Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  “Don’t go,” I say, in a little boy’s voice that I haven’t used since he dropped me off at Boy Scout Camp. Camp Watchung, Glen Gardner, New Jersey, which was my last run at a Physical Fitness merit badge. “Don’t go,” I say. “You don’t know what it means to me, just looking at you. Don’t go.” Little boy lost. He doesn’t answer, but he puts his arm around me and we go back to the motel.

  V.

  HEY, POP,” GEORGE SAYS, THE NEXT MORNING. It snaps me out of a trance. I get hypnotized, watching America pass by: an American Legion hall, a lumber yard, a mobile home, a farm—or what’s left of one—a car lot, an ice cream place, a discount carpets place, fireworks, cigarettes. “We went to Florida lots of times. Three or four anyway.”

  “That’s right,” I answer. I can’t get over the satellite dishes, like cupped hands waving hello at the universe, begging for an answer, even if it’s video shopping and preachers. Anything that’s out there, please come down and visit me.

  “Three days, two nights, I think it was,” George says. “Good roads all the way. Motels weren’t so good.”

  “There were plenty of good motels,” I correct him. “But I was cheap. There’s no getting around it. I saw a swimming pool, I’d speed up. ‘Somebody’s got to pay for that, not me.’ Six bucks a night, eight tops and I always sent your mom to look over the room first. Tour of inspection. She liked a place, I worried we couldn’t afford it. George?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry I was so stingy with Mom. Always cutting corners. Saving for what?”

  “Tell me about your first trip,” he says. “First time to Florida.”

  “That was 1933,” I say. “In a Ford I bought for $200 when I was living on Classen Avenue in Brooklyn, a little before we got married. I got up in the dark and got over to Yorkville. Then we headed …”

  “You traveled with Mom … before you were married?”

  “No. That was me and my brother. Heinz. My famous brother.” I stop a minute. Sometimes, when you picture the past, you step right into the picture, like a trap door opens right under your feet. One minute you’re talking to someone like George, the next you’re back fifty years. And when you get back, it’s hard to put in words where you’ve been. You were in the picture. They get the caption.

  “So …” He jogs me. “America. Summer. 1933.”

  “It was just after the Max Baer fight. Max—our Max— Schmeling got knocked out in the tenth round.”

  “What’s my father talking about?” I can see his expression. One Max knocked out another Max? He thinks I’m losing my mind. That I’m senile all of a sudden. Drooling memories. But, even though he’s lost and he doesn’t know one Max from another, and all these fights he never heard of, he doesn’t do what he used to do, that always drove me crazy. He doesn’t yawn, stretch, roll his eyes. He sits and listens. Would you believe it? Are you looking down from heaven, Mom?

  “Schmeling was heartbroken after Sharkey. He expected he’d get a fair shake, a rematch. He got nothing. He got Max Baer and the press made it a Jewish-German thing and Baer came into the ring with the Star of David on his trunks, even though nobody was sure whether he was really Jewish. Kind of makes you shudder, wearing that star, when you think of what happened later. Oh Christ …”

  George was bargaining for a Readers Digest yarn about traveling in the thirties, funny stories about flat tires and farmers daughters, but now he watches me tumble into something strange, boxing matches from before he was born. Still, he doesn’t interrupt.

  “It was an ugly fight. Baer by a knockout. I sat right behind Al Jolson, the singer. ‘My Jew-boy beat the German!’ Heinz took it hard. So the Florida trip was my idea, to get him away from boxing and out of Yorkville. We had a flat or breakdown every day and it took ten days to cross the Florida line. Waiting for ferries. You never knew what was next. Half the time you never knew where you were and when you asked directions, they didn’t know where they were. Florida was something they’d heard about, way south. A rumor. They asked us to come back and tell them what it was like there. Everything was new to us. Everything was new, period. Buying watermelons right out of the fields. A million times, we said, someday we’ll look back and laugh. We were laughing then, already. It was a new country. It’s an older country now and I’m an older traveler. This whole neighborhood seems like an autumn kind of place, the same way a beach is summer. The white churches, the post office which is also a general store, the red brick mill-factories, scuffed-up chicken farms trading in maple syrup and apple cider, all of it has a tired-out feeling, hunkering down for winter, just around the corner. No wonder the senior citizens love it this time of year. Who wouldn’t want to go out like a maple, flaming red and filling the wind with leaves? Hoping for a glorious resurrection, come Easter? But we don’t go out that way. We go like cars, dented, leaking oil, mufflers farting. We go into automobile graveyards, where weeds grow around our axles and mice next to the driver’s seat—that’s burial. Or we go into one of those pressing machines that can squeeze a Cadillac into the size of a toaster. That’s cremation.”

  Living with George, I write columns in my head.

  VI.

  “HEY, SON,” THE OLD MAN SAYS. “IT’S NONE of my business. I’m just wondering.” That’s his trifecta, I think. When the old man says “son,” he pulls rank. It’s none of my business suggested disinterested curiosity. Just wondering suggests the idea is scarcely his own; it just popped up.

  “Shoot,” I said. Now that was what I called straight-forward, as in ready, aim, fire.

  “You going to your reunion?”

  “It’s in ten days.”

  “That’s a yes?”

  “That’s an ‘I guess so.’ We may have to hurry back from Florida. I have a date. Maybe.”

  “How do you go about doing something like that? At your age, I mean?”

  “At my age?” He acts offended but he laughs. “It doesn’t get easier, Pop. It’s just as cruddy and awkward as ever.”

  “Who’s the lucky lady, if I can ask?”

  “I knew her in high school. I ran into her again a couple of weeks ago.”

  “She’s been waiting for you all these years?”

  “Not exactly. She’s separated from her husband. You remember Kenny Hauser?

  “You bet I do. Jewish kid. A real crackerjack.”

  “Well, I want to give her a call. Joan Simmons. I always liked her.”

  “Okay by me. But you’re not rushing your work, are you? Work comes first, I always say.”

  “Pop, I did Australia in a week.”

  Then he gives me this sly look, like he’s deciding if he can get away with something. “Let me ask you, Pop. After Mom died … did you ever look around … for company?”

  “We Germans are like pumas, son,” I begin to say. Which is as far as he lets me get, before he chimes in. “We mate for life.”

  It was hard, sometimes, to take my work seriously. Covering autumn? If the leaves fell without my writing about it, it would still be autumn; if they didn’t fall, I had a scoop. Meanwhile, I was sharing autumn with the old man, streaks of color in the mountains, leaf raking in a dozen Shenandoah Valley towns and leaf burning and billboards advertising high school football games, bitter rivalries between places I’d never heard of, and Halloween closing in, pumpkins and goblins, spooks and effigies, and that snap in the air, flowers waiting for the first killing frost and, after that, maybe one year in three, the miracle of Indian summer. It was coming into Lexington, crossing over the Maury River, glancing upstream at the remnants of other bridges and an old mill that once drew power from the river. We passed a football stadium and meandered down streets lined with red brick houses, small shops and restaurants, the kinds of places that get murdered when the malls come in, and old houses with porches, gardens loaded with mums, people raking leaves in afternoon light. See, I told the old man, there’s still nice places in America. There are handsome towns and fine drives, woods and farms and likeable cities
, all here, spread out like the ingredients of a meal no one has quite figured out how to prepare.

  The old man worried as we headed south. The brother waiting at the Flamingo Motel was bothering him. The night before, he’d gotten dressed while it was still dark and gone walking. The Flamingo Motel was getting closer, like a police car with lights flashing at the scene of an accident that included him.

  We drove north out of Lexington, past horse farms, rolling country around Rockbridge Baths. The car windows were open, the radio off. We passed through Goshen, another crossroads collection of old houses and trailers and what looked like a school turned into a Dollar Value General Store. I divided American small towns into the ones that were waiting for something to happen and the ones that had given up on waiting. I’d have gotten a column out of that once. Now I had the thought and let it go: unseen leaf in an imagined forest.

  “We’re almost there, Pop,” I said, downshifting as we started a serious uphill through George Washington National Forest. “Five miles.”

  “To where?” he asked. The mountain air perked him up.

  “A place I never wrote about,” I said. “Warm Springs.”

  “Where Roosevelt died?”

  “That was Georgia. This is Virginia. Bath County. Jefferson wrote about it. Early on, this was spa country. Like Carlsbad and Baden Baden. You’ll see.”

  “How come you never wrote it up?” he asked. “Sounds worth writing about.”

  “Also, worth not writing about.” It was kind of a gift, not having to turn places into columns. When you wrote about places, whether you praised or knocked, you were a predator. That was the appeal of one true map to a writer tired of words. We came to the top of the mountain, Warm Springs Mountain. Through a cut in the trees along the road, we glimpsed what we left behind, Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountains. Then we headed downhill.

  “I don’t want to build this up too much, Pop,” I say. “You know how it is. You talk up a restaurant, bring a crowd of friends, that’s the night that immigration raids the kitchen.”

  “If you never wrote about it,” the old man says, “it must really be something.”

  “It’s a place out of a children’s book. ‘The Happy Valley.’ I always leave feeling … better. You ever have a place like that, you could count on?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My back yard.”

  Now I could see the Warm Springs Courthouse, way down below, and the little town around it. We dropped out of the forest, into uphill meadows. Across, on the other side of the valley, one ridge of mountains followed another, all the way to West Virginia, like mountains doodled by kids who couldn’t get enough of them. At the bottom of the hill, the highway that ran into the valley, east to west, intersected the highway that ran through the valley, north-south. The valley was no secret. It had a huge hundred-year-old hotel with a Sam Snead golf course, scores of Jamaican and Filipino servants, and hundreds of rooms that conventions, tournaments and old money couldn’t seem to fill. That was a few miles down the road in Hot Springs. This was Warm Springs, one town north.

  I pulled to the side of the road. A creek meandered through a grassy field, fenced off from the surrounding pastures, occupied by two rickety white clapboard buildings that the creek flowed in and out of: the Warm Springs Bathhouses. Getting out of the car, the old man stretched and strolled over to the brook, where he knelt on the grass, sniffed the air, and put his finger in the water.

  “It’s warm,” he said. “I think I’m going to like this.”

  “That one …” I pointed to the building on the left, “… is for women. Mrs. Robert E. Lee. An invalid. They lowered her into the water.”

  “Let’s go,” he said, gesturing to the rickety bathhouse on the right. He was impatient, like a kid. Always. Start and finish. Even at Mom’s funeral he was impatient, as if life itself were better when you started on time and finished early. So I let him go first, pulling open the bathhouse door. The bathhouse was an octagon, built of wood, white painted and peeling and before every season—April through October—management replaced a dozen of the most obviously rotten boards. That was about it. A building could last, that way. Stone buildings last forever and if they fall, they still leave something behind, a chimney or a wall, a ruin. Old wood buildings were something else again. Stone you respect. Wood you root for. I felt another column, slipping away from me.

  Pop stopped as soon as he stepped through the doorway. He found himself on a boardwalk that circled around the pool. Off the boardwalk were a half dozen changing rooms. Overhead, the roof beams converged, like spokes meeting at the hub of a wheel, except where the hub would be, the roof stopped and there was a circle of sky overhead, so light came down into the water and sometimes rain, which didn’t bother you at all.

  He stared down into the pool, like a kid at the edge of a wishing well. The pool was thirty feet across and five feet deep and you could see through to the bottom, rock-covered, with bubbles, endless bubbles, rising to the surface. Pop knelt down again, just as he had outside, feeling water the temperature of warm milk, and bubbles like champagne. The old wooden building enfolded him, warm water mixing with nippy autumn air, winter just around the corner, and when he looked up he could see a late afternoon sky, pink-tinted clouds scudding by. We had the place to ourselves, except for the attendant who gave us towels and our choice of changing room. End of day, end of season: I liked the feeling. The old man turned to me, puzzled.

  “Bathing trunks?” he asked me. The attendant overheard him.

  “We don’t use them here,” he said, over his shoulder. “The women do.”

  “Is that so?” Pop responded. “Well, how about that?” He looked at me, shrugged and walked into a dressing room. I was the one feeling awkward. I took another room. He was already in the water when I emerged—I gave him time—and he was floating on his back, eyes sighting through the hole in the roof, when I stepped into the pool, going backward down the ladder, not that he was looking.

  After that, the place took over, those tickling bubbles from down below, the whiff of lower regions, the changing light that filtered into the ancient clapboard shell and the quiet, the absolute quiet, except for the sound of the water, coursing in and out of the pool. It was baptism, immersion, cleansing, voyage. For the first half hour, we didn’t speak. The power of the place was absolute. Sometimes Pop came into view, floating on his back, paddling lightly, or sitting on the steps at the edge of the pool.

  “Well,” he said after nearly an hour. “You’ve done good, George. I have to say.”

  “They close next week,” I said. “We’re just in time. They open again in the spring.”

  “I might be back,” he said. “And George? Don’t ever write this up …”

  “Not much risk of that.“

  “Just don’t write about it till I’m gone. Promise?” Then he looked at me in the eyes. “At least we had this.”

  When I had toweled off and dressed, I stepped out into an evening that was chilly and found the old man sitting in a gazebo near the woman’s bath house, ladling some water out of a well into a paper cup.

  “That’ll go through you like prune juice, Pop,” I said, but I drank the cup he offered me. It felt like communion. “At least we’ll be on the same schedule.”

  “Nippy out here,” he said. “It feels good, after those baths.” I sat next to him, watching evening take over the valley, cows in a neighboring pasture turn into silhouettes, a dog barking up the road, a very occasional car coming up the road from Hot Springs, headlights on, though it wasn’t quite dark.

  “Good sleeping weather,” he said. “We have far to go yet?”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” I said. I nodded right across the street where the Warm Springs Inn sat at the meeting of the mountain roads. “Over there. I’ll bring the car around. You just cross the street.”

  “Where do we go from here?”

  “A day or two in the mountains, to someplace I can say, this is where autumn stops. Th
at’s all I need. After that I was I was thinking about Savannah.”

  “No,” he said. “Please. I want to go to Florida. Direct. I can’t dawdle. I can’t wait. Please.”

  “Okay, Pop,” I answered. “Whatever you say.” Suddenly, something was ending. It felt sad, that our easy traveling was over, zig zagging here and there, stopping a day or a week, moving on when we pleased, following the leaves. The old man picked up on that. Or, it could be, he felt the same way himself.

  “What about Germany? How’s that looking?”

  “Germany?”

  The way he said it, it was if Germany were something new, a suggestion he was hearing for the first time. I might as well have said “Portugal” or “Chile.” Something had changed, that I didn’t want to press. Then, his mood changed. His face was grim. “Germany’s waiting for me. Right down the road.”

  PART FIVE

  I.

  IT’S JUST PAST DAWN ON A HIGHWAY OUTSIDE OF NEW Port Richey, Florida and George and I are looking in at the Flamingo Motel which we found five miles south of town behind a car lot with prices chalked on windows and a line of plastic flags flapping in the breeze. The motel sits in back of the car lot. Air-cooled, the sign says. And NO VACANCY, though there’s only two cars parked in front.

  I pull into the lot. No one’s around. That’s good. I like the idea of getting there early and waiting, of seeing him before he sees me. I drive along the rows of cars for sale, clunkers mostly, till I find an empty space in the row that looks right out at the highway.

  “I’ll paint a price on the window,” George says, “and we could sit here forever.”

  “It doesn’t amount to much,” I admit.

  “At least it’s not called Cheap Adolf’s or Crazy Otto’s,” he says, trying to keep things light-hearted. George means well but it’s not working. I feel my calves tensing, tying up into knots and the car’s feeling small. I try stretching my legs but I can’t.