The Clarinet Polka (37 page)

I think everybody in the place danced at least once except for the Dłuwieckis. But all the old folks danced, and they were fanning themselves, going, “Wow, was that ever a workout! One of these days I'm gonna drop dead, and it'll be the polka that killed me,” and everybody's ordering more beer, and the combination dinner, making Franky Rzeszutko just as happy as a clam. And everybody was congratulating the band, telling Mary Jo she'd really put together a hot group that time—and they're all so pretty!—and they were going over to the Dłuwieckis' table, saying, “Oh, you must be so proud! How'd your little girl ever learn to sing like that? And she plays that clarinet like an angel.”

Janice came over and whispered to me, “I think it's okay. I made him laugh.”

Right when they'd stopped playing, Patty Pajaczkowski's dad ran straight over to her and lifted her about three feet in the air and gave her a great big hug, and Bev's famous brother said they had polka bands on the Jamboree every once in a while, and maybe he could arrange something. Did they know any tunes in English? Franky passed the hat; Mary Jo counted it later, and it turned out to be $87.75—which everybody thought was just fine—and naturally all the band members got a free dinner, including me.

We were all feeling pretty good, but then I saw that Janice's dad had taken her off in a corner, and he was telling her something or other, and she was looking up at him real serious. Well, he's an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of guy, so he gathers up his wife and his boys and goes home.

Linda's going, “What did he say? What did he say? Was he mad?”

“Oh, yeah,” Janice says, “but he couldn't really blow up at me here in front of everybody.”

“Well, what did he
say?
”

“He congratulated me and all, but he was real stiff. He said I looked like I was born to be on the stage. He said I had an enormous God-given talent, but— Oh, I could tell there was a whole lot more he wanted to say.”

“How mad do you think he is?” Linda wanted to know, and Janice just shook her head.

Meanwhile, Father Obinski was talking to Mary Jo. He was asking her if she thought the band might be interested in playing at the annual street fair in August. Well, when Linda catches the drift of that one, she jumps in between Mary Jo and the priest and says, “Excuse me, Father, but you should talk to our manager.” That's yours truly. Mary Jo didn't care for that much, but she kept her mouth shut.

“We were trying to get the Andrzejewski brothers,” Father Obinski says to me, “but they're booked somewhere up in Pennsylvania that weekend.”

“Yeah,” I say, “they're a terrific band. They're getting to be too popular.”

Well, then there's Norm Kolak's band or Ray Pahucki's band, Father Obinski says. He hadn't talked to them yet, but he really did want to have our band because it was a local group from the parish. But maybe in addition to another band. The street fair goes on for a while, and that's a lot of polkas.

So I step off to one side with the good father—where we can, you know, go at it man to man—and I launch into this thing about how he's heard only a fraction of our material and we've got enough tunes for three or four sets, and of course I'm making all this up. I don't know how many tunes the girls have got.

Finally, we get around to the price. He mentions a figure, and it sounds okay to me, but I'm the manager, so what the hell?

I go, “Excuse me for asking, Father, but is that what you'd pay the Andrzejewski brothers?” I see him hesitate a second, and I go, “I know it's a fund-raiser for the church, and we're just starting out, so we're not trying to drive any kind of hard bargain here—”

And he's going, “Well, you're right, Jimmy, fair's fair at the street fair, if you don't mind the pun,” so I go no no no, and he goes yes yes yes, and lo and behold I've just bumped the money up by fifty bucks.

He gives me a wink, and we shake on it, so the band's booked. I go back to Linda and Janice and tell them what I've done, and Linda goes, “Oh, my God! How many sets?”

Janice says, “We can do it.”

“Sure we can,” Mary Jo says.

The evening was winding down. Georgie helped me lug the sound system out, and Bev Wright left with her famous brother to go hear some country music, and Mary Jo and Gene Duda were getting loaded with some of the other old crocks, and Patty Pajaczkowski and her father, you know, hadn't had anything resembling a conversation in years so they just couldn't stop talking to each other. But Linda and Janice were still worrying about Czesław. “I thought I'd get away with it, but I don't think I did,” Janice said. “Boy, am I ever going to get it when I get home.”

*   *   *

We were kind of holding our breath to hear what happened with Janice and her dad, but for the next few days there wasn't a peep out of her. Central was out for the summer, but rehearsing on Tuesday nights had become a kind of tradition so they were just going to keep on with it. Then Janice calls up and says she can't make that next Tuesday's rehearsal. Naturally Linda wants to know what's going down, but Janice tells her, “I can't really talk right now. I'll tell you when I can.”

Linda hangs up the phone and gives me this gloomy look. “That sure doesn't sound very good,” she says. “Oh, the little nitwit, why didn't she pay any attention to me?”

Well, I usually went home on Saturdays. Like at one or two in the afternoon when my hangover was starting to let up, I'd drift on down to the house and fix myself a sandwich and slip Mom a few bucks and maybe put in a load of laundry, and just hang out until I felt a little better and figured out what I was going to do that night. Saturday was Linda's piano students day, and I'd always come in through the back door so I wouldn't disturb her. There'd be these tiny girls all dressed up by their moms, real serious with their music books in their hands—one sitting at the piano getting her lesson and one or two more waiting in the living room, kicking their feet against the couch, till three or four in the afternoon.

I'll never forget this. That day Old Bullet Head was out front washing his car. He always drove a blue Chrysler. Every few years he traded it in and got another one, and he always kept them immaculate—you know, for the resale value—and he says to me, “Why don't you clean up that piece of crap you're driving around?” and I say, “Come on, Dad, the dirt's the only thing holding it together,” but I thought, why not? What else have I got to do?

So Old Bullet Head and I are washing our cars and joking around—the best way to get along with my father is to do something with him—and I look up, and here comes Janice walking along the sidewalk. It's a hot day, and she's wearing old tennis shoes and what looks like gym shorts and a wrinkled gray T-shirt that must've belonged to one of her brothers. I'm surprised because usually she's neat as a pin.

She goes, “Hi, Jimmy. Hi, Mr. Koprowski,” and Old Bullet Head goes, “Oh, hi there, Janice. How's your mom and dad?”

“Oh, they're fine.” And she says to me, “What's Linda doing?” and I say, “It's piano students day.”

“Oh,” she says, and she looks up and down the street—like maybe there's somewhere else she could go that's suddenly going to jump up and wave its arms at her. Then she says, “You want some help with your car?”

“Sure,” I say. I hadn't been planning on putting any wax on it. I mean, what's the point? But she picked up the can of wax and started in on the hood.

Well, you never saw anybody more miserable in your life. She was just radiating it. I say, “What's the matter?” and she says, “Oh, nothing.”

So we wax my dumb-ass Chevy, and she's not saying a word, and I go, “So what's happening? Your dad tell you you couldn't play any more polkas?”

“No, he didn't say that. It's up to me if I want to play in the band or not.”

“But he did say something, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. He said plenty.”

I keep waiting for the rest of the story, but another ten minutes goes by without a word out of her, and we've got my silly green-and-white car looking just about as good as it's ever going to get—it looks ridiculous if you want to know the truth—and she's starting to drive me nuts, so I say, “Okay, Janice, just go ahead and sink under your misery and drown if you don't want to talk about it.”

She sighs. Then she says, “Take me somewhere.”

I thought she meant someplace specific—like back home or out to the mall to buy something—so I say, “Sure. Where you want to go?”

“I don't care.”

We stand there and look at each other a minute, and then I say, “Okay, kid, get in the car.”

Now I've got this silent miserable girl in my car, so what am I going to do with her? Well, what I did was drive out to Waverly Park. A beautiful day like that, it seemed like a good idea.

I parked by the pool and bought us a couple Cokes. A cold beer would have tasted good, but—well, I may be a fool, but I'm not that big a fool. At least that day I wasn't. She said, “I've got a cousin in Poland exactly my age. Her name's Paulina. I've got her address. I can write to her if I want.”

“That ought to make you happy,” I said. “You wanted to know about your relatives in Poland.”

“Yeah, I'm glad I found out about her,” she said in this absolutely dead voice. “I know about a lot of other things too.”

The park was packed with people, and we walked away from the pool, up onto a hill where we could be alone—sort of alone—and sat down under a tree. “I can't stop crying,” she said. “Oh, I don't mean like now. I'm not going to start crying right here in front of you. You don't have to worry about that. I mean at night. When I get in bed.”

“So what are you crying about?” I said, and she told me the whole story.

*   *   *

Last Saturday night when we'd dropped her off, it'd been close to midnight. She'd been steeling herself for whatever her dad was going to dump on her—but still hoping, you know, that maybe he'd just be asleep. So she walked into the house and smelled his pipe smoke and thought, oh, rats, he's still up—he's going to pounce on me.

She peeked into the living room and saw him sitting there in the dark. She figured he was having a few jolts of the old furniture stripper—which he did on a regular basis when he had trouble sleeping. She knew he must have heard her come in, and she waited a minute for him to say something, but he didn't, so she went out into the kitchen and had herself a glass of milk. She came back and started for the stairs and bumped right into him in the hallway. She hadn't heard him coming, and he just scared the living daylights out of her.
“Dobranoc, Tatusiu,”
she said.

What he said back to her was, “You are a very clever girl.” The thing that really got to her was that they always spoke Polish at home, but he said it in English. And it was his tone of voice too—hard as nails.

“I couldn't move,” she told me. “My blood ran cold.”

“You lied to me,” he said.

“No, I didn't. I never lied to you.”

“Don't quibble about definitions. You lied by omission.”

“Okay, I did,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

Then he switched into Polish, and he said, “The day the Germans invaded Poland, they weren't playing polkas on Polish radio. They were playing Chopin.”

There was absolutely nothing she could say to that, so she just looked at him.

“What you were playing tonight,” he said, “it's a disgrace to Polish culture. Polish folk melodies turned into cheap, vulgar American songs. They might have Polish lyrics, but they're not really Polish.”

Without even stopping to think, she said back to him something she'd heard from Linda—“That's like saying Louis Armstrong isn't really African.”

She could see him making a real effort not to blow his cork. They were standing in the hallway with no light but just that one little lamp they always kept on for a night-light, and the house was quiet quiet quiet. It was kind of creepy, she told me.

“You may certainly play whatever music you like,” he said, “but never lie to me again.”

“I won't,
Tatusiu
. I promise.”

“You didn't have to lie to me. Please,
Janusiu,
just listen to me. You could be playing serious music. You could be playing the oboe. You could be playing chamber music, symphonies. You could— I didn't know you could sing. I was amazed. God has blessed you with enormous talent. Can't you respect that talent? You could take voice lessons. You could sing lieder, even opera. You could go to Juilliard.”

She didn't think it was the right time to point out to him that they don't let you into Juilliard unless you can read music. She kept searching her mind to find something to say, but she couldn't find a thing.

Then it was like he was disgusted with her for just standing there silent as a stone, so he made this motion like, oh, get the hell out of here and go to bed, and he said,
“Dobranoc,”
and she said,
“Dobranoc,”
and she was thinking, wheww, that was awful, thank God that's over, and she ran up the stairs, and just about the time she gets to the top, he's yelling at her, “
Janusiu!
” So she's got to take a deep breath and walk all the way back down again.

Well, he started off fairly calm. He said, “When you stand up in public and sing in Polish, you have a certain responsibility. You're representing the Polish people. Do you know what that means?”

She shook her head. She really didn't know what he meant by that. So he starts in with this stuff she's heard her whole life. About Poland in the old days, a land without stakes—you know, where no one was ever burnt for heresy—and about the religious dissenters coming to Poland from all over Europe, and Poland the bulwark of Western civilization against the Asiatic barbarians, and the Old Republic where the aristocracy was a fraternity of equals, where even the peasants were proud. None of this stuff is exactly news to her, right?