A Good American (37 page)

For a long time after Rosa died I stopped playing chess. Recently, though, I’ve begun to go online and do battle with people across the globe. There’s always someone out there looking for a game. We come from every continent, and speak every language known to man, but we find common ground across those sixty-four squares.

As I stare at the computer screen or turn another well-worn page, the person I loved most in the world, the person who loved me more fiercely than I ever knew, is a constant presence at my shoulder. Rosa is there, watching my games and laughing along with me. I am not alone. I am never alone.

J
oseph eventually became bored of resurrecting dead animals to their former, clear-eyed glory, and instead he began to spend his days at the senior center on Philadelphia Road, looking for company and a game of dominoes. And, as it turned out, love.

At the senior center, Joseph created something of a storm with the ladies. He had two things going for him. Firstly, he still had a full, thick head of hair, even if by then it was completely white. Secondly, he was still fully ambulatory. This heady combination had the ranks of wizened octogenarians swooning in their wheelchairs. They watched him walk unassisted across the carpet to fetch another cup of coffee with the rapacious gaze of a flock of vultures.

A quiet but vigorous competition for Joseph’s attention began. The air in the day room became thick with cheap perfume and bitchy comments. Armchairs close to the domino table were poached immediately after breakfast and jealously guarded thereafter. The fragrant hordes waited eagerly for Joseph’s arrival, surreptitiously popping in their teeth moments before he sprang into the room with his gazelle-like grace. Most of his admirers were happy just to grin bashfully at him. But Magda Applequist wanted more.

Magda had woken up one morning a few years previously to discover her husband of forty-nine years dead in the bed beside her, stolen away by a massive stroke during the night. She did not like living alone, and so she began frequenting the senior center on the hunt for a new mate. Once Joseph had drifted unwittingly into her crosshairs, she went out and bought a new outfit and six new lipsticks, each a different shade of pink. No effort was spared to lure him into her honey trap.

Joseph was no match for these predatory wiles. He had no idea he was being hunted, like geriatric big game. Slowly, Magda Applequist reeled him in. Soon he was spending less time playing dominoes, and more time playing gin rummy (a game he’d always hated) with his new lady friend.

I was pleased for him. I thought he deserved a bit of fun, if that was what it was, after so many years alone. Then one day he announced, in a dazed voice, that he and Magda were getting married. I tried to hide my shock. I had viewed their friendship with the patronizing indulgence that the not-quite-so-old reserve for elderly romance. The two of them falling in love was a quaint idea that I couldn’t take entirely seriously.

The wedding was a simple affair at the local registry office. Frank’s ridiculous family filled half the room. A small convoy of cars ferried a coven of pastel-clad ladies over from Philadelphia Road for the service. I guessed from their sour, pinched expressions that these were Magda Applequist’s erstwhile rivals for Joseph’s attentions, and that they had been invited so that the bride could gloat in matrimonial triumph.

At eighty-three years old, Joseph closed the door on his old life, and set off into the future with Magda by his side.

The newlyweds bickered constantly, and since neither one of them was readily able to storm out of the room, their arguments tended to go on for hours. Trapped in their armchairs, they carped and grumbled endlessly at each other until neither could remember exactly what they were fighting about. It didn’t really matter, because in the end they always ended up squabbling about the same thing.

Magda had been a devout Christian all her life, and she was troubled by her new husband’s refusal to attend church with her. She had assumed that she would wear him down eventually, but (as I could have told her) this was one battle that Magda would never win. Every Sunday morning Joseph drove her to church and then sat in the parking lot listening to the car radio until the end of the service. Not once could she persuade him to come inside. They drove home in silence.

When Magda realized that she was never going to change Joseph’s mind, she tried a different tactic. If he was not willing to be saved, she would just have to do it without him. She made plans to give him a full church funeral, in the hope that a last-ditch display of piety might do the trick. When Joseph found out what she was plotting, he became extremely agitated. He was worried enough to visit an attorney to see if his wife could do all those things against his wishes. The lawyer shrugged his shoulders and said that the only foolproof way to make sure that it didn’t happen was to live longer than she did.

So that is what he set about doing. I don’t know how many successful marriages have been based upon the participants’ resolute determination to outlive each other, but it worked for Joseph and Magda. Joseph, haunted by the thought of prayers, hymns, and benevolent sermons (by his own son, to boot), had all the incentive he needed to eat right and stay healthy. Whenever I stopped by to visit he would surreptitiously hand me a shopping list of vitamins and supplements that he wanted, miracle pills that he’d seen advertised on the Shopping Channel.

To my surprise, the old couple flourished in this fractious, slightly morbid, atmosphere. Deep down they were very fond of each other. In the end, their marriage lasted longer than many regular unions. In 2004 they both turned one hundred, and became minor celebrities for a while. Radio and television stations from across the state reported the news. There was a huge cake, but they could only blow out a few of the candles. A week later, Oprah Winfrey and a television crew came by. I have a recording of the interview. I still watch it every now and then. Magda is guarded, distracted, perhaps a little dazed by the banks of television lights in her living room. She seems uncertain about exactly what is going on. Joseph, on the other hand, is suave and funny. I bought him a new shirt and tie for the occasion, which he wears proudly. He even flirts with Oprah a little, patting her beautiful hands and winking creakily at her. He looks directly into the camera and tells his story. At the end of the interview, Oprah softly kisses his leathery old cheek and wipes a tear from her eye.

In the end, Joseph won his race. Watching the two of them on the television, you can see that poor Magda was already fading; she died a short while later. Her decline, when it came, was swift and painless, but Joseph was swamped by his loss. Suddenly he had nobody to fight with, no reason to keep on going. He spent his days sitting in his favorite armchair, gazing sadly at the walls. After Magda’s death I worried that he would allow old age to sweep him away, too, but that was never his way. He plodded resolutely on, swallowing handfuls of brightly colored vitamins, willing himself through each new day, even though he really had nothing left to live for.

CODA

Joseph Meisenheimer finally died last year, at the age of 105—a ridiculous age, although not, apparently, to him. Two months earlier, he had renewed his driver’s license for another three years.

We had been waiting for him to die for so long that when he finally did, nobody knew quite how to react. A good, long life, people agreed—and he’d been as sharp as a tack, right up until the end.
I should be so lucky
, we murmured to each other, wishing we felt a little worse about the whole thing.

Joseph had left precise instructions as to how he wished to be remembered. There was to be no fuss, no grand memorial.

All he wanted, in the end, was the four of us.

W
e filed into the restaurant and I locked the door behind us. Freddy carefully placed the urn holding Joseph’s ashes on the counter next to a pile of colorful laminated menus adorned with Mexican flags. We stood in the middle of the floor and gazed mutely at each other, unsure how to begin.

“Shall we?” I said.

We lined up just as we had always done, and awkwardly turned to face the urn. Teddy produced a pitch pipe from his pocket and gave us our notes. Frank counted two bars, and off we went. As the music filled the room, past and future faded from view. There was nothing but the present, bright and rich with the sound of our voices. Joseph had never stopped loving the music that we made together. Neither had I. But as we bade him farewell, that sweet sound filled me with tender regret.

For I was older now, and I knew that the song would end.

Mr. Jefferson Lord, play that barbershop chord

That smooth-sounding harmony

It makes an awful awful hit with me

Play that strain just to please me again

’Cause Mister when you start that minor part

I feel your fingers slipping and a-grasping at my heart,

Oh Lord play that barbershop chord!

Afterward we went back to the house and scattered our father’s ashes around the apple tree in the front yard.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in Joseph’s house, stuffing his possessions into large black trash bags, unsure what to do with any of it. I stood on a chair and carefully took the broken terra-cotta angel’s wing down from the wall, where it had watched over my family for more than a century. As I stripped the bed of its linen, I saw the corner of a cardboard box poking out from underneath the mattress. I squatted down and pulled it out. Joseph had written
things
on one of the flaps in black felt marker. I opened it up and looked inside.

Staring up at me were Frederick and Jette and Joseph, standing in front of the courthouse on the day that they became American citizens. Beneath that photograph lay another—Joseph and Cora on their wedding day, smiling into the camera and surrounded by that chorus of unhappy ghosts. I dug a little deeper. Carefully preserved between two pieces of cardboard was an old letter. The date, barely legible, was October 13, 1918. As the afternoon sun fell through the window, I sat down on the bed and read the last words my grandfather had written to his sweetheart, more than ninety years ago.

Beneath everything else nestled a white envelope. Inside were court papers, tied up in faded pink ribbon. It was an adoption order, issued by the Circuit Court of Caitlin County, Missouri, in favor of Joseph and Cora Meisenheimer in June 1937. I had been less than a month old. I sat for the longest time, the yellowing paper stiff beneath my fingers.

For all but a month of my life, Joseph had been my father, after all.

I
knew that nobody else would be interested in the stories that I’d found in that cardboard box. My brothers were too busy watching new generations rush headlong into the future. I was the only one who had nowhere to look but back.

As I returned to the box again and again, excavating memories, an idea slowly nudged its way into my brain. I thought of all those unpublished novels that were gathering dust in my spare bedroom, those improbable tales I’d spun out of my imagination. But as I considered the lives enshrined in that aggregation of photographs and artifacts, I realized that there was no need to invent a single thing.

This story will do.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Six years is a long time to be writing a book. An awful lot of people helped out along the way.

Thanks first of all to my editor and publisher, Amy Einhorn. It’s hard to know where to begin, really. There is so much to be greateful for—for rejecting the first draft of this novel with such generous candor and grace; for reading it again twelve months later; for changing her mind!; for her brilliantly insightful guidance during the extensive rewrites that followed; for being an editor who
actually edits
; for the title—and, most of all, for her faith in the story I had to tell. Thank you, Amy. Words aren’t really enough, but they’re all I’ve got.

I will be forever grateful to my agents, Bruce Hunter and Andrew Gordon in London, and Emma Sweeney in New York, for their calm stewardship, endless patience, and excellent advice throughout the publication process.

Thank you to my quartet of reading angels: Christina George, Jennifer Perlow, Elaine Johnson, and Allison Smythe. They have provided invaluable support, encouragement, and astute criticism, propping me up and urging me on when the going got tough. Every writer should be so lucky.

Other honorable mentions: thank you to Nancy Woodruff, for that party invitation; and to Chris Teeter, for naming Buck Gunn for me. Thanks, as always, to Richard Lewis and Louis Barfe. Geography has made things difficult lately, but it always helps to know that they are there, however far away. And I am grateful to my friends in Missouri who have made me feel so welcome over the past nine years, my funny accent notwithstanding.

My deepest thanks to my parents, Alison and Julian George, for their love and strength, new wells of which I keep discovering.

This book is dedicated to my darling Catherine; she and her brother Hallam are the funniest, most loving and wonderful children a father could wish for. I am grateful beyond words that they are here.

My thanks to Charlotte Ross, for the Italian translation, for the opera, and for all the music.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When I left the country I had grown up in to begin a new life on the other side of the world, I was just following in the family tradition.

My mother was born and raised in New Zealand. In her early twenties she took a boat to England, met my father, and decided to stay. A few generations earlier, her great-grandparents had made the trip in the opposite direction, eloping from their English families, who disapproved of their union, and hoping for freedom in the wilderness of the Southern Hemisphere. I left England to live in America because that is where my wife is from. Like Jette and Frederick, the impulse that fueled all our journeys was the same: love.

Before beginning
A Good American
, I had begun, and abandoned, a couple of other ill-fated novels. Some of the most common advice given to aspiring writers is “Write what you know.” It’s a fine theory, but probably only if you have something worth knowing. As I was pondering this, it occurred to me that the experience of packing up my life and moving to a new country, with no expectation that I would ever return home again, might just qualify.

Finally, I had my story.

In some ways, my experience of moving to America in 2003 could not have been much more different from my ancestors’ journey to New Zealand in 1864. But certain essential elements had probably not changed much: the hope for a better life, the fear of the unknown, and the paradox of wanting to adapt to your new country without forgetting where you came from. (My mother has lived in England for more than fifty years now, but she still calls New Zealand home.)

I wanted to set the story in Missouri not just because it’s where I live, but also because there feels something uniquely, unflashily
American
about this strange, largely empty place; it’s the quintessential “flyover” state. You don’t have to spend much time here to recognize the legacy of its German settlers, so it made sense for me to have my characters depart from there, even though Frederick and Jette arrived decades after the first significant influx of German immigrants.

Writing this book was an illuminating experience. It shone a light on my own feelings about moving here. Despite the long and generally amicable relationship between England and America (if we pass discreetly over the War of Independence), people still relish the little things that divide us, like the funny way I talk. But having lived here for some time now, I prefer to consider what unites us. I practiced law for eight years in England, and when I arrived here I had to requalify as an attorney. While I was studying for the bar exam I learned that much of the American legal system was (unsurprisingly) based on the English one. But there remain important differences. Many of the rights of which Americans are so rightly proud—freedom of speech, of religion, of association—are enshrined in the amendments to the United States Constitution. England has no equivalent. We rely instead on cloudier concepts, on an unwritten constitution, shrouded by centuries of jurisprudence.

But I like the American system more. As a writer, I think that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are two of the most exciting and inspiring documents ever written. The principles and beliefs upon which this country was founded are unimpeachable. I am a lawyer and a novelist, and so I have a reverence for words. They are the tools of both of my trades. America’s founding documents provide the guiding light by which much of the world sets its course for the future. In 1630, as he stood on the deck of the
Arabella
just before landing in New England for the first time, John Winthrop preached a sermon that talked of the new settlement as a “city on a hill.” Winthrop knew that the eyes of the world would be upon them. Nothing has changed. The world still looks to America for hope, for inspiration, and for guidance. It’s one reason people have always dreamed of coming here, by fair means or foul.

One of the appeals of the immigrant tale is its ubiquity. Almost every family living in the United States today has a story similar to this one somewhere in its past. Whether ten years ago or three hundred years ago, whether through due process or by way of a midnight ghosting across an unmanned border, whether by slave boat or luxury airplane, we all came here from somewhere.

A brief note for nature lovers: In general, raccoons are nocturnal animals, but some do emerge during the day. When they do, they are not—contrary to popular belief—necessarily rabid. Rosa’s friendship with Mr. Jim is based on real-life experience—although not, I am willing to admit, my own. Raccoons are, of course, wild animals and do not make good pets. Jette was wise not to allow Mr. Jim into her house.

Finally, a brief word about the music. At around the same time that I was beginning to consider immigration as a theme for this novel, my former wife’s great-aunt passed away. Halfway through the memorial service, four men (who, I later discovered, were brothers) stood up at the front of the church and sang a beautiful, close-harmony version of “Abide with Me.” And as I listened, while I should have been thinking about our recently departed family member, all I could think was:
I must put this in a novel
. So I did. (Sorry, Ethel.)