by Kluge, P. F.
“Listen, George,” I say. “I’ve got to do this alone. When he comes. Whenever he comes. I meet him by myself.”
“Okay by me,” he says. “I’ll hang back. I’ll stay in the car and read. It could be a while, Pop.”
“Could be,” I grant. But I know I’m close. I can feel it all over me. “Please. Don’t argue. I want you to take your stuff out of the car and walk across the street to that Eckerd’s Drug Store. I want you to call a taxi and take it to the airport and fly north. Newark, if you can. If not, La Guardia.”
“I know the names of the airports,” he says. He’s hurt, I can tell, and rightly so. It’s as if I told him he could stay up till midnight and now it’s lights out at eleven.
“I don’t know how this is going to work,” I admit. “Whether it lasts a day or a week. Whether I like it or hate it. But it’s him and me. It’s not a family party, ‘here’s my son, fine looking lad, thank you very much, a chip off the old block, looks like his mother, takes after his father, not his grandfather.’ That stuff is for later. If ever.”
“I get it. You’re dumping me.”
“I’m not going with you to your reunion,” I say.
“Maybe you should,” he counters. “I might need you.” Still, he gets out of the car. I open the trunk. He pulls out his suitcase and his tote bag. Then we’re just standing there, feeling foolish.
“Well,” he says. “Good luck with this. If you think of it, pick up a bag of grapefruit on your way north. Indian River’s the best.” And suddenly he’s hugging me. “Bring me some kumquats, too.” He backs out of my arms, but we’re still touching, his hands on my shoulder, my hands on his arms. We’re standing there, looking foolish, but I don’t care.
“I’m not done with you yet,” he says.
“Well, I’m not done with you either.”
“We sound like a couple of kids planning to have a fight.”
“I think that’s over,” I say. “The fighting.”
“Well, then …”
“I’ll see you up north,” I say. “My boy.”
Then I watch my son wait for an opening in traffic, scoot across the street, walk into Eckerd’s. The next five minutes, I divide my attention between the drugstore in front of me and the motel in back. Then there’s a taxi and I see George pile inside, looking over his shoulder to wave goodbye, like one of those times he went off to college. Hello and goodbye, that’s what life is. And love, I guess, if you’re lucky. I’m luckier than I knew. But, looking at the Flamingo Motel, I wonder how long my luck will last.
Twenty minutes later—8 a.m. sharp—a door opens on the second floor, a room at the end of the building. A man walks over to the railing, looks into the car lot, like a farmer checking crops. It’s Heinz. It’s Heinz plus forty years and forty pounds, but it’s him alright. I see him. He doesn’t see me or notice the car I’m sitting in. He goes down the steps. He walks well and he’s nicely dressed for Florida, black slacks and a white shirt that’s rolled up at the sleeves. He’s not doing any work today. He always dressed sharp. He passes along the front of the building, past flower boxes full of weeds, pulls some keys out of his pocket, unlocks the office. Before he opens the door, I make my move. I slam the car door shut. He turns around—what’s this?
I take my time. I sense my brother watching me and I guess he’s irritated. We Germans never like dealing with people before we’re ready and that means coffee, two cups. Then I step out and walk towards him, just waiting for the moment when he knows it’s me, after all. And then it happens. He stares hard— could it be? is it? for sure?—and then, as if one more second of delay is unbearable, after so many years, he’s running towards me, running awkward and flushed, Max Schmeling’s road work partner, a heavyweight and then some, and he’s making a sound that raises goose bumps, somewhere between singing and crying, and I’m suddenly wishing George could see this, how my brother hugs me. I’m losing it a little myself, so I hold him at arm’s length and give him a real good look and try to say just the right thing.
“Boy, did you get old,” I say. And my brother hugs me all over again. Then, he gets this puzzled look and looks around for my luggage, my car.
“I parked over there,” I say, pointing over at the rows of cars. What a place for a reunion. I can’t get over it. Two old men in a used car lot. In Florida. George, what would you make of this? Is God piling it on a little?
“It’s alright? My parking over there?” How quickly we move to the important things! “They won’t sell it while I’m visiting you?”
He waves off my worry and throws an arm around my shoulder. So far, he’s said nothing. He just looks at me and chokes up. He takes me into the office, sits me down, and starts fussing with a coffee maker, looking back at me every few seconds so I don’t disappear on him.
“I don’t know where to begin with you,” I say in German. And it’s the truth. Do I start with the hard questions, the nightmare makers? Or do we have a nice chat? So, Heinz, how do you like the Sunshine State, the second time around? Things like that?
At the coffee machine, he shakes his head. He doesn’t know where to start either, I suppose. He signals I should wait, while the coffee machine starts to drip. Looking around, I see what used to be the registration desk is now a salesman’s cubbyhole. Behind it, there’s a cork board with hooks dripping keys. The motel’s out of business, I decide, but just then a black woman opens the door and sticks her head inside.
“Hi, sweetie,” she calls out to Heinz. She’s pushing a shopping cart full of sheets and towels, plus those little bars of soap and bottles of shampoo, with conditioner, they put in bathrooms. Heinz points to me, as if this were the opening day and I were customer number one and they’d get me to sign the first dollar I give them and put it in a frame behind the counter.
“Well, how about that!” the woman says. “The long lost brother. Hans, right? I’m Millie.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say. This place feels strange. Suddenly, I’m back at Schmeling’s camp. Der brother von Heinz.
“I’ll fix up number seven nice,” Millie tells Heinz. Then she turns to me. “About time you came.” With that, she disappears and Heinz brings over coffee, black.
“So,” I say. “How was the voyage back to Germany?”
He laughs, shakes his head, points at his mouth. He shakes his head, no, no, no, and then I understand that funny noise he made as he came running towards me is the only noise that he makes any more, the last note on his scale. He shakes his head back and forth, no can do, no can do. His tongue has gone down for the count. He lifts a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen, like a student showing he’s ready for school. I waited too long, I see, or not long enough. This was going to take a while, here in Florida.
Wait, he signals. He pantomimes the lifting of luggage, points out to the car lot. I should bring my stuff in. He points upstairs. Room seven. I get my luggage and I see Heinz walking around the back of the motel, with our coffee on a tray. I find room seven on my own. Millie is inside.
“It’s clean alright,” she says. “But it needs some airing out. Later on, you can turn on the air con.”
“Not air-cooled?”
“That’s from years ago,” she says. “Heinz put in air-con.”
“Millie, I don’t understand. Who stays here?”
“Your brother,” she answers. “This is how he does it. He starts out in one room, spends a night or two, moves into the next one, works his way down the hall, room to room. He likes it that way.”
“And … it’s just him?”
“Well, I’m in room four.” Millie gives me a warning look. “That one he stays out of.”
“Does he … is it a business?”
“He rents out the front, like you see. Those cars aren’t much to look at. ‘Little shit boxes,’ he called them, before his stroke.”
“When was that?” I ask. My guess is that the stroke was something that happened in the war. As if that were the only harm in the world.
“A year ago,” Millie says. “He knocks on my door and shows me a piece of paper. Millie, I had a stroke. You believe it? He’s doing okay now.”
When I come down, Heinz is waiting at the bottom of the steps. He leads me around to the back of the motel. I expect weeds and a dumpster. You know how it is with motels, you walk around them in the morning, just stretching your legs. Out front they keep up appearances. Out back, nobody pretends. But I’m in for a surprise. There’s a swimming pool, left behind from another time, filled with clean water, and a table and chairs underneath a beach umbrella. Heinz looks pleased and proud. He takes me into the garden that fills up the rest of the property, right up to the fence that runs around back. He has eggplant and morning glory and snap beans growing on the fence, like he’s trying to see which can get to the top first. Between fence and pool, he’s done all sorts of things that Germans do when they have time on their hands, flagstone paths winding around a sort of rock garden, a bird bath grotto with ceramic dwarves fishing in puddles and Roman babies pissing onto pebbles. He watches me take it in. I nod appreciatively, act impressed, even though the whole project is a disaster. He’s got no idea what he’s doing, no clue about sunlight, shade, watering and spacing, so he just threw a bunch of stuff in the ground and waited by the swimming pool to see what happened. “Nice place you have here,” I say to him, still in German. Now he is ready to talk. He jots a quick note and hands it over. “English, please,” it said. And then, he starts writing. “Dear brother. Thank you with all my heart for coming. This is what I wanted, for many years already. I always thought about you and Maria, wherever I was. H.”
“Yes,” I say when I finish. “I understand. I thought about you also. When I thought you were dead, even then you stayed in mind. Heinz, listen. Back then you were wrong. But I was wrong also. Letting you go, like I did. Leaving you. Losing you …”
He shakes his head in disagreement, taking up his pen. And then something enormous overcomes me. I reach out and stop his hand from writing.
“She died,” I tell him. “Our Maria.” I watch him, to see how he reacts. When the news of a death reaches someone who hasn’t heard, the death itself happens all over again and you’re back on the day it happened. But while I watch him—wondering if he’d break down and what it would mean—he’s watching me right back. It’s strange. Did she send him a letter, while she was dying? Did she have his address all along?
“Cancer,” I inform him. It’s as if I’m dealing with it for the first time. “A little cough that wouldn’t go away. Annoying, that’s all. Stop it, I’d say and she hid it pretty well. But she didn’t get rid of it. So I pushed things. I wanted us to go back to Germany. She didn’t feel like it, but she pretended she did. Well, over we went and it was me going out, and her sitting in hotel rooms. When we eat she hardly touches her food. She moves it around, I say it looks like food-arranging is her brand new hobby. Wasn’t I a hoot? And I’m mad. I’m mad at her for getting sick and ruining our retirement, canceling out on all those trips we were going to take, all those tours and cruises. Out the window. All the time she was dying I was mad more than sad. Death wasn’t cheating us. It was cheating me. She was leaving ahead of time. Skipping out on me. Absent without leave …”
I stop to rest. I’ve been talking non-stop. Something is turned around, is backwards. He should be filling me in. Adventures, secrets, crimes and confessions, they should be coming from Heinz to me. Yet here I sit, like a priest on the wrong side of the confessional. Boy, that dead tongue is his secret weapon. Someone can’t speak, you think of them as helpless, like a baby or someone very old. But Heinz has the edge. And I see his eyes are still gambler’s eyes, taking chances I never took with my life, measuring odds, knowing me much better than I know him. I also notice a kind of valise at his feet, a scuffed-up leather thing, leaning against the edge of his chair. He rummages around and out comes a copy of George’s first book about interstate interruptions.
“Where’d you find that old thing?” I wonder aloud. “And how did you know that this guy was your nephew?”
He opens up to the front page and now I see. George dedicated the book to his parents, Hans and Maria Greifinger, from “the little boy in the back seat.” I’d forgotten that. At the time, I said he dedicated it to us because, what with the name difference, he could tell anyone who asked that he was adopted.
“What else you got in there?” I ask. It’s a regular show-and-tell period. Out comes another book, this one in German, Max Schmeling’s autobiography. I didn’t even know he wrote it. Heinz has it all over me in the homework department.
He passes me the Schmeling book, opened to a certain page. Maybe he got mentioned, I guess, or maybe I did: how Max played horseshoes on my property. But what Heinz wants me to look at is a photograph. I see Max in boxing trunks, clinging to ring ropes and the ropes are all that holds him up. The caption says it’s his last fight, 1948, scuffling for money among piles of rubble, the glory days gone forever, you might as well ask the Hindenburg to try another landing at Lakehurst.
When I hand the book back to Heinz, he points at himself and at the photo, back and forth, as if to say, Max and me, Max and me, the whole story of his life.
“You were with him at the end?” I ask. “You found him after the war?” Heinz nods. “How many fights?” He holds up five fingers. Then, three up, two down. Then he waves the memories away. Next he pulls out a clipping, a business story, and watches me read it: how Max contacted James Farley, Roosevelt’s postmaster general and a long-time political operator, and Farley helped Max get set up with a Coca-Cola franchise in Hamburg. And when I finish reading, Heinz makes the same sign, him and me.
“So you went in business together. Economic miracle. Germany comes off the canvas.”
Yes, Heinz nods. And then, maybe for the first time that day, I have a thought of my own. I’m not just responding to what he gives me, a piece of the time. “You know, I wrote Max after the war,” I say. “About you. I thought you were dead … and I blamed myself … and I thought, well, maybe you got lucky. And Max might know. Max wrote back, too. He said you went to Russia. Twice. That’s all he knew. So he said.”
Heinz smiles, almost like a kid who pulled off a fast one. He points at himself, pantomimes writing. Now we’re doing charades. He folds an imaginary letter, licks a stamp, waves goodbye to it. So the joke was on me. Then, seeing some anger flash across my face, he writes a real note. So you wouldn’t worry about me anymore.
“But now’s the time for us?”
He nods.
“Too late for Maria,” I say. He closes his eyes, bows his head. The meaning is clear: I’m sorry.
“So where were you, Heinz? Were you in Russia? Or was that something you made up?”
That’s where the curtain comes down. He gives me a look that makes me feel, though we’re sitting close, we’re miles away. It’s like the gap between a healthy hospital visitor and a terminal patient. So near and yet so far. Hey? What do you know about it? He puts paper and pencil back in the valise. Over and out. It’s his story. His life. I don’t own it. He’ll tell me what he wants me to know, not more. I don’t think he’ll lie to me, although that Schmeling letter was a lie. But then—why contact me at all, if not to tell me the truth? Maybe he just wanted to see me, that rush across the parking lot, that crying, gurgling sound that came right past his tongue. Maybe that was all he wanted.
“She put your picture on a shelf in the living room,” I say. “And it stayed there all through the war. You in uniform, with her, that last visit she made before the war. I wanted that photo down. She said no. I thought you’d like to know.”
He sits there, taking it in. I have spoken, if not in anger, then with some other kind of feeling, and I can tell it registers. He blushes some, though it’s hard to be sure, he flushes easily, big as he is and in this heat. He looks at his watch. He rubs his stomach. He’s inviting me out.
His car is a BMW that smells new. He turns on the air conditioner,
which I appreciate. He turns off the radio, but not before I notice it’s one of those easy listening music stations. “We’ve Only Just Begun,” by that woman who starved herself. Odd, listening to that on the way to lunch. Heinz is a good driver, left hand on the wheel, right relaxing at his side. What’s more, he’s got that air of ownership people have, driving in their own neighborhood, keeping track of things. I can’t get over seeing him, cruising down a Miracle Mile, mall to mall, and pausing at a stoplight across from a “Bagel Bonanza” store, next to a pick up truck full of sun-tanned kids with bleached-out hair and a portable radio blasting music. Florida makes that war I worried about seem far away and long ago. Maybe Florida is right. It was four or five years out of more than seventy, he’s lived. What’s my problem, anyway?
“How’s Max?” I ask. Heinz gives a thumb up. “Still alive,” I muse. “That’s something. All the others, down for the count. Louis, Baer, Sharkey, Carnera, the bunch, he outlasted them all. Joe Jacobs died, though. I guess you knew that.” Heinz nodded. “He was something. Did you like him?” Heinz nods. “Not every Jew would have handled a German back then,” I add. It’s a leading question. I’m watching for Heinz to make a face or maybe rub his fingers together as if to say, well he got his money. But all I get is another nod.
We’re moseying along the coast now, in no rush. It’s terrible what they get away with, building on beaches, big houses that look like space stations, other houses in developments—transplanted Levittowns—where one shot could kill a dozen mailboxes. But then it thins out and we’re closer to the Gulf of Mexico, more like a lake than an ocean, with inlets and bridges, keys and passes and folks fishing, senior citizens studying the newspaper weather map while waiting for a bite. After twenty miles, he cuts inland into orange groves, and I remember that happy time when I was a greenhorn, the time of oranges. Now he rolls down the windows, so we can catch the smell. He breathes deep and smiles at me. At that moment, he’s so loving, it’s more than I can bear, thinking in another couple of years, one or both of us would have been gone. We finally got back to Florida. New Jersey was my America. This was his. A paradise of oranges.