A Good American

by Alex George

  And then, by golly (as Bertie Wooster would have said), I got one.

  One Saturday morning in late April of 1953, in the middle of a busy breakfast shift, Billy Florscheim appeared at the door of the diner, out of breath. Billy was the First Christian Church’s choirmaster. “James, James Meisenheimer,” he cried, the moment he saw me. “There you are. Have you seen Magnus Kellerman today?”

  I shook my head. “We played chess after school yesterday afternoon. That’s the last time I saw him. Why? What’s happened?”

  “He’s disappeared,” gasped Billy. “His parents are mad with worry. They’re forming a search party.”

  “Magnus has run away?” I said.

  He looked at me sharply. “Did he say anything to you?”

  I thought of my friend’s cherished plans to begin a new life in St. Louis. My eyes grew as big as saucers. “No,” I said hollowly.

  When I told Joseph what had happened, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. We closed the diner as quickly as we could and hurried off to help with the search. A large crowd was milling outside the church. Reverend Kellerman was organizing groups, sending volunteers off to search in different parts of town. When he saw us approach, he abruptly stopped what he was doing and walked over. He and my father hadn’t spoken in fourteen years. The minister’s hair had turned as white as snow by then. It fell, rich and lustrous, halfway down his back. His whiskers had grown into a long, uncontrollable thicket; even his eyebrows had begun to sprout in splendid, bushy abandon. He had begun to bear a startling resemblance to the Almighty himself. The two old adversaries looked at each other for a moment.

  “Heard about your boy,” said Joseph. “We’re here to help.”

  “Thank you.” Reverend Kellerman’s voice was soft, quite unlike his usual delivery from the pulpit.

  “I’m not coming back, though,” warned my father.

  The pastor’s eyes creased into a small smile.

  The two men shook hands.

  We were sent to search the woods behind our house. For the next five or six hours we went up and down the hill, calling out for Magnus. I searched and shouted along with the others, even though I was sure that he had hitched an early-morning ride out of town and was now heading toward his dreams, bound for St. Louis.

  It seemed that everyone was growing up except for me.

  As evening drew in, we finally gave up our search and returned to the church. We walked back along the riverbank, tired and hot, our voices hoarse from yelling. As we passed by the pier, I noticed that the far end of the wooden walkway looked strange. I went to investigate. As I approached the end of the pier I saw that some of the old planks had splintered into rotten fragments and fallen into the water. My throat tightened in sudden, wordless sadness.

  I walked slowly back to the church.

  We’re all sinners, Reverend Kellerman used to tell us. Week after week he had promised his congregation that they would all burn in Lucifer’s flames. As it turned out, his own dose of damnation arrived early; hell had come to visit him on earth.

  His son’s body was found later that evening, a mile or so downriver. Magnus was floating facedown in the water, a few feet from the riverbank. His naked buttocks shone pale in the moonlight. I don’t suppose, given his monumental girth, that he was a very strong swimmer at the best of times, but he didn’t stand a chance with his trousers around his ankles. Some of the material had snagged on an underwater root, halting his progress.

  In the end, he never even made it as far as St. Louis.

  THIRTY-THREE

  We did not sing at Magnus Kellerman’s funeral, because there was no funeral. His parents left Beatrice two days after his body was found, taking their dead son with them. To this day I have no idea where Magnus is buried.

  Nobody could understand why the Kellermans fled as they did, when there was a whole town ready to offer them help. I suspect that they could not face such an effusion of well-intentioned sympathy and Christian charity.

  There was no escape for me, though. I waited for the yoke of grief and suffering to descend upon me and bestow its grace, just as it had for Freddy. To my dismay, though, I felt no beatific glow of anguish for me. I hoped that I might be in shock, that my friend’s death just hadn’t sunk in. But as the weeks passed, I still failed to register the kind of soul-enriching remorse that I had been hoping for. This prompted a degree of melancholy, but for me alone: Why, I wondered miserably, couldn’t I have been fond of Magnus the way that Freddy was devoted to Morrie?

  I realized sadly that I’d never been much of a friend to him. Finally, shame sharpened my loss into something resembling pain.

  Soon after the Kellermans left town, a new minister arrived at First Christian Church. Beatrice was Arthur Gresham’s first professional posting. He was young and extraordinarily devout. He was also very handsome, with a chiseled jaw and neatly cropped dark hair. He did not possess the fiery rhetoric of his predecessor, but after two decades of splenetic predictions of eternal damnation, the congregation was ready for a change of pace. People were relieved when Reverend Gresham plowed a less hysterical furrow in his sermons. He spoke thoughtfully and calmly, his delivery rarely rising above his normal speaking voice. He would take a theme from the day’s scripture, expand upon it briefly, throw in a few telling anecdotes, and then—just as people were settling back into their seats for the long haul—announce the next hymn.

  Attendance at the ten o’clock service increased, swelled by rumors of the new minister’s good looks and the brevity of his weekly address. The town’s unmarried young women began to cram themselves into the front pews. They batted their eyelashes at him, provoking a scarlet flush in the young clergyman’s finely sculpted cheeks as he led his flock in worship. With Reverend Gresham in the pulpit and Mrs. Fitch at the piano, now everyone in the congregation had something to distract them during the services. Poor Reverend Kellerman was not much missed.

  Death danced all around us back then. On Christmas Eve, my grandfather, Martin Leftkemeyer, passed away in his sleep. He died as he had lived, quietly and without fuss. He had limped through the years since my mother’s death, a baffled, lonely wreck of a man. We could not cry for him. He was happy at last, reunited with the two women he had adored. A month or so later, Dr. Becker, who by then was in his nineties, suffered a massive stroke. He was discovered sitting in his favorite armchair, the Optimist neatly folded on his lap, a puzzled look on his face, as if he had been pondering his own final diagnosis.

  Jette was buffeted by the loss of her old friends. She stopped working shifts at the diner, and in the months that followed she aged visibly, as if time had finally caught up with her. She spent her days in her armchair, watching the flickering television screen with the curtains drawn. We often went round to watch with her, and she was always glad to see us. When all four of us went, we sang for her, and this was what she loved the most. She would settle back in her chair, her white hair fanned out against the cushion, and close her eyes. A small smile would appear on her face as she listened, warmed by distant echoes that only she could hear.

  By then it was Freddy’s senior year at school. When he wasn’t with Morrie he spent a lot of time alone on our back porch, listening to radio broadcasts of baseball games that were being played hundreds of miles away. I watched him through the door. He would sit for hours, his chin in his hands, staring out into the yard, never moving, listening to the low tones of the commentators and the excited cheers of the distant crowd. The strange thing was that Freddy didn’t even like baseball. I suppose the sedate rhythm of the games, the slow crawl toward an irrelevant conclusion, ball after ball after ball, was a balm against whatever storms were raging inside him. I assumed that he was thinking about Morrie, wondering when his friend’s mutinous body would give up on him, but it turned out that there were other things on his mind, as well.

  My brother graduate
d from Beatrice High one morning in early June. That afternoon we sat around the kitchen table eating a celebratory lunch with Rosa and Jette. Joseph was in an expansive, expectant mood.

  “So,” he said, smiling at Freddy, “when do you want to start work?”

  “Monday,” Freddy replied.

  Joseph laughed. “Excellent! You’re keen to get started, then.”

  Freddy didn’t blink. “Mr. Niedermeyer says they’ve been short-staffed for months.”

  There was a terrible silence around the table. Finally my father found his voice. “Oscar Niedermeyer?” he croaked.

  Oscar Niedermeyer ran the town’s funeral parlor. Freddy nodded.

  “He’s offered you a job?”

  “I asked him for one,” corrected Freddy.

  “But you already have a job. With me.”

  Freddy put down his knife and fork. “I don’t want it.”

  Joseph stared at him. “Why not?”

  “I want to do something else.”

  “Something else? What’s wrong with being a cook?” choked my father.

  “It’s the onions,” said Freddy.

  My father looked stricken. “The onions?”

  Freddy shrugged. “I hate the smell of fried onions,” he said. “They stink. Did you never notice?”

  Joseph was too mortified to speak.

  “You can come home and scrub yourself raw, but it doesn’t make any difference. The smell gets into your clothes and under your skin and just stays there.”

  The two of them looked at each other across the table.

  “Besides,” said Freddy, “there’s more to life than feeding people breakfast.”

  “More to life?” thundered my father. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Freddy stood up. “I want to do something else, that’s all.”

  “Where are you going?” demanded Joseph. “We haven’t finished discussing this.”

  “There’s nothing more to discuss,” replied Freddy, his voice steady. With that he walked out of the room.

  “Joseph,” said Rosa gently.

  If my father heard his sister’s warning, he ignored it. A moment later he was out of his chair. Rosa and I followed him to the back porch. Freddy was sitting in his usual spot, listening to a game between the Braves and the Phillies. We watched through the screen door as my father turned off the radio with an angry swipe of his fist and demanded explanations. Freddy answered him quietly. More questions followed, my father’s arms flying about in agitation. Freddy listened, and then shook his head. Finally Joseph turned his back on his son and walked into the yard. There he stood quite still with his hands on his hips, staring up at the cloudless sky.

  “Well, well,” murmured Rosa. “I never knew Freddy had it in him.”

  “Neither did I,” I said.

  “He didn’t tell you anything about this?”

  I shook my head. “Not a word.”

  Working in a funeral parlor made a certain sense for Freddy, I could see that. His best friend was dying, after all. The somber atmosphere at work would match his mood exactly. Freddy sat on the porch for a moment, watching Joseph. Then he reached over and switched the radio back on.

  My aunt put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed softly. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  I turned to look at her. “What?”

  She smiled at me sadly. “You’re next.”

  Freddy began work at Niedermeyer’s the following week. He took a bus to Jefferson City and bought two black suits. The atmosphere in our house was glacial for weeks afterward. At breakfast Freddy and Joseph sat at opposite ends of the table, ignoring each other. The rest of us hunkered down in between the two workingmen, keeping a cautious eye on both.

  There was one upside to Freddy’s new job: we saw an increase in funeral engagements. He was now in a position of some influence with the families of the recently departed. He was able to suggest—discreetly, of course, and with appropriate dollops of hand-wringing compassion—that perhaps a musical tribute might be in order at the ceremony. Perhaps some four-part harmony, madam?

  None of this helped me, of course.

  Rosa had been right: I was next.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  My own senior year at high school—a time, supposedly, of carefree, youthful innocence—was cast into bleak shadow by the fate that now awaited me on graduation. Mostly it passed in a haze of baffled dismay.

  The hot plate was waiting for me. I was to be a short-order cook.

  More than anything else, I remember feeling lonely that year. After Magnus died, I didn’t make any more friends; I was too busy working. I had less than twelve months to learn what Joseph had been teaching Freddy for years. Each morning I reluctantly tied on my apron and helped my father with the early breakfast rush before grabbing my books and staggering to school. Freddy had been right about the fried onions. I quickly came to detest them, too. As I sat in class I could smell them on my clothes and in my hair.

  The twins were freshmen by then, but of course they wanted nothing to do with their boring, smelly older brother. I was left to contemplate my dreary fate alone. I remembered Rosa’s quiet confession of wanting to escape our little town during that first trip to the ice cream parlor. You’ll leave, she’d told me. And then one day you’ll come back, and everything that you once loved about the place will drive you a little bit crazy. Well, my aunt had been wrong. I would never leave, not now. Even poor old Magnus had escaped farther than I ever would.

  While I was busy cooking eggs and frying up mountains of Texas toast, everyone else at school began to pair off. Suddenly there were couples everywhere. From the pretty cheerleaders to the math club nerds, they all found a lid for their pot. The heady whiff of hormonal overdrive was palpable. Everyone was at it. Everyone except me.

  Worst of all, Miriam Imhoff was at it, too.

  One Monday morning in early spring Kevin Kinney, the school’s star linebacker, arrived at school and began telling anyone who would listen what Miriam Imhoff had let him do to her in the back of his car the previous Saturday night. By Tuesday, everyone had heard the rumors, and for the rest of the week fresh details of Miriam’s wanton depravity percolated through the school.

  I listened along with everyone else, but I knew better than to believe such filthy lies. By then I considered myself something of a connoisseur of pornographic fantasies, but some of her alleged stunts sounded improbable, even to me. I knew Miriam would never do such things, especially not with a lumbering knucklehead like Kevin Kinney. I waited for her to refute the whole story.

  But Miriam didn’t deny any of it. In fact, she appeared to be relishing the attention. Girls swarmed around her, scandalized and eager for information. Boys kept their distance, watching her furtively. During the course of that week, speculation about her nymphomania grew to fever pitch. I did my best to pretend that none of it was happening. Then on Friday Miriam arrived at school with Kevin’s lettered football jacket around her shoulders, and my heart broke into a million tiny pieces.

  In the evenings, while my classmates felt each other up in the backs of their parents’ cars, I went to visit Rosa. Earlier that year, having finally saved up enough money to buy a place outright, she had moved out of Jette’s home and into a house of her own. Rosa cooked me dinner and then we listened to the radio and played chess. Our tussles over the board were less one-sided now. Sometimes I even won. While we played, our conversations invariably followed the same pattern. She would begin by telling me of her most recent illnesses, describing each symptom in unnecessary detail and then offering up a variety of morbid diagnoses for my consideration. Over the course of that year Rosa suffered enough chronic diseases to kill her several times over. Every part of her body was riddled with cancer; mosquito bites throbbed with fatal menace; the mildest rash p
rompted predictions of a long and hideous death. More than once she made me swear that I wouldn’t let her suffer too much when the time came. She loved nothing better than burrowing through her encyclopedia of infectious diseases. Her pulse raced in fear and excitement as she triumphantly checked off the symptoms of yet another murderous illness that had her in its grip.

  Since Rosa was feeding me each night, it seemed rude to point out that she appeared as healthy as ever (which she did). All she really wanted from me was a sympathetic ooh at some of the more gruesome bits of her prognosis, and I was happy enough to oblige. When my aunt’s apocalyptic medical ruminations were finally exhausted, it was my turn to moan. My litany of ills never varied much.

  I remained devastated about Miriam Imhoff. It was painful enough to imagine her with anyone else—but why did she have to hook up with Kevin Kinney, of all people? I was dismayed and outraged by her lack of taste. He was an oafish moron with a military buzz cut, a dumb laugh, and a neck as thick as my thigh. I began to speculate that perhaps Miriam hadn’t been out of my league after all, if she’d been willing to go out with him. I replayed in my head dozens of moments when I might have flashed a shy smile, instead of always running blindly in the opposite direction. But it was too late now.

  Miriam was not the only source of my abject self-pity, though: when school was over, I would be grilling burgers for a living. Rosa was not as sympathetic about this as I would have liked, frankly. She told me that it would be nobody’s fault but my own if I took a job that I did not want. When I protested that I had no choice in the matter, she snorted and told me that if Freddy could stand up to my father, then so could I. But I knew that wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have been able to bear the weight of Joseph’s disapproval for more than a minute. I think Rosa realized this, too. She knew the insecurities of the second born. Still, that didn’t mean she was going to give me an easy ride.