TWELVE
After she had silently watched Frederick knock on the kitchen window and then disappear, my grandmother began to make plans.
A few hours later, she marched down to the doctor’s office, where Dr. Becker received her with a smile.
“How nice to see you, Jette,” he said.
“He didn’t tell you, then?” she said flatly.
Becker frowned. “Tell me what?”
“Frederick has volunteered for the army.”
“Pardon?”
Jette nodded. “He’s gone off to fight in this awful war.”
The doctor laced his fingers together and looked at her thoughtfully. “How extraordinary,” he said.
“I’m sorry he didn’t tell you before he left.”
“So am I,” said Becker. “I would have told him what a fool he was.”
“Too late for that.” Jette’s face was grim. “I’m here to ask if I can take over his job at the Nick-Nack. I know I have no experience, but without his salary we have no means of support, and I don’t know how—”
To her surprise, Becker started to chuckle. She stared at him. “Is something the matter?”
“It looks as if your dear husband has been keeping secrets from both of us,” said the doctor.
That was how Jette learned that Frederick owned both the tavern and their home. She sat in Dr. Becker’s office and wept, stung by his deception. And then she realized that she had kept secrets, too—she had never told Frederick about the death of her parents. All that was left was the silence of their untold truths.
Her sadness took her breath away.
L
ater that morning Jette made her way to the Nick-Nack. Polk was sweeping the floor as she entered.
“Well,” she said, “he’s gone.”
There was a pause.
“I’m sorry,” said Polk. “Who’s gone?”
Jette looked around her. The last time she had been inside the Nick-Nack was the night of Joseph’s ill-fated opera recital. “I suppose you imagine you’ll be in charge now.”
Polk’s face was blank. “In charge?”
“There’s no need to pretend anymore, Polk,” Jette said, sighing. “It’s happened. Frederick has gone.”
At this Polk leaned weakly on the handle of his broom. “Gone
where
?”
The look of bewilderment on the old man’s face seemed genuine enough. “He’s gone to join the army. To fight,” said Jette, more gently.
Polk’s face crumpled. “But what about this place?”
“That’s what I want to discuss with you. Now, I have no idea when Frederick will return. But until he gets back I’m going to help you. You will continue to do what you do best, which is to serve drinks. I’ll do everything else. If you agree, I’ll double your salary, starting today.”
Polk remained completely still. His knuckles had whitened around the end of the broom handle.
For as long as he could remember, Polk’s life had revolved around alcohol—the making of it, the serving of it, and the drinking of it. There had been women once, but a long time ago. They had all escaped in the end. One had married a cattle farmer and gone to live in a big house in Cooper County, where she’d had eleven children. Another departed for Topeka soon after a young and over-ardent Polk had left a necklace of walnut-sized bite marks on her neck.
Then there had been Loretta Heismoth. Loretta was a farm girl with a hint of a mustache on her upper lip and legs as solid as tree trunks. Over the course of one blissful summer, in a secluded spot in one of her father’s cornfields, she let Polk do more than any of the other girls had ever done. His hands had been allowed to wander a little farther on each fevered excursion. He dreamed constantly of what lay beneath the seemingly inexhaustible layers of Loretta’s undergarments. Progress was tantalizing but slow. As fall closed in, Polk began to worry that his time was running out. It turned out that he was right, although not quite in the way he’d imagined.
Early one September morning, Loretta’s gelding, Buster, was stung by a wasp on his hindquarters while she was cleaning out his stable. The horse lashed out with his hind legs just as she was bending down to shovel his droppings into a bucket. When they found Loretta some hours later, there was a perfect facsimile of a horseshoe in the middle of her forehead. It had been a closed casket service. Polk had sat in the church behind Loretta’s family, and wept along with them. His tears were born more from frustration than grief, but they were just as heartfelt.
This was more than fifty years ago. Polk had given up on women after that. There was more fidelity at the bottom of a bottle, less chance of humiliation in the next morning’s hangover. Polk hadn’t thought about romance for years—until Jette walked into the Nick-Nack that morning and turned his life upside down.
Perhaps the shock of Frederick’s departure had momentarily lowered the ancient bartender’s emotional defenses. Perhaps there was something about Jette’s physical heft that reminded him of poor Loretta Heismoth. Whatever the reason, as he leaned against his broom, Polk felt the fingers of God brush lightly over his soul. He had seen my grandmother many times before, of course. She had often come to the tavern for Frederick’s musical performances. Then she had stood quietly at the back of the room, never emerging from out of her husband’s shadow. Now, though! She had stepped into the light, a life force of impossible loveliness. Jette stood by the bar, impatiently waiting for an answer. Something slipped within him.
“Yes, Frau Meisenheimer,” he croaked.
“Good. Thank you.” Jette was calm, all business. “Let’s see, we have a few hours before we open. Perhaps it would be best if we started with the prices.”
Helpless to resist the quiet dignity of this little speech, Polk fell in love. Jette was twice his size, forty years younger, and married to his boss: the noble futility of it all was irresistible. He saw the chance for one final, doomed waltz with heartache.
In some ways, Polk was an incurable romantic. He understood that it was the act of loving, not of being loved, that mattered. He would keep his infatuation to himself. Besides, he had come to like and respect Frederick. Perhaps falling in love with his wife, if done correctly, might be considered a compliment. A beatific calm settled upon him. His unilateral adoration for Jette Meisenheimer would be a final, cleansing absolution. And, once in a while, he would bathe in the heroic misery of it all.
So Polk became a silent foot soldier of love, trudging onward with his exquisite burden. He spent the rest of the day explaining to Jette how the Nick-Nack was run. Her gaze made him stammer and blush like a young boy. Soon he was yearning for the first customer to walk through the door and rescue him. More than anything, he needed a drink.
When Polk collapsed at the end of that first night, he fell further and harder than he had ever fallen before.
J
ette had been sure that the Nick-Nack’s customers would be horrified when they heard that Frederick had volunteered for the army. They would shake their heads and shuffle quietly away to their tables to contemplate her husband’s irresponsible behavior. An air of sober reflection would descend.
By the end of her first evening behind the bar, as the loud, drunken crowd launched into their sixth joyful rendition of the national anthem, Jette stepped out into the alleyway behind the tavern and shed hot, angry tears. There had been no shocked silence at the news, no bemused outrage. Instead, Frederick’s departure had been met with rapturous celebration. He had gone off to fight for the country he loved! He was a hero! Toast after toast was drunk. Rambling speeches were made, full of frank admiration.
After that, to Jette’s dismay, the Nick-Nack became the town’s war room. Men went there to talk about the latest news. Reports were analyzed, tactical developments discussed. Drinks were drunk—and so, inevitably, songs were sung. There were no German tunes now, of course. Instead the men swayed to “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Jette quickly came to loathe them all. She wondered what Frederick was doing. She was sure he was not singing.
When news reached the Nick-Nack of the death of a local soldier, an impromptu wake would be held. She hated those evenings most of all. Men sat quietly at their tables, raising their glasses to the fallen hero. It did not take long for the place to fall into an inebriated stupor. Those with the energy to fight often did. Jette watched this maudlin buffoonery with barely suppressed contempt. To make matters worse, the excessive consumption of alcohol, when combined with the contemplation of their own mortality, had a strangely libidinous effect on some of the Nick-Nack’s clientele. It seemed that no man was immune to my grandmother’s charms if he had enough drinks inside him, and poor Jette had to be constantly on her guard. I say “poor Jette,” but she never regretted these encounters half as much as the fools who tried their luck with her. The punch that had floored Frederick at the moment of Joseph’s birth was no fluke. She had a good eye and the size and strength to ensure that anyone she hit wouldn’t forget it in a hurry. Although she only swung her fists in self-defense, every blow she landed bore the full force of her accumulated fury and frustration. Her victims would not return to the tavern for several days afterward, hiding their bruises. Heaven knows what they told their wives.
Jette’s English improved dramatically when she began working at the Nick-Nack. During the day she would speak to Polk quietly in German, but when the doors opened she turned and faced the world with foreign words heavy on her tongue. She was a fast learner. Unlike Frederick, she did not study textbooks and newspapers; the Nick-Nack was her classroom. As a result, she was soon speaking with a splendidly idiomatic grasp of the vernacular that her husband never acquired, for all his diligence.
My grandmother continued Frederick’s policy of booking bands, although for different reasons. Music could drown out the men’s incessant talk about the war. Her booking policy was based largely on the volume of noise that the musicians were capable of generating. A really loud band could even stop the men from singing their stupid patriotic songs. She had only one rule: there was no more opera. The tunes that Frederick had made his own remained unsung.
W
hile Jette struggled to come to terms with life without her husband, Joseph and Rosa were fighting battles of their own.
The children’s lives had been turned upside down by Frederick’s departure. Unfamiliar routines were forced upon them, now that Jette was working at the Nick-Nack. Each evening Joseph gravely led his sister to the tavern, where Jette fed them supper and put them to bed on improvised pallets in the back room. Joseph lay awake in the darkness, listening to the sounds of revelry through the wall, and thought about his father. At the end of each night, they made their weary way back home, Rosa asleep in Jette’s arms and Joseph doing his best to hide his yawns, baffled by exhaustion and sadness.
Joseph was devastated by Frederick’s desertion. He could not help believing that he was to blame. His attempt to reconcile his warring parents had failed—and now Frederick was gone. Guilt swarmed around him, blocking out the light. He clung to Jette’s promise that Frederick would be home soon, and did his best to be brave. He tried not to think too much about where his father might be and what he might be doing, but it was a source of fascination for Stefan. Joseph listened numbly as his friend speculated endlessly about how many men his father had killed. He was unable to connect the steely, ruthless hero of Stefan’s imagination with the gentle man he knew and loved.
Once a week my father walked across town to the Bloomberg farm, where he and Riva planned a grand recital to celebrate Frederick’s return. Joseph felt happiest when he could disappear into the music and submerge himself in all that beauty. In between the songs, he told Riva Bloomberg how it would be: where Frederick would sit, how he would react to each piece. She listened with a sad smile on her face.
R
osa was too young to understand exactly where her father had gone. All she knew was that he was no longer there. Like her brother, she imagined herself responsible for his absence: she believed that Frederick had left because he did not love her. Her hypochondria worsened. Every week she was laid low by a fresh barrage of imagined ailments. But her broken heart was real enough.
One day in the early fall of 1917 Rosa looked out the kitchen window and saw a fat raccoon sunning himself on the roof of the outhouse. He lay on his back, quite still but for his long striped tail, which occasionally gave a languid flick in the warm afternoon air. He looked as if he did not have a care in the world. She went outside to get a closer look. At the sound of the kitchen door clicking shut, the raccoon slowly rolled over onto his belly and peered down at her from the roof.
“Hello,” said Rosa. “What are you doing up there?”
The raccoon studied her unblinkingly for a long moment and then rolled onto his back again with what sounded like a deep sigh.
“Hey, I’m talking to you,” said Rosa.
The raccoon sighed again, but did not move.
Rosa was used to having to work hard to get the attention of others. There was no reason why wildlife should be any different from her parents or brother. She went back into the kitchen, cut an apple into slices, and carried the fruit outside on a plate. She put it down on the grass and took a step backward.
“I brought you something,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
The raccoon’s head popped into sight again. He looked down thoughtfully at the fruit, and then vanished. There was an effortful scrabbling noise, and then the raccoon appeared from around the corner of the outhouse, heading for the plate. Rosa stood quite still and watched as the apple quickly disappeared. When he had finished, the raccoon picked up the plate and looked hopefully underneath it to see if there was any more to eat. Then he turned and looked Rosa in the eye for a moment before scurrying back to the outhouse. Moments later he was back on the roof, basking in the sun once more.
The next day the raccoon was sunbathing again, and the day after that. Each afternoon Rosa put a plate of fruit out for him, and watched from a distance while he ate. She decided to name him Mr. Jim.