The Clarinet Polka (15 page)

A few days after the band recital, Linda gets her chance. She's doing some shopping uptown, and she sees Mr. Dłuwiecki walking into Eberhardt's, so she follows him and accidentally runs into him in front of the men's shirts. They stop and have a chat—mostly in Polish, of course—and she tells him about hearing Janice play in the band recital and how wonderful she was.

Well, he's the kind of guy if you want to tell him his daughter's wonderful, he'll stand and talk to you all day and on into the night. Yes, he's amazed at her musical ability. He's only sorry that she started on a band instrument. He's been trying to get her to switch to the oboe, but so far he hasn't had much success with that. She can be very stubborn. But he'd like to see her go on with it, perhaps get a degree in music. “You have a degree in music, don't you?” he says.

The conversation's going exactly right. Linda gets to tell him about ethnomusicology and writing her paper on Polish music, and then she lets drop that she's trying to put together a Polish musical group.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I say. “Did you tell him it was a polka band?”

“Well, not exactly. I think I just said
zespół
.”

“Is that a polka band?”

“It's a broad term. You could use it for a polka band.”

Mr. Dłuwiecki took her bait—hook, line, and sinker—and allowed as how it would be a wonderful thing for his little Janice to be playing authentic Polish music, so next Sunday after Mass, Linda invited Janice to dinner. “You did
what?
” Mom said.

Linda has only lived here her whole life, and you'd think that she would have figured out how things are by now, but no. Linda lives in her own world, and she keeps doing this—making dumb mistakes about things that should be absolutely obvious—and then Mom goes berserk. She used to get so mad at Linda she'd chase her across the room pinching her—it looked like a big bird pecking at a little bird—and Linda would wrap her arms around herself and just keep backing up with tears running down her face because she could never understand what was going on. Linda's too old to pinch now, but Mom can still yell at her. “Holy Mother of God, why do you do these things to me?”

And Linda says what she always says—“What? What did I do?”

The big problem here is that Mom can never really tell Linda what she did because these things are so obvious to Mom she couldn't put them into words if she tried. But I know how she thinks, and it goes like this. Step one is that people don't come as separate units, they come as parts of families, and you can't invite somebody else's kid over to the house, you've got to invite the whole family. Step two is that it's your relatives you invite over to the house, not other families. If you want to socialize with other people, that's why God gave you the church, but if you invite another family over to dinner, they'll think, oh, shit,
what do they want?
And if they come, then they'll have to invite you to their house, and you'll have to invite them back again, and there you'll be, stuck inviting each other back and forth with no way to get out of it for the rest of your lives.

And the last straw for Mom is exactly who this particular family is. “The Dłuwieckis! Oh, my God, Linda, how could you do this to me?”

*   *   *

If I expect you to follow much more of this, I guess I've got to tell you about what my father called “that old-country crap.” Okay, so if you take your Eastern European immigrants, we're the largest group in the valley, but you've also got enough Slovaks so they had their own community hall down in Millwood, and some Czechs and some Hungarians and some Slovenes and Croats and a few little pockets of various other Slavs. And a lot of these folks went to St. Stans even though everything was in Polish.

So if you look at it right, we're all sort of like cousins, or at least like distant relatives, but that first wave of immigrants that came over, they didn't see things that way. Back in those days, there wasn't any Poland, and the Polish people were divided up into three chunks. Mom's family was from the Austrian chunk, and so they figured they had real culture, but people from the Russian chunk, like Dad's family, were just ignorant peasants. And Dad's family didn't much care for Mom's family because they were from the mountains, and everybody knows those
górale
are a wild and crazy bunch, and they drink too much and get in fights and like that. So when Mom and Dad first started going together, they got treated a little bit like Romeo and Juliet.

And of course all the Poles got to look down on the Slovaks because back in the old country the Slovaks were shit on even worse than the Poles, and what the Slovaks said about the Poles was that Poles are naturally arrogant and suspicious and you couldn't ever really trust them. And so on, and so on. People not liking each other because of a bunch of crap that went on in the old country. But the Americans—that's what we called the people who spoke English and ran everything—but the Americans couldn't tell a Pole from a Pomeranian, and no matter where you came from back in the old country, they called you a Hunky.

Well, most of that old-country crap died with the first generation, and my father hated all that stuff, wouldn't put up with it for half a second. Just about the worst chewing-out he ever gave me was when I called a guy I was playing football with—Joey Dubik, his name was, and I called him a “dumb Slovak.” Now I didn't mean anything by it. It was just something to say. If anything, I probably thought it was us Slavs against the world. But Old Bullet Head just about murdered me. He's banging on the table with his fist. He's yelling, “I won't have any of that old-country crap in this house, you hear me, Jimmy?”

You see, when they talked about the
brotherhood
of steelworkers, he took it serious—he believed in that—and he was just about the least prejudiced guy I ever knew. He probably could have gone up the ladder in the union if he'd wanted to, and he did get elected to this or that little position over the years, but he was a rank-and-filer his whole life. From his point of view too many damn decisions got made in Pittsburgh anyway, and the guys who went up in the union got way too cozy with the company way too fast, so the only guys he trusted were the guys he worked with, and he really did try to treat them all like brothers no matter who they were. It's something I always respected him for.

Anyhow, the first generation got old and the second generation started taking over, and most of that old-country crap faded away, but then right after the war you've got your displaced persons coming over so you've got a whole new wave of old-country crap. There weren't a lot of DPs in Raysburg, maybe four or five families, but absolutely nobody liked them—I mean when I was growing up, DP was practically a swearword—and of all the DPs that turned up, the Dłuwieckis pissed people off the most.

When they first got here, you never saw anything more pathetic in your life than the Dłuwieckis. That's what my mother said anyway. They'd been living in some refugee camp, and they had ragged old patched-up clothes that didn't fit, and they were so thin it hurt to look at them, and they had a tiny little boy so hungry he couldn't even cry. So why should people like that piss people off? Well, I'll tell you.

Czesław Dłuwiecki—yeah, it's Czesław he calls himself, and don't you ever try to call him Chuck—doesn't take the job they got for him at Old Reliable. He speaks good English— Well, that's not quite it. He studied English in Poland back before the war, read Shakespeare and all that other good shit, and he may have a thick accent, but he speaks this high-flown fancy English, and he's an absolute whiz with numbers, so he gets a job keeping the books at the Benbow Lumberyard, and the next thing you know he goes to night school and gets himself a CPA ticket and goes into business for himself. In a year or two there's not a tax loophole he doesn't know by its first name, and he's got more clients than he can handle, so what does he do? He moves out of South Raysburg, buys himself a big house out in Edgewood, and sends his boys to the Raysburg Military Academy along with all the rich out-the-pike WASP kids. You can see how people got pissed off, right? But you still haven't got the whole story.

Father Stawecki used to put out a newsletter at St. Stans whenever he got around to it, a couple times a year maybe, and the first newsletter Mr. Dłuwiecki gets, he's over at the church waving it in the priest's face. The newsletter's in Polish, right? And Czesław has gone through it with his red pen and marked all the errors. He is, he says, absolutely appalled at the lousy Polish that is written and spoken in South Raysburg. It is a disgrace to the fatherland.

This is how Father Joe dealt with complaints—anything you came to him complaining about, the next thing you know, you're in charge of it, so that's how Czesław Dłuwiecki got to be the editor of the St. Stans newsletter for the next ten years—up until it switched into English—and you better believe the Polish in there was perfection itself. And so was the Polish that came out of Mr. Dłuwiecki's mouth, and that's what he wanted to hear coming out of your mouth, so if you tried to have a conversation with him in Polish, you'd get about three sentences out and he'd be correcting your grammar.

Okay, so the Polish spoken in South Raysburg was peasant Polish to start with, and then it got kind of blurry over the years, what with bumping into English and picking up a lot of English words, and it may not be the world's greatest Polish, but hell, it's
our
Polish, and we're not delighted to have some asshole straight off the boat from the refugee camps of wartorn Europe telling us we don't talk right, so Mom's yelling at Linda about how we brought those
gówniarze
over here, and they didn't have a pot to piss in, and we clothed them and we fed them and we opened our homes to them and we helped them get on their feet, and how do they repay us? They go around looking down their noses at us. We're not good enough for them, oh no, we're just a bunch of ignorant peasants, them and their big house out in Edgewood.

When Mom's really mad, she turns into a pressure cooker. Her voice drops down to a hiss, and you can almost see the steam coming out of her ears. Linda's just standing there staring at her. “We don't speak good Polish, huh? Well, screw him, that
sukinsyn
. His
dupa
may be in the Ohio Valley but his mind never left Poland. Maybe he should go straight back there!”

So now, of course, we're all set to have a wonderful time at dinner.

*   *   *

Babcia Wojtkiewicz—that's Mom's mom—always comes over for dinner on Sundays, and she always brings something with her, usually a big pot of soup. That Sunday she'd made
barszcz
—that's just fine with me—but Mom's worried is it okay to serve with roast chicken to
the Dłuwieckis' kid
. “Of course it is,” Linda says.

Then right when the kid's supposed to show up, she shows up—like to the minute. She's so on time she must have been standing outside counting off the seconds on her watch. Mom's hissing, “Linda, Linda, Linda, there she is,” so Linda runs out to let her in—“Oh, Janice, how nice that you could come.” Janice has got her clarinet case with her. When she first walks through the door, I think she's wearing her school uniform, but no, that's not it. Even though she's off duty, she's wearing an outfit that's exactly
like
her school uniform—you know, the blazer and the pleated skirt and the kneesocks. She's still wearing her hair in pigtails. They're really long, like practically down to her waist.

So Janice perches on the edge of a chair with her knees together, and, oh, my God, we've got
the Dłuwieckis' kid
in our living room. I know other people don't think this about us, but Poles are the politest people in the entire universe, and we're all doing our best. Ordinarily when Babcia was there we'd be speaking mainly Polish, but now we're sticking with English, and we sound like bad actors on television. Mom pops in, wiping her hands on her apron, and says, “Well, Janice, it's so nice to see you. How are your parents?” This, of course, is to remind everybody that Mom hasn't forgotten for half a second that Janice is the Dłuwieckis' kid.

“Fine,” Janice says.

I'm watching all this go down, and—well, maybe it's because I was away four years and it's given me a different perspective on things, but I feel like the Polak from another planet. Okay, so Babcia's English isn't too bad for an old lady born in the old country, but she's not exactly what you'd call at home in it. And if you gave the matter some thought—like much longer than about eight seconds—you'd expect Mr. Dłuwiecki's kid to speak Polish, wouldn't you? So why are we speaking nothing but English? Well, where do we live? The United States of America. What language is spoken in this fair land? Yep, you guessed her. And if we were to speak Polish, we'd be up to our eyeballs in that old-country crap.

“I bet she'd like a Coke,” Mom says to me. “Jimmy, why don't you get Janice a Coke?” Nobody has ever drunk a Coke before Sunday dinner in the entire history of the Koprowski household, but I say, “Sure, Mom,” and while I'm getting Janice a Coke, I get myself a beer, and Mom gives me a look that would peel the paint off the wall, but she can't say a thing because the Dłuwieckis' kid might hear her.

Old Bullet Head is peering at Janice over the top of his reading glasses. He's speaking in slow motion. “So. Janice. Tell me. What grade. Are you in?”

“I'm a sophomore, sir,” she says.

“Oh? You don't look. That old.”

“Everybody always thinks I'm younger than I am.”

Now I don't know what Mom told Babcia about Janice—she must have told her something—but you can see that Babcia's having a hard time figuring out what this little girl is doing at our house, but whatever it is, Babcia's going to do her bit to make her feel welcome. “You go to Central?” she says.