Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  “No.”

  “No to coffee? Or no, I’m not depressing you?”

  “You’re not depressing me. I arrived that way.”

  “From talking to your father?”

  “You guessed it,” I answered, wondering how much she knew. Had the old man set up a one-two punch? A paternal left, a pedagogical right? Immigrant parent and high school teacher: no way I’d go free. But something new accompanied my irritation. It was their belief in me. Touching. And I realized something that pleased me. It was about teachers. Not all of them, but a few. You think, when you leave school, when you escape, you’re beyond their reach. They must not think about you, you think. Why bother? There’s a new crop of kids every fall. It’s over. But some of them don’t let go. Pauline Kennedy was one of them.

  “Yes to coffee,” I said. “It’s nice seeing you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said, staring at me. I remembered the way she used her eyes, the way other teachers used their voice, or hands, to reprimand. “I’ve received an invitation to your high school class reunion. When I called to confirm that I’d attend, I asked about you. They said you’d declined. Or at least, you hadn’t accepted. I want you to reconsider.”

  “Why?” Is that all it is? I asked myself. She just wanted to see me with the others at the reunion? No deeper interrogation? What a relief! What a disappointment! “What’s so important about reunions?”

  “I get invited all the time. It’s a retirement benefit, I suppose. I’m a connoisseur of reunions. And a believer in them.”

  “I didn’t know you’d be there,” I answered weakly.

  “You never know who’ll be there. That’s part of the charm. Or what they’ll be like. Reunions, George, are potluck dinners. You take what’s there …” She relaxed and smiled. “And there are some remarkable covered dishes. Shall I stop this metaphor now or do I continue?”

  “More. Please. I love metaphors. I’m the man who called Big Sur ‘Mother Nature’s Maginot Line.’”

  “Well, then. You stand by the door watching people come in and you think, well, there’s a tuna casserole, there’s a macaroni and cheese salad and, oh, my, tortellini and pesto! Sushi! Who could have known? Ah! Meat loaf. Once a meat loaf, always a meat loaf.”

  “Terrific. What kind of dish would I make?”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking about,” she said. No more jocular metaphor now. No fun deciding whether I was a pineapple upside down cake or a cotton candy cone. “Let’s take a walk.”

  “Ein Platz fur alles und Alles in Sein Platz,” the old man used to say: a place for everything and everything in its place. And this was the place for people who placed cleanliness next to godliness, or maybe ahead of it. They weeded seriously here, they mowed and clipped and raked yards the size of carpets. I didn’t need to look at mailboxes to see German names: the ceramic elves and dwarves and deers and mushrooms gave the game away. It was hard to picture Pauline Kennedy fitting in. She wasn’t the type, I thought.

  “I didn’t think you’d stay around the Garden State after you retired,” I said. “I thought you’d be in the Berkshires someplace.”

  “I wanted to travel,” she said. “I needed a house that I could lock up and walk away from and not worry about.”

  “Do you travel?”

  “Oh, my, yes!”

  “You must know my work,” I said, trying again to put a comic edge on what was mostly a feeling of dread, as though she were about to grade a very shaky paper that I’d just handed in.

  “Yes,” she answered tersely. “I do know your work.”

  “Lots of people find it useful,” I said. “Some would say —I’m quoting Auto Life’s review of my first book—‘close to indispensable.’” Keep it light, George, I told myself. Turn on the charm.

  “I’m not that kind of traveler,” she responded. “Or reader.”

  Okay, so I was in for it. I decided to just keep walking, let her decide on the time and place of execution. I took a lively interest in the neighborhood, especially the yards, which were revealing as the medicine cabinets Mrs. Kennedy said she snooped around in. Some yards reflected surging happy retirement, second childhood. Sunflowers, pinwheels, rock gardens, waterfalls. Wooden cut-outs of bending-over women in polka dot bloomers. Elsewhere there was only lawn, bare lawn, and a dripping air conditioner and the sense of life winding down behind drawn shades.

  “Your father found this place for me, you know,” she said. “He helped me move in.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. I’d no idea that the old man had that kind of contact with Mrs. Kennedy.

  “He’s a remarkable man. When I met him first … that’s when I had you of course …”

  What was happening? I asked myself. When I had you. That was a mother’s language, about an inch away from “when I was carrying you.”

  “… well, my first impression was wrong. That’s odd, George, because in general I credit first impressions. I don’t believe that there have been more than two times in life when I’ve had to say, well, I got that person wrong. Your father was first. And you … you may be the second.”

  It’s coming now, I thought. Brace yourself. You pass judgments all the time. Bed-and-breakfasts live or die on your comments. If you say a drive is scenic, that’s the way traffic will turn. So now: be judged.

  “I thought that your father was a lot like other foreign immigrants.” She stopped and caught herself. “Foreign immigrants? That’s redundant isn’t it? Well, I thought here’s another earnest hard-working newcomer who won’t give his wife or child a moment of peace until his son has made his first million. Getting rich in America, such a tiresome scenario! And we were implicated in it, because education was the ticket to money and good grades were a mark of education. Oh my. They didn’t understand education, they didn’t understand grades, they didn’t understand …”

  “What?”

  “I was going to say they didn’t understand America either. But maybe the joke’s on me. Maybe they did.”

  “I think they did.” Let’s talk about America, Mrs. Kennedy, I thought, making notes for my defense. The America she taught, Emerson-Thoreau-Melville, the New England America she was born in, had nothing to do with New Jersey. When those transcendental traditions were forming and flowering, New Jersey’s future citizens were making traditions of their own in Sicily and Odessa, Warsaw and Dublin. To New Jersey, New England was a national park they drove through when they couldn’t find a summer rental on the Shore. The House of Seven Gables was a shoe store, Moby Dick a seafood place somewhere between Wildwood and Cape May. And those driving, inarticulate immigrants who came in for consultations about their kids’ grades were dreaming of an America that meant low margin, high volume along Route 22 and a pastel Tara in the hills beyond.

  “Maybe they were right, maybe I was right,” she countered briskly. “But I was talking about your father. And your mother. They were different. They thought you were going to be a writer. I warned them. I warned them you might not get rich. That was alright, they said. Money wasn’t everything.

  “I’ve done alright,” I said, “money-wise.”

  “Don’t use wise as a suffix,” she snapped. “It’s barbaric.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and she nodded her acceptance. We walked some more, passing senior citizen strollers, men in baggy shorts and ace bandages, women in slacks and tennis shoes, stepping out briskly.

  “The point is that your parents were prepared to look past the money. Do you have any idea how unusual that was? They sat there in my office and your mother as much as told me that money didn’t matter so much. Being a writer was special. A writer was a good thing to be.”

  “Well, that was my mom,” I said. Then I couldn’t resist a question. “How did my father take the news?”

  “He nodded his head. He was all for it. I was amazed. I’d been condescending to them. Your parents realized—if only instinctively—that it wasn’t just about how well you made out, Geor
ge. ‘Money-wise.’ I find it interesting that you asked about your father. You have doubts about him?”

  “Nothing compared to his doubts about me, Mrs. Kennedy,” I fired back.

  “He came to me a while ago with a question. He asked me what I thought of your work. Writing wasn’t his line, he said, and although he reads a lot, he wasn’t, he said, ‘what you call educated.’ So he came to me and asked me to confirm—or contradict—an impression that he had that your work was … second rate. I told him that it was hard getting started as a writer and that many good writers had to do things they weren’t proud of, especially at the start of their careers. Because it is a hard trade and I suspect it’s getting harder. My reading of presidential biographies suggests as much. But at the end of it all …”

  “You agreed?”

  “Yes.” She looked right at me. “Second rate.”

  “Maybe …” This was hard for me to say. I was shaky. “Maybe we’d all be better off if they hadn’t taken the chance, on a writer. If they’d settled for a …”

  “A what?” she challenged me. Maybe she sniffed my weakness. The fact is, whenever I’d tried to identify a trade that I could practice, other than writing, something that I could get paid for, I ended up working as a night watchman.

  “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” I said.

  “Alexander Pope,” she snapped. “The point?”

  “Well, so is a little talent,” I said. “That’s dangerous too.” Then I supplied the source of my quotation. “George Griffin.”

  We passed a community house where oldsters were playing cards and walked down to a pond where there were benches near the water’s edge. She was deciding how to respond to what I’d just said, about a little talent being a dangerous thing. Sometimes, back in high school, I’d seen her pause like that, usually when someone had said something unusual, something that was startlingly bright or shockingly dumb. When she turned towards me, I could see I hadn’t said anything bright.

  “If there were corporal punishment …” she began.

  “You’d hit me?”

  “I’d shake you up some, that’s for sure. Honest to God, George!” I felt I was back in school. Humiliated. “Sit down,” she commanded. I obeyed. “It’s been a long time since I saw you, George, and there’s every chance I may not see you again.”

  “I slipped up and from here on out …” She raised her hand for silence. I was speaking out of turn.

  “Now I see you again for the first time in ever so many years. I compare the boy I knew to the man who’s visiting me today.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Please. I don’t need this.”

  “That bright, cocky, callow, virginal, bookish boy …” She stopped for breath and smiled at me, or the memory of me.

  “That covers it,” I said.

  “And now … this hangdog, equivocal, charming lost man. Trapped by his own success. Resigned to it. As if life’s a prison and failure is a meal that gets slipped through the bars of a cage. Oh, George! There’s so much depending on you! You mean a lot. And what happens to you matters. So ten minutes of talk from me, uninterrupted talk, shouldn’t be unbearable. What does it come to, if you average it out? Half a minute per year? You used to sit still for much longer than that for me, every day. After I’m done, you’re excused, and let’s face it, there’s nothing I can do about what happens to you. So I’m going to give you a bit of a lecture and after that you’re free to go on your merry way. Or not so merry.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “And … thank you.”

  “Thank you? You haven’t heard me yet.”

  “Thank you for caring.”

  “Caring is the theme, George. Caring about your work. Remember how I used to break that down in class? You had to care about your subject matter and you had to care about your audience and you had to care about yourself. ‘The big three.’ And my difficulty or … to put it more precisely … my disappointment with you is that your work had come to show remarkable indifference to all three.”

  She paused to light another cigarette but I could tell she wasn’t done yet, though I wished she was. Possibly, I could defend myself. I could explain things. Indifference to subject matter? You bet. These days, traveling around America got old fast. I wished I could make her see that. And my audience, my too-faithful readers? They were tourists, crowding and contaminating whatever they touched. And what about myself, not caring about myself? I could tell her about my plans, my projects. I decided not to. It was the difference between “guilty” and “guilty with an explanation.” No difference at all.

  “When you left your father’s home, when you left my classroom, we thought you’d make us proud. That’s the investment a parent makes in a child, the same kind of investment a teacher makes in a student, except that we have so many more children. So many. But you live for the ones that are special, George. All my life, there were a dozen like that, which is large for a family, I admit, but very small for a career. A tiny percentage, out of thousands. I never wrote off anybody. I turned them into careful writers, maybe, or better readers, or maybe better people. And I hear from them, George, some of the worst thugs in school remember me. But it’s the special ones that I recall. The ones you send out into the world like arrows, like missiles, like … I don’t know … knights. Good lord, I’m losing it.”

  She turned away from me, shuddering or maybe crying and part of me wanted to jump up and hug her, but she was my teacher and I stayed put and when she freed me she was dry-eyed.

  “The special students,” she resumed. “You were one of them. I care about you. I don’t want you to fall into a trap, George, even if it’s of your own making. Most traps are. You were special. Promise me you won’t forget that.”

  “Okay,” I said. But my agreement had come too quickly. It was suspect.

  “I haven’t even gotten to the heart of it, George. I’m not close to finishing.”

  “I figured …”

  “Wrong. Listen. What’s next is difficult because I have to begin by admitting that I might be wrong. I don’t think I am, though. Here’s what it comes to. Those first years, that are so hard on everybody, have been easy for you. You took off. You saw your name in print. You were paid. You prospered. And all of us who were watching you—and there are more of us than you might think— were thrilled. I know your parents were. And a lot of those people who’ll be showing up for the reunion, I’ll wager many of them were watching you too. They recognized your name.”

  “Not my name,” I corrected her, although it felt like I was doing the old man’s job for him. “My face, at the top of every column.”

  “Fair enough. We pictured you at large, working, writing, making your way in the world. Now here’s the question. While we were thinking of you … did you think of us?”

  “Often,” I admitted. “All the time.”

  “How?” she pressed.

  “I even called it my if-they-could-see-me-now feeling. You know what I mean. You must. In Hong Kong. In Hawaii. In Kenya or Vienna. Just anywhere. Whenever I felt … excuse me … hot shit.”

  “You’d look back to New Jersey.”

  “Not in anger. Just … wow … here I am. Here! And getting paid for it!”

  “So … we were your audience.”

  “Not my only audience, Mrs. Kennedy. You know that. Eighty newspapers. More or less.” Not bad, not bad at all. “But when I pictured the faces I wrote for … they were Jersey faces, that’s for sure.”

  “That if-they-could-see-me-now-feeling. Do you still have it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Only … it’s not the way it was before. The fun’s gone out of it. I don’t know what it is, whether it’s harder for me to imagine them or them imagining me.”

  “That settles it, George. You come to that reunion. You need to come. To see the ones you wish could see you.”

  “Alright,” I said.

  “Alright?”

  “I mean, yes, of course.”

  “
Good.” I felt her slip her arm through mine and turn us back in the direction we’d come. Late summer evening crept into the Pine Barrens, with the whoosh of lawn sprinklers, the murmur of senior citizen voices on front porches, the glow of televisions bringing reports of disaster in the world they’d retired from. They sat around televisions the way people once sat around fires, watching flames. Pauline Kennedy walked beside me, matching my stride. We were done talking and it felt good. She was thinking things over, I sensed, and that was my excuse not to think at all. I remembered those tubes in radios and early televisions, the way they glowed awhile, fading slowly after you turned them off, and the old man saying he guessed dying would be like that, not an immediately black out but a gradual dwindling. When we got to where my car was parked—the old man’s car, I should say—Pauline leaned against the door.

  “It wasn’t so bad, was it?” she asked.

  “It could have been worse.”

  “You’ve had some success … of a certain kind. Too much success … of a certain kind. There are worse things than failure, George. Think about it on the way home.” She tossed her cigarette into the grass and stepped on it. “There,” she said. “You’re excused. For now.”

  VII.

  I’M SITTING HERE WITH MY LISTS AND WITH some old photo albums, calling roll, marking people absent. I’ve got pictures of beer parties we used to have in the back yard, a half dozen couples at a picnic table covered with steins and wurst. I’ve got pictures of us dancing out in the garage, Ernst Muller playing the accordion. I’ve got pictures of horseshoe games and fishing trips and vacations from Cadillac Mountain to Key West, folks leaning against cars, the ’51 Mercury is the one I remember best, and pictures of dogs and gardens and pictures of Christmas trees with packages spread underneath, the Wildroot Cream Oil I got every year and the neckties they gave me for a joke. There’s pictures that we mailed back to Germany, to show folks what kind of country we were living in and how well we were all doing over here in America. We’re grinning from behind twenty-five pound turkeys, dangling bananas and pineapples in front of the camera. There’s pictures from further back, between the wars, hammering away on each other’s houses, or camping in the Catskills, or lounging outside those tents we used to rent for the summer on Jamaica Bay. Plum Beach was the name of the place. There’s pictures of me and Mom before we met, me working as a janitor for Otto Hofer, her standing guard over baby carriages in Riverside Park, working as a nanny. There’s Eighty-Sixth Street and the Steuben Day Parade and the Turnverein and Nature Friends and Sängerbundhalle. There’s pictures of me as a kid with a bunch of others, wading in the Elbe, a dozen of us in bathing suits, boys and girls, arm in arm, and out behind us you can see the ships—some of them still had masts—that were going to be carrying us away. And a picture of Mom just before she left Stuttgart, leaning against some Swabian apple tree, looking like she’d been crying. Sentimental, she was. I remember there was a song years later, in the fifties, maybe, “throw momma from the train a kiss, a kiss throw momma from the train a goodbye,” a real can of corn, but she was sobbing in the kitchen nook, remembering the last time she saw her mother. Goodbyes meant something then: the ocean was wider, before Peoples Express and those other cheapo airlines.