A Good American

by Alex George

  Jette was devastated by Anna’s death. First she had lost her husband, now her best friend. She felt increasingly lonely and remote. There was nobody left but the children, and without them she feared that she would float away. Each morning she looked out the window at the naked boughs of the young apple tree she had planted in Frederick’s memory. It occurred to her that it was time to put down some roots of her own.

  While Frederick was alive, it had been easy for Jette to despise the Nick-Nack. But his death demanded a rewriting of what had gone before. Every note he had sung still echoed in the old bricks. The place became a memorial to him, and Jette threw all her energies into honoring his legacy. She began to book more bands, and made plans for the future. But history conspired against her: in January of 1919, Missouri was one of five states to ratify the United States Congress’s bill outlawing the sale of alcohol. Those five votes were enough to ensure that the ban on liquor would become law exactly twelve months later.

  The last year of the Nick-Nack’s life was an extended good-bye party. People drank as if every evening would be their last. Business had never been better. Polk and Jette struggled to cope with the extra workload, so Joseph began to help when he could, sweeping floors, clearing tables, and washing glasses. The customers were kind to him. They slipped small coins into his pocket and pressed crumpled cigarettes on him with a benign wink. Joseph began to understand that the tavern traded in more than simply drink. Other commodities were also on offer: companionship, community, and the comfort of ritual. He became familiar with the nightly rhythms of hope and despair, as the world slowly collapsed around the men who drank there. They wept, fought, slept, and stared longingly at his mother, before stumbling out into the darkness at the end of each night.

  Joseph was proud to call himself a workingman. He devised a small ritual: at the end of every week, Jette gave him a dollar bill, thanking him for his hard work. Joseph put the money in his pocket, relishing the touch of the paper beneath his fingers. Then he pulled the note out again and gravely handed it back, his contribution to household expenses. It was this transaction, the responsibility and sacrifice of it, that gave him the most pleasure of all.

  Meanwhile, there was music everywhere. The Nick-Nack was reveling in a marvelous swan song. Just about anyone who walked through the door with an instrument under his arm could secure a night’s work. There were brass ensembles, string quartets, an endless procession of guitars and fiddles. William Henry Harris still played regularly, his elegant fingers weaving syncopated spells to bewitch the listening crowds.

  Joseph enjoyed the bands, but it was the singers he remembered the most. A woman came from Quincy, Illinois, squeezed into a tight satin dress, a slash of scarlet across her mouth. She winked and hollered her way through a honky-tonk repertoire of old bordello songs, bursting with lewd innuendo. She had the saddest eyes Joseph had ever seen. There was a huge ogre of a man, nearly seven feet tall with a long black beard down to his chest, who carried his double bass onto the stage as if it were a child’s violin. He glared furiously at the audience, and then began to croon plaintive love songs in a screeching falsetto, accompanying himself with occasional low percussive thwacks on the bass strings. Identical twins from Moberly hunched over their banjos and sang mournful songs of longing and regret. The long necks of their instruments pointed away from each other, slender horns on a double-headed beast.

  During these performances, Joseph moved among the tables, delivering fresh drinks and picking up empty glasses, but always listening to the music. One night, four men dressed in brightly colored jackets walked quietly onto the stage. There was no band to accompany them. They huddled closely together, almost turned in on themselves, paying no attention to the audience. Then, without warning, the air was filled with delicious sound. Their four voices merged to form a perfect chord, brilliant with promise. Joseph stood, his tray limp in his hand. It was the sound he had been waiting for his whole life.

  Once they had the audience’s attention, the quartet launched into “You’re the Flower of My Heart, Sweet Adeline.” The lead singer sang the main line while his three companions wove intricate patterns back and forth around the melody. They swooped and rumbled, creating layered confections of a cappella harmony, cross-pollinations of sweet notes and tones. Their voices would stack up with exquisite precision for a dazzling instant; then they would move on, tearing down the edifice they had just created and constructing another of equal wonder in its place. For an hour they sang folk songs, spirituals, and ballads. Joseph listened, spellbound. Frederick used to call the human voice God’s first instrument, and here it was in all its unadorned beauty, four times over. Their last note, a big, fat sunbeam of harmony that refracted through the room in warm shafts of beauty, rang out for several beats too long, the singers reluctant to bring the music to an end.

  Joseph never forgot that night. The shadow it cast would be a long one.

  Amid all the elegiac revelry at the Nick-Nack, Prohibition was drawing nearer. On January 16, 1920, the tavern would close its doors for good. Jette gazed at the calendar like a condemned prisoner staring up at the glinting blade of a guillotine. She watched helplessly as the months passed, too paralyzed by the impending calamity to come up with an alternative plan.

  Around that time, new neighbors arrived in the house next door. Like Jette’s own lopsided family, the Leftkemeyers were missing a parent. There were just two of them, a short, serious-looking man, and his daughter, who was about Joseph’s age. Martin Leftkemeyer had come to Beatrice to run the town’s bank. Every day he wore the same three-piece suit and pristine brown homburg. Joseph watched him as he trotted down the steps of his house on his way to work. Amid the town’s farmers and laborers he seemed more like an exotic bird of paradise than a bank manager.

  The bank occupied a large building on Main Street, just opposite the tavern, but Martin Leftkemeyer never came in for a drink. Instead he went home every night to eat a quiet supper with his daughter. This allowed everyone else to gossip about him freely, but the lack of any ascertainable facts meant that people resorted to idle speculation, not all of it generous.

  Jette listened to these rumors and kept her own counsel. She had knocked on the Leftkemeyers’ front door a few days after their arrival, a basket of freshly baked roggenbrot under her arm. She had stayed as long as she could, trawling indiscreetly for information.

  “What a tragedy,” she said when she returned home. “The poor man could barely look me in the eye. Wouldn’t smile. So serious. His wife died in the influenza epidemic. He’s come here from Kansas City to start a new life.” She was silent for a moment, as she contemplated the impossibility of her ever attempting a similar escape trick. She was rooted here now, and she knew it.

  Joseph, though, wanted to hear about the daughter.

  “She’s a skinny thing, that’s all I can tell you. She sat the whole time with her hands folded neatly on her lap and didn’t open her mouth once.”

  “Is she pretty?” asked Joseph. He knew the answer to this already, but wanted to hear it from someone else.

  “Pretty?” sniffed Jette. “I didn’t notice.”

  Joseph hid his disappointment. He had been unable to take his eyes off the girl next door. She offered a fragile allure that was quite alien to him. Thanks to all that German food, most of the females in Beatrice had lost their gamine figures by adolescence. But there was almost nothing to Joseph’s new neighbor. He was bewitched by the graceful contours of her slender arms. Every day she wore a different color of ribbon in her hair. Joseph had already begun to lie awake at night and think about those ribbons.

  “What’s her name?” he asked, staring at his fingernails.

  “The girl? She’s called Cora.”

  Cora!

  Joseph began to loiter at the living room window for hours, hoping for a glimpse of Cora Leftkemeyer. During the day she was a cyclone of domestic indus
try, forever hanging out washing in the yard, sweeping the back porch, or cleaning windows. Every afternoon she put on her bonnet and walked to the shops with a wicker basket on her arm, returning a little while later with groceries for dinner.

  More than anything, Cora loved to spend time planting and tending her vegetable garden. In this she was always meticulous and methodical. Joseph watched with interest as she carefully staked out the perimeter of the area with string and tall poles. She spent hours turning over the soil with a pitchfork that probably weighed as much as she did. She planted seeds in precisely measured lines, smoothing over each tiny hole with the back of her trowel. At the end of each furrow was a stick with a yellow piece of paper pinned to it—a reminder, Joseph supposed, of what she had planted. She watered every morning and evening. She often sang as she worked. Sometimes she simply wandered up and down the neat lines of topsoil with her hands on her hips, a look of quiet satisfaction on her lovely face. By the time she had finished her work, her cheeks were often smudged with soil. Joseph had never been so enchanted.

  Every evening after dinner, Cora and her father walked arm in arm around the neighborhood. Neither talked as they made their way up and down the streets of the town. Joseph dreamed that one day it would be his arm that Cora took before setting out on her stroll.

  There was a certain purity to my father’s adoration. He was still young enough to be awed by the intoxicating force of his own passion. Everything was brilliantly illuminated by his ardor. Each beer-stained table he wiped, each glass he collected and washed, each sweep of the broom across the Nick-Nack’s dirty floor—it was all for Cora. He tripped happily through his days, his heart a large, silent incubator of innocent devotion.

  Joseph knew better than to discuss his fascination with Cora Leftkemeyer with Stefan. Their gruff discussions about females were willfully coarse (as well as anatomically inaccurate). Joseph had no business falling in love—he knew that much. A confession of how he felt about his pretty neighbor would provoke nothing but scorn from his friend. Consequently he maintained his usual mask of bored disenchantment whenever the topic arose with Stefan. Joseph made no attempt to hide his love-struck mooning from Jette, though. As she watched him keep his vigil by the window, my grandmother’s heart flooded with memories of Frederick. She knew that the aria that had ambushed her from behind the hedge in the Grosse Garten had been a long time in the making. Now Jette watched her son as he fell under a stranger’s spell with the same intensity, and she couldn’t help but worry.

  Unlike Joseph, my grandmother was unimpressed by Cora’s cool demeanor. She thought the girl was too wrapped up in her Kansas City sophistication to be interested in a country boy like him. When Jette looked at Cora, all she could see was the person who was going to break her son’s heart.

  Which she duly did, although not in the way that Jette had imagined.

  SIXTEEN

  As 1919 drew to a close, the mood in the Nick-Nack grew increasingly despondent. People drank as much as they could while it was still legal to do so. Jette stopped booking music acts. Customers no longer listened. Instead they turned their backs and muttered about the fools in Washington who passed such idiot laws. Every night people begged Jette to ignore the ban.

  There was no chance of that, though. The town’s police chief, Walford Scott, promised her that he intended to enforce the new law vigorously. He dropped by once or twice a week and hungrily inspected the tavern’s remaining stocks of alcohol, taking note of what had been consumed. Jette knew that he and his deputies would confiscate whatever bottles remained undrunk. She also knew that any seized contraband would be poured directly down their throats, and was determined that there would not be a drop left for them. She resolved not to take a cent for drinks on the final night.

  January 16, 1920, the last day of the Nick-Nack’s existence, dawned crisp and clear. Joseph walked toward the tavern, cheerfully humming “Sweet Adeline.” He was not worried by the Nick-Nack’s impending closure; he was still young enough to believe that everything would work out all right in the end. Besides, he was (as usual) preoccupied by his thoughts of Cora Leftkemeyer. As he made his way through the town, he concocted fantasies about how she would finally notice him and how, the thunderbolt unleashed, she would adore him as much as he adored her.

  To Joseph’s surprise, there was a tall man lying on the ground in front of the Nick-Nack. His head was resting on a small case and a battered hat covered his face. Two large black hands lay folded peacefully across his chest. He appeared to be asleep. Joseph gingerly stepped over him and inserted his key into the front door. Just then a hand gripped him by the ankle.

  “Little man,” growled a low voice. “You gonna ask me in?”

  “I thought you were asleep,” said Joseph.

  “Fat chance. Your Missouri ground ain’t as soft as some.” Joseph tried not to stare as the man slowly got to his feet. He brushed dirt off his arms and legs, and waited patiently as Joseph fumbled with the key. A generation on, my father was as tongue-tied as Frederick had been when William Henry Harris had first appeared at the Nick-Nack’s door. Finally the two of them stepped inside.

  “I heard you hire musicians,” said the man, looking around.

  “We used to,” said Joseph. “But we’re closing down. Tonight is our last night.”

  “Prohibition?” The man put his hands into his pockets. “You actually gonna do what that dumb law says?”

  Joseph nodded. “What do you play?” he asked.

  The man bent down and opened his case. Inside there was a cornet. He put the instrument to his lips and blew a streaky run of quarter notes. “You like that?”

  Joseph had no wish to upset the enormous stranger. “It’s very nice,” he said.

  The man put his head to one side. “You ever been to New Orleans?” he asked.

  “I’ve never left Missouri,” admitted Joseph.

  “Well, New Orleans is famous for three things: gumbo, carnivals, and cornet players. We got cornet players coming out of our asses down there.” He played a bright little phrase. “There’s one kid blows the rest of us halfway down the street. Louis Armstrong, his name is. They call him Satchel-mouth, on account of his big fat face. You could stuff his horn into that mouth of his and never know where it went.” The man shook his head. “That boy can charm the moon down from the sky, he plays so hot.” He walked over to the stage and opened the piano lid. “Too hot for me, at any rate. Every night folks ask me how come I don’t sound more like that flashy little motherfucker. Fact is, that’s just not how I like to play.” He perched his enormous frame on the edge of the piano stool, and softly played a chord with his left hand. With his right hand he raised his cornet to his lips and played a couple of mournful notes. His fingers moved across the piano keys, a sparse and haunting accompaniment. He sat back on the piano stool. “That hot stuff isn’t for me, see? I like to play sweet and low.” He looked at Joseph. “So you gonna give me a gig?”

  Joseph coughed uncomfortably. “Like I said, it’s our last night.”

  “All the more reason. One night only. Catch it while you can.”

  “I’ll have to ask my mother,” said Joseph. “She’ll be here later.”

  “Your mother, huh.” The man leaned over the piano and picked out another chord, strange and melancholy. “Mind if I wait around?”

  Joseph shook his head. He fetched the broom and began to sweep the floor while the man watched him from the stage. Occasionally he would turn to address the piano keys and concoct another foreign chord that hung in the air, dissonant and unsettling.

  About an hour later, the front door opened and Jette walked in. When she saw the man at the piano she stopped abruptly. Immediately he stood up, hopped off the stage, and walked toward her. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said. “Your son was good enough to let me in to wait for you. I heard you have music here in the evenings
, and—”

  Suddenly he stopped talking. “I know you,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Jette.

  “I know you,” repeated the man. “I seen you before somewhere.”

  Jette shook her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Never forget a face,” said the man. “I seen you before. You ever been to New Orleans?”

  “No,” said Jette.

  “Not ever?”

  “Well, I was there once, for less than a day, but that was a long time ago, and anyway, there’s not the slightest—”

  The man snapped his fingers. “The train station. There was flooding up the line. I spoke with your husband. Got you on a boat upriver.”

  Jette frowned. “There was a man—”

  “You was expecting.” The man turned and looked at Joseph and whistled. “This the boy?”

  Jette was still struggling to make sense of this unexpected arrival. New Orleans was another world away. “Yes, but—”

  “Lomax. The name is Lomax.”

  “Mr. Lomax,” said Jette weakly. “It’s been a very long time.”

  “And how is your husband?” asked Lomax. “I remember he liked Buddy Bolden.” He turned to Joseph. “Buddy Bolden was another cornet player. The real deal. That cat could play Louis Armstrong’s raggedy little ass off. Your daddy heard him play. That was how we met.”

  “My husband was killed in Europe, Mr. Lomax,” said Jette quietly. “In the war.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”