A Good American (25 page)

But there were glimmers of delight that kept us coming back for more. We discovered the quiet pleasure of being buried deep within that music. The twins may have hogged the melodies, but my own notes fattened those tunes into glistening slabs of sweet harmony, and that was enough for me. Our individual voices were subsumed into a delicious aggregation. When we got it right, the sound that spilled into that room was just beautiful. Joseph sat at the piano and listened, a proud smile on his face. And that remained the most precious reward of all.

For months our nightly rehearsals were private affairs. When we finally made our first public performance, Joseph kept his promise to Riva Bloomberg that she would be the guest of honor—although not in the way that either of them would have liked.

TWENTY-EIGHT

One afternoon in the fall of 1947 Joseph knocked on the door of the schoolhouse, where the four of us now spent most of our days being cowed by Rosa. (Not even Frank and Teddy were a match for our terrifying aunt. They may have run riot at home, but the moment they stepped into that schoolroom they were as meek as lambs.) Rosa opened the door and looked at Joseph.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. Only an emergency could have made him close the restaurant early.

“Riva Bloomberg died,” he said. “I need the boys.”

Rosa eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

“She left a note. She wanted them to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ at her funeral.”

“‘Amazing Grace’? You do realize that’s a
hymn
?”

Joseph rolled his eyes. “Thank you, yes.”

“And that the funeral will be in the church?”

“Look, it’s for Riva. It’s the least I can do.”

Rosa look amused. “Has anyone told Reverend Kellerman?”

“I haven’t got time to worry about him,” said Joseph. “We’ve got to start practicing right away. They’ve never sung a hymn before.”

“No, I would think not,” said my aunt, amused.

For the rest of the afternoon we applied ourselves diligently to learning the hymn. We were excited at the prospect of our first public performance, and the hostilities that usually accompanied our rehearsals were momentarily suspended. We were focused on the music, riding the crest of each phrase as one, united in spirit and purpose. We were no longer just four boys singing. Finally we became a quartet.

The following morning Joseph and Jette argued all the way to the church. My father may have been prepared to let us sing, but there was no way he was going to attend the service himself. He did not want Reverend Kellerman to claim his appearance as any sort of victory in their ongoing feud. Jette begged and pleaded with him to change his mind, but he was adamant. We trailed a few steps behind them as they squabbled, humming “Amazing Grace” under our breaths and tugging nervously at our collars.

At the front door of the church, Joseph squatted down and drew the four of us into his arms. He kissed each of us, told us to sing our hearts out for Frau Bloomberg, and promised to wait outside. We walked into the church and settled down in the back pew. Jette sat next to us, keeping watch.

Freddy nudged me. “Did you see the coffin?” he whispered.

I shifted position and squinted through the crowd toward the front of the church. In front of the altar, surrounded by a glade of lilies, a small casket sat on a pair of trestles.

I frowned. “What about it?”

Freddy gripped my sleeve. “Do you think she’s in there?”

“Of course she is,” I muttered.

I glanced sideways at the twins to see if they’d heard Freddy’s dumb question. They hadn’t. Frank was sitting with his head tilted back, gazing up at the ceiling and blowing a spit bubble between his lips. Teddy was idly scratching a buttock, looking around the church with interest. Freddy poked me in the ribs again.

“
What?
”
I glared at him.

“Look at the coffin,” Freddy whispered.

“I just did.”

“Look at the
lid
.”

With a sigh, I looked at the lid.

It was open.

I sank back into the pew and we looked at each other in horror. We had never seen a dead body before.

“Do you think her eyes are open?” whispered Freddy.

Before I could answer, the doors at the back of the church opened. We clambered to our feet and watched Frau Bloomberg’s nine sons walk up the aisle, followed by Reverend Kellerman, who clasped a Bible between his hands and kept his head bowed as he walked. I watched him as he passed by the coffin. He did not stop and stare at the dead woman lying there. I could feel my heart thumping against my ribs. A dead body! I closed my eyes tightly and hummed my part.

Riva Bloomberg’s sons were cattle farmers. They were big, heavyset men with a reputation as hard-bitten, no-nonsense types, but they were also highly emotional, God-fearing folks. The highlight of Bloomberg family meals was the grace, which would be long, high on drama, and by the end would have half the assembled company sobbing into their chests. The Bloombergs loved nothing more than a good funeral, and by the end of the scripture reading, the pews were filled with quietly weeping mourners.

Reverend Kellerman climbed into the pulpit to deliver the funeral address. He pulled his straggly gray hair (which by now was well past shoulder-length) out of his face and peered down at the rows of black-clad children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Riva Bloomberg, their cheeks shining with fresh tears. His gaze finally fell on the four of us at the back of the church. He stared at us for a moment before beginning his sermon.

It was a point of some pride for the minister that he did not tone down his usual hell-and-damnation rhetoric for funerals. He did not do comforting introspection, fond memorializing, that sort of thing. Instead, he told the listening congregation that for all of her apparently saintly behavior, Riva Bloomberg had been as bloated with sin as the rest of us, and was thus condemned to languish in the ravaging pits of eternal hellfire. Even as we are gathered here praying for her soul, he thundered, the diabolical flames of damnation are consuming her. By the time he had finished, the church had been stunned into silence.

“And now,” said Reverend Kellerman, “
at the departed’s special request
”—his eyes rolled—“Frederick, James, Franklin, and Theodore Meisenheimer are going to sing ‘Amazing Grace.’” His tone made it clear that the four of us were destined for an even worse fate than Riva Bloomberg’s.

Jette stood up and ushered us along the aisle. I felt the gaze of the congregation on my back, but I was far more worried about the open coffin at the front of the church. Freddy was in front of me. I could see the fear coiled between his shoulder blades. The carpet beneath my feet seemed to be tugging at my shoes, holding me back, but on I went, until I was standing next to my brother, peering down at the old dead lady.

Frau Bloomberg lay with those famous chicken-strangling hands crossed gently over her chest. She wore a simple black dress, black stockings, flat black shoes. Around her neck hung a small silver cross. Her eyes, mercifully, were shut, but I was unable to look away from her soft, still face. She seemed so peaceful. It was hard to believe that at that very moment her soul was being feasted upon by the devil himself. The thought occurred to me that I never, ever, wanted to die.

There was a pointed cough. I looked up. The whole church was watching us as we stood paralyzed in front of the coffin. Teddy and Frank were waiting impatiently. I moved toward the twins, and after a moment Freddy followed. Finally we turned to face the congregation. I stared blindly at the people in front of me. All I could think was: she’s never coming back.

Teddy, who was singing the lead, counted us in with a whispered four. As one we took a deep breath.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound.

We nailed it. Every harmony, every inflection and nuanced dynamic that we had slaved over—it all came off perfectly.

As for what happened next, I can only imagine that my recent encounter with Riva Bloomberg’s dead body must have left me in a state of heightened emotional sensibility. I began to cry at the beauty and sadness of it all. This was not, unfortunately, a compassionate tear or two trickling discreetly down my cheek, but a fully fledged bawl. Suddenly I was fighting for breath, gulping air into my lungs. I stood there silently, my mouth opening and closing like a demented goldfish. As I struggled to regain control of my lungs, I realized that Freddy had stopped singing, too. Instead he was looking at me, his eyes full of concern. Not for the last time, my brother’s bighearted compassion got the better of him. We may have had a job to do up there, but Freddy, bless him, was more worried about me than the music. Which just made me want to cry even more.

So there we were, two of us singing, two of us not. At least the right two were still going. The twins carried the melody onward, their voices intertwining perfectly. Freddy and I just stared at each other, quite lost. There was no way either of us would be able to pick up our parts midway through the tune.

As public debuts go, it was a disaster. It could have been a fatal blow to our musical career, but for what happened next. It turned out that there was a reason why Riva had wanted us to sing “Amazing Grace”: it was the Bloomberg family hymn. By the end of the second verse the congregation had recovered from the shock of Reverend Kellerman’s sermon, and were ready to reclaim the service as their own. As Frank and Teddy began the third verse, everyone else in the church joined in, bellowing the words as loudly as they could, trying to drown out the echo of the preacher’s words. The twins’ voices could no longer be heard as the congregation sang and swayed in their grief. Freddy remained motionless, his gaze flickering between me and the open coffin. I just stood there with my head in my hands, quite overcome.

The hymn soon degenerated into a chaotic free-for-all. Even the drunks who used to raise the roof of the Nick-Nack with their marching songs were more disciplined than the Bloomberg clan in mourning. Everyone, it seemed, had his own idea about how the tune went. Faced with a churchful of contradictory opinions, each singer just sang a little louder. The result was a catastrophe, musically speaking, but by the time the congregation had stumbled to a messy conclusion (several bars separating the first ones home from the stragglers), every face had been lit up. That was when I finally understood what my father and grandfather had known all along. That crowd of tone-deaf cattle farmers showed me what music, however imperfect, can achieve. They taught me the redemptive power of song.

T
he other thing that a good sing-along can do, apparently, is erase memory banks. After the service, word quickly spread that we had sung magnificently. I suppose those present were grateful for our help in chasing Reverend Kellerman’s words out of the building. Whatever the reason, we were the beneficiaries of some generous collective amnesia. Reports focused on those first few moments before everything fell apart. People clucked admiringly. Such precocious talent, they said. Those who remembered Frederick nodded sagely. It’s in the blood, they said.

We continued to gather around the piano each evening to learn new tunes. A month or so after the funeral, Dale Fruhstock came into the restaurant and asked Joseph if we would sing at his daughter’s wedding.

And so, rather than falling at the first hurdle, our musical career was launched.

After Sandra Fruhstock’s wedding (which passed smoothly enough, the bride and groom getting hitched without any more emotional meltdowns) we became a popular fixture on the Beatrice social scene, such as it was. Four cute boys with bow ties and high-pitched harmonies—what was not to like? Soon we were performing regularly at weddings and the Saturday night dances that took place each week around town. We even did a few more funerals. I learned to tamp down my emotions. The trick was to cut myself off from the dramas unfolding before us. We witnessed many pivotal moments in other people’s lives, but by the age of eleven I was a cynical, world-weary pro. Retirement parties, baptisms, family reunions: it didn’t matter to me. It was just another gig.

As we began to try more complicated arrangements, Joseph’s limited ability at the piano began to cause problems, as he was unable to show us how our parts fitted together. To our delight, he solved the problem by asking Morrie Knuckles to stop by and play the piano.

Morrie’s parents ran the pharmacy in town. He was a year older than Freddy. Everyone loved Morrie. He was extremely tall for his age and ridiculously good-looking. He possessed big dark brown eyes and perfect, brilliant teeth, and was unburdened by the usual nettled insecurities of adolescence. I don’t ever remember hearing him say a mean word to anyone. I always felt a little warmer, walked a little taller, after Morrie Knuckles had taken the time to tell me a joke or ask me how things were going. We always loved it when he came to play our piano and listen to us sing.

Joseph never accepted a dime as payment for our services. We didn’t mind. The applause, the indulgent smiles, the occasional toe-curling peck on the cheek from a grateful bride—that was enough for us. Joseph stood in the shadows at the back of the room and watched us sing—except when we performed in church, of course. Then he would loiter in the parking lot, hands buried deep in his pockets, no matter how filthy the weather. He must have made a strange sight, this lonely man standing quite still beneath the large stained-glass window, listening intently. For when our father heard the four of us sing, he could think only of Cora. For him our voices chanted a never-ending hymn to her memory. Our harmonies sent him to a place where we would never find him, somewhere pooled with old stories and sweet regrets.

TWENTY-NINE

While we were growing up, so was America. Another war had been won, but the cost of victory was still being calibrated. A new enemy was rising in the East. The evil threat of Communism cast a chill shadow across our homes. We had seen the carnage caused by the
Enola Gay
and its deadly cargo over the skies of Hiroshima. Now people began to wonder how long it would be before the Soviets aimed such terrible weapons at us. Americans buried their fears beneath a mountain of gleaming household appliances. New cars rolled off production lines in Detroit, bodies long and sensuous, sharp lines flashing chrome. People scurried out of the cities, needing somewhere to put all that
stuff
. Sprawling subdivisions appeared on the fringes of towns, brand-new houses as chillingly uniform as the endless rows of white crosses freshly planted in the fields of northern France. Those new streets had no fulcrum, no heart, just house after house after house. Community was replaced by commute. Every morning the country climbed into all those sparkling new automobiles and drove off to work.

Not that suburbia made it to Beatrice back then.

We were still a town of farmers, mostly. There was no need to build new homes. The exodus from Beatrice that had begun during the Depression continued in the years after the war. People were moving away, and they wanted to go much farther than the first empty field.

We weren’t going anywhere, though. The four of us roamed through the town, as comfortable in its streets as we were in our yard. Back then, there were no curfews, no worried parents waiting by the telephone. We were lucky to have all that freedom, even if we didn’t know it. We spent the long summers of our childhood in the same giant oak in Tillman’s Wood that Joseph and Stefan Kliever had so loved. The tree sheltered us from the unforgiving sun and kept us dry during the thunderstorms that punctuated the relentless summer heat.

Sometimes I left the others to their fun and climbed away from them, as high as I could. Alone among the tallest branches, there was nobody in the county higher than me. Up there the leaves were caressed by a cooling breeze on even the stillest of days. I peered over the edge of the cliff and watched the Missouri River far below me. The sun’s reflection caught the crests of the gently rippling water. The dazzling quilt of light appeared quite still, as if time up there were frozen.

Long after the oak had stopped being our communal playground, I continued to return there alone. I still visit it now, from time to time. I’m too old to climb it these days, of course, but when a certain melancholy steals over me, one that cannot be banished by more traditional means, I will slowly make my way up the hill to Tillman’s Wood. The tree has been colonized by a new gang of escape artists these days. These kids have taken to hacking their initials into the old trunk. The letters run into each other, an extended, primal howl encircling the tree. I sit on the ground, leaning against the trunk so I cannot see them. I breathe deeply. The smell of the soil and the damp bark at my back trigger a thousand memories, and I escape.

A
s we grew older, Freddy and I stopped visiting Tillman’s Wood, but the twins continued to play there for years afterward. They spent every moment they could outdoors. The war still loomed large in our young imaginations, and both Frank and Teddy enjoyed leading platoons into bloody battle with each other. These games were punctuated with technical disputes about the accuracy of each other’s shooting, and how many bullets it took to kill a man. It was usually Frank who raised these objections; he found that tormenting Teddy with pedantic queries about whether or not he was really dead was more fun than peppering him with imaginary bullets. Their weapons, after all, were just pretend, but there was nothing imaginary about his brother’s fury at all the interruptions. Frank calmly disputed everything until Teddy lost his patience, at which point he would administer a brief but violent beating. Frank was usually laughing too much to bother defending himself, and his mocking guffaws hurt Teddy far more than his fists ever could. It would be days before they went back into the woods to kill each other again.

Jette watched the twins’ growing dislike for each other with concern. She suggested to Joseph that it might be a good idea to channel some of their enthusiasm for physical confrontation toward more positive pursuits, and so my father signed them up for every sporting activity available. They excelled at everything, but baseball was their passion. (Frederick, our family’s proudest American, would have been delighted.) With its limitless capacity for statistics, the game allowed the twins to compete against each other even when they were playing on the same team. After the games they would argue about who had done best, qualifying and parsing the unforgiving numbers on the page.

The boys became the stars of the Beatrice Little League team. They went in to bat at numbers one and two, and between them they threw every pitch of every inning. For the first time in living memory, the team began to win more games than it lost, and suddenly there were more than just bored, anxious parents in the crowd. The whole town began to flock to the diamond behind First Christian Church to watch the games.

Family life soon pulsed to the gentle rhythm of the Little League fixture list. I spent the warm Friday evenings of my childhood summers perched on peeling bleachers with my nose in a book, while my younger brothers brought glory to Beatrice. By that time I had embarked on two simultaneous love affairs that, sixty years on, have yet to relinquish me from their grip. One was with a game; the other was with a middle-aged Englishman. My aunt introduced me to both.

O
ne afternoon at the height of summer, Rosa appeared at our house wearing a white straw hat with a wide rim. She smiled at me when I opened the door.

“James. The very person.”

“Hello, Aunt Rosa. You look very nice. Are you going somewhere?”

“I hope so.” She eyed me speculatively. “Are you busy?”

“Me? Not especially.”

“Good. Come on, then.” At once she turned and walked back down the path. After a moment’s hesitation I reluctantly followed her. Rosa may have been my aunt, but she was also the despot who terrorized us at school each day. I was used to obeying her instructions.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I’m going to buy you some ice cream,” she told me.

I brightened considerably at this news. “At the restaurant?”

Rosa’s nose wrinkled. “I thought we might try the new ice cream parlor.”

“Oh,” I said. I had never been to the ice cream parlor.

“I thought we’d have a bit more privacy there,” explained Rosa.

“All right,” I said, suddenly anxious.

Rosa strode briskly ahead, talking brightly, while I struggled to keep up. At the ice cream parlor Rosa ordered me an ice cream sundae and a strawberry milk shake. She ordered an iced tea for herself. We settled into a booth and she watched me eat.

“What do you think of the milk shake?” she asked.

“It’s wonderful,” I said. “Would you like to try some?”

“Oh, no thank you. I can’t. I think I may be chronically allergic to dairy products.”

I frowned. “Chronically—?”

She leaned forward, entirely serious. “Your milk shake might kill me if I drank it.”

I was shocked. “Really?”

Rosa nodded soberly. “Best not to take any chances.”

I took a tentative, guilty sip.

“Is it better than your father’s?” she asked.

My father’s milk shakes were pretty good, but this was, without question, better than any I’d ever tasted before. My cheeks flushed with guilt as I nodded mutely.

“Don’t worry,” said Rosa cheerfully. “It’ll be our little secret.”

I looked up at her. The scowling, chalk-throwing persona that my aunt adopted so convincingly in the schoolhouse had vanished completely, replaced by this kind woman I hardly recognized. I didn’t know what I had done to be singled out for this special treatment, but suddenly it didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Here we were, just the two of us, and it felt good.

“Everyone needs secrets,” she told me. “It keeps you from going crazy.”

“Do
you
have secrets?” I asked her.

She looked down at her iced tea and swirled the straw around the glass. “Lots, actually,” she said.

I didn’t believe her. “Tell me one, then.”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore.”

“Just a small one.”

“A small one.” Something unreadable passed behind Rosa’s eyes. She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “All right, then. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“I promise.”

She made a show of glancing about her and then leaned toward me across the table. “Sometimes this town drives me nuts,” she whispered.

I looked at her in astonishment.

“You wait,” she told me. “You’ll see what I’m talking about, once you leave yourself.”

“Once I
leave
?” The idea had never occurred to me.

Rosa took a sip of her tea and nodded. “You’ll leave. And then one day you’ll come back, and everything that you used to love about the place will drive you a little bit crazy.”

“Did
you
leave?” I asked.

She nodded. “I went to college, but only for a year. And then later on I left again, for a little while.” She smiled at me, a little sadly. “But each time I came back.”

I thought about this. “Why?”

“Love,” she answered simply.

“Really? Love?”

She nodded. “You, your father, your grandma. Home is where the heart is, James. I can’t leave Beatrice any more than I can cut off my own arm.”

“But you don’t like it here?”

Rosa sighed. “Oh, most of the time I like it just fine, I guess. Maybe not as much as some people. Still, life would be boring if we all liked chocolate ice cream, wouldn’t it?”

I stared down at my half-eaten sundae, unsure what she meant.

Later we walked home in silence. We stopped in front of Jette’s house. “Well, thanks for the treat,” I said. “That was fun.”

Rosa cocked her head to one side. “Can you come in for a minute?”

I followed her inside. In the drawing room Jette was dusting the mantelpiece. My father’s angel wing still hung in solitary splendor, high up on the wall. She turned toward us as we entered. “There you are,” she said.

I gave her an awkward wave. “Hi, Grandma,” I said. It felt strange to be here without my brothers. I felt a little furtive, as if I were secretly trying to gain some illicit advantage over the rest of them.

Jette looked first at me, and then at Rosa. “Did you have a nice time?” she asked.

“Very,” said Rosa. She and my grandmother exchanged looks.

“Well, it’s all ready,” sighed Jette.

“What’s all ready?” I asked.

“Over here.” Rosa led me across the room. A chessboard had been set up on the dining table.

“Chess,” I said. I remembered finding my mother’s old board stashed away in the back of a cupboard once.

“Fancy a game?” said my aunt.

“I don’t know how to play.”

“Not
yet
.” She beamed at me.