The Clarinet Polka (19 page)

I don't know why I told her any of that. I didn't really care what she thought about it. I wasn't looking for sympathy. I didn't expect anything from her. I didn't like her much, but I knew somehow she wasn't the kind of kid who'd say something stupid that would make me feel worse.

“How did you find out about it?” she asked me. That seemed like a pretty strange question, but I told her about getting the letter from Jeff Doren. “Yeah,” I said, “he wrote me as soon as it happened. He knew I'd want to know what happened as soon as it happened.”

“Was he right? Did you want to know how it happened?”

I didn't have a clue what she was getting at. “Well, sure. Of course I did.”

“Why did you want to know?”

“Well, hell, Janice, what? You think ignorance is bliss? You've got to know. Don't you understand that? It wouldn't be right if you didn't know.”

“It's not morbid to want to know?”

“Oh, Christ, no. Where do you get that morbid business? What the hell are you talking about?” I was getting mad at her all over again.

“My grandfather,” she said, “my father's father—was tortured and killed by the Gestapo.”

Now that's not a line you expect to hear dropped into casual conversation, you know what I mean? And it pretty well stopped me.

“I've asked my father a million times to tell me what happened,” she said. “I wanted to know what my grandfather was doing, how he got caught. I wanted to know what they did to him—how he died. He won't tell me. He says, ‘Janice, you're being morbid. You don't want to know these things.' Do you think I'm being morbid?”

“Oh, hell no.”

“I don't want to think about it like it's some dumb old movie, you know, like ‘Ve haff vays of making you talk.' I know it wasn't like that. But he won't tell me what it was really like.”

That cold rain was really hammering my Chevy, blowing in my open window. We were parked at the end of her block. Big houses on big lots, and trees all up and down the street, bending in the wind, most of their leaves gone, and I remember how dark the sky was and how cheery the lights in the houses looked against that sky, and us out on the street in my car in the dark. I don't think we would've had that conversation if it'd been a nice sunny afternoon, you know what I mean?

She must have wanted to talk about this with somebody for a long time. The words were just pouring out of her. “As long as I can remember, my dad's always said to me, ‘Thank God, Janice, you'll never know what it was like. You'll never have to see what we saw. You'll never have to do what we did.' And then other times, it's not ‘thank God,' it's like he's angry with me—furious with me—because I got out of it. Because I didn't have to live through it.

“He was in the Home Army,” she said, “and Mom was in a labor camp. We've always known that, but they won't tell us anything about it. We have relatives in Poland, but he won't even tell us their names. He gets letters from Poland, but we're not allowed to see them. We get letters from England too, and sometimes we even get letters from Israel. Why on earth would we be getting letters from Israel? It's got to be something to do with the war, but he gets mad if you even ask him about it. ‘Janice,' he says, ‘thank God you'll never know what it was like.' Over and over and over he says that. But I
want
to know what it was like. Don't I have a right to know?

“‘Janice,' he says, ‘you're an ordinary American girl.' Well, that's just crazy. How on earth does he think I could possibly be an ordinary American girl? He made us all learn Polish. We had to study it just like we were in school. We read to each other in Polish every Sunday night. Mark and I used to play Polish Resistance and pretend we were hiding from the Germans. That's an ordinary American childhood? ‘Be happy,' my dad says. ‘You have all the advantages. You have everything we didn't have.'

“You know what my older brother said? Johnny. He was born in a DP camp in Germany. The last time he came home, he kept trying to get Dad to tell him about the war, and Dad just kept getting madder and madder until they were yelling at each other. John said, ‘This house has too many damn secrets in it,' and he just stormed out and drove back down to Columbus. He hasn't been back since.”

So Janice and I sat there and talked for—oh, I guess it must have been over an hour. It was really intense. There's nobody in the world more intense than a fifteen-year-old girl. Well, one thing led to another, and I ended up telling her about the Red Alert when I was stationed down at Carswell. I hadn't told that story to anybody before. I don't know why I'd never told it to anybody before.

“I'm driving onto base,” I say, “and they're just shoving those B-52s up as fast as they can get them airborne—faWOOM, faWOOM, faWOOM—and I say, ‘Hey, what's going on?' and it's a Red Alert, and that's nuclear war.”

The way they'd run tests before went like this. The klaxon sounded, and they told you, “Now you're on alert,” and then they'd time you—like how quick you could report to the aircraft—but when they were running those tests, they never even fired up the aircraft. I was part of what they called “Leapfrog Mobility,” and the tests were to check out our response time in case of nuclear war. But this time it was different. There was no klaxon. Nobody said it was a test. We jumped on board the aircraft, and they fired it up and away we went. We thought it was for real.

“So the first thing you've got is this crazy euphoria, like, hey, wow, we did it. Because we'd got off the ground ahead of the incoming missiles. And then it starts to sink in. Oh. Christ. Where are the nukes coming down? I knew the Russians would hit the valley, you know, because of the steel mills.”

“Mother of God,” she says, whispering it.

“So anyhow, they sent us to Goose Bay, Labrador. The next thing we're worrying about is what we're going to find on the ground when we get there. Like is anybody going to be there to meet us, or has it been nuked out? Will we even be able to land? Well, we get to Goose Bay, and they say, ‘Surprise, it was all a test. You guys did real good.'”

“Oh, you must have been so scared,” she says.

“Well, yeah, what do you think?” And then it dawned on me that I'd just answered the question she'd asked me driving up the hill. I'd forgot all about it.

“I'm really afraid,” she said. “You know Our Lady of Fatima? The Third Secret. I'm really afraid of what it could be.”

“What? You think it's nuclear war?”

She just nodded.

“Yeah,” I said, “it gets kind of depressing if you think about it too much. Sitting there on that flight to Goose Bay— You try to imagine what the world's going to be like. And you know that your life, whatever happens, the most you can hope for— Well, whatever happens, you know it's going to be fairly grim. It's not something you can come back from. Do you understand what I'm telling you? You're just not the same person after that.”

We probably could have kept on talking for a couple more hours, but then suddenly it hits me, hey, we're late. I'm looking at my watch, going, “Oh, my God, we've got to get you home.”

Czesław jumps on us the minute we walk through the door. He looks mad enough to spit carpet tacks. “Where have you been?” he yells at Janice in Polish. Her mom's right behind him, and she's going, “Oh, we've been worried sick.”

It was the first time I met her mother and her brother Mark—I mean other than just seeing them, you know, at Mass. Janice's parents are falling all over us, and Mark's kind of standing there in the background trying to keep them calmed down. They'd imagined us going off the road in the rain and laying dead at the bottom of Highlight Road somewhere. Janice flips instantly into Polish, telling them that we've been sitting in my car talking about my experiences in the war effort, which I guess we have.

“If you want to talk,” Czesław yells at Janice, “you come home and talk. Never, never, never do something like this again.” And of course she's going, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't know how late it was.”

Well, you would've thought we'd been standing out in the rain all that time, not sitting in a car. We've got to huddle up by the fire, and I get to knock back a couple shots of paint thinner, and I'm doing my best to blend right into the woodwork—you know, sitting there watching it all go down.

Janice's brother Mark looks just like his dad, only smaller and younger. Tall and thin, dark curly hair cut real short because he goes to the Academy. Big Adam's apple sticking out, black-framed glasses—yeah, he looks like somebody who gets straight A's. But Janice's mom was the one that really got me. She was a lot more dressed up than you'd expect for somebody just staying home on a Tuesday night. She had a skirt and sweater on, dark colors, and high heels. Not the tacky kind, the expensive kind. I'd seen her in church lots of times and wondered who she was, because—well, the point I'm trying to make here is, she didn't look like somebody's mom.

She was a paler blond than Janice, and she had these wide-spaced, light blue eyes. She wasn't tall, but for a minute you thought she was, because she stood straight as a plumb bob. Even when she sat down, her back was perfectly straight. She had to be in her forties, but— Well, it wasn't like she looked a lot younger than that; she was the kind of woman, it's hard to guess her age. She was the kind of woman you'd turn around and stare at on the street as she goes sailing by not giving you a glance. When she was a girl back in Poland, she must have knocked all the boys dead within a radius of about ten miles.

Looking at her parents, I can see how their genes went together to make Janice. She got the best of both of them. Janice was a head taller than her mom and skinny as a peeled stick, so she'd got that from her dad—and his dark blue eyes. From her mom she'd got the blond hair and something else. I don't quite know how to—Well, let's say you were in a room with one of them, and they weren't saying anything or even doing much of anything, you'd still always know they were there.

I was nervous as all hell because I was the one, you know, who'd screwed up and didn't get Janice home on time, and my Polish sure wasn't good enough to jump into their conversation, and then it's like Mrs. Dłuwiecki was reading my mind because she switches into English and says, “Oh, how impolite of us. You must feel terribly excluded.”

I'd been thinking that maybe they'd been speaking Polish because her English wasn't too good, but I gave up that idea pretty quick. “No, problem,” I say. “I can pretty well follow everything.”

So she launches in, saying all these polite things to make me feel like a welcome visitor in their home and not some totally irresponsible jerk—like how nice of us to have Janice over on Tuesday nights and how kind of me to drive her home and apologizing for all the fuss they made when we came in. “You must think we're terribly strict with Janusia,” she says, “but we just want to know she's safe. Every time you open the paper, you read about such terrible things that can happen to people.”

SEVEN

You ever do a 180-degree flip on somebody you didn't like and end up liking them a lot? Well, that's what happened with Janice. After that night in the car, I stopped thinking of her as Perfect, and we got to be pretty relaxed with each other, and I looked forward to our little bit of time alone together on Tuesdays. Sometimes I'd turn onto Edgewood and park in the spot where we'd been that night in the rain, and we'd sit there for a few minutes more and try to wrap up our conversation, but I was always careful to get her home on time. After a while we got so we were doing, I guess you could say, a once-a-week debriefing on each other's life. It was nice. It was like having another little sister.

Most of what I'd thought about her turned out to be dead wrong. She may have looked like a little goody-two-shoes, but she wasn't like that at all. I'd figured her for an honors student, but she was kind of mediocre in school. She did as little as she could get away with, so if her little bit got her an A, like it did in English, that was okay, but if her little bit only got her a C+, like it did in math, that was okay too. She liked playing her clarinet and hanging out with her girlfriends and sitting alone in her room reading books that had nothing at all to do with her schoolwork. She felt like she was attached to St. Stanislaus Parish, but she didn't feel very attached to Raysburg Central Catholic. Most of what went on at Central she thought was totally ridiculous.

Naturally she talked a lot about her family. She was real fond of her older brother, John. The year he left home and went off to Columbus, she was going into the fourth grade, and she cried for days. She thought she was a lot like him. “We both know our own minds,” she said, “and we're both stubborn like our dad.” John always treated her with respect even when she'd been a tiny little girl, and she never forgot it. “It's probably because of John,” she said, “that I feel so comfortable with older boys.”

Her brother Mark she got along with okay, but she didn't have too much in common with him. He was top of his class at the Academy, sang in the glee club, collected stamps, studied books on chess moves, and basically did a bunch of uncool stuff like that, and he hung out with the other uncool guys in his class, and he brought them home for dinner. Janice's mom kept telling her she should go out with them—because they were Academy boys, you know, from out the pike—but Janice thought they were all hopeless. “I'm a big disappointment to Mom,” she said.

To Mrs. Dłuwiecki, everything that was good and true and beautiful was Poland before the war. She went on and on about the beautiful china and crystal and silver her family used to have, and all the oil paintings that'd been in the family for generations. She remembered all the fancy outfits she'd ever worn, and she described them to Janice down to the finest detail. She even remembered things like her white veil and her little white shoes from her first Communion that she'd saved in a special wooden box, and the little silver scissors her mother had used to cut the roses—and all that beautiful stuff was gone, lost, plundered by the Germans. She didn't even have any photographs from those days. She said she'd lost her precious heritage and all she had left was memory.