The Clarinet Polka (16 page)

“That's right,” Janice says, and she nods about six times. She's just as uptight as the rest of us. “I go to Central.”

“Good, good,” Babcia says with this big smile like it's the greatest thing in the world to go to Central.

Janice has got to be fifteen, but she still looks about twelve to me. She's taller than she looked on the stage at Raysburg High—it's kind of surprising; she's a little bit taller than Linda—but she hasn't got any figure that you could notice. She looks like— Okay, for a while the Communist government in Poland used to put out a magazine, and God knows why, but we used to get it at the PAC, and sometimes if you were bored, you'd pick it up and flip through it for a laugh. It was straight propaganda, all about how wonderful everything was in Poland, and they had these real crude color pictures, you know, where all the colors are too bright, and there'd be a picture of a peasant on a big, brand-new, shiny red tractor, and he's happy happy happy. And there'd be another picture of peasants on a collective farm, and they're happy happy happy. And there'd always be a picture of peasants doing their peasant dances in their peasant costumes, and you better believe they're happy happy happy. And they'd always find the most beautiful little peasant girl in all of Poland to put in that magazine, and there she'd be in her peasant costume—you know, with the wreath of flowers in her hair—and she'd have eyes as blue as the sky and hair as blond as a haystack, and that's exactly what Janice Dłuwiecki looks like.

So we go in and sit down around the dining room table, and Old Bullet Head is still trying to get something started that might have a chance of turning into a conversation. “So. Janice. Linda tells me. You're quite the musician. You play the clarinet?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'll tell you a secret, Janice. You don't have to call me sir. I work for my money.” That's supposed to be a joke, right? But we've all heard it a thousand times, and nobody cracks a smile.

So we're all sitting at the table now—with the Dłuwieckis' kid—and Mom says, “Walt, why don't you say grace?” Except for big-deal occasions like Christmas Eve, the last time we said grace before dinner was probably back around 1958 when we had Father Stawecki over.

My dad folds his hands and sits there a minute, and then he kicks into probably the only grace he knows—
“Pobłogosław Panie Boże nas i te dary, które z Twojej świętej łaskawości będziemy spożywać. Przez Chrystusa, Pana Naszego. Amen,”
and we all go, “Amen.”

Babcia liked hearing the grace in Polish, so she says,
“Jak przyjemnie usłyszeć modlitwę po polsku,”
and Janice says to Babcia,
“Ale proszę Pani, oczywiście modlitwa musi być po polsku,”
and Babcia stares in total shock at this little kid in pigtails sitting next to her and says,
“Hey, she's talking Polish!”
and Janice says,
“Bo ja jestem Polka,”
and then, bing, like somebody pushed a button on one of those headsets they've got at the United Nations, everybody's speaking Polish—well, all except for yours truly.

The minute Polish starts to come out of her mouth, Janice lights up like a Christmas tree. You wouldn't believe it was the same little girl. She's giggling, she's waving her hands in the air, she's talking a mile a minute in that educated Polish that always sounds to me like somebody chewing up crisp lettuce leaves.

I should tell you something about me and the Polish language. It was the first language I spoke, and I went on speaking it for years when I had to, and I even got A's in it from the nuns, probably because most of the other kids at St. Stans didn't speak Polish at home, and that gave me an unfair advantage. But I never paid any attention to the grammar; whatever people around here said, that's what I said, and I never read anything in it besides the boring crap they gave us in school, and I'm not like Linda—I never went out of my way to hang on to the language, and you use it or lose it, right? So I could follow everything that was going down, but as for saying something back, well, just forget it. By the time I'd thought of something I could say, the conversation was already a mile and a half down the road.

Well, Babcia said something to the effect of, “She talks just like the upper crust,” and we all had a good laugh, and that pretty well broke the ice. So we started shoveling in the food, and eventually we switched back to English, except whenever Janice said anything to my grandmother, she said it in Polish. Mom asked Janice how she'd learned such good Polish, and she said her father didn't give her much choice in the matter—which we could have guessed.

Mom and Dad pumped her about her family. Of course we sort of knew them—they went to our church—but we didn't know all that much about them because they didn't live down here, and like I said, they weren't exactly popular in the parish. I vaguely remembered her oldest brother, John. He went to St. Stans for a few years before they moved out to Edgewood. Well, now he was out at Ohio State getting himself an advanced degree in something or other. He'd got his B.A. from Ohio State and had a good job in Columbus, but then he decided that what he really wanted to do was further his education. That's the kind of story Old Bullet Head just loves hearing, and he gives me what you'd call the significant look. Her brother Mark was in his senior year out at the Academy. He was applying to a whole bunch of schools, but he was hoping to get a scholarship to Yale, and Old Bullet Head was just as impressed as all hell. “I kept telling this one to stay in school”—he jerks his thumb at me—“but he wouldn't pay any attention to me.” Of course he doesn't say a word about Linda's B.Mus. because that's good for absolutely nothing.

So by the end of dinner everybody decided that Janice was a really nice little girl—everybody except me. I thought she was a pain in the ass. And then Linda sat Janice down in front of the piano and delivered her the Polka Lecture. I figured if I heard it one more time, I could deliver it myself.

Linda got out some music and put it on the piano. Janice looked at it a minute and said, “I wish Dad would quit bragging about me all the time. It's embarrassing. I'm not really that good.”

“You don't have to be modest, Janice. I heard you in the band concert. You were wonderful.”

“Thanks.” Janice shrugged like it was nothing.

“Why don't we try this?” Linda said.

“I'm sorry,” Janice said, “I don't read very well.”

“Oh, that's all right. We'll go slow.”

Janice got a look on her face like she was going to take her medicine even if it killed her. “I'm sorry. I don't read very well at all. I know I shouldn't have done it, but I've been fooling everybody for years. I'm really sorry.”

Linda was having a hard time with that one. “How do you play in the band?”

“Oh, as soon as I hear the other kids play something, then I can play it.”

“You take lessons, don't you?”

“Oh, yes. With Mr. Webb.”

“How do you do that?”

“When he gives me a new piece, I always get him to play it for me first, and then when I play it, I pretend I'm reading it. After a few times, I can even sort of read it.”

“And he's never caught on?”

“Well, sort of. But he doesn't really know how bad I am.”

“Well, good grief, Janice, how'd you learn that solo you played with the band?”

“Mr. Webb lent me the record.”

“You learned it
off a record?
What record?”

“I should know, shouldn't I? It was somebody or other's New Orleans band. The clarinet player was a guy named Sidney Arodin. I guess he's famous, huh? It was really hard. It took me forever.”

“Oh, I bet it did. How long did it take you?”

“Oh, I guess it took me a whole weekend.”

Linda sat there forever without saying a word. Then she said, “If I play something on the piano, can you play it back to me?”

“Oh, sure.”

Linda played the beginning of “The Clarinet Polka.” Janice picked up her clarinet case. “I've got to pull out,” she said. “Your piano's a little bit flat.” She started putting her clarinet together.

“What do you mean it's flat?” Linda said.

Janice looked at Linda like she was plain nuts. “You know,
flat
.”

“Oh,” Linda said, “you mean it's out of tune with itself.”

“Well, yeah, it is, but the whole thing's a little bit flat too.” Janice blew a few notes and stopped.

I want to make sure you're getting this. After hearing Linda play, Janice never once checked her clarinet against the piano. She fiddled with the top end of her clarinet, pulled it out just a tiny bit more, and she blew a few more notes and that seemed to satisfy her, so she played the beginning of “The Clarinet Polka” just the way Linda had played it. Then she just sat there looking like a little kid waiting for the next part of her lesson.

Linda reached over and hit a note on the piano and it was perfectly in tune with the last note Janice had played. Linda stared at Janice like she'd just seen the stigmata break out on her. “Oh, my God,” she said, “you've got perfect pitch.”

SIX

I'm not sure why Janice Dłuwiecki bugged the hell out of me, but for a while there, it was like nails on a blackboard every time I laid eyes on her. Oh, I could list all kinds of things that annoyed me. For starters, those long blond braids and her Central uniform that made her look like this perfect Catholic schoolgirl, and then the way she sucked up to grown-ups, like talking Polish to my grandmother, and the sound of it—that soft, hissy snappy Polish with zero defects—and the way she always said
pan
or
pani
no matter who she was talking to, like that's how you talk to a priest or how little kids are supposed to talk to their parents, like calling my father “sir” in English, which she always did. And something else about her that was just, I don't know, queer and old-fashioned, maybe from being second generation and so close to the old country—you know, that she could speak Polish at all—and my mother saying all the time, “What a nice little girl,” but Janice seemed to me just way
too
nice, you know what I mean? Like a little girl designed by the Legion of Mary. Yeah, and then there was that perfect pitch Linda kept talking about—what a rare gift, possessed by only a tiny percent of the population, and on and on and on—so I started calling Janice “Perfect.”

Linda was rehearsing with Mary Jo and Janice Dłuwiecki every Tuesday, and everything in South Raysburg gets connected up to St. Stans eventually, so Father Obinski let them use one of the rooms at the church. Janice would come down to our house straight from school and stay for dinner—which was a lot for Mom to handle, but she could always blame it on my crazy sister who never did anything right, and she liked Janice. Everybody liked her but me.

Well, my sister did have a driver's license, but back in those days she didn't own a car for the simple reason that, just like all the other Koprowskis, she was too cheap to spend her money. And Central is only about four blocks from Vick's shop, so Linda says, “If Janice walked over there after band practice, could she get a ride home with you?”

“Sure,” I say, “no problem,” and about half the time Perfect turns up at the shop the way she's supposed to, but the other half, band practice runs late so I've got to go over to Central and get her. Then I bring Perfect home with me, she eats dinner with us, she and Linda go off and rehearse, and then they come back, and pretty soon it's, “Oh, Jimmy, would you mind running Janice home?” The bus service in South Raysburg on weekday evenings is kind of shitty. I guess the company figures there's nobody down there but a bunch of Polaks and they don't go out after dinner much anyway, but anyhow if Janice takes the bus, she's got to transfer, and it takes her an hour and a half, and somebody can drive her home in ten minutes, and that somebody of course is me, so pretty soon I'm providing Perfect with a free taxi service every Tuesday night.

Well, sure, Linda, it's always been my greatest ambition in life to drive somebody else's kid around. I'll just drop whatever I'm doing at nine-thirty so I can drive Perfect back to the big house in Edgewood her father bought so he wouldn't have to live down here with the rest of us where his daughter wouldn't have any trouble getting from point A to point B because she could damn well walk.

But I really don't know what I was bitching about. At nine-thirty on a Tuesday night about the only thing I'd be doing would be watching the tube with Old Bullet Head or sitting in a bar somewhere with Georgie Mondrowski, and after a while I kind of got used to having Perfect around once a week. Well, no, that's not right. I don't know why I said that. I never got used to having her around.

*   *   *

Sometime that fall I got a postcard. It had a picture of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on it, and all it said was, “I'm in the Soap Creek Saloon and your act is not playing.” He didn't even sign it, but of course it was from Jeff Doren, so he'd got out of the service.

I bought a postcard with a cartoon hillbilly on it—big hairy barefoot guy holding a jug of moonshine in one hand and a shotgun in the other—that said, “Welcome to West Virginia,” and I wrote Doren a note telling him I was working on reintegrating myself back into civilian life and I wasn't doing half bad. I was still coming to Austin, I said, but the way things were looking, probably not before spring.

I felt like I owed it to Jacobson to go back to Austin just the way he and Doren and I used to talk about all those times on Guam, and I never let that idea go. That first year after he died, I kept dreaming about good old Ron Jacobson. One dream I remember clear as anything. He's sitting on the end of my bed. I open my eyes and there he is, absolutely real, and he says, “Jimmy, I thought you were never going to wake up.” It's funny how dreams can stick with you.