The Clarinet Polka (54 page)

I'd been doing pretty good—I kept telling myself that. From Easter right on through the summer it'd been like I had my life under control, and I'd bitched and moaned to Mondrowski about how I hadn't had two seconds to myself, but at least I'd never got bored. Then comes September and it's boredom city. Well, it's amazing how fast you can slip back into the sauce—like there's no slack and you're just
there
—and I was drinking as hard as I ever had in my life.

*   *   *

On Tuesday nights I'm stopping in again at the Dłuwieckis' to have a couple shots of creosote with Czesław, and you would've thought he'd never had a harsh word to say about polka music. “You know, Jimmy,” he says, “many serious musicians play popular dance music on the side.”

“Oh, is that right?” I say.

“Yes, it's quite common,” he says. “It's good practice for them, and they can make some extra money that way too. Sometimes very good money. Why, you'd be surprised at the number of musicians in symphony orchestras who financed their higher education by playing in dance bands.”

Then at one point when Janice is off in the kitchen talking to her mom, he leans over to me—giving me the straight scoop man to man—and he says, “You know, Jimmy, girls can be a problem in their teen years. So it's a good thing if they have serious outside interests—like music. It keeps them out of harm's way.”

“Oh, right,” I say. “My mom's always said that.”

Yeah, Czesław was pretty much back to his old self. He'd lost that chewed look he'd had in the summer, and he was all full of piss and vinegar again, smoking his pipe and holding forth like he was king of the world. He was doing what Polish people are real good at—getting on with life. It's something we've had lots of practice at.

He didn't know that I knew about all the heavy shit that had been going down, so he didn't talk to me about it, but naturally Janice did, and she said it was like a big wind had blown through the house and cleaned out the gloom. She never would take much credit for turning things around, but it was kind of obvious to me that the speech she'd made at the street fair had hit her dad pretty hard.

Then, for their next act, Czesław and John had got themselves reconciled. You see, John had been stewing over what he could say to Czesław to fix things up, and he came up with something, and he tried it out on Janice, and she said, “Yeah, that's it—that's perfect.” So the day after the street fair, he laid it on the old man. “You know, Dad, if the Germans had won the war, they would have taken this half-Polish kid and raised him as a German. But you won the war, and you really got even with them. You took this half-German kid and raised him as a Pole.”

Czesław laughed and laughed. And then they sat out in the back yard alone together and talked for a couple hours, and after that you never would have guessed they'd ever had a problem with each other. Of course John still had a problem or two, but he was keeping that to himself.

So Mark went off to New Haven, and Czesław could brag that he had a kid at Yale, and John decided he was going to get himself a Ph.D., after all, and that was pretty good bragging material too, and both Czesław and Marysia had decided they liked John's girlfriend—she was sweet and pretty and sensible and
Catholic
—and they took a little trip to Toledo to meet Anna's folks, and the two families hit it off, and so there was this nice big wedding in the spring to look forward to.

And guess what? Janice was back to normal too. For a while there it'd looked to her folks like she might be turning into a weird hippie brat who was going to defy them on a regular basis and have to be dragged home from dens of iniquity by an old friend of the family, but no, she's a good kid after all—playing in a polka band to make some extra money while she gets on with her serious music and stays out of harm's way.

*   *   *

A lot of Saturday nights, Linda would dial out, and so Janice and I would go somewhere and talk. Those heavy topics like World War II and the Nazis and what it means to be Polish did arise from time to time, but generally speaking, the name of the game was getting back to normal, and when things are back to normal, what people usually talk about is just, you know, their lives. So I get to hear all about who's going out with who in the eleventh grade at Raysburg Central Catholic. And what she's got for homework. And how the band's doing, and Mr. Webb telling her he doesn't care how much of a virtuoso she's turned into, she'll never make first chair until she learns to read music. And all about clarinet reeds—and that's a lot more complicated topic than you'd think and I'm not going to bore you with it.

And one of the great burning issues of Western civilization is the length of Janice's skirts. You see, Janice and the girls in the rat pack, their main object in life was to wear their skirts as short as humanly possible. And the nuns wanted to see their girls looking like nice, modest, decent Catholic girls, which is why they've put them in a uniform in the first place. So the girls are saying, “Oh, Sister, I'm sorry. I didn't realize—I guess I must have
grown
over the summer!”

Well, if you're sixteen, you don't grow over the summer, and even Sister Mary Rose of the Immaculate Conception has got to know that. So the girls have to go in the office and kneel down, and their skirts have to touch the backs of their legs. Before they take that little test, they pull their skirts down till they're practically falling off them, and then when they're still too short, they move into the good old delaying tactic—“Oh, I'm so sorry, Sister, my mom hasn't got around to it yet”—so they can go one more day showing off their underwear to all the horny young studs at Central.
I
even thought Janice's skirts were too short, but who gave me the right to have an opinion?

Of course I got to talk about my normal life too—mainly bitching about working for Vick Dobranski. And Janice goes, “Why don't you look for another job?” Good question, right? I can see that now, but at the time all it did was piss me off. And sometimes she'd tear out the ads in the paper for electronics technicians and things like that and she'd give them to me. And I'm thinking, okay, Koprowski, this is truly wonderful. Now you've got a sixteen-year-old in pigtails trying to run your life for you.

*   *   *

Oh, there's something I almost forgot to tell you—and I've got to admit I really did want to forget it just about damn near quick as it happened. Back in August, John and Anna had stuck around in Raysburg for a few days after the street fair, and one night they took Linda and me and Janice out to Tomerelli's for dinner. It was nice. And we drove up to the park afterward just to enjoy the evening. We're just strolling around, and John's a sometimes smoker, and he says, “Can I bum one of those?”

So I give him a smoke, and I fire up one for myself, and the girls are walking on ahead of us, and John says kind of under his breath, “You know, Jimmy, my sister's deceptive.”

I'm going, whoops, here it comes. “Oh, yeah?” I say. “How's that?”

“Well, she's always been a serious girl. Maybe too serious for her own good. And sometimes she can seem—well, really mature for her age. But she's still very young—and still very vulnerable.”

I'd never thought of Janice as particularly vulnerable. I'd always thought of her as one tough little cookie. But hell, what did I know? “I'd hate to see her get hurt,” he says.

For about half a second there I saw him in a Nazi uniform. I mean, he really did have those looks—the ice blond hair and the eyes so blue they kind of snap—but then I thought, come on, Koprowski, give the guy a break.

He's going on about one thing or another, still approaching things sideways, talking about what he calls “the counterculture,” and saying how the winds of change are blowing through the land as any fool can plainly see, and he'd be the last person in the world to want to put limits on somebody else's personal choices, especially in terms of their lifestyle—and he just keeps laying these good words on me right, left, and center. It was kind of obvious what he was getting at, and I didn't see any reason to keep pussyfooting around it. “Don't worry, John,” I said. “We're just friends.”

“Oh?” he said. “That's not what she thinks.”

*   *   *

Okay, so what was stopping me from saying to Janice, or her saying to me, “What are we going to do about this bind we're in?” Nothing that I could see—except maybe sheer terror. That day on the top of the hill at the end of Pike Street, we'd gone sidling up to the topic, but then we'd both jumped back from it like pulling your hand away from a hot stove. But it was getting real clear we couldn't run from it too much longer.

Janice was pretty much the only thing I gave a damn about. I admired and respected her too much ever to lay a hand on her, but when I was with her, I'd look at her sometimes and I'd get this—well, you know, your basic horrible ache, and I'd think, oh, God, it's all so hopeless. Then pretty soon the only sobriety I had left was when I was with her. I won't say I didn't drink at all around Janice, but it was important to me that she'd never see me drunk, and her parents would never see me drunk, and they never did. Everybody else did.

I'd been building up a little bank account, but now it was getting eroded for the simple fact that I was having a hard time getting my ass into work. One day I stagger into the shop around noon, thinking, hell, I've got to make a few bucks for a change, and Vick says, “Koprowski, what the hell do you think you're doing? Don't come in here drunk.”

So I go staggering back out again, half pissed off and half relieved because I hadn't felt much like working anyway. And it couldn't have been more than a few days later, I went home for dinner, and Old Bullet Head was where he always was—kicked back in the living room with his nose in the paper—and we had us like an eight-word conversation. Any idiot could see the state I was in, and of course he'd been talking to Vick so he was all prepared for me.

He puts down his paper, walks over to me, grabs me by the hand, and yanks me to my feet. Then he says to me in this absolutely dead quiet voice, “Never, never, never walk into this house drunk. You got that?”

What could I say? “Yeah, sure, sorry,” is what I said.

Then he grabs me by the arm and waltzes me down the hall and shoves me right out the front door. “You ever want any help, Jimmy,” he says, “all you got to do is ask for it,” and he closes the door in my face.

I was getting to the point where I had to have a good stiff jolt first thing in the morning just so I could get my ass out of bed. And I was drifting into that binge drinking where you lose a couple days at a time and you can't quite recall where they went. It was getting so bad I even admitted to Janice I was worried about it—although I didn't tell her it was anywhere near as bad as it was. She goes, “Why don't you get some help?”

That's one of those things people say that you don't know whether to laugh or cry because you know perfectly well there isn't any help. “Yeah? Where?” I say.

“I don't know. How on earth would I know? Talk to Father Obinski.”

Of course I thought that was totally ridiculous—although I didn't tell her that because I didn't want to hurt her feelings. But looking back on it, I'd have to say she was right. Any parish priest worth his salt can at least aim you in the right direction. But that was way too simple for me. The last thing in the world I would have done at that time in my life was go to a priest with my problems.

So I went drifting on into the fall trying to convince myself that things weren't really as bad as I knew perfectly well they were, and I was getting through life the same way I'd got through the service, but when you're in the service, you can always blame it on being in the service. You can say, okay, once I get out, things are going to be different. But you know what? Now I didn't have anything to get out of.

*   *   *

Well, if you're a junior in high school and you're pretty, boys are going to start asking you out. They had a big school dance sometime that fall, and Janice told me she wasn't going to it. “Why not?” I said.

“Oh, I don't feel like it.”

Then when the dance was only a few days away, she started having regrets. All her friends were going. She felt left out. “You could still go,” I said. Well, no she couldn't. A boy had asked her and she'd turned him down. She'd told him she had to do something with her family—one of those things that's booked months in advance, you know—and in the meantime he'd asked somebody else, and she couldn't just turn up at the dance by herself.

“What's the matter with the boy?” I said. “He got two heads?”

“Oh, no. He's nice enough. You probably met him. Remember Tony? He was at my birthday party. He's got kind of a thing for me.”

“Yeah? Why didn't you want to go with him?”

“I don't know. I just didn't feel right about it.”

I looked her in the eyes, and she looked back at me with that honest look she's got, and I'm thinking, oh, you poor kid, boy, am I ever screwing up your life for you. So I said—I mean, it just popped out—“Look, you can't just sit at home feeling bad. I'll take you somewhere.”

And she goes, “Oh, would you? That'd be really nice,” lighting up like a Christmas tree. Yeah, me and my big mouth. Because I'd meant that maybe we'd do what we usually did—go sit on a hill somewhere, or drive around, or go to a movie with Linda—but that's not how she took it. Damn fool that I was, I'd just asked her out on a date.

“I'll get Sandy and Eddie to drop me off,” she says. Sandy Czaplicki had started going out with Larry Dombrowczyk's little brother Eddie. “Is that okay with you? I always wanted to see where you live so I can imagine you there.”