Now, Mother, be fair. We could never afford a sofa with three pillows or a piano as pedigreed or rooms so warmly paneled as this house has.
That’s my meaning. It exceeds we minor mortals. The building is too big for you and me to take proper care of—too vast, too costly, Grössen, too much in the movies. It has gobs of history we are ignorant of and foreign to. Besides, the house is falling apart. You can see it. I can sense it. Creaking to a halt. This place is full of groans. Clear to the eaves.
It’s windy out.
Drafts. I share twelve paths of air in the morning when I make my descent of the stairs. In the afternoon, when I take my nap, we go back together like a bad smell. And the radiators knock.
That’s a sign the boiler is working.
They sound like that dreck you’re still driving.
The house, the car, go bravely on.
You always make excuses when I want to see Debbie. The Rambler is … in op—what do you say?—it’s fragile as tissue is to a snort’s nose.
Debbie doesn’t need looking after. I do. What’s for dinner?
I have noticed that in recent years you are always here at mealtimes.
I notice that in recent years there are fewer of them. Breakfast and lunch I have to fix for myself—
—open a box, stir a spoon in a bowl—
—yeah, open a can, drag a spoon through some soup—
Don’t I do dinner for you?
Now and mostly then. What happened to the Würstelbraten and the Faschingskrapfen I love so much?
Oh, ya, then you are prompt as a cold at Christmas. When the pots steam. You remember sometimes to pour me some wine. You smile and lie about your day. It’s nice. You are going to pretend the Faschingskrapfen remind you of Vienna.
Impossible.
Ya. Indeed. Impossible. You have never been there. Many times. But you like to pretend. When you talk to people at parties sometimes, I see you cycle the streets.
I never do that.
Like a newsboy. You know addresses.
I have never memorized a number or cycled a sidewalk. My tires are flat. Besides, your Faschingskrapfen aren’t imaginary. They are merely missing. Along with Krautfleisch and that Steirisches Schöpsernes you used to make.
I used to be invited to your parties.
Everyone was eager to meet you.
Now nein mehr.
You don’t like being given small bites of things. You complained, at the beginning, that all the parties were the same.
They were little and round. Gossip on such crackers as break in the hand. In every drink, small sunken olives. A grimace of cheese spread on office news. Mein Gott! Carrots leaning like oars in a water glass. I tell you, Joey, chitchat about people you don’t know is boring as celery.
When the first wave of greeting is over, it lies quiet on the sand awhile. Anyway, celery is famous for being celery. Perhaps you should teach the faculty wives how Austrians cook.
In the kitchen, you can’t make a living with just drippings. That’s my lesson. Did you ever find a nice white brick of lard in that place Americans call a butcher’s? This town! how badly equipped it is for life! Or see Beuschel or Kalbskopf or a handful of Hirn or a plump Huhn either? What a town, I tell you! Lamb maybe you can find but not mutton. Now what is Beuschel in this dreadful language?
Lights.
So you say. Who’s heard of “lights” in such a dark and barren land! The lights they refer to are a kind of cigarette.
Close. “Lights” means lungs.
At least you don’t smoke.
No, I don’t do that. I cycle down dark hotel hallways.
The common folks of this dreckish and dismal country don’t eat hoofs only haunches, shoulders, and flanks but not kidneys or brains. They are strange. Odder than Amish. Everybody in town drives a truck.
I can’t argue with you there. These locals prefer only the visible parts of their animals. They devour the outsides of things.
Jews love liver.
They aren’t American.
They don’t eat hair or eyes or ears … Americans. No noses … not Americans. Spit out nails.
Who eats hair?
People eat the fruit in scrotums.
Mother!
I could say more about what gets eaten.
Mother! You have become coarse like one of your graters.
While I grew old, you were supposed to grow up.
It’s my skimpy diet.
You can’t have drafts in the kitchen when you are preparing Krapfen. Or cool instruments—you know—bowls must be as warm as your hands, hands you have briskly scolded, and the pastry board should be in the same state, and not gray with the dust of old loaves. You will need knuckles to knead flat those sneaky folds of air, and you must give the dough a few swats with your scrubbled palms. Whap! Like you slap the cheeks of an ass pincher. The skin of the dough will contract. And have the palest lard nearby to fry your dough’s nut in, like some saint—I forget—he requested—you know—he chose the oil that would make him a martyr.
I can seal the windows with putty.
So. All these rooms, up and down, over and back. We shall rattle around. What a racket! Which one have you selected?
For what?
Arguments. Which one is the argument room?
Do we argue, dear?
Incessantly.
We sometimes disagree.
Incessantly. We argue about whether we argue.
You complain. That’s not the same.
You oppose me only to oppose me.
No. I try to reason …
Haw! You grew to fit into a cartoon of your father.
That’s not fair.
You stayed inside his lines.
Compared with him I have crayoned the sky.
At dusk I could mistake you for him. Ach. I’m glad he’s not here.
So am I.
Then Joseph and Miriam went their separate ways, gradually laying claim to this space or that by making various deposits (clothes, books, other obvious belongings—he coffee cups, she tea—on whatever was flat—sills, floors, tables, radiator covers); or with more deliberation declaring a proprietary interest in a sewing table by covering its cherry top with chess pieces positioned in the same brink-of-checkmate configuration as Capablanca, playing white, had cornered Nimzowitsch during a Mannheim match. Joey didn’t play chess but he possessed an International Herald Trib that mentioned the game. He said the simple wooden figures gave his (patrolled) zone in the sitting room class.
Miriam, for her part, might arrange on some shelves the beginnings of her seed catalog collection or on a fireplace mantel settle a bowl holding only two Christmas cards both from Woodbine’s one and only bank or perhaps upon a hassock pile issues of a magazine devoted solely to knitting. Empty LP sleeves did the trick for Joey until they slid under newspapers still awaiting perusal. There remained, in every room, a need for chairs. Perhaps the most peculiar of their proprietary signs were those that lay claim to a prized window-lit space—even when it had no rocker handy in which to deposit a claimant’s body—such as a saucer into which Miriam had spit tangerine seeds or a sausage saved from maceration by somebody whom neither tenant admitted being, and no one consequently would remove, or several pages torn from a copy of the magazine Modern Musical Notes with its damaged cover depicting an augmented guitar and a player piano. Oddly, no one would confess to having planted that marker either.
The problem, as even Joey was able to discern and Joseph to define it, was that neither mother nor son seemed capable of putting anything back where it belonged. In this house, with its ample rooms and many floors, there were few spaces that could be clearly marked as home for a specific implement, object, or activity, like a toilet, closet, or sink, so that the idea of a possession that was utterly impersonal in its demand for order remained to the pair more foreign than French: that the crayons belong in their box, that pins should be put in their cushion, that plates need to stack in a cupboard; o
r even that states of affairs had their initial conditions to which they should be returned: drawers once drawn open should be shoved shut, doors ditto, shoes kicked off need to be replaced upon their owner’s feet, a book, having been read or fingered to some sort of finish ought to be returned to its gap in the row; and lights switched on should not be left to glow uselessly and wastefully over empty chairs and blank walls or flood vacant rooms with their pointless scrutiny; that beds must be made before they are messed again, perishables put back in the icebox to perish there, the eggcup in which Miriam intermittently keeps her wedding ring scrubbed clean of egg before its next use, or that Kleenex tossed in soiled wads should be responsibly aimed and safely reach a wastebasket: otherwise all will be lost in jangles of clutter and scatter, deserts of dust that will stultify the eye, and piles of partly experienced, and only faintly understood, previous behavior will lie smothered by puddles of past time like uneven sidewalks after a very gray rain.
Several days later, Joseph had polished his reply: “I’ll bet he’s also glad he isn’t.” “… Isn’t here.” But what good is a retort if it comes a week late? and has, as he immediately saw, no originality, no snap. “I’ll wager, he’s glad, too.” Oh, dear, “wager” was the wrong word. “Wager” would bring them both back to Rudi and his winning ticket. All the words were wrong. Short ones and long. They arrived too late, like callers who just drop by to say good night. His choices were as bland as blue milk. They lacked zing. Presence, pop. He had made a mouse trap that had sprung for an ant.
Joseph had also learned to let Miriam have the last word, as if she were still the martinet mother who had borne him out of London in a boat. Nevertheless, in the attic where he had begun to accumulate clippings, he imagined several versions of what he thought might be his father’s response and practiced some appropriate performances. He often assumed the voices of others and presumed their points of view. To speak for Marjorie Bruss he donned her long blue frock, its white buttons marshaled from neck to hem. As the head of the library, she could not countenance confusion and utterly disdained those who, she said, danced the dillydally when they should be marching in squares like members of the military. The Major’s world, of fonder memory now that months of reruns had rubbed Joseph’s embarrassed role in it to a high shine, kept standard library time as it had to keep if it were going to carry out its functions efficiently. Everything in Tidytown, including the paraphernalia and litter of visitors, not just the overcoats, lunch boxes, and handbags of regulars and staff, had a place appointed for it, and there, each morning, like cadets, they answered the roll call: books in their comforting ranks, magazines in their appropriate displays, newspapers rolled on the right sticks, stands for umbrellas and racks for hats, bulletin boards whose out-of-date notices had been harvested, light that had touched, like an old friend, its customary patches of floor, and the fresh hush that a nighttime of silence had delivered to the reading room. Soon the clash of the push-open door would be felt right up to the front desk where the Major would take her first drag of the library’s consoling atmosphere, just as Joey had seen smokers inhale their early morning smoke.
The first cigarette, whose life would be abruptly snuffed in an urn near the entrance, normally belonged to Mrs. Harley Stuart, who arrived shortly after nine with a volume recently read or recently rejected, both now to be returned, almost always with an energetic “whoof” for works deemed difficult and/or heady. Now and then she would share a naughty giggle with Marjorie Bruss, which was customarily followed by her wish for “a novel that’s daring, a story that’s new.” This request would occasion more laughter—screened by Marjorie’s white cloth gloves, her fingers pretending to be modesty’s fans—a sodalike bubbling that the lady gave off when her cork was pulled, and who otherwise never seemed, even during such stretches of snickering, to be a woman that in bed, as it was said, drank, smoked, and read, though she did, and did, she sure did.
At the end of a day, Marjorie would note with satisfaction the number of cigarette ends sticking out of the sand like projectiles from a desert war, counting them with glee, because they each represented a bomb that had failed to go off or a bullet that had missed its mark.
“I’ll bet he’s glad … I imagine he’s happy … I’m sure he’s pleased … to be absent too …” “I’ll bet he’s also overjoyed.” “I’m sure he’s relishing his absence.” “I’m glad he’s not here,” hadn’t she said? So he could say, “Now I understand the reason for my father’s disappearance.” That last would hurt her. Was hurting her wise? Why be wise when stupidity was so readily available?
Visits of son with mother were easy, generally pleasant, when Joseph was a student at Augsburg or working in Urichstown, but now, with Debbie pregnant, Miriam’s affections, formerly pointed at him, had been recompassed. And his usefulness around the house had been put to the test, another exam on which he’d performed badly, having no gift with the pliers or the wrench, and his experience as a handyman limited, when a small boy, to banging against a heap of concrete a shovel whose flat wide blade was expressly made for shifting rubble into trucks and wheelbarrows. It rang like a dinner gong and would be, in short order, taken away from him. The noise is too much like my hunger, his father would say to him, trying to be jovial. Joey did not understand the connection, even now.
After its second rising, Miriam rolled her doughnut dough slowly, lifting the entire mass from time to time so that the softer sides would sag back toward the center and folding its edges in the careful way Joseph folded up his copy of the Times. For Fasching she added a bit of beeswax before fast-frying the floating balls in a very hot pot of pure lard. It wasn’t long before the dumplings took on the color we call gold. His mouth didn’t water when he thought of how they smelled or how they tasted, but his soul yearned for the agreeable times these preparations brought back, because the kitchen was really the heart of any house. He would sit quietly on a stool in the warmth of its occupants and marvel at the magic his mother made.
The house would have enjoyed the company and function of three substantial fireplaces had Joseph been able to persuade them to draw properly; however, as it stood, they smoked like Mrs. Harley Stuart. Of course, had they drawn with relish, and greedily eaten the woodpile already in place, Joseph would have been expected to replenish the supply without hurting himself on the blade of an ax. Although fresh fuel might be a necessity, his injury would be a certainty. So while Joseph felt the behavior of the fireplaces to be quite benevolent, Miriam found them cruel and obstinate. She never failed to exit their rooms without an insult.
Joey had always admired, and desired to possess, even to be, one of those little boxes that swallowed still smaller ones of the same species until almost nothing was left to be the last bite eaten but a grain of atmosphere. The result of this clever storage would be a cube of cubes, secretly multiplying, at least mathematically, and kept, in Joey’s case, in a cigar box papered by exotic young women in hoods for hats and plastered with official seals that proved someone had paid an appropriate tax just to open it. But with his new residence’s gothic vastness confronting him, at first he could not successfully cope. Counter to everything he had heard about romantic styles of building, this house did not seem willing to contain a series of secrets in descending sizes. Everything one did or privately thought stood about like the furniture for sale at Mr. Hursthouse’s shop. There were closets galore; there were back stairs, attic stairs, and a stairway that took you to the cellar; but there were no secret spots where mirrored evaporations might take place or dark corners where bad behavior might go to hide, be by curtains engulfed, or in crawl spaces lie concealed. Perhaps if he were still twelve, the house would feel, by turns, surprising, sinister, and melancholy, but now that he had reached the last cruel stages of his thirties, the college’s loaner was repeatedly threatening to creak (and in that way verify its age), to leak (and in that way call out for repairs), to squeak (and in that way complain of its neglect), to crack and break (and in that way giv
e evidence of its abuse).
Joey had initially looked forward to carrying plates of succulent sausage and creamy potatoes, sauerkraut, or—most particularly—Wiener schnitzels the size of a breakfast pancake, golden like a pancake, too, with three or four thin slices of lemon languishing on top, from a—to be sure—ancient kitchen into a dining room so woodworked it astonished its chandelier; but Miriam had—in effect—announced an end to her stretch of mothering in this life and made it known her present baby had been the unintended consequence of—okay—her son’s gift of seeds, whose subsequent plants had spectacularly surrounded their cottage, slowing most cars and stopping some, and that she would now expend most of her nurturing energies in gardening, because—even Joey would have to admit it—their new yard, though oddly shaped, was the great grand thing about their borrowed house, and it simply yearned to be farmed.
Joseph had his own field to plow. The idea of a museum that would remind its visitors of the vileness of mankind—not its nobility and its triumphs but its vulgar greed, stupidity, and baseness—had taken hold of him; but he was already realizing that many aspects of its subject would have to be left for others, since there were facets of human behavior so persistent and enduring as to defy any enclosure: daily criminalities, vandalism, elementary embezzlements (from local banks, charities, or schools), small-money muggings, corrupt police, neighborhood whoring, disease, drugs, drunkenness, the theft of cars, break-ins and home invasions, every family’s choice of its method of administering cruelty, the repetitive landscape of the obscene, going postal while in possession of guns. If Joseph were to include everything that counted toward his general indictment, he would have to pitch the entire daily paper into his disgrace case: just look at this … and this … and this … and this … and this …
38
The Catacombs contain so many hollow heads:
thighbones armbones backbones piled like wood,
some bones bleached, some a bit liverish instead;
bones which once confidently stood
Middle C Page 41
