Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  “Listen, Gooker,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about Joan …”

  “My sources say you been more than thinking,” he replied. “Better late than never, I guess.”

  “Do you know …” I began. Of all the people to find myself confiding in. “What’s going on with her? What’s she up to?”

  “She takes courses all the time, Rutgers, Drew, Farleigh Dickinson. Wants to be a college graduate. Flirting with age forty, who cares you went to college? All these years, they said, you were nothing, you didn’t go to college. So I went. They said you gotta have a good transcript, A’s and B’s, because people would want to see that transcript, like it was a physical, bring in some pee and a stool sample. Well, George, guess how many times I showed my transcript? How many times I had to whip that sucker out?”

  He raised his hand, joining thumb and trigger finger to make a goose egg. “Anyway, what I don’t get, George, is why bother?”

  “With college?”

  “With her. I mean, now that you got over on her. There’s lots more out there. They keep coming along …”

  He stopped, almost as if wanted to think over what he’d just said, another Gooker-type one-liner. Something came over him. I’d never seen a mood change so quickly. “All that I’m trying to do,” he said and I swear that his voice was breaking, “is feel like I’m alive. Is that so much to ask?” He leaned towards me. “You think I’m an asshole, don’t you?”

  “Gooker …”

  “Well, everybody’s somebody’s asshole. Forget about it. Question is, what kind of asshole am I? That gets interesting. Let me tell you what I think.”

  He finished his beer, hauled a couple more out of the refrigerator, gestured for more. We could have been doing a downbeat beer ad: well guys, it doesn’t get lower than this. Beer ads for bad times. Pop a chilly on your way out of a numbers-crunching tax audit. Have a brew after a gloomy doctor’s office visit. Here’s looking at you after a lay-off at the steel mill.

  “I’m the kind of guy who does things other people don’t do and if I don’t do them they don’t get done. This reunion. Exhibit A. Exhibit B. I’ve got this slow-pitch softball team. The Retreads. Everybody over thirty and no ringers. Men and women. And the other teams, they bury the women at the end of the batting order. One third of the line up is a write off. They call it the women’s inning. My team, they bat first, fifth, eighth. So we lose a lot and we lose big, 19 to 5, scores like that. End of it all we go to Two Guys from Sicily and it’s my show. Everybody loves it. They talk about it all week, keep charts and stats. But I skip two weeks in a row, it dies. Just like the reunion would die if I didn’t have my secretary making phone calls and licking stamps and putting last-known-addresses in a computer. So. Am I still an asshole?”

  I raised my hands. “I never said you were. Tell me … on the softball team … does Kate play?”

  “Does she play? She doesn’t even watch. She stays at home and … I don’t know … reads magazines.”

  “Oh.”

  “There’s no dancing around it, kiddo. The things I care about, I’m on my own. Not supposed to be that way. But it is. Like the reunion.” He stopped to finish his beer. “I’m the local bozo. I’m the class cut-up who never left town. People come back to visit their parents—or maybe bury them—and they know where to find me, right on the highway between Coney Island Hot Dogs and Toys ‘R’ Us.”

  I saw his point. Whatever we had—of community, of union—came down to someone like Gooker Cerruti. Not me, not Joan or Kenny, not any of the others, but someone like Gooker you could count on to be there. But who could Gooker count on?

  “You remember that night in New York, Kate and I got into it a little after dinner? She actually liked the idea of moving into the city and living in one of those loft things … and I don’t know … going to galleries and museums and theaters. The kids are leaving, she wants us to start another chapter. ‘Have adventures.’ That’s what she says. She wants us to change … Hold on a minute.”

  He went down the hall to the bathroom, pissed without closing the door, returned, sat down heavily and found the bottom line.

  “Kate wants us to move,” Gooker said. “Sometimes it’s California, in the wine country. Or Seattle, on the water. Depends on what magazine arrived that day. It’s Yankee Magazine, we’re running a bed and breakfast in New England. Southern Living and I’m raking Spanish moss off the lawn in Charleston. And I don’t buy any of it. I know where I’m from. My grandfather came off the boat from Sicily and dug subways in New York and went home to a place in the Bronx that’s a nest of Ricans now and grew tomatoes in a yard that’s smaller than the closet Kate keeps her shoes in. My old man lived in Berkeley Heights, worked for the road crew and if it weren’t for the U.S. Army and the Monmouth Race Track he’d never of left town at all. Now I’ve got a company that grosses two million a year. I’ve got seventeen people working for me, my wife’s got a George Washington house and my kids had horses to go riding on, till they got bored with them, and now the horses are gone, the kids are gone and Kate wants us gone. And I ain’t going.”

  “So stay,” I said. “To hell with it.”

  “I might be staying by myself. She’s getting worse. Your fault.”

  “My fault?”

  “Not fault, exactly. But she looks at you and … maybe you didn’t notice … you had your eyes on Joan, which I don’t blame you for … but you start rattling off the places you been to … I could feel her getting itchy.”

  “Jesus, Gooker. I never knew.” Kate, the cheerleader, interior decorator, mother of two. Kiss me Kate.

  “Well,” Gooker said. “Maybe people do change. Or maybe you got it right. Maybe it just takes longer to figure out what they were like all along.”

  “It takes time,” I agreed. “Figuring other people out. And ourselves.”

  “You got that right,” Gooker said. Then he got up. “I just needed someone to talk to. And you were the guy I thought of. You of all people. And after all these years. Is that a … what … tribute to the past? To what we had? Who we were? Or is it a criticism of the pa-fucking-thetic grown-ups we are now?”

  “Beats me …” I said. “But you’re showing up here … it’s okay with me.”

  “Really?” Gooker asked. I nodded. “And your dad. He okay?” I nodded again.

  “He picked up a dog. My father did, I mean.” “They got lots of dogs in Florida. I picked up a whole kennel once.”

  “He means a real dog.” “These were real dogs, too,” Gooker persisted. “Fort Lauderdale. Break out the kibble. Hey … did he tell you? I drop by your father’s place every other week or so?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, shit, George, I know your old man lives alone and you read these stories about people they don’t find for days afterwards and I thought, the least I can do is check on your old man. I always liked the guy.”

  “Thanks,” I said. It would be Gooker, I thought, or someone like him, coming down the sidewalk to check on things, some imperfect savior, some vulgar-mouthed buddy who defined virtuous conduct as “giving a shit.”

  The next day, I did something I’d never done before. I set the whole day aside to think about my life. Does it sound easy? Try it. People do anything not to think. Balance checkbooks. Clean ovens. I started after breakfast, on a bench in Riverside Park, looking across the Hudson at New Jersey. The sight of broken down railroad piers and half-finished apartments and the occasional garbage scow getting tugged out to sea got me thinking about the past. The old man, first coming into this harbor from across the sea. Mom working as a nanny in Riverside Park, sitting on this same bench, maybe. And then, their beginnings in New Jersey, job, house, family, the whole drill, a story that seemed so old, these days, it could be Little House on the Prairie, it was that far back.

  I make these thoughts seem more orderly, more purposeful than they were and omit a dozen distractions which, once overcome, oddly complemented my reflections. Those elderly West Side couples
, for instance, tired, cranky, old world Jews who fought their way through D’Agostinos, took their afternoon cake at Eclair, and hobbled down to the promenade along the Hudson when the weather was good. A wounded, cultured folk, and not the easiest to get to know. After all they, or their unlucky relatives, had suffered, these survivors carried a certain entitlement so that, if you beat them to line at a grocery counter, they could make you feel like Himmler’s godchild. They were dying out and the City would replace them. Their stuffy furniture, their cherished LP’s, their decades of opera programs would go down the river on barges, out past the Statue of Liberty somewhere. Yuppies would romp in their old apartments. Still, they made this the autumn side of town, hurt and melancholy.

  At mid-day, I walked across Broadway, on into Central Park, retracing the route I’d covered with my New Jersey visitors a month before. It had been that long since I’d slept with someone. But not someone. Joan. And I wondered if she could say the same. There’s a place I like in Central Park, a knoll just north of the Sheep Meadow. I sat there, facing the 59th Street skyline to the south. No melancholy here, no sense of the past. This was the New York of dreams, the magic city, bristling with hope, Mecca for the yuppies who tracked south in the morning, bound to mid-town offices. This was Sunday afternoon, volleyball time, kite-flying, newspaper reading, bicycle riding. Young people, young pursuits. They came to New York as I had come, snapping up $18,000 jobs in publishing and brokerage houses, doubling up in studio apartments, grabbing supper from salad bars at Korean vegetable stands, and mostly, loving it. But it was hard to picture them growing old here or even staying as long as I had stayed and I was beginning to think that I had stayed too long. My work took me through the towns they abandoned, forlorn towns intolerable to kids with looks and brains and heart, towns made even more intolerable by their desertion. Ugly, betrayed places, the more they grew, the uglier they got. Well, maybe we’d all have to go home, sooner or later.

  II.

  “‘WELL, BRÜDERCHEN, SO HOW DID YOU LIKE YOUR trip to Florida?’ That’s what I heard him say. Brüder chen means little brother in German. Coming from my brother, it can sound affectionate, even loving. Other times, it drips sarcasm. It’s a put down. You never know.”

  At last I was sitting in Pauline Kennedy’s living room in Lakehurst. I’d motored up from Florida in twenty-eight hours. Say what you want about interstates, you can really make time, if time is all you want to make. It’s like driving through a tunnel at seventy miles per hour. Sometimes it’s night, sometimes it’s daylight. It doesn’t matter a bit. As soon as I crossed the Delaware Bridge and stood on Garden State soil—at a rest area—I called her. “I got a dog,” I said. Those were my famous first words. At 6:30 a.m., it was risky, saying good morning. Then I asked could I come by for breakfast. And she said she’d go out for rolls.

  “I tell you about it now,” I said, “and I get shaky all over again.” I reached down and patted Mr. Jacobs. It hadn’t been much of a trip for him. But when we pulled into our last rest area he’d jumped out and gave me a surprised look. Something new in the air, just starting out: winter.

  “So the stroke was …”

  “It never happened. A lie. His maid and his kids were in on it. Not much of a conspiracy. But it fooled me.”

  “I wondered about that stroke as soon as you told me,” she said, over her shoulder, on the way to the kitchen.

  “So,” I shouted after her, “you’re saying I’m easy to fool?” Pauline Kennedy was one of those people who figures out Murder, She Wrote before Angela Lansbury stops for the first commercial.

  “It sounded very selective,” she said. “And convenient.”

  “It was … for him.”

  “Till he decided … to give it up,” she said. She put some plates on a little table, fresh rolls and some cheese and jam, then coffee. “That’s interesting. Tell me about it.”

  “You wonder why?” my brother asked. I stood there in the swimming pool, hearing a voice I thought was gone forever. “And why now?” It felt as if he were reading my mind, just like I’d been reading his, all week. Our roles were reversed. Now I was speechless, wondering if I was facing the brother I used to know, or my anxious host of the last few days, or a stranger I was only meeting now.

  “I thought about you a lot,” he said. He went on. His life was settled, his money was made, his family all around him. And in Florida! The same state we’d blundered into and broken down in, a pair of greenhorns in America. I was his unfinished business. It’s just that we were brothers and it didn’t feel right, that we should live so long and not see each other again. Sometimes it seemed that was the only reason we’d both been left alive.

  He liked odd projects, hideouts, hobbies, stunts—the old gambler in him—and the motel was one of a long list that had included antique cars, a home brewing kit, a fish-smoker, since disposed of, a German pork butcher shop, prospering, volunteer work at the local animal shelter, now replaced by his personal kennel-of-last resort. As soon as he saw it, he sensed that the Flamingo Motel was perfect. It would be as if we were picking up where we’d left off, on that 1930’s trip to Florida. Meeting there would be like traveling through time, as if nothing had come between now and then. Neutral ground on memory lane. A rest stop.

  “I knew that you would come,” he said. And then he’d started to worry. It wasn’t whether I’d come. It was how. But he knew that I’d come down with a load of questions. “Like a doctor checking a tumor,” he said. “Malignant or benign.”

  He knew what I deserved to know. He could put it in a sentence. He’d entered this country legally on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Philadelphia, with a continuation to Miami. He hadn’t paddled to land in a rubber raft launched off a U-boat. No one was looking for him, in Germany or Israel or anyplace, that he knew of. Visiting him wouldn’t get me in trouble. That much he could tell me, that much he would volunteer. But he knew me. He knew I’d want the whole story, in order, from the beginning.

  The stroke. No problem. A stroke of genius, no? Well, maybe not. Millie and the kids. In the words of Buddy Greifinger, “Whatever, Pop.” And, let’s face it: “You weren’t so hard. Was I on the Russian front, you wanted to know. Hans, don’t you know that every German veteran who speaks to an American was on the Russian front? It was almost a joke, right after the war. An American couldn’t find a single German who fought in France and Italy. Not one! They were all in Russia! Where were the other ones, they wondered. The answer was, in East Germany, telling the Russians how they’d fought the Amis.”

  “So,” I asked, now that we’d established I was gullible, and better late than never, “Were you there? In Russia?” But he didn’t respond. He just waved it away, as if he were waving it to the back of the line. You tried that once already, he seemed to say.

  “You gave up so easily, Hans, you let me go. On the first day, a few questions. You were eager to get it over with. It was hard to believe. You were too good to be true. You took what I gave you. My scribbles. You believed what I told you.”

  “No,” I said. “I wanted more.”

  “Of course. Every day, you tried. And when you failed you said to yourself—well—what did you say? Tomorrow is another day?”

  “You want to know?” I said. I’d had enough, the way he was talking down to me. “I said, maybe this Heinz of mine is a monster who should be shipped to Israel. Or maybe he was a hero who did what he could to save people. A good German. I wondered about you. Who is he, this eager-to-please motel owner, this clumsy gardener, this heavy-tipping Florida senior citizen? Good German or bad? I wanted to know alright. But no matter what he is … he’s my brother.”

  “Are you sure you want to know?” he asked. “Really sure?” There was no missing it, his tone was menacing. “Are you sure? Brother?”

  “Yes.” One word. But it was hard getting it out. Maybe I wasn’t so sure.

  “Well then, let’s try. I’ll tell you a story. And … brüderchen?”

  “Ye
s?”

  “There are many other stories besides this one,” he said. Then … funny thing … he swam across the pool and back, using a breast stroke, slow and careful, that kept his head above the water, like the periscope on a submarine.

  “So,” said Heinz. He was back in the corner of the pool. “Let me tell you how the war ended.” He glanced at me. “That’s not the part you want to hear is it? But you’ll take it won’t you?”

  My silence said he was right. The end of the war? Not what I would have chosen. But he wasn’t a waiter, offering a menu.

  “I was in all the cold places, Hans. Norway. In the Lofoten Islands, for nearly a year. And Russia. Forever in Russia. And then, Belgium. End of 1944, beginning in 1945. The Battle of the Bulge, the Amis called it. The war was already lost, of course …”

  Now it was his turn to get quiet. I studied him, wondering if he was organizing his testimony. What to leave in, what to take out. But maybe not. He looked the way I guessed I looked, when I studied an old picture, talking about it with someone who wasn’t there, George maybe, and one minute I’m explaining the when and where of it, putting names and faces together, and then I’m gone, I’m back there.

  “Some say it was over before it started. So I read. But it didn’t feel like that. As close as we came. But by 1942 I knew. And it didn’t make any difference, that we would lose. Think what you want, but you still fight. You still want to live and you want the men around you to live. You understand this, Hans? Whether the tide goes in or the tide goes out, you still try to swim. The things we did! All in a losing cause. All for nothing. Agreed. But I saw brave things. I had my life saved by men who died. I gambled my life, that men would live. I was a hero, they said. Tell me, can a losing side have heroes?”

  He no sooner put the question than Mr. Jacobs, shifting position on my pile of clothes, let out an enormous groan, the way dogs do at the end of a long day. I couldn’t help laughing a little. Heinz shook his head, smiled.