by Kluge, P. F.
“Yes.”
“I saw you at lrene’s, I said, well there’s a script for this movie after all. It’s a movie, not an old scrapbook falling apart. But I put too much on you, George. You’ve got problems. You’re lost too.” She smiled at me. “Too bad.“
“Come with me. Anywhere. You name it.”
“Not possible.” She had way of talking that was getting on my nerves. Those short non-sentences, as if language itself wasn’t worth using now.
“I’ll call you.”
“Call. Write. Sure. Anything.” And, turning away from me, towards the line of passengers: “Bye.”
II.
ANOTHER ONE CHECKED OUT. OVERLOOK HOSPItal, age of 71, long illness—cancer, that means— leaving a son in Portland, Oregon, a daughter in Raleigh, North Carolina, a brother on the Jersey Shore. “Predeceased” by wife. Cliff, our old milkman, a nice fellow, even if he was a Yankee fan. The Italians I could always forgive for rooting for the Yankees, what with DiMaggio and Crosetti, Berra, Rizzuto and the rest. Milk and cream he carried in a wire basket and when he retired nobody replaced him. That son who’s now in Portland didn’t want to be a milkman, that’s for sure. So that was the end of it. Well, I started a list of people who used to come up the sidewalk. The paperboy. First on foot, then on bikes, now their parents drive them on the route, end of story. A guy who sold cheese and another sold fruit and vegetables, a man who brought ice when you called and others who brought coal, all kinds of salesmen—not just Fuller Brush—and television repairmen in the days they tried to fix it on the spot. Doctors too, a million years ago. These days, the sidewalk waits a long time for the feel of feet, the front steps are mostly a place where I sit, waiting while the last and maybe the only person who made house calls comes up the sidewalk with a smile old Cliff would have envied. The realtor. The realtor still makes house calls.
“Putting it on the market” is how he expressed it. “Turning it over” was another phrase he used. He said the smart thing was to set a price that was high, a price that you were hoping for, but in the back of your mind you had a price that you’d be willing to take. I walked him through the house which he said was solid but choppy. Some walls would be coming out, he guessed. The yard impressed him—the rock garden, the rose arbor, the hemlocks along the edge of the property, the blue spruce in front. And the size, a double lot by today’s standards. And the location. No problem in turning this one over, he said, and I wondered if I should tell him it’s not houses that are turning over, it’s people. Turning over and trading up, that’s what he was about, as though this was God’s plan for us, onwards and upwards forever. Would someone please straighten me out? What’s the goal? A nation of 200 million people living in castles? I told him he’d be hearing from me, maybe. He gave me his card, he gave me half a dozen of them, raised letters on good stock, which I can use for book marks or to pick my teeth with. As soon as he left, I went into the cellar and made a sign. Three signs, actually, connected by a cord that runs through holes I drilled. I planted it right out by the mailbox and, sitting here this last half hour, I’d already seen a half dozen cars slow down and stop, the drivers fishing for pen and pencil. FOR SALE says the top part of the sign. BY OWNER says the middle. And there’s a phone number on the bottom. George’s number in New York, business and home. Me, I hate telephones.
III.
“LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL AND …” THE VOICE at the other end of the phone paused and waited for my reply.
“Melt with Sue!” I fired back. Sue Hoover, the Mansfield/ Dors/Loren of our high school class. “Hello, Kenny.”
“Ever wonder what happened to Sue Hoover?”
“Never,” I said. “Or maybe once in a long while.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. Nightly.”
“I like the idea of second chances.”
“So I hear,” he said. I guessed he knew that I’d seen Joan. I sensed tension. He had no grounds to attack me. They were separated. I was single. But a whiff of bird-dogging was in the air, of she’s mine, no mine, I saw her first, the hell you did, now it’s my turn. The phone silence stretched out. Two guys too smart to say what they were thinking. Not smart enough to have other thoughts.
“You want to get together?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“So where do you want to eat?”
“I’ll give you a hint. Did you see ‘Marathon Man?’”
Perhaps Kenny thought that 86th Street was enemy territory, little Germany, a place where people kept quiet about their war records. He’d be disappointed. New York’s melting pot may not have worked on people but it played hell with neighborhoods. I’d watched it happen here, the Gimbels, the RKO movie twins, the running shoe shops, Mexican restaurants, Korean fruit stands, salsa nightclubs. The place had been hit by more bombs and torpedoes than the Bismarck.
I came to the Heidelberg once in a while, just to confirm that it was still there, so that if the old man ever came to visit, I’d have a place to take him to. He’d knocked around here some when he was young, I recalled, and he’d had a brother who was a bartender, the one who went back to Germany just in time for World War II. Shrewd move. You had to wonder, sometimes, why more people didn’t see things coming. Heinz. That was his name. His picture sat out on a wall-shelf in the living room, all the time I was growing up, this uncle in a snappy uniform, my mother in his arms. She’d gone back to visit, a year or two before the war. The grandparents sent the ticket, so that they could see her one more time, before all hell broke loose. I guess some people saw it coming after all.
Kenny was late. I ordered another Dortmunder and found myself thinking about the Nazi uncle. He was something of a sore point, or if he wasn’t, the picture was. It was at the center of the only argument I’d ever heard my parents have. And I started it. It was around the fourth grade. I went out with neighborhood kids to build forts and tree huts. There were still woods in town then. We played softball and told dirty jokes. Some of us collected baseball cards, others had graduated to skin magazines. “Stroke books,” Gooker called them. In no way was I the leader of the pack. But I did have an ace up my sleeve, and that was the German stuff. In a gang of nondescript Americans, that made me a little interesting, that blood connection to dark-uniformed villains. What were Indians, after all, compared to snappy Nazis? Playmates asked to come in the house and “see that picture,” to see a woman recognizably my mother flanked by four men in enemy uniforms, their arms around her, everybody smiling. My friends would look—dumbstruck—and I’d usher them out. For a little while, I’d be something special. Now, here’s the poignant part. My mother greeted the crew as they came in, tickled to death that her George was getting company. She’d be at the sink, up to her elbows in suds, she’d be doing something with swiss chard, she’d drop everything and offer milk and cookies to the bunch, as if every minute they were in the house, every bite and swallow, added to my popularity. And, watching them leave, she’d hope they’d come over again, anytime, we even had a badminton set we could put up in the backyard. On her own, God bless her, she’d never have figured it out. But the old man did.
“What’s this parade into the house?” he asked one Saturday. He’d been working in the garden when a bunch of friends arrived —a special tour, including somebody’s cousin from Connecticut. Now he was sitting on the stoop at the side door, in shorts and socks that curled up against an old pair of shoes. He was bare-chested, covered with sweat, the sweat dusted with peat moss he’d been spreading. And, as usual, he was drinking a Ballantine Ale.
“Maria,” he shouted. “Come out here.” It was the voice he used when something was wrong, a cut finger, a wasp sting, snails on the tomatoes. My mother rushed out. “You noticed the parade a while ago?”
“Those are George’s friends,” she answered proudly. “They come to play.”
“Play what?” he asked her. Then me. “Play what, George?
“The picture,” I confessed. “They want to see it.”
“Which picture? Narrow it down for me a little. They were wondering what you looked like when you were a baby?”
“The one …” I hesitated. I looked at my mother, certain this was the last second she would ever love me. “Mom’s.”
“Mom and me and you at the Catskill Game Farm?
“Mom …” My eyes filled the way they always did when I screwed up.
“Hans …” My mother said, but it was too late. My father had his hands on me, not to punish me, but to steady me while I told the truth.
“Mom and those soldier guys,” I said. “The … uh … Germans. The kids want to see it. I don’t know. They think it’s neat. They think I’m neat, a little bit.”
“Okay,” he said. “Go inside.” I did, up the steps, through the kitchen and into the nook, where I listened to every word they said, still blurry and sniffling.
“Take it down,” he said. But it wasn’t an order. The commanding tone was gone. It was a plea.
“Du warst doch sein Bruder,” she said. I used to understand German, in a rough and ready way. “You were his brother, after all.”
“Ja.” the old man acknowledged. “Das war Ich.” That I was.
“Und sein Freund.” And his friend.
After a minute. “Das war Ich auch.” That too.
“He brought you over. He helped. Don’t forget that.” This, in English. And that was it. The next thing my mother came inside so fast, she caught me in the kitchen nook before I could sneak upstairs or even make it to the icebox, pretending to search for a snack. “No more parades,” she said, returning to the sink.
“That looks tasty,” a voice behind me told the bartender. “I’ll have one. And this gentleman will pay … and pay.”
“Hello, Kenny,” I said, shaking his hand. Crew cut, blue eyes, overweight, a scuffed-up valise under his arm, a sense of deadlines and projects barely under control. Kenny. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s been about half a lifetime,” he said, studying me closely. “You take me back.”
“You do the same for me,” I said. It was funny. Or sad. Of all my friends, he was the one l would have guessed would be with me forever. “When … I’ve been asking myself … was the last time we met?”
“Don’t know,” he said. He thought about it a moment. “Got me. For guys who take each other back, the way we always say we do, you’d think we could remember our historic last meeting.”
“During college, it must have been. That first Christmas vacation, I couldn’t wait to get home and compare notes. We even wrote some letters back and forth. But there was one vacation—spring break—you went away. The Caribbean. And it wasn’t so important anymore, getting together. Once we missed a turn, we were off the track forever.”
“I went to Jamaica,” Kenny said. A pleased look crossed his face: a chance to score a point. “Joan went with me. We were both at Bucknell, remember? And I was chasing her. Had been. God! I won’t say it was the only important thing I wanted to do in life. But it was the first. And Jamaica. George! That’s where it happened. Big time!”
Was I going to hear about it, in detail? Was I going to listen? He might want to trade. I had to stop it. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Life’s little ironies. If she’d gone to that place you went, you might have been the lucky man.”
“I went to an all-male school. In Ohio! Remember?” And like that, we were past the rough spot. We both laughed and the beer—my third, his first—arrived. We toasted, no hard feelings.
I let Kenny decide what we would talk about. It was easy to do. Old patterns reasserted themselves. I remembered those dozens of tests we used to take, running neck in neck for the head of the class. I won Pauline Kennedy’s A, but Kenny edged me everywhere else. The master test-taker of all time, murder on multiple choice exams, he unerringly detected the right answer, distinguishing the true from the not quite true from the palpably false. I was slower. Considering all the possibilities, I imagined situations in which the false answer might be true and the true, not quite. Important situations that needed to be pointed out, even to the people who devised the tests. While Kenny was circling answers, I wrote notes in margins, notes that would never be read, explaining things the teachers might have missed. My imagination cost me time, and points. But it also nudged me towards writing. Kenny was into choices. Now the word was that he’d chosen Israel. Lobbying, letter-writing, fund-raising, not for the government, but for orthodox, irre-dentist never-againers—the Gush Emmunim—who settled the West Bank.
Pigs knuckles for him, veal shank for me, sides of creamed spinach and red cabbage, double order of potato pancakes, the food was on the table. The waitress called us over. Kenny hefted himself off his stool, grabbing his briefcase off the floor. Man and briefcase, both overweight and out of shape and stuffed with plans. He held it out towards me.
“A million stories in here,” he said. “Incredible. Things you wouldn’t believe. Know any good writers?” He was needling me. But there was more. Joan had told me Kenny always wanted to write, he’d tried a couple things that were—Joan at her most succinct—“no-go.” And then, with an absolute certainty that surprised me, as if she were giving me his weight or waist size, she added, “Kenny can’t write.”
“So, what do you think of her?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Terrific.”
“Come on, George. It’s not like we can’t talk about her. We go back forever.”
“I’m thinking about going forward.”
“Whoa! We’re playing it close to the chest this evening, aren’t we?”
“My chest.”
“Fair enough … I’m not here to … you know … I’ve got no feelings of rancor.”
“Why’d you marry her in the first place? That’s what I can’t figure out.”
“What’s to figure?” he flipped back at me. “Are you kidding? Joan Simmons! The gorgeous? The untouchable. And smart, besides? You’re asking me why? What’s wrong with you? She was your fantasy too.”
“Okay,” I said. “Yeah. She was.” The beers were catching up to me and it was too bad, because I wanted to be sharp.
“Something I want to tell you,” Kenny said. “I never told anybody this before. I’m sure Joan knows. Sooner or later she figures things out. Maybe you noticed.”
“I noticed.”
“Yeah, she packs it in, the highs and lows. She had better grades than I did, until she got pregnant and quit. Never got back. Sat there, in maternity clothes, typing my papers. Sucks, when I look back. We didn’t know much, did we? About women, I mean. Could be, women didn’t know much about themselves.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “We had a lot to learn. Was there something specific?”
“Yes,” he said. “This. We thought we were learning about women when we were out chasing them, trying to get laid. Did you ever, by the way?”
“Damn it! Yes! Lots of times!”
“Okay, okay. Touchy, aren’t we?”
“People keep asking. First Gooker, then you. Same question.”
“Me and Gooker. That’s a frightening alliance. Anyway, about women … the sex we were after … that was a lesson, no doubt. But it was only lesson one. Which we kept repeating because it was so much fun. More sex with this one. Different sex with other ones. It’s like we were choosing to stay in kindergarten. ‘Sure, teacher, just let us keep playing with these nice toys and we’ll be alright.’ That’s arrested development, George. It kept us from moving on to the next lessons. Such as all the ways they’re smarter than we are. Wiser, shrewder, savvier. We were hot shots, George, we really were. But we missed a lot. Anyway, the reason I went to Bucknell. Not Dartmouth or Connecticut Wesleyan. She was it.”
“So what happened?”
Kenny reflected for a minute, poured himself beer, poured me some too. Then I caught him studying me and I guessed what he was thinking: why am I telling you this? You of all people? And then—I could see the grin when the thought came to him
—why not you? Who else?
“Maybe it would have happened anyway,” Kenny began. “You know me. A lot of ability and no clear calling. I tried some other things.”
“Such as?” I’d had some answers from Joan but I wondered if he’d mention writing, if he’d take that chance with me, risking a confession of failure.
“Stuff …” he said, shrugging. “Anyway … what made it worse was … I always saw what I was doing through her eyes. And what I saw looked second rate. She never criticized me, that way. I did it myself. I knew what she was thinking.”
“So then … Israel … you discovered there was a war going on and you enlisted …”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding annoyed. “Maybe you’re being funny. I don’t know how seriously to take you these days. It comes from reading your column, I guess. I’d like to think that you’re turning out that crap tongue-in-cheek. I’d like to give you that much credit at least. But yeah … Israel. And a war.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sorry. How’d it happen?”
“Remember when we used to make a list of ‘great Jewish athletes.’ That bit of schtick we used to do? The comically short list?
“Let me see,” I said. “Benny Leonard, Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax and …” I shrugged and raised my hands. Kenny loved Jewish jokes. He invented them. Once, when we were sitting in a Broadway delicatessen where all the sandwiches were named after show business celebrities—you could order an Eddie Cantor, say, or a Jack Benny—he proposed a menu built around notorious Jewish criminals. Order a Julius Rosenberg, say, or a Bernard Goldfine, a Lepke Buchhalter, or Abba Dabba Berman. We were like that once. Diaspora humor, I guessed. We figured it should go both ways, that we should tell German jokes as well. Only there weren’t any. “Did you hear about the German who invaded Russia every thirty years?” “How many Nazis does it take to …” Not funny.
