Middle C

by Gass, William H

  Only a brisk walk up a rising street from where he perched, Whittlebauer sat as steady as Stonehenge, and there his students gathered. He heard the college bells divide the academic day into equal and peaceful parts, but never felt the years as they slipped away.

  If Joseph’s seat was not very luxurious—even precarious, rudimentary—it was appropriate and would not encourage nodding off, which he was now inclined to do, although his customarily scrappy little lunch should have left him alert as a hunter. Two similar boxes elevated a drafting board to the level of his knees. Many years ago—oh, so many, Joseph thought—he had come upon this castoff in a salvage shop in Urichstown. Ancient ink stains, coffee spills, and the tracks of thumbtacks, collecting like boxers in neutral corners, made interesting this instrument’s once-featureless face; and there the professor cut out columns of the latest calamitous news from the daily papers, labeled them as to subject, pasted pictures with their accompanying clips into scrapbooks, and emptied a handful of raisins nearby his glass of tepid tea.

  So much had changed since he and Miriam had moved into the gothic “spookhouse,” as he’d heard the kids call it while under the influence of Halloween. The college owned the place as they did many of the old mansions near the campus and let faculty members live in them rent free, awarding the houses like prizes instead of paying their occupants a decent salary. It was also a way of keeping valued teachers from seeking more-moneyed pastures. Joseph guessed that rich farmers had built these mitigations of their wealth when they retired to town. As homes, they were tall, ornate, whimsical, constructed from timber that was both local and plentiful, and band-sawn according to new techniques that made possible the extravagant filigrees of the Queen Anne style. Every such home was required to have at least one biblical moment pictured in art glass and positioned where the sun could strike a landing window: Susanna, clothed as though she were naked and ogled by the elders, Ruth in a swath of sentiment gathering grain in Boaz’s fields.

  Miriam welcomed the large yard with cries of ancient Austrian origin. There was no doubt that she was a different woman from the mousy cottage complainer she had been during their early days in Woodbine when she “sweated over tubs of plastic” and marched rows of unwilling flowers alongside walks and around borders, as if their modest cottage had to be outlined in petunias and forget-me-nots the way a Valentine sported its scallops. Vines had climbed about like too many squirrels, shinnying downspouts and masking lattice with wild rose and honeysuckle. Others lay in gutters like sunning snakes causing rainwater to shower along the eaves onto the sodden soil below and fill a number of the season’s struggling tulips, as though they were goblets, until the petals sprang apart.

  As a landlord the college was as much an absentee as God in the Deist’s conception of him, and it permitted the property to run down in a manner suitably decorous and stately. Annoying as this was, for Joseph Skizzen it had the considerable advantage of his privacy, for no one was likely to wander unwanted upon his masterwork or even raise an eyebrow at his and his mother’s living arrangements: neither the grand piano to accompany the potting table in the dining room nor the scatter of scissors and trowels would cause a snook to be cocked, neither his boxes of flypaper and pots of paste, nor her piles of muddy gloves or ranks of empty flower packets, already neatly sleeved over tongue depressors, waiting to mark, as though they were really graves, the place of some plant’s birth.

  Dicentra spectabilis, or old-fashioned Bleeding Heart, will self-sow.

  Nowadays Miriam wore durable trousers that elastic closed at the ankles; she strapped on padding for her knees; fastened around her waist a carpenter’s apron stuffed with tools and little sticks; drew over her coiled and braided hair a floppy broad-brimmed khaki hat, and encircled her neck with a kerchief soaked in insect repellent. Gardening was war, and like a professional soldier she also bore a firm stern face into battle, uttering hoarse cries (Whoa! or Woe to you, Joseph wasn’t sure which) when, for instance, she removed an invasive violet from her carefully calibrated pools of grass. She would howl and slap her thighs whenever a stray cat came to poach, for she generally thought of the birds as her friends unless, like hawks or crows, they were predators or lazy sneaks who laid their eggs in nests not of their own contriving the way the cowardly cowbirds did.

  Sometimes, momentarily defeated, she would burst into Joseph’s breakfast kitchen. Ah, calamity! Where is my red currant jelly? I shall cook Hasenbraten … Hasenbraten mit Rahmsauce … how would you like that? I’m sure I would love it, Mother. Well, we shall have a year’s worth. Joey, I suffer from an overrun of rabbit. They are eating all my petunias; they decapilate my zinnias; it is massacre season for my marigolds. Poor babies. Malignant hassen! Ich hasse hassen! They sit in the grass like city folk visiting a park and chew my clover. They fornicate in the nighttime and give birth by dawn’s break. A root of ginger, I need, and some spoonfuls of jelly. I shall braten them for a year. Their big eyes shall become my buttons. Miriam laughed, surprised by her language. I am trusting their pitiful squeals will not disturb the music you are singing in your ear.

  Miriam tolerated lightning bugs, dragonflies because of their beauty, bees because of their service. She granted butterflies a pardon even though the charming worms of the swallowtail were insatiable (she’d plant extra parsley the way she once would have set a dinner plate for a visitor); but hornets received no such reprieve because they tried to bite off frayed edges of her chicken when she enjoyed a leg for lunch.

  Do not disturb the dew. Some nights the world weeps. Late-morning light, before the sun grew uncomfortable, was deemed the best time for gardening, and Miriam would, as she said, work hard on behalf of her friends, moving her ministrations from shade to shade. No longer were her enemies droning noisily through the night air, or—in her husband’s language of fear—were they vaguely whispered to exist behind bushes, royal beards, or in government bureaus. And she had allies: ladybugs to eat aphids, lacewings to go after whiteflies. Some of these otherwise züchtig Mädchen carry parasites into the garden, she’d say—I have to watch out for that—but mostly they fatten on potato beetles and similar bad behavers. But you aren’t growing potatoes, Joseph would protest, on behalf of the gorgeous black-and-gold insect as much as the welfare of the tuber or, choosing whatever the argument seemed to require, in defense of the onion’s thrips or spinach’s leaf miners, or any errant vegetarians that might come searching among the flowers, such as the squash’s modestly gray bugs, cabbage’s maggots, or the carrot’s weevils. Ya, but our neighbors are. Better the nasty things should die here. The poor potato (or corn ear or bean pod), Joseph joshed, is born just to be eaten by somebody. God saw to that, Miriam said with satisfaction. God made aphids, too, and … —and (he said with emphasis, trying to prolong his indictment), but Miriam would break in anyway— … so that ladybugs would have something nice to dine on … —interrupting with redoubled pleasure because she had scored a goal. Joseph was then left to finish their contest by lamely naming codling moths and cutworms because God had also designed them. Each of us eats, and each of us is edible. Miriam made her pronouncements as if they were pronouncements. This irritated Joseph, who thought the tone only suitable to speakers with a certain status, a status that was due his professorial position.

  Upon her plants she loosed a vociferous stream of advice. Pointing to the bleeding heart that was prospering in its place across the yard, she would address a flower in front of her that was flimsy and order it to do as Marlene was doing or Roberta across the way: Look at that stream of red hearts—like fat fish. Spend yourself on bloom! Do as Clem Clematis does: Be blue!

  When Joseph wasn’t meeting a class, he and his mother would sometimes exchange shouts about their business, pro and con and up and down. Joseph called his announcements “Reports from the Ruins of Reason.” Miriam merely bellowed, as routinely victorious as any Caesar. She took her midday meal resting on an overturned pail and looking wan as a beaten soldier, sore-footed and weary, while
Joseph munched his sandwich—lettuce and liverwurst—searching the columns for a story and flinging bread crusts from his window. More reports from the ruins of reason. This, he would cackle, is for the birds.

  Digitalis, or Foxglove, impossible to duplicate.

  Sometimes, when a gentle breeze made the blooms bob, and a cardinal lit on the top of their holly tree like a Christmas decoration, performing its territorial song, its tail pulsing with the effort as if it were pumping each note through some designated distance, perhaps as far as Joseph’s even loftier perch, then the professor would be tempted to descend and walk about in the garden, though Miriam thought he did so like a health inspector, his hands clasped behind his back, promising not to touch but bending slightly to be nearer the fragrance of a flower or the wrinkled leaf that spelled fungus.

  It was just that he worried over their welfare, Joseph insisted. How is Clem this morning? Miriam maintained that her son didn’t believe she could do anything really well except cook and expected the garden to fall over dead of black spot, larval infestation, or webworm at any moment. That wasn’t true, Joseph felt, but he knew that it was Miriam’s habit to pick black-spotted leaves off her rosebushes one by one or routinely to rake them up from the ground around the plant if they had fallen and then to burn her collection at a safe distance from all things as if they were the bedclothes of plague victims.

  Train the beetles to munch the black spots, Joseph suggested, whet their Japanese appetites, redefine their Asian tastes, but his mother was never in the mood to humor him when the garden was involved. Let them make nice lace of the leaves, was his final advice. Do you notice how they never eat the hard parts but leave the veins. Remarks of this kind would rile her, because what she got from her garden was not only reprieve and renewal but romantic transportation to the old days—by wagon back then … plodding horses … sing-alongs … cider … the redolent hay—when Rudi Skizzen had begun his love affair with her round wet eyes and when, as Nita Rouse, she had barely recovered from her childhood. They eat everything but the skeleton, Joseph said, and he was not alone in his opinions. They go clean to the bone, the way you eat a chicken’s thigh. That’s what, according to Mother Nature, they’re supposed to do, he’d add in a tone of triumph. Miriam always threw up dirty hands as if to ward off his words. Am I then—your good son—evil, too? Because I chew my food? Professor Skizzen received a scornful look instead of an answer that might have been maybe.

  I’d rather think about the good people, not the wicked ones, Miriam could be counted on to say. Look how that primula lies on the earth like a kiss on a loved one’s cheek. She would smile then, because she knew such sentiments embarrassed him, and reach out with her arms in tribute to the flower’s intense yet tender blue, its velveteen allure. They are as pure and innocent as I was before I became a washerwoman, when we lived in the low hills on the farm, ach, how the day would break, as clear as birdsong. Whereupon Joey would point to the shrill green leaves the primrose possessed, almost prehistorically indented. Miriam would agree that the plant was medieval and had been sewn into tapestries in order to stay in bloom forever.

  Yet it was Joey who was the tenderhearted observer of the scene, worrying about everyone’s health and suggesting remedies he had seen in old books for this or that perceived ailment; while it was Miriam who ruthlessly rid herself of anyone weak, ripping the plant from the earth, not hearing, as Joey did, its pathetic scream. It is not individuals we are growing here, but families, she insisted. I worry about the clan they come from, the kind of plant they are, not about this Hans or that Kurt or my Heinrich. Still, she named them all and lectured them all and threatened them with failure and removal very much as the professor was forced to hector and chide his students according to the system in favor with his college.

  Joseph, who had cultivated snobbery as an essential professional weapon, was always surprised by Miriam’s eagerness to learn the Latin names for the plants she grew and to insist upon their use, so that when Joey spoke about the primroses she would correct him with “Prim yew-luh,” emphatically broken into its pronounceable parts. If he complimented her Jacob’s ladder, she would respond with “Po-lee-mow nee-um.” When he admired her patch of lilies, she told him what he loved was called Lil ee-um and that they were the belles of summer. Then it was Joey’s turn to complain that there were too many “um”s. It’s a Latin ending, she would say with a pleased growl of disgust, because she loved to correct her professor. As they crossed the garden on a grassy lane dotted here and there with the projecting ends of quite-white rocks, Miriam recited the names she had learned, halting by the beds where the named were flourishing: Hettie Hem-er-oh-kal is, Rudy Rud-bek ee-uh, Hortense Hos tuh, Gail Gay-lar dee-uh. Connie Ko lee-us.

  This new learning was both gratifying and disturbing. Everyone ought to have a proficiency concerning which they could claim the honor due anyone skilled, the respect appropriate to every form of learning. For Miriam, as these proficiencies grew, the garden grew, and as the garden grew, she flourished. She became active in the Friends of Woodbine’s Gardens, a group of ladies who met once a month to exchange enthusiasms, information, and neighborhood gossip—quite a lot of gossip if Joseph’s ears were any measure. Nonetheless, he had to be happy his mother was finally a member of the community, had friends, as well as a familiar, much-approved, ongoing enterprise.

  Yet Skizzen had no such friends, his connection with the college had become purely formal, he was close to no one and, if anything, moved farther away every day like the sun in winter. Was he improving his mind as she was? were his fingers more agile today than they had been a year ago? did he glow with pride when his students excelled or when one of his observations was published? no and no and no, the answer came. Only his madness progressed, along with the museum that was its most persuasive evidence. It was an advancement that came through accumulation not selection, repetition not interconnection or—he feared—any deeper understanding.

  He had once thought that the many terrible deeds of men might be understood by positing some underlying evil working away in the dirt of each life like the sod webworm. Perhaps there was an unrequited urge at the center of the species, a seed or genetic quirk, an impulse, bent for destruction, a type of trichinosis or a malignant imbecility that was forever ravenous. It might be just possible that we were killing off the weak to make the species strong. The young men can shoot one another. Those left standing can rape and murder the enemy’s mistresses, whores, and wives. Dead men cannot fertilize, or dead women bear. Then maybe our wars worked to keep our increasing numbers in check. But that hope turned out to be Heinrich Schenker’s doing, who had put these ideas in Skizzen’s head by insisting that for every harmonic composition there ought to be such a hidden center—a musical idea from which the notes that would be heard emerged, and were thereby governed, the way words issue from a mouth when the mouth moves on account of a consciousness that is formed, at least in part, by a nature as obdurate as an underground god at his forge hammering the white-hot blades of his weapons.

  Nicotiana, or the Tobacco Flower, best in C+ soil.

  Joseph enjoyed the progress of the seasons, especially that period in earliest spring when the trees showed the tiniest red tip at the end of every twig—just before they grew a furl of green. The color was like a tentative chirp from inside an egg until you turned your head a moment, perhaps to confront invaders—cabbage whites like tossed confetti or dandelions as orange and unacceptable as yolks where they disgraced the grass—only to find that while your attention had been withdrawn, the entire tree had burst into an accolade of bloom.

  Music, above all, is what drew Joseph Skizzen to the garden, particularly on those days, as crisp as radish, when the birds were establishing their territories. The air seemed to sense the seeds and the seeds to grow toward the songs of the birds. Joseph thought he knew the plants that had sought out the twitterers, and those that had risen for the wren, or a fern that turned, not to the sun, but toward the chatte
r of the chickadee, so quick were the petals of its song, so sharp so plentiful so light, so showy in their symmetry, so suddenly in shade.

  Astilbe, he said to his own ear. There’s a name that could be played—uh-stil bee—a plant that could be sung.

  But the robins wanted worms, and the whitethroats wanted grain; he had read of a hunting season specifically designed for doves; the honeysuckle was rapacious; one stalk of bamboo was soon twelve; and violets choked grass while looking cute. Miriam yanked weak plants from the earth and thinned the strong as if they were Jews, but Joseph could not tease her in those terms—not an Austrian. So he suggested that perhaps a little food … No, not worth the bother, she’d reply while troweling a plant that had prospered in its present position for removal to a place where it would look better. I need to force these to flower, she would say while wielding a pair of snapping clippers. Deformities were dispatched without remorse, as readily as the infected or those that reverted to their prehybridized days or whose blooms surprised her by being magenta. Creams and pinks that had been together several years were ripped asunder because they were no longer thought to complement one another, and poisons were planted in otherwise wholesome specimens to kill whoever might later eat a leaf.