Read A Good American Online

Authors: Alex George

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

A Good American (10 page)

Punch by punch, fight by fight, his pile of money grew.

TEN

The cost of my grandfather’s steadily accumulating nest egg lay not only in the bloody noses of strangers. A higher price was being paid closer to home.

Frederick could think of little else except the day that the Nick-Nack would be his. He spent all day and all night at the tavern, watching over his dreams, while Jette and the children waited for him to come home. He responded to his wife’s attempts to engage him in any other topic of conversation with a peeved tolerance that drove her to despair. When she accused him of no longer caring about his family, Frederick was sullen and unapologetic. He had not abandoned them, he said stiffly; quite the opposite. He was investing in their future.

Soon they did nothing but fight. Resentment and disappointment soured even the simplest exchanges. Jette was unable to hide her scorn for Frederick’s purported plan for the future.
What plan
?
she demanded angrily.

It was a fair question. Frederick had not told her about all the money he had saved. He did not know how to explain where it had come from. He certainly did not want to tell her the truth.

He was ashamed of the truth.

Jette began to mourn the man she had fallen in love with, sadly remembering the bighearted beauty of his first words to her:

 

When it comes to dreams and fancies

and castles in the air,

I have the soul of a millionaire!

Now it seemed that dreams and fancies were no longer enough. Castles in the air could not compete with local real estate. Jette blamed America for hoodwinking Frederick with its empty, rotten promises.

Then a letter came from Hanover.

She did not recognize the handwriting on the envelope. She tore it open and scanned the single sheet of paper within. The letter was from a lawyer. The sentences came, one after the other, heavy with formal regret. From that unyielding thicket of dry, legal prose: her parents were dead.

Jette’s mother had suffered a violent heart attack two months previously. Her father had followed her shortly afterward, precise cause of death still unknown. The lawyer, charged by the court with the administration of the couple’s estate, had discovered boxes of Jette’s letters while compiling an inventory of their assets. Her mother had not thrown a single one away.

The news knocked the fight out of her.

There were no more angry confrontations. Silence descended on my family’s house.

J
oseph watched as his parents sank into their embattled stalemate. All he knew was that there was no more singing, no more laughter. Frederick had become a spectral presence, flitting in and out of the house under cover of night. Joseph stood at the closed bedroom door and listened to Jette sob into her pillow. He understood that the world as he knew it was coming to a messy end. He became a serious, unsmiling boy, haunted by his parents’ sadness, sure that he was somehow to blame.

Once a month Frederick visited Frau Bloomberg’s house for one of Joseph’s music lessons. He listened to his son sing, with equal amounts of astonishment and pleasure. At the end of each session he stood and applauded, and then he opened his arms. This was the moment that Joseph waited for. He ran to his father and held on to him as tightly as he could. He would remember every sensation of that embrace—his face squashed against the rough fabric of Frederick’s trousers, his almost unbearable happiness for those few, sweet moments—for the rest of his life.

Soon after Joseph’s ninth birthday, Frederick and Riva Bloomberg decided that he was ready for his first public performance. They agreed that he should sing “Addio del passato,” Violetta’s mournful aria from
La Traviata
, at the Nick-Nack’s next opera night. Joseph practiced for weeks, polishing every phrase of Verdi’s melody until it shone. Thanks to Frau Bloomberg’s inventive translations, he was under the impression that he was singing about a small dog that had fallen down a well, rather than the wreckage of a doomed love affair. Joseph was fond of dogs, as Frau Bloomberg knew. The plight of the fictional mutt added an emotional edge to his performance, and the effect was mesmerizing.

Frederick made Joseph and Riva Bloomberg promise to say nothing of their plans to Jette. He wanted to surprise her. Opera nights were now the only time she ever set foot in the Nick-Nack.

On the evening of the concert, Jette and the children stood at the back of the room, watching Frederick perform. At the end of the recital, Frederick bowed to acknowledge the crowd’s applause, and then held up his hands for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you are good enough to come here and listen to me sing my little songs. But tonight I am pleased to introduce you to a young man who has more talent in his little finger than I have in my whole body. He has never sung in front of an audience before.” Frederick looked across the room and smiled. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present—Joseph Meisenheimer.”

Joseph began to make his way through the crowd, his excitement growing with every step.

Over the course of the last few weeks, he had convinced himself that his performance that night would make his parents happy again. He would sing his song, and, overwhelmed with love and pride, Frederick and Jette would collapse into each other’s arms. The miserable chill of the past year would be forgotten. It was the prospect of their reconciliation that excited him as he clambered up onto the stage. Joseph arrived at his father’s side, shyly took his hand, and then, finally, turned with a hopeful grin toward Jette.

She was not there.

A
s Jette had watched Joseph weave through the crowd, she knew at once that she could not, would not, watch him sing. She had no wish to see her son become another singer of songs before an audience of drunks. At once she began pulling Rosa toward the exit. A path cleared in front of her. As she reached the door, a hand touched her elbow.

“Jette,” said Frederick. “Where are you going?”

“I’m not going to listen to this,” said Jette angrily. “Don’t expect me to—”

“Jette, please. Come back and hear your son sing.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“He has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. I swear, the birds stop to listen.”

Jette struggled to contain her fury. “Why didn’t you tell me you were planning this?”

Frederick’s face crumpled in disappointment. “I wanted to
surprise
you,” he said.

Jette turned and looked across the room. Joseph stood in the middle of the stage, watching them. He had never looked so alone.

“Up there is no place for a small boy,” she said.

“But his voice. It’s a miracle. Up there is where he needs to be.”

“No, Frederick. Up there is where
you
need him to be.” Before he could reply, she pushed open the door and left.

Frederick made his way back through the crowd to where his son stood.

“She’s gone,” whispered Joseph.

“But you’ll still sing, won’t you?” asked Frederick. He smiled weakly and put his hand on Joseph’s shoulder. “We don’t want to let these good people down, do we?”

The boy stared at the tavern door.

“Joseph?”

“Yes, Papa?”

“Are you ready?”

Joseph looked toward the piano, where Riva Bloomberg was eyeing him over the top of her music. The whole town was listening—except for the one person who mattered. He gave a small, mournful nod.

“Good boy.” Frederick patted him on the back and retreated to the side of the stage. The opening notes of the piano accompaniment floated into the room. Joseph readied himself to deliver the first line.

When he opened his mouth to sing, no noise came out.

Riva Bloomberg faltered, and eventually subsided into silence. Prompted by Frederick’s gestures, she tentatively played the introduction again. Once more Joseph took a deep breath, and again the audience watched the words form silently on his lips.

After four bars, Riva Bloomberg’s fingers finally stilled. In the silence Joseph stared over the heads of the audience toward the tavern door. Finally Frederick stepped onto the stage and led his son away.

T
he following morning the citizens of Beatrice gravely addressed these events. People recounted the episode, shaking their heads at the strangeness of it all. The image of Joseph Meisenheimer, soundlessly opening and closing his mouth like a marooned goldfish, gripped the town.

The odd thing was that Joseph could still sing like an angel. He continued with his lessons, and in private his voice still made Riva Bloomberg weep. Joseph could not explain what had happened that night. A few months later, they agreed to try again, but the same thing happened. Joseph silently mouthed phrases, his chest heaving with effort. That was when Frederick decided that enough was enough.

Dr. Becker examined Joseph and concluded that there was nothing physically wrong with him. Of course there wasn’t. It was simply that every time he was confronted with an audience, no matter how small, the memory of Jette’s face looking at him across the crowd arose unbidden, and caught the notes in his throat. This was Joseph’s tragedy: all that beauty, hidden from the world. It was our tragedy, too, in a way, for it was his silence that condemned us to our own peculiar musical fate.

Even though the rest of the town couldn’t stop talking about it, Frederick and Jette never discussed what had happened that night. The house fell back into its old uncomfortable silence.

While Joseph was embarked on his futile attempt to engineer Frederick and Jette’s reconciliation through song, his sister exploited her parents’ disharmony to advance her own agenda. She played her parents with unblinking virtuosity, orchestrating conflict, whipping up maelstroms of guilt, agitating for favors. Frederick and Jette were too unhappy to realize what she was doing.

Rosa’s manipulation of her parents was an act of desperation, not malice. The three years that separated her from her brother—three years that Joseph had had Frederick and Jette all to himself, in the full-beamed glare of their adoration—were a torment she could not stand. She believed herself second-best, an afterthought. In Rosa’s imagination, her inferior status was as real as the fingers on her hand. And so she set about her family, pulling them this way and that, trying to make them love her more.

One afternoon a few months after Joseph’s disastrous evening at the Nick-Nack, Rosa came in from playing in the yard, complaining of a headache. By the evening she was writhing in sheets sodden with sweat, her face as gray as stone. The following morning there were flecks of blood on her pillow and an angry rash across her chest. Dr. Becker was summoned. His sober diagnosis: typhus. Before long the only sound in the house was the rasp of air shuttling in and out of Rosa’s fragile lungs as she fought for each breath. Every morning the doctor appeared by her bedside while Frederick and Jette hovered anxiously behind him. After his examination, the three adults would confer in grave murmurs. As the illness wrung her young body into exhausted defeat, here, finally, was the evidence Rosa had been craving, proof that her parents
did
love her, after all.

Dr. Becker had told Frederick and Jette that Rosa would be dead within a month, but he had not counted on my aunt’s formidable willpower. Rosa was never going to allow herself to die—not
now
, after she had finally witnessed the love and affection that she had dreamed of for so long. She began to fight the disease. Three weeks later she was cheerfully sitting up in her bed, eating like a horse. Becker declared her a medical miracle. Rosa watched her mother’s tears of gratitude, and felt a warm glow of happiness inside her.

It did not last long. Once she was healthy again, Rosa was appalled to discover that there were no more anxious bedside conferences, no more covert looks of worry, no more tears. She had much preferred the haunted, red-eyed look that her mother had worn during her illness.

Poor Rosa! She had been offered a tantalizing glimpse of everything she had longed for, only for life to return to its old, intolerable ways. Naturally enough, she did everything she could to make herself sick again. She foraged for toadstools in the woods and ate them where she found them. When that didn’t work, she started licking anywhere she thought germs might be lurking—dirty floors, the soles of other people’s shoes. More than once Joseph found his sister furtively running her tongue over mud-encrusted rocks from the yard, her eyes squeezed shut in hope and disgust. Every winter Rosa would stay outside in the snow as long as she could, woefully underdressed, courting influenza. She hovered outside Dr. Becker’s consulting rooms, hoping to give a home to a stray virus. When, to her fury, she remained resolutely healthy, she tried a different approach, and began to concoct symptoms. Her first attempts at such medical dissembling were betrayed by an unchecked melodramatic streak that she had inherited from Frederick. The spectacle of her obviously healthy daughter thrashing around gibbering deathbed hysterics three times a week quickly alerted Jette to her scheme.

But even if her parents were not fooled, Rosa eventually began to believe her own fantasies. She became convinced that she really
was
ill. Dr. Becker’s heart sank whenever he saw her in the waiting room, always with the same purposeful look on her young face.

It wasn’t just her parents’ affection that Rosa craved. She adored her brother, too. But while Frederick and Jette’s indifference toward her was simply a figment of her imagination, with Joseph it was real enough. Rosa was a loud, complicating presence in Joseph’s life, and he wanted nothing to do with her. His antipathy toward her manifested itself in a campaign of sly provocation. He pinched her, poked her, and pulled her hair. He called her names that he did not understand himself. He hid her toys, or put them in plain sight where she could not reach them.

Rosa suffered these cruel indignities in hurt silence. Joseph’s antics frequently left her in tears, but not once did she run tattling to Jette—she did not want to get him in trouble. For she loved her brother more than anyone else, deeply and forever.

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