The Clarinet Polka (56 page)

I'm going, “Hey, Mom, slow down. Wait a minute here. There's nothing happening with me and Janice.”

She doesn't even take a breath. “Holy Mother of God, Jimmy, where's your brains? You've always been crazy, but I at least thought you had good sense. And that poor little girl— Religious girls, God help them. They just don't know what hits them. What they got between their legs might as well be a flowerpot for all they know about it—”

“Mom! Hold on a minute. Give me a break here—”

But she's not going to give me a break here. I've just got to stand there listening to her until she runs out of steam. “Come on,
Mamusiu
,” I say.

“Don't give me that
Mamusiu
crap, you jerk.” She's softening up just a touch, I can tell. After all, she is my mom.

“Give me a chance,” I say. “Just listen to me a minute, okay? She's like a little sister. I never laid a hand on her. You can go get the Bible and I'll swear on it. You can ask Linda.”

I was hoping she could ask Linda. I didn't have a clue what Linda was thinking on the topic these days.

“So I took her out to dinner,” I say. “Big deal.” I was hoping that's all Sandy had told her mom.

“You've been doing more than that.”

“Yeah? What have I been doing? You want to tell me? Come on,
Mamusiu
, tell me what people are saying.”

She just makes a face at me. “Mrs. Dłuwiecki's not active in the church,” she says, “but she does go to Mass. How long you think it's going to be before somebody says something to her?”

I didn't have a good answer to that one. “Tell me what people are saying,” I asked her again.

“It doesn't matter a damn what people are saying, it's plain as the nose on your face. All you have to do is look at the two of you— You kids are so in love with each other it's like something out of a movie.”

That one really got to me, and I guess she could see it. “Aw, hell, Jimmy,” she says.

“Mom, I swear on everything holy, I never touched her.”

We stand there looking at each other for a while, and then she says, “I got to finish my dinner.”

*   *   *

It was getting close to Halloween, I remember that, and we were having this last little burst of Indian summer—still hot in the afternoons—and it's a Saturday and it seems like Janice's parents have invited me over to the house. Kind of a picnic thing, you know, for late in the afternoon.

I turn up and Czesław gives me the glad hand—
“Witam cię, Jimmy”
—and ushers me out onto the back lawn. This was back in the days before people were getting into decks or patios, so they'd set up some card tables out there. “Your sister can't be with us tonight?” Czesław says, and I think, hey, Janice, you really did a number on me, didn't you? And I go, “Oh, Linda sends her regrets. She had a date or something,” and I'm looking around to catch Janice's eye, but she's off helping her mom.

Needless to say the crystal decanter came out, and I had a couple snorts of Lysol with Janice's dad, and we had a nice dinner out there on the lawn—everything friendly and relaxed. Mrs. Dłuwiecki told me that Janice had insisted they cook a real Polish dinner. She kept apologizing about it, making it absolutely clear that she usually cooked American but she was only doing this for her nutty daughter. So anyhow we had this soup,
szczawiowa zupa,
that's so damn Polish I don't even know if there's a name for it in English. And then we had this beef dish,
zrazy
, that you cook slow for a million years so it melts in your mouth, and it makes a terrific gravy to go with the
kasza
—which is, well, you know, kasha. Is that an English word? Hell, I don't know. But it's like this grain stuff, and I hadn't eaten it since Babcia Koprowski was alive.

Whenever Janice's mom and dad would drift into Polish, they'd catch themselves and switch back into English—I guess on my behalf—and Janice said, in Polish, “Don't worry. He can understand you. And I'm going to get him speaking Polish yet,” and they all thought that was pretty funny.

Her mom was teasing Janice about all her newfound domestic urges—that's how she put it—like I guess Janice had all of a sudden decided she'd better learn how to cook when she hadn't shown the slightest interest in it before. And then Mrs. Dłuwiecki got to reminiscing about her mom, like she hadn't been much of a cook because they'd always had a peasant lady who did their cooking for them. And that gets Czesław reminiscing about his mom, and it seems she'd been one hell of a cook. Like he's mentioning this dish and that dish she used to make, and damn but they were good—he could still taste them.

Naturally they didn't know that I knew anything about it, but it gave me a funny feeling hearing them talking about Janice's two grandmothers like that—because I couldn't help thinking about how one of them had died of typhus in a German slave labor camp and the other one had been shot in the back of the head and buried in a common grave in the forest outside Krajne Podlaski.

I'll never forget this. The sun was starting to go down and it was getting chilly, but we were still sitting out there because the view was so nice. All those streets in Edgewood are built along the ridges of hills, and from their backyard you were looking down over all these rolling hills—a real West Virginia scene—and the trees had changed color so there's these flaming oranges and reds and yellows, and we were getting that gorgeous slanting golden light you get late in the day in the fall sometimes, and it was, I guess you could say, just pretty damn wonderful.

I'd never seen Czesław in a better mood. Big smile on his face, looking out over his back lawn like a king over his kingdom. And I thought, well, it's probably a relief to him—all those secrets he'd been keeping all those years, and now they're out in the open, and everything's worked out fine.

Janice went in the house to get a sweater for her mom, and then she started carrying plates and things inside. Her mom said, “Wait awhile. We don't have to do that yet,” and Janice said, “You sit still, and let me do it,” and I got up to help her, and she said, “That means you too, Jimmy Koprowski. Sit down and relax.”

She carried a load of plates into the house, and when she came back, she put her hand on her dad's shoulder and said, “Isn't it beautiful,
Tatusiu
?” and he said, “Yes, it's beautiful,” and then he said, “God has blessed us.” He looked up at Janice with this absolutely wonderful smile, and he said,
“Mój aniołek,”
and all of a sudden I was all choked up.

After everything they'd gone through, he could say, “God has blessed us.” It really got to me. And I thought about how it had always been in Poland, where maybe you'd want to pray, “Oh, God, please give me a little time where I can have something like a normal life”—you know, in between wars.

All of a sudden I was remembering Ron Jacobson. You know that strong clear sense of a person you can get sometimes so if you turned around and they were standing right there, you wouldn't be surprised? Well, that's what it was like, and I felt bad because it'd been months since I'd thought of him at all. I mean, he'd just slipped completely out of my mind, and I thought how sad it was that somebody could be so important to you, and then they die and after a while you quit thinking about them.

You don't imagine Protestants having big families—anyway I don't—but he had two sisters and a brother. His kid brother, he used to say, really looked up to him. It kept him honest because sometimes he'd think, well, I'd better do this one right because Kevin's looking up to me. And I thought about that hole he must have left in their family, that emptiness that was never going to be filled up.

And it hit me that I wanted to have a family. I'd sort of played with the idea, but I'd never felt it that strong before—like something I really believed in—that it'd be good, you know, just to have a decent job and a family, so in the end you could think how it'd all been worth it. And how it'd be great to have kids, to have a daughter as wonderful as Janice so you could say to her, “My little angel.” And I thought about how far away I was from anything like that.

I don't know how she knew it, but it was like Janice could feel I was sad or something because she came over and stood by my chair, and she put her hand on my shoulder just the way she'd put it on her dad's shoulder, and she left it there.

Except for holding her hand sometimes, we'd never touched each other. I'd been real careful about that. And I sat there just like everything was perfectly ordinary, and I felt her hand on my shoulder. It was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like an eternity. Then she took her hand away and left this tingle on my shoulder.

I don't know if you like twilight as much as I do—that little bit of time when the sky seems kind of smoky and everything starts to go blue on you. Her dad said, “Maybe Jimmy would like another drink,” and Janice filled up a couple of those tiny crystal glasses for us, and Czesław and I toasted each other—
Na zdrowie!

Janice and her mom carried everything into the kitchen, and Czesław and I folded up the card tables and carried them into the house. Janice said to me under her breath, “They're too polite to tell you, but now's the time for you to leave.”

So I thanked them for the wonderful dinner and wished them good-night, and Janice walked me out to my car. “Now that I'm here, I can't go out again,” and she made a face about that. It was still real early. “I'll see you on Tuesday,” she said.

I said,
“Dobranoc, Janusiu,”
teasing her, you know, by speaking Polish. Or anyhow that's what I thought I was doing.

We were standing there by my car. I hadn't opened the door yet. Her parents were in the house, and we were outside in that smoky blue-gray twilight with about a foot of space between us. She just stepped across that little bit of space and kissed me.

Listen. I honest to God don't know what to say about that kiss. Well, I guess I'd have to say it was a sacred moment for me, so I wouldn't feel right talking about it too much. But I don't want you to get the idea it was a little kid's kiss. No, it wasn't. By the rules the nuns taught us at St. Stans, it was definitely in the mortal sin department. And it went on for quite a while. Like neither one of us wanted to stop. It was the most intense feeling I'd ever had for a girl in my life.

We were probably both remembering her parents inside the house and wondering how long it'd be before they noticed she was gone. So we stopped. I looked straight into her huge blue eyes, and I thought, okay, Koprowski, what do you do now? Shoot yourself? “I'm sorry, Jimmy,” she said. “I got tired of waiting.”

The only thing I could possibly have said back to her was, “I love you,” and I didn't say it. Not because I wouldn't have meant it, but I didn't say it—well, for all the reasons I couldn't say it. Instead I put my arms around her, and I gave her a good hug. Then I got in my car and drove away.

TWENTY

I got about halfway down the hill and I started to cry. I hadn't seen it coming, and I couldn't stop it. It was as bad as that day when I'd got the letter telling me that Jacobson was dead. Hell, it was worse. The first chance I got, I pulled off Highlight Road, and I just sat there in my car and bawled like a baby.

When I got myself straightened up, I drove down to the PAC, and I sat by myself and drank boilermakers. I kept trying to find any way at all that Janice and I could go on, and I just couldn't find it. And I kept thinking about Jacobson and all the shit we'd gone through together, and I guess I'd hit the point where I knew he was honest-to-God dead. And as dead as he was, that's how dead I was going to be someday.

I kept going over my whole life, and it seemed totally pointless, you know what I mean? A total waste. Well, I sat there till closing time and then I slipped Bobby Burdalski a couple bills and he slipped me a fifth of Four Roses, and I took it down to the riverbank and drank it. The inside of my head was like mud.

I killed that whole damn fifth. You can imagine the shape I was in. But somehow or other I decided that the only thing to do was go to the church, and I managed to stagger over there. I went creeping in and knelt down in a pew at the back, real quiet, you know, because I didn't want to bother anybody. Fat chance of that at three in the morning or whatever time it was by then.

I was glad to be in the church. It was all so familiar. The smell of the incense, and the little angels down by the altar, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus on one side, the Blessed Virgin on the other—with that picture of Our Lady of Częstochowa. I think I said the Hail Mary. I'm pretty sure I said the Hail Mary. And I prayed for Janice. And I passed right out.

I woke up and I was just a mess. I was drooling all over myself. Still kneeling, kind of fallen over onto the pew in front of me, and I hauled out my handkerchief and wiped my face with it, and I thought, hey, what am I doing here? And then it starts to come back to me. And it was the strangest thing—I wasn't at the back of the church where I'd started out. I was down at the front.

I was kneeling in front of the picture of Our Lady of Częstochowa. Now it's obvious how I got there, right? I must have got up and walked, right? But I didn't have any memory of doing it, and it felt like somebody had just picked me up and carried me. I don't know if you've ever seen a picture of Our Lady of Częstochowa, but, believe me, she's powerful. When I was little, I was afraid to pray to her.

The original picture's back in Poland in the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Częstochowa. It's been there since sometime or other back in the Middle Ages, and later on one of the Polish kings proclaimed her Queen of Poland. She's dark with age, almost black. At some point some heavy-duty barbarians invaded, and one of them struck her twice with his sword. You can still see the slash marks on her cheek. He tried to hit her the third time, but then he dropped dead.