A Good American (27 page)

M
y brothers and I were becoming increasingly busy with singing engagements. Our brand of syrupy romance was especially popular at weddings. We kept the congregation entertained while the bride and groom signed the marriage register. We were usually invited to the reception after the ceremony. The Knights of Columbus Hall had cornered the wedding reception market in Beatrice. As soon as the ceremony was over, guests hurried down the street to get in line for the buffet, which always consisted of boiled beef, boiled potatoes, and boiled green beans. During the meal the happy couple would tour the tables, greeting their guests. The bride always led the charge. Her new husband would trail a few steps behind, thoughtfully chewing his gum, wondering what on earth he had gotten himself into.

These weddings were never the best advertisement for the joys of matrimony. The spectacle of two young people embarking on their lives together gave the older couples in the congregation an opportunity to reflect on their own unions. Once that process had begun, the slow accumulation of grievances, disappointments, and resentments was as unstoppable as the Kansas City Express. By the end of the night everyone had found something to fight about. Couples sat slumped in defeat, husbands tugging dejectedly at their ties while their wives, prim and thin-lipped, looked the other way.

The most exciting part of the festivities was the cutting of the cake. These were elaborate confections, festooned with pink and yellow roses made of frosted sugar. The younger children would demolish their portions in seconds and, their bodies hijacked by the ensuing sugar rush, would charge screaming through the hall. At Maria Hulshoff’s wedding, the bride’s six-year-old cousin Lenny was so hopped up on marzipan that he ran straight into the wall by the back door, knocking himself out cold in the process. There is still a small dent in the plaster just below the light switch.

When the four of us weren’t singing, we worked with Joseph at the restaurant. Just for once, being second eldest was an advantage. Freddy was expected to stand by the grill and watch Joseph as he worked. My father kept up a running commentary as he flipped burgers and cracked eggs, scrupulously explaining every facet of the process. Every so often he would hand Freddy a wooden spoon or spatula and invite him to try for himself. Freddy would step wearily toward the grill and prod the cooking food with undisguised reluctance. He understood what all this meant. As the eldest son, it was both his right and his duty to inherit Joseph’s gastronomic dynasty. My father was already looking forward to the day when Freddy would stand alongside him and they would feed the town together.

The rest of us were mercifully unburdened by such grand paternal expectations. It was my job to help Mrs. Heimstetter take orders and ensure there was always fresh coffee in every guest’s cup. I soon got to know all the regulars—which was about the whole town—and actually came to enjoy my shifts at the restaurant. I was the only one of us who did. The twins bused empty plates, washed mountains of dirty dishes in the back room, and swept the restaurant floor, bickering incessantly at each other as they did so.

Sometimes Joseph would glance up from the food in front of him and watch us as we worked, an unreadable look in his eye. Freddy was already as good as chained to the grill, but Joseph was wondering what the future held for the rest of us.

THIRTY-ONE

For as long as I could remember, my brothers and I were a constellation of four. We occupied places collectively—restaurant, house, schoolroom, stage. My brothers were reference points by which I could plot my own coordinates and ground myself accordingly. I always knew that one day our little unit would be broken up, and that a new means of navigation would be required, but I still wasn’t ready for the schism when it came.

In the fall of 1951, Freddy began high school. While the twins and I remained under Aunt Rosa’s tutelage in the old schoolhouse, I watched in silent envy as my big brother set off each morning on his own. The year yawned endlessly before me until the day when I would be walking there with him.

Freddy soon began hanging around with Morrie Knuckles, who still came to our house each week to play the piano during our rehearsals. The twins and I were mightily impressed by this, particularly since it afforded him a degree of access to Morrie’s older sister, Ellie.

Eleanor Knuckles was eighteen years old, utterly beautiful, and the object of more adolescent fantasies in Caitlin County than any Hollywood starlet. Morrie’s parents owned the town pharmacy, and Ellie worked there, too. Even with her lustrous mane of fragrant, honey-blond hair tied back in a ponytail and dressed in an unflattering white coat, she was still impossibly alluring. We knew that she was way, way out of our league. The years that separated her from us were our salvation, in a way. We knew that our devotion would never be reciprocated, but the older boys in town were not so lucky. For them, there was the faintest glimmer of hope, and this was their downfall. The pharmacy had been a theater of heartbreak for countless would-be paramours. There had been many whispered declarations of love between the shelves of aspirin and nasal decongestant, but none had ended well.

After our rehearsals Morrie and Freddy would stroll off into town, laughing or talking earnestly as they went. I watched them walk down the street into some exciting future where I was not, and felt my heart beating blackly within me.
My
best friend was Magnus Kellerman—fat, unpopular Magnus. Our chess games were always conducted in out-of-the-way places, where nobody would interrupt us—and where nobody would see us. I never invited him home, fearful of my brothers’ mockery.

Of course, it wasn’t Magnus’s fault that Freddy was friends with someone as glamorous as Morrie, but I blamed him for it all the same. I exacted revenge the only I way I knew: I joined in the taunts and teasing of the other kids, finding guilty comfort in the collective venom of the crowd. I look back on these idle cruelties with shame, now. Magnus suffered it all without complaint. He was too grateful for any crumbs of kindness I chucked his way to complain when I acted like everyone else.

T
he following fall, I finally began at Beatrice High myself. The school was a single-story, monolithic sprawl of red brick and whitewashed concrete. It couldn’t have been more different from Aunt Rosa’s quaint little schoolroom. Long corridors crisscrossed the building, a lattice of low-ceilinged, windowless chutes that funneled students past a thousand identical doors. We scurried through the maze, lost and late for class, our worried faces lit by the fluorescent glare overhead. We resembled nothing more than a pack of lab rats, caught in a monstrous experiment.

Suddenly I was a stranger in the town where I had lived my whole life. The school drew students from several smaller villages nearby, and I had never seen a lot of my classmates before. Many of the boys in my class were the sons of farmers, huge for their age from a lifetime of work in the fields. They sat at the back of the room, taciturn and terrifying. I remember once, at the St. Louis zoo, watching a lion sun himself on a flat rock, his large head sunk low to the ground. He surveyed the gawking crowds through heavily lidded eyes. These farmers’ sons watched the rest of us with a similar bored detachment. There was also the same sense that they could have swatted us out of existence with a casual swipe of their giant paws. At least the threat that they posed was more or less quantifiable. With the girls—well, with one girl in particular—it was different.

You can’t fight genetics. Falling deeply in love with strangers was in my family’s blood. Frederick had worshipped Jette from a distance as she clomped around the Grosse Garten; Joseph had adored Cora while she tended her vegetable patch. My father’s and grandfather’s stories were beautiful, bursting with romance, ripe for telling to future generations.

Mine, not so much.

For it was my bad luck to fall head over heels in love with Miriam Imhoff.

I can still remember the very first time I saw her. It was my first day at Beatrice High. I was sitting in our homeroom class, waiting for the bell to sound, fiddling with my pens in an effort not to look too anxious. The door opened, and in walked the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. A delicate spray of freckles kissed both her cheeks and the top of her cute little nose. She had huge, deep green eyes. But it was her hair that really caught my imagination, a lustrous mane of russet curls, which shone coppery gold in the sunlight.

She walked right past me and sat down at a desk near the back of the room. I spent the rest of the class surreptitiously trying to steal glances toward her. Subsequent surveillance confirmed my initial impression that she was utterly perfect. Every time I looked at her I felt a peculiar yawning sensation in my stomach. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to gaze at her forever or to run away, as far and as fast as I could. By then I was familiar enough with Bertie Wooster’s idiotic friends to know what was happening to me. I was falling in love.

The Imhoffs lived in a large house just off the main square. Her parents were rich, at least by local standards. Miriam had not attended Rosa’s school with the rest of us; instead, a private tutor had come five mornings a week to teach her French and Latin and trigonometry. Her parents had decided that once she was old enough to attend Beatrice High, she should mingle with the community at large, agricultural riffraff that we were. She walked up and down the school corridors with the sort of confidence that I supposed only a private tutor could teach you. Every day she arrived at class perfectly turned out, as deliciously winsome as a china doll. My classmates swarmed around her, an admiring chorus, but I didn’t dare approach, sure that I would make a fool of myself if I stepped into her heavenly orbit. Instead, thick-headed with infatuation, I became the class show-off. I spent all day cracking bad jokes, misbehaving, acting the clown. There was no level of love-struck buffoonery to which I would not sink to get Miriam Imhoff’s attention. Of course, she always ignored me, but the boys at the back of the room watched me closely. They were probably planning to take me down a peg or two, but I didn’t care. I would have happily traded some retributive whacks across the head for an appreciative giggle or two from the object of my devotion. On I went, making an ass of myself. Every morning I bounced out of bed at the prospect of another day spent in the delicious proximity of the beautiful girl who wanted nothing to do with me.

I thought about Miriam all day, and I dreamed about her all night. I began writing very bad poetry, just for her, gushing tributes to her unassailable perfection. Unfortunately all those barbershop songs had left their mark on me: I could not escape their mawkish ideas of sugary romance. Overwrought metaphor tangoed with inexcusable cliché. I stashed every completed ode beneath my bed, the growing pile of terrible verse testament to my inarticulate ardor.

To complicate matters further, my body was being battered by a relentless typhoon of hormones. Back then nobody talked about that sort of thing. All I knew was that a lot of the time there was an embarrassing lump in my pants. Following weeks of trouser-bound experiment, I finally figured out what to do about it. Then it became difficult to think about anything else. Suddenly any door with a lock on it glimmered with erotic promise. The cubicles in the boys’ locker room were just too tempting to resist. I would retire there several times a day and furtively whack off. Not once on those excursions to the toilet stalls did I think about Miriam Imhoff. My passion for her was too noble to sully with my adolescent lust. Instead I thought, perhaps somewhat ungallantly, about the other girls in my class. But as much as I was enjoying myself, I knew that what I was doing was wrong. Guilt and shame gnawed away at me, until salvation of sorts arrived.

One morning I crept into the locker room and quietly slid into my usual cubicle. As I pulled the bolt into place, I heard heavy breathing from a few doors down. I sat down on the toilet seat and listened, thinking:
I am not alone
. There was a small groan, followed by some hasty tugs at the toilet roll. A moment later, furtive footsteps padded past my door.

The next thing I heard was the quiet hiss of running water. I squinted through the tiny crack between the door and the cubicle wall.

Even from behind, the rotund physique was unmistakable.

“Magnus?” I whispered.

I
t took me five days to get Magnus Kellerman to admit what he had been doing.

Although we were in different classes at the new school, we had continued to meet for our daily chess games. After our encounter in the locker room, the thoughtful silence that usually descended while we played was punctuated by my incessant accusations. I prodded and cajoled him, obnoxious and persistent. We played every afternoon in a far corner of the cafeteria, well out of earshot of our fellow students. On the fifth day after the incident, Magnus did not appear. As I waited for him, alone with my chessboard, I realized forlornly that he was the only real friend I had at school. When I finally saw him make his way across the room toward me, I wanted to throw my arms around him in relief, but he stood in front of me, grim and business-like. “I’m not going to play chess with you anymore,” he told me.

I sat there, stunned. “Why not?” I demanded.

“Because of all the crap you’ve been giving me about the restroom,” he said.

“Magnus, please,” I said. “Sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down.”

“At least let me explain.”

His eyes were thick with suspicion. “Explain what?”

“Look, there’s something I didn’t tell you.” I paused.

“What?” Magnus frowned.

I sighed. “I was—Well, I was doing that thing, too.”

Magnus ran a worried hand through his hair, suspecting an elaborate ruse to humiliate him further. “Really?” he said.

“Really. Several times a day, sometimes.” I felt the color rise in my cheeks. Magnus saw it, too. He knew then that I wasn’t kidding.

“Huh,” he said.

He sat down.

O
ur shared hobby opened new conversational doors for Magnus and me. Now that we knew each other’s darkest secret, there seemed little point in holding back on anything else (although I never confessed my devotion to Miriam Imhoff). Our chess games were no longer conducted in silence. Ideas had been fermenting within us, and our muddled internal monologues needed an audience. In each other we found a willing listener.

Magnus told me that he longed for the day when school would be over. The afternoon he graduated, he told me, he was going to pack his bags and leave Beatrice forever. He had it all worked out. He would take a coach to St. Louis, find a job there, and begin a new life, finally free of his father’s judgmental glare.

I listened to all this, unsure what to make of it. Part of me was disappointed by the poverty of his ambition. I wanted to say,
St. Louis
? Why not New York? Or Europe? Or at least somewhere where the weather is more pleasant? But I kept my thoughts to myself, since the idea of leaving town had never even occurred to me. I nurtured no lingering resentments. I harbored no secret plans. I thought I was perfectly happy where I was.

I still felt guilty about my constant trips to the school toilets, but Magnus made me feel better about it. He informed me that everyone—he pointed a stubby finger at me to reinforce the point:
everyon
e
—whacked off. How did he know? I asked, wide-eyed. His father had told him so, he said. It was one of the many reasons why we were all going to hell.

It transpired that Reverend Kellerman had caught Magnus jacking off in his bedroom some months previously. There had been much thundering and imprecation, and dire, end-of-the-world threats if Magnus were ever to disgrace the house with such depraved behavior again. Since then the pastor had taken it upon himself to protect his son from further temptation. Magnus had been forbidden to shut his bedroom door, ever. His father had taken to creeping down the corridor in the dead of night to listen for signs of illicit nocturnal frottage. Once, Magnus had found him in his bedroom on his hands and knees, searching the wastepaper basket for balls of malodorous tissue paper.

Magnus told me all this with sober resignation one afternoon as we sat in the cafeteria, the chessboard between us.

“So what do you do?” I asked.

“At home, nothing,” he replied.

“
Nothing?
”
I breathed. I shared my bedroom with my three brothers. Magnus was an only child. He had a room all to himself, open door or not. The very idea made me dizzy.

“Not in the house.”

I looked at him. “Not
in
the house?”

Magnus shrugged.

“Where then?”

Magnus contemplated me for a long moment. “The pier,” he said finally.

The Kellermans’ house was two blocks from the river. I frowned, trying to work it out. “But how do you . . . ? Where do you . . . ?”

“I sit on the end of the pier.”

“In
full view
?”

He rolled his eyes. “I only go out at night, James. It’s
dark
. Nobody can see me. And when I finish, it just falls into the water.”

I was hugely impressed by this. There was something heroic about my friend’s determination to feed his habit while also technically complying with his father’s apocalyptic prohibition.