatting nearby that was slightly larger than Woodbine and had a distant view of the river. Posting the opening in the Woodbine Times (he was disappointed to learn he’d misread its name) was a little like nailing a note to a tree to advertise your lost dog. There was a Greyhound, and he boarded it for what was an annoyingly slow ride, since it seemed to stop like a school bus at every mailbox along the way. When the windows began to move, Joey remembered without nostalgia his long railroad journeys and the sense he had of falling through farther and farther patches of foreign country. It was late spring, and fields and forests were a wet raw green. Tree leaves had reached their fullness for the first time, and Ohio’s low easy hills lulled the eye. The road made slow undulating music all the way to the river.
Just off the customary courthouse square, which told Joseph that Urichstown was a county seat, he found a small tidy stone library funded by the bobbin boy Andrew Carnegie, bless his generous Scot’s heart. At a large semicircular desk sat a woman wearing a huge head of gray hair that the wooden triangle lying there said was the hair of Marjorie Bruss. She raised her head from her reading, and her hair flew as though quail had suddenly taken flight from a hidden nest.
You’re not from around here.
No, ma’am. I’m from Woodbine.
We beat you in basketball.
I wasn’t aware.
That’s a good sign.
Gee. How did you know I’m here about the job?
You don’t have a card. No one comes in here without a card.
How did you know I don’t have a card?
I know the face of everyone who has one, and the hand that holds it out to me. Except for the too-olds and too-ills who can no longer climb the steps.
Well, whom do I see about it?
Indefinite reference.
The job.
You see me. You said “whom.” “Whom” is also a good sign. Miss Bruss paused. It was apparent she was questioning herself. We did put an ad in Woodbine’s fish wrap. She caught his look … read it … revised her remark … Its newspaper.
I went to Augsburg Academy. I live in Woodbine.
That’s a long commute.
I live with my mother, but if I had this job I’d come over here to room.
The way you do at Augsburg?
Yes, ma’am. I played the organ at the school, but now I’m through.
What was your major? For the first time, Miss Bruss picked up a pencil. Her fingers were unmodified.
Um … Music. Um … English.
Music. Good.
The piano is my real instrument.
Are you …? I hear something.
I’m Austrian. My father was. My mother is. She brought me over ahead of the Nazis.
What’s your name?
Joseph Skizzen.
Two z’s? She wrote.
Yes, ma’am.
You graduate this spring?
Um.
This job doesn’t pay much. What do you want it for?
My present job doesn’t pay much either. The college covers my board and room.
You’re on a scholarship?
Um … Same as.
Can you catalog, check out, check in, reshelve?
I can learn. I can count. I know the alphabet. They don’t cover cataloging at Augsburg.
Are you a Lutheran? Religious?
I can be if I have to.
Ms. Bruss laughed like a contralto, though her speaking voice wasn’t notably dark.
What do you want it for—this job?
I can’t live off my mother anymore. She can’t afford me. And I want to go further on in school, but I didn’t feel … well, frankly, I didn’t feel I was learning enough at Augsburg.
Augs. She laughed again. Ugh. She thrust the pencil—point first—into her hair. “Further” is good. Delicate distinction. But you’re too young. You don’t look twenty.
I’m nineteen.
Through Augs by nineteen?
I accelerated.
What do you go by?
Jo—Joseph.
Below her hair, Marjorie Bruss had a rosy round face, quick laugh, and happy wrinkles like lashes about the eyes—beneath her hair, no neck and lost ears. I have to tell you.
Ma’am?
No one wants it.
Don’t you get to read?
For days. Maybe that’s a reason no one wants it. But the pay is poorer than bad cheese. The only applicants I’ve had are eighty. They are trying to earn the price of their plot. They will bore me till I lie in one. I need someone who can carry armloads.
I have two forearms.
You’re quick. But a tabula rasa.
I will ask you lots of questions. What’s a rasa?
You’re a blank page.
I’m a clean sheet.
Okay, Joseph. She gave Joey a piece of paper with a dollar figure on it. Accept this and you’ve got the job.
14
First, he walked around the town. It was located in a valley that had one obviously open end because you could follow the accelerating water of the creek, as well as the main drag that paralleled it, in order to see now and then at some distance the broad blue Ohio into which the fast stream poured, earning for itself the name Quick Creek, though the natives said Quick Crick, since the stream was often like a line of ink and also because they couldn’t help themselves. The many elms that once shaded most roads were ill, but not all of them had been taken down. Squeezed as it was between hills, Urichs
town was only a few streets thick, and cross streets were short, stopping at the crick or giving out like a winded runner some small way up a slope. Apart from a square of judicial buildings that had been set to one side as if by a picky eater, the main points of public meeting were the three brief bridges that spanned the Quick, and kept the two halves of the town together. They were said to be “brief” because they had no great distance to span and because spring floods often rushed roiling water through the town to wash one or more of the crossings away. These floods were consequently measured by the spans they engulfed—“one bridge,” “two bridge,” or “three bridge,” as sometimes proved to be the case. Only when the Ohio was so full it forced itself up its tributaries, and the rapid water from the hills ran into the river like a truck into a train, was the flood actually fierce enough to endanger homes or public buildings.
Joseph sat on a bench at the bus stop whiling away the half hour he had until the posted time of its arrival, and then the fifteen minutes more that would pass before its actual appearance. The weather was perfect. Sun ran over his calves and flooded his feet. There weren’t many people about, and those he could see kept to their missions and paid him no mind. Traffic was subdued. He thought how differently he felt about this change in his circumstances. For many such moves he had been but a burden with a runny nose, a loud sore throat, and a pair of frightened eyes, someone who inconveniently remained the same armload of duties wherever his mother and sister bore him. However, since then he had begun to strike out on his own. After all, hadn’t he half chosen Mr.
Hirk, sought out the High Note, and taken all the ceremonial opportunities that came his way to play “Beautiful Ohio,” even if he did so with a notable lack of enthusiasm? As for Augs—he hadn’t enjoyed it very much. He’d rarely been stirred the way he had been when playing Mr. Hirk a new tune or even receiving the polite applause of mothers or finding a record worth a turn. Instead, he had become confused. Augs was education? However, the tidy little library with its rosy round-faced librarian appeared so welcoming, and the look of the books gave him heart they seemed so available, as did the quiet of the reading rooms with their promise of repose (a purposeful quiet in which one might sit as if in a pause between movements), that Joseph was encouraged to approach his future with a confidence and an enthusiasm he had rarely known. He wasn’t fleeing from, he was running toward, and what he hoped to learn would be free and unassigned, known only to himself; so that, consequently, to the world Joseph would remain undefined—a vague reference.
For the first few miles the only other passenger was a vast woman with spiky hair carrying a teddy bear. Joseph preferred to think that she had boarded the bus at the last minute in order to save him the embarrassment of being the lone ticket, but she chose to sit in the aisle seat next to him and his window because “We’uns the onlies here, might as well chat to spare the hollows.” Joseph wondered whether she hadn’t been inflated like a float toy by someone fearful of the water. The enormous lady was a comfortable talker and as redolent of goodwill as she was of cologne. He stared at his own glass-imprisoned face—wan, transparent, and stuffed with trees, grass, and bushes—while her chat went on, rarely addressed to him, mostly headed for the ear of the bear. We needs the warmth of this weather, she said. I don’t know where you bin, but I bin here, and we needs the warmth of this weather. It’s misery—and I am witness to it—when—even here—at the bottom of April—clothes freeze on the line. Joseph felt obliged to nod. Like they’d of died—that stiff. And Billy Bear’s blankit here—frosted like windy glass. Her hair as stiff as ’cicles, too, Joseph thought. It must be rather wonderful to assume that the world would receive with interest whatever came into your head. As Joseph was considering the distance between himself and this crazy creature, in order to marvel at it, he remembered that it had always been his job to hang the wash, pinning even Debbie’s panties, bras, and blouses to the line that hung behind the house, carefully stretching the sleeves out with clothespins at the cuffs so she wouldn’t complain of wrinkles; and at that moment he shared this overlarge lady’s hatred of hanging damp trousers up with freezing fingers. Billy Bear likes to travel, see sumthin of the whorl, so sumtimes I jus git a tickit and come on for him to injoy the trip. Nice day for it, Joseph offered. Oh gawd yes but not today, today aint for him, we bin to town on bizness an now we’re goin back to LouElla. Lowell was a village the size of an intersection. Joseph was grateful for the information, because Lowell was the next stop; even now from the crest of a hill he could see where the train tracks turned toward its station. So you live in Lowell, he felt himself safe enough to venture. Sum of the time. Sum of the time I live in Whichstown. Sum of the time I live in Gale. Sum of the time it seem I live on dis bus. Her flesh shook, the heavy flesh of her arms shook when she laughed. That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it? to live so many different places—I suppose not all at once—but so near one another. Oh you guessed it, dear—all at once, shure. But Billy Bear live in only LouElla. Hey, we is home, honey. And she heaved herself up from her seat and waddled toward the driver as the bus brakes sighed and they entered Lowell. Bydeebyby, she tossed to him over Billy Bear’s shoulder. He saw that, though the hair on top of her head was drawn up in teepee-shaped points, it fell like a flap over her neck in back. In a moment, Joseph became the sole passenger on the bus again, but now he was cuddling a mystery against his chest the way Miss Spiky-hair carried her bear.
As far as Joseph could see, Lowell consisted of a wooden warehouse, very weathered, whose southerly lean lacked conviction, a gas station with a porch roof shading the pumps, a store of some kind hidden behind rusted signs, and a junkyard cum car lot that sprawled alongside the road as if everything it contained had been tossed there by someone passing. Joseph couldn’t decide what was more emphatic: lot, junk, or car. A worn sign threatened that not far from the highway a trailer park lurked.
The bus boarded a pair of passengers from Lowell and added one or two every three to five miles until it was about a fourth full by nightfall, when it reached Woodbine. Joseph followed the failing light with a pleasure that caught him by surprise. The bus is returning me to Woodbine, but I am starting afresh in Urichstown. I’m out of the reach of Madame Mieux. I’m out of the grasp of Rector Luthardt. And beyond Ponsonby’s reach. No. Ponsonby was in a book. On his left the hills were as dark as those on his right were bright. Shadows fattened or shrank as the bus turned, showing no signs of indecision. Now and then a window would come alive: disclose the entrance to a low, otherwise lost road, feature a fruit stand not yet in business, or a gate with its mailbox like a sentry—each vision as romantic as his ignorance could make them. He would learn of the world now—even if from books—the way he’d learned to play: by ear, by hunt-and-peck, by instinct, by guess and by gosh—by means of his inner talent. The bus lights blew down High Street sweeping obscurities from gutters, walks, benches, and façades. Joseph stepped off a block from the Point and whistled his way home, rehearsing the piano opening of a Brahms quartet, the first one in G major, with Rubenstein and the Guarneri, pretending to be the piano as it tiptoes down a short flight of stairs into the strings.
After Joseph had been shown around the library, Marjorie Bruss handed him several employment forms to fill out. For tax purposes he would need a social security number, which Joseph realized he didn’t have because he wasn’t in fact a citizen. As a refugee his mother had been given something she called an alien labor letter along with other dispensations, but Joseph, though born in London, was still an Austrian to the bureaucracy, a fact that filled him with delight but was now a real difficulty. It occurred to him that in all likelihood not a single penny he had ever been paid for selling records or playing music had been reported to the government. You could study and become a citizen, and then apply for a number by which you would be forever known; or, for a simple work permit, you could allow yourself to be caught in the inky coils of a distant and indifferent bureaucratic squid. Joseph had Miriam’s distrust of offici
als, and, though his English was as American as the next guy’s, and his invented numbers had been accepted by everyone throughout his schooling, he had absorbed from Miriam the uncertainty of one who wasn’t native. Nor did he wish to ride the bus with the frequency boasted of by Miss Spike, whom he might also meet going to and fro from Whichstown, Gale, and LouElla with her bear. These demands meant he’d have to purchase a car, however cheaply, learn to drive it, and get a license upon which, he feared, the social security number he didn’t have would need to be prominently posted.
Joey immediately reported his good news to Miriam, who disapproved of his salary, questioned the distance, and worried about where he’d live—in a tent, on a dime, at the edge of the earth. After a few more congratulations of this kind, Joey described his quandary: on the forms he had been given there were blanks aplenty for a social security number. Your mother is a resident alien, a mother from the moon, she said.
But you must have one?
Yes, yes, now, yes, it took years, yes, I have one, but you don’t, you are an unregistered resident alien.
And what is Debbie, then? Is she numberless, too?
Your sister doesn’t have to work. She doesn’t have to drive. She married well, a man who nearly went to Yale.
That’s how it’s done? to live numberless you need to marry?
It’s true, you do lose your real name.
You can hide behind your husband’s credit, I suppose. Live in his house.
Bear his kids. Slice his beef. But you can’t drive his car.
She has her own chauffeur. She gets to sit in the back, wave to the crowd.
If she’s so well off now why doesn’t she come around sometimes? She could help you with a few things.
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