Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  There were two people watching my approach. It could have been Pop and Mom, together. And a dog. It could have been them and something in me choked. Who hasn’t wondered what it would be, the ultimate reunion, if you could see your parents standing together, one more time, and go rushing towards them?

  The old man came out onto the doorstep, walked across the lawn in bathrobe and pajamas. He glanced at the mess of grass and shook his head, not unkindly.

  “Backyard Adventure, George?” he asked.

  “Hello, George,” Pauline Kennedy said.

  “Mrs. Kennedy!” I said. “Hi …” I turned to the old man. No, he wasn’t mad about the lawn. He was worried about other things. He was worried about this. I turned towards him and saw tears in his eyes. “It’s okay,” I said. “Never apologize, never explain.”

  “That’s what Henry Ford Junior said when they caught him drunk driving with a bimbo.”

  “It’s okay,” I repeated. “I love you.” He took my hand, half a handshake, half a squeeze. These things come hard for us.

  “Me too,” he said. And we walked into the house.

  In a neighborhood where houses are huge and lots were small, our house was tiny, our yard was large. If you liked vacuuming carpets, you lived one way, if you liked cutting grass, you did something else, the old man always said. Our house was small, with my bedroom upstairs, and Mom and Pop’s downstairs. So Pauline Kennedy wasn’t upstairs. They were together. They were a couple. We stood around a while. Then we went into the living room where Pop sat in the chair that I always checked for lost coins and Pauline Kennedy sat beside me on the sofa. It was my house but I felt like company. Three’s a crowd, and I was third.

  “So,” I began. “How’d it go in Florida?” The question seemed odd and that was because I knew he’d already answered it. Pauline Kennedy had gotten the story first.

  “Well, I found him,” he said. “Twenty minutes after you left.” And … I heard his voice trail off. He needed prompting. “A dozen times, I thought of you,” he said. “I needed you. Your way of asking questions. I needed you to check things out. Tell me how I was doing. I needed you, George.” Now he found my eyes, then looked away. “Missed you too. We talked, but not until the last night. Till then he said he had a stroke. I mean … he acted that way.”

  “Hold it. You’re telling me your brother faked a stroke?” I couldn’t help laughing. It was funny, it was sit-com premise. Wait forty years for a reunion and fake a stroke! “So … what happened then?”

  “He didn’t want to have to deal with all that stuff in the past. So … yes … he went mute. I asked a few questions that he answered with paper and pencil. Then I sort of threw in the towel. But, the night I left, he opened up.”

  “And?”

  “I got a piece of story, anyway.”

  “What kind of story, Pop?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ve got to go back.”

  “You don’t sound so happy about it.”

  “He’s my brother. I can put up with him. I put up with you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “And I’m glad I did.” With that, he got out of the chair, gestured towards the bedroom. “I’ll see you in the morning. I’m tired.”

  “Okay, Pop. But what’s that thing in the driveway?”

  “Ask Pauline,” he said. “We’ve got a long day tomorrow. I’ll need you to help me roll the lawn.”

  “Yes, Pop.”

  “Well, then …” He got up and headed towards the bedroom. The dog—I’d barely looked at it—followed along. Pauline Kennedy and I were left together. She watched him leave, shaking her head.

  “I wonder how your mother put up with him sometimes,” she said.

  “Actually, he’s mellowed,” I said. “Years ago, he wouldn’t be able to go to bed with the lawn looking that way. He’d be out there now. The times I saw him out in the middle of the night, raking leaves. Four a.m., I mean. ‘Leaves aren’t garbage,’ he’d say. He’d sweep them onto a blanket and pull them towards the compost pile. Later … Sunday afternoon … he’d have that blanket over his legs, when he sat out in the sun. He was something. You won’t have as hard a time … as Mom did.”

  “I thank her for that,” she said. “If he hadn’t had her … missed her … he wouldn’t want me.”

  “What did he find in Florida? I know he told you.”

  “At length,” she acknowledged. “He needed to get it out and I was there. I hope you don’t feel that was out of order … or out of place.”

  “No. But he was having nightmares on the road about meeting his brother. So I’m wondering …”

  “He sees himself in his brother. What happened to one brother could happen to the other. The life he didn’t lead … all that. Maybe it’s why we have brothers.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “He heard a story it was hard for his brother to tell. Hard for him to hear. And that was just an overture. George, I don’t know what kind of testimony he got … or is going to get …” She broke off, thinking. I looked around the living room. It was still Mom’s room. The plants were gone, those African violets, but you could tell where they’d sat, because the wood was darker there. I wondered how long a person stayed around a house after they died. Not forever, certainly. But for a while.

  “And now … you’re part of it,” I said. “Of us.”

  “Yes. Do you mind?”

  I was surprised she asked. Teachers weren’t supposed to worry about what their students thought.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have pictured you two as a couple. I’ll go to bed tonight wondering how it happened, how it works …”

  “That,” she said, “is none of your concern.”

  “But I’m glad you found him. That you’re in his life. And mine. God, he’s a handful. One of a kind … But I like your showing up … that pleases me. And not just for his sake.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be hearing much about moving back to Germany.”

  “One question, Mrs. Kennedy.” I hope she wouldn’t ask me to please call her Pauline. And she didn’t. It would be Pop and Mrs. Kennedy, to me. It wouldn’t surprise me if he called her Mrs. Kennedy too. “What’s that thing in the driveway.”

  “It’s rented.”

  “That’s how you get to Florida?”

  “Not right away.” She walked to a shopping bag that was just outside the bedroom door, pulled out a map and spread it out, like a chef presenting a special dish. Her dish was the United States—her gift to my father—the states all speckled with stars, dozens of them, red and blue, each one numbered.

  “What’s this?”

  “Figure it out,” she said. She was smiling, pleased as punch. The initial tension was gone. Most of the stars were in the east, most of them in Virginia, some in New England, some in the Mid west. Ohio did pretty well. After that it was slim pickings, until California.

  “It’s the presidents, isn’t it? Where they were born …”

  She nodded. “And …”

  “Died …

  “Well … are buried.”

  “And this is a trip you’re taking. Cradles and graves. But not in order.”

  “Does it sound … daft?”

  “It sounds terrific,” I said. And then it was like school days, caring teacher and game student, taking an idea for a ride. We went at it for an hour, talking about the mythic, monumental presidents—the Mt. Rushmore quartet and a few others—and the notoriously bad ones, the mean and the obscure, the part-termers, the not-reelected, the ones who were right on the edge of oblivion: no visitors at the museum, grass growing over their graves.

  “I’d go with you in a wink,” I said.

  “I’d like that. But your father’s going with me, you see.”

  “So …” That wonderful German word, which could be the beginning and end of everything, the start of a question, the tail of an answer. There it was. The old man had gained a dog and girlfriend. I got a house. I was happy for him. Not so sure about m
yself, but happy for him. “How long will it take?”

  “Oh … months at least.”

  “After that?”

  “Well, this is between us. I haven’t told him yet. And I won’t be telling him for a while. Alright?”

  “Yes,” I replied. We were co-conspirators. The old man was our mutual responsibility. She lifted the map of the U.S. How many people visited Grant’s Tomb? How many dropped in on Millard Fillmore? Beneath the first map was a second, and a whole new set of stars. I looked at it and at her and couldn’t help laughing.

  “The vice-presidents.”

  IV.

  LE BISTRO WAS A QUAINT PLACE, BY NORTH Jersey standards, columned portico entrance, a neon sign that welcomed the Class of ‘64, and a parking lot that was about the size of a football field, and I was hiding in a corner of it, sitting with Pauline Kennedy, watching arrivals. We didn’t want to be the first. And, besides, I was nervous. I could feel it in the palms of my hands. I watched cars pulling in and couples stepping out, classmates and spouses, but it was too far away to be sure which was which. I wondered if this was what the old man had felt down in Florida, sitting in another parking lot, waiting for his brother to show. Wondering, how far have we come? How far apart are we now? How close together? What remains of what once was? Sticking your hand in life’s grab bag, that’s what it was.

  “I’m a grown up man,” I said. “I make good money. I travel wherever I want. I don’t have anything to apologize for to these people.”

  Pauline Kennedy glanced at me and smiled. “Of course you don’t,” she said. My teacher was wearing a black dress with silver threads in it, severe and classy. She looked readier than I was. When I’d visited her in Lakehurst, I had wondered whether being around students, year after year, made you old ahead of time or … the opposite … somehow kept you young. I had my answer now. She had come to see if her students were aging as well as she had … and knowing that they hadn’t.

  “It’s revenge, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Now I get it. Revenge. Year after year they sit in front of you, those ripe little cheerleaders, those athlete studs, those wise alecks like me … and they think they’ve got it all coming to them. Time and tide. Their lives in front of them. And they think of you as a schoolmarm. So you wait a couple of decades and then bingo.”

  “Bingo?”

  “You’ve lapped them. You’re coming up behind them. Yes. Bingo.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it revenge.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “We don’t live alone, George, even if it feels as though we do. There are others all around us, going through the same things. We tend to forget that. And then, true enough, people move, scatter, lose touch. You should know that. You of all people.”

  “Do you ever wonder … you must … if we’d all stayed in the neighborhood?”

  “That can’t be,” she said. “But I’ve thought about it, yes.”

  “Would it be a better place? Would we be better people?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so. People move. That’s how the country began. And grew. Freedom of movement. It could be in the Bill of Rights, at the top of the list. I’m sure it means more to people than all of the rest of it.” She paused and lit a cigarette. The secret vice of teachers. “What’s missing is something else,” she resumed. “Roots. Commitment. Community. Love of place. You need them both, the moving and the staying. It’s like breathing, inhale, exhale. It’s the beat of a heart, systole and diastole, in and out. Leaving and returning. It’s out of balance now. That’s why tonight’s important. It’s a reminder of what we need. Tonight … tonight it’s as if every one of us had kept on living here. For one night, a community that doesn’t really exist reconstitutes itself. Can we go in now?”

  “Mrs. Kennedy? I’m just asking. Did you ever go to any of your own reunions? High school? College?”

  “Good Lord, no!” she answered. With that, we stepped outside the car and walked across the lot together, her hand around my arm. Her walk was brisk, mine nervous. Coming to the reunion with a teacher! That takes the cake, I could hear Gooker saying. What a brown noser! And he didn’t know the half of it, that the same woman escorting me to my reunion would be accompanying my father to his. He didn’t know how lucky we were.

  You never meet the people you want to meet, at least not in the order you want to meet them. Otherwise, Joan Simmons would have been standing there in the lobby, right where members of the reunion committee were making out name tags, and Kenny Hauser would have been with her, along with maybe a dozen others—out of four hundred—that I’d wondered about now and then. But reunions were random occasions … pot luck Pauline Kennedy called them … and the first person who shook my hand was Doug Russo. I hadn’t wondered about Doug at all but as soon as we touched hands I remembered him pinning me in twenty seconds in wrestling, I remembered the smell of his sweat and the feeling of a sweaty plastic mat under my shoulders.

  “Where’d you come from?” asked Doug.

  “I’m at my father’s place,” I said. “Same as always …”

  “Too bad. We were talking about you the other day. A cinch for the traveled-farthest-to the-reunion award …”

  “Oh.”

  “But five miles won’t do it.”

  “I can hack it,” I said. We’d gone through twelve grades together, plus Boy Scouts and summer camp. Now he told me he ran a U-store in North Plainfield.

  “U-store?” I asked. “You store?” I forced myself to focus on him, because I hated it, when the people I was talking with searched the room behind you for better company.

  “Storage buildings,” Doug explained. “People rent out their houses. Or maybe they sell one place and they buy another but it’s a while before they can move in. So they come to me, with everything that used to go in attics and barns and garages. I’ve got a hundred units.” He pulled out a card, wondered if I might want to “do a write up.”

  “People keep buying more stuff than they know what to do with,” he reflected. Already, he was feeding me quotes. “Trampo lines, mountain bikes. Things their kids have to have. Then they lose interest.”

  “Maybe you should store the kids,” I said.

  “That’s what school was for,” he snapped.

  “Is it Greifinger tonight?” someone asked. There was a woman labeled Sandy Parks Cowan. Sandy Parks anywhere, we used to say.

  “Hi, Sandy. Better make it Greifinger.”

  “Okay.” She wrote the name under my picture, as it had appeared in our high school yearbook. She slipped it into a plastic sheath that had a pin on back, tossed it into a box, and gestured for me to reach in a brown paper bag she held out.

  “What’s this?”

  “Just take one,” she ordered. I was holding a picture of Sue Hoover.

  “Oh boy,” I said. There she was: blonde hair, teasing smile, slightly slanted Slavic eyes, all presiding over a sweater and a crucifix.

  “Oooh, you got Sue,” Sandy said.

  “Yeah,” Doug interjected. “Lucky you.”

  “You’re supposed to look for her,” Sandy explained. “And meanwhile, whoever picks your picture is looking for you.”

  “Everybody mixes and mingles,” Doug said.

  I moved from one person to another, handshakes, hugs, stares, exclamations. Pauline Kennedy had gone her own way, joining some other teachers Gooker had found. I was on my own. I hadn’t been sure what it would be like, “going stag.” It didn’t matter, though. The people we’d married were along for the ride—polite representatives of a country we hadn’t traveled to yet, when we were in high school together. We were all stag. And lots of us. I’d forgotten how many of us there were together, back then. Four hundred in our graduating class: a gigantic enterprise, bigger than anything else I’d belonged to. Memory had shrunk those long, waxy, disinfected halls, the cave-like steamy cafeteria, the high school auditorium that could match a Broadway theater. It had
been a regional school, drawing on grungy enclaves that staffed oil refineries and old colonial enclaves where genius scientists went to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories. There were Portnoy-ish subdivisions within commuting range of Wall Street and the garment district. There were nests of Old World Italians and Germans and moderately left-wing Jews besides. And everybody sent their kids to school. Amazing, when you thought about it.

  Things sorted themselves out quickly, college prep from vocational ed. It was a cliquey place. Still, you walked the halls, ate in cafeteria, shared home room and at least a few classes— phys ed was a democratizing experience—with people you’d never meet again. So there we were: snobs and sluts, A-students and ass-men, science fair winners, Boys Staters, home-ec majors, detention hall recidivists, beatniks, rope-climbers, cheerleaders, auto mechanics: we were virgin, pregnant, promising. How could I ever have even contemplated not coming back? How could anybody not wonder how it all turned out?

  “Guess who?” someone said, slipping hands over my eyes.

  “Give me a hint,” I said. “I wasn’t into hands.”

  “We were in Foundations of American Culture together.”

  “That brings it down to thirty people.”

  “You lusted for me.”

  “Hi, Sue,” I said, slipping my hands around her wrists, moving them away from my eyes, turning to face our Kim Novak.

  “I heard you were looking for me,” she said.

  “I got your name,” I said, flashing the yearbook picture I’d gotten at the door. No connection at all, no help at all. I could have looked all night and never matched the yearbook starlet with the heart breaking heavyweight before me.

  “I set that up,” she confessed. “I heard you were coming. I said to myself, no way does he get away without talking to me.”

  “That’s good,” I said, staring at her the way everybody stared at everybody else tonight. She hadn’t needed to slip her hands over her eyes. I’d never have recognized her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I know I’m big.”

  “We all change,” I said.

  “Sure, George. Gray hair. No hair. Some wrinkles. A little pot. Everybody changes. Not everybody doubles.”