36

From the same post that delivered the professor’s daily New York Times—three days late but with admirable regularity—he received a valentine. Out of an envelope whose lacy getup made him reluctant, he withdrew a handmade watercolor that his past identified at once as by the brush, hand, and careful purpose of Miss Moss. The realization produced only apprehension, since his mother had celebrated the holiday’s sentimental occasion weeks ago with cupcakes and a cartoon movie chosen to amuse Nephew. Perhaps Miss Moss’s wall calendar still hung open at February, as he had once observed. The card was built like a triptych. You saw, first, a bright red apple out of which someone very hungry had taken a bite, although tooth marks were not visible. The apple, when you opened the cover, was sliced to disclose a length of worm as wet and dirty as might please a bird. On the left side was a hand-printed greeting: EAT THIS APPLE ADAM. On the right was a message in bright blue ink: Dear Joey: I am being poisoned by the Major. I shall soon die. Good-bye. Not immediately, but after a brief bemused study of the image, Joey guessed that the biblical serpent was represented by the worm. Across the bottom from side to side, in the smallest of hands, but clearly in the same one, was written: I have stuck a pin into her quim. Though thin as a slot, the pin went in. I thought her dead but she is not. Who would miss that mean old twat? He could not acknowledge the words his eyes at first fled over except with a shiver of aversion. This was followed by a rereading that incomprehension and disbelief prompted, and to which a prolonged hiss of disapproval put period. I do not know what this portends, Joey said almost audibly, as if whispering an aria. He had almost immediately broken out in something. It appeared to be a sweat.

First there was fear, fear of the sort he would experience at any reappearance of his past, especially a piece torn from one of his months in Urichstown: a fear of old unaccountable angers, and the possibility that at any moment he might be unmasked by the simplest mischance. Even the Scarlet Pimpernel was eventually found out. Joey did not take Miss Moss’s contention about the Major seriously—at least not in terms of its reality—but as a concern of Miss Moss’s, he knew the threat was worrisome enough. He was certain, too, that some Raggedy Ann had received a puncture wound, with serious intent to harm.

Of no minor seriousness was the knowledge, verified by Joseph’s repeated examination of the evidence literally at hand, that what had seemingly delayed this letter was not an incorrect address or a redirected journey to his present residence from an earlier one or a passage through the slow-motion screenings of his college, because its labels were all in order and, from what its postmark said, the apparently laggard valentine had been recently mailed, so that it had, like cupid’s reputed arrow, delivered itself with promptness to its target, stirring his heart, if not with love, with love’s equal—alarm.

Then another memory arrived like a late guest—one Joey had allowed himself to forget. Just the other day—no more than a week ago, it was—perhaps two … Joey thought he saw the thin carrot-topped back of Castle Cairfill sauntering along Main Street as skinny as you please. Joey jumped into Schafley’s shoe store like a frightened bunny and then had to pretend he was considering a purchase. He didn’t know his shoe size, but he knew he had a hole in his sock large enough for the flight of a heel. Cairfill had been suspected of theft … back when? Cairfill had failed to return several volumes on fencing … was it fencing? so unlikely … but what was likely anymore? Gossip said Cairfill had been caught playing naughty games with girls. So unlikely. But what was … likely?—what was … Caz doing?—these days. How might he have greeted the scoundrel: Well, if it isn’t … Good gracious, it’s … ’Pon my word, where did you pop from? Wait a minute! It was Joey who had been accused of stealing. Shame reddened one cheek, anger the other. To think he had been suspected if not accused! Police had come to his mother’s house, bursting with impatience; they had rummaged in his bedroom closet, annoyed by their defeat. Even for a moment, his mother … might have doubted … She was certainly angry about the fuss.

Skizzen had never fooled with the surfaces of his pupils either, or with that French teacher—horrid notion—though some people might have gotten ideas. Suddenly he had a picture of the Major thrusting a foil through the chest of a rag doll. The doll screamed, Mum-eee, Mum-eee. And bled ……………………… red thread.

Women. Joey and Joseph and the professor were vexed. Major, Miriam, Miss Moss, Debbie Boulder, Miss Spiky, Madame Mieux … Women. It wasn’t fair. There were only three of him. Mieux and Marjorie, Miss Moss and Miriam … MM and MMM.

The professor had been putting off the thought, even when it followed him home like a stray, that someday his real-life history would be exposed. While sauntering happily along he would stumble over something, the most unexpected thing, a small stone in the road, a buckeye that turned an ankle and overthrew a throne. Or a gust would blow a tattered poster from a public wall to reveal Skizzen with his head mummified in swathes of toilet paper, but otherwise, skinny-naked … then the wind would blow again to disclose a skull covered with shreds of newspaper, a hair of headlines … before his exposed figure became a boney bust of death with teeth made from yellowed piano keys … His heart beat against the nature of what his imagination dreamed: the professor should be shown to be a smiling boy, sweet-featured, a bit coy, modest about all things, quiet, unobtrusive, innocent, though not naïve, and although young and small and weak, fixed in a determination as strong as those of religious faith: Humanity, thou shalt not enmesh me in your horrible history! The sweet smile was supposed to stay until it became the last bonbon in the box, and the rest of his ideal qualities had been eaten by enemy eyes.

Suppose Skizzen were the one who remained; suppose he were the aftermath, the i v e of “survive.” He had finally unlocked the word! Properly rearranged, it read: “I’ve served.” The laugh that fled his throat left it sore. He sat for some time in a silence scoured by that passage of amusement.

What he really wanted the world to see, were his lifelong ruse to be discovered, was the equivalent of Moses’s tablets before they got inscribed: a person pure, clean, undefiled, unspoiled by the terrible history of the earth. So he could rightly say to his accusers (and accused he would be): When you were destroying yourselves and your cities, I was not there; when you were debasing your noble principles, I was not there; when you were fattening on lies like pigs at a trough, I was not there; when you were squeezing life from all life like water from a sponge, I was not there. So see me now! Untarnished as a tea service! I’ve done nothing brave but nothing squalid, nothing farsighted but nothing blind, nothing to make me proud, yet never have I had to be ashamed.

My father’s son! After all … after all … I could be proud.

Yet Joey had been ashamed just now. Or was it just Professor Joseph Skizzen? He had been for a moment uncertain. Yes, it was the prof who had faltered.

Many of his colleagues had seen a travelogue about turn-of-the-century Vienna at the local cinema and began to ask Joseph about it: where a certain square was, relative to his lodgings; had he sat in the pews of the cathedral; whether he had known this man about town or another; had he ridden on the Ferris wheel that had been erected in the Prater, or enjoyed a Sacher torte at the Sacher Hotel? And, of what, exactly, was such a cake made? These questions had quite unnerved him. He said, truthfully, that he was too disturbed by the past to discuss its leaner features. Since that moment of emergency—heavens, it was some years ago—Professor Skizzen had taken care to read up on the period of his residency. Now he knew all the names of Vienna’s points of interest and a bit of the bios of its main men. And of what a Sacher torte is made: chocolate cake and marmalade. As the thirties there drew on—which meant the deepening of his civic reading—he felt he could occasionally catch something of what his father had said he smelled: the aggressive odor emitted by an increasingly fragile smugness—in sum, rudeness heated to the degree called brutality.

He had now the habit of rehearsing some of his more elaborate stories, whenever he had a free moment, so that he would not forget the facts he had alleged or mix their circumstances. After a while there were so many anecdotes, vignettes, and reminiscences he kept a card file for them where he noted all the salient details by means of keywords: whooping cough (when and how serious), the stormy voyage across the Atlantic, close calls during train travel, funny things that happened to him while learning how to play the piano, ditto for the organ (very chancy, that one), the arthritis that limited his present performances so that he could no longer give Chopin or Liszt recitals (as he once had done, to great acclaim), the makeup of the legendary Vienna Philharmonic—its death and resurrection—the fat content of the local cuisine, what he learned in Vienna from the esteemed Gerhardt Rolfe, the noble nose of a character he called Father who smelled catastrophe. About real people and actual events—his sister and his mother mostly—Skizzen possessed a reluctant tongue.

What had once been difficult to utter—falsehoods that weren’t just social lies and lame excuses or little trivial elaborations—in time became a custom and a challenge. The satisfaction he felt at being to the world an artifice was the deepest he knew. All the world was a stage. But not for all the world. Over time his tales became so much a part of his public self, he could eventually remember, as he recounted them, how he felt, for instance, when, nearly naked, he ran after his Rambler as it coasted backward down a hill into the highway. In the snow, remember, in the snow. This part of his history had such a brilliant shine that, like a diamond, it had to be rather regularly reset. Where had his car been parked? Why was he wearing a towel? Better make that a bathrobe. And because so many of his stories made fun of their source, they were, he surmised, readily believed.

The persuasive element was always the same: why would anyone tell such a tale if it hadn’t happened.

Miss Moss had sent him an apple, a bitten apple. Its significance hit him with the shock and the shame of a slap. He was the Adam addressed; he was the Adam commanded: Eat this and swallow my message, swallow the truth, digest your guilt, let your appetite worm its way through every self you own. And bring you down.

So—now that you have eaten from the tree, what are you going to do about what you know? Here was shame showing again on his open face. For he would do nothing. That was foregone. Eat the apple and welcome the worm. However, Miss Moss’s threats were surely idle. No one was going to kill or be killed. Rhetoric was rhetoric … and the worm was painted paper. Ah, but how artfully, amid the creamy white pulp, had she depicted that almost living length of moistened brown. Still, how could Miss Moss accuse or threaten when she had helped him take his first steps toward a duplicitous self and its misleading life. Miss Moss would recognize at once what he had done. Lordy, she might even approve. She should approve. Bravo! what a joke on the school, the town, society itself. Of course she would approve.

Okay. From the garden … from the garden he could be expelled. He and Eve, fig leaves in hand. Miriam would find nothing funny, nothing clever, nothing admirable in his masquerade or the solemn leafy departure they made, even if it became a theme for artists to enjoy the way they once rendered the positions of the cross. There were so many cards to watch fall from their delicate embrace of one another: Professor Skizzen’s name defiled, his position, its status, its income; his house, its landscape, taken from him; Joseph’s standing as a musician too, respect—right down the line—lost, Miss Spiky’s hearty warmth cooled by contempt; Joey’s moral purity dirtied by inevitable leaks—seepage was certain—Professor Skizzen’s great project—his obsessive sentence, too—made laughingstocks, the condemnation of mankind they represented turned into a simpleton’s idiosyncrasies.

He had to laugh anyway. Miss Moss had sent an angleworm to do the devil’s business. Who, among that holy bunch, was supposed to be a fisher of souls?

Joseph, when he entered the garden, always sought shade. The beech tree’s trunk had been trimmed of its lower branches so that early and late light would flood easily under the reach of its leaves, even as ivied as they were. Consequently he would sit where the house could shield him, where the faucet was, and a weathered chair that had been positioned to let him feast on the flowers from a vantage bees might have envied. The wood of the chair was of a pronounced gray because flying ants and other insects had meticulously licked off the inner resins that the sun of several summers had lured to the surface. In June, after the season’s first heat had deeply warmed the earth, the garden burst into bloom the way, during the hot evening of the Fourth, the sky brightened and smoked with homemade stars. Now the beds were lit by daylilies during their brief bright lifetimes; buddleia and penstemon beckoned the butterflies and hummingbirds while daisies, monarda, rudbeckia, stood steady for weeks on end, when, every fortnight, the grass paths were cut by the mower’s roll. Sometimes he dozed till his sweat, like the sap in his chair, drew insects to him.

Skizzen had read about posthumous people—those whose real life begins long after their death—but he was equally impressed by prenatal folk who live before they live and are made of fear or anticipation—people whose promise is fulfilled by the promise itself—when one cleans the house in case you might hire a maid—or those villains in books who hiss: I live for the day you die—because its realization is invariably disappointing and often dimmer than a bulb that has never seen soil or emitted light. His father, he liked to imagine, understood how future conditions drew upon present desires to ready the field and plant the earth, scour cities and hills for next year’s pogroms; how the masked ball that has not yet been held brings about its preparations: an engraved invitation, a new dress, a novel disguise, a fresh date. And there are all sorts of details that “flesh out” these dreams: the corsage that a boyfriend sends ahead of himself, the dark car that whisks you and your young prince away, the bright lights that dominate the party rooms, the music of Mozart, the glitter of silks, skins, and jewels … ah, he had let his mind flee into a fiction … he heard hunting horns, hooves, and baying dogs.

For the young prince will become a poor printer, the bright lights will be those of searching beams, bomb sounds will follow sirens, and sometimes screams will even precede. But he, Joey the Joseph, will have no actual past; he will be safely out of the stream of consequences: I was not here, I was not there, I was not noticed anywhere.

So: was Miss Moss seeking safety from the Major by fleeing to the imaginary welfare of his arms, or was it revenge that motivated this menacing greeting—but for what sort of oversight or failure?—for forgetting, when he left the library, to free her from her dungeon room and restore her like a deposed queen to her rightful place at the front desk, next to the day’s overdues? How could he have accomplished that? And the scurrilous verse—he guessed it was—what was he to make of such words and their worse thoughts? that Miss Moss was a witch, too, like the Major and Miss Spike? Hawkins, she said it was … Hazel Hawkins.

How long had it been since he’d worked in the library, since he’d sat like a young squirt in front of the Major and worshipped the whirl of her hair and the swirl of her laughter, too? Thirty years? Good grief, none of these ladies might be alive. Yet here he had a note from the eldest of the trio. Joey had thought of her as old when he was fetching wounded volumes to receive her ministrations in the basement of the Carnegie. Good grief, the library might be gone as well, torn down, its contents scattered to the six winds, though the winds of heaven were unlikely. People, nowadays, liked old brick. They might have stolen its walls to pave their patios. The town itself might have slid into the river. But he had heard of things going on down there … faint aromas had floated up the map … a person passing through from that direction who reported a severe season of bird flock or leaf fall. Yes … signs that said they were there … as we were here … and the world was still at war.

Professor Skizzen disliked mystery even more than Joey, especially mysteries whose clearing up could not be kind, like clouds that part to reveal rain. Was he also old by now? old in an old house, practicing an old trade—not in the teaching of music but in the arts of deception. Was he older then than his mother? Fear-filled will be his nights, when his curtains blow the way they do in the movies, accompanied by gasps from terrified strings. Skizzen, sheet drawn to his chin, shall lie stiff as a stick in fear of the denunciation that his father foretold and his mother described: darkly dressed creatures, caped and cowled, uttering imprecations while they form a hounding circle around him. Fake. The word could not be hissed. Fake. Fake. Evenly spaced. Tock. Tock. Tock. Until he heard his alarm. At which time, his accusers would flap their cloaks and fly through the window. Good grief, Joey admonished Joey, I now remember rightly: the Urichstown library was not built of brick, it was built of stone.

What to do about this billet-dure, this piece of poisoned pen? He remembered Maurice. If you were waiting for the worm to turn, Maurice would keep you waiting until you walked off arm in arm with your impatience, whereupon, leaves eaten, the twig to which his freshly finished cocoon was fastened would sway a little in the wind. A moment ago Maurice had barely had a name. Marjorie marched into view, looking mad. For practice in screaming, she screamed. Sheets of music were hidden in Mr. Hirk’s piano’s seat. On the cover of one song a woman in a widespread dress stood by a bicycle composed of one huge front wheel. A silly thing to wear, he always thought, when cycling—a widespread dress—especially if you were a woman with only one song. How did Maurice arrive to trouble Joey’s consciousness? Not by bicycle. Even standing stock-still, Maurice sidled—sidled in a circle—as if searching for the center of the sky. You have a fake social security number. No, sir. My number works for my taxes and is busy being genuine in the bursar’s office. You have a fake license plate. No, sir. I no longer own a car. I no longer drive. My sister’s husband drives my mother about now, and to the farm to see the child … occasionally … once in a while he does it … all right—only too often. To see—

—his first steps in the making of a duplicitous self … Wrapped like Gandhi in nothing but a diaper, the kid totters toward his mommy with enough glee on his face to cover toast. Debbie wears her pride like a pullover and the fingers that beckon her son are so full of eagerness as to take years off the age of her wedding ring. She is cheering for her team again. She kneels as if ready to spring up, as she will when her son reaches her arms: yes … there … the feat has been accomplished, and up the child rises as gleeful as any victor. Good-oh, Joey cries, clapping his hands hard enough to sting. I picked my way through rubble, he thinks. I brought back pieces of broken homes and watched them get flung away as foreign to our ruins. For my first steps—well, they weren’t my first exactly—there was no applause.

You do not have any advanced degrees, Rector Luthardt said. I have publications that identify me as a Ph.D. Fake. You fake! The word could not be qualified, just multiplied. What difference does it make? A fraud occurs when a fake is used to mislead. You fraud! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God! The words could not be qualified, only multiplied. You don’t like Schoenberg. I do so, and with great determination. Your enthusiasms, your loyalties, are pretenses. Anyway, his early work is okay. Nice of you to admit that much, but what a condescending thing to say. A lie too, by the way. His painted self is your bogeyman. He fumbled his own faiths the same way you have … fumbled them. No, I admired, I longed to imitate, that change of heart. You are accustomed to your dodges after so many years, with every day and every lie, the same old lie, repeatedly woven like a friendly sweater. The maestro led us all astray. Would you say: like shaven sheep on a midsummer’s day? Well, that’s what you might pray to the God your mother worships. But you would be … A Fraud! I put in a good word for Alban Berg. Your life is a lie from earth to sky. I am better at my business, though you call me a fraud, than my colleagues, whom you call genuine. You are a cartoon. I believe in what I say. Cartoons do. I don’t really mislead for gain. Repetition is your reality. I try to give the right change. You think you are Professor Skizzen? My students all address me in that way. Your students are frauds, too. That’s right. The furies—for whom this voice is a spokesperson—give you frights. That’s right. You don’t know a damn thing about music. In all things necessary, I know how to get by. That’s demonstrable, I admit, you are right. I played it smart. That’s right. I took no part in affairs of the heart. That’s right. But now, obnoxious noise, did you notice? “right” is on my side. You are an infant Adam all the same and can only complain of fate and your mistake. In a song composed for my piano? In a stolen key.

Adam’s Lament

He had not played it smart, she was just a tart, though she sang like a lark; but it was no way to start, he’d taken no part in such affairs of the heart, even if he’d been struck by cupid’s dart, and kept in the dark where the cars were parked; because his love lacked art and would make small mark on her hardened heart: oh, she’d played it smart, for her it was only a lark, those affairs in the park, when she’d offered him an apple from a vendor’s cart; well, she’d keep no part of his broken heart because he was getting over the shameful smart of the affair in the park, where he’d bought her a tart from a vendor’s cart, and carved her name on the compliant bark of a birch.