A Good American

by Alex George

  “I like it here,” he said when he had finished.

  “It’s as good a place as any,” agreed Kliever.

  “It looks as if we’ll have to stay for a while,” said Frederick. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “You’ll stay with us,” said Kliever.

  The two men looked out across the dark water for a moment.

  “Thank you,” said Frederick.

  And so, as they stood side by side, making their own modest contributions to the longest river in America, did Frederick Meisenheimer and Johann Kliever become friends.

  That night Frederick slept on the floor next to his wife and son. When he awoke the next morning, Jette was propped up in the bed with Joseph on her chest. The baby’s eyes were tightly shut as he sucked hungrily at her breast, oblivious to everything else. Frederick got to his feet and stroked his son’s tiny head. It felt hot to his touch, full of life.

  “A late night,” observed Jette dryly.

  “Yes, well,” said Frederick, abashed.

  Jette smiled. “I suppose a celebration was in order.”

  “The doctor says that we must stay here for a while. He wants to be sure the baby is healthy before we go any further.”

  “If that’s what he says, then that’s what we’ll do.”

  “The driver went back to St. Louis yesterday. We’re on our own now.”

  Jette nodded at this news with a faraway look in her eye. The baby was not the only one being nourished, Frederick saw. His wife was tranquil, replete with new discoveries. “We’ll manage, when the time comes,” she said, hugging Joseph to her.

  After the unhappy chaos of the previous few weeks, Frederick wondered whether some measure of calm might finally be returning to their lives. He was not a superstitious man, far less a religious one, but he couldn’t ignore the serendipity of it all: the driver’s decision to stop to refresh the horses, Jette’s waters breaking just then, Kliever strolling by. They were less than a day’s ride away from Rocheport, but at that moment the final miles of their journey seemed as daunting as a return voyage back across the Atlantic.

  Rocheport had only been the vaguest of destinations. Nobody was expecting them there.

  That evening, Frederick and Johann Kliever returned to the Nick-Nack. Frederick became increasingly preoccupied as the evening drew on.

  “You seem quiet tonight,” remarked Kliever.

  “Sorry.” Frederick tapped the side of his head. “I’ve been thinking. I’m wondering if perhaps we should stay here.”

  “Perhaps you should,” said Kliever.

  “If Jette agrees, of course. And if I can find a job.”

  “There are always jobs for hard workers.”

  “You know I’m not a farmer.”

  “There are other things in this world apart from farming,” said Kliever. “Besides, it’s backbreaking work. Terrible hours. And you’re a slave to the damned weather. If you have a drought—poof.” Kliever’s large hands collided over the table with a heavy, cataclysmic thud. Polk tottered up, his tray laden with fresh drinks, and silently unloaded the glasses onto the table. “I’ve just had an idea,” Kliever said. He stood up. “Back in a moment.” He turned without another word and strode out of the bar.

  When Kliever returned a few minutes later, Frederick was surprised to see Dr. Becker following him. As the two men sat down, Polk materialized and put a glass of beer down in front of the doctor.

  “Good evening,” said Becker, after a lengthy contemplation of the tabletop. “Kliever tells me you’re thinking of staying with us.”

  “We’ve had such a warm welcome.”

  “You would need to find suitable employment.”

  “That, and to convince my wife.”

  Becker nodded and looked over his shoulder toward the bar. “You’ve met Polk,” he said.

  “A phenomenon.”

  “Yes, well. His crashing into unconsciousness at the end of the evening is getting tiresome.”

  “Tiresome?”

  The doctor drained his glass of beer in one long swallow. “The thing is,” he said, “the Nick-Nack belongs to me.”

  “To you?” said Frederick.

  “Perhaps you think it inappropriate that a member of the medical profession should own a tavern.”

  “Not at all,” replied Frederick.

  “Well, there are enough people who do,” said the doctor bitterly. “Anyway. No matter. We were speaking of Polk. Frankly, I prefer drunks on the other side of the bar.” The doctor turned and watched Polk wobble precariously between the tables. “After he collapses I never know who’s in charge. Volunteers are all very well, and they’re all good men, but I’d like to know there’s someone here I can trust to protect my investment. A manager, in other words.” Becker laced his fingers together. “You seem like a reliable man. And from what I hear, you have a natural talent for bar work. If you want it, the job’s yours.”

  “I want it,” said Frederick at once.

  “You’ll have to learn English, of course,” continued Dr. Becker. “Not everyone here speaks German.”

  “I understand,” said Frederick.

  “And since you’ll be staying, you’re going to need somewhere to live. As it happens, I have a house you can rent. You could move in straightaway. It’s a little run-down, but nothing that a lick of paint wouldn’t fix. And I wouldn’t ask much.”

  Frederick beamed at him. “I’m sure it will be perfect.”

  Just then there was a crash from the back of the room. The men turned and saw customers leaning over the bar. The doctor sighed. “Well,” he said, “now I can watch you in action myself.”

  The following morning, Frederick went back to the Nick-Nack with Becker. The doctor introduced him to Polk and explained to the barman that Frederick would be working with him from now on. Polk listened silently to the news. Frederick could smell stale alcohol seeping through the old man’s skin. He remembered that first night on board the Great Republic, the only time he had ever drunk alone. The same sodden misery that had haunted him then lingered in every line of Polk’s gray face.

  That evening, Frederick stood proudly behind the bar of the Nick-Nack, a pristine white apron around his considerable girth, and informed customers of recent developments. The drinkers of Beatrice approved of the new addition to the Nick-Nack’s staff. For all his robotic efficiency and entertaining collapses, Polk provided little of the warmth that people expected when they went to a tavern. Frederick, in contrast, was always ready with a cheerful welcome and a sympathetic ear. Together they made a fine team, at least until the old man crashed to the floor, at which point Frederick worked alone until the end of the evening.

  Exactly a week after Joseph’s birth, Frederick and Jette moved into the house that Dr. Becker had promised them. The small wooden bungalow was nestled in the cold shadow of the tree-blanketed bluff that marked the northern perimeter of the town. The house had not been lived in for several years, and the slow creep of decay and disrepair had gone unchecked. Doors hung off their hinges. Untended window frames had splintered beneath the frost and fire of countless Missouri seasons. The panes were so thickly smeared in grime that only a few pallid rays of sunlight fell through the glass. Cobwebs crisscrossed the rafters in such delicate profusion that the ghostly filigree appeared to be holding the house together.

  The rooms were empty cocoons of shadows. Spiders scuttled into corners at the first footfall. There was a large fireplace in the living room, ancient ash lying in its grate. An old stove leaned against the wall by the back door. In the yard was a wooden outhouse, half hidden by overgrown grass. Beyond it a solitary sugar maple tree stood silent sentry to the forest behind.

  Frederick and Jette stood on the Klievers’ porch as they prepared to walk the four blocks to their new home, the final leg of the journey that had s
tarted in the street outside Andreas’s apartment. As Frederick picked up Jette’s suitcase, Kliever stepped forward. “Here,” he said to Jette. “This is for you.” He was holding the terra-cotta angel’s wing that Frederick had broken as he had staggered backward under the force of Jette’s punch, just as Joseph was being born.

  Jette took the wing and put it in her pocket.

  That evening, while Joseph slept, Frederick fashioned a hook out of a short piece of wire. He hung the broken angel’s wing high up on the wall of the living room, directly over the fireplace. They gazed up at the bright patch of color, their new home’s only decoration. The terra-cotta heart glowed warmly in the light of the flames below.

  Finally, they had stopped moving.

  EIGHT

  In the weeks that followed, Frederick watched Polk closely and learned as much as he could about running the Nick-Nack. Once the old barman realized that he was going to keep his job, and that Frederick intended to ignore his furtive nips from the whiskey flagon, his icy detachment thawed, but only a little. Nothing would entice Polk to interact with his fellow men with the same enthusiasm that he communed with a bottle. Every afternoon he began the same, slow process of getting stupendously pickled.

  Like Polk, the tavern had a certain run-down charm about it. The sawdust that covered the floor hid a legion of cracks and holes. The wall of beveled glass behind the bar had acquired its own misty patina, the fog of age creeping slowly inward from its perimeter. Sometimes Frederick would eye the piano hidden beneath the tarpaulin in the corner of the room.

  Johann Kliever often spent evenings propping up the bar at the Nick-Nack until it was closing time. Sometimes he would pester Frederick for a song as the two of them made their way home. Every night they would walk to the end of the pier and urinate beneath the stars. Frederick’s deposits into the Missouri River became a sort of spiritual investment, an act of primeval connection with this new land. The unchecked force of nature that surrounded him could not have been more different from the prim streets of Hanover. Those visits to the pier were a constant reminder that this was, above all, somewhere new.

  By tacit agreement, neither man burdened the other with his innermost thoughts. Frederick often found himself reflecting how little he knew about his new friend. Sometimes Kliever would vanish for several days at a time, and then reappear without comment or explanation. After these mysterious absences he often moved gingerly, the ghost of a painful grimace haunting his face.

  When he was not at the Nick-Nack, Frederick began work on his new home. He painted the house a brilliant white, both inside and out, and scoured the windows until they relinquished all those years of dirt. He sang while he worked; the rooms were filled with sunlight and music. Frederick repaired the rotten window frames and built a bed. He was not a natural handyman. His only assets were a cast-iron will and a newly acquired phlegmatic streak that saved him from being crushed by disappointment when his efforts failed. Ladders toppled, pipes burst, wood splintered, glass broke, but Frederick gritted his teeth and plowed on. He relished the small satisfactions of a newly daubed wall or a freshly chopped pile of wood. Little by little, he turned their small house into a home.

  In what little spare time he had, Frederick began to study English. He borrowed books from Dr. Becker and read for an hour each morning. Every week he bought the town’s newspaper, the Beatrice Optimist, and slowly worked his way through it, dictionary by his side. He listened closely to conversations at the tavern, eager to grasp the language’s strange vernacular. Frederick was an assiduous student. A year after their arrival in America, he had amassed a fair vocabulary and was rarely caught out by the army of irregular verbs that lurked in ambush. But for all his hard work, Frederick had no gift for English. After the dour rigidity of his native tongue, its anarchy unnerved him. There was always a glimmer of apprehension in his eye when he spoke, as if every sentence were a high wire from which he was liable to topple at any moment. His unease made him retreat from the perils of idiom. He adopted a cautious, formal mode of speech, although this wasn’t just because of his fear of opaque colloquialisms: English was the language of his family’s future. It deserved to be spoken with respect, not sullied with lazy elisions and cheap slang. As he listened to the alien words form themselves in his mouth, his heart would swell with pride.

  Because Frederick loved America. He loved its big open spaces, the sunsets that drenched the evening sky in blistering color. He loved the warmth of the people. Above all, he loved the smell of promise that hung in the air. Europe, he could see now, was slowly suffocating under the weight of its own history. In America the future was the only thing that mattered. Frederick turned his back on everything that had gone before, and looked ahead into the bright lights of the young century. Here, a man could reinvent himself. His determination to learn a new language was his own path toward such reincarnation. German became just an echo of his past. Frederick addressed everyone in his newly starched English, his words muddied by the thick accent that he would never lose, every tortured syllable pronounced with relish.

  Jette was not so lucky. Joseph’s birth, rather than directing her eyes toward the future, instead turned her gaze back toward the home she had left behind. Motherhood changed everything that she thought she knew. Everything was now refracted through the prism of a new mother’s love. She stared down at Joseph as he slept, and knew that she would be destroyed if he ever left her. Suddenly, remorse flooded through her as she thought about her parents, alone now on the other side of the world.

  She hid her dismay behind a faultless mask of contentment. She sewed curtains and embroidered cushions, and persuaded Anna Kliever to teach her how to knit. But no matter how assiduously she busied herself in domestic industry, she found herself missing Hanover terribly. It had been her idea to come to America, but now she began to wish that they had never left. As she watched Frederick eagerly immerse himself in his new country, she kept her homesickness a guilty secret.

  Unlike her husband, Jette learned scarcely a word of English. Almost everyone in the town still spoke German, and she found her old language a welcome comfort in the face of the strange parade of foreign customs outside her front door. Jette’s quiet yearning for home manifested itself in other ways, too. She cooked only traditional German fare—bland, hefty dishes, fortified by mountains of starch. Possessing no cookbooks, she picked her way back to distant memories. By dogged experiment she extracted the tastes and textures of her childhood from deep within her. Over time she constructed a gastronomic mosaic, each dish a quiet elegy to all she had left behind. Spareribs with sauerkraut, steamed ham, caraway meatballs with spaetzle, fried apple slices, barley porridge with buttermilk—these concoctions came freighted with memories. A mouthful of streuselkuchen, laced with golden almonds, took her back to long summer afternoons spent in the garden of her childhood home. The heavy rye of roggenbrot brought the chill northern evenings closing in. Jette’s kitchen became a shrine, turning out culinary museum pieces. Every day she baked mountains of white bread, laced with milk and sugar. And there were lebkuchen, Joseph’s favorite—crumbling fortifications of molasses, spices, raisins, and lard.

  While Frederick was at work, Jette secretly began to write letters home. She filled page after page with detailed reports on their new lives, the lines smudged by her tears. In between these reports she begged her parents for forgiveness.

  She never received a reply.

  One Friday morning, a few months after Joseph’s first birthday, Frederick was sweeping the floor of the Nick-Nack when there was a knock on the door. “We are closed!” cried Frederick in his awkward English. “You must wait until lunch!” He carried on with his work. After a brief pause, the knock came again.

  Frederick put down his broom with a sigh. He went to the front door of the tavern, pulled back the bolt, and opened the door. Leaning against the door frame in an elegant slouch was a black man no more than
five feet tall. He was dressed in a light gray suit and black patent leather shoes. The brim of his hat was pulled down over his eyes. A gold fob chain hung on his vest, glimmering in the morning sun. Frederick tried to hide his astonishment. Since he had arrived in Beatrice he hadn’t seen a single Negro.

  “I am sorry,” said Frederick, “we are closed.”

  “Don’t want no drink,” said the man.

  “Well then, how is it that I can help you?” asked Frederick politely.

  The man pushed himself away from the door frame. “Heard you got a piano.”

  Frederick nodded. “Yes, that is correct. We have a piano.”

  The man scratched the side of his neck. His fingers were long and thin. “I can play.”

  “No thank you,” said Frederick.

  “Folks like to hear me play.”

  “No thank you,” said Frederick again, stepping back inside. As he closed the door, the gleaming tip of the man’s shoe appeared, blocking its progress.

  “But you ain’t heard me play yet,” he said through the crack. He spoke without rancor.

  When it came to matters of race in America, Frederick was hopelessly out of his depth. Here his innate warmth toward his fellow man was outflanked by history. Only a few decades earlier, Missouri had been ripped apart by the Civil War. Fathomless atrocities had been committed on its soil, a slave state at the frontier of Confederate territory. Thousands of soldiers had perished, innocents were slaughtered, women were raped and beaten to death. Children were taken from their beds, never to be seen again. A cloud of terror had hung over the land. All this in the name of freedom. The tragedy of it all was that the Union’s eventual victory did not erase the shadow of slavery. People’s thinking would not be altered by a peace accord and new laws that they did not want.

  Frederick, unsullied by the blood of local history, was perplexed by the unreflective racism that he had witnessed in many of his customers. He struggled to reconcile the casual bigotry he heard at the bar with what he knew of the men who said such things.