Snake, please. Miss Moss held out a small white palm. I need a weight. Oil upon the waters — that’s it, he thought. Joseph handed her a length of velvet rope. He saw that each end was tied up in a knot by violet thread.
You see some interesting people on the bus.
Meet any? Miss Moss bent intently over her work.
One.
The air felt cool as a cave’s, their voices artificially resonant.
Who?
A teddy bear.
Ever have a toy you were frightened of?
Nooo … Never had many toys.
I was given a bulldog once with a black eye and big teeth. Scared me so. I was supposed to hug him. He was stuffed like a club. Hard as a ham-mer. I buried him in the backyard, I was so scared. These villainous magi wanted me to take bowwow to bed. I screamed, I was so scared. So I buried it in the backyard with a shovel I had for sand. But that bowlegged dog with a pirate’s eye still haunts me. To and in-cluding this day. Even this day. Even down here. Eventually we moved away from the house with its grave. We left that backyard in our wake, but the toothy bulldog followed me. He’s al-ways — good, that should do it — a-round, barking loudly though you can never hear him. “He who has felt such fear is haunted forever … by days that will not come again,” she suddenly half hollered. I bet the teddy bear was better company.
His mother — a great wide woman — was.
Mothers. I never liked mothers much, you know that? None of my mothers were … well — it’s done, and now you are a person to the world — very motherly. Take a card.
Joseph decided silence was the better speech.
I left your weight the same as mine. See. I don’t need weight now that I never drive. Because the cop that stops you always looks in the driver’s window where you’re sitting in your shame and guilt, and he can’t tell, not even if God were to ask him, how much you’re heavied. Of course … if he orders you to get out … the truth may get out, too.
Gratitude made Joseph brim over with that truth. It led him to overlook the misperceptions he had already encouraged: that he was Austrian, that he was a more accomplished musician than he really was, that he had graduated from Augs and done rather well there, when he had done rather poorly and dropped out. Or that he had friends like Chris the King of the tennis courts who would offer him their driver’s license to copy.
Joey rather liked buses, Joseph said. He had ridden on double-deckers in London during the Blitz. They bounced about quite a bit because of the shell — no — bomb holes … craters. Yes, he had endured the bombing.
Hid in basements, sought refuge in sewers, often in the Underground, where people held one another when the earth shook. Yes, he had been frightened by near misses and had seen people blown to pieces before his very eyes. And a piano, too, every key flung up in the air to fall like rainless music. He didn’t remember bus rides in Vienna, though — too young. But he could still recall vast parks. Vienna Woods — yes. Both cars and carriages. Vendors purveying ices and little cakes. “Purveying” was a new word Joseph was pleased to take for a walk. The sea voyage to America was worse than the Blitz because roaring storms bedeviled him and his mother the entire trip, the ship taking on water, whitecaps above the masts like angry spitting clouds.
Details filled in behind his recollections the way leaves blow into a hedge. Although Miss Moss led Joseph out of her office and returned him to his routines, he realized that he was welcome to rap at her door when down in her domain. He was also allowed to use her typewriter to compose a few letters of reference and a CV faithful to its form if faithless in everything else. She taught him a few tricks with inks. And how to steam off stamps and safely remove other sorts of seals.
Miss Moss admonished Joseph not to speak to the Major about his visit. He was to remain particularly mum about the ID and that she had showed him how to ink, Polaroid, or steam. Have you received the green glare of Major’s eyes? Joseph hadn’t. He rather thought her eyes … green in the import of them … I mean, green the way a fire burns. While Quasimodo plies his bells, Quasimama sweeps her keep, she said, adding mystery to mystery.
Joey’s new driver’s license already felt legitimate where it hid as it should in the wallet he had stuck in his hip pocket. Feeling it there made him calmer when he drove, if not more competent, and as the car rose over the low hills he saw endless possibilities in every barn and silo, as he had in his recent journey through his own past, since every memory was made of many elements, each of which had or could be given a diverting history. He felt front porches fill with people he could then pretend to know. Smaller roads kept crossing or leaving the highway, and he could travel over any one of them simply by turning his wheel to drive down the lane of the damaged piano or visit the day when his dad had disappeared (for public consumption, Joseph would call him “dad”), the bobbies arriving at their door as though Dad were dead or in dreadful trouble; or he could stop to admire the greeting-card view of his first Christmas in America or even revisit Debbie’s wedding in the backyard of the groom’s potato patch. For that miserable affair he could collect clichés and stereotypes like the stamps he had only today learned to lift from envelopes.
The Skizzen family had been driven to a small severe church for a ceremony that was simple and soon over, distressing Miriam, who of course was upset to be the sole Catholic in the crowd and often taken to be Jewish in the bargain. It was also clear that her daughter was the only member of this refugee family the groom’s was inclined to adopt. Deborah wore a dress her mother had made for her and was given away by her brother, who was consequently compelled to be civil. She looked pretty in the way brides must, beaming like an ad and smooth as a counterpane. Afterward the congregation drove out into the country where, in a farmyard, the bride and groom recapitulated kisses.
After a decent interval the dismal couple departed for their prepackaged life with only one JUST MARRIED sign on their car and no tin cans to rattle at their rears. In a few days they would return to the family property where the groom’s inheritance was being prematurely forked over like one of their hills of potatoes. Joseph determined to think of his new in-laws as small-town bovines who mooed when you pulled their tails and then blew smoke from their noses. As cartoons he could endure the folks they really were, people calm in their convictions, as secure about the direction of their life as a train about the destination of its track, and this serenity unsettled Joey, who admitted in dark moments to being envious as well as scornful of it, because the regularities of his own life had been so routinely interrupted and because it depended on an indifference to the wider world that was tended as carefully as one of their spud-filled fields.
But, if ignorance brings bliss, as he had recently learned, it is still smart to be satisfied. When he complained to Miriam about the complacency of his about-to-be in-laws, she told him he wouldn’t have liked Austrians then, because they knew to a napkin how life should go on, what was right and what was wrong — be honest, work hard, trust God — everybody knew these things, they knew them, but they often didn’t do them because honesty meant you couldn’t steal and cheat and get ahead of others by using damnable devices. Hard work was hard, that’s why it was called hard, so few people wanted to do it, though they knew they should, they knew to trust God, too, which was the most difficult, since it meant accepting the troubles that made up much of life, accepting them and getting on, even when you were uprooted, bombed, and abandoned.
As she had been, she was once more prepared to tell him.
During Joseph’s many pensive moments in the library, he had an opportunity to reflect upon his own unearned sense of superiority. He began to realize that his friends would see him as they saw a Christmas package, decorated to entice but wrapped to conceal. By giving himself youthful myths and minor mystifications, he had donned, in effect, a powdered wig and a false nose and thereby could actually remain far away in his actual unoperatic life, doing nothing they might imagine, feeling nothing they could share, still pure as plain blue sky. Unsmudged by the smoke from a single chimney.