A Good American

by Alex George

  It was his customers who caused him to hesitate now. He had never seen a black face inside the Nick-Nack, and he supposed that there must be a good reason for that. He gazed down at the man’s shoe, and thought fast. After the generous welcome he had received in this town, the least he could do was to offer the same to another, now that he was in a position to do so. He glanced over at the piano in the far corner of the room. It had remained beneath its blanket since the day he had arrived.

  Nobody would complain about a little music.

  Frederick looked down and saw the man’s toe twitch. He opened the door.

  The Negro stepped into the room and looked around him, apparently untroubled by the silent standoff that had just ended. “Let’s see this piano, then,” he said cheerfully.

  The two men rolled the piano into the middle of the room. Frederick removed the tarpaulin. The instrument’s panels were decorated with elegant marquetry. The ivory keys had yellowed with age. The stranger extended his right index finger and pressed down on a key. The note echoed through the room.

  The man took off his hat and drew up a chair from the table behind him. His feet could barely touch the pedals. “Name’s William Henry Harris,” he said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Before Frederick could respond, the man began to play.

  For the next hour Frederick listened, the broom forgotten in his hands. William Henry Harris played that piano as if his life depended on it. Without a note of music in front of him, he delivered languid anthems, shimmering with funereal grace; stately marches, their formal pomp subverted by sharp syncopation; and breezy romps, melodic lines prancing onward, as light as air. Frederick watched as the man’s fingers danced across the keys. His right hand spun each melody out of the air and simultaneously constructed around it a gorgeous confection of harmony. His left hand steamed up and down, pounding out a rumbling bass counterpoint. The piano, unplayed for so long, emitted the odd sour note of protest, but nothing could dilute the beauty of the music. Even the faster numbers were shrouded in mournful dignity—what some were already calling the blues. A cracked holler of remorse lingered in the echo of each note.

  Frederick didn’t know it then, but this was his first encounter with ragtime, Missouri’s greatest gift to American music (although there are some who might argue that Charlie Parker, flying the coop of Kansas City and touching down on New York’s Fifty-seventh Street to ignite bebop’s flame, had a stronger claim). Scott Joplin was in Sedalia, Missouri, flush with the success of “Maple Leaf Rag,” and playing like a man possessed. William “Blind” Boone had cut his chops in the whorehouses of the tenderloin district in St. Louis, and now was pulling in large crowds across the state, stomping and wailing long into the night. Everyone was crazy for that syncopated style! The pebble had been dropped in Missouri, and the music, bright-eyed and restless, was slowly rippling outward toward the flame-bearers on the coasts, who would take that new rhythm and make it swing. Frederick stood mesmerized as William Henry Harris redrew his musical map. He had not moved when Polk came in through the back door of the tavern. The old barman came and stood silently next to Frederick as Harris continued to play.

  Finally Polk spoke. “Who’s the nigger?” he asked.

  Frederick frowned. “This gentleman, Polk, is tonight’s entertainment.”

  Polk did his best to make Frederick change his mind. Men wouldn’t want to be disturbed by a piano-playing midget, he protested. Frederick refused to listen. The music had put him beyond reason. He was determined to see William Henry Harris play. They agreed on a modest fee, and with a tip of his hat, the Negro disappeared, promising to return that evening.

  That afternoon, Polk anxiously drank himself into oblivion in record time. He was already sleeping peacefully on the mattress behind the building before the bar was even half full with the regular evening crowd. Frederick manned the bar alone. The piano was back in its old position in the corner of the room, but the tarpaulin had been removed and the wood polished. Frederick had decided to keep William Henry Harris hidden in the stockroom until the last possible moment. As a further precaution, he charged half price on all drinks in the hope of securing a sympathetic audience. Rather than descending into a benign haze of inebriated fellowship, though, the Nick-Nack was soon crackling with alcohol-fueled tension. Already one pair of rowdy drinkers had been shepherded outside to finish their argument in the street.

  When it was time for the show to begin, Frederick went to the stockroom where William Henry Harris was waiting patiently. The pianist straightened his tie and put on his hat. Frederick pushed open the door and led him into the crowded tavern. As they made their way toward the piano, the room fell silent. The only sound was William Henry Harris humming softly as he trotted along behind Frederick. He put his hat on top of the piano and settled himself on the stool. Frederick stood next to him, meeting every glare. When Harris had stopped fidgeting, Frederick looked down at him. “Play,” he hissed.

  Harris looked affronted. “You ain’t gonna announce me?” he whispered. “You know, give me a buildup, tell a few jokes, get them warmed up a little?”

  “Play,” growled Frederick.

  William Henry Harris flexed his fingers, and tore into a blistering rag, a double-timed, jazzed fugue of cascading sixteenth notes. For the next hour a continuous stream of music flowed from the Nick-Nack’s old piano. The customers watched him play, stunned that he should be in this place, doing this thing, but not one of them moved to object. They were too busy listening.

  Finally William Henry Harris removed his fingers from the keys and placed them quietly in his lap, his head bowed—man and music exhausted. Frederick looked around the room. Men stared quietly into the bottoms of their glasses. The silence grew more menacing with every passing second. It suddenly occurred to Frederick that William Henry Harris might not get out of the tavern alive.

  And then from somewhere came the slow, dry slap of skin on skin. After a few seconds—the longest few seconds of his life, Frederick would later call them—the lone hand clap was joined by another, from deep in the shadows. A moment later, another. It was just enough. The small eddy of approval slowly pulled others into its orbit. One by one, others joined in. Soon the room was filled with applause.

  From the piano stool William Henry Harris looked up at Frederick. His face was shining with perspiration. There was the smallest glimmer of triumph in his eye. He said: “I told you folks like to hear me play.”

  After he had unblinkingly renegotiated his fee, Harris agreed to come back to the Nick-Nack on a regular basis, and those evenings of ragtime became hugely popular. Word soon spread about the tiny Negro who could conjure such mesmerizing music out of the old piano, and a little judicious publicity on Frederick’s part ensured that the tavern was full every time Harris arrived in town. Regular customers found themselves having to fight for tables.

  On those subsequent nights, Frederick no longer felt the need to stand guard over the piano, but he remained cautious. Harris always stayed in the stockroom until it was time to begin, and left immediately after his performance. Where he came from or disappeared to, Frederick never discovered. He arrived promptly, immaculately dressed, and played for precisely the agreed-upon length of time.

  Over the years that the pianist came to the tavern, he and Frederick never became friends. Despite, or perhaps because of, the precarious nature of their joint endeavor, there was a necessary caution between them, a tacit understanding that no matter what boundaries they might breach on the floor of the Nick-Nack, others remained impregnable. Frederick’s reticence was also due, in part, to lingering guilt. In his memory, the tip of William Henry Harris’s polished shoe remained firmly wedged in the crack of the door, a reminder of all that still separated the two men.

  Frederick could not forget that he had been reluctant to let him in.

  Encouraged by the success of the ragtime evenin
gs, my grandfather began to plan other musical events at the tavern. He placed an advertisement in the Optimist announcing auditions. Soon the Nick-Nack was hosting marching bands, creaky violin trios, and pennywhistle recitals. Musicians came from neighboring towns to play. On weekends, bands performed during the afternoon, and the room was filled with families who had come to listen. Before long, music filled the place most nights of the week.

  Johann Kliever had always enjoyed Frederick’s singing as they meandered back home at the end of another night at the Nick-Nack. It was he who suggested an evening of opera. Frederick was thrilled by the idea. His natural affinity for the limelight had been muted since his arrival in Beatrice, but now it returned, stronger than ever. He persuaded the town’s best pianist, Riva Bloomberg, to accompany him. They rehearsed in the Nick-Nack during the afternoons, Frau Bloomberg’s nose a perpetual wrinkle of disapproval at the lingering odor of alcohol and tobacco. Riva Bloomberg was a farmer’s wife who rose at five every morning to strangle a chicken for her family’s dinner with those delicate pianist’s fingers of hers. It is fair to say that she and Frederick were not natural collaborators. During their performances Frederick pounded his chest and leaped about, while Frau Bloomberg sat motionless at the piano, not raising her eyes from the music except to glare at the audience. Still, the opera evenings were a great success. On those nights Jette and Joseph were always at the back of the darkened room, listening to the songs that had swept Jette off her feet back in Hanover. Ambushed by old memories, my grandmother wept as Frederick performed his repertoire of the lovestruck and the lovelorn, the blessed and the doomed.

  Joseph lay in his mother’s arms, listening, taking it all in. The music ran into his blood.

  Frederick’s belief in the greatness of America never faltered, not even for an instant. He had never forgotten Joseph Wall’s parting advice, to be a good American.

  One clear April afternoon in 1907, Frederick and Jette went to the courthouse to swear the Pledge of Allegiance. Frederick had not needed the small card on which the words were printed. He had long since committed them to memory, that spell that would grant him what he longed for most. As he recited the oath he stared in wonder at the American flag that hung behind the judge’s bench. Next to him, Jette held her own card up to her face to hide her tears.

  To mark the occasion Dr. Becker arranged for a photograph to be taken after the ceremony. It sits now on my mantelpiece, its faded sepia tones a quiet hymn to its century-long life. Frederick and Jette are standing on the steps of the courthouse. Frederick is beaming at the camera from beneath the brim of a brand-new homburg, purchased for the occasion. His hand rests on his young son’s shoulder. Joseph’s gaze has drifted away from the camera, his attention caught by some drama unfolding behind the photographer. Trapped in his tieless white shirt, the overstarched collar pinching his young neck, this newly minted American seems anxious to escape. Jette’s face is shrouded in shadows of sadness. She is wearing a pretty floral print dress, and stands a little apart from her husband and son. Her hands are resting protectively over her belly, which swells out in front of her.

  NINE

  Two months after that photograph was taken, Rosa was born. My grandparents’ joy at the arrival of their daughter—the first true American of the Meisenheimer brood, both conceived and delivered on this soil—was tempered by the baby’s manifest irritation at being sprung from the sanctuary of Jette’s womb.

  From her first breath my aunt drew on a seemingly limitless well of dissatisfaction. The slightest disappointment provoked screams of staggering ferocity. Her fury quickly acquired its own devastating momentum, and there was nothing her parents could do but wait for her to yell herself to a standstill. Her stamina was extraordinary. She often cried through the night, falling into a deep sleep just as the sun was rising. The rest of the family was left to stumble through the morning in frazzled exhaustion. Frederick, who was already keeping peculiar hours at the Nick-Nack, sometimes went for days without sleep. Before long Rosa’s tactics had crushed all opposition in the house. Her whims were cravenly indulged; all domestic decisions were based solely on whether or not she would approve. Joseph’s good-natured calm was no match for his sister’s spiky irascibility. Although it was his angel wing that hung in pride of place above the fireplace, Joseph soon became a furtive presence in his own home. His sister’s endless demands for attention slowly eclipsed him from view.

  In fact, Joseph did not especially mind Rosa’s tyrannical domination. He spent most of his time playing with the Klievers’ son, Stefan. The two boys roamed through the neighborhood together, lost in imaginary worlds. Stefan was usually the architect of their adventures, and in Joseph he had a willing accomplice. The people and creatures they encountered became characters in the drama unfolding in their heads. Old ladies morphed into evil witches. Cats became ferocious tigers. Men lurched along streets, evil in their hearts and violence burning in their eyes. All were dispatched with devastating blows from the boys’ arsenal of invisible weapons. They left a trail of bloody carnage in their wake.

  Their favorite place to play was Tillman’s Wood, a windswept copse at the top of the hill that overshadowed the town to the north. Separated from the surrounding forest by a ragged corona of scrubland, it was perched on the crest of the river bluff, edging up to a drop of several hundred feet down to the Missouri River. At the heart of Tillman’s Wood there was a tall oak tree, and the boys loved to swarm over its weathered limbs. In early summer, when the tree was wreathed in young leaf, they would be cocooned by verdant camouflage, invisible from the ground. They spent many blissful hours there, sometimes playing, sometimes lulled into stillness by torrents of sweet birdsong. There, far away from the adult world below them, Joseph and Stefan were kings.

  When Joseph was seven, Frederick asked Riva Bloomberg whether she would be willing to give his son singing lessons. Riva cautiously agreed. The apple, she knew, never fell far from the tree, and she was unsure whether she really wanted to be responsible for ushering another musical show-off into the world. Joseph himself was no more enthusiastic about the idea. He was terrified of the lady behind the piano who scowled her way through his father’s recitals at the Nick-Nack. Frederick held Joseph’s hand as they walked to his first lesson. The Bloombergs lived in a large farmhouse half a mile out of town. All the way there, Frederick promised him everything would be wonderful. Joseph said nothing, but his young eyes were clouded by doubt.

  In fact, Frederick was right.

  The first time Joseph stood in Riva Bloomberg’s living room and sang back the patterns of notes that she picked out on the piano, his untutored voice brought her fingers to a standstill. As she listened, Riva Bloomberg felt as if she were hearing music for the first time. Each note Joseph sang was a small starburst of beauty, too perfect for the world into which it emerged.

  Joseph had no idea of the effect he was having on his teacher. He mistook Riva Bloomberg’s misty-eyed rapture for the same disapproval she showed while Frederick cavorted about during his performances. But not even that disquiet could dampen the euphoria that swept through him when he sang. The music filled him up, and made him whole. As the notes flew from his throat, the rest of the world receded. All that was left was beauty.

  Melody and rhythm came to him as naturally as breathing. Riva Bloomberg only had to play a tune once for it to be deposited, note for note, in his faultless musical memory, and then he could reproduce it perfectly on demand. After a few months, Joseph had worked his way through every piece of music Riva Bloomberg had for solo treble. She asked Frederick what they should try next.

  “Oh, there is plenty of music out there,” Frederick said cheerfully. “Just not for boys.”

  So it was that Joseph and Frau Bloomberg began to explore some of the great soprano opera roles. Every week my father underwent a peculiar metamorphosis, changing from a shy young boy into one of a gallery of unhinged women. He played sc
heming maids, a suicidal Japanese concubine, a collection of flaky consumptives, an oversexed gypsy, several aristocratic grandes dames, and at least one witch. He did not possess Frederick’s flair for melodrama, but the music, distilled in a voice like his, needed no histrionics. This was just as well, because most of the time Joseph had no idea what he was singing about. Riva Bloomberg did not approve of most of opera’s greatest female characters, who were (in her opinion) either hysterical hotheads or dissolute fornicators. She was determined to protect Joseph from all that depravity. Whenever he asked the meaning of a particular foreign word, Frau Bloomberg said the first thing that came into her head. As a result, when Joseph wistfully sang about the imminent return of a long-lost lover from overseas, he believed that he was telling a touching story about penguins. His innocence breathed new life into those arias. In that parallel universe of meaning, unshackled from messy human context, the music existed simply for itself and acquired a new, luminous beauty. Joseph’s voice was high and lovely, impossibly pure. The notes chased each other through Frau Bloomberg’s living room, a shimmering tail of melody.

  Ever since my grandparents’ arrival in Beatrice, Anna Kliever had been Jette’s closest friend. The two women recognized in each other the perfect confidante. The town was small; everyone lived their lives in front of a silent, watchful chorus of their fellow citizens. Wary of this unwanted audience, Anna Kliever had learned to bury her feelings deep within herself. But Jette’s guileless friendship opened her up like a flower feeling the first warm touch of summer sun.

  As for Jette, the patina of breezy good humor that she maintained for the benefit of her husband and the outside world could not survive the intimacy she shared with Anna. When they were alone she was unable to halt the choked litany of regret that stewed inside her. It was Anna who listened to Jette’s frustration at Frederick’s inability to concede, even for a moment, that their new life was anything but perfect.