Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  German stuff, you call it. And you shrug. Well, the truth is, I’d have dumped the whole kit and caboodle in a minute, every last Stille Nacht and prosit and sauerbraten, every package from here, every letter from there, every scrap of memory, every beer stein and Hummel statue, if it helped me become a part of something in America. That’s what Otto Hofer believed and that’s what my brother Heinz abandoned but never mind, because I stepped right and I sat pretty. I learned the language, took the oath. And I was loyal. We all were. We worked overtime in munitions plants, building bombs we saw in newsreels raining down on our hometowns, and we sat there watching. Saving silver foil and planting victory gardens.

  Walking around the house at night in my bathrobe, not tired enough to sleep. You need less sleep as you get older. That’s cruel. You should need more. It’s God giving you more time to think things over. The house makes sounds during the night, sighs of wind around the windows, branches hitting against the roof, tapping out messages in code. The faucet dripping in the kitchen that I put a pot under, not wanting to waste water, but I have to listen to the dripping all night long. Creaks and hisses in the winter, when I run the furnace—not yet, not cold enough—like a ship that’s running along by itself, no passengers on board, the Marie Celeste they called it. In the summer, the wood sighs and expands in the morning, shivers a little at night and when it rains real hard, you can sense the house enjoying itself, like a kid under a hose, water splashing off the gutters, hosing down the sidewalk. I pad around in the dark. I know this house. A pile of mail by the door. I turn on a light. Early years, mail made our day. Letters from Germany, a few real heartbreakers during the war, via Switzerland, months coming. They got here, though. News finds its way to you good or bad, Mom said. She was right. It did. Onion skin, super-light envelopes, hand printed in block letters. Inside, old style German script. Clipped obituaries. In Russland gefallen. Pictures of graves. Wooden crosses on the Eastern Front. Bombed out houses. Junk mail, I get plenty. Occupant. You may already have won a million dollars. Bank statements. That’s it. Except for a postcard, so old it could have slipped out of a scrapbook of a trip to Florida. What’s this? Picture of a motel that’s right out of the fifties, before the chains took over. Flamingo Inn. “Air-cooled.” Would you believe it? Is it from George in a funny mood? He travels with packs of them, no telling when they arrive. Postcards of Gallup, New Mexico, postmarked Istanbul. Drove his mom crazy, trying to keep track of him. What’s he saying now, I wonder. And then, printed letters. Herr Greifinger. I know this handwriting. Quick, the postmark: ten days ago, from Florida. Oh God! It’s Heinz. A short note. Only two words. “Auf wiedersehen?”

  PART FOUR

  I.

  “YOU AWAKE NOW, SON?” I ASK. HE CAME DOWN grouchy this morning and I left him alone. Now I’m driving carefully over the railroad tracks in Berkeley Heights, not wanting him to spill coffee on himself. That’ll get to anybody. “What’s up, Pop?” he asks. This isn’t the way to Florida, where we’re headed. I make a left off Springfield Avenue and head north, through the older part of town, used to be Italian places, maybe still. Then we’re out under high tension wires where we used to pick blackberries.

  “Okay,” I say. “History. We built that house of ours ourselves, me and some of the uncles and we did it mostly on weekends. We had carpenters plenty and we could read a blueprint. Only outsider we hired was an electrician, some crazy Russian, lived in the woods, muttered to himself while he worked. All on weekends. The women cooked …”

  “Amish barn raising,” he sighs, with a stop-the-music, I’ve-heard-this-tune-before tone of voice.

  “With beer,” I reply. George doesn’t respond. I’m still talking to him but I’m back more than fifty years, hearing the hammering and sawing, the way Germans work, like it’s what they were put on earth to do. Weekly progress on our American home, except when my brother visited, dressed in a suit and tie and carrying cake, always, and sometimes pumpernickel bread and smoked eel he knew I loved. Heinz, come on over, we need you, we’d shout. Give him a hammer, a shovel, a saw. Not Heinz. As soon as I saw him, I knew our schedule was shot. Soon, our tools were on the ground and we were playing horseshoes. “He never changes,” my wife always said. I thought she meant it as a compliment. Maybe not. He never did change. He had his ups and downs, alright, but he was always the same fellow. The rest of us, America caught up with a little at a time, sometimes almost by accident, when we laughed at some radio show or actually cared what happened in a baseball game, hard to say when we became American. Not Heinz.

  Now we cross the Passaic River. Most people see it from the Pulaski Skyway, winding through those weird, polluted Jersey Meadows, a mess of chemicals by that time. Out here, it’s just muddy and slow. George brought home some fish from there, all bones. His mom pretended he’d saved us from starvation. Along River Road, I park where people parked years ago. Then it was an orchard gone to seed. Now it’s the building for the New Providence Rescue Squad. We get out of the car and walk to the edge of the road. I gesture towards a driveway leading to a place across the street. There’s still some odd sheds and buildings scattered around, but it’s hard to tell what’s what, the trees are taller now and there are some hedges, planted for privacy. There’s more traffic, too, on River Road these days. No chance of road work now, during rush hour. Boxers would be dodging commuters.

  “No point in going any further,” I say. “It’s just someone’s house now. But this was where I discovered America. This was Ehsan’s Training Camp. Also known as Madame Bey’s. That’s where Max Schmeling came. And Heinz with him. While I was building my home, setting up in New Jersey, Heinz never left Yorkville, except when his friend Schmeling arrived. He never got a real job, only tending bar. He never married.”

  “It’s like an old movie,” he grouses. “One brother becomes a priest, the other goes to the electric chair.”

  “Not quite,” I say.

  “Pop? What about your brother? Why’d he go back?”

  “What’s this?” I say. He finds me in a weak moment. Weaker than he knows. “Is this an interview?”

  “Okay,” he says, backing off. “Forget I asked.” But neither of us gets up to leave. And then he speaks again. “I notice you talk about him, Pop. He keeps turning up. Old days in New York. First trip to Florida. And his picture in the house all those years. It’s one thing remembering the old days. But this is different. It’s the difference between a scar and a wound. The wound’s still hurting.”

  End of speech. But he doesn’t move either. We’re both still standing there. I can take it or leave it.

  “I don’t know,” I say after a while. “He went back in 1938, after the second Louis fight. It was a bad business. He made a stink. Right after that, your mom made a last visit. Late 1938. Cutting it close. That’s when that photo you used to show off was taken. He was already in uniform by then. Now I’m guessing. Once, I thought I knew for sure. It felt … true. In May, 1942, there’s a headline in the papers. SCHMELING KILLED IN CRETE. Max had joined the paratroopers, see? The story goes, he was wounded and captured and, when they’re taking him to the hospital, he goes berserk, grabs a gun from a guard, starts in to shoot, but before he fires, someone else kills him. Well, that was too bad because I’d met Max and I thought he was a fine fellow. And that was that. Until the next day. Mistaken identity, the paper says. Someone who looked like Schmeling. And my heart stopped. Heinz. It had to be.”

  “You said it felt true. Why?”

  “They were linked. Like a movie star and a double. It had to be him … had to be. And it stayed that way. Except after the war I wrote Schmeling, just to see what he knew. He said he’d seen Heinz in Berlin, lightly wounded, headed back to the Russian Front. And that was that. He came back to life, for a minute, and died again.”

  “And … so much for Heinz.”

  “He left in a mess. He did a lot of stupid things. Hell of a guy, though. Your mother liked him. The fact is, I’ve always wondered if I wasn�
��t a second choice.”

  “Pop! After all these years! You’re jealous!”

  “Silly, no? After … like you say … all these years. God knows I loved that guy. And hated him a little too. But all the time I watched newsreels, during the war, I said to myself, not everybody dies in war, not everybody.”

  We head out quietly, almost reverently, as if we’d been at a ceremony ourselves. Dissolved in something great. On the way home, suddenly, George laughs.

  “I used to think being German was neat,” he says.

  “Before you changed your name, that was?”

  “Yes,” he answers, ignoring my criticism. “All the other villains were born losers. Nobody came close to Germans. I always pulled for them. The first half of the movie was always the most fun.”

  “Well, George,” I say. “I guarantee you. My brother stayed for the end of the movie.” And I hand him the postcard.

  “Where’d you find this?” he asks, fingering the old-time card.

  “In the mail.”

  “Air-cooled.” Then he turns it over. “Auf wiedersehen?” “He means, it’s been too long, it’s time we got together.”

  “Him? Who?”

  “Him!” I point up the driveway. “The brother that didn’t land in the electric chair….” Or in a fractured submarine or a charred tank or a pile of frozen snow. “He wound up in Florida.”

  “We’re going to see him?”

  “I want you to take me. Will you do that?”

  “Okay,” he says, handing back the postcard, shaking his head at the strangeness of it.

  “If you knew him, he never did things the easy way. He was a gambler. And God knows what else.”

  “You don’t have to do this his way, you know,” he says. He can see I’m shaky. “Listen, I’m syndicated. I call one of my outlets—Tampa, St. Petersburg—and they’ll make a few phone calls. Send someone over to the Flamingo Motel.”

  “No,” I said. I opened the door. “Let’s go. You drive first. An hour. We’ll have a big meal in Pennsylvania. Later on, I’ll tell you a story.”

  George sleeps with his mouth open, drooling some, and when I glance over at him, I can see what he’ll look like when he gets old. A long-faced, grey-haired, sad-eyed fellow, stoop shouldered and slouchy, with only his height to save him from appearing fat. I can see it coming. You always can, if you look. Even with a young person, a baby, every now and then you get a peek of the old person that’s waiting, way down the road. And when you’re old—old as I am—you sometimes get a flash of what you were a half century ago, a reminder of the baby that was.

  Now it’s dark and we’re in western Pennsylvania, and the traffic thins out, so I sometimes have the road all to myself. I like that. America was a country that I learned by car. I loved it. We’d leave early in the morning, though never early enough for me. We’d do an hour or more before breakfast, big roaring breakfasts, orange juice, waffles, sausages, you name it, breakfasts like we never had at home and never wanted, except when we were on the road. God, the diners, the dumps, the dives! And the places we’d end up sleeping. Stuffy old guest houses and firetrap hotels and that first generation of motels, cabin courts they were called, little wooden bungalows. Boy, it was fun being greenhorns, knocking around a new country with a car and a tank of gas and a wife keeping track of every penny and a little boy who made a federal case out of it if you missed a single roadside historical marker. Outside Niagara Falls, I remember, you’d see men standing along the highway with flashlights and lanterns, waving you toward their houses, where you could have a room for the night. Because there were no motels yet. It felt as if the whole country was asking you to come visit, stay awhile.

  “Hey, Pop!” George snaps out of his nap, looks ahead, looks back, alarmed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m just driving …”

  “It’s how you’re driving.”

  “I was driving before you were born!”

  “Listen. Just listen. You are on the third lane of an interstate highway. That lane is for fast traffic, especially for fast traffic which wants to pass slower traffic in the other two lanes.”

  “Right.”

  “Then why are you in the fast lane?”

  “I’m entitled. I’m going the legal limit …”

  “But what about that convoy of cars … and trucks … behind us? Didn’t you notice? Honking their horns? Blinking their headlights? Hugging our bumper?”

  “The legal limit, George. If they want me to pull into the slow lane it’s only because they want to go faster than the law allows. That means, if I get out of the way, I help them break the law …”

  “Pop …” He’s pleading now. His voice has that frustrated tone of voice that only kids can get and only when talking to their parents. I pull out of the fast lane, find a rest stop. Anyway, it’s his turn to drive, which he does for an hour or so.

  “Pop,” he says. “You’re not sleeping.”

  “No, George. I’m not sleeping. Not with you driving. An accident happens, I want to see it coming.”

  “Would you mind if …” His hand flicks toward the car radio. “I … I just looked around and see who else is up tonight?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Go ahead.”

  He punches each stop on the dial and he doesn’t get much. Everything sounds like transmissions from a fleet of ships that got scattered in a storm, out there in the dark somewhere. News from Detroit. Country music out of Akron. They used to build most of the tires in the world in Akron. No more. Not one. News from Plattsburgh, New York. Violins from Portland. Portland, Maine or Oregon, I don’t know.

  “Nothing out there, tonight,” he says. “Not even a late night minister. Some of those guys are good, Pop.”

  “What are you looking for?” I ask.

  “You never know what’s out there,” he says. “Especially at night. A minor league baseball game.”

  “At 11 p.m.?” They’d be in the twentieth inning!”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I spend a lot of time driving. I try my luck with the radio. Sometimes … if it’s the right song … it picks you up. It encourages you.”

  “Maybe you should get one of those things … you know what I mean … you shove in the box of tape. Whatever you want …”

  “I thought about it,” he says. “It didn’t feel right.” He glances over at me, to see if that was enough of an answer, but I’m still waiting for more. He stares forward. The highway has narrowed. With high beams, you can see birches and pines and hemlocks along the side. This is where our Christmas trees come from. Twenty-five years ago, for the fun of it, I’d propose pulling over and digging out a free one to take home. We’d argue back and forth, vote, and I would lose, two to one. Now I keep to myself, that stuff.

  “Not right,” he says. “Remember when we went off in the car, Mom would always want us to take food along?”

  “‘Perfectly good food,’” I repeat. “I can hear her saying it. I can hear her. Right now.”

  “And you insisted that the stops we made—good or bad— were part of the experience of a trip … Well, that’s how I feel about sticking with what’s on the radio. It’s part of the trip. Of playing fair with the trip. It’s part of making yourself available to whatever’s out there. You see what I mean, Pop?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I see.”

  “Pop, what about the house,” he asks.

  “What about it?” I snap right back. He’s got his nerve. Does he think he can take me for a ride in the country and soften me up? Does he think he can charm me? I had one charmer too many in my life. Charmed his way all the way to the Russian front, I figure. “You’re the one who’s selling it? Got any live ones yet?”

  “I want to talk about it, before I do anything. I want us to talk.”

  “Well, I don’t. I didn’t come along with you to talk real estate.” I all of a sudden picture the house the way it must look right now. Empty. Dark. It makes me all of a sudden sad.

&
nbsp; “It feels like I already moved out,” I say.

  “I’ve let you down, haven’t I?” he says. “All sorts of ways.”

  I don’t say yes and I don’t say no. Who says we never learn? “I think maybe I asked too much of you. Maybe that’s the problem. Pauline Kennedy pointed it out to me.”

  “When?” he asks. Nosy. “Where?”

  “Stop with the questions,” I say. He senses something, I can tell. “I’m not a story. And you’re no reporter.”

  “I just was asking.”

  “Anyway, Pauline says those of us who came from the other side, we felt all kinds of pressures. For us, it was a matter of getting here, getting situated, getting ahead, that stuff. But there were other pressures we passed on to our kids. I mean, this was America. It didn’t matter what you used to be in the old country or where you came from. This was a fresh start, an all-new ballgame. This was the moment for us to show our stuff … in our kids. What we were made of … in our kids. Does it sound corny?”

  He’s staring at me, like I was reading a will. I smile and wave my hand before he can answer.