Members of the Catholic church in town, into which his mother now and then wandered, were accustomed to the sounds made by their ill-tempered organ and to the complaints of their bad-tempered organist; however, when Mr. Tippet fell ill they wondered of Miriam whether her son, Joseph, so well named, might be available to play at a few of their services. They recognized that he had schoolboy duties at Augsburg, but perhaps, for the short while they envisioned Mr. Tippet to be incapacitated, her son could squeeze in some hymns for them. They would be grateful for Joseph’s help and could pay him with gratitude and a sum just short of insulting.
Joey was happy for this excuse to visit his mother, whose cooking had improved remarkably since he had started attending Augsburg. On Sunday evening she would serve him gedünstetes Kraut to which she would add grated apple and Würstelbraten, each slice shot through with rounds of sausage, a dish she liked because it extended the service of the beef. Then they would talk about old times if Joey was unable to steer her away, about the food she fancied from her childhood, such as Steirisches Schöpsernes, a mutton stew served by her mom with horseradish and plenty of potatoes, but now and then there would be events at school he could introduce to their conversation, and lately some chaff concerning the row of white ageratum that had suddenly appeared in a line along their front walk. Miriam had chiseled out a furrow with a screwdriver, thrown in some of her birthday seeds, and to the amaze of her eyes saw plants pop into view.
This surprise, he told her, reminded him of one he’d just had with a Thomas Hardy novel that he had read with some pleasure to be sure but not without suffering a number of disappointments along the way. However, certain facts about its composition had come to light with a similar bright suddenness: namely that Hardy was ill in bed — in a town called Tooting — wonderful name — no, no, it was Upper Tooting — he was ill in bed with a urinary infection — he was sometimes almost delirious — he was ill in bed in Upper Tooting dictating the first draft to his wife — well, Hardy was actually lying on an inclined plane with his head lower than his pelvis the whole time — the whole time was almost six months — compelled to complete the book despite his pain because he felt bound to honor the date for its publication in Atlantic Monthly—a magazine, did Miriam know? called Atlantic because it came out simultaneously in New York and London. Naturally, the novel would have its ups and downs. It was remarkable it had gotten written at all — well, dictated, then revised. Moreover, he had learned that Henry James — was Miriam familiar? — had also dictated some of his last works to a typist — his novels were serialized, too — though James wasn’t in anything like the same pain, just getting on and disappointed by the world …
Miriam did not see any connection between Joey’s tussle with Thomas Hardy and the delight given her by ageratum popping up in a nice regimental line along their walk — or her walk now — who would have guessed? She was even a little tiffy about it. The packets had turned up in a drawer just as her need to plant their seeds somewhere had accidentally appeared. She was a bit ashamed of so whimsical an impulse and remembered her implement with good humor — a screwdriver, who would have guessed? — yet here they were — these little button-shaped flowers — as if stolen from a nosegay. One plant, which hardly interrupted the run of white, was — well — purple, she guessed, a black sheep.
Joey found it quite amazing that a man should lie on a board for weeks, even months, making up a novel in his head; it wasn’t like music, which always signaled the next step to take and stuck to your memory as naturally as taffy to the teeth. Miriam had just shoved the dirt back over the seeds with the side of her foot and then stepped on the place to tamp it down. Joey thought that maybe he’d read Far from the Madding Crowd next — didn’t Hardy choose strange titles? — and such descriptive names, too, so appropriate as to be odd — quaint to a fault — he’d looked into this novel about the crowd, leafing about a little, and seen Mr. Oak mentioned, Farmers Boldwood and Poorgrass, Bathsheba in front of Everdene. Could you take Boldwood and Poorgrass seriously? Miriam had been very encouraged by her success with the trim; it was more fun than she’d expected, and she planned to put in more — at other edges — since Joey had given her only seeds from short plants.
The kraut was red as a red wine, with a soft broad leftover taste. Joey could understand how it had become a comfort, not only taking his mother back to her farmhouse childhood but also soothing her tongue from a run of bad words and steering her thoughts from complaints. If Mr. Tippet cultivated his condition perhaps Joey could earn enough to buy some Berlioz, or maybe a hoe for his mother if she was going to dig in the yard. He did worry a little that they might want him to play difficult pieces that he had no previous knowledge of, but Joey remembered the tawdry services he had attended and believed the priest would just say “play” the way he said “dominoes.” Luxury lace is next, Miriam said. What’s that? What it says on the package. White, too. She looked, shook the packet — Alyssum, she said. Do you ever see pinks? Did she know he had pilfered them, Joey wondered, beginning to blush — I’ll … I’ll poke around.
Joey wheezed his way through several Sundays of early mass and shook off effusive compliments; meanwhile, at the other pole of performance, he managed to snitch some dianthus from a potting tray where there was a loose pile of seed packets still, and dwarf marigolds, too. Rakes, hoes, spades leaned against the shed wall tempting him into significant dishonesty, but he refused to surrender another inch of his already abbreviated virtue. The trips to and from school were a nuisance, but various parishioners did drive duty for him, full of curiosity about Augsburg and its quiet ways. Joey made up a life that was regular and serene yet far more interesting than the one he knew, since this college’s life seemed to have no real qualities at all, and his only anecdote was one he dare not tell on himself. He stayed at his mother’s over Saturday nights now in order to make early mass and be driven back to Augsburg for elevenses. More than once his chauffeurs observed with amusement how late Protestants slept in.
The grass in the Augsburg quad, the college catalog said, was the same grass that had spread its welcome across the colony’s common in its first days; and the main hall, of limestone and granite, had stood nearly two hundred years of student food and student chit and student chat and student sing-alongs at lunch on Sunday when visitors were frequent; moreover the light that fell through the chapel’s glass to stipple the floors and pews had fallen every day in the same way since the glass had been installed with evangelical ceremony and in exultant sunshine; so that when you walked beneath its principal line of stately, though now infected, elms, you heard in the moving leaves the hum of history, indeed history was where you were headed, for at the heart of the school, in the center of its campus, a large door, said to have been rescued from an abandoned Catholic church, had been stuck in a hunk of concrete that represented stone, and upon its crackled panels had been pinioned a symbolic copy of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in the shape of windblown bronze leaves.