7
Rudi had not left his family in the lurch, Miriam told the children at first, frightened of the effect the truth would have upon them. It was Raymond Scofield who had done that. Rudi had, she insisted, gone to America, where he would find work and, in due course, a pleasant place to bring them. After the second year, this lie could no longer be lengthened. Who knew what foul thing had befallen him in that faraway barbaric country of cowboys? And when they sailed for the States, that was the story in charge: their dear father had been killed by wild beasts, outlaws, or Indians in New York or Canada. He had doubtless been buried on the lone prairie, because neither the immigration authorities nor any of the refugee organizations had any record of a Rudi Skizzen or a Yankel Fixel or a Raymond Scofield. But, by the children, this was no more believed than Santa Claus, though the pretense was for a while maintained. We should have gone to Halifax, Miriam said, that’s where your father is. But Miriam and her children were now in the hands of the system, so they went to a tiny two-bus town in Ohio, where they lived in a very small house at the edge of whatever civilization there was; Miriam got a routine job making rubber dishpans; the kids rode hand-me-down bikes to a very small school; Miriam caught one of the buses to work where she made friends readily; and life in Woodbine, Ohio, was safe, calm, regular, and quiet. About her occupation, Miriam always said it was better than the laundry. She still smelled of something, but it was no longer soap. Debbie loved her school where she soon had plenty of chums and took up cheering the boys at their American sports. When Debbie jumped up and down her breasts bobbed beguilingly beneath her sweater, and that was the real reason for the acrobatics, Joey felt. He liked Debbie better younger when she was without them and their gentle wobble. Imagine being popular for such a reason or made happy because you stuck out.
Joey was not so pleased with himself or his place. He was uneasy with everybody but Mr. Hirk, who had also made him uncomfortable at first. Perhaps it was because Joey fancied himself an Austrian of aristocratic lineage. Or because he began a grade behind and never got over the shame, though the normalcy of it all was explained to him countless times — wartime risks, irregularity of life, uprootedness of family, loss of father, poverty, the rest of it. The fact remained that he had been put back and was regarded as a stupe on that account. What he didn’t like was standing out, being noticed, for whatever reason. He felt endangered by attention. During the rest of his schoolboy days he settled for Cs and gradually found a spot in the back row.
From the back row he never asked a question or answered one, if he could help it. He never took chances, shuffled his feet, whispered or passed notes, or surreptitiously read an illicit book while it hid inside the assigned one. He dressed as plainly as possible, stayed awake in study hall, didn’t join, date, suck up, or hang around. He was resolutely friendly but had no chums. He owned nothing so valuable he felt responsible for it.
With Mr. Hirk out of the picture, Joey had no piano to play and no place to practice; however, he remembered that there was an old upright in his former grade school gym, so he went there after classes had let out, walked boldly in — such was the laxity of that peaceful place and those peaceful times — and played honky-tonks with its sticky keys. The tunes echoed from the vast expanse of wooden floor as though it were a sounding board. He found he could reproduce the little marches his fifth grade had been made to parade to, so he began with those, and no one still left in the building minded; perhaps the janitor thought Joey was working on a project or preparing for a pageant … as, it would turn out, he was.
Joey would find that, in America, at least, if you turned out a tune when you played the piano, then you played the piano; the skill was given you as easily as a second cup; appearances were better than reality; and the sight of someone slightly inept was immensely reassuring to those woefully without ability. As had to happen, teachers remaining after hours for a meeting heard the racket and a few came to the gym door to investigate. Joey was playing the “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” something they recognized, so they went away again without a question. However, the teacher, into whose hands and hoarse voice the children’s instruction in music had fallen, sought Joey out and asked him to play a few times after school for ceremonies and such things. Joey said he would be happy to, on one occasion playing his own variations on “Three Blind Mice” to childish laughter and parental applause.
In this way Joey learned that music is an enemy of isolation. People gather for it as if it could not be heard without help; it certainly could not be enjoyed without all those whom it employed: the place, the performer, the piano, the passive rows of people in chairs, devoted to their own silence, all ears.
The music teacher — who often rented instruments for this or that child in her charge from a sheet-music and record store in town that had such a sideline — recommended Joey when she learned that a clerk-of-all-work was needed there, and so, after relatives and friends of the owners were found to be uninterested or unavailable, Joey was approached. Through such a turn of fortune, Joey found himself with a real piano to play on and in his mother’s grateful good graces at the same time. He began working after school and on weekends, but when he graduated he was taken on full-time at the High Note, so named because it was on High Street, a street so named because it lay across the edge of a ridge and looked down on Main, though only by a little. Through two small bleary windows at the rear of the shop Joey could look out over a small valley toward the low hills on which Whittlebauer College was perched, since every college in Ohio, maybe every college ever built, had to have a hill and be said to be “on the hill” and therefore come to be called, not the college, but the Hill. In short, he could see from High to Hill, although he could not know then that it would be his life’s ironic trajectory.
Who was it? ah yes, the father of Marcella Sembrich. That gift-giving father, Joey remembered, learned to play many of the instruments of the orchestra without any formal training. At the store Joey blew into everything that had a mouthpiece and soon was able to do party, wedding, or retirement tunes on a lot of them, which pleased Emil and Millicent Kazan, his employers, since he could thus provide customers with demonstrations. He handled the rental business and then sales of sheet music as well, an addition to his work that increased his musical knowledge, too, because Joey devoured the liner notes, and his score-reading markedly improved, though, of course, it was for catchy melodies that were not long on difficulty or merit.
His fellow clerk was a kid called Castle Cairfill. At first, Joey felt sorry for him. Apparently, all through Woodbine High, he had been called Airful or Careful or, with another kind of scornful irony, Sir Castle, not Caz as he had hoped, and Joey was by his plight reminded how happy he was to be a Skizzen (odd as the name was) and not a Yussel — Yussel Fixel, what a burden! — even though he was called Skizz, because Skizz wasn’t so bad. But Airful was an asshole. He was Joey’s first asshole, though a regiment would follow. Airful had a head of stiff red hair the color of brick that he wore unevenly short so it resembled the bristles of a military brush that has been through many enlistments. You saw a lot of that head because Castle was noticeably tall as well as thin and, apparently embarrassed by his height, went about as if under arrest and concealing his face from the press. The belt he wore — there seemed to be two that worked each week — had so much tongue, when cinched, it fell from his waist like a panting dog’s. Caz’s complexion was both pale and flushed — that is, it was splotchy — and the splotches appeared to pulse when Airful was himself hot about something, whereas when he was frightened or anxious, his skin grew whiter than a fish’s belly, so he looked sickly, tubercular, Joey imagined, like a male Mimi.