Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  I heard him opening the refrigerator door, taking out some beers. I heard him try the radio that sat on top of what he called “the ice box.” And I wondered what to tell him. Sooner or later, every child plays the game, guessing which of his parents will be the first to die. I had picked him. He was a rough and hectic worker who threw himself into every task, the Saturday garden, the Sunday walk. I knew how he worked, sweating and storming. I knew how he ate, wiping gravy off a plate while other people were still cutting meat. Whatever life had in store for him, he was bound to finish it first. My mother seemed longer-lived, a quiet and contemplative sort, dreams and pains deep inside her. An apple, a piece of Nestle’s chocolate, and an article in the Reader’s Digest—that was her nightly ritual. But cancer, that wild card of a disease, upset my forecast and stranded the old man. I almost wished he’d marry again. But I knew what his response would be; he’d used the line for years, patting my mother’s hand after she burned a cake or misplayed a hand of pinochle: “That’s alright, Mom. Germans are like pumas. We mate for life.”

  “Mom died,” I said, “and you’re left. But you’re not the first. You have two people, they’re both going to die, but chances are they won’t die together. One of them is going to live on and …”

  “And what …?”

  “Maybe make new friends. Get to know the new neighbors, I don’t know. Stop sitting around the house feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “I’m not just feeling sorry for myself,” the old man corrected me. “You got it backwards. I feel sorry for them too.”

  “Them?”

  “What you call the new neighbors. Because the town I lived was a better place than what they’ve got now.”

  “Come on, Pop. You’re not going to be another senior citizen cranking up a speech about the good old days.”

  “Good old days, bad old days,” he shrugged. Then he got out of his chair and walked over to the kitchen window. “Will you look at it?” He pulled back the curtain and stood there, beer stein in hand, as though he were an artist offering a full-view of the just-completed canvas. He gestured for me to behold the world outside, out beyond his apple tree and lawn chairs, out beyond the picnic table where the old Germans came together for his famous beer parties, out beyond his chicken coop, empty now, and his vegetable garden where, beside bell peppers and tomatoes, he grew kale and Swiss chard and radishes that were the size of apples, out beyond the hemlocks that marked the edge of our property. Three generations of family dogs were buried there and that was where he’d scattered my mother’s ashes too, a handful at a time, like 5-10-5 fertilizer.

  I kept looking at that old picnic table. If any place attracted ghosts, this was it. They came to me now, all the old timers sitting there. The driveway full of cars from three states. New Jersey was a country drive back then. “The sticks,” they called it. They showed up late in the morning and I was always out front, watching for company coming, at least until the years I didn’t care; then I’d be upstairs reading and didn’t appear until they asked for me. When I pictured them now, aunts and uncles and a scattering of cousins, I saw them at the table, smiling in the direction of the camera, and what registered the most was their certainty, self confidence, their pleasure in the way things had turned out for them, from Germany and World War I to America in the 1950’s, the finest, fattest place of all. And now another couple of decades had passed and the table was out there in the rain.

  “Pop.” I put my arm around him and at least he didn’t move away. Still, it felt odd. I held onto him, knowing he couldn’t wait to be let go of. We were both glad nobody was watching.

  “Pop, if I had an answer …”

  “I know you don’t.” Like that, he turned on me. That stab at human intimacy, father and son style, had set off an alarm in him. Now we re-entered the zone of argument. Familiar territory for us. “You know what’s wrong with you, son?”

  “I was just wondering. Let’s hear it.”

  “Skip it.”

  “No, Pop, let’s hear it. Let’s get it off your chest. You’ll feel better then.” What an enormous subtraction Mom had made. Let him have his say, I thought. And swallow your tongue, for Mom’s sake.

  “You don’t want to hear this,” the old man said.

  “I’ve heard it before, that’s all.”

  “It didn’t do any good then, I guess,” the old man said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. The stuff you write, George. Honest to God! I mean this thing out of Florida …”

  He shuffled through the mess on the table he kept next to his easy chair, junk mail, a Horatio Hornblower novel, U.S. News and World Reports.

  “Here we go,” he said. He showed me the column before he read it. It was old, he’d been saving it for years. For what? I was in for it but this wasn’t the main agenda. Those were warm-up tosses. He read it aloud. My words coming back at me:

  FARAWAY PLACES

  By George Griffin

  Blown out truck tires, black-top highways, palmettos and peanut brittle. Were those your best memories of Central Florida? Well look again, traveler. The mouse that roared—We’re talking Mickey—has wrought some hefty magic down South …

  “Alright! Enough! Halt!” I waved the napkin that had come with the Ritz crackers as a white flag. I couldn’t help laughing but the old man shook his head as if to say, this ain’t funny.

  “George, I used to cut out your clips to save them, so you could have them all in a scrapbook someday. Now I take my scissors down to the library and cut your articles out to save myself embarrassment. Everybody’s complaining about stuff missing out of the Sunday travel section …”

  “Then there’s at least one thing you must feel good about,” I said.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “The name thing.”

  “Oh my God!” I stopped him cold. Nom de plume sounds high flown, so I don’t know what you’d call “George Griffin.” An alias, maybe. The fact is that my father’s name is Hans Greifinger and my name was, and for some purposes still is, George Hans Greifinger.

  “You got your nerve, George,” the old man said, swallowing a mouthful of Becks as though to get rid of a bad taste in his mouth. “What a battle that was. A humdinger.”

  A humdinger indeed. I had a whole list of agents, publishers, magazine editors who’d say I was right. A German-American from New Jersey named Greifinger stood as much chance of being accepted as a travel writer as an Indian named Two Mules stood of prospering as a wine critic. Writing was hard enough, at least at the start. Why go around sounding like you’d come to a Club Med opening in a loden jacket and lederhosen? Greifinger had to go or I’d never get past the Trapp Family Resort in New England.

  “I see better writing in my Burpee seed catalog,” the old man groused. I’d heard that before, too. We repeated ourselves a lot. No new material in our act.

  “I’m still young, Pop”

  “That so?” he retorted. He stopped for a moment and looked at me, appraisingly, as though it was time to march me out to the garage where, right next to the wall covered with New Jersey license plates, a new one for every year from 1931 to the early sixties, when the state stopped issuing plates and started with tags, there was a two by four which he’d stood me up against while I was growing up, marking and dating my height. The way he was looking at me, though, he might take me out to the garage this minute and find I’d lost an inch or two off what I’d been.

  So I decided to try and get an inch back. I sat him down in a chair, saying I needed his advice, needed it badly and I told him, when he spoke—please, after letting me finish without interruption—he should remember that he wasn’t just speaking for himself. He was speaking for Mom too. That got his attention. It took twenty minutes to get it all out. The way I had come to feel about my work. I described my struggles with “serious” projects, novels that never got past outlines, serious non-fiction that expired in a single sample chapter. To recall was to ache. My proposed comparison of Florida and Califo
rnia, reality and myth in America’s two dreamlands. “The Duel of Oranges,” my agent called it. The Edward Wilcox project: profile of an aged planter, hanging on at a rubber plantation in Malaysia, which he still called Malaya. This proposal had it all, racism, poetry, brutality, nostalgia, the petty rituals of a dying world, servants, clubs, teas, tennis, sex and torpor and endless, bitchy gossip. “Staying On, II” was my agent’s shorthand: it sounded like a sequel to Paul Scott’s fine novel of India. I took the project back when he mentioned, offhand, that we might shop it around to university presses.

  The old man listened carefully to a story that kept getting worse. When a frown crossed his face, I hoped he was sharing my disappointment, my frustration at being locked into a hack reputation. “Phil Rizzuto,” he sighed, not without sympathy.

  “Yeah, Pop. If he makes it, maybe I will.”

  Now, there was nothing left except to find out what he wanted—whatever had prompted that letter to Bangkok, the late call from Jersey. Then I’d leave. There was nothing here for me, nothing and no one. No one home.

  “I got a favor to ask,” he said. “Not for me.”

  “Yes?” I hated how he added, not for me, as if that would make me more likely to oblige.

  “Pauline Kennedy’s been asking for you.”

  V.

  —baseball doubleheaders

  —barbers who could shave

  —free suet for birds, free bones for dogs

  —free slices of wurst for kids, from the butcher

  —road maps at gas stations

  THOSE ARE THINGS I MISS. I’VE BEEN MAKING LISTS, THESE last years. Every night after Vanna White waves “bye-bye” I sit down and make new lists or add to old ones. Food I used to like but can’t find anymore. People who I’m sorry they died young. My favorite American roads. There’s nothing you can’t make a list out of. Here’s one: When I Knew This Country Was Past Ripe:

  —when banks started giving away gifts like televisions and rotisseries to attract savings accounts

  —when people started drinking water that got shipped all the way from France

  —soap on a rope

  —tanning salons

  —light beer

  George would think I’m being silly. He takes a dim view of anybody writing something he doesn’t get paid for. When he was out in college and no mail came and his mother’s heart was breaking, I made a deal that I’d pay him ten dollars per letter and boy, you should have seen him stuff the mailbox. Even his mother smelled a rat.

  “Dear folks, a lot has happened since yesterday, and more than I can put in just one letter …” A money-writer from the start.

  VI.

  THE OLD MAN SAID HE’D MET PAULINE Kennedy—where else?—in the Berkeley Heights Public Library. They were both people who loved a place you could get books for free. I supposed their meeting was a coincidence. But the idea of their talking, even if by chance, made my ears burn. “You went from Lowell Thomas to Robin Leach,” my father said. I hoped he hadn’t shared that opinion with Pauline Kennedy. She’d been my high school English teacher. Now she wanted me to visit.

  I crossed over Route 22, which looked like an airport landing strip, convoys streaming east and west, and I drove into North Plainfield on Watchung Avenue, past stately Victorians with porches and attics and room to spare, hard-to-heat and slow to sell. Whenever you saw one that still impressed, it turned out to be lawyers offices or a funeral parlor. Downtown Plainfield was boarded store fronts, closed-down movie theaters. These days, Thursday night shopping and Saturday night dates were transacted elsewhere, someplace on the highway. It wasn’t communism that gutted America’s towns and despoiled its countryside: it was shopping malls.

  Out through South Plainfield, left turn through Iselin and I climbed onto New Jersey’s primal artery, the Garden State Parkway, a nostalgic, sensual conduit that transported generations of Jersey youths to tacky, heartbreaking beach towns where they lost their virginity in sandy, funky boardwalk places and then, three or four decades later, took them to the tidy, manageable retirement communities where they gave up their lives. At Exit 88, I turned off the mainstream coursing towards Atlantic City and came down a quiet eddy that led into what was left of the pine barrens.

  Cedar Glen West was where I was headed. Following directions, I got as far as the community itself. Then I was lost. The streets were named after birds. Oriole, Heron, Robin, Dove and the whole settlement had the air of an elderly, orderly aviary. The posted speed limit was 15 miles but just to make sure no motorcycle gangs missed the point, municipal signs were supplemented by private warnings: SLOW, THIS MEANS YOU. I could sense people watching me as I drove in, vigilante oldsters, quick on the draw with flashlights and garden hoses.

  Pauline Kennedy had been sitting out in her patio keeping an eye out for company. Little kids and old people are like that. In the prime of life, you’re fashionably late, but not at the edges. She popped out of her chair and walked towards me as I got out of the car.

  “Thanks for coming, George,” she said. I had given her my hand because it didn’t feel right hugging a teacher, but she pulled me towards her into a hug. “I know you’ve interrupted your schedule.”

  “It’s high time I came, Mrs. Kennedy.” I had expected someone ancient. I foresaw a visit that was one step up from a call at a nursing home. A pat on the hand, some shared memories and parting endearments: how much she meant to me, how much I meant to her. But Pauline Kennedy surprised me: dressed for tennis, brisk and vigorous, she looked about the same as I remembered her. And the arithmetic was humbling: the woman I remembered might not have been any older than I was now.

  “Listen, George,” she said. “I’m going to say this whether you like it or not. You have no idea how happy your visit makes me.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s good …” I meant it, too. Weeks could pass, I realized, before I saw anyone brighten at the sight of me, anyone who wasn’t interested in money or publicity.

  She took me by my elbow and walked me across the patio, into her quarters, which were exactly that: one fourth of a building that had three more apartments in its other corners. Sitting room, living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath: nice and tidy. I did what I always did, when I found myself in offices with lots of identical desks, a bank or an airlines office. I looked for personal traces, a raunchy calendar, a kid’s finger painting, anything that was different. I noticed a wooden typing table with an ancient portable Underwood and a whole wall of the living room that was covered with maps, maps of the world, continents, and state maps: New Jersey was covered with notes and circles and underlines. Two or three decades of high school yearbooks were piled in a corner, along with books and what might have been some papers she’d never gotten around to grading.

  “Do you see anything interesting?” she asked. She was in the kitchen pouring coffee into mugs.

  “I hate to snoop.”

  “I can’t believe that, George. Snooping is a sign of an inquiring mind. I go into people’s medicine cabinets, wherever I visit.”

  “No television. That impresses me.”

  “Don’t be so impressed,” she said, laughing. “It’s in my bedroom.” She came out with cake and coffee. “Save your compliments. I didn’t bake this.”

  Juicy plums set like cobblestones in a crust that was just a minute away from turning to charcoal: it was right out of childhood. Sometimes I worry about keeping recipes alive. Not those breathless fashions, ginger and mango topping mahi-mahi, tofu and pears accompanying free-range chicken. I’m talking about potato pancakes fried in a pan that made potato pancakes for twenty-five years, about combinations of strawberry and rhubarb that no one but me seems to have heard of.

  “My mother made this,” I replied.

  “Brings back memories to you?” she asked.

  “Yes …”

  “You bring back memories to me,” she said. Something in her voice warned me that this wasn’t going to be about pulling out old yearbooks and getti
ng nostalgic. I’ve learned that those inner signals—those premonitory twinges—are hardly ever wrong. They come off an envelope before you open it, out of a phone on the first ring. You know you’re in for something.

  “See those books over next to my chair?” she asked. “That stack? That’s what I’ve been doing. I decided I would read a biography of the U.S. presidents, each and every one. It was a job just to put together a list, but I found a man in the history department at Rutgers.”

  “How far along are you?”

  “I’m closing in. Caro’s book on Lyndon Johnson.” She stubbed her cigarette on the edge of her coffee saucer. It wasn’t the sort of gesture I’d expected from her. I wondered if she was doing this so I’d put aside my memories of her as a school-teacher, dedicated, formidable, ascetic. I wondered what else there was in her life. There were pictures on an upper shelf, framed black-and-whites. Some of them were of men in uniform, soldiers and sailors, but there was no way of knowing whether they were brothers, fathers, lovers. And no offsetting snapshots of kids, no technicolor smilers wanting to be remembered on their birthdays. She knew a lot more about me than I did about her.

  “I made a mistake,” Pauline Kennedy was saying. “My mistake was that I started at the beginning. I started with George Washington.”

  “What’s wrong with that? You start at the beginning.”

  “That’s what I thought. But now I see I should have started with the incumbent gentleman and worked my way back to the beginning. Reading it in order as I’ve done, there’s a ghastly, sinking feeling. It’s as though I were walking down a ladder. Not that all the steps are evenly spaced. But you compare the founding fathers with today’s leaders … compare education, ethics, what they read, what they wrote, how they wrote. Compare, for that matter, the houses they lived in. It doesn’t make you feel too buoyant. Want some more coffee, George? Am I depressing you?”