by Kluge, P. F.
“Sounds corny to me alright. Like all our generations were leading to you … the first American. So what it comes to is you’re off the hook. And so am I. There’s a statute of limitations on this parent stuff. You get old, they take away your license. I still have my passport, though.”
“I hate to spoil your party, Pop,” he says, “but does it occur to you that your picture of Germany is about fifty years out of date?”
“I’ve been back.”
“You’ve seen what you want to see,” he snaps. “You’re a homecoming old-timer. You’re softer than the softest tourist. You’re sentimental.”
“I’ve got feelings, if that’s what you mean …”
“Sure. So how do you feel about the lead poisoning of the Black Forest? Or that chemical trough they call the Rhine, hell even the Lorelei holds her nose. You like soccer riots? Have you seen the way those people move along the autobahn? No speed limits and if there’s a crash, no survivors. You walk around the cities, it’s Turkish slaves who do the heavy lifting. Ever watch a German TV show? Read a paper over there? I’m telling you … you’ll miss New Jersey.”
“Do you?”
It’s story time. Our house was nearly finished, I tell him. The garden was coming along. Already, there were forsythia along the driveway, tulips and daffodils lining the sidewalk. Out back, I had apples and pears. I never had much luck with cherries. We’d get plenty blossoms and the fruit would come out—sour cherries and sweet, both kinds. And then, the birds. The word went out, hey, fly on down to Hilltop Avenue, Greifinger’s treating. This was 1936, springtime. Another thing. Your Mom was pregnant. That surprises you, doesn’t it? You weren’t the first. She was pregnant twice, full term. Still born. RH factor. A girl and a boy. Perfectly formed. Beautiful. You were our third try. And last. Someone—Lorenz Schroeder, acting as a spokesman—came to me, when Mom was pregnant with you and he said, now, Hans, enough is enough. But it wasn’t me. Your mother was the one. She wanted you bad. Well, I guess God decided that the world needed another frequent flyer and out you popped, blue in the face. You almost didn’t make it. Almost.
For awhile there, after the Jack Sharkey fight, I believed things might work out for Heinz. The gambling, it never died out. But it died down. The amounts got smaller. It wasn’t always all or nothing, or double or nothing, life or death. It was more like a hobby. And he talked about Florida a lot, let’s go back to Florida. Florida-crazy, he was. Start a hotel, an orange grove, a date farm, you name it. Avocados. Ostriches. The idea-of-the-week. Sponges. Sea shells. Meanwhile, he still lived on 86th Street above the bar and he was there, always there, when Schmeling came over for a fight. Which Schmeling did. Win some, lose some. He had a great fight against Mickey Walker, which ended in the eighth round when Max gave the referee a sign, pointing at the Toy Bulldog, hopelessly beaten, as if to say, what am I supposed to do, kill him? Max was a sportsman in a world where sports was going out of style. Then, there was that terrible loss to Max Baer. Schmeling should have won that fight. But Baer put on the Star of David, stopped our friend in the tenth. Someone has the best night of his life, there’s not much you can do. “Every time I punch Max Schmeling in the nose,” Max Baer told reporters, “I’m punching Hitler in the nose.” Nastiness was in the air. Schmeling seemed surprised and, as long as I live, I’ll never know if he really was surprised or was acting surprised, that it wasn’t sports anymore, that a boxing match became a war game. All the signs were there. They railroaded Hauptmann. They sabotaged the Hindenburg. But whatever they did to us here, it was nothing to what we were doing over there. We listened to Hitler’s speeches on the radio. It was like opera, that you couldn’t understand exactly, those screaming highs and whispering lows and howls of pain and sarcastic jokes and then, those huge Sieg Heils out of Nuremberg or Berlin, like the whole country had gathered in a cave. Anyway, we’re out in the yard, the party’s just getting started. I was setting up horseshoes out back, where it didn’t matter if the lawn took a beating, and the women were in the kitchen, drinking coffee and working on food. It was still early. The only ones at the table were the real old timers, the omas and opas who got brought over for a visit. Not a word of English, but they watched like hawks. If they didn’t like what they saw, if the house wasn’t clean and I don’t mean the dishes or the floor, I mean the back of the top shelf in the linen closet, the floor underneath the radiator, they might take us back to Germany for re-training. The night before, I caught Mom taking out light bulbs all around the house and wiping them with a wet rag, then drying them off before putting them back in, so some tante wouldn’t complain, your light bulbs are filthy.
Well, the driveway filled up fast, so you had to park out on the street. I looked up from pounding horseshoe stakes and I see your uncle walking across the front lawn. Heinz was carrying a pastry box from Bauer’s Bakery in Yorkville. Behind him, carrying a second box from the same place came Max Schmeling, ex-champion, a contender now and not getting any younger. When I came across the lawn to him, he smiled, shook my hand, this fellow who fought in front of sixty thousand people. It must be something, George, to have your defeats and victories happen in front of an audience like that. Then, I guess, you’ve got an audience of millions yourself, millions of readers.
“Thank you for letting me come,” Max said in German. I nodded, though I could have said, well, to be honest, we were hoping Heinz would bring a nice girl, someone to marry. “I like your place,” Schmeling said.
Maybe he was just being polite, he was as decent a man as I’ve ever come across, but I offered him the tour, which Mom said I should never do without permission. Max and I walked together—Heinz wasn’t interested—down into the cellar, which Mom never forgave me, that the first thing I showed the important visitor was a coal bin, my tool bench, her wash sink, and the closet where we kept apples and potatoes and onions. Later, I told her I meant to give them time to prepare the upstairs, to put away the hairbrush and comb I kept on top of the toilet and replace it with some new soap. He’d think the world of us then, no doubt. Put in a new roll of toilet paper, that would impress Max a lot too. The look she gave me. That’s how she operated. She gave me those looks. Those silent killers.
Max and I came up to the kitchen. You could hear them listen to us coming, it was that quiet. They were all there, all the tantes, standing by like a bunch of maids waiting for orders. I introduced him and they stood there, quietly, politely. Mom denied it later, but I swear she curtseyed when he shook her hand. Max noticed how still they all were. “What’s that …” He raised his nose in the air, he sniffed “ … I smell?”
“Zwiebelkuchen,” Mom said. That’s a dish I’ll never eat again. Put it simply: onion cake. The French have something like it, they call quiche, but not as good as ours. It’s a springtime dish, South German, we drink it with new wine.
“Zwiebelkuchen,” Max said. “Kann nicht sein!” It can’t be!
“Haus gemacht,” Mom said. Home-made. Max played the part of a little boy, sneaking over to the stove, touching the oven handle. Then he peeked over his shoulder to see if anybody was watching, the answer being ten hausfraus, not one of them who had been this close to anyone famous except maybe Hilde Hofer, because Otto had been super at a building up on Amsterdam Avenue and they knew the super up the block, Mr. and Mrs. Gehrig. Lou was a nice boy, Hilde always said. They watched him grow up, go to Columbia, become the Iron Horse and later they listened on the radio when he retired—“the luckiest man on the face of the earth”—and a few years later he was in the ground. Well, Schmeling studied the oven, appraised the women and calculated that if he touched the handle, his boxing career was over.
“Later, today?”
Mom nodded yes and I took him upstairs, into the room that was yours, and the guest room next to it. Max made the rooms seem tiny, the whole house like a weekend bungalow. But when he went to the window—the one where you sat to do your homework—and he saw the whole property, pine trees and chicken coop and empty fields
beyond, I could see he was pleased. We’d done alright in America.
“What were you doing when we came?” he asked. “Hitting a pipe for what?”
“That’s a sport,” I said. “Horseshoes.” I said that in English. Then I tried to figure a translation. “Hufeisen.” He was still puzzled. “Hufeisen schmeissen,” I said. To throw horseshoes. He still didn’t get it. “Come on, Max,” I said. “I’ll show you.”
It was one of the rare times when no one had a camera. I’ve got to count on my memory. And memory serves. All of us men—me and the others you called Onkel, whether or not they were related—stood around in shirts with sleeves rolled up, suspenders, trousers, pitching horseshoes. At one end, Max Schmeling and your Onkel Heinz—like the movie star and his double. I was at the other end, with Otto Hofer. In horseshoes, I was Heinz’ partner, Max was Otto’s. In life, it worked out otherwise. When I think back on that day, I see two men who left and two men who stayed. At horseshoes, Hofer and Schmeling got lucky. Beginner’s luck.
So Max got his zwiebelkuchen and a little May wine. Then the men went for a walk around the neighborhood, settling our meal, Max asking about the price of land and how much did it cost to build a house. We didn’t talk about boxing, the same way we didn’t talk about business. And it would have stayed that way, if not for Tillie Heinrichs, your Tante Tillie. You remember Tillie, don’t you? Big, sweet-tempered generous woman, married to Erwin, the butcher, lived in Allentown? Later you played with their son, Alfred, who moved to Carolina and went broke in the water purification business. You have to say it, Alfred was a dud.
“You have a fight soon, Mr. Schmeling?” Tillie asked.
“Yes,” Max answered, stirring some. Maybe it was nice to forget, for a minute. “Always another fight.”
“With that same fellow …” Tillie turned to her husband for help.
“Jack Sharkey, noch ein mal?”
“No,” Schmeling said. He hadn’t gotten the rubber match with Sharkey, another chance at the championship. Sharkey had blown the championship to pathetic Primo Carnera who lost it to Baer who clowned around and later blew it to Jimmy Braddock, the Cinderella Man.
“Then … who?” Tillie asked. Max could have said he was scheduled to fight Fatty Arbuckle or Tom Mix, for all the difference it would have made to Tillie.
“Joe Louis,” Max replied. Around the table that day, maybe three people knew that name. Joe Louis, the unbeaten, the unbeatable, who’d cut through contenders, white and black, and just lately had been demolishing former champions, Carnera and Baer—Sharkey came later—clearing the way for a reign that would last a dozen years which … it turned out … was just as long as the Third Reich. Now it was Schmeling’s turn, I guessed. This was hail and farewell. Max’s last visit to America. It had to be.
“Louis.” Now Otto Hofer had spoken. Not the sporting type, but he read two newspapers, every day of his life. “Not beaten.”
“Ja,” Max acknowledged. He met Otto Hofer’s stare. Their eyes locked, the appraising and respectful nod you used to see in the middle of a boxing ring, while referees gave instructions, before all this voodoo stare-down came along.
“Not beaten,” Otto repeated. I had a feeling Max had heard about Otto from my brother. The ship sails both ways. Hin und her. No gentle Opa here. “Not beatable?”
“No one is not beatable,” Schmeling said. “Not me. I know that.” It was as if, losing to Baer, Hamas, Gaines, even Sharkey, he’d learned a lesson that Joe Louis had left to learn. Max thought about it some more, while we all looked on. Something came to him and you sensed it was coming to him for the first time. “To be unbeatable,” he said, “is not so good.”
“For the other fighter?” Otto knew better. He was testing him.
“No, no,” Max said. “For the fighter himself.” A silence followed, just hung there, while the table divided into people who understood what he’d just said and the ones who didn’t get it and never would. I saw some confusion on my friends’ faces. It’s better to lose? What’s all this? The more you lose, the better off you are? Others understood. My wife got it. Otto, too. Heinz, I’m not so sure about.
He looked confused.
“Anyway,” Max said. “When you see me fight … or hear about it … it was only me up there. Not Germany. Just me and …” He put an arm around my brother, his brother, “ … and Heinz.” And here was another one of those moments that stays with me forever, that just plain ambushes me, when I look back, Max standing in my backyard, beaming and at ease among us and Heinz beside him, turning towards his friend the way a flower turns toward the sun, all joy and shining. And it’s in my backyard. I swore I’d hold onto that moment forever. And maybe I have. But then it was all about what we’d accomplished. Looking back now, it’s about what we lost.
“He’s a nice man,” I said later that night. I always enjoyed helping her clean up, after one of our parties. Most of the washing and drying was done by the other women before they left, but there was always a pan or two that had been left to soak. She trusted me with that. “Do you think he enjoyed himself with us?” I asked.
“Why shouldn’t he enjoy himself?” she snapped.
“Then what’s the matter?” At the end of a beautiful day, something was wrong. She didn’t have to turn around for me to see it. Her movements had a rushed, jerky quality, also her voice.
“Why should there be something the matter?” she asked. That clinched it.
“I’m sorry I showed the house,” I said.
“It’s not the house,” she said. “It’s your brother. He never changes.”
We had a lot of rain that spring and a couple of weeks later I took a bag of asparagus—tender and white—up to where Max was training, up in the Catskills, at an old hotel. Bad luck: Max was taking a nap and I wasn’t going to ask them to wake him, not for the likes of me. So I was about to leave my vegetables in the kitchen when I saw Joe Jacobs.
“Hansel!” he shouted. “Der brother von Heinz.”
“Mr. Jacobs …”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Asparagus. From my own garden.”
“Great. Makes your piss stink something awful, ever notice? I heard you were out here. You doing okay?”
“Fine, Mr. Jacobs.” He was staring at me while I talked. It had been four years since the Sharkey fight. I’d filled out some. I owned property now, and a car. He could see that. So we talked, over coffee and some hard rolls he’d brought out from the city. He talked and I listened. He still needed an audience. And the talk came to this. Max was a ten-to-one—or should I say one-to-ten?—underdog. It was that bad. Ten to one. That meant people who knew more than I did, weren’t betting about win or lose. They were betting what would be Max’s last round. Round Five, even money. Joe saw I was shocked, that such a fight would even be permitted.
“Rough business, Hansel, “ he said. “Besides, I like Max. He takes grief back in Deutschland. Having a Jew manager.”
“Really?”
“I am Jewish, Hansel. This didn’t escape you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean no. I know you are of the Jewish.”
“And I take a certain amount of grief at this end,” he says. “Around the Baer fight. Traitor to my race.”
“Mr. Jacobs? Does he have any chance?”
“Of course he does! Ask anybody! One chance in ten …”
The way he said it startled me. Like a joke but not funny. I waited for him to say something—anything—more. I wanted him to say that Max would be well paid. Or it would be over quickly, that he’d tried to stop it, he’d throw in the towel if it got too bad., that life was cruel and business was business. I could see him rummaging around for something—anything—that might make me feel better. Then he leaned forward, the way he always did, and acted like he was conveying the meaning of life.
“You watch boxers, Hansel. And they look great, sometimes. Greater all the time. And this is no lie. Great they are. The fights get shorter and the odds ge
t longer and you start hearing those words. Unbeatable. Invincible. And that’s when you know somebody’s getting vinced. And who does it? The number one contender? The obvious opponent? The match up the public wants to see? No. It’s some kid with no name at all, from a country nobody’s heard of, some guy who’s—let’s face it—a little over the hill.” Now Joe Jacobs leaned forward. No one was there to hear us but he liked you to think you were hearing a secret. “Louis is training down in Lakewood. The people I talk to say he’s been having fun. You know what Max does for fun? He goes to the movies. The same movie, over and over again. Now, you know the star of the movie he’s watching? Come here.”
I leaned forward. He whispered a name into my ear.
“Joe Louis.”
II.
“IS THAT STRASBURG?” THE OLD MAN ASKED. THE question jarred me. He’d been quiet a while, not sleeping, just thinking. That wasn’t his style. Sure, he had thoughts, lots of them, but they came out rapid-fire, restless, fidgety, opinionated. Now he was different, oddly quiet, immersed in the past, all this about Max Schmeling and his own long-lost brother. He spoke awhile and, just when I got hooked, fell silent and the story disappeared, like a dream interrupted by a bladder with no respect for narrative. We’d run out of that day’s portion of highway a little too soon. Strasburg exit, straight ahead, Strasburg, Virginia. I wanted to get back to that story, the way a sleeper tumbles back in bed, trying to locate a dream.
“Pop,” I said.
“I know. I don’t want to check into some place and have a lovely meal. Not yet. Keep driving.”
I headed past the Strasburg turn off, into the Shenandoah Valley. We passed a cluster of motels and restaurants and whole convoys of trucks. And, across the center island, we saw headlights of traffic heading north. When I was a kid, I wondered where everybody was going. Now I know. And wonder why.
“In there,” Pop said, nodding at a sign that advertised a rest stop. Rest means piss and stretch and walk the dog and that sort of stunned, moonwalky lurch that people use, after three hundred miles at sixty miles an hour. Sometimes, during the day, you saw families picnicking at rest stops. Not surprising. But then you checked the license plates on the cars they tumbled out of. They lived in the same county the rest stop was in. That always got me. “Hey, kids, what say we pack a basket and head out to the interstate?” What kind of dreams does that generate? I’m gonna be a truck driver. A state cop, that’s for me. Or maybe, when I grow up I’m gonna get me a job out at the rest stop.