“I told you, I don’t want your money.”
He leaned back in his chair, sizing me up. “So what
do
you want?”
“I want you to tell me more about him.”
David pulled a face. “Well, let’s see. He was an old-fashioned guy, you could say. Pretty conservative at heart.”
“Must have been quite a surprise when you found those letters.”
“You have no idea.”
“Actually, David, after this week, I believe I do.”
He gave a wry smile at that. “My father always did play his cards close to his chest,” he said. “He wasn’t given to huge displays of emotion. He loved us, but he was always happiest when he was working. After Mom died, he never remarried.”
“What else?”
“He was a very stubborn man. Always believed he knew what was best, and not much inclined to listen to the opinions of others. There was nothing anyone could do to make him change his mind, once it was made up. I don’t believe I ever heard him apologize for anything in his life.”
“He never set eyes on me, not once,” I said quietly. “He never tried. Not even when he knew he was going to die.”
David got to his feet and turned to look down the garden. “Let me tell you one thing, James. My father was the most careful man I ever met. He never did
anything
by accident. If he left those letters in that drawer, it was because he wanted me to find them.” He was silent for a moment. “That’s why I sent them to Missouri, despite my wife’s protests. It was what he wanted. He never could admit that he’d made a mistake, but that was the closest he ever came to expressing regret about anything.”
We were silent for a long time.
“Do you have any kids?” I asked.
I knew the moment the words had left my mouth that I had made a mistake. The question was a horrible miscalculation. It reminded David of the threat that I posed to all that he held most dear. I watched sadly as he packed away his memories of his father and his expression became flat and defensive.
“Look, James, you seem like a decent guy. You tell me you’re not interested in my family’s money, and I suppose I’ve got no reason to think you’re lying about that. If you are, I guess I’ll find out soon enough.” His mouth twitched, not quite managing a smile.
“I’m not lying.”
“Here’s the thing, though. This changes nothing. I don’t know you. You and me, we’re not about to become lifelong buddies. You have your life in Missouri, I have mine here. I’d like to keep it that way.”
I was momentarily tongue-tied by his presumption. “Okay,” I said.
He looked thoughtful. “You know, though, there’s something I’d like you to have before you go.”
I waved a hand at him, not interested in his halfhearted bribery. “No need. I’ll keep my word, you’ll see. I’m not going to bother you.”
“Really. Dad brought it with him from Missouri. I guess it reminded him of where he’d come from. I’d like you to have it. A keepsake.”
I shrugged. “If you insist.”
“Be right back.” He stood up and walked toward the house.
Alone, I stared up at the sky. I had been hoping for something more than a half brother who was frightened of losing his inheritance. The banality of it all made me want to weep. I looked up at the large house and suddenly I couldn’t wait to leave.
“Here.” David was back, holding a black case out in front of him. I took it from him and put it on my lap. I undid the clips and lifted the lid. “He’d take it out sometimes and blow into it. Dreadful noise he made. He used to boast that he’d never taken lessons, and I could believe it.”
Inside the box, resting on a bed of dark velvet, was an old cornet.
FORTY-SIX
Later that afternoon I walked through Central Park from my hotel on the Upper West Side to the Metropolitan Museum. I wandered through the galleries, looking at famous paintings. I sat on the museum’s steps and listened to a man play a squirreling bebop line on his saxophone. I ate a hot dog in the shade of the trees on Fifth Avenue. I tiptoed through St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I took a crowded elevator to the top of the Empire State Building and watched the yellow taxis swarm up and down the avenues below. At the end of the island the Twin Towers majestically punctured the sky, beautiful and massive and still. Behind them the Hudson shimmered in the afternoon sunlight.
I was in New York at last, and none of it mattered a damn.
I
sat in my car for some time after I had said good-bye to David Kliever, staring into space. Finally I turned on the ignition and pulled away. I drove aimlessly for a while, unable to think. I saw another signpost for Remsenburg, and then I remembered where I had heard the name before—it was the town where P. G. Wodehouse had spent the last few decades of his life. He had died ten years earlier, but I knew that he was buried nearby. I followed the sign and soon was driving through the town. I parked next to the small post office and stepped inside. Behind the counter sat an elderly lady, whose expression suggested that it was not the first time she had been asked about the great man’s resting place. She gave me directions to Remsenburg Community Church, a whitewashed building with a small wooden spire a little way out of the town. Behind it was a peaceful graveyard fringed with trees. I wandered through the tombstones until I found the grave. It was rather grander than its neighbors. A stone book sat open on top of an impressive granite block. Into its pages had been carved:
JEEVES
BLANDINGS CASTLE
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH
MEET MISTER MULLINER
Poor Bertie hadn’t made it onto his creator’s final memorial, but his butler had. I stood in front of the grave for some time. Wodehouse, I reflected ruefully, would have approved of the plot twist my own little story had taken.
Lomax’s cornet sat in the trunk of my car. Its valves were stiff with age and disuse. A constellation of green rust spots spanned the length of the horn. On the rim of the bell there was a dent—the sort of dent that might have been caused by clubbing the thing against its owner’s skull.
My father had killed a man, and he’d kept the murder weapon as a trophy.
I
ate dinner at a plush, darkly lit steakhouse near Times Square, then made my way north up Broadway. It was a warm night. The streets were full of people, a richly variegated slice of humanity. I walked blindly past them all. By the time I reached my hotel, I was bone-tired. I lay on my bed and listened to the sound of the city at night.
First thing the next morning I paid my bill and drove down Ninth Avenue. Without a backward glance, I turned into the Lincoln Tunnel and escaped home.
T
he United States of America is a large country, and—for once—I was grateful to live in the middle of it. It took every hour of that long drive back from New York for me to work out what I needed to do.
The poisonous legacy of Lomax’s battered cornet savaged me as I fled home. The urge to interrogate Joseph about my mother and father diminished with every passing mile. By the time I got to Missouri, there was nothing else that I needed, or wanted, to know.
I arrived in Beatrice late the following afternoon. As I drove through the town, the sun was still hot and high in the sky. The main square was empty, the murderous humidity keeping people off the streets. I parked and got out to stretch my legs. Beatrice Eitzen maintained her grumpy vigil in front of the courthouse. I was pleased to see her familiar face, although she seemed as unimpressed as ever as she looked at me down her long nose.
What did you come back for?
she chided me silently.
You should have escaped, too, when you had the chance.
I walked around the courthouse a couple of times, and sat on a bench in the shade. Finally I climbed back into the car and drove to Joseph’s house. As I pushed open the door I heard the sound of the television. Joseph was in his usual chair, not watching the screen but squinting at the front page of the
Optimist
. He looked up as I walked in. A wide smile appeared on his face.
“James! You’re back!”
I looked at this old man, this old man who loved me.
And I said, “Hi, Dad.”
FORTY-SEVEN
My story is almost done.
The day after I returned from New York, I purchased a safe-deposit box at the bank, and there I hid the Kaiser’s medal, the cornet, and Rosa’s letters—relics from a past that could only hurt us. The key still sits somewhere in the bottom drawer of my desk, hidden beneath a pile of old papers. A quarter of a century later, I have never opened the box.
I never told Joseph that I knew his secret.
After all that he had given me, my silence was the smallest of gifts back.
F
rank continued to work hard at the bank. In 1990, some thirty years after he had first stood behind the counter as a teller, he became president—Grandfather Martin’s old job.
Darla and Frank passed their fertile genes on to the next generation. One by one their children left home, found a mate, and began reproducing almost immediately, and in similarly astounding quantities. Now they have sired their very own dynasty of little Meisenheimers. I am too old to keep track of all of my great-nieces and -nephews. I sometimes wonder whether Frank even knows which of his grandchildren he’s talking to. He is careful never to call them by their first name as he pats them fondly on the head. Claudine’s eldest, Jackie, got married last year to his high school sweetheart and now they are expecting. Soon my little brother will be a great-grandfather. I am unsure what to do with this information, save to report that he seems pleased about it.
It’s funny how things turn out. Frank wanted to leave Beatrice more than any of us. Now he’s one of the grand nabobs of the town, and it’s impossible to imagine him anywhere else. The threads of his family’s life have become interwoven with the tapestry of the place. The stories of his children and his grandchildren have played themselves out on this land, and he’s tied here more firmly than by the lash of steel ropes. And he’s just fine with that. The comforts of home and family will wash away every disappointment, given time.
I
n contrast to Darla and Frank’s excessive reproductive habits, Freddy and Eleanor had just one daughter, Adeline. Throughout their long and contented marriage, they enjoyed each other with quiet delight. Their little family was a beautiful knot of love; they did not have much need for the rest of us. They kept their distance from the chaotic fray of Frank’s family on the other side of town.
Freddy became Oscar Niedermeyer’s lieutenant at the funeral parlor. When the old man died, he took over the business, and continued to spread his black-garbed comfort to new generations of mourners. Business was always good. Death and taxes, James, he used to say to me, death and taxes.
To Freddy’s disappointment, Adeline did not have a musical bone in her body. She could not hold even the simplest of tunes. She began working in the funeral parlor the day after she graduated from high school, and she’s been running the place since Freddy retired. My niece is the image of sober efficiency at work. She inherited her father’s knack for greeting mourners with just the right amount of compassion and professional rectitude, but outside the funeral parlor she is the loudest, most obnoxiously cheerful person I know. She’s a walking maelstrom of winks and nudges, determined to find raucous hilarity in everything. Every piece of news is greeted with a shrill bark of laughter, whether amusing or not. Her husband, a nice man who fumigates houses for a living, stands by and watches as she dominates every conversation she joins. I’m fond of Adeline, of course, but I do my best to avoid her in social situations. (I’m not too keen to meet her in her professional capacity, either.)
Freddy and Ellie were married for forty-four years, and every one of them seemed happier than the one before—even when the aggregation of mutinous cells that had been lurking in Ellie’s left breast finally jumped ship and began to ravage the rest of her body. They bore the onslaught of her cancer with the bravery of two people who know they’ve had it good.
Eleanor Meisenheimer, the town’s fabled beauty of yore, passed away in her sleep in June of 2003. The hospice had sent her home a week earlier, when there was no more to be done. Freddy was by her side, holding her hand as they both slept. He awoke to discover that death had, for the second time, stolen away a loved one during the night.
After Ellie’s death, Freddy joined a choral group in Columbia. He drives over there every Monday night for rehearsals. They’ve performed opera, a mass or two, “Carmina Burana,” and an awful lot of requiems. Almost everything is in either Latin or German. It’s all terribly serious. There’s not much silly, love-struck crooning going on. I go to all the concerts. Freddy stands amid a crowd of dinner-jacketed men, holding his music stiffly in front of him, never taking his eyes off the conductor’s baton. There must be at least a hundred men and women in the choir, with thirty more in the orchestra. His fine voice, which has grown deeper and richer over the years, is lost among the vastness of this well-meaning crowd. He could stop singing and nobody would notice. This troubles me, but Freddy doesn’t care. He just loves to sing. I watch him as he mouths all those somber foreign words, and I marvel at the fresh delight he discovers in all that beautiful music.
Adeline and her husband continued Freddy and Eleanor’s modest family ways, and had just one child, a boy. Morrie has grown up tall and strong and handsome, just like his beloved namesake. He’s twenty-six now, and lives in New York. Adeline worries about the next terrorist attack, of course. That, and the legion of brigands who lurk around every dark corner. She dreads the midnight phone call that never comes.
Nobody is quite sure what Morrie does. It’s something complicated to do with other people’s money. He lives in a tiny apartment in Chelsea, and comes back home twice a year. These visits are a cause of excitement and celebration for the rest of us, but I worry that there may not be many more of them. Last time he returned with a girl on his arm. Her name was Rita. She was a lawyer, exquisite in her chic Fifth Avenue outfits. She watched in polite bemusement as we all cavorted around her in delight, loudly admiring everything about her. She was kind, we all agreed, and funny, and obviously smart, and of course very beautiful. The one thing nobody mentioned was her gorgeous brown skin. Rita is from Puerto Rico—something that Morrie had not thought to tell us before they arrived. We all did our best to pretend that it was the most natural thing in the world to have this darkly exotic creature in our midst, but I don’t think she was fooled for a minute. Not even Adeline’s hysterical bonhomie could disguise her discomfort. It didn’t help that our neighbors and friends stared at Rita in astonishment whenever she and Morrie set foot outside the front door. Neither of them has returned to Beatrice since.
The last I heard, Morrie and Rita are planning a small wedding in Manhattan. We’re all wondering—although nobody will dare speak the words aloud—whether we will ever see them again. Adeline has been staggering around the town looking as if she’s mislaid a winning lottery ticket, as she contemplates the prospect of mixed-race grandchildren. I want to tell her that Frederick, her great-grandfather, would be pleased, because this is the American way. We are all immigrants, a glorious confection of races and beliefs, united by the rock that we live on. As the years wash over us and new generations march into the future, family histories are subsumed into this greater narrative. We become, simply, Americans. Adeline is wondering if she will be able to love babies who are not quite like her, but she’s missing the point. They’ll be exactly like her. They’ll be Americans, too—only more so.
O
nce Teddy returned to Beatrice to take the helm at First Christian Church, he was never going to leave again.
Over the years, Joseph gradually made peace with his good-for-nothing, God-loving son. I often turned up at my father’s house to find Teddy and Joseph arguing about abstruse theological constructs. Teddy always gave as good as he got in those encounters. He knew he would never persuade Joseph to come back to the church, but felt obliged to try.
Soon after he arrived back in Beatrice, Teddy got himself a dog, an elegant German shepherd called Maggie, and the two of them quickly became inseparable. Maggie padded up and down the aisle at church as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Whenever I saw Teddy driving through town in his pickup, she was always sitting next to him in the passenger seat. Theirs was a blissful friendship, one of uncomplicated and total devotion. Teddy loved that dog almost as much as he loved the Lord, and when she grew old and died, he was heartbroken. Joseph was desperate to stuff poor Maggie and put her on a plinth, but Teddy loved her far too much to let him do that to her. Instead he buried her in the yard and got another dog just the same. He called her Maggie, too. As I write this, Maggie is on her fourth incarnation.
At some point during the tenure of Maggie II, Teddy married Hope McClary, a girl he had unsuccessfully tried to date in his senior year of high school. Hope had married and moved away from Beatrice soon after she’d graduated. Her husband, an infantry sergeant, was killed by North Vietnamese sniper fire on Hill 875 during the battle for Dak To. After that, the pretty young widow returned to Beatrice with her son, Billy. Every Sunday morning the two of them came to church and listened attentively to Teddy’s sermons. Then Hope volunteered to help Mrs. Heimstetter cook at the next church social, and that was that. Romance blossomed over the fried chicken, and she and Teddy were married six months later. Teddy and Hope never had children of their own, but that was all right. My brother adopted little Billy, and from that moment forward loved him just as if he were his own. That was typical of Teddy; he always seemed to have a little bit more love to share than the rest of us.
I am the only person who knows the strange circumstances behind Teddy’s religious awakening, and we have not spoken the name of Rankin Fitch between us for many years. Perhaps when you’ve been the beneficiary of as many divine miracles as my brother believes himself to be, unshakable belief is easier to come by. I don’t believe that Teddy has ever suffered from the kind of spiritual angst that so afflicted Reverend Gresham during his troubled time here. A hushed, profound contentment has settled upon him as he does the Lord’s work. He ministers to his flock with a quiet but forceful certainty. He believes he is doing what he was put on this earth to do. It’s a beautiful thing to see.
A
nd me?
I sold the diner to Frank’s son Todd and his wife, Jeanne, a couple of years ago. They immediately closed the place down, applied for a liquor license, and reopened two weeks later as Frederico’s Taqueria. Now they serve sangria and margaritas by the bucketful, and the place is packed every night. There’s not a cheeseburger in sight—now it’s all fajitas, burritos, and enchiladas. It doesn’t seem to matter that neither Todd nor his wife has ever been south of the Arkansas state line. Authenticity isn’t the point. Lots of hot salsa, sour cream, and guacamole is the point. Good luck to them, I say. Our family has fed the people of Beatrice on that spot for four generations now. Todd’s dubious chile relleno is a world away from Jette’s beloved sauerkraut, but that’s progress for you. The restaurant will continue to evolve just as surely as we will.
I’m still on my own. It took me years to recover from my infatuation with Miriam Imhoff, but recover I did, even if nothing could ever quite measure up to that first blissful starburst of young love. There have been several flings over the years—some brief, others not so brief, but all very discreet. I always traveled for my romance. I’ve had affairs across the state, but never in Beatrice. I didn’t want to run into my paramours in the grocery store or the post office. I especially didn’t want to run into their husbands. For I have been a lover of other men’s wives.
It’s strange. Serial philanderer was never a role I would have imagined for myself, but the marriages from which these women were escaping were a safety net, both for them and for me. We were happy with stolen moments here and there, a pleasant hotel tryst and perhaps a light lunch afterward, that sort of thing. It was always very civilized and uncomplicated.
We all agreed that I wasn’t worth risking a marriage for.
Miriam returned to Beatrice sometime during the Reagan administration, when Kevin finally retired from the army on a fat pension. They built a large house in a new subdivision on the edge of town, and have lived there in slothful indolence ever since. I hope it won’t sound too ungallant to observe that half a century in the soupy mire of married life has exacted a hefty price. The beautiful red hair that I used to dream of is long gone, destroyed by gallons of toxic colorants and chemicals. It’s white, thin, and brittle now, a ghost of its former glory. Miriam likes to wear sweatshirts decorated with showers of colorful sequins. She has special tops for Valentine’s Day (festooned with glittering hearts), Easter (glittering eggs), July 4 (glittering flags), Thanksgiving (glittering turkeys, pumpkins, and pilgrims), and Christmas (glittering Santas, reindeer, and Christmas trees). When the calendar does not dictate more topical motifs, she wears a bright pink number with
world’s best grandma
emblazoned across her chest. Her voice, which I used to hear in my head each night as I fell into fitful sleep, could now freeze a rutting steer at fifty paces.
Frankly, I wished Miriam had stayed away. I would have preferred my memories of her to remain untarnished. When I see her these days, there is no rueful reexamination of the past, no awed gratitude at a lucky escape. Instead I feel just a vague sense of regret, that the youthful innocence of my dreams was no match for the bruising banality of real life.
These days I keep largely to myself. I have more time on my hands now, of course, but there’s still much to keep me occupied. I like to read through my Wodehouse library at least once a year. I’m still dazzled by the same timeless wonder that first transfixed me sixty years ago, when I sat in the sun and frowned my way through
The Code of the Woosters
for the first time. Bertie is an old friend now—as affably idiotic as ever, a reassuring beacon of old-fashioned decency. He offers me ageless comfort, and I will be forever grateful to him.