A Good American (29 page)

THIRTY-THREE

We did not sing at Magnus Kellerman’s funeral, because there
was
no funeral. His parents left Beatrice two days after his body was found, taking their dead son with them. To this day I have no idea where Magnus is buried.

Nobody could understand why the Kellermans fled as they did, when there was a whole town ready to offer them help. I suspect that they could not face such an effusion of well-intentioned sympathy and Christian charity.

There was no escape for me, though. I waited for the yoke of grief and suffering to descend upon me and bestow its grace, just as it had for Freddy. To my dismay, though, I felt no beatific glow of anguish for me. I hoped that I might be in shock, that my friend’s death just hadn’t sunk in. But as the weeks passed, I still failed to register the kind of soul-enriching remorse that I had been hoping for. This prompted a degree of melancholy, but for me alone: Why, I wondered miserably, couldn’t I have been fond of Magnus the way that Freddy was devoted to Morrie?

I realized sadly that I’d never been much of a friend to him. Finally, shame sharpened my loss into something resembling pain.

Soon after the Kellermans left town, a new minister arrived at First Christian Church. Beatrice was Arthur Gresham’s first professional posting. He was young and extraordinarily devout. He was also very handsome, with a chiseled jaw and neatly cropped dark hair. He did not possess the fiery rhetoric of his predecessor, but after two decades of splenetic predictions of eternal damnation, the congregation was ready for a change of pace. People were relieved when Reverend Gresham plowed a less hysterical furrow in his sermons. He spoke thoughtfully and calmly, his delivery rarely rising above his normal speaking voice. He would take a theme from the day’s scripture, expand upon it briefly, throw in a few telling anecdotes, and then—just as people were settling back into their seats for the long haul—announce the next hymn.

Attendance at the ten o’clock service increased, swelled by rumors of the new minister’s good looks and the brevity of his weekly address. The town’s unmarried young women began to cram themselves into the front pews. They batted their eyelashes at him, provoking a scarlet flush in the young clergyman’s finely sculpted cheeks as he led his flock in worship. With Reverend Gresham in the pulpit and Mrs. Fitch at the piano, now everyone in the congregation had something to distract them during the services. Poor Reverend Kellerman was not much missed.

D
eath danced all around us back then. On Christmas Eve, my grandfather, Martin Leftkemeyer, passed away in his sleep. He died as he had lived, quietly and without fuss. He had limped through the years since my mother’s death, a baffled, lonely wreck of a man. We could not cry for him. He was happy at last, reunited with the two women he had adored. A month or so later, Dr. Becker, who by then was in his nineties, suffered a massive stroke. He was discovered sitting in his favorite armchair, the
Optimist
neatly folded on his lap, a puzzled look on his face, as if he had been pondering his own final diagnosis.

Jette was buffeted by the loss of her old friends. She stopped working shifts at the diner, and in the months that followed she aged visibly, as if time had finally caught up with her. She spent her days in her armchair, watching the flickering television screen with the curtains drawn. We often went round to watch with her, and she was always glad to see us. When all four of us went, we sang for her, and this was what she loved the most. She would settle back in her chair, her white hair fanned out against the cushion, and close her eyes. A small smile would appear on her face as she listened, warmed by distant echoes that only she could hear.

By then it was Freddy’s senior year at school. When he wasn’t with Morrie he spent a lot of time alone on our back porch, listening to radio broadcasts of baseball games that were being played hundreds of miles away. I watched him through the door. He would sit for hours, his chin in his hands, staring out into the yard, never moving, listening to the low tones of the commentators and the excited cheers of the distant crowd. The strange thing was that Freddy didn’t even
like
baseball. I suppose the sedate rhythm of the games, the slow crawl toward an irrelevant conclusion, ball after ball after ball, was a balm against whatever storms were raging inside him. I assumed that he was thinking about Morrie, wondering when his friend’s mutinous body would give up on him, but it turned out that there were other things on his mind, as well.

My brother graduated from Beatrice High one morning in early June. That afternoon we sat around the kitchen table eating a celebratory lunch with Rosa and Jette. Joseph was in an expansive, expectant mood.

“So,” he said, smiling at Freddy, “when do you want to start work?”

“Monday,” Freddy replied.

Joseph laughed. “Excellent! You’re keen to get started, then.”

Freddy didn’t blink. “Mr. Niedermeyer says they’ve been short-staffed for months.”

There was a terrible silence around the table. Finally my father found his voice. “
Oscar
Niedermeyer?” he croaked.

Oscar Niedermeyer ran the town’s funeral parlor. Freddy nodded.

“He’s offered you a
job
?”

“I asked him for one,” corrected Freddy.

“But you already
have
a job. With me.”

Freddy put down his knife and fork. “I don’t want it.”

Joseph stared at him. “Why not?”

“I want to do something else.”

“Something else? What’s wrong with being a cook?” choked my father.

“It’s the onions,” said Freddy.

My father looked stricken. “The
onions
?”

Freddy shrugged. “I hate the smell of fried onions,” he said. “They stink. Did you never notice?”

Joseph was too mortified to speak.

“You can come home and scrub yourself raw, but it doesn’t make any difference. The smell gets into your clothes and under your skin and just
stays there
.”

The two of them looked at each other across the table.

“Besides,” said Freddy, “there’s more to life than feeding people breakfast.”

“More to
life
?” thundered my father. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Freddy stood up. “I want to do something else, that’s all.”

“Where are you going?” demanded Joseph. “We haven’t finished discussing this.”

“There’s nothing more to discuss,” replied Freddy, his voice steady. With that he walked out of the room.

“Joseph,” said Rosa gently.

If my father heard his sister’s warning, he ignored it. A moment later he was out of his chair. Rosa and I followed him to the back porch. Freddy was sitting in his usual spot, listening to a game between the Braves and the Phillies. We watched through the screen door as my father turned off the radio with an angry swipe of his fist and demanded explanations. Freddy answered him quietly. More questions followed, my father’s arms flying about in agitation. Freddy listened, and then shook his head. Finally Joseph turned his back on his son and walked into the yard. There he stood quite still with his hands on his hips, staring up at the cloudless sky.

“Well, well,” murmured Rosa. “I never knew Freddy had it in him.”

“Neither did I,” I said.

“He didn’t tell you anything about this?”

I shook my head. “Not a word.”

Working in a funeral parlor made a certain sense for Freddy, I could see that. His best friend was dying, after all. The somber atmosphere at work would match his mood exactly. Freddy sat on the porch for a moment, watching Joseph. Then he reached over and switched the radio back on.

My aunt put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed softly. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

I turned to look at her. “What?”

She smiled at me sadly. “You’re next.”

F
reddy began work at Niedermeyer’s the following week. He took a bus to Jefferson City and bought two black suits. The atmosphere in our house was glacial for weeks afterward. At breakfast Freddy and Joseph sat at opposite ends of the table, ignoring each other. The rest of us hunkered down in between the two workingmen, keeping a cautious eye on both.

There was one upside to Freddy’s new job: we saw an increase in funeral engagements. He was now in a position of some influence with the families of the recently departed. He was able to suggest—discreetly, of course, and with appropriate dollops of hand-wringing compassion—that perhaps a musical tribute might be in order at the ceremony. Perhaps some four-part harmony, madam?

None of this helped me, of course.

Rosa had been right: I was next.

THIRTY-FOUR

My own senior year at high school—a time, supposedly, of carefree, youthful innocence—was cast into bleak shadow by the fate that now awaited me on graduation. Mostly it passed in a haze of baffled dismay.

The hot plate was waiting for me. I was to be a short-order cook.

More than anything else, I remember feeling lonely that year. After Magnus died, I didn’t make any more friends; I was too busy working. I had less than twelve months to learn what Joseph had been teaching Freddy for years. Each morning I reluctantly tied on my apron and helped my father with the early breakfast rush before grabbing my books and staggering to school. Freddy had been right about the fried onions. I quickly came to detest them, too. As I sat in class I could smell them on my clothes and in my hair.

The twins were freshmen by then, but of course they wanted nothing to do with their boring, smelly older brother. I was left to contemplate my dreary fate alone. I remembered Rosa’s quiet confession of wanting to escape our little town during that first trip to the ice cream parlor.
You’ll leave
, she’d told me.
And then one day you’ll come back, and everything that you once loved about the place will drive you a little bit crazy
. Well, my aunt had been wrong. I would never leave, not now. Even poor old Magnus had escaped farther than I ever would.

While I was busy cooking eggs and frying up mountains of Texas toast, everyone else at school began to pair off. Suddenly there were couples everywhere. From the pretty cheerleaders to the math club nerds, they all found a lid for their pot. The heady whiff of hormonal overdrive was palpable. Everyone was at it. Everyone except me.

Worst of all, Miriam Imhoff was at it, too.

One Monday morning in early spring Kevin Kinney, the school’s star linebacker, arrived at school and began telling anyone who would listen what Miriam Imhoff had let him do to her in the back of his car the previous Saturday night. By Tuesday, everyone had heard the rumors, and for the rest of the week fresh details of Miriam’s wanton depravity percolated through the school.

I listened along with everyone else, but I knew better than to believe such filthy lies. By then I considered myself something of a connoisseur of pornographic fantasies, but some of her alleged stunts sounded improbable, even to me. I knew Miriam would never do such things, especially not with a lumbering knucklehead like Kevin Kinney. I waited for her to refute the whole story.

But Miriam didn’t deny any of it. In fact, she appeared to be relishing the attention. Girls swarmed around her, scandalized and eager for information. Boys kept their distance, watching her furtively. During the course of that week, speculation about her nymphomania grew to fever pitch. I did my best to pretend that none of it was happening. Then on Friday Miriam arrived at school with Kevin’s lettered football jacket around her shoulders, and my heart broke into a million tiny pieces.

I
n the evenings, while my classmates felt each other up in the backs of their parents’ cars, I went to visit Rosa. Earlier that year, having finally saved up enough money to buy a place outright, she had moved out of Jette’s home and into a house of her own. Rosa cooked me dinner and then we listened to the radio and played chess. Our tussles over the board were less one-sided now. Sometimes I even won. While we played, our conversations invariably followed the same pattern. She would begin by telling me of her most recent illnesses, describing each symptom in unnecessary detail and then offering up a variety of morbid diagnoses for my consideration. Over the course of that year Rosa suffered enough chronic diseases to kill her several times over. Every part of her body was riddled with cancer; mosquito bites throbbed with fatal menace; the mildest rash prompted predictions of a long and hideous death. More than once she made me swear that I wouldn’t let her suffer too much when the time came. She loved nothing better than burrowing through her encyclopedia of infectious diseases. Her pulse raced in fear and excitement as she triumphantly checked off the symptoms of yet another murderous illness that had her in its grip.

Since Rosa was feeding me each night, it seemed rude to point out that she appeared as healthy as ever (which she did). All she really wanted from me was a sympathetic
ooh
at some of the more gruesome bits of her prognosis, and I was happy enough to oblige. When my aunt’s apocalyptic medical ruminations were finally exhausted, it was my turn to moan. My litany of ills never varied much.

I remained devastated about Miriam Imhoff. It was painful enough to imagine her with anyone else—but why did she have to hook up with
Kevin Kinney
, of all people? I was dismayed and outraged by her lack of taste. He was an oafish moron with a military buzz cut, a dumb laugh, and a neck as thick as my thigh. I began to speculate that perhaps Miriam hadn’t been out of my league after all, if she’d been willing to go out with
him
. I replayed in my head dozens of moments when I might have flashed a shy smile, instead of always running blindly in the opposite direction. But it was too late now.

Miriam was not the only source of my abject self-pity, though: when school was over, I would be grilling burgers for a living. Rosa was not as sympathetic about this as I would have liked, frankly. She told me that it would be nobody’s fault but my own if I took a job that I did not want. When I protested that I had no choice in the matter, she snorted and told me that if Freddy could stand up to my father, then so could I. But I knew that wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have been able to bear the weight of Joseph’s disapproval for more than a minute. I think Rosa realized this, too. She knew the insecurities of the second born. Still, that didn’t mean she was going to give me an easy ride.

As I watched the calendar creep slowly forward, a defeated inertia crept over me. I numbly ticked off the days to graduation. When the posters went up on the school bulletin boards announcing the senior prom, I took no notice. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to celebrate. Besides, I had no wish to watch my fellow graduates paw at each other’s fancy clothes before they slunk off for slugs of vodka and steamy bouts of heavy petting. And the prospect of watching Miriam and Kevin dancing together as newly crowned king and queen of the prom was too appalling to contemplate.

I never would have gone if we hadn’t been booked to sing there.

A week before the prom, the gym became a hive of industry as an army of seniors began its transformation to an elegant venue for the grand soiree. The room had acquired the funky whiff of perspiring adolescents that no amount of balloons or bunting could ever shift, but nobody seemed to mind. A makeshift stage was constructed over the bleachers at one end of the room, behind which a huge purple banner emblazoned with the words
good-bye, class of ’55!
had been hung.

As they worked, the girls discussed how far they might be prepared to go with their dates if things went right. The boys watched them from the other side of the room. As the big day approached, the febrile atmosphere of sexual anticipation grew. While I moodily contemplated my father’s pots and pans, my classmates were considering their own induction into adulthood in altogether different terms.

I spent the day of the prom standing next to my father, helping him with the Saturday lunchtime rush. At three o’clock I escaped the grill and walked morosely up to Tillman’s Wood. There I clambered through the limbs of the old oak tree one last time, a valedictory tour. Most of my classmates were impatient for school to end, but I was clinging desperately to what remained of my childhood. I watched the sun as it inched westward across the sky. There was no stopping the dull trudge of time.

That evening the four of us gathered in the kitchen. We wore dark suits, white shirts, and thin black ties. This was our standard uniform for funerals, which struck me as appropriate, since we were there to witness the death knell of my youth. Frank was the last of us to appear. As he walked into the kitchen a pungent aroma wafted from him.

I frowned. “Is that
cologne
you’re wearing?”

My little brother inclined his head toward me. “It is.”

“Did you take a
bath
in it?” asked Freddy, wrinkling his nose.

The thought occurred to me that I could have used a splash of cologne myself to mask the lingering odor of fried onions, but I said nothing. Frank extracted a comb from his inside pocket and ran it through his hair, which, I now noticed, was shining with a recent application of Brylcreem. “It’s the senior prom, fellows,” he said. “You snooze, you lose.”

“It’s not
your
senior prom,” I pointed out.

Frank waved away my objection.

“I believe,” declared Freddy, “that young Franklin thinks he’s going to
score
.”

Teddy immediately looked worried. “That’s ridiculous!” he barked.

“Do the math.” Frank pointed at me. “There are boys going without a date. There’ll be girls without a date, too.”

“But you’re a freshman,” said Freddy. “No girl is going to throw herself at you,
just because she hasn’t got a date.”

Frank sat down at the kitchen table. “It’s their senior prom,” he said simply.

“Besides, that cologne is awfully strong,” I said. “They won’t get within ten feet of you without gagging.”

Frank put on a pair of dark glasses. “Mock me all you like, James,” he said coolly. “Like you said, it’s
your
prom. But we’ll see who’s laughing at the end of the night.”

I understood my brother’s thinking. The fables of bacchanalian excess that surrounded previous prom nights had cloaked the event in irresistible erotic mystique. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that a posse of teachers prowled the school all evening, which meant that the interesting stuff would take place after the dance, in the backseats of cars out at Gants Bluff. And Frank did not have a car.

We practiced our set list for that evening. We were doing the usual crowd-pleasers, and for the finale I had penned some snappy new lyrics to “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” which said good-bye to school, innocence, happiness, hope, that sort of thing.

As we walked to school we were passed by a slow-moving fleet of cars filled with my classmates. The boys lounged behind steering wheels, doing their best not to look awkward in their rented tuxes. Their dates sat next to them, checking makeup in their compacts and smoking furiously. The couples weren’t talking much, nervous about the evening ahead. Seeing their anxiety cheered me up a little, and for a while I managed to camouflage my misery behind a veneer of haughty condescension.

In front of the school, prom-goers were milling about. Girls squealed and kissed one another. They admired each other’s dresses and exchanged final words of encouragement. Boys gave each other last-minute pep talks. Most of them had hip flasks hidden in their jackets, the liquor siphoned off from their parents’ drinks cabinets. They all looked as if they could do with a swig right then, but the booze wasn’t for them. It was for their dates. Everyone knew that alcoholic lubrication would be required if the evening was to end as hoped.

We made our way toward the gym. Streamers had been hung across the room, crisscrossing above our heads. On the stage, a solitary microphone stand stood gleaming beneath a bank of bright spotlights. The rest of the room was plunged into shadow, illuminated only by a rotating mirror ball that had been hoisted high above the painted lines of the basketball court. A constellation of tiny squares of light floated across the floor. In one corner of the room lurked a crowd of grim-faced teachers, none of whom looked happy about sacrificing their Saturday evening to police a crowd of randy teenagers. We were not due to sing for over an hour, and so we gathered by the side of the stage and watched as the gym began to fill up. Frank inspected every girl with interest, although he was still wearing his dark glasses, which meant that he couldn’t see much. Most of the activity was near the punch bowl. The teachers hovered nearby, hawkishly watching for attempts to sabotage the mix with alcohol.

Just before eight o’clock, Eugene Jurgenschlitter, the chairman of the prom organizing committee, approached us. He was wearing a lime green plaid tuxedo. His date was a heavyset girl called Julie Tippet, who was squeezed into a scarlet dress that was a couple of sizes too small for her. She stood two paces behind Eugene and smiled at us. The lights from the mirror ball bounced off the orthodontic strips on her teeth. I could smell the alcohol on their breaths. I figured Eugene would need to be pretty well oiled if he was going to contemplate sticking his tongue into Julie’s industrial-grade metalwork.

“You guys ready?” asked Eugene.

Since it was theoretically my prom, I had been designated spokesman for the night. “Absolutely,” I replied.

“You’ll sing for thirty minutes?”

I nodded. “Maybe a bit longer, if we get encores.”

Eugene grinned. “Encores, right.”

Frank spoke for the first time. He had been examining Julie Tippet with undisguised interest. “We get encores,” he said, looking directly at her over the top of his dark glasses.

Julie Tippet giggled and let out a small hiccup.

“Hey, Eugene,” I said, “are you going to introduce us?”

“Sure thing,” said Eugene. He took a small flask out of his inside pocket and took a quick swig. He smacked his lips together and winked at us. “Show business, eh?” he declared. With that he turned and clambered unsteadily up the steps and into the glare of the spotlights. At once the crowd began cheering and whistling, relieved that matters were about to get under way. Eugene squinted out at the audience and waved his arms for silence.

Next to me, Frank turned toward Julie Tippet. He whipped off his dark glasses and gave her an unambiguous look. “We also do
requests
,” he said. Julie giggled again.

Eugene finally got the crowd quiet. He made a few brief announcements about the evening’s schedule and then introduced us. We filed onto the stage. There was some polite applause and we launched into “Brown Eyes, Why Are You Blue?”