The Clarinet Polka (45 page)

Janice is holding my hand—it's like she doesn't even think about how it must look to them—and her hair's still down, this wonderful golden curtain. It swings when she walks. “You feel okay, Rapunzel?” Patty says. “Oops, sorry. I'm not supposed to call you that.”

“It's okay. You let down my long hair, so you can call me that. I'm okay. I guess I am. How long's it take before it goes away?”

“Just go to bed. You'll be fine in the morning.”

We stop by the swings. “I'm going to run her up to Edgewood,” I say. “What are you guys doing? You want to have a beer?”

“Yeah, sure. You want to meet us somewhere? The PAC?”

“I wouldn't go in there on a bet,” Patty says. “Probably run into my old man in there.”

There's this kind of pause where we're all just trying to pull ourselves back together enough to function. “Listen, you guys,” Janice says. “I'm sorry, okay?”

“You've got nothing to feel sorry for,” Georgie says. “Does Franky Rzeszutko stay open this late? I wouldn't mind a sandwich or something.”

“There's a place on the Island,” Patty says. “I think they're open till one. Or we could go out the pike.”

“Lots of places in Center Raysburg open,” I say.

I think I've told you how stubborn Janice is. She's just not going to let it go. “But I do feel sorry,” she says to Georgie. “You were there. You were in Vietnam. What right have I got to—to be so—?”

“Aw, hell, honey, come on. There's no problem that I can see.”

“No, I mean it. Everything I've read about it—it must be such an awful war. And it must have been so hard for you to come back home. I don't know, that's what I read anyway.”

He's looking at her with this kind of puzzled expression. It's obvious she's real sincere and all that. “Yeah, well, it had its harsh moments I got to admit,” he says. “Yeah, and coming back home was kind of weird.”

He looks over at me like maybe I'm going to bail him out of this one. “Most of the guys will tell you that,” he says. “But what the hell did we expect? They were going to meet us with marching bands and majorettes? Yeah, I could have used a majorette or two— But seriously— Yeah, maybe a little bit more than what we got. Yeah, that would have been nice.”

“Like what?” Janice asks him. “What would have been nice?”

He makes a face like, hey, doesn't this little girl ever know when to quit? He stands there for the longest damn time. Then he says, “Well, somebody could have said thank you.”

SIXTEEN

When she considered her close encounter with the weed, Janice thought it had been interesting and all that, but she said, “Whew, it was like being in a freaky movie. I never never never want to do that again.”

She remembered it all in that super-heavy, high-reverb way you do when you're stoned, and she'd turned into a one-girl Patty Pajaczkowski fan club. “She was so sweet to me,” she kept saying. “I never would have guessed she could be so sweet.” And she took to heart all that weird stuff Patty had been saying to her, but being a good Catholic girl, she put her own spin on it. Going off into the desert and talking to lizards was not something she could relate to, so she decided she wasn't on a
spirit
quest, like Patty said, but she was on a
spiritual
quest. And for the next part of her quest she had to go see her brother.

They hadn't heard a good word out of him since he'd gone back to Columbus, so eventually Czesław called him up, and the whole family's waiting around with bated breath to hear what he has to say, and Czesław gets off the phone and says, “Everything's fine,” you know, kind of stony-faced, so of course they knew that nothing was fine. “You wouldn't want to drive me to Columbus, would you?” Janice asked me.

“Oh, sure. Your old man would just love that.”

“I'd get his permission.”

“Are you kidding? He's not that crazy. Come on, kid, where's your head? And on top of that, there's this wonderful piece of legislation called the Mann Act.” I told her it was easy to get to Columbus. You take the bus.

“Dad would never let me.”

But she asked him, and to her total amazement, he said yes. Both her parents thought it was a good idea for her to go see her brother. She had to call them the minute she got there, and John had to promise to meet her at the bus station, and she had to call home every night. Janice goes, yes, yes, yes, she'd do all that. She was really excited. It was the first time in her life she'd ever gone anywhere by herself.

She was gone five days, and I spent most of that time brooding. We'd got to the point where we were practically living in each other's pockets, and it was getting harder and harder for me to run the oh-she's-just-my-little-sister number. I was starting to notice a lot more than just her hipbones, you know what I mean? She'd got me to the point where I thought kneesocks were sexy, and believe me, that's a real accomplishment.

“I can see why you like her,” Mondrowski said. “She's beautiful, and she's real smart, and she's mature—”

“Well, sometimes she is.”

“And she's just nuts about you. That's kind of plain to see. And she looks like Dorothy Pliszka.”

“Come on, man, that's ridiculous. She doesn't look a thing like Dorothy.”

“Sure she does. They're exactly the same type. Blond, blue eyes, nice legs, little Polak faces. That kiddy look Dorothy had back in high school.”

And I'm going, no way, man. Just no way I was going to admit to that one. But I'm thinking, shit, he's got a point. How come I never saw it before?

“But I just want to offer you a word of caution, Koprowski. Her old man was in the Polish Resistance, right?”

“Yeah, he was.”

“Any chance he's kept some of his old hardware? You know, like maybe he's got a forty-five laying around, or one of those WW II rifles with the long bayonet?”

I'm laughing, but it's not that funny. “I've never laid a hand on her.”

“Yeah. Right.”

*   *   *

Well, Janice went to Columbus hoping to make her brother feel better and maybe get him talking to their parents again, but it mainly turned out to be her next big bummer. Janice said she'd never felt closer to John, but— Well, it wasn't that she wished she hadn't gone. No, it'd been a great trip. They'd had some wonderful times, but— “Oh, he's so angry,” she said.

Finding out that Czesław wasn't his real father was the least of his problems—or anyway that's what he told Janice. He and his girlfriend had just moved into a little apartment, and Janice helped them unpack and put things away. Of course Janice knew that some young people lived together before they got married, but she hadn't thought her brother would do that, and she was kind of shocked. All the time she was there she had to keep pretending she was cool with all kinds of things that shocked her right down to her toenails.

Her brother was one of those dangerous student radicals her father ranted about. John had met his girlfriend back when they were undergrads and they'd both been in the Catholic antiwar movement—I didn't even know there
was
a Catholic antiwar movement, which tells you how well informed I was—and they'd been dangerous radicals together ever since. If Janice had come to Columbus only a week or two before, she would have found them living in a commune—a real commune where they had these heavy-duty meetings and planned political actions and like that.

The main thing John and his girlfriend were talking about was what they called “the fragmentation of the left.” They'd been in that dangerous radical organization SDS, and it had split into two big groups—one of them was those crazy Weathermen—but John and his girlfriend hadn't been in favor of either one of those big groups. They'd been in some tiny little splinter that nobody else agreed with because it wasn't radical enough. And everyone in the commune had agreed that John and Anna weren't radical enough. Real radicals, you know, were into smashing things—like they were going to smash the state, and smash racism, and smash imperialism, and one thing they were going to smash real good was monogamy. So everybody was supposed to sleep with everybody else, but John and Anna didn't want to sleep with anybody but each other, so they were considered just hopeless. That's why they'd moved out of the commune and got their own apartment.

“In the history of the American left,” John said, “1970 is going to go down as the Year of the Big Mouth.” Like every word you said, you had to sound like you were the meanest mother on the block. The real heavy radicals were talking armed revolution and underground cells and all that crap, and John and Anna just couldn't relate to it. They said the Weathermen were the worst. “They're completely out of touch with reality,” they said. “They're living in some sick violent dreamworld.”

That spring there'd been some real serious rioting going down at Ohio State. It'd already been going on for a week when they heard about the kids getting killed at Kent State, and that just freaked out the whole campus even more. They brought in the National Guard at Ohio State too, and everybody was paranoid that those guys would start shooting and then they'd have their own blood in Columbus to deal with. The university finally got closed down. It was open again now, but with high security. “Now it really is a police state,” John said, and he and Anna were sick at heart over everything.

There was nothing left for them to belong to. They told Janice that when they'd first joined up with SDS, one of its main goals was to make a world where love is more possible—she really liked that—but nobody was mentioning that lately. Now people were talking about Mao and Fidel and Uncle Ho, and sometimes they even had nice things to say about that pig Stalin, and some of the girls were going off into these women's lib groups where they considered all men to be scum, and John and Anna didn't want to be part of any of it. Meanwhile the war was still going on and people were being killed in it every day, and the student movement, they said, was “rushing off into irrelevance and committing suicide.” So you could see how finding out you were half German wasn't exactly high on John's list of things to worry about. That's what he told his sister anyway.

Then he got around to talking about their family. It was pathogenic, he said. That word really got to Janice; she kept saying it. “Pathogenic. Pathogenic?
Pathogenic!
” That meant it drove people nuts. Like John would have been driven totally nuts if he hadn't gotten away from their parents and gone off and lived his own life, and Mark was already totally nuts, and it was just too bad Janice was still stuck in high school because the way things were going, she was going to get driven totally nuts pretty soon herself.

The way the kids got driven nuts, John said, was from getting all these double messages. Like, “You're Polish, you're American,” and “Think for yourself, don't contradict me,” and “You're nothing without the family, get out of here and make something of yourself.” The minute Janice heard about the double messages, the light bulb went on in her head because she knew exactly what he was talking about, and she started laughing and coming up with her own, like, “The people in South Raysburg are ignorant peasants, they're the salt of the earth,” and “You're a little girl, you're a sophisticated young woman.” Yeah, John told her, she'd got the idea, and it was easy enough to laugh at it now, but when you're a little kid, it just warps out your mind for you.

He did feel sorry for his parents, John said. He'd always felt sorry for them, and after hearing their story, he really felt sorry for them. And he did love them—just so long as he could keep a few hundred miles between them and him—but he'd figured out early on that they couldn't handle anything real, so all he ever told them about himself was, like he said, “the official lie.” No, he hadn't gone back to grad school to better his lot in life, climb up higher and faster on the ladder of success. He'd gone back to school to stay out of Vietnam. He didn't even know for sure what he was doing in grad school. He was registered in the Ph.D. program in political science, but he was getting nowhere fast with it. Maybe he'd get a Master's. Maybe he'd drop out. Who the hell cares?

And as to being half German, well, that was meaningless. But the question Janice should ask herself was why her father had kept his mouth shut for years and then picked that particular time to tell them all about it. “He was getting even with you,” he said, “for going against his wishes and playing in a polka band.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, he wouldn't do that.”

“Oh, yes he would. I'm not saying it was a conscious decision on his part, but just look at it, okay? That's exactly how petty and vindictive he can be.”

But the craziest thing of all, John said, was Polish. “They've produced three kids who are fluent in a useless and totally irrelevant foreign language spoken only in a backward, third-rate, Soviet-bloc country somewhere to the east of Europe.” The Poland they'd grown up hearing about had never existed. That nice little town with its tough little boys playing Indians in the forest, beautiful aristocratic girls riding horses, wise peasants tilling their fields, quaint old Jews studying the Torah, and everybody getting along with everybody, was just a romantic dream. That great man Piłsudski was really just a clumsy thug who'd ruled Poland as a dictator. And all those martyrs and saints and patriots were just a pile of horseshit. Just think about how crazy it was, he said, all of them sitting around on Sunday nights reading Mickiewicz and Władisław Reymont and those other heavy-duty Polish writers to each other. It'd be like if you had an American family somewhere in Poland, surrounded by people who didn't speak a word of English, and they were supposed to learn to be Americans by reading
Huckleberry Finn
and
The Leaves of Grass
.