by Kluge, P. F.
ALSO BY P.F. KLUGE
Eddie and the Cruisers
Gone Tomorrow
Biggest Elvis
Final Exam
Alma Mater
The Edge of Paradise
A Season for War
McArthur’s Ghost
The Day I Die
COMING SOON
The Master Blaster
To the people who watched me
grow up in New Jersey—
the Ensslens, Fuchses, Bruders,
Gerediens, Kochs—and
the Kluges, my parents
Maria and Walter, and my brother
Jim, who still keeps an eye on me.
Copyright
This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2011 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 2010 by P. F. Kluge
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-981-3
Some are in prison, some are dead;
And none has read my books,
And yet my thought turns back to them …
From “The Chums” by Theodore Roethke
Contents
Also By P.F. Kluge
Copyright
Part One
Chapter I
Part Two
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Part Three
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Part Four
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Part Five
Chapter I
Part Six
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
PART ONE
I.
YOU COULDN’T NOT LIKE MAX SCHMELING. I KNOW that sounds strange, considering the millions who hated him. But if you knew him the way I did, you knew better. Der Max. “The Black Uhlan.” Heavyweight champion of the world, 1930-1932. Still alive, as far as I know. I don’t think I read about him dying, but then again, he is old and some days I skip the newspapers. Everyone remembers that great upset in 1936 when, already past his prime, Max right-handed Joe Louis half to death, knocking him out in the twelfth. And, since everything involving Germans and Americans has to be a confrontation between Good and Evil, they move quickly to The Brown Bomber’s dramatic night of revenge, two years later, when he stopped old Max in the first round. One step backward for the master race, which Schmeling represented, one step forward for the human race, which Joe Louis was a credit to.
Heinz—that was my brother—was the one who brought me to Schmeling. They’d been friends on the other side and whenever Schmeling came over for a fight, Heinz walked away from his job, bartending on 86th Street in New York, and he joined Max’s entourage. Heinz was always a charmer, the life of the party. He was a big gambler, not just fights, but horses, baseball—which he hardly understood—and how many inches of snow and what time, exactly would the Hindenburg be crossing over the island of Manhattan? It wasn’t about money. Gambling was my brother’s way of making life more interesting. Every event that had money riding on it was a drama. It was exciting. It had meaning. His definition of 100% happiness would have been to bet everything on anything, every day. Impossible dream, but he came close a time or two. He called it “action.” And that’s what drew him to Max Schmeling. Schmeling was action. Plus, they were friends.
Heinz came over a few years ahead of me, in 1925. He was bigger than me, he grew up faster. Though I was older I was always “brüderchen,” the little brother. Heinz was a headache, at school, at work, at home. I’m not sure there wasn’t a girl he got in trouble, right before he left. He was always taking chances. By the time I arrived, in 1928, Heinz was already set up on 86th Street. I came across on a second-class ticket—that was Heinz’s doing—so I was able to avoid a night on Ellis Island and go straight to Battery Park, where Heinz met me, looking like a million dollars, wearing a fedora, a camel hair coat, a three piece suit, new shoes. He’d stepped out of a movie poster: tall, dark, handsome. Standing next to him—actually a little behind, as if waiting to be properly introduced—was an older German who had to be Otto Hofer, so-called Onkel Otto, my father’s friend and my sponsor in America. He’d come over in 1898. He remembered the Spanish-American War. He lived through World War I, when they stopped teaching German in schools, they looked at German-speakers as spies, they closed shops and re-named streets. Sauerkraut was liberty cabbage, hamburger was Salisbury steak. We were a race of bull-necked, baby-murdering, nun-raping monsters. Otto got through that. And, starting in the 1920’s, Otto and Hilde Hofer sponsored one greenhorn a year, giving them a place to stay—and work— in the apartment buildings where he was superintendent, on the West Side, from Harlem to Morningside Heights. I was the latest in that line of greenhorns.
Years later, we put together a party for the Hofers. This must have been in the 1950’s. Much later, Otto was dead and couldn’t attend. 1952, say. They were both in their eighties then. We rented a room in a restaurant, the Deutsche Hof out near Flemington, New Jersey—the town they railroaded Hauptmann in, if you remember the Lindbergh kidnapping. The restaurant’s still there, doing good: deer heads and cuckoo clocks on the wall, beer steins and Hummel figurines on shelves, a lederhosen wearing oom-pah band on weekends. “Ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank?” But that night was something. Fifteen greenhorns and their wives and kids, fifteen out of sixteen they brought over. And it was mostly a real nice time, going way into the night, dancing and singing, Otto and Hilde sitting at the table, stern and proper as ever, until at the very end, the two of them got up and danced and, I swear, there wasn’t a dry eye. What a night. Some of us had never met, because the deal was, you worked a year for Otto, then you moved on and made room for the next one off the boat. But we all got up, one by one and thanked them, funny little speeches about how green and young we’d been. It turned out none of us had been able to resist retrieving things out of the trash, perfectly good things that came down the dumbwaiter, shirts with lots of wear left in them, shoes that were fine for us to walk around in. We all slept between the luggage room and the boiler—we talked about that—and the looks from Otto when we came home a little tipsy and the way Hilde would serve us corn on the cob for our first American meal and more than half of us bit into it like it was a hot dog. We recalled the sound of operetta—Tauber singing Lehar—on Saturday nights and how other old-timers came over, bringing records to play, these were the Hofers’ contemporaries, some of them had even known Carl Schurz. They weren’t so sure about us newcomers, whether we had what it took to make it in America. They nodded at us, we nodded at them, and they kept their opinions to themselves. We were still on probation. But by 1952, there was no doubt, we were all successes, us with our fat
finned 1950’s cars and our suburban homes and Florida vacations, wives and wunderkinder. Look at us we seemed to say, aren’t we something. American success stories. Sure, we had to admit it, we were lucky. We came to the country at the right time. We had trades. We were willing to work—that leaves out a lot of people in this country, let’s face it—and we knew how to work—and that leaves out a lot of the rest. The Depression? We worked. The War? We worked overtime. And after the war— the forties and now, fifties—best time a working man ever saw. We owned nice houses. We had televisions, soon as they came out. We weren’t so sure about unions anymore. We were sending our kids to college so they could have the chances we’d never had. We were doing good. Some of us were even doing fine. But, as the speeches rolled on, when we got to the year 1925, it was awkward. That was Heinz’ year. The room got quiet and I felt that they were all looking at me, as if I knew something they didn’t, which I didn’t, and I was looking at my wife, wondering if she knew something I didn’t. Everybody in the room was waiting for something from me. Whatever they knew about Heinz, it wasn’t enough. They’d all found themselves wondering about him, every one of them, and now it was as if we ought to raise a glass or have a moment of silence. But what for? War criminal? War hero, good German, bad German, who knew? Then I saw Otto Hofer smiling at me for the first time. “Well,” he said. “Nobody’s perfect.”
That was all in the future. At the start, Otto Hofer was a proper old man standing behind Heinz. I’d heard so much about him but in real life, as they say, he was disappointing, especially when you compared him to the fine figure Heinz cut that morning. Even his handshake, it’s the way I pictured the Germans surrendering in that railroad car in Versailles, after World War I. Everything was muted and polite. Except maybe his eyes. He had curious eyes. I felt him watching me while Heinz spun me around in welcome. Who are you? What are you? Are you like your brother? His house was my official address in America, he explained. I was his responsibility. “That is the arrangement,” he said in German. “I hope you like it. And I hope that I like it too.” Normally, he would take me home but he understood my brother—a stiff nod at Heinz—had made other arrangements. He expected me at work the next morning, at seven a.m. Another look at Heinz. Make it six a.m. he said. Then he left.
Heinz was in a rush to show me the town. I said no. I wanted to just stand there for a while, there where my ship came in. I wanted to remember the moment. The arrival hall was huge, filled with the dusty yellowish light that you see in train stations and factories, the sun shining through windows that hadn’t been washed in years, that the rain streaks but never cleans. It’s the yellow light that makes every day seem like afternoon and every season autumn, even on a bright spring morning. There were birds inside the building, pigeons way up high, sitting on the roof beams. Down below, it felt like the floor of a cathedral. I watched the passengers come out from behind the immigration barriers. A furniture maker from Ulm, a pair of sisters from Heilbrunn, some Jewish department store people from Stuttgart. Out they stepped, some of them carrying a suitcase and nothing more, traveling light like me, others leading a couple of porters who’d wrestled their trunks onto carts. Steamer trunks. I was seeing something I would never see again, people stepping out into a new world. I told George, the future travel writer, about it once, that is I tried to. I said I felt like I was standing between my past and my future. My son looked at me and rolled his eyes, the way he did when he felt he’d heard something dumb. It made me want to clip him, when he did that.
“Pop,” he said, oh-so-wearily. “If you could only listen to yourself.”
I never did hit him, not then, not ever, though I gave him some looks that scared him. “I heard myself,” I said. He was home from college, reading out on the back porch. Whenever you got near him, he turned over the book, so that we wouldn’t see the title. Then he wouldn’t have to talk to us about what he was reading, which was over our heads of course.
“Every minute you’re alive, you’re standing between the past and the future,” he informed me. “That’s what the present is.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, turning away. “You weren’t there that morning.”
“But Pop, if you want to talk about it …”
“You were in the future,” I said, heading out the side door to the garden. Mom had patience, not me. She’d cut him plenty slack, ever since we got called into school when he was in the seventh grade. We stopped into the principal’s office wondering what kind of mess our George had stepped in. We had no idea. As a kid, he wasn’t up to much, just reading. Even then, he asked permission to keep the light on late, would you believe it, the good little boy, sometimes if we were playing pinochle on Saturday night at somebody’s house, he’d even call and ask permission, could he stay up and read a little more. This was the kind of boy, when his mom baked cookies “specially for you” and they came out a little burned, like charcoal, he’d ask for more, just to please her. That kind of kid. In summer we let him play under a hose, he’d always make sure to find a brown spot on the lawn, so the grass would get the benefit. What could the trouble be? Then they told us that they’d given tests and he was—here comes a nickname we used for years—“college material.” I swear, that was the start of what’s happening today, wherever in the world he’s eating for nothing at the moment. College material. Like that, a sweet dreamy kid—a real klutz around tools and nothing special in sports—became our wunderkind. Mom tried keeping up with him, but, hey, did Werner von Braun tell his mom about Peenemunde? Our rocket scientist kept his V-1s to himself. When George was in high school, I’d see mom trying to read what he read. Then she’d try to discuss these books with college material. Herman Hesse. She was scared, so she’d watch for him to be in just the right mood and still he’d sniff—annoyed at being interrupted—and say, “Mom, I’d have to start with the invention of the wheel.” I learned early, not to make that mistake. In the garden, by myself among the red currants and the gooseberries, I remembered that thick yellow light, gold dust almost, and that wooden floor, scuffed and polished the way wood gets, almost oiled, like the deck of a sailing ship or the banister in an old house. I could see groups of people coming out the gate, some rushing out, like kids into a schoolyard, others scared, holding onto pieces of paper with relatives’ addresses. This was the beginning of something. Part of me was in a rush, anxious to begin, tired of waiting, aching— after ten days at sea—to walk for miles. But another part just took in what was happening. Those people. The birds in the rafters. The sunlight coming in. I wished I had the words.
I was happy from the first day. It was the time of oranges for me, for all of us. That’s how I think of it, to this day. I didn’t have much money but I had enough for small things and just seeing those piles of oranges in grocery stores—sometimes out on the sidewalk—I couldn’t have been more excited if I’d come across a pot of gold. An orange meant a lot to a young man who’d spent the winter of 1917 eating turnips so that the sight, the smell—the very idea—of a turnip all these years later, makes me gag. Those oranges meant more to me than any car I ever bought. And barbershop shaves! Oh my God! Those were the days of hot towels and warm shaving lather, talcum powder and bay rum and when I stretched out in the chair, I could see an overhead fan turning and a stamped tin ceiling and on the radio they’d be talking about the Yankees. I learned English fast. Already, I was ahead of the Italians who were shaving me, already I understood about the Yankees. Every time I picked up a newspaper, I learned new words. You could look at a photograph, you studied the caption, you learned. So, I was young and green and happy those long ago Sundays. Most of my life I was happy, but that was the happiness with other people around me, with Mom and later George. Back then I was just happy by myself. Now that I’m alone again, I wish I could get that kind of happiness back.
I’d leave the barbershop and enter the park at 110th Street, by the lake. I’m shaved, I smell of talcum powder. I’ve got a new suit and a straw hat, I’m a Yankee Doo
dle Dandy, headed to Eighty-Sixth Street to visit my brother, and there are kids and nannies, German nannies, lots of them, on the benches along the lake. I leave the park behind and stroll down Fifth Avenue, past mansions. Call it May, 1932. A left off Fifth brings me onto 86th Street, crossing Madison, Park, Lexington, the city that belongs to people who were here before us. At Lexington, though, it changes. Yorkville. Little Germany. Land of Greenhorns. Some of them got to Yorkville and never left, the ones who had to have German food, movies and newspapers and would rather worry about a soccer game that happened three weeks ago than a pennant race with the Yankees in it and two Germans, Ruth and Gehrig, leading the team. But that’s where Heinz’s place was: the Restaurant Germania. Food in front and a back room … knock … knock … that was a speakeasy, with bad beer and my brother in charge.
“Pass auf,” he shouted as I came in that first time. “Here comes the greenhorn.” This was all in German, everyone at the table was German, recently arrived. The women were housekeepers and nannies—a few secretaries. The men were printers, machinists, carpenters, electricians, skilled blue-collar types who—they didn’t know it—were a little too young for World War I and a little too old for World War II. They caught it just right, coming to a country that would enrich them beyond their dreams. If they stayed. Already, they had a kind of rakish style, just like I was acquiring, a kind of cockiness, because it usually didn’t take more than one day on the job for them to know that the competition was nothing to worry about. So they were all at that point when New World money and Old World style were mingling evenly. Later, they had more money. And less character. But that was later.
Heinz introduced me to his crowd. Already, I felt nervous around all these Germans. Nice people, but why cross the Atlantic to surround yourself with Landsmänner? Heinz had been talking about me, before I came, I could see from the way they looked at me, wondering if I was another Heinz. Also, I was a newcomer and the newest arrivals made these people feel that much more experienced. We reminded them of home. We repeated the same greenhorn mistakes, getting lost in Queens, trying to walk to Schutzen Park in Jersey City through the Holland Tunnel. We showed them how far they’d come.