Middle C (7 page)

The tacky church Miriam took her children to had not a single spear of light, no rebounding shadows, no mystery, no majesty, no music of note. The congregation sang almost as badly as the choir, and cliché determined the selection of hymns. The services were in an inept Latin and the acolytes always a step late, as if they had fallen asleep. Catholics had not prospered here. The county and its seat was filled with Amish, odd Protestants, slow roads, bad organs, and poorer organists.

Mr. Hirk honeyed up to him during Joey’s senior year. Joey would simply show up and play, mostly something he’d heard on the radio or a few things he’d begun by improvising, and then they would both sit in the cool gloom and listen to the Victrola that Joey had begun winding up because Mr. Hirk’s fingers were presently incapable: Emma Calvé, Galli-Curci, the stentorious Caruso, and “Home Sweet Home” by Nellie Melba. Mr. Hirk no longer marked time by banging even a thin book. Now, when Joey left, with a gratitude that exceeded any he had ever felt, he would squeeze Mr. Hirk’s upper arm (because he didn’t dare put pressure on him anywhere else); Mr. Hirk would sigh hoarsely and watch Joey bike, it must have seemed nimbly, away, leaving Mr. Hirk alone
in his room with his body’s disability and his machine’s recalcitrance until another Saturday came along. Joey always cranked the Victrola one more time before he left, so a few sides could be managed if Mr. Hirk could spindle a record—hard to do with his crabbed hands growing crabbier by the week. Joey rode off to an era of LPs, vinyl, and other speeds, but only Mr. Hirk had Olive Fremstad and her sound—Calvé’s, Caruso’s sound—sounds—hollow, odd, remote—that created a past from which ghosts could not only speak to admonish and astound, they could sing again almost as they once sang, sang as singing would never be heard sung again, songs and a singing from somewhere outside the earth where not an outstretched arm, not a single finger, could reach or beckon, request or threaten or connive.

If Joseph Skizzen later could imagine his mother, with whom he had lived so much of his life one would think he’d not want to add another sight or an additional thought of her to his consciousness; if he could clearly picture her in her culottes and gloves grubbing in her garden, literally extracting coiled white webworms from the soil and flipping them indifferently into a coffee can filled with flat cheap beer (only one moment of many he might remember), it was partly because, at the commencement of his piano lessons, he had begun envisioning Mr. Hirk, who had also unwittingly given him life, painfully bulked in a bulky chair or doubled up in a daybed he could no longer refold, waiting through the hours for Joey’s bike to skid in the gravel before his door. It was a picture that prompted him not to ignore his pedals but to push hard, hurrying to arrive and kick his kickstand into place, to knock and enter Mr. Hirk’s house all at once, to say “Hiyuh, Mr. Hirk, how goes it?” and slap his happy hand down on the piano bench before sitting there himself to play a new tune he’d heard that week on
Your Hit Parade
, a song already at number 7 although it was the first time for its appearance on the list. Mr. Hirk would pretend to hate the new stuff—trash and drivel and noise, he said, or treacle and slop and lies—but he would listen as if only his large ears were alive. Joey would then play the new hit from the week before, going back over his own list, making the slim recital last, turning it into his lesson, performing each of the songs on the sheets in the bench, and ending, as the order firmed itself, with “Danny Boy,” as if he knew where it belonged, and without being the least embarrassed by its schmaltz, its treacle, or its prevarications.

5

It had to happen. One Saturday afternoon, searching for a football game, Joey tuned in the Metropolitan Opera’s matinee during a moment when all its throats were rapturous. His mother stood in the doorway, somewhat dazed herself, because her intention had been to ask him to turn down the volume. The voices weren’t of tin but of gold, and the orchestra was full, not a fiddle and a drum or a faint hinky-tink piano. Even Miriam sat and listened, too indifferent to her hands to fold them in her lap, until the evident sadness of events withdrew her. Neither had the slightest idea what was going on until between acts a commentator, with a voice melting over its vowels like dark chocolate, recited the plot as it was about to unfold. The tenor, it turned out, would be in a jail cell awaiting execution, and the act would open an hour before dawn at an artillery emplacement at the walls of a castle overlooking Rome. Rome! The audience will see the Vatican in the distance, the announcer says. Then, after an orchestral interlude, with the song of a shepherd boy barely audible in the distance, the tenor, told he has but an hour left to live, will be brought to the battlements where he will write loving last words to his opera singer while sitting at a wooden desk set to one side of the stage. He writes something splendid, Joey remembered, about the shine of the stars perfuming the world. Of course the tenor would sing the words in the moment that he wrote them. Here, in this magical realm, singing words were all there were.

Joey heard everything happen as it had been foretold. The tenor’s voice soared despite its despair, and Joey felt his own throat ache. It was a moment in which sorrow became sublime and his own misfortunes were, momentarily, on someone else’s mind.

Now when he had a lesson, he would ask Mr. Hirk his opinion of the singers of today, not all of whom Mr. Hirk loathed; indeed, there were a few he praised. Mr. Hirk was impatient with Joey because, after all their sessions, his improvising was not improving anything but his ability to mimic. Although Mr. Hirk formed his sentences with reasonable clarity, his words emerged as if they too were rheumatic, bent a bit, their heads turned toward the ground, their rears reluctant to arrive.
No … noth … nothing gained. You are copying the cat as if—that way—you could become one. Shame. You are hitting the keys a bit like my stick here, Mr. Hirk complained, when your fingers—your fingers, young shameful man—should sing; you should feel the song in their tips—on the ball where the ink stain blues it—like a tingle. Your technique—oh God—is terrible. You need to do Czernys … and … and I don’t have any for you, not a page. I am a poor teacher. Naw. Nothing can be gained. I couldn’t sing or whistle them. They are not for copy, the Czernys. They are for the fingers like lifting weights. Which you either do, or you don’t do. Czernys. So you either get strong in the fingers or you remain weak … and if in the fingers, then in the head.

What Mr. Hirk hated most about Joey was his forearm. Do not move the forearm. Forget the forearm. From side to side from the wrist the fingers find their way, kneading the notes—your hands must be big slow spiders out for a walk.

Early on Mr. Hirk had grasped Joey’s hands with his voice. Show me your nails! Show me! They’re bitten! Look at them, poor babies. That is no way. Are you a beaver in a trap to be gnawing at yourself? Nails should never be long—short is wise—never so long they click on the keys, so they interfere with your stroke—no—but not bitten, a bad bad habit—they are not to be chewed like a straw. Nails are to be nurtured, nicened. Yes. Filed with your mother’s file. Not long like a lady’s but smooth, short, and smoothly rounded like the moon that is in them. That is the way. Remember. Short, round, smooth. Better if they’re polished like flute keys. Hooh, he would conclude, exhausted.

Dressing Debbie was getting expensive, and Miriam felt that Joey’s progress was being hampered by Mr. Hirk’s physical impediments. To the point of pointlessness, she thought. Joey looked forward now to his miniconcerts, but he could not protest his mother’s decision even if it was not adequately based or sincerely made. Joey was to inform Mr. Hirk on Saturday next that the present lesson was to be the final one. This, Joey had no desire to do. You hired him, you should fire him, he told his mother in the most aggrieved tone he could muster. It makes no sense for me to make a special trip just to do that, she answered in what would be her last reasonable voice. You send him his money by mail, Joey argued, why not end it the same way? That would be cold and unfeeling, she said sternly, that would be inconsiderate and impolite,
even rude. Shame on you, she said. On me? Joey was unusual in his anger. Mr. Hirk is a sick old man! He has no income! He hasn’t even one Czerny. He lives mostly in the dark waiting for me to come and play. I give him that relief. This was said with pride. Now you want to take his single pupil and his only pleasure away. Joey was embarrassed by his own heat. Such novel opposition was quite beyond Miriam’s understanding. It made her furious. She blamed his poor upbringing on America. As someone who had been browbeaten, she could browbeat now with assurance, and she could be furious with Joey without worry because, though Joseph Skizzen was of the male sex, he was still a Joey. Ah, how you overcount yourself. How do you know what that man’s pleasures are! Joey’s stiff face told her that his certainties were unchanged. Then say nothing, just don’t go again, you obstacle, she shouted. Whatever you do, I won’t mail another fee. She ended the argument but not the issue by leaving the room in a huff that would have seemed more genuine if it hadn’t had wheels.

Joey knew now that the singers on Mr. Hirk’s old records were ghosts in truth, though he did not love them less for that. And Mr. Hirk had begun telling him of other singers, such as Marcella Sembrich, whom Joey had not heard, and how she had studied for years with an old piano teacher who discovered and developed her voice by taking her, willy-nilly, to the best teachers. Mr. Hirk was a bike tire turning in gravel—hard to understand—but Joey listened to his history of Marcella Sembrich as if she were a star of film, an actress of dangerous beauty. Indeed, Marcella Sembrich was her stage name, not her real name, Mr. Hirk told him. Her real name was Marcellina Kochanska—Kochanska—as a name Kochanska would not do—and she came from a part of Poland the Austrians owned. I know the place, Mr. Hirk said proudly. Lem. Berg. It runs in families like my arthritis does. The gift, I mean. I know a lot of similar histories. Her father—her father taught himself to play—from hell to hallelujah—half the instruments. So she knew notes by the time she said daddy. She was sitting up to the piano by four. Perched on a Bible. I know. It’s as if I was there. And she was playing a violin her father made for her when she was six. Six! In ringlets. It’s so. It’s not even unusual. That same father—the father of her—taught his wife the violin. Yes. True. By seven … you just linger on the number, boy, linger on her age … by seven she was playing in the family string quartet
with her brother, who was born before her, a cello’s child. Then an old man who heard her, when the family minstrelized around the country to make ends meet, sponsored her for the Conservatory because he loved her as she should have been loved. In Lem. Berg. I know the building. I know the halls.

Joey had read of worms that glowed in the dark. Mr. Hirk was glowing. Like one of the plant’s leaves, his face was glowing, and his voice cleaned itself up as if it were going to church.

When Marcella went to him—to Stengl, her teacher, sent by one lover to another—she was about your age—how Stengl must have adored her little fingers—with a waist that didn’t require a corset. Though in later years … Mr. Hirk spoke of Marcella Sembrich as if she were an old friend. He spoke and he glowed. Yes, yes, Marcella stayed with him—with Stengl, stern as he was—studying—she stayed despite his sternness for eleven years. Joey heard the word “stayed” with a pang. Eleven years of piano. Mr. Hirk made a point of it. Not eleven years of voice, not five. No. Though she sang in some community choruses during that time and was thought to have a pretty soprano. Mr. Hirk always stood to talk, because scrunched up he was short of breath, but his voice was aimed at the floor. She married the old man, Stengl, eventually, after he’d kissed her fingers often, growing old in his role as her teacher, and after she, who had arrived as a bud, became a blossom. He had taken her to Italy to study singing, because he believed there was more to her “pretty” voice than prettiness, that inside her small light soprano there was something big and dark. Oh yes, he did hear a darkness. And that “big” voice was born there too, in sunny Italy, like a baby born to a giant. Then he swept her off to London without even telling her why. He had said to his young wife one day, We are going away to London. Why? She wanted to know of course. It was natural to want to know. You shall see, her husband said. It will be for the best. And Stengl figured out a way to get her heard there. Not just heard there … heard well. She sang a selection from
Lucia
with the Covent Garden Orchestra accompanying her. Imagine. The entire orchestra playing, she singing. Just imagine. You have heard of Covent Garden? On that legendary stage. She sang. There, where the great Patti had just rehearsed. She sang. Marcella Sembrich sang. Well, they rose, the violins first, to applaud her performance. They said she sang like a violin—and in fact she played that instrument,
though not as well as the piano. After that the happy couple—wouldn’t they have been a happy couple?—his wisdom and her fingers, her figure and her voice, his worship and his passion—traveled to Russia and Spain and America, too. Where she was an astonishment. In
Lucia
. At the Met. In
I Puritani
, in
La Sonnambula
. What vocal calligraphy! You know about the Met? You should have heard her in
The Magic Flute
. Such a queen—such dark power—with her voice—she invoked it. Like a setting sun calls forth the night. For a moment Mr. Hirk was proud of his age. A piano teacher had flown the soprano to these great heights: an old man was her wings, as well as her lover, and saw her soar.

Joey knew then that he would not be able to tell Mr. Hirk he was fired, that the lessons were over—“terminated,” a word Miriam had learned at work to fear—now that Mr. Hirk was finally reaching out—only figuratively, of course—to his pupil, and opening his heart’s attic to him, unwrapping his enthusiasms, and—young Joey recognized—confronting the death of his hopes, the ruins of his life. Mr. Hirk, after all, lived in a small dark leaf-lit room; he was no one who had ever played or sung before the public; he had probably never even taught another who might, then, have gone on to earn acclaim. And for a pittance, for pity, he was beating booktime to a boy who was only, at best, a mime, a faker who had never faked a measure of Chopin, and didn’t even know what a Czerny was.