Madame Mieux — there! he’d invoked her — name, naughty thoughts, and all — now he’d brought the weird one into view — what were you up to when you asked me over to listen to a piece by Berlioz you knew he’d never written? why didn’t you pick up your pillows, they make a sorry scene, quite tasteless and unsettling? and to come to the door in a drug-induced daze to greet a young and simple pupil? in billowy belongings that didn’t seem quite fastened on you? Seeing you in school standing in front of us in your tight hips and tall shoes; hearing you shout French as if you were on an unreliable telephone … well, Madame, seeing you, hearing you, did not entice any of us to touch or smell or taste Mieux, too; no, did not tempt us to come closer than we had to, loll on one of your souvenir pillows, our noses full of pot smoke, and — who knows? after music, after chocolates — to be done to.
On gray days, when the light was soft and the grass was greener than seemed possible, Joey would often see Professor Pastor Ludens crossing the quad in his customary black suit, stiff-legged, too, like a crow, a bit pompous, bearing two dark books, each held against his chest into which they disappeared — a Bible and the hymnal, Joey guessed. He appeared especially often on autumn evenings when the sun was low and hid behind the treetops as well as in the clouds, possessing so little strength it could not lend the pastor a shadow to precede him on the path to the chapel from whose loft windows Joey would observe him approaching so that, suitably warned, he might slip swiftly from the choir himself, as if his practice were concluded, to sit in his basement room sheltered by the sort of careful silence that signified he wasn’t there even when he was.
After a canny edit of the details, Joey told Miriam about his interview with Rector Luthardt. She was ready to hit the rector with her purse. How could that man and his renegade church possibly object to Joey’s playing for Saint Agatha? Joey had found a word for Luthardt’s complaint — miscegenation — and Miriam embraced it. It was better, both thought, than “syncretism,” which sounded barbarous. In her eyes, nothing could have justified Joey’s suggestion that he leave Augs more readily than his account of the moon-faced rector’s remonstrances and the suspicion that spying had to be their cause; however, if he were to decamp (as he subjunctively put it to her, though he had made up his mind already), he would need to find work, since her income scarcely kept her afloat; she didn’t need his weight in the boat. In the settlement’s infrequent newspaper, the Woodbine Twines (a name of uncustomary originality unsupported by its content), Joey read that a librarian was wanted in Urichstown, a community squatting nearby that was slightly larger than Woodbine and had a distant view of the river. Posting the opening in the Woodbine Times (he was disappointed to learn he’d misread its name) was a little like nailing a note to a tree to advertise your lost dog. There was a Greyhound, and he boarded it for what was an annoyingly slow ride, since it seemed to stop like a school bus at every mailbox along the way. When the windows began to move, Joey remembered without nostalgia his long railroad journeys and the sense he had of falling through farther and farther patches of foreign country. It was late spring, and fields and forests were a wet raw green. Tree leaves had reached their fullness for the first time, and Ohio’s low easy hills lulled the eye. The road made slow undulating music all the way to the river.
Just off the customary courthouse square, which told Joseph that Urichstown was a county seat, he found a small tidy stone library funded by the bobbin boy Andrew Carnegie, bless his generous Scot’s heart. At a large semicircular desk sat a woman wearing a huge head of gray hair that the wooden triangle lying there said was the hair of Marjorie Bruss. She raised her head from her reading, and her hair flew as though quail had suddenly taken flight from a hidden nest.
You’re not from around here.
No, ma’am. I’m from Woodbine.
We beat you in basketball.
I wasn’t aware.
That’s a good sign.
Gee. How did you know I’m here about the job?
You don’t have a card. No one comes in here without a card.
How did you know I don’t have a card?
I know the face of everyone who has one, and the hand that holds it out to me. Except for the too-olds and too-ills who can no longer climb the steps.
Well, whom do I see about it?
Indefinite reference.
The job.
You see me. You said “whom.” “Whom” is also a good sign. Miss Bruss paused. It was apparent she was questioning herself. We did put an ad in Woodbine’s fish wrap. She caught his look … read it … revised her remark … Its newspaper.
I went to Augsburg Academy. I live in Woodbine.
That’s a long commute.
I live with my mother, but if I had this job I’d come over here to room.
The way you do at Augsburg?
Yes, ma’am. I played the organ at the school, but now I’m through.
What was your major? For the first time, Miss Bruss picked up a pencil. Her fingers were unmodified.
Um … Music. Um … English.
Music. Good.
The piano is my real instrument.
Are you …? I hear something.
I’m Austrian. My father was. My mother is. She brought me over ahead of the Nazis.
What’s your name?
Joseph Skizzen.
Two z’s? She wrote.
Yes, ma’am.
You graduate this spring?
Um.
This job doesn’t pay much. What do you want it for?
My present job doesn’t pay much either. The college covers my board and room.
You’re on a scholarship?
Um … Same as.
Can you catalog, check out, check in, reshelve?
I can learn. I can count. I know the alphabet. They don’t cover cataloging at Augsburg.
Are you a Lutheran? Religious?
I can be if I have to.
Ms. Bruss laughed like a contralto, though her speaking voice wasn’t notably dark.
What do you want it for — this job?
I can’t live off my mother anymore. She can’t afford me. And I want to go further on in school, but I didn’t feel … well, frankly, I didn’t feel I was learning enough at Augsburg.
Augs. She laughed again. Ugh. She thrust the pencil — point first — into her hair. “Further” is good. Delicate distinction. But you’re too young. You don’t look twenty.
I’m nineteen.
Through Augs by nineteen?
I accelerated.
What do you go by?
Jo — Joseph.
Below her hair, Marjorie Bruss had a rosy round face, quick laugh, and happy wrinkles like lashes about the eyes — beneath her hair, no neck and lost ears. I have to tell you.
Ma’am?
No one wants it.
Don’t you get to read?
For days. Maybe that’s a reason no one wants it. But the pay is poorer than bad cheese. The only applicants I’ve had are eighty. They are trying to earn the price of their plot. They will bore me till I lie in one. I need someone who can carry armloads.
I have two forearms.
You’re quick. But a tabula rasa.
I will ask you lots of questions. What’s a rasa?
You’re a blank page.
I’m a clean sheet.
Okay, Joseph. She gave Joey a piece of paper with a dollar figure on it. Accept this and you’ve got the job.
14
First, he walked around the town. It was located in a valley that had one obviously open end because you could follow the accelerating water of the creek, as well as the main drag that paralleled it, in order to see now and then at some distance the broad blue Ohio into which the fast stream poured, earning for itself the name Quick Creek, though the natives said Quick Crick, since the stream was often like a line of ink and also because they couldn’t help themselves. The many elms that once shaded most roads were ill, but not all of them had been taken down. Squeezed as it was between hills, Urichstown was only a few streets thick, and cross streets were short, stopping at the crick or giving out like a winded runner some small way up a slope. Apart from a square of judicial buildings that had been set to one side as if by a picky eater, the main points of public meeting were the three brief bridges that spanned the Quick, and kept the two halves of the town together. They were said to be “brief” because they had no great distance to span and because spring floods often rushed roiling water through the town to wash one or more of the crossings away. These floods were consequently measured by the spans they engulfed—“one bridge,” “two bridge,” or “three bridge,” as sometimes proved to be the case. Only when the Ohio was so full it forced itself up its tributaries, and the rapid water from the hills ran into the river like a truck into a train, was the flood actually fierce enough to endanger homes or public buildings.