For a brief spell it served as a finishing school for milkmaids and put the name AUGSBURG ACADEMY on stationery it could scarcely afford. On warm days girls, aspiring to be ladies, in flowing white garments, could be seen dotting the lawns with sketch pads and easels. Local youths liked to imagine the academy was a huge whorehouse where every attending girl was free, easy, and scrumptious. To support this myth, they made up others, relating stories of fleshy revels that everyone enjoyed though no one bothered to believe. The faculty comprised old men whose privates were presumed to be long past erection and maiden aunts whose charges had died and left them unemployed. The academy’s sole published catalog began, “In a quiet sylvan environment” and bragged that in its precincts even the offspring of deer were safe. All that remained, now, of those daisy days were a few signs, one in a parking lot, another, directional, toward a stream that had dried up, and a third, partly hidden by shrubs, that read, confusingly, AUGSBURG COMMUNITY ACADEMY. After a short time the finishing school returned to Lutheran arms and virtue’s camp where no one gave its coeds the compliment of slander.
Augsburg Community College did not pay its students for their chores. If you clerked in the bookstore, mowed the lawn, or washed the dinner trays, you might get a break on your board bill or free books in exchange, a slight reduction in your tuition, a cut in your room rent, or, more likely, a waiver of student fees. Joey hoped to get out of phys ed, but he couldn’t cut a deal. We’ve given you a room, that should be quite enough, he was rather severely told. He didn’t know America that well, and at first accepted the system as standard, only to find out later how unusual it was to have half the student body on work-study, which included painting, sweeping, and tuck-pointing. An answer to the question, What’s your major? might be Latin and lawn care. Augsburg, Joey decided, was either a very progressive artsy-craftsy school or a license-plate prison.
So he never had any money to speak of and was living, in consequence, a good Lutheran life. His innocence forbade him to notice how often the poorer pupils augmented (only they called it Augsburging) their income by doing favors for those better off, another clever way Augsburg had of readying its students for the world. Some stole exams; some altered records; some sold sections of themselves for sex; some swiped candy from the commissary. Joey thought he was being original, acting like a criminal, when he slipped a few small packages of flower seeds from the groundskeeper’s shed; easy enough to do, the door was often open, and guarding a few ageratum packets was no one’s urgency.
Joey didn’t know which to feel worse about—his empty pockets or his criminal pursuit—but he needed a token gift for his mother’s birthday, and he was confident a few small packages of seed would not be missed. Untutored pilferator that he was, he did not consider that the seeds could be out of spritz and as old as Nita’s memories. His gift was meager, his mother forgave him that (there were exactly half-a-dozen common annuals, all edgers); it was also a surprise to her habits, since she had shown no interest in either their dismal yard or absent garden; but she understood her son’s circumstances and did appreciate the gesture the way the cliché said she should, so she let only her eyebrows rise when she undid the thin green string and pressed flat its flimsy wrapping. The seeds went in a dresser drawer where, if they were lifeless, they grew even more inanimate.
Among the flaws in Joey’s character, which, at this age, he was quick to reveal, was his adolescent’s demand for praise and reassurance before doing anything more meritorious than exist. Everyone he knew was as stupid as a brick, and he pitied his plight: that he had to pretend to be another brick packed in a stack stuck among them.
Joey practiced keening on the organ—faithfully, which meant religiously—and tried to carry away a few things from his classes; but his teachers were largely wizened one-note relics from the bottom of the barrel, bent by holy poses into zeros. He believed that the world despised them whenever it thought about thinking of them at all; they despised one another; mostly they despised themselves. They were noticed because they were so unremarkable, and this Joey took note of: do not fall so low as to be treadable, because people tend to watch where they step, curse when they stumble, and tromp upon supines and other grovelers. Never fail, merely pass. Slip by. Don’t miss the class photo but, if short, find a place in the middle of the back row. However, he did learn from the texts each course required—even the shabby ones, used ones, out-of-date ones, boring ones, schoolbookish, double-columned ones with dictionary-sized archival photos spotted about like illustrations of things no longer made and for uses no longer remembered—he learned not to highlight every other line or deface margins with doodles or smart remarks, dog-ear pages or enlist a paper clip or rubber band to do the work of a ribbon, because these practices reduced the books’ resale value. And you would never have any further use for Amo Amas Amat, the Latin first reader, or A Concise History of Lutheran Thought, required for all students, or Biology for Believers, a junior elective. Copies circled endlessly like stratospheric trash.
Madame Mieux’s laughter preceded her like a warning siren. She taught French in a loud raucous voice that went with that language as smoothly as wool with silk, though her gutturals were okay and her r’s rolled like dice. Madame Mieux had breasts, and breasts bothered Joey. He preferred them hidden under clothes that billowed. Madame Mieux used makeup, and that was disapproved of; she wore tight skirts, and that was frowned on; she hennaed her hair in a style she said was à la française, and that was widely thought vulgar; she collected bracelets on her wrists, and that was deemed tasteless; she hobbled about on open-toed high heels that made her look ridiculous; she put her hand on your arm when she spoke, her eyes widened as if to swallow your ears; and her accent was so fraudulent as to mock your meager understanding of la patrie and la parole.
She appeared to take a fancy to Joey, who had initially enrolled in enfant French in order to avoid Latin for at least another semester. He was told that Latin would help his English, but it was Latin that was dead. German was the other tongue that the academy was prepared to make you wag with some proficiency, but when, during his application interview, he saw that knowledge of German was, in his case, assumed, he kept contentedly quiet and let them believe what he had only let on. It was a technique he would perfect. So to graduate he had to have French. Madame Mieux was a spilling handful, however, and he began to have doubts that he would make it. At first Joey appreciated her apparently genuine vulgarity in such a crowd of stodges. As it proved, she was a deceiver, too. She came from some coarse place in New York City; she was an old maid and not an old madame; her hair wasn’t hennaed, she wore a red wig; and she yelled in her classes and stood close to talk because she was hard of hearing. Every student of hers eventually discovered these things—it was what they learned.
However, in addition, Joey acquired this: among Madame Mieux’s affectations was a love of French music, and indeed she could do a good imitation of Edith Piaf growling the verses of “La Vie en Rose.” One day, on a portable player that Mr. Hirk would have listened to without complaint, she played for the class a song by Hector Berlioz. Listen to the diction, she admonished them. The song was called “Absence” and was sung by Eleanor Stebber, of whom Joey had dimly heard. Now he understood what was meant by “the long line.” He was transfixed. Here was a purity, a beauty, of which he knew too little to dream.
The rows of impassive faces alongside him—listening to the diction, he supposed—made him realize how lucky he was that he could hear what was being sung and how unlucky he was that he could neither sing nor write nor critique but simply be moved by this poignant work whose words he understood only through the sound of the song itself, having let his attention to the diction slip. It was his solace, his secret delight, his cherished difference, and because his expression was probably as wooden as the others’, his response was as hidden as a bee in a blossom. Yet Madame Mieux had caught something. Her quest for a protégé had sharpened her faculties. She had seen light like the sh
adow of a cloud cross his face. It was no doubt on account of the diction.
When the song was over, she said to the class: This lady was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. If she can speak French, so can you. Wheeling, West Virginia, Joey thought, running the words back and forth between his ears, what a paradisal place the name must designate. A number of years had to be disposed of before Joey discovered that the divine singer was Eleanor Steber, pronounced “Steeber,” not the Stebber of Madame Mieux’s mangling. Marcella Sembrich, Eleanor Steber: worth a caress.
Madame Mieux scribbled a note to Joey on one of his examination papers. It was a vapid vocabulary and conjugation test that she had decided to award a C even though a minus should have been added—her note said. Your classroom demeanor shows promise, she wrote, beginning to pencil her observation in French, a gesture that she then thought better of and crossed out. Joey knew what “demeanor” meant. It meant she had designs. Had she, in class, been more properly dressed, this thought would not have crossed his mind, for he was not vain about his person or interested in hers. She asked Joey to fetch books from the library for her. Delivering them to her office, he was requested to fill a vase with water from the bubbler in the hall to refresh a few flowers she was rearranging. At receipt of them she grabbed him and delivered a peck to each cheek. She saw how red her busses left him, and this encouraged her. See you in class, she said to his retreating back in a tone she usually reserved for speaking to her cat. An angora, it lay its swollen body down to sleep in a basket that Madame Mieux parked on the windowsill in her office. There it could look out without opening its eyes.
Sundays he would sometimes hitch a ride into town to see his mother. They’d have dinner together and chat. Miriam would tend to fall into reminiscence if Joey did not keep his hold firmly on their present life. Madame Mieux was useful for that. As Madame was presented to her, Miriam could only be amused, and she asked detailed questions about the teacher’s dress, questions that sharpened Joey’s eye for such things. Miriam concluded that Madame Mieux favored autumnal colors—rust, plum, ocher, tan, mauve—because they complimented her henna dye job. Miriam, whose hair had been jet as a Jew, and blond when English, insisted that, though it was true that Europeans, the French in sad particular, used henna as if it were soap, nothing whatever went with it but the dance hall.
And Miriam wanted to know what the flowers were, and was the vase nice? However, Joey had not done his homework. He had paid no attention, disappointing still one more expectation. Well, it’s better to have your teacher sweet on you than you sweet on your teacher. Maybe you can get a B out of her. Joey wondered—not aloud—what it would take to reach an A. Nor did he say he didn’t want a B, because that would relight an old argument. His mother did not understand her son’s preference for mediocrity. At first she thought he must be basically a plodder and was pretending to be aiming at what he couldn’t miss. It’s smart to want to be dumb if dumb is all you can do, she said, but where was his ambition? where was his pride? how did he feel when Debbie brought home Bs? and was so bubbly inside when he was so sober? because she did dates and all the things that teensters were supposed to do—examined herself in all the mirrors, felt wounded by the wind, would sulk in her room if the phone that rang wasn’t ringing for her, loved the drumstrum music kids liked at her age … while Joey’s lugubrious preferences were for distant English horns or Saturday orgies at the opera … at least a little Fledermaus, Miriam thought, a bit of Gypsy Baron, would be a relief.
Madame Mieux was hard to pin down, and Joey appreciated that. Her name wasn’t her name, her hair wasn’t her hair, her cat was on loan, her house was a rent, the flowers in her little vase would die, not to be replaced, and her knowledge of French was suspicious. The difficulty? she was now defined by these deceptions. Her love of music appeared to be genuine, although Joey gradually realized that all the composers she was possibly pretending to admire were French: Berlioz foremostly, Erik Satie had surprised Joey by turning up, Debussy and Rameau, Gabriel Fauré. Fauré? Then he made a mistake. He was young and new at the game that, on this occasion, was his Hide and her Seek. He made a mistake. He told Madame Mieux that he had begun reading Berlioz whom he understood had quite a reputation as a writer. On the alleged basis of that encouragement, he was invited to Madame Mieux’s house to listen to music. There would be a sofa and sweets, he suspected, but a better Victrola than Mr. Hirk had. She promised him Berlioz—a trombone concerto. What could that be? He made a mistake. He accepted her invitation. And on the appointed night, he went.
Joey rang the bell and was startled to hear her laughter enlarging as she approached the door. She seemed ever so short and was dressed in a fulsome robe. Her head wore mist like a mountain. The smoke smelled sweet. In order to get in—Come in, she’d commanded—he had to squeeze by a deep loopy sleeve and avoid the red end of her cigarette. Smoking was frowned upon at Augsburg. It was spring, so she didn’t have to take his coat. He saw a rose-colored room. There were pillows everywhere. Piles of pillows that glistened or glittered. Little pillows. Large fat smothery pillows. Paunchy pillows. Pillows with hortatory mottoes. Joey swallowed his own laugh—one of apprehension. He thought maybe a nearby pile was heaped upon one of those currently popular beanbag chairs, but it was pillows, all pillows. None of them, as far as he could see, were bed pillows, but they did feel as much at home as they would in a boudoir. There were pillows with tassels; there were scalloped pillows; there were embroidered pillows; there were patchwork pillows. There were round, rectangular, three-pointed, long, flat, cubular pillows. He followed a path to the center of the room and slowly turned to see where he might go next. Make yourself comfy, he couldn’t believe she said. The lid from a large tin lay on the floor in the middle of a barren moment. It bore a drink and received ash as if there would be anything left of Madame Mieux’s roach but the afterglow. Where, Joey wondered. Anywhere, she said, and flung herself down in front of him as far as her brief length would. In a mirror Joey saw her burnt head floating above a sea of cloth.
On the walk where he had fled Joey tried to draw air from the stars, his ribs closing on his lungs like the doors of a cage. He realized already that he was not embarrassed or repulsed, he was terrified, and that terror was not the appropriate response: amusement maybe, disdain perhaps, a sense of superiority or a feeling of pity: any one of these might have saved the situation. Instead, he had humiliated himself, fleeing from Madame Mieux’s pillow party. But it was iniquity’s den. And she was the den’s mother.
11
Mother … (a formal address for a serious subject) … Mother, perhaps my father was a ’fraidycat.
He was brave enough to risk England.
He was just fleeing from the Nazis.
Your father was a good Austrian; he had nothing to fear from the Nazis.
Then he had no reason to skelter away to England.
If you do something without good reason, Joey, does that make you feig?
I guess it’s what you run from without a good reason. My father said he was avoiding evil by shunning the wicked—always a good reason.
No, Joey, sometimes you have to confront crooks with their crookedness.
It didn’t do, did it? to confront Nazis.
Nazis? no … but your father only claimed—aloud and at length—he claimed that the fruit of fascism would poison its tree and that the roots of such a tree would contaminate the earth and that the evilized earth would seep through our boots and travel up our legs and—well—damage our desires, curdle our blood, and beat out our brains, but saying so doesn’t print it in the paper; he just said that: said it—said it—louder didn’t improven the noise—he couldn’t know he was right at least as far as the roots—their poison—went; how could anyone know such a thing, how could anyone even guess? he invented it—the danger like the lightbulb—even if it would become—okay—sort of true eventually on account of Austria’s bad luck in living nearby Germans; he pretended to see dark clouds, and if it rained like h
e said it would, if it came down as it did sometimes at home in strings, even if the ground drowned, it wouldn’t change the fact that he imagined clouds before there were real ones.
Maybe my father had foresight; didn’t he say so?
Say so—sie sagen—say so—is say so, so? no, Joey, his foresight was a boast like the butt of a nanny.
Mother, maybe getting out of a bad place isn’t such a bad idea and can’t be called cowardly—careful at worst, prudent perhaps.
He didn’t take me out of a bad place, Joey, he took me out of my homeland and lovehouse and marched me off to war; we went where the bombs would be; where we—I include you—would see people burned—skin and bones, worst of all, hair, like celluloid, nails; where only cats had the sense and slither to be safe.
I want to think my father ran away from more than blame, Mother; that he tried to do no harm when harm was a universal habit.
He harmed you, didn’t he? We lived on water for weeks, maybe you were too young to remember—just as well—and slept in the same clothes the livelong day, day in and day out, as if they covered us like bark; and he hurt your sister, holding her so hard when we sat in—what in hebe do they say?—the Tube, adding our stink to the stink of the sewer, to the smell of other smellers; and the bricks shook from the bombs, and the lights dimmed from the bombs, and people screamed or fainted, fearing to die in the middle of their complaints as if their complaints were dinner.
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