Middle C

by Gass, William H

  I quite understand.

  Read, Joseph, read. But don’t use the words you read in front of a casual public; the words you read and the way they are written are rarely meant to be spoken out loud in ordinary life the way one says “Hi” or “How are you?” with careless or indifferent intent. You may say, “It was quite large.” That’s all right.

  Quite.

  Good. You are a good Joseph today. You shall earn a cookie. Now then, where …? was? Oh. Books must not be shelved so loosely they lean lazily to one side; that will cause them to become separated from their backbones and abrade their tail edges. Look here—she held up a volume by its covers and he could see how its pages hung down like fish on a string. So, remember to hold them as you hold your honey, not too loosely and not too tightly.

  I haven’t got a honey.

  You’ve got a mother maybe. Joseph learned that Marjorie puffed her cheeks while thinking ahead. She did that now. Then: Don’t—I’m sure you won’t—pick up a book by just one board, and be sure to carry heavy folios with both hands. By the way, you might think that turning pages is easy and obvious and needn’t be learned—a cinch to master, you might think—but people regularly tear wide pages by pulling too fiercely and too sharply down on them. I can tell because the tears will come about a fourth of the way along the top from the spine. Thick books have deep creases, consequently the book is rarely fully open. So when holding a book, especially when turning the pages, do not put your thumb in the gutter. Marjorie demonstrated. The page rolled awkwardly over even her small thumb.

  Hands are important here, Joseph ventured.

  Ah, yes, good. Your hands will get dusty in this world of ours, and you’ll need to wash them often. Not just for the books’ sake. You’ll suffer paper cuts. Infection sites. A nuisance but a peril of the job. You’ve probably seen the notices I’ve put up in the bathrooms, yes? Dust jackets weren’t idly named. We do risk the jackets for the first few weeks, when the books are NAs, because even protected they’ll nick or fade a little, but then, after the volumes come back here to the open stacks, we store the jackets in basement boxes as if they were winter wear. Miss Moss … if she chooses … Miss Moss can show you where. Have you encountered Miss Moss?

  Yes I have. We—

  We allow pencils, but watch out for readers, usually women, who use the eraser to capture corners and roll pages over or, worse, who lick their fingers. Admonish them. Be gentle. But admonishment is necessary.

  Ah—

  I know the jokes. Do I have my hair in a bun? With a pencil thrust through it? But we have to admonish; we have to shush. We have few funds and can’t replace books readily, so we must be particular. And we haven’t the space to keep duplicates. We’ve got to sell them off, you know. Send them on their way. Patrons are always giving us duplicates. Miss Moss is in charge of the poor things, as well as the old folks and the orphans. Sometimes I think she is a faint late duplicate herself.

  Joseph laughed in a way that showed his admiration for Marjorie’s turn of phrase without making his mirth seem malicious about Miss Moss. He was learning, and Marjorie sent him a look that said “Well done.”

  Marjorie had told him to choose his eight hours from the library’s day, but Joseph had hesitated because he wanted to pick what would be, for her, the most suitable times. She liked to arrive and leave late—working from ten to six usually—so he said he’d do nine to twelve and five to ten. Although Marjorie only nodded and made a note to install him at the early and late “stamp-out desk,” as Marjorie called it, she appeared hugely gratified, particularly since she didn’t like to make Miss Moss work after dark. In winter Marjorie worried about her steadiness in the streets. However, worry is the most she could do because Miss Moss wasn’t a woman who was easily helped.

  You dust each book when you put it back, Joseph asked Miss Moss, having thought of nothing better to say.

  Yes, I indeed do. I do. Which is to tell you twice.

  I—I guess you did.

  I wipe them with this rag that Major doesn’t like. She wants me to use the vac.

  Noisy. Awkward to carry about, I suppose.

  Because the rag just rubs it in, she says—pushes the dust down between pages. The dust is as fine as polish paper down here. It will work its way into the least crack or crevice. But I wipe it in anyway. The top ends get gray, as do we all. Including the Major. Why shouldn’t they show their age?

  Well, yes, you are certainly right about that.

  You don’t really think so. I’m sure you side with the Major.

  Well, I—I really haven’t sides.

  We all have sides. I am at least hexagonal.

  Well … that many?

  Those who go to the well too often, often fall in.

  Ah, yes, well warned.

  Major wants me to fasten cheesecloth over the nose of the hose and then push the attachment in.

  Really? Why? That seems extreme.

  The Major is extreme. If any fragments of paper, cloth, or leather fly off when I’m hosing, they will be caught in the net of the cheese. Of course they’d be minute and of no worth even if they were pasted back where they bee-long.

  Well, that is clever.

  Ver-ee clever. Miss Moss held her swatch aloft. I am clever, tooo.

  Joseph now noticed how streaked her cloth was. Miss Moss had turned her back. Her dust rag lolled over her thin shoulder like a small towel. Marjorie’d have us wear white gloves if she wouldn’t have to wash them. Miss Moss managed to dial her voice up for that remark.

  As far as the library goes, I guess, she thinks all books are fine ones.

  Joseph thought Miss Moss hissed. She certainly sailed out of sight. Her world must be flat because she disappeared all at once rather than a bit at a time.

  During the week, the busiest times at the desk occurred shortly after the schools let their pupils out. Many stopped by on their way home, high school kids mostly, though occasionally lower grades showed up with mothers in tow. Weekends could get heavy. Then only the front desk was manned. Sunday Joseph was free and took his obligatory drive to Woodbine. Miriam was always glad to see him, though she complained constantly of this or that—this or that condition, repair, or logistical problem for which Joey would have found a solution if he wasn’t living far away in the country of the witches. He had gotten the Rambler to back down Marjorie’s steep drive safely a few times—he just held the wheel steady, disengaged the clutch, and rode the brake—though always with great trepidation, particularly while essaying the turn of the car’s rear into the road. Fortunately, there was little traffic. There, after sitting a bit to regain control of his breath, Joseph would start the motor. The Bumbler (he had given it the same name he had given its driver) made lots of funny noises, but they seemed to signal nothing that impeded his progress, so he learned to ignore them. Driving without a license was the least of his crimes. Driving without knowledge was probably foremost, though the car itself was threat enough. He did swerve unaccountably a number of times, and the gears were still inclined to clash, but he was beginning to enjoy the machine’s passage through the country—with himself at the helm. The automobile enslaved and set free at the same time. This realization, appropriate to so many things, would become a constant in the character of Joseph Skizzen while he was a professor of music at Whittlebauer College. You think choosing the chromatic scale set the composer free? he would ask his class as acidly as he could. It made a slave of him!

  In her own domain, Miss Moss could be as particular as Marjorie was meticulous. Perhaps that was the plan. In one hand Joseph had brought a new arrival, which had a slightly shaken lower spine, down to Miss Moss’s workroom to receive a modest injection of paste, while in the other—Marjorie did not approve of towering stacks from which, when carried, volumes slid off to disaster—he held an old worn Bullfinch whose cover had come off entirely. These he placed on the trolley that stood outside her door and knocked. A knock, down there, was a real noise. He waited and was abou
t to knock again when the door opened. Joseph did not understand that she was the Star and that this was—if not her dressing room—Her Office. Consequently a certain delay in response was necessary. He was, nevertheless, as deferential to her as to a dancer. Miss Moss, I just wanted you to know I’ve left these books—he waved in their direction—for repair. She actually seemed to be smiling until she saw the trolley.

  Oh my, she said, as if in deep distress. I’m going to have to show you how to load a book truck. Don’t balance books on the heads of other books, as you’ve done here. They aren’t practicing to improve their posture. And if you row them like this, with their fore-edges down, see how the entire content hangs from the spine? These days so many books are glued instead of sewn, and it is particularly hard on them to do what bats do. On the other hand if you put them spine down on the truck, the back gets roughened up. The corners of the boards are also exposed, and these points are the most easily bumped and dented. That will happen to them soon enough. You can’t know yet what people inflict on the poor things.

  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 tho
ughts, 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.

  Marjorie and Joseph also discussed music and books. Schenker, Joseph kept to himself. He didn’t know enough to discuss him in any case. But he was quite taken with the ideas of scale-step and voice-leading, which he understood as constituting the x and y axes of musical space. Tonal color, he thought, ought to serve as the third. However, he knew he hadn’t grasped what the introduction called “Rameau’s great error” concerning the figured bass. It would become clear, he hoped, in time, or as the pages turned. There were personages, like Joseph Fux (or Rameau, for that matter) who had not previously been in his landscape, and whose acquaintance he had to make. For the first time, Joseph’s greed for knowledge might be satisfied. The many books that were at his arm’s length made him giddy, anxious, hasty as a glutton who fears competition from a multitude of other mouths.