Summer of My German Soldier (3 page)

“Wait till she gets a boyfriend,” Mrs. Fields was saying. “She’ll spend all her time fixing herself up.”

“I wish I was sure of that! Some children just seem to be born with things others aren’t. Now, take Sharon, she was never a moment’s trouble.”

If there were no mirrors or mothers I probably never would know how ugly I am. But it was all there, plain as my reflection in the glass. Skinny bones, skinny face, feet too big, and nose too long. In the mirror I could also see my mother’s profile: a high cool forehead and a slender nose that stopped where a nice nose ought to. A lot like Sharon’s. And there were the lofty cheekbones that gave mother’s face form, symmetry, and on occasion, great beauty. Sometimes I think God lavished so much beauty on her outsides that when he got around to her insides there just wasn’t much of anything left over.

When I returned with the comb my mother pulled a stray hair from its teeth before sliding it back into her pocket. “Wonder if Ellie Mae would have time for me?” she said.

Walking to the wall phone, she fluffed her hair into place as she gave the crank a couple of turns. “Mary, please ring up M’Lady Beauty Parlor in Wynne City.... No, I don’t have the number,” she said, resting her arm on the Rice County telephone directory.

“Mother, did you hear about the POWs?” I asked. “A bunch of them just came in by train.”

“I don’t know why they don’t keep them over in Europe where they belong. It’s dangerous having those criminals a mile from town.” Her head shifted back to the speaker. “Hello, is this Ellie Mae? ... Do you know who this is? ... Well, Ellie Mae, I can be in Wynne City in about fifteen minutes. Do you think you could take me right away? ... Just a wash and set and one of your nice color rinses. ... Oh, fine, see you in a few minutes.”

Actually, and I’ve told her this, her hair looks its very best just before she goes to the beauty parlor. By the time they finish with her it’s tight and unreal, like the hair on a department store manikin.

I watched her tear off a strip of adding-machine tape and write, “$5 Pearl,” before exchanging her scribbled note for a fresh five-dollar bill.

As my mother carefully applied her make-up in front of the three-way mirror, Mrs. Burton Benn came into the store looking as though she was on an important mission. A step away from my mother she halted. “Mrs. Bergen,” she said, in the same tone that she must use when calling her Sunday-school class together, “I have something to say.”

My mother smiled. “What can I do for you today, Mrs. Benn?”

“It’s about your Nigra!” said Mrs. Benn.

“Ruth?” answered my mother as though she weren’t completely sure of the name.

“Yes, Ruth! After supper last night the Reverend told me that I ought to leave the dishes and get right over to the Sav-Mor Market, take advantage of the marked down hamburg.
Well,
” she said, making the word sound important. “Your Ruth, that uppity Nigra, sees me making a bee-line for the meat counter and she practically breaks out in a run to get there first. She tells Gene, ‘Give me the rest of that hamburg.’” Mrs. Benn’s voice sounded like a white woman trying to imitate a colored one. “Now, you just tell me what’s a darky gonna do with two pounds of hamburg? All she wanted was to keep me from getting any and that’s the truth!”

“Oh,” said my mother, sounding genuinely grieved. “She’s probably eaten it by now.”

“I don’t
want
that meat!”

“What do you want?” asked my mother, confused.

“To teach her a lesson. I want you to fire her!”

I watched my mother gently shake her head No. She’s getting ready to tell off Mrs. Benn, I thought. She’s going to tell her how good and kind Ruth is—how much we love her, Sharon and me. “I just can’t fire Ruth,” she apologized. “She’s the best cook and house cleaner we’ve ever had.”

In the shoe department my father sat alone, his lean body half-hidden behind the open pages of the afternoon
Memphis Press Scimitar.

“I came here specially to tell you,” I began, wishing that Ruth could hear all my sweetness, “about the Nazis that came into Jenkinsville on the eleven thirty train.”

He turned from the paper. “What about them?”

I felt like an actress who finally gets her big chance, but just at the moment the spotlights expose her she remembers that she has neglected to learn her lines. “Well,” I said, “there was a whole bunch of them. They were about as big and mean-looking as anybody could be.”

His eyes went back to the
Press Scimitar.

“Well, aren’t you interested in the really exciting thing that happened?”

“What happened?”

Some people say that God strikes down a liar—Boom! I decided to risk it. “One of the prisoners tried to escape.”

A wrinkle of genuine interest came slicing between his neat black eyebrows. “You mean, after they got off the train?”

“Yes, sir. As soon as he stepped off the train, I noticed that his head started moving around, so right away I became suspicious. I guess the guard noticed it too because he came right up behind him and said, ‘Make one move and I’ll blow your brains out.’ Just like that. ‘I’ll blow your brains out.’”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, sir, that’s all.”

“Then let me read my paper in peace.”

If you follow Main past Front Street, the road continues even though the pavement ends. I stood at the corner looking down the narrow dirt road towards Nigger Bottoms, wishing to be black for a while so that I could enter into the other Jenkinsville. By the side of the road two women stood. Nearby, a scrawny rooster chased a large speckled hen. The bigger of the women pointed to the hysterical hen before
leaning her head close to the ear of her friend. Suddenly their heads fell back and the high notes of their laughter carried all the way up to Front Street.

The thought came to me that even from a distance people dislike being watched. I moved on down Front Street to Mr. Matthew Hawkes’ run-down drugstore. People say the aspirin old Matty sells has been on the shelf so long that it gives more headaches than it could ever take away.

Next to Hawkes’s drugstore is Cook Brothers’ Furniture and Appliances. Then comes a secondhand-clothing store which never had a sign saying what its name is. After that is Mr. J.G. Jackson’s cotton gin office, and the office and printing press of Mr. Quentin Blakey’s
Rice County Gazette.

And right next to the
Gazette’
s office is something interesting. I mean, you wouldn’t exactly think it was interesting because there’s nothing there now besides a vacant building with a Coca-Cola advertisement and a sign that says THE CHU LEE GROCERY CO. Well, Mr. Lee—everybody called him “the Chink”—was the first merchant to open every morning and the very last to close. Maybe that was because of him and Mrs. Lee living in the back of the store, so convenient and all.

What happened I don’t exactly understand. One day he was doing business just like always, and the next day without so much as a going-out-of-business sale he had taken his groceries and left. I guess it happens; people get sick or find better opportunities elsewhere.

But why would there be this hole, bigger than a football, right through the plate-glass window? At first I thought maybe the moving men hadn’t been careful when they were carting things out, but when I looked inside the empty store
there was all this glass lying around the floor, so the window just had to be broken from the outside.

I would have forgotten all about it except for what I happened to hear Mr. J.G. Jackson say to my father. “Our boys at Pearl Harbor would have got a lot of laughs at the farewell party we gave the Chink.” Then Mr. Jackson laughed and my father gave a weak laugh, too, as though his heart wasn’t really in it but still he wanted to keep the respect of so important a man as Mr. J.G. Jackson.

Later, when I asked my father what Mr. Jackson meant by that, he told me that I was never in my life to mention it again. All I know is that if Mr. Lee had been Japanese, then it might have made more sense. Anyway, there’s probably a simple logical explanation. It couldn’t be what I think.

2. Swimming the Mississippi

I
T WAS TEN O’CLOCK
Sunday morning when my father came back from doing his bookwork at the store and asked, just as nice as you please, if we were all ready to go to Memphis. Like he didn’t mind at all. My mother dearly loves “to go home” again. And Sharon likes playing with our little cousins, Diane and Jerry. Me? Sometimes Grandpa and I discuss the important things that are happening in the world. We both, for example, think President Roosevelt is a very
great man. I talk a lot with Grandma too, but she’s always asking me questions: Am I gaining any weight?—not really. How am I doing at school?—I make a lot of
C
s. Then she gets around to the hardest question of all: Do I have a lot of friends?—I guess so.

But even with the questions Grandma and Grandpa are nice, so I’ve never understood exactly why my father disliked them so much.

I think the problem may have started when he married my mother, and Grandpa didn’t give him a job in his real estate business, S. Fried & Sons. Now, my father is always saying that he’d rather starve than have to work for Grandpa and his brothers-in-law, but I think he resented it all the same. Because the company is big enough not only for Grandpa and his two sons but for two of Grandpa’s nephews and even the outsider, Bernard Kaplan, who runs the insurance end of things.

Considering the trouble my father had with his own parents, it’s really sad that he doesn’t have in-laws he can love. Even now, he never ever mentions his own mother. I don’t remember Grandma Bergen as being mean, but I was only about Sharon’s age when she died, so I don’t know for sure. About the only sure thing I remember is her hair, which was auburn like mine. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed that. Uncle Max, my father’s oldest brother, says my hair, my eyes, and even “my way” remind him of her.

Uncle Max also told me that on a poor working-class street like Hamel Street, in South Memphis, the Bergens were considered the poorest of the poor. Grandma Bergen’s dresses were washed so many times that the threads were almost countable. And poor Grandpa Bergen, a cobbler, died of a
heart attack at forty-two when he was only seven dollars short of saving enough for a stitching machine. With one of those machines he was sure he could repair enough shoes to support his family.

Which gets to another point. Since the Bergens were so poor, I think my father would still be a ticket seller at Union Station if it hadn’t been for Grandpa and Grandma Fried’s lending him the money to go into business. So wouldn’t you expect him to be all choked up with gratitude? Well, he’s not! Maybe it’s because he hates favors—not so much to give as to take them. “I don’t like to be obligated,” is the way he puts it. It’s as though, in his own heart, he believes that he could never have made it without them. And he hates having needed them. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

“Lock the doors,” my father ordered as he backed the car down the driveway. At the First Baptist Church corner I touched his shoulder and pointed towards the glass-enclosed sign in the churchyard. “Hey, did you see that? It says, ‘Sin now—pay later.’ I didn’t know they charged for that, did you?” I started up a laugh, but when nobody joined in, it made a hollow sound.

“O.K.,” he said, “don’t bother me when I’m driving.”

Suddenly Sharon jumped off the back seat and touched my father’s shoulder at the very spot I had touched. “There’s a bee on you!” she shouted. “April fools!”

From deep within his throat my father chuckled, while Mother turned around to give Sharon a love pinch on her cheek. “Are you the bad girl that fooled your daddy?” she asked.

Sharon reached out to touch the neck of Mother’s lavender
dress. “There’s a bee on you. April fools!” She squealed with delight.

Mother pretended horror. “Get that bee away!” she said, swatting at the neck of her dress.

After a few more of Sharon’s April-fool bees, Mother seemed to tire of the game. “Can’t you do something?” she asked me. “Amuse Sharon. Tell her the story of the ‘Three Little Pigs.’”

“I don’t know if I remember that story,” I lied. “But the story of ‘Cinderella’ and her wicked stepmother is still fresh in my mind.”

At the end of the story when Cinderella marries the world’s handsomest prince at the world’s fanciest wedding Sharon sighed, looking every bit as happy as the bride and a whole lot sleepier. She curled up in the corner, and with just a touch of a smile on her lips, fell asleep.

“So, if we take the men’s underwear to the back of the store,” Mother was saying, “we could use the front counter for an impulse item.”

“Men’s underwear is a big seller. We sold more than six thousand dollars’ worth last year.”

“But, Harry, we’d sell every bit as much,” she argued, “because men come in specially to buy it. But with women’s blouses it’s different. A woman sees something pretty and she just ups and buys it spur of the moment.”

“Well,” said my father as though he didn’t want to give in too quickly, “don’t go moving things tomorrow; we’ve got a lot of merchandise waiting to be checked in.”

When we reached the two-lane Harrihan Bridge that connects West Memphis, Arkansas, to Memphis, Tennessee, I
looked down at the bluey-brown Mississippi. They say the river’s current is strong and very few people have ever been able to swim across, although not a year goes by that somebody doesn’t drown in the attempt. This may sound crazy because the only time I ever go swimming is a couple of times in early summer when Edna Louise Jackson’s mother takes a bunch of us to the public pool in Wynne City, but I could swim it. The secret is in absolutely refusing to let the river beat you down. If I had to, I’d measure my progress in inches. One more inch I’ve swum—one less inch to swim. Once you know the secret, then nobody’s river can bring you down.

On Riverside Drive, “Memphis’s front door,” my father dropped his speed down to between thirty and thirty-five miles per hour.

My mother was resting her head against the seat, her eyes closed as though she were dozing. She was wearing her healthy-looking black hair in my favorite way—brushed back so that her widow’s peak shone like an extra added attraction above her high forehead. And hers wasn’t an everyday pretty face. The shape of the nose, the cut of the chin, but it was more than that—more than its parts. My mother’s face was an artist’s vision of sensitivity, intelligence, and love. And so it had to be a big lie what they say about beauty being only skin deep. For if it weren’t really there why would it show?