by Kluge, P. F.
“Those two girls are mine,” Buddy tells me. “The boy is Debbie’s.”
Heinz creeps up behind them and puts his arms around them. He gets a short flurry of hugs and “Hi, Opa,” but then the novelty wears off. On the whole, he’d done better with the dogs.
“Kids,” says Buddy, “this is your opa’s brother. He’s your Uncle Hans.”
Maybe it would go better if he waited for a commercial. When I step around to say hello I make the fatal error of standing in front of the television screen. One minute they’re looking at me, the next they’re looking around me. I’m in the way. We leave the kids and head through the kitchen, out to the patio, where Debbie is grilling hamburgers. Heinz joins her while Buddy goes for beer.
“I couldn’t find any Ballantines,” he says. “Pop said you used to work there. Here’s a Becks.”
“That’s good,” I say. “Nice place you have here.”
“I’m glad it’s here. I’m divorced. I live in an apartment. Tiny. The kids like to come here. Debbie’s husband is a recreation guy, works on a cruise ship, like the … you know … Love Boat. She did the same thing, till the kid came along. They live in Fort Lauderdale. They like coming over. Hey …” He looked at my beer, which I was holding. “I’ll bet you want a stein!”
“I’d like that, yes,” I say.
“It’s okay, Pop’s the same way.” In the kitchen he discovers a mug, which he brings out to me. For himself, he pours vodka over a glass full of ice cubes and adds a little tonic water. He smiles when we toast each other. What a funny habit it must seem. Beer in a glass. So Old World.
“So … you don’t live here?” I ask.
“Just visit … when I get custody.”
“So … the house belongs to …”
“Pop. Mom and Pop.”
“His house?”
“Sure. Him and Mom found this place themselves. Designed it too.”
His house. I can’t resist getting up and walking around, looking at the place more carefully, now that I know who owns it. Looking for him, in the house. And not finding him. When Heinz came back to America the second time around, he did it right, he did it all the way and, if this house is any measure, his first commandment was: never look back. This time around, I’m the disloyal one, he’s the hundred-percent Amerikaner.
“When he came over he was in beer and soft drinks,” Buddy says. “Before long he was into real estate. He’s got the gift of gab.”
“Always did,” I agree.
“A natural. He had a piece of this development. A big piece.”
“Then … what confuses me … is the motel? The Flamingo? Where does that fit in?”
“Hah! That’s a question.”
“He lives there. So I thought.”
“I guess,” Buddy says. “But it’s nothing. It’s a toy, a hobby is all. People buy old trailers, don’t they? Vintage cars? Railroad cars, even? Maybe motels are the next thing. It didn’t cost much. Back taxes. He bought it at auction. It’s just his hangout. His place to go to get away from … well … us.”
“It’s different when your mother’s home?”
“Not so different. He shows up, he eats. He feeds the dogs. Sometimes he sleeps here, sometimes he goes back to the motel. He’s like a kid with a tent in the woods. Only there’s no parents to make him come in.”
Dinner is strange. With Heinz, I’m accustomed to sitting in silence. Now, with Debbie and Buddy, there is something called conversation that has to be kept going, like a ball that can’t hit the ground but has to go on bouncing from mouth to mouth. While I get tired hitting the ball, Heinz sits contentedly, enjoying his food, nodding, smiling now and then. Buddy talks real estate. He’d gone into the business, though with less success than his old man. But it wasn’t his fault.
“Pop caught it just right,” he sighs. “Late fifties, early sixties, you’d be an idiot, if you didn’t get rich. It rolled in.”
Those were the days. I’ve heard it before, I’ve said it myself, but it sounds different, coming from a young fellow. Angrier. George sounds the same way, sometimes. You guys, you old -timers, you got in on the ground floor of everything. Cream off the top, high on the hog, fat of the land. Now you sit back and congratulate yourselves and watch us struggle for table scraps, watch us mess with the … the what? … the Japs, the Arabs, the blacks, the I.R.S. I wonder who his particular villain is.
“What happened?” I ask. And get five minutes on growth restrictions, building codes and the damned E.P.A. Buddy drinks vodka like water and it starts to show. It’s amazing how fast things can go downhill with family. Here’s a bunch of blood relations I’ve never met before. I can see my brother in them, when I look, and my parents too: the nose, of course, the eyes, and the set of the shoulders and a certain impatience, something that makes it hard to sit still for long. We’re reunited, just like those reunions you see on television during the day, all the hugs and screams. For about a minute. After that it’s some guy you barely know, some version of yourself, wondering what’s your position on capital punishment. It’s like you recorded an original song—words and music—and you hear a bunch of copycats singing it. But it’s not the real thing.
After awhile, Buddy warms up on blacks. Not all blacks are niggers, not by any means, he grants that much, some of them it doesn’t matter what color they were, black, white, or green. But some others—he could show me tonight—are. Whole neighborhoods, shot to hell. I look at Heinz.
“Remember Cleveland?” I ask. “And Billy?”
He nods. He probably still owes them money from a bet he lost.
“Ever wonder where they wound up?”
Another nod. Our eyes meet. For a second we link up. Then Debbie calls out from the kitchen, whether we want coffee now or later. At that, Heinz just lifts himself out of his chair and motions for me to follow him. Buddy pops up to trail along but Heinz indicates, no, it’s okay for him to stay, maybe help his sister in the kitchen.
“Now you’ll meet his real family,” Buddy says, a little resentfully. “They weren’t here, we’d be down to Christmas and Thanksgiving.”
Heinz leads me across the patio out onto the grass, still wet from the sprinklers, sweet smelling. From a far fenced-off corner comes the sound of joyful barking. Now I see a whole pack of dogs. I guess we’ll get swarmed, nuzzled and licked to death, Heinz especially. But when he opens the gate he claps his hands, twice hard, and maybe he isn’t any kind of gardener and maybe his kids are write-offs, but he sure has his dogs in shape. Except for one who was nursing puppies—he excuses her with a wave of the hand, when she starts to get up—his dogs sit quietly. He greets each one of them, the two German shepherds from out front and the others, a mixed bag, kneeling in front of them, touching them. When he’s done, he claps his hands again and the dogs break ranks, some of them playing, others rolling over on their backs, hoping for a tummy scratch, one or two drinking water, making that musical sound while their tags clink against the side of the bowl. Heinz meanwhile leads me over to the puppies, four of them, golden-retriever looking, but smaller and shorter haired. He makes an approving sound, like he’s humming. Then he gestures for me to take one.
“No way,” I say. “Drive back north with a puppy in the back? Cover the seat with newspapers?”
He’s not giving in. Take one, he commands.
“I’m a little old,” I tell him. “Puppies are for kids, they grow up together. After maybe fifteen years, the dog dies and the kid gets his learner’s permit.”
Heinz stares at me, just waiting, listening and not believing a word. And then the moment comes, just like we both knew it would, because we’re brothers.
“Maybe if you had something older,” I say.
Sure, Heinz signals. Right away, the German shepherds are in front of me, his special pets. Take one, take two, I don’t care, he signals. But I can’t take them.
“Could I see the others?”
There’s a Dalmatian. Sorry. Dalmatians remind me of Budw
eiser beer ads. There’s a collie. I didn’t know they still made collies, after Lassie went off the air. And there’s a brown something or other that comes over last, with a what-kept-you-so-long look on the face, a mutt, no doubt about it. And smart. Some dogs are all appetite and impulse. Others mull things over. This one’s a thinker. I check around back. A male. Sits confidently. Waits patiently. This case is closed. I can picture him next to me in the front seat when we head north to Jersey. And I remember a man who I met in New Jersey.
“Hello, there,” I say, “Mr. Jacobs.”
Wouldn’t you know it? Buddy has a boat that his father bought for him. The next day we go out on the water, there’s no getting out of it. At least we don’t pretend to fish, we just go streaking up and down the coast, poking into rivers and inlets, sneaking peaks at the houses that millionaires build along the water. Mr. Jacobs likes what he sees, he rides up front like a hood ornament on the top of a car. It’s hard to talk when a boat is speeding. The idea, I guess, is that we’re all supposed to be speechless with joy. Heinz and I sit on chairs bolted to the deck, while Buddy steers and, now and then, shouts out the price of waterfront footage. Heinz, meanwhile, smiles up at the sun as if he’s personally grateful for its appearance today. The Russian front could do that to you. If that’s where he was. But I may never know. It’s none of my business. Still, it gets to me. There’s men all over America who’ve come back from wars, making it very clear that they didn’t want to talk about it. And people respected that. But a German—from that war—you can’t cut the same slack. They have so much more not to talk about.
“Heinz,” I say, “I’ve got to go back to Jersey. Not this minute,” I assure him. “Not even tomorrow. But the next day. Soon, anyway.”
Out come the paper and pencil. He hasn’t used them much lately because I’ve stopped asking questions. We’ve settled into a pattern, no questions asked, puttering around together, taking Mr. Jacobs to the beach, contemplating senior citizen early-bird specials. We move from room to room in the motel, up and down the hall, a pattern that seems completely sensible and natural. One night, there’s just a wall, the next we’ve got a half dozen rooms in between.
What is wrong, he writes. Everything you need is here. “Well, that’s mostly right,” I say. “But you didn’t expect me to come and never leave, did you?” I look again. “Did you?” I can tell that’s exactly what he wanted. “Heinz,” I plea, “you’ve got your wife coming back from Germany soon. I guess you timed our reunion so that it would happen while she’s away but still …” I visit the house every day. Then he smiles and adds a line. I see her when I feed the dogs.
I’ll come back again, I promise, I’ll come back every winter, I’ll spend February and March every year. But he just doesn’t want to see me drive away. He was thinking of taking a trip down to Key West, he writes, and he already has Debbie working on a surprise for me, a cruise through the Caribbean. And there was the America he hadn’t seen, all those places out West. The Grand Canyon. Yellowstone. Alaska!
“I’ll come down in winters. I’ll meet your wife. I’ll come down again this winter … in January. That’s what? Eight weeks? I really look forward to meeting her.”
He shrugs. He doesn’t seem to care whether I meet my sister-in-law or not. I saw pictures of her at the house, an echt German blonde, the kind you picture on skis in the alps, bursting with health. Later, she put on weight—you could trace it in the pictures—but she’s got that patented German I-am-sturdy look. Some of these women talk a lot and I have a hunch this might be one of them. Heinz can’t talk. That makes it worse. Maybe he sits around, hoping his ears will go out next.
Buddy and Debbie and the three kids meet us for a farewell dinner at an Italian place called Pavarotti’s. The margaritas come in buckets, the onion soup is a crock the size of a flower pot, with a big gob of Parmesan on top, half melted, so it looks like they dropped a grilled cheese sandwich in it on the way out from the kitchen. The pasta comes in piles, not portions, you get the idea, but thanks to the margaritas, Buddy is lively and for once I don’t have to talk a lot. Debbie chats with me a little—I make sure I sat next to her—and she strikes me as a lively woman who’s just now discovering she made all the wrong choices. She talks about going to college up north and maybe law school. Every now and then I check out Heinz, who listens to Buddy conspire about some orange-grower who’s ready to subdivide. Well, Heinz, I say to myself, looks like you finally made it in America.
It’s already late when we get back to the Flamingo. There’s a funny peacefulness about a car lot after closing time. The cars sit out like senior citizens on the porch of a retirement home. You can almost hear them talking. You still here? asks one and yeah, made it through another day, says another and, I got worried for a while, comments the third, they popped my hood and poked around. That’s nothing, says a fourth, they’re turning back my odometer. Oh man, bad news, adds a fifth, I got taken for a ride around the block and the son of a bitch kicked my tires when we got back. Then, they all say goodnight. But not Heinz. He taps me on my shoulder, signals, let’s take a swim, which we do often, a couple times a day.
“But my swimming suit is packed,” I say, pointing to where my car is pulled around to the front, full of gas and oil, pointed north. So what, he shrugs. He’s right. So what. I shouldn’t be in so much of a rush. I go up to my room for Mr. Jacobs, who stands at the door—he heard me coming—and I can see the place on my bed where he was sleeping and it looks like his head was on my pillow. We’ll talk about this later, I tell him. I go to the pool. Heinz isn’t there yet. I take off everything, pile it near the edge, and step into the water. The pool is just thirty feet long so you can do a lot of laps quickly and think you’ve accomplished something. I start swimming back and forth, Mr. Jacobs running alongside back and forth, until he decides it isn’t worth it and flops down on the pile of clothing. I keep going. Full moon. There is glitter on the waves I make and the leaves on the trees are all shining. Now, I see that Heinz has come. He’s unwinding the hose—carefully—and watering, just the way I showed him, mainly concentrating on the roots, but he can’t resist splashing the leaves, and I can’t blame him: they’re dripping silver now.
Heinz slips into the pool and stands by the edge, just watching me go back and forth. While I swim, I think about how to say goodbye. Germans go out of their way to avoid emotional scenes: those are for Italians. We shake hands, we nod, we’re gone. I want something special that’s not corny. I paddle towards him, altering course, catch the ladder and wrap my arms around it. He’s in chest-deep water, arms up on the edge, facing me. I stare up at the moon, which pleases me. I’ve always wished that full moons came more often. I point up, so that Heinz can appreciate it too.
Then comes a moment that will give me goose bumps the rest of my life. I hear something frightening. I turn towards what I hear, which is a voice out of the past, the kind of English—correct, school-learned German English—that I remembered hearing from Hauptmann and Schmeling and Heinz Greifinger.
“Well, brüderchen,” he said. “So how do you like your trip to Florida?”
PART SIX
I.
SATURDAY NIGHT—DATE NIGHT, WE USED TO CALL it—was turning into Sunday morning. The bars on Columbus Avenue were crowded, limousines were parked outside Mexican restaurants, a queue of yuppies waited for admission to Steve’s Ice Cream. And the Sunday New York Times, fat and smug, crowded walkers off the sidewalks. An appeal to conscience, to all the things you’re supposed to care about, movies, surrogate mothers, peace in the Middle East, homeless people, the environment, all of it waiting to ambush you at brunch. I bought a copy and thinned it savagely, a section at a time, one for every garbage pail as I walked home. It had felt good, being out of reach of the Times.
I missed my old man. The motels, the rest-stops, the random roadside food. Also, his moods, reflections, opinions. The memories that he carried around like luggage. Now my apartment, my exotic, costly, cluttered apartme
nt looked to me the way it must have looked to Joan Simmons. A roost, not a nest. And, for the first time, I felt lonely in it.
When the bell rang, I grabbed my wallet: I’d ordered Chinese takeout and the carryout guy was there alright. And Gooker was right behind him.
“Hey, it’s the Flying Dutchman! How you doin’, George?”
“You just happened to be in the neighborhood?”
“Something like that. Pot luck. Okay if I come in?”
Five minutes later, we were drinking beer and I was waiting for him to tell me why he’d come. There was plenty Chinese carry-out for the two of us.
“So you followed the leaves south? With your old man? How’d it go? The color nice? Come down on schedule?”
“It was better than I thought it would be,” I said. “Relaxed and easy. I was worried he’d get cranky. And we argued some. I got cranky, too. But he was good company all the way. I’m glad we did it. Years from now, I’ll be more glad.”
“And now … the $64 question. You coming to the reunion?”
“I guess so.”
“Alright! You’re coming! Alright! Sucker for punishment!” He went into the kitchen and brought us back some beers, heaved himself back into the hammock. “I’m glad you’re coming. Misery loves company, I guess. I’m getting fat. I get up to piss in the middle of the night, most nights. I use Grecian Formula in my hair. Shit … Well, we’re in this together, I guess.”