A Good American (35 page)

FORTY-FOUR

In 1965 my father hung up his apron and retired from the diner. He was sixty years old, and had cooked enough eggs by then. His back ached pretty much constantly from all those days leaning over the grill, and he was ready for a break from the early mornings.

The restaurant business was changing, too. It seemed that nobody had time to sit down and eat anymore. The nation had climbed into its car, and was reluctant to get out again. Identical drive-through establishments were sprouting up at every highway intersection, a sinister proliferation along America’s arteries. Mammoth corporate franchises competed for market share, coldly slashing prices until smaller restaurants were forced to close down.

Luckily for me, none of the big fast-food companies yet had their greedy eyes on our little rural paradise back then. Still, I knew that it was only a matter of time before the grinning colonel and his secret recipe came calling for my customers. One day I would wake up to see those dumb golden arches glinting nearby, ready to run me off. I couldn’t see that there was much point in worrying about it unduly; what would be would be.

My father and I continued to live together in our little house, as content and domesticated as two long-term bachelors can be. Joseph decided that he needed a hobby to occupy him during the long, empty days that he was suddenly facing, and to my bemusement he signed up for a correspondence course in taxidermy. Before long he had transformed the sitting room into a macabre workshop. There were boxes of eyeballs and claws, bags of feathers and false teeth, swatches of variegated pelts. Tacked up on a large board were photographs of deer, otters, and pheasants. An eyeless fox stood in the corner of the room. I found this frozen menagerie rather unsettling, especially since many of the animals were in various stages of either composition or decomposition—I could never quite tell which.

During this time I continued to write, although after the excitement surrounding the president’s assassination, I resolved to stay away from topical themes in the future. My next book was a comedy about a publishing executive from New York who, thanks to a faulty transmission in his rental car, ends up stranded in rural Missouri on his way to Colorado. The publishing executive is accompanied on his travels by his wife, a beautiful but vacuous redhead. The couple unwittingly patronizes and offends the locals, who are good, honest, unpretentious folk. They decide to teach the stuck-up out-of-towners a lesson or two, with, as they say, hilarious results. At least,
I
thought the results were hilarious. It was certainly deeply cathartic. I inflicted a succession of grotesque humiliations on my fictional nemesis, who suffered on behalf of the entire publishing industry. (Predictably, the redhead got her fair share of grief, too.) Rosa chuckled her way through it, although she would not be drawn into a discussion as to who was funnier, me or P. G. Wodehouse. We performed the now-traditional ritual of sending out the packages to New York, but this time I didn’t even bother waiting for a reply before I began my fourth book, a heartrending coming-of-age tale about a young chess prodigy whose genius goes unnoticed in his small, rural hometown.

Chess was on my mind a lot back then. When I wasn’t writing, I was usually over at Rosa’s house, listening to her complain about her latest ailments and doing battle over the chessboard. We spent the summer of 1972 glued to the television set, watching Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in Reykjavik to become the World Chess Champion. Every day we tuned in to Shelby Lyman on PBS, set up a board, and followed along with the moves. I was hopelessly out of my depth, baffled by the brilliance of the chess and enthralled by the spectacle of it all. Spassky was reserved, chillingly unemotional—a Soviet machine, Rosa and I agreed disapprovingly. Fischer, in contrast, was a neurotic jangle of tics and twitches. He gazed at the board with alarming ferocity. We were looking at the same board, but I knew he was seeing whole universes in those sixty-four squares that I could never imagine.

While I frowned over the chess pieces, Rosa swooned and sighed over Bobby Fischer like a teenager with a first crush. She became quite besotted with him. She was charmingly daffy about it. She wrote him long, impassioned letters of support, addressed simply to “Bobby Fischer, Reykjavik, Iceland.” As the weeks went by and Fischer brilliantly clawed his way back into contention after a disastrous start, Rosa became increasingly partisan in her support. Though she had lived through two world wars, it took a brooding, sociopathic chess genius for her to buy a flag and hang it outside her front door.

After the chess book, I tried my hand at an old-fashioned whodunit, a complicated saga about the murder of the beautiful heiress to a Midwestern cured-meat empire (who just happened to have red hair). On I went in this fashion, producing a new novel every three or four years, with my loyal readership of precisely one. I would have been happy not to even bother the publishers with my manuscripts, but Rosa insisted. I still have copies of each book, stacked neatly side by side on shelves in my spare bedroom. There my words sit, slowly gathering dust, silent testament to thousands of lonely evenings. Sometimes I’ll pull a block of paper down at random and flick through the pages. I do this without rancor or regret. I enjoyed every moment at my typewriter, staging my nightly escapes.

But when Rosa died, I put my typewriter away.

There was nobody left to write for.

M
y aunt had inherited Jette’s strong political convictions, and she was appalled when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. She scoffed at the matinee idol in the White House. She thought him a buffoon. America was doomed, she was fond of telling me, when it chooses movie stars to run the country.

When the president authorized the invasion of Grenada in October 1983, Rosa’s simmering dislike of the man crystallized into full-fledged loathing. America, she seethed, had no right to attack another sovereign state when not a single one of its citizens was under the slightest threat of danger. This was imperialist lunacy. Reagan was just a bully, looking for a fight. Rosa was convinced that he’d approved the aggression in order to deflect attention away from his failing domestic policies. (Since our close brush with the Kennedy assassination, she’d not lost her appetite for juicy conspiracy theories.) She became so obsessed with the president’s wrongdoings that she even stopped discussing her gloomy diagnoses of her latest illnesses with me, preferring instead to rant and rage about the iniquities being perpetrated in Washington.

Looking back, I can’t help wondering if my aunt had some presentiment about what would happen next, whether her anger at Ronald Reagan was a deft piece of legerdemain to distract herself from impending catastrophe. The moment my aunt stopped discussing her poor health, I should have started to worry that she was getting sick.

R
osa died of a heart attack in the summer of 1984. She was seventy-seven years old.

I discovered her body on the kitchen floor. Only the shattered plate that lay close by hinted at the violence of the myocardial infarction that had ripped the life out of her. In the oven was an untended casserole. It had been charred black. The mess would have dismayed her, I knew. I swept up the broken pieces of china and scrubbed the pan clean before picking up the telephone.

After a lifetime of expecting to be struck down by rare and exotic diseases, I knew that Rosa would have been galled to be killed by something as mundane as a heart attack. But perhaps an overburdened heart was appropriate, in the end.

I’d expected a small handful of guests at the visitation, but to my astonishment, half the town was there. I stood at the door of the funeral parlor for three hours. With each sympathetic handshake came a new story about Rosa. It seemed that for every piece of chalk that she had hurled across her schoolroom, there was a quiet act of tenderness that had gone unnoticed by the rest of us. At some point everyone had seen my aunt’s softer side, and nobody forgot it. It didn’t take much: a gentle squeeze of the shoulder, a few whispered words of encouragement, a secretly tendered piece of candy. Over the course of that evening, the threads of a thousand small kindnesses grew into a tapestry, rich with affection.

Rosa had loved every child who ambled reluctantly into her domain. She was a maestro before an unruly orchestra, carving harmony out of chaos. She dragged her charges onward by the sheer force of her will, cajoling them with a pitch-perfect blend of public threats, private encouragement, and great big dollops of love. It had been a remarkable act of selfless devotion, sustained over generations.

That night I lay in bed and wondered whether Rosa had chosen to adore her charges to make amends for her own uneventful love life. It was only when I stood up to address the congregation at her memorial service the following afternoon, and surveyed the packed pews in front of me, that I realized I had it the wrong way round. My aunt had simply never needed to seek out the uncertain delights of traditional romantic entanglements. Her heart was already full.

T
o my astonishment, Rosa left me her house in her will.

I won’t pretend that I was sorry to be moving out of my father’s home. After all, I was forty-seven years old and was still sleeping in my childhood bedroom. What was more, Joseph’s gruesome zoo was starting to take over the house. He was getting old by then, and forgetful, and often abandoned projects halfway through. Featherless birds were left to jostle for space with three-legged bobcats and the dismembered head of an elk or two. I had lost count of the number of times I had inadvertently impaled myself on some forgotten antlers. So it was with some relief that I carried my meager belongings down the street and installed myself in Rosa’s house. I had spent so many evenings there over the years that it already felt like home.

My typewriter lay silent in the spare room, surrounded by the forest of words that only Rosa had ever read. I often sat on the sofa and paged through her beloved encyclopedia of infectious diseases, wondering which illness she would have chosen next. The place was dreadfully lonely without her there. I bought two kittens for company. Rosa always hated pets, but I thought she would at least approve of their names—I called them Jeeves and Wooster. They quickly came to treat the place as their own. I left the chess set where it had always sat, its pieces arranged for just one more game.

In the late summer of 1986, I arrived home one afternoon to discover a small package resting against the back door of the house. Rosa’s name was printed on the label in small, no-nonsense capitals. There was a New York postmark. I frowned. Rosa had never mentioned knowing anybody on the East Coast. I picked the box up and carried it inside.

I had no compunction about opening the thing. Rosa had been gone for two years by then, and I had gotten quite used to reading her mail and responding when necessary. I sliced open the tape and peered inside. On top of a stack of papers there was a black velvet bag and a small white envelope, with Rosa’s name written in the same neat handwriting. I opened the letter.

Dear Ms. Meisenheimer:

It is with deep sadness that I write to inform you that my father Stefan recently passed away, after a mercifully brief fight with cancer. After his death I discovered these items in a locked box that he kept in a drawer of his bureau.

I confess that my father has never mentioned your name to me. He was a man of many gifts, and I suppose many secrets. However, I am sure that he would have wanted these things to be returned to you. I hope that they will bring you a measure of comfort.

Sincerely,

David Kliever

I sat down and read the letter again. Over the years Joseph had occasionally mentioned Stefan Kliever as we worked side by side at the grill, so I knew about his desertion all those years before. I opened the velvet bag. The medal that the Kaiser had pressed onto my great-great-grandfather’s chest fell into my hand. It had been almost fifty years since it had been stolen. I held it up to the light and inspected it, wondering what its return meant. Then I reached into the box and took out the remaining papers.

There were letters, scores of them, all beginning in the same way:
Dear Stefan
. The elegant flamboyance of my aunt’s penmanship was unmistakable. Tucked in between the pages were hundreds of photographs.

Of me.

FORTY-FIVE

I flicked through the pictures, watching the years accelerate beneath my fingertips as I morphed from cherubic infant to lankily awkward youth.

Ever since I was a baby, Rosa had regularly written to this man I did not know and delivered news about me. My progress through childhood was faithfully charted. Mostly Rosa kept to the facts, but occasionally she would allow herself some editorial comment. Her opinions betrayed her fondness for me, but also her inability to pass judgment without some measure of criticism.

He seems so very shy
.

That’s James—always eager to please.

At least he tries his best.

Unable to turn away, I read on through the years, watching my childhood unfurl through the sharp prism of Rosa’s waspish commentary. The letters ended soon after I had settled into my job at the diner.

He’s grilling burgers now,
she wrote in her final letter.
Standing where you used to stand.

I sat at the kitchen table, staring into space, as the truth steamrollered over me.

Joseph was not my father. Cora was not my mother. Rosa was not my aunt. A lifetime of warm, carefree assumptions lay in tatters.

Finally, all of the special treatment that Rosa had lavished on me over the years began to make sense. Her fondness for me had nothing to do with the plight of being the second born. I thought back to the countless games of chess, our shared love of P. G. Wodehouse, all those long evenings together. Our intimacy had been real enough, but it was based on a lie. My family had closed ranks and sought to make me someone that I was not. Everybody was guilty: Joseph, Cora—and Rosa most of all. I believed that I’d known her better than I knew anyone, but she had gone to her grave with her secret. My lingering sadness over her death was suddenly laced with anger and a fresh sense of loss. Now I had been cheated out of not one mother, but two.

Even Jette, I saw miserably, had not been innocent. She must have known as much as anyone. At least, I thought bitterly,
she
was still my grandmother. I remembered the unreadable look in Jette’s eye when Rosa had brought me home for my first chess lesson. She hadn’t been worried about me, as I’d always imagined. She’d been worried about Rosa, wondering if her daughter would be able to maintain my family’s long conspiracy of silence.

I sat back in my chair. I had always assumed that Joseph and Cora had named me after Lomax, but now a new theory presented itself. What if Rosa had been allowed that privilege, before she gave me up? I remembered her stories of Mr. Jim, the raccoon she had adored so fiercely when she was young. I stared at the ceiling, and wondered if in fact I had been named in tribute to her beloved childhood pet—the animal that my father had shot.

I knew nothing.

That night I lay in bed and surveyed the unfamiliar landscape. We cannot exist without our histories; they are what define us. But my history was a lie. All of a sudden I was rootless, cut adrift from everything that I thought I knew, an immigrant in a land where I did not belong.

At two o’clock I climbed out of bed, unable to sleep. After Rosa’s death I had put her old correspondence into cardboard boxes and stored them in the spare room along with my manuscripts. I carried the boxes to the kitchen table and began to work my way through the mountains of paper that accumulate around a life. I was hoping to find Stefan Kliever’s replies to Rosa’s letters. Surely he would have had questions about me, some words of encouragement or advice he wanted to pass on. But there was nothing, not even a postcard. Rosa had covered her tracks well.

I had reached a dead end. I stared out the window into the night. All I could see was my own dark reflection in the glass. I looked at the stranger gazing silently back at me. I no longer knew who I was. All I knew about my father was a handful of anecdotes, half a century old. It wasn’t enough. I needed to know who Stefan Kliever was.

Joseph was the sole surviving perpetrator of this elaborate hoax. I knew this wasn’t all his fault, but by then there was nobody else left for me to blame. I didn’t have the stomach to confront him. Besides, he was an old man by then. I did not want to resurrect old, painful ghosts for him. I would have to look elsewhere for answers.

Then I remembered that there had been a return address on the package that had been waiting for me by the back door. I rummaged through the trash can, and two minutes later I was looking at an address in Eastport, New York. I went to find Rosa’s road atlas.

Every map in her tattered Rand McNally bore evidence of intense scrutiny. There were doodles in the margins, smudged fingerprints, rings from the bottom of coffee cups. I turned its dog-eared pages, perplexed. It looked as if Rosa had run her finger along every highway in the lower 48. I wondered if she, too, had been planning her escape.

Eastport was on the south coast of Long Island, one of a string of villages in the Hamptons. I looked at the map for an age, wondering what on earth to do next.

A
fter two days I realized that I could no more forget about the address in Long Island than I could cut off my own arm. It was an itch that would have to be scratched, sooner or later. I decided that there was no point delaying the inevitable. I began to pack.

One of the advantages of Frank and Darla’s astounding fecundity was that their family provided a steady supply of manpower to work at the diner over school holidays and weekends. Clyde and Todd were my principal helpers that summer. They were industrious and competent, and I knew I could trust them to run the place in my absence. I called Freddy at the funeral parlor and asked him to check in on Joseph while I was gone. I didn’t even tell Joseph that I was going away. I didn’t trust myself to talk to him. His betrayal gnawed away at me, scraping me hollow.

I decided to drive. The journey by road would take me two days, and I needed the time to think. I pointed my car east and drove all day, marking my progress by the fading in and out of radio stations. When a song died I would twirl the dial until I found something new. I listened to country, jazz, and rock and roll, but mainly I listened to pop. All those vapid synths and drum machines didn’t sound much like music to me, but it filled the car with noise, and kept me company as I slowly edged back toward my past.

By early evening I was exhausted. I stopped at a shabby motel on Interstate 70, outside Hebron, Ohio. Dinner was a dried-out turkey sandwich that I had bought at a service station earlier that day, washed down with a warm can of soda from the vending machine outside my door. There was no ice. I lay on the bed and watched
Cagney & Lacey
as I ate.

I was still unsure exactly what I was hoping to achieve with my pilgrimage. My day of solitude behind the wheel had not clarified much. I wanted answers, but I still didn’t know what the questions might be. Perhaps I just wanted to get a glimpse of Stefan Kliever’s second act away from Beatrice, to see what might have been. I was pretty sure that no good could come of it, but that no longer mattered. There was no turning back, not now. I did not sleep well.

The next morning I climbed back into the car and continued my journey east. Pennsylvania went on forever. Finally Interstate 78 escaped into New Jersey. As the roads became busier, traffic began to move faster, jigging and jagging between lanes. At Newark I turned north onto the New Jersey Turnpike, humming Paul Simon. Vehicles screamed past me on both sides. To my right, New York City shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. It was all I could do not to pull over and stare. I took 95 across the Hudson and through the Bronx, before turning south and hitting the Long Island Expressway. I had been driving all day, but didn’t feel tired. I was electrified by the city’s skyline. It was delicious, to be so tantalizingly close to the place I’d dreamed of for so many years. I decided that once I’d finished my business in the Hamptons, I would treat myself to a day or two among the skyscrapers. It had been a long time coming.

I drove east along 495, watching Manhattan retreat in my rearview mirror. Finally I turned south off the highway and arrived in Eastport. I had assumed that I would find somewhere to stay in the town, but it was the height of the summer holiday season, and everywhere was full. I finally found a bed-and-breakfast in Westhampton, a few miles down the road. The landlady was very nice. She saw my Missouri license plates and asked me what I was doing such a long way from home. Visiting family, I told her. She smiled approvingly.

The following morning I drove back into Eastport. On the way I noticed a sign for Remsenburg. The name struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t remember why. Eastport was a tiny place, but I still managed to get lost as I drove up and down quaint tree-lined lanes that all looked identical. After twenty minutes I finally found the address I had copied down from the package. I pulled over, and left the engine running—either for the air-conditioning or so I could make a quick getaway, I was not sure which. The house was an Italianate villa, set well back from the road. A wide drive swept elegantly up to a grand, double-fronted entryway. There was a well-maintained garden populated by mature trees and perfectly trimmed topiary. A man in blue overalls was laboring in the shade of a lushly foliated elm. A pair of sprinklers hissed at each other, sending parabolas of water dancing through the still air. I switched off the ignition and walked up the driveway. I waved at the gardener. He did not return my salute. I rang the doorbell.

After a minute or two the door opened. A man about my height stood in front of me. His hair was shot through with gray, and his eyes creased into small deltas of wrinkles as he squinted at me in the morning sunlight.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“David Kliever?”

“Yes? Who are you?”

“My name is James Meisenheimer.”

He looked at me steadily for a moment. “You’re the boy in the photographs,” he said. I nodded. He looked down at his shoes and sighed. “My wife said this would happen. She told me not to send those letters back.”

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” I said.

“There’s nothing for you here.”

“You don’t know what I want yet,” I said. I didn’t know myself.

He shook his head. “I should have listened to her. It’s not as if my father would have cared. He’s dead, for God’s sake.”

“I’ve driven halfway across the country to see you. At least give me a few minutes.”

He sighed, and closed the front door behind him, unwilling to grant me entry to his home. “A few minutes,” he said. He led me down a gravel path to a shaded patio with a wrought-iron table and two chairs. A long, perfectly manicured lawn stretched away from the house. At the far end I could see a swimming pool, shimmering blue in the morning sun. We sat down. He did not offer me anything to drink.

“Did you say you
drove
here?” he asked.

I nodded. “I needed time to think.”

“Look, I’ve spoken to several lawyers about my father’s estate. It’s all in trust. Watertight wording, they tell me. You’ve no chance—”

“I don’t give a damn about his
estate
,” I interrupted. “I just want some answers.”

“Answers?”

“Of course. I’ve just discovered that I’m not who I thought I was.”

“Your mother never told you?”

“I thought she was my aunt.”

“Is she still . . . ?”

I shook my head. “She took her secret to her grave.”

“Dad never said a word about you, either, not even when he knew he was dying.”

We contemplated the web of silence that our parents had constructed.

“You can’t prove a thing,” said David after a moment.

I ignored him. “Do I have any other brothers? Or sisters?”

He looked at me as he weighed his options. “A sister,” he replied finally. “Her name’s Elizabeth, although everyone calls her Betty. She’s an ob-gyn in Connecticut.”

“Older or younger?”

“Four years younger.” David paused. “We had another sister. She died when she was seventeen. Leukemia.”

“What was her name?”

“Amy. She was two years younger than me.”

The second child. I wondered whether Amy had suffered the same tribulations that I had. Then I realized that she wasn’t the second child, not really. She was the third. I felt an acute pang of loss and longing for this sister whose existence I hadn’t known about a minute before.

“Losing a sister is hell on earth,” said David quietly. “It destroyed my mother. She started drinking heavily after Amy died. One night she’d spent the evening at a bar in Mastic. She came off the road on her way home. Smashed into a tree. She died on the way to the hospital.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“After that, we hardly saw my father. He just buried himself in his work.”

“What did he do?”

“He had an idea, took it, and made it grow. Worked hard, got rich. The American Dream.”

“What was the idea?”

“You’ve heard of Delish-a-Burger.”

A bark of disbelief escaped me. There were two Delish-a-Burgers in Jefferson City, three in Columbia. I had eaten in all of them—clandestine expeditions to spy on the competition. Their secret signature sauce, a phosphorous orange gunk, couldn’t camouflage the gristled awfulness of the pale gray meat, but there were always lines going out the door. Every time a new Delish-a-Burger opened, there was a downtick in my business. “Stefan founded
Delish-a-Burger
?” I blurted.

David Kliever nodded. “He always said that when he left Missouri, he could only do one thing well, and that was cook cheeseburgers. So he decided to carry on doing exactly that. He saved up some money, and opened his first restaurant in Newark. In ten years he had dozens of stores in New Jersey. Then he started franchising restaurants across the country. Of course, he lost control of the company years ago, when it went public, although the family retained a decent holding.”

I looked again at the elegant garden and enormous house. “Wow,” I said.

“You really didn’t know?”

“David, a week ago I didn’t know you existed.”

I could see the suspicion behind his eyes. “But now that you do—”