The Clarinet Polka (26 page)

We drive up in my dad's car, and it's one of those perfectly good blue Chryslers he buys every few years, but all up and down Edgewood there's all these Buicks and Cadillacs and Lincolns, and I'm thinking, what the hell? We go in, and there's Czesław speaking English, “How good of you to come,” and there's his wife looking like she stepped off the society page, saying all these nice things about how she's eternally in our debt for all we've done for Janice, and it's all in English.

They lead us into the living room, and there's these stuffed shirts and their dressed-up wives. Who the hell are these people? Well, it's the guys old Czesław works for, and he's an accountant, right? So you've got your businessmen and your doctors and your lawyers and people like that—you know, anybody who's making the big bucks and needs a wizard with numbers to come in and cook their books for them.

I've never seen my parents so uncomfortable in my life. I can see them adding up the money like they've got cash registers behind their eyes—ding, ding, ding—and, my God, you should have seen some of those women, the clothes they had. There's a pink punch for the ladies, and a table with hard stuff for the men, and there's every kind of booze you've ever seen in your life. About ten different kinds of Scotch, the ones that cost your left nut. I sampled most of them. And big silver trays with little twirly sandwiches and shrimp and meatballs that you're supposed to eat with toothpicks and dumb things on crackers with an olive on top. Is there a nice plate of
pierogi
anywhere to be seen? Are you kidding?

Are there any South Raysburg Polaks in the room? Yes, four of them. Their names are Walt, Mary, James, and Linda. I was really pissed off at old Czesław. Would it have killed him to invite Mary Jo and old Gene Duda? Janice had been playing music with Mary Jo every Tuesday night for months. Would it have killed him to invite
anybody
from St. Stans? Why did he even bother taking his family to St. Stans? They should have gone to St. Joseph's with all the other out-the-pike micks who'd ever made a buck. And why the hell did the Koprowskis rate, peasants that we are? Because we'd been feeding his daughter once a week? What he should have done was invited us to dinner.

Mom's giving me a look that says this is just too damn much—although not any worse than she'd expected—and we're sure as hell going to hear her opinion about it later. Old Bullet Head has checked it all out, and he starts to sweat. I mean right there before our very eyes little beads keep popping up on his forehead, and he keeps patting them away with a napkin. Here he is, a good union guy, and he knows who these people are. He's surrounded by the enemy.

Janice's older brother had come back for the occasion, and the two boys were helping out, walking around making sure that everybody was happy and had plenty of booze in their glasses. I was glad to see that Johnny Dłuwiecki had lots of hair—even more than I did—and I figured it must have given his poor old dad a fit or two.

Linda and I were propping up a wall, and John came over to have a little chat with us. “Boy, have you guys ever made a big impression on Janice,” he says. “She never stops talking about you.” We all sort of vaguely remembered each other from when the Dłuwieckis were still living in South Raysburg and he was going to St. Stans. He was the only kid other than Shirley Zembrzuski and us who could speak Polish. And of course, I remembered him from football—you know, when I was playing for Central and he was playing for the Academy. He wasn't very big, but he was a tough little bastard, and once at the Island Stadium he hit me with one of those tackles where you lay there on the field for a few seconds afterward and contemplate Eternity.

So anyhow John asks us if we want to see the birthday girl, and sure we do, so he takes us down into the basement where his dad has built himself a rec room with the wood paneling and the recessed lighting and the leather-covered bar, the whole bit. And you know what's funny? Czesław's still got posters from the Goldwater campaign plastered up on the walls.

Well, the party was divided up by age, so you've got all your teenyboppers down in the rec room, and your chips and chip dip and your stereo playing Donovan, and we walk in, and I check out this one girl, and I'm going, wow, far out, who's the cute little chickie with the long legs? And then I do a kind of, hey, whoa there, buddy, because the cute little chickie with the long legs is Janice.

I honest to God didn't recognize her for a second. She was wearing one of those Twiggy dresses, real short, and I guess I must have told you by now she's a tall girl, so the first thing you see are these legs that go on forever and then these— She always wore little-kid shoes—you know, with the strap—but that pair had quite a heel on them, and that made her even taller. Well, having a birthday didn't all of a sudden give her a figure, but somehow that didn't matter anymore.

Her hair's down, some kind of doodad holding it back, and she's got a couple long strings of beads around her neck, and she's got makeup on. First time I ever saw her with makeup on, and she didn't go overboard on it—it's mostly around her eyes—but it did change her. On Christmas Eve I'd been thinking, hey, Janice, you should dress a little older, and there she was dressed a little older, and to tell you the truth, it made me uncomfortable.

“Sweet sixteen, huh?” I said. “You look terrific.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I'm polished up like an apple.” You probably had to be there, but the way she said it, she really cracked me up.

She seemed very calm for somebody on her big sixteenth birthday. Sometimes Janice was, I guess you could say, real self-possessed. Little hint of a smile, and you don't know what she's thinking. Naturally her good buddies were there—that pack of St. Stans girls—and a bunch of other kids from Central. Linda and I knew all the Polish kids, so we're going, “Oh, hi, Sandy— Hi, Maureen— How's your family?” and like that. And one of the boys—a dark kid, not Polish, good-looking, well, a little bit too good-looking, if you know what I mean. He was so gone on Janice it was kind of pathetic. The way he was looking at her, it made me feel protective of her, like, hey, kid, watch yourself.

All of a sudden she says, “Oh, Jimmy, let me show you where I practice,” so I had to follow her out of the rec room and across the basement and around the side of the furnace to this tiny room in the back. There's nothing in there but a kitchen chair and a wooden bench with her clarinet on it, and a record player, and some of Linda's polka records, and a neat stack of paper with the words to some polka tunes written out in Polish. It did have a window, one of those little low things at ground level.

“Hear how quiet it is,” she says and shuts the door.

You couldn't hear much of the party in the rec room, and you couldn't hear the party upstairs at all. “Yeah,” I said, “it's real quiet,” and I'm thinking, hmmmm, I wonder why she didn't ask Linda to come along and see her little room where she practices.

We're just standing there looking at each other. She wasn't kidding about being polished up like an apple. She'd even got her nails done. I'm going, “Yeah, well, Janice, it is kind of neat down here. Not too bad at all. You had me thinking it was more like a broom closet or something.”

“If it wasn't for the window, I'd probably go nuts.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I can see that.” I really wanted to get the hell out of that little room.

So I'm going, “Janice, I hope you have the greatest sixteenth year any girl ever had,” and dumb stuff like that.

She says, “Thanks, Jimmy, I appreciate it,” and I can't think of anything more to say, so we just look at each other. Her eyes are that real dark, real intense blue the sky gets sometimes after the sun's been down for a while, and they looked really huge that day. All of a sudden I'm remembering Christmas Eve, and I feel this little shiver inside, and— Yeah, she really is beautiful. When I first met her, it just, you know, annoyed the hell out of me how beautiful she was. And I'm thinking, what's going on inside your head, you weird little kid? Then she turns and walks out and I follow her back to the party.

You can call me a liar if you want, but it was the first time I ever thought of her as anything but—I don't know, something like a little sister. I stood there sipping her dad's expensive Scotch and watched her with her friends—and watched that dark pretty boy watching her—and it made me feel kind of sour and old.

*   *   *

The next Tuesday Janice was back to looking like her normal Catholic schoolgirl self. It turned out that she didn't like her party much more than we did, and she's telling me all about it. “I asked them not to do that,” she says. “I didn't want all Dad's dumb clients there. I just wanted a few of my friends, you know, and some hot dogs and a cake or something, but I guess he had to make a big deal out of it because of his business.”

The Dłuwieckis threw two big parties every year, she said, one around Christmas and one in the summer, and her dad always invited his clients. “He thinks they're his friends,” she said, “but they're not his friends. I see how they treat him. They look down on him something awful. They can't even be bothered to learn to pronounce our name right. The men all kid around with Mom because she's so beautiful, but Dad—they think he's just a funny old guy with an accent. They're so obvious about it, it's embarrassing. But they have to show up, you know, because it's
business
.

“At Christmas they give him bottles of expensive liquor, and when they come back in the summer, they drink it, and they just stand around and talk to each other. They never invite us to their homes. And he still thinks they're his friends, but— You know the only person who ever comes into our house and sits down and talks to him? That's you.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, I'm not kidding. He likes you. He thinks you're real smart—‘a diamond in the rough,' he says. He thinks he can educate you.”

I had to laugh at that. “Well, it's been tried before.”

I was just turning off Highlight Road. “Don't take me home yet,” she says.

“Where do you want me to take you?”

“I don't care. Just stop somewhere.” So I parked on Edgewood.

“I hate coming home sometimes,” she says. “I don't want to live out here. I want to live in South Raysburg. I want to live so close to St. Stans I can walk to Mass. I want an ordinary family like yours.”

All I can do is laugh. “No, I mean it,” she says, “like yours or Sandy's or Maureen's. They have nice families. I mean they're not perfect. Nobody's perfect. But they're nice. Ordinary. They laugh and talk to each other. They don't have to have complete silence when Dad comes home. They don't have deep dark secrets nobody can talk about.”

“Oh, I bet they do.”

“But not like ours. It's like there's this wall. You can only get so far, and then, bang, you're up against this wall.”

We sat there as long as I thought we could get away with, talking about her family and this and that, and I kept glancing at my watch because the last thing in the world I wanted was to have her parents on my ass.

She told me about how her mom had wanted them to join the country club. That was after her dad had started making the big bucks and they'd moved out to Edgewood. And the goddamn Raysburg Country Club was the same as it's always been, one hundred percent WASP, and that means no Jews and no Hunkies, and our friends and neighbors of the African-American persuasion aren't even on the radar. But Janice's mom figured that the Dłuwieckis were an entirely different class of people from us peasants down in South Raysburg, so there'd be no problem, right? Unfortunately the folks at the country club didn't understand the real important differences between various kinds of Polaks.

That was pretty hard for Janice's mom to take, but she swallowed her disappointment and thought, hmmmm, well, maybe we can't be members of the country club, but that doesn't mean Janice can't go to country club dances. You see, most of those country club boys went to the Academy with Janice's brother Mark, so that turned into Mrs. Dłuwiecki's major campaign, to get Janice to date some of those boys, but Janice just kept saying no, no, no.

“The Ohio Valley is not Poland before the war,” Janice said, “and the Raysburg Country Club is not the Hotel Europejski in Warsaw, and I am not my mother— But I could never in a million years say that to her.”

Well, I wanted to lighten things up, you know what I mean? So I started teasing her. “You don't like those Academy boys, huh? They too stuck-up for you?”

“No, it's not that. They're just—jerks. The ones that Mark knows anyways.”

“But that pretty boy at your party? Now he's a different story, right?”

She kind of laughed. “Who do you mean? Tony? Yeah, he liked me right from the first day I walked into Central. I don't know why. He's Italian. I think maybe he just likes blondes. We're, you know, exotic.”

“How about you? You think he's cute?”

“Oh, sure he's cute. A lot of girls think he's really cute, but—”

“Yeah? But he's not your type, huh?”

“Oh, it's not that. It's— Well, boys my own age just seem so immature.”

*   *   *

One night in the spring when The Italian Renaissance had pretty well run itself out, Connie and I are sitting in our booth at the Night Owl. She's wearing a tight white sweater with a big round hole built into the middle of it—some Italian designer she said it was, but it looked more like Frederick's of Hollywood to me. I was probably telling her how much I admired the way she filled out that sweater. I really don't remember what I was telling her. But she looks up—you know, out into the stygian gloom—and goes into shock. I mean for real. Like she's been flash frozen.