Suppose Skizzen were the one who remained; suppose he were the aftermath, the i v e of “survive.” He had finally unlocked the word! Properly rearranged, it read: “I’ve served.” The laugh that fled his throat left it sore. He sat for some time in a silence scoured by that passage of amusement.
What he really wanted the world to see, were his lifelong ruse to be discovered, was the equivalent of Moses’s tablets before they got inscribed: a person pure, clean, undefiled, unspoiled by the terrible history of the earth. So he could rightly say to his accusers (and accused he would be): When you were destroying yourselves and your cities, I was not there; when you were debasing your noble principles, I was not there; when you were fattening on lies like pigs at a trough, I was not there; when you were squeezing life from all life like water from a sponge, I was not there. So see me now! Untarnished as a tea service! I’ve done nothing brave but nothing squalid, nothing farsighted but nothing blind, nothing to make me proud, yet never have I had to be ashamed.
My father’s son! After all … after all … I could be proud.
Yet Joey had been ashamed just now. Or was it just Professor Joseph Skizzen? He had been for a moment uncertain. Yes, it was the prof who had faltered.
Many of his colleagues had seen a travelogue about turn-of-the-century Vienna at the local cinema and began to ask Joseph about it: where a certain square was, relative to his lodgings; had he sat in the pews of the cathedral; whether he had known this man about town or another; had he ridden on the Ferris wheel that had been erected in the Prater, or enjoyed a Sacher torte at the Sacher Hotel? And, of what, exactly, was such a cake made? These questions had quite unnerved him. He said, truthfully, that he was too disturbed by the past to discuss its leaner features. Since that moment of emergency — heavens, it was some years ago — Professor Skizzen had taken care to read up on the period of his residency. Now he knew all the names of Vienna’s points of interest and a bit of the bios of its main men. And of what a Sacher torte is made: chocolate cake and marmalade. As the thirties there drew on — which meant the deepening of his civic reading — he felt he could occasionally catch something of what his father had said he smelled: the aggressive odor emitted by an increasingly fragile smugness — in sum, rudeness heated to the degree called brutality.
He had now the habit of rehearsing some of his more elaborate stories, whenever he had a free moment, so that he would not forget the facts he had alleged or mix their circumstances. After a while there were so many anecdotes, vignettes, and reminiscences he kept a card file for them where he noted all the salient details by means of keywords: whooping cough (when and how serious), the stormy voyage across the Atlantic, close calls during train travel, funny things that happened to him while learning how to play the piano, ditto for the organ (very chancy, that one), the arthritis that limited his present performances so that he could no longer give Chopin or Liszt recitals (as he once had done, to great acclaim), the makeup of the legendary Vienna Philharmonic — its death and resurrection — the fat content of the local cuisine, what he learned in Vienna from the esteemed Gerhardt Rolfe, the noble nose of a character he called Father who smelled catastrophe. About real people and actual events — his sister and his mother mostly — Skizzen possessed a reluctant tongue.
What had once been difficult to utter — falsehoods that weren’t just social lies and lame excuses or little trivial elaborations — in time became a custom and a challenge. The satisfaction he felt at being to the world an artifice was the deepest he knew. All the world was a stage. But not for all the world. Over time his tales became so much a part of his public self, he could eventually remember, as he recounted them, how he felt, for instance, when, nearly naked, he ran after his Rambler as it coasted backward down a hill into the highway. In the snow, remember, in the snow. This part of his history had such a brilliant shine that, like a diamond, it had to be rather regularly reset. Where had his car been parked? Why was he wearing a towel? Better make that a bathrobe. And because so many of his stories made fun of their source, they were, he surmised, readily believed.
The persuasive element was always the same: why would anyone tell such a tale if it hadn’t happened.
Miss Moss had sent him an apple, a bitten apple. Its significance hit him with the shock and the shame of a slap. He was the Adam addressed; he was the Adam commanded: Eat this and swallow my message, swallow the truth, digest your guilt, let your appetite worm its way through every self you own. And bring you down.
So — now that you have eaten from the tree, what are you going to do about what you know? Here was shame showing again on his open face. For he would do nothing. That was foregone. Eat the apple and welcome the worm. However, Miss Moss’s threats were surely idle. No one was going to kill or be killed. Rhetoric was rhetoric … and the worm was painted paper. Ah, but how artfully, amid the creamy white pulp, had she depicted that almost living length of moistened brown. Still, how could Miss Moss accuse or threaten when she had helped him take his first steps toward a duplicitous self and its misleading life. Miss Moss would recognize at once what he had done. Lordy, she might even approve. She should approve. Bravo! what a joke on the school, the town, society itself. Of course she would approve.
Okay. From the garden … from the garden he could be expelled. He and Eve, fig leaves in hand. Miriam would find nothing funny, nothing clever, nothing admirable in his masquerade or the solemn leafy departure they made, even if it became a theme for artists to enjoy the way they once rendered the positions of the cross. There were so many cards to watch fall from their delicate embrace of one another: Professor Skizzen’s name defiled, his position, its status, its income; his house, its landscape, taken from him; Joseph’s standing as a musician too, respect — right down the line — lost, Miss Spiky’s hearty warmth cooled by contempt; Joey’s moral purity dirtied by inevitable leaks — seepage was certain — Professor Skizzen’s great project — his obsessive sentence, too — made laughingstocks, the condemnation of mankind they represented turned into a simpleton’s idiosyncrasies.
He had to laugh anyway. Miss Moss had sent an angleworm to do the devil’s business. Who, among that holy bunch, was supposed to be a fisher of souls?
Joseph, when he entered the garden, always sought shade. The beech tree’s trunk had been trimmed of its lower branches so that early and late light would flood easily under the reach of its leaves, even as ivied as they were. Consequently he would sit where the house could shield him, where the faucet was, and a weathered chair that had been positioned to let him feast on the flowers from a vantage bees might have envied. The wood of the chair was of a pronounced gray because flying ants and other insects had meticulously licked off the inner resins that the sun of several summers had lured to the surface. In June, after the season’s first heat had deeply warmed the earth, the garden burst into bloom the way, during the hot evening of the Fourth, the sky brightened and smoked with homemade stars. Now the beds were lit by daylilies during their brief bright lifetimes; buddleia and penstemon beckoned the butterflies and hummingbirds while daisies, monarda, rudbeckia, stood steady for weeks on end, when, every fortnight, the grass paths were cut by the mower’s roll. Sometimes he dozed till his sweat, like the sap in his chair, drew insects to him.
Skizzen had read about posthumous people — those whose real life begins long after their death — but he was equally impressed by prenatal folk who live before they live and are made of fear or anticipation — people whose promise is fulfilled by the promise itself — when one cleans the house in case you might hire a maid — or those villains in books who hiss: I live for the day you die — because its realization is invariably disappointing and often dimmer than a bulb that has never seen soil or emitted light. His father, he liked to imagine, understood how future conditions drew upon present desires to ready the field and plant the earth, scour cities and hills for next year’s pogroms; how the masked ball that has not yet been held brings about its preparations: an engraved invitation, a new dress, a novel disguise, a fresh date. And there are all sorts of details that “flesh out” these dreams: the corsage that a boyfriend sends ahead of himself, the dark car that whisks you and your young prince away, the bright lights that dominate the party rooms, the music of Mozart, the glitter of silks, skins, and jewels … ah, he had let his mind flee into a fiction … he heard hunting horns, hooves, and baying dogs.