A Good American

by Alex George

Frank was idling away the afternoon alone by the riverbank. He had just finished his swim, and was standing on one of the hidden struts of the old pier, drying off beneath the sun. But what Reverend Gresham saw was this: there, a good thirty feet from the shore, in the middle of the onrushing current of the Missouri River, was one of the Meisenheimer twins. The pastor blinked, and looked again. He was not mistaken. The boy was standing on the water. His eyes were shut, and his arms were flung outward from his body, forming the shape of a cross.

  The blueberry pie was forgotten. Reverend Gresham turned and stumbled back the way he had come. At the church, he flung himself to his knees at the steps of the altar and began to pray.

  Early the following morning, Teddy trudged to the church. He had a great deal on his mind. My brother had undergone an abrupt yet profound religious conversion following his strange encounter with Rankin Fitch in Tillman’s Wood.

  The facts, as my brother saw them, were incontrovertible. As he had shivered in terror halfway up the oak tree, waiting to die at the tiny attorney’s hands, he had prayed to God for mercy—and here he was, still breathing! It was a miracle, there was no other word for it.

  No matter that it was a strange kind of divine intervention, saving one life at the expense of another; all of a sudden the blissful yoke of spiritual certainty settled upon Teddy’s shoulders. Joseph had raised the four of us to be staunch atheists, but now my little brother had more faith than he knew what to do with. God’s love shone down on him, bathing him in grace and covering him in confusion.

  For one thing, he had profound misgivings about the bargain he had hastily struck with the Almighty while he was hiding up the tree. Strong as his newfound religious convictions were, Teddy did not want to go to Africa and become a missionary. He wanted to see if it might be possible to renegotiate, or at least clarify, some of the terms of the deal. As a result he had spent a lot of time praying, but—never having prayed before—he was unsure if he was doing it right. His surreptitious conversations with the Lord had been disappointingly one-sided so far, and had left him none the wiser, so he’d decided it was time to seek some professional guidance.

  Teddy pushed open the door of the church and looked around. The place was empty. Just as he was about to leave, he heard someone snoring. He tiptoed up the aisle. Reverend Gresham was lying in front of the altar, his hands clasped tightly together in prayer. He was fast asleep.

  “Reverend?” whispered Teddy. He put his hand on the sleeping man’s arm and gave him a gentle shake.

  Since seeing Frank sunbathing the previous afternoon, the clergyman had spent every waking moment in fervent and alarmed prayer. He knew what he had witnessed by the riverbank: Christ crucified, walking on water, back among his flock once again. And he had little doubt that the Messiah’s return had something to do with Rankin Fitch’s death, and Reverend Gresham’s feelings toward his wife. So when he opened his eyes and saw the newly risen son of God looming over him (he, of course, had no way of telling the twins apart), the potent cocktail of ragged exhaustion and apocalyptic neurosis made him scream in terror. Teddy stared down at him, alarmed.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s me, Teddy Meisenheimer.”

  By then Reverend Gresham had struggled awkwardly to his feet, not taking his eyes off Teddy. He bowed his head, and said, “I know why you have come.”

  My brother’s eyes grew as large as saucers. “You do?”

  The minister swallowed. “This is about Rankin Fitch, isn’t it?”

  Teddy took a sharp intake of breath. So God truly was all-knowing. There was no other way that Reverend Gresham could have known about the deal he’d struck while he’d been hiding up the tree. He hadn’t told a soul about it. “Yes it is,” he said in quiet awe.

  “What do you have to say?” asked Reverend Gresham apprehensively.

  “I was hoping you’d be able to help me,” said Teddy.

  The clergyman’s eyebrows twitched. “You want me to help you?”

  “That’s right,” said Teddy.

  There was an awkward pause.

  A weak smile creased the corners of Reverend Gresham’s mouth. What could the Messiah possibly want from him? “Exactly how can I be of service?” he asked politely.

  “Well.” Teddy plunged his hands into his pockets. “I was wondering whether we might be able to work something out. Find a solution.”

  “A solution?”

  Teddy nodded. “One that didn’t, you know, involve sacrificing my whole life.”

  A strange choking sound emerged from Reverend Gresham’s throat. Jesus had already died once for the sins of mankind. Now he seemed ready to do it all again, just because of him! “I hardly think the sin warrants it,” he stammered.

  “The sin?” said Teddy.

  “Exodus, chapter twenty, verse fourteen,” said the minister. “‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’”

  “Oh,” said Teddy. “That sin.”

  “Or perhaps I should say, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s ass.’ Since, as you know, it’s not as if anything actually ever—”

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Teddy. It didn’t seem right, standing in church discussing Mrs. Fitch’s ass, which was what he was pretty sure they were doing. “You’re saying that you don’t think I need to throw everything away because of this?”

  “Oh, absolutely not,” said Reverend Gresham.

  Teddy brightened. So he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life in Africa after all! “Do you think it would be all right if I stayed in Beatrice?”

  Reverend Gresham considered my brother for a moment, and wondered whether this was some sort of test. “If that’s what you choose to do,” he said carefully, “I’d be honored if you’d attend our church every Sunday.”

  Teddy’s face fell. “Ah.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Well,” said Teddy, “I’d love to, of course. It’s just that my father—”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” laughed Reverend Gresham anxiously. “I know all about your Father!”

  “Really?” said Teddy, surprised.

  “Of course,” said the minister. “I know Him well.”

  “Well, in that case you’ll understand my concern.”

  Reverend Gresham understood no such thing, of course, but he nodded anyway. “Your Father’s capacity for forgiveness is infinite,” he said, hopefully.

  “Do you think so?” asked Teddy.

  “I know so.” The clergyman beamed. “So you’ll come?”

  Teddy had been worrying about how he was going to tell Joseph about his newfound faith. At least Reverend Gresham’s invitation would force the issue. “Sure,” he said, and stuck out his hand. The two of them shook.

  “There was one last thing,” said Reverend Gresham. “That whole business with Mr. and Mrs. Fitch.”

  The two of them looked at each other for a long moment.

  “Yes?” said Teddy.

  “Shall we agree to say no more about it?”

  “That would be fine,” replied my brother, trying to hide his relief. “My lips are sealed. You’ll hear no more of it from me, I can promise you that.”

  Reverend Gresham looked pleased.

  “Well, good-bye, then,” said Teddy.

  “Anything I can do to help,” said the minister, “just let me know.”

  Teddy gave the thumbs-up sign. “See you on Sunday.” And the two most confused people in Missouri that morning went their separate ways.

  That evening Margaret Fitch visited Reverend Gresham and told him that she had decided to leave Beatrice. The town had too many painful memories for her, she explained. As the young clergyman listened, any doubts that may have lingered about my brother’s divinity (he hadn’t expected the risen Christ to be quite so goofy) were swept away. Finally, God had respo
nded to his prayers. And how! A quiet cyclone of awe tore through him. After Mrs. Fitch left, he fell to his knees and began praying all over again.

  THIRTY-NINE

  That strange summer of 1958 finally drew to a close. At the end of August the twins left town. We all drove with Frank to Jefferson City and watched him board his train east. He waved as his carriage pulled away from the platform, a grin of dazed relief on his face. My father drove Teddy to Columbia, the back of the car piled high with everything my brother owned. Joseph was heartbroken at the vast geographical buffer that Frank had so carefully interposed between us and his new life in North Carolina, but the shorter journey was just as painful for him. He was proud of his boys, of course, but he knew that he had lost them both.

  We missed the twins, but after a while those of us who remained in Beatrice adapted to their absence and found a gentler rhythm to our newly compact existence. There was Joseph and me in our house; Jette and Freddy next door; and Rosa in defiant solitude, two blocks away. When I wasn’t working at the diner, I shuttled between these three hubs. I played chess with Rosa several times a week and visited my grandmother when I could. I sat and held Jette’s hand and talked and talked until my throat hurt. She smiled at me, vaguely aware that I was someone she had once known. Most of the time her rheumy eyes gazed sightlessly across the room, her mind tucked safely away, out of reach. On I plowed, relentless and bright. She seemed comforted by the sound of my voice.

  I missed our singing more than I missed the twins themselves. I was smothered by the silence. Without the quartet, I was drifting away on the quiet tide of my own irrelevance. I often belted out our old tunes into the morning air as I walked to work, but my voice, shorn of fraternal support, sounded lonely beyond measure.

  Now that my brothers had left, I longed to escape more than ever. I thought constantly about Miriam Imhoff, and wondered where she was now. Every discussion about cattle feed at the diner’s counter was an unwelcome reminder that I was still here, marooned in Missouri. I found myself wishing that Jette and Frederick had taken a boat to Ellis Island, like everyone else. Cooking eggs in Brooklyn or the Bronx might at least have been bearable, with the shimmering promises of Manhattan only a train ride away. I worked in long-suffering silence. I was as tethered as the cows my customers talked about at such intolerable length.

  Still, there were small compensations. With the twins gone, I finally had a bedroom to myself. I carried my typewriter home and set it up on a makeshift desk in the corner of the room. Every night I escaped into my novel, seeking solace in the unlikely adventures of Buck Gunn. When I finally switched off the light, I stared into the darkness and tried to imagine what adventures Teddy and Frank were enjoying, so far away from our little town.

  I was twenty-one years old, and had never seen the ocean.

  Joseph had been dismayed when Teddy told him that he was going to return home every weekend so he could attend the Sunday morning service at First Christian Church. He took Teddy’s conversion to Christianity as a personal affront. I often heard him stomping ill-naturedly around the house, talking to himself about Teddy, wondering where he had gone wrong, trying to work out how this could have happened. (My brother, probably wisely, had not explained to Joseph that his Road to Damascus moment had come about as he cowered in the limbs of the old oak tree, believing he was about to be shot dead by a cuckolded dwarf.)

  As a result of my father’s displeasure, Teddy’s weekend visits home were strained affairs. He arrived on the bus late Saturday afternoon, and we all ate dinner together at our house. Freddy and Aunt Rosa peppered him with questions about college life, while Joseph harrumphed his way through the meal, muttering that Teddy should be out chasing girls and drinking beer on a Saturday night. The following morning Teddy put on a coat and tie and tiptoed through the house like a thief. He slunk through the town toward the church, guilt pinching his shoulders.

  It wasn’t just our family who came to view Teddy’s trips home with misgiving. Reverend Gresham quickly came to regret his invitation to the risen Messiah to attend his church every Sunday. Of course, the young clergyman was grateful that the awkward situation with Margaret Fitch had been resolved, but my brother’s presence still put a huge strain on him. Teddy always sat in the same pew toward the back of the church, and Reverend Gresham found himself watching him as he delivered his sermons. In the past the minister had sometimes recycled old ideas and favorite themes, but he didn’t dare try any of those tricks now. While we were sitting in uncomfortable silence around the dinner table, Reverend Gresham was hitting the books, anxiously drafting and redrafting the next day’s message. He often didn’t get to bed until the early hours of Sunday morning, and would appear at church with dark rings of exhaustion around his eyes. To make matters worse, sometimes Teddy lingered in the church after the service, a meaningful look in his eye. Reverend Gresham didn’t know if he was going to offer criticism, advice, or something else, but nor was he willing to find out. Instead he crept out the back door and scuttled home to pray for forgiveness. Private apologies to the Almighty were easier than enduring the wide-eyed scrutiny of His son.

  In fact, Teddy wasn’t waiting for Reverend Gresham at all. As he sat and listened to the sermons that the minister had worked over so slavishly for his benefit, my brother’s eye fell with increasing regularity on the pretty young girl at the piano. Darla Weldfarben had taken over the musical duties at the church when Margaret Fitch left town. Her hair was always tied back in a prim ponytail, and a small cross hung on a silver chain around her neck. Teddy found himself thinking about that cross during the week as he sat in lectures and labored over his coursework. On Sunday mornings he offered to help her collect the hymnals. The two of them chatted amiably while they did their chores. When she smiled her thanks, Teddy felt something slip inside him.

  My brother embarked on a suitably monk-like existence during the week. He kept a polite distance from his fellow undergraduates. The other students regularly left the campus in search of beer and local girls, but he went to bed early and read his Bible. At the end of each night he knelt down by the side of his bed and prayed about Darla Weldfarben.

  And lo, it came to pass that God saw fit to answer Teddy’s prayers for a second time. By the Christmas holidays, he and Darla were an item. Now we had an extra place to set at our Saturday evening meals. If Darla noticed the way that Joseph glowered suspiciously at her cross, she chose to ignore it.

  Even if Teddy’s visits home weren’t quite the happy family occasions that we might have hoped for, at least he did come home—which was more than could be said for his brother. Frank seemed determined to stay in North Carolina as long as he possibly could. At the end of each semester, an affable but infuriatingly vague letter would arrive explaining why he had to remain on campus during the holidays. He had found a new job; he had extra studies to complete; he couldn’t afford the ticket home. We had no way of knowing whether any of it was true. The only thing I was sure of, reading between the lines of those bland evasions, was my little brother’s glee at having escaped. I wrote to him, demanding point-blank when he was going to return. About a month later a postcard arrived, addressed to me. On it Frank had written simply:

  WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS ONLY.

  He was true to his word. During his time away, he came home twice—for one of each.

  During the final months of Morrie’s life, Freddy had become as much a member of the Knuckles family as he was of ours. He spent many nights sleeping on the couch next to his friend, and he ate at their table more often than he did anywhere else. Shared grief erased the usual walls of polite Midwestern formality. Morrie’s parents treated Freddy like another son. This metamorphosis seemed entirely natural; everyone was too focused on the dying boy sprawled across the living room floor to worry about much else.

  After Morrie died, Freddy continued to visit the Knuckles home. He could no more stop knocking on their front door
than he could stop breathing. Mr. and Mrs. Knuckles escaped their grief by working longer hours at the pharmacy, reluctant to face the now-empty space in the middle of the living room floor. As a result, Freddy often found himself alone in the house with Ellie. The two of them sat at the kitchen table and talked for hours, drawn together by the urgent need to remember the brother and friend they had lost. From the depths of their shared sorrow sprung a new intimacy. This was Morrie’s legacy, his final gift to those he loved. In his death they turned toward each other, and found fresh reason to hope.

  It was Ellie who worked it all out. She woke up one morning after a fitful night’s sleep, and was astonished to discover that she had fallen in love with my brother. As she brushed her teeth, she gazed at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and watched tears of happiness brim in her lovely eyes. That evening, when Freddy knocked on the front door, she was ready for him.

  The person most surprised by this turn of events was Freddy. (Although I was not far behind.) He had been burdened by the same innocent infatuation with Eleanor Knuckles as the rest of us. Now here she was, holding his hand and telling him that she adored him. When she was finally through talking, the two of them stared at each other for several moments, both scared out of their wits. Then she took a half-step toward him. The kiss that followed was awkward and clumsy, but it did the trick.

  I suppose Morrie’s death had taught them that there was precious little time to waste. Their wedding was set for the spring of 1959, just a few months after that first kiss in the hallway (they had not even made it to the kitchen). Freddy asked me to be his best man. I accepted with mixed feelings. We both knew that I was his second choice for the job.

  The wedding took place on a Saturday afternoon at the First Christian Church, with the usual reception afterward at the Knights of Columbus Hall. The evening before, I drove to Jefferson City to pick Frank up from the railway station. We didn’t talk much on the journey home. He parried my questions with bored grunts and stared out the window in thoughtful silence. When we arrived in Beatrice, there was not a flicker of emotion on his face as we passed the town’s landmarks, unmovable stars from which the arc of our childhoods could be minutely charted. He turned away from the memories that lingered on every corner. Frank was looking only forward now. He did not want to be here. I felt sad for him, and for us.