The Clarinet Polka (33 page)

So there I am in my little phone-booth-sized shower, and I'm contemplating the fact that Mrs. Constance Bradshaw has just turned up looking pretty damn fine. It's amazing the excuses you'll give yourself, but I thought, hell, Connie may be crazy as six loons, but we sure had some wild times together, and here's the clincher. Okay, Koprowski, maybe what you need in your life right now is some of that
adult
companionship.

I came out of the shower and told Connie I was glad to see her—especially looking just lovely the way she was at the moment—and I got a big bright smile for that. She told me she had a surprise for me. “Oh, yeah?” I said, “am I going to like it?”

“You're going to love it.”

What she wanted me to do was get in her Mustang and go somewhere with her. “Honey,” I said, “there's a basic rule with me. I don't go anywhere unless it's under my own steam.”

She'd been laughing a lot ever since she showed up, and she laughed at that. “Oh, you're so paranoid. What do you think I'm going to do, kidnap you? Okay, take your own car then. Follow me.”

So I followed her on out to St. Stevens. Ended up on this quiet, picture-postcard street—you know, with your shady old trees and big front porches and lawn sprinklers going. I park behind her, and we both get out, and I follow her around to the back of this house and up the steps, and she unlocks the door and pushes me inside. “Ta-DUM,” she says, “it's mine.”

It was a pretty sunny little apartment, everything in it neat and clean as a pin. “We're separated,” she said. She told me that she and her husband were doing one of those trial separation things. He was still in the house with the kids not too far from there, so she could see them anytime she wanted.

She's going, “This is mine, mine, mine! What do you think, Jim? Isn't it fabulous?”

I looked around, pretending I was admiring everything, but I didn't know what I thought. Her furniture looked brand-new. She had pictures of her kids all over the place, but none of her husband. I'd never seen pictures of her kids before, and it gave me a jolt. They were beautiful kids. I didn't like seeing their little faces looking at me.

After she and her husband had the big fight when he'd found out she hadn't been going to The Italian Renaissance, everything had worked out just fine, much to her amazement. Of course it took days of bitter slogging to get there, but now they were seeing a marriage counselor, and they'd decided it was a good idea to keep the kids in their familiar environment, so they'd hired Mrs. So-and-so to look after them full-time. That meant Connie could come and go as she pleased. Her husband had even agreed to an open marriage. He was hoping it wouldn't always be like that, but he could live with it for the time being.

Up until then I'd always felt sorry for Connie's husband, but now I was thinking, okay, let me see if I've got this one right. She moves out, leaves the kids with him, gets him to agree that she can screw other guys, and he's still paying for everything? That guy must be the biggest damn fool who ever walked the earth.

Ever since she'd showed up, she'd been working hard to show me how happy happy happy she was, so naturally I was starting to wonder if she was really as happy as all that, and yeah, there was something phony about it. Like the way she was talking didn't sound like herself. Like she couldn't quite meet my eyes. Like that little tinkly laugh was just pathetic. Like I could see her hands shaking.

She showed me this book called
Aerobics
she'd been reading and told me how it'd changed her life. She'd been jogging every day. “I'm almost up to a mile. Isn't that wonderful? And I've always been just about the least athletic person you could imagine. Oh, I'm going to be so fit.”

She takes me in her bedroom and shows me all these clothes she's bought. During the worst of it, she said, she'd gone home for a few days—when she said “home” she always meant Baltimore—and she'd treated herself to a few new things. I swear, a dozen of these minidresses and miniskirts in that ungodly expensive melt-in-your-mouth leather she liked. All colors. White and pink and red and blue and yellow. She's going, “Oh, I just adore leather. Don't you, Jim? It's just so sexy. I'd wear leather panties if I could find someone who would make them for me.”

“Honey,” I say, “clothes hanging on a hanger don't do much for me. I like to see them with a woman inside.”

She gives me a good ha-ha over that one.

“Do you like athletic girls?” she says. Standing there in her pink tracksuit. The drapes drawn on the bedroom window. I hadn't been laid since The Italian Renaissance, so what do you think I did?

*   *   *

Well, it started out okay. I'd drive out there late in the morning on Sundays, and Connie would cook one of those brunch things—you know, the eggs and the orange juice—and then we'd retire to the bedroom. It didn't have the high-octane kick we used to get back when we'd been riding that thin edge, but it was nice. We'd snooze a bit after we got done, and then we'd lay there and have a couple beers and, you know, chat about nothing in particular. We were having what she called “a Mature Relationship.” I guess that means you get to screw somebody once a week and not have any responsibilities.

Then afterward I'd say, “Well, I got to go home for dinner. Big family thing on Sundays, you know,” and that seemed okay with her. But she'd always want to know exactly when I was coming back. “We haven't got a lot of room for spontaneity,” she said.

She made me swear on everything sacred that I'd never just turn up unannounced. “He can sort of handle it when it's all in the abstract,” she said, “but if he actually saw a real human being, I don't know what he'd do.”

Well, I didn't want to run into her husband any more than she wanted me to, so I played by the rules. I could call her any time I wanted, but if she said, “Oh, hi, Barbara,” then I was supposed to get the message that her husband was there. But I didn't call her too often. To tell you the truth, I didn't think about her all that much when I wasn't with her.

*   *   *

Meanwhile Linda started taking trumpet lessons with Mr. Webb, and she called up Franky Rzeszutko and he told her, “Sure, kid, any Saturday night you want to bring your band in here, that's fine with me. It'd be great to have live music again. How about
this
Saturday?”

No, no, no, that was way too quick for Linda. She decided they should wait till school was out. “It's only fair to Janice,” she said. Well, Janice didn't care, so the person Linda was being fair to was herself because she wanted to cram a million hours of practice in before she had to stand up and play that horn in front of God and everybody.

Seeing as Bev and Patty were professionals and knew everything there was to know about the music business—that was how they saw it anyway—they had a serious talk with Linda. Told her there were a number of heavy-duty things the band had to do if it was going to be for real. Number one on the list was they needed a manager. “Jimmy?” Linda says.

“No problem,” I say. “Since about the age of four, it's always been my burning ambition to be the manager of a polka band.” So I go up to Kaltenbach's and check out the PA systems they got for rent and pick one that'll do the job at Franky's place just fine.

Nobody could figure out what the band's name was, but they all kept trying. Mary Jo came up with the Red-Hot Polka Girls.

“Aw, come on,” Linda said, “it sounds like we're the residents of a polka dancers' whorehouse.”

Janice suggested,
“Wesoła Polka.”
You see, in Polish “polka” means a Polish woman, so that meant “the happy Polish woman.”

Mary Jo said, “That's cute. But if you don't speak Polish, you wouldn't get it.”

Even Patty had a shot at it. Phone rings in the middle of dinner, Mom answers it, says it's Patty Pajaczkowski.

Linda hisses at me, “You get it, Jimmy. I don't want to talk to her.”

So I pick up the phone, and I'm hearing in the background Janis Joplin wailing away and a bunch of whacked-out people speed-rapping—that goofy laugh has got to be Mondrowski—and Patty goes, “We got it.”

“Got what?”

“The name. We're going to be the Polestars, okay? And then when we start making albums, they're going to be, ‘Heavenly Bodies,' ‘Polka Heaven,' and ‘Lead Me On.'”

I convey this to Linda, and she raises her eyebrows, so I say to Patty, “We'll take it under advisement.”

“Oh, God,” Linda says, “maybe we should be Poles Apart.”

“Hey,” I say, “that's pretty good.”

But that got her thinking, and the next day she decided—for real—the band should be the Magnetic Poles, and their albums would be “Opposites Attract,” “From Pole to Pole,” and “Push and Pull.”

“Everybody's working too hard,” Mary Jo said. “All we need is a nice simple name people can remember—like ‘Mary Jo and the Polka Girls.'”

Nobody said anything to that.

“Hey,” Bev said, “you heard of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young—?”

“No,” Linda said, “there's no way we're going to be Duda, Koprowski, Dłuwiecki, Pajaczkowski and Wright.”

*   *   *

On the first Sunday in May we had the procession to the church the way we always do. The cops come down and rope the street off, and the procession goes from St. Stans school around a couple blocks and ends up at the church. Everybody in the parish turns out for it.

The sodality elects a May Queen and her court. The May Queen's a girl out of high school who's not married yet, and she's supposed to be pretty, but when they're picking her, they also take into account how active she's been in the sodality and like that. The May Princesses are usually her girlfriends, and they're all dressed up in these old-fashioned ball gowns. In the old days the May Queen had a long train on her dress, and a couple little boys had to carry it so it wouldn't drag on the ground. When I was a little boy, I always went way far out of my way to make sure I wouldn't get picked to do that.

The different grades at St. Stans school have different costumes they wear, and the kids really look cute. I was in it for years, and if you're a little kid, of course you're not thinking you look cute, you're thinking you look ridiculous and you hope nobody laughs at you. Like I remember wearing a robe and a cape and a hat trimmed with white fur, that fake stuff. The littlest girls are dressed all in white like First Communion dresses, and the bigger girls wear long dresses, and the eighth-grade girls carry a statue of the Blessed Virgin. The procession ends up in the church, and the May Queen crowns the Blessed Virgin with flowers, and then you have Mass. It's a nice happy springtime event, and you look forward to it every year.

But from Czesław Dłuwiecki's point of view it was yet another example of our degenerate peasant culture. Janice had got sick of hearing him say that, and she told him it wasn't fair, so he took that opportunity to explain a few things to her once again.

The peasants in different parts of Poland, he said, have lots of different customs, but the only thing that even resembles a queen is in that harvest festival called
Dożynki
. The peasants pick a pretty young girl and crown her with a wreath made out of grain and decorated with ribbons and flowers and berries and like that. She's not really a queen, but if you wanted to stretch it a bit, you could maybe call her a harvest queen. And there's festivals in honor of the Blessed Virgin all over Poland, he says, and the crown of the Blessed Virgin is an important symbol in Polish Catholicism, but May Queens? There's not a real May Queen to be seen in all of Poland.

So where did this weird ceremony at St. Stanislaus come from? Well, her dad's going to give Janice the straight scoop on that. The people who first settled here—that's our grandparents he's talking about, right?—were poor peasants with no education whatsoever. You could hardly even call the language they spoke Polish, it was so crude. Poland was partitioned in those days, so they had no sense of a common nationality. The economic conditions were truly terrible, and a lot of them had already been displaced from the land and were just wandering around loose, and then they ended up in America. And the long and the short of it is that these poor folks were basically so ignorant they couldn't tell a
dupa
from a teacup.

So they settle in Raysburg, and they've got some dim recollections of their peasant past back in Poland, and dim recollections of Polish history, and somebody thinks they ought to have a celebration on the 3rd of May to commemorate the signing of Poland's constitution. And somebody else thinks having a May Queen is a good idea—even though the May Queen is a
British
folk tradition not a Polish one—and then they decide to make it a little bit like an American beauty pageant, and then the Church jumps in the way it always does to make sure the whole thing's Catholic, and there you've got it.
Degenerate
. When Czesław uses that word, he says, that's exactly what he means, and that's exactly what it is.

This didn't go down too well with Janice. She'd gone to school with the nuns at St. Stans just like the rest of us, and she'd been in the May procession for eight years just like the rest of us, and she thought it was beautiful. “It's such an important part of the life of the parish,” she said, “how can he object to it? Oh, he's so self-righteous. He thinks he knows everything.”

Well, she wasn't about to let it go, and she asked him something I'd been wondering about myself. “If you feel that way, why are we even members of St. Stanislaus Parish?”

“It's a Polish parish,” he said like it's obvious. “Don't get me wrong, Janusiu. Those people are good people. Good Catholics. Sincere, honest, shrewd, hardworking. The salt of the earth. They were very good to me and your mother when we first came here, and we will always be in their debt.”