Accordion Crimes (41 page)

“My old man? Hey, I don’t want to talk about the bastard. The old lady fills you with lies. He was a lousy musician, interested only in the dollar. His music was coarse—‘the cow shit, the bull farted, everything went into the same hole, I came along and looked and we all shit some more.’ That was what he liked. Crude stuff. The lowest common denominator. Then he’d blubber all over the place when he heard the Angelus or something. He claimed to be a pharmacist in the old country, but I did some checking up and he wasn’t nothing but a peasant. Tried to make out he was better over here. Once he left, it was good. I played a lot of weddings the week he left—three or four a week. I was happy. It was good times, not just because people was getting married but because he was gone.

“Hey, when I came back to Chicago after the war it was all changed. Everything! Before the war we used to have a lot of fun at dances—there’s one thing you gotta say for polacks, we really know how to have fun—there was this guy, big heavy guy with a red nose like a cherry tomato, worked at the steel
mill, you’d see him at every dance the sweat just pouring off him, and he’d shout ‘
ale sie bawicie?
’ Are you having fun? and the whole dance floor would roar ‘yah, yah, yah.’ Weddings? They used to go on for three days. But then after the war everybody is serious, no time for fun, the wedding dance is three hours instead of three days, all the Polish halls and societies are closed down and there’s niggers everywhere, entire streets, whole Polish neighborhoods wiped out. And the people are different too, I mean white people, Polish people. They don’t have such exuberant fun, even though the music, and I mean the polka music, was terrific, better than in the old days, punchy and fast and loud. Hey, I think of the music—Li’l Wally Jagiello, he’s the one started the business about singing the Polish lyrics, he’s got a good voice, before him hardly ever anything but instrumental polkas. But hey, are we having fun? Are people warm and friendly like they used to be, a big arm around your shoulder, buy you a drink, have some more food? No, no, everybody’s cool, everybody’s casual, stand back a little, don’t make a big thing, don’t act so Polish. This cool stuff, I say they got that from the niggers who will stand there like statues, very still, never move but watch everything going on and not move a muscle, act unconcerned,
cool,
where a old-fashioned polack would be tearing his hair out and praying to the saints. See, polacks are more like wops in the emotions. And that’s when the Polish dance halls and community dances started to close down, so now the only time you hear polka music is at somebody’s wedding and at special Polish days, festivals and like that. Records too, records spoiled it—hey, everybody can have a polka band in their living room on the phonograph, they don’t need to go out to a place where live musicians are playing. So we’re losing it. I heard my first rock number with a polka beat last week, some
jerk band of kids, call themselves the Warsaw Pack. Ha-ha. I predict that in ten years the polka will be dead. And don’t ask me anything again about my father. He was a lousy shit.”

The occasional third pleasure of Hieronim came when someone—always someone else, never him—got some whore in the back room to do for all of them, whoever was drunk enough.

In winter, there was no fishing and he spent all day at the Polish Club. But there was another reason he liked to come there. The bartender, Feliks, because of a birthmark, had an uncanny resemblance to a man who boarded in their house when he was eleven, twelve, Mr. Brudnicki.

The house seemed full of boarders after the old man left, some working at the mill, some traveling through with things to sell, sometimes musicians and actors. Mr. Brudnicki was youngish, with swollen hands and tight pursed lips, a birthmark from the inner corner of his left eye to his ear like half a mask, a series of dots and dashes, purple writing in some strange alphabet. He was part of something the men knew about, a show or some event that happened elsewhere. Sometimes he would come into the kitchen and, if no one was around, crook his finger at Hieronim, a good-looking big kid then with snow-blond hair and wolf-green eyes, already thinking of himself as “Harry,” to come up to his room where his bed was curtained off from the others, and if the house was empty he would lean against the bed and Hieronim would stand in front of him. Mr. Brudnicki would open first his pants, letting the “Red Devil” (as he called it) leap out, then Hieronim’s, to release the “Little Devil” which
he stroked, pushing back the foreskin and pressing the head against that of the circumcised Red Devil, and then it was time for the two devils to spar, rubbing, bumping, shoving at each other until Mr. Brudnicki turned him around and pushed him onto the bed and then Hieronim would feel the Red Devil, dressed in a cold layer of lard from the can under Mr. Brudnicki’s bed, enter the “secret cave” with snorting and writhing. Afterward Mr. Brudnicki would swear him to silence and give him a quarter, a magnificent sum, worth any amount of devil sparring, though the secret-cave entry gave him pain and diarrhea.

Once, restless for that odd excitement, he took his cousin Casimir up to Mr. Brudnicki’s room to teach him the trick, but when he knelt to get the lard can under the bed he saw a small red trunk. It was locked. He looked then in the scabby green cupboard where Mr. Brudnicki kept his clothes and saw an extraordinary garment suspended from a wire hanger, a glittering thing, a dress of ice. He lifted the hem, heavy and cold with tiny glass beads.

“Casimir, see this.” His cousin came up beside him and touched the dress. The gloom of the cupboard, a musky, spicy smell, enveloped them. He heard his cousin breathing, could feel his warm breath on his neck. They pressed into the cupboard, the beady fringe of the ice dress clicking as they rubbed each other’s swelling pricks.

“I do this all the time,” gasped Casimir.

“So do I,” lied Hieronim, the clotty sperm hitting the ice dress, deciding not to tell Casimir about Mr. Brudnicki and the quarters, which was different from this, sinister yet thrilling and enriching. When Casimir had finished too they started to laugh, and forevermore Casimir had only to say “the beaded dress …” and they would both smirk and blow their lips out in half-laughter at the memory.

After a few months Mr. Brudnicki started a series of brief absences, often falling behind in his rent, and then a long absence of weeks although his trunk and his can of lard were still under the bed, the mysterious dress in the cupboard. Sixteen days passed.

“That’s it!” cried his mother to Uncle Juljusz. “He’s more than two weeks behind. I got good men, working men, want this room. If he don’t come by Saturday it all goes out. I rent to somebody else.”

Saturday passed. On Sunday afternoon his mother went into the room, pulled the blanket divider aside and began throwing out trousers and shoes, the ice dress, the can of lard and the red trunk which crashed down the stairs, unlocking itself on the way, tumbling out wigs, cosmetics, unguents, glittering masks, and a curious elastic-backed garment with a rubber front sporting a pair of large breasts with maroon nipples.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” shouted his mother and Uncle Juljusz came out of the kitchen and looked, picked it up. He took it to the mirror over the sink, held it up in front of himself, but it looked laughable until he took off his shirt and pulled on the breast garment over his bare skin. The effect was extraordinary. It was Uncle Juljusz, the seamed, flattened face and the straggling mustache, and the red arms with tufts of stinking hair, but then he became—not a woman, but part of a woman. Uncle Juljusz minced around the kitchen shouting “oh, you bad man” in falsetto and slapping at the air.

“Now you know how he could pay the rent!”

At that moment when they were all screaming with outraged laughter, Mr. Brudnicki opened the door. He was thin and white, a soiled bandage like a helmet wrapped around his head. He stared at them with tragic eyes, saw his glittering dress on the floor in a heap like melting ice, turned and ran down the steps,
back into the street. “What was I supposed to do, wait until doomsday?” shouted his mother after the flying man.

In 1967, the week before Joey and Sonia—a beauty with a flat, still face, the full, rich mouth seeming to pull the cheeks toward it, great-lidded eyes of china blue provocatively slanted—married, it rained steadily, every morning beginning with fog that thickened and turned to drizzle that turned to steady rain that turned to downpour as night fell, so that under the drumming roof they slept well. Sometime between four and five the rain stopped and for a few hours there was the hope of dry weather, but then it started again.

On that Sunday morning Hieronim believed it was going to clear. The mist was blowing off, the ragged clouds showed sky. There was a lovely freshness to the day, the smell of the country. He passed the extension cord out the window, went outside and connected the worm probe. Barefooted, pale feet with knobby bunions, a cup of coffee in one hand, the probe in the other, he walked across the spongy lawn looking for a good spot. A slight depression in front of his wife’s rain-beaded ornamental cabbages, pearly violet and mauve-frilled leaves, what beauties. He plunged in the probe and turned on the current. For a moment, as he leaped into the air, he had the galvanizing sensation that he was being turned inside out as a skin is stripped off a rabbit in one sharp jerk, but by the time he landed facedown in the sopping grass he was almost dead, and he was thoroughly dead, surrounded by a halo of electrocuted worms and robins, when his wife noticed him from the kitchen window four hours later.

She had given him the worm probe for a name day gift two years before.

Hieronim’s wake was something, the last of its kind in the neighborhood, in the old, old Polish style, and nobody would have known how to do it except Old Man Bulas from the Polish Club, who carried a blind man’s watch, a curious horologe knobbed with chimes and rings that sounded the hour and minute when buttons were pressed. The two of them had drunk and talked away the years together, both of them filled with a deep and mystical regard for Mikołaj Kopernik, the father of astronomy. Nobody would know how to conduct such a funeral in future, as Old Man Bulas himself died two weeks after the funeral-wedding weekend, and was buried with a scanty American ceremony. There’s irony for you, said Mrs. Józef Przybysz, slamming her cane on the floor and weeping.

In his youth Bulas had studied literature, but when he emigrated to America the only work he could find was in the steel mills where, after six years of work, he was burned and discharged with a small settlement. His right arm was puckered its length like the skin on hot milk, his shoulder was withered and shining with scar tissue, but he was the leader of singing and knew the hymns, scores of them all written down in his
spiewnik,
a thick, handmade book wrapped in black cloth.

“Important!” he said. “Important because now they are saying the mass in English. A tragedy.” He, at least, knew the poetry of incantatory words and the power of secrecy.

He came to the funeral home at dusk with men from the Polish Club, the good singers. Hieronim, soaped and shaved and dressed in a sharkskin suit, lay in his walnut case like a polished knife in a silver chest. The singers filed in and stood along the
wall. To their left was a small table covered with a white cloth and on it a dish of peppermints and a saucer of cloves. The hymns and the prayers began, Hail Marys, hymns to the Mother of God, to the saints, then, after an hour, the men went out to the parking lot and drank beer and whiskey to intensify their grief, while the women said the rosary, voices elongating, drawing out the ancient words. The men filed in again with flushed faces, belching and hiking at their belts, stood once more along the wall. Darker and more morbid became the hymns, groaning pleas to God to remove the singers from the misery of the body—
I am lost, I am damned, I have sinned.
They sang of the damp grave, the final hour, and of sinful humans’ vain pleas for mercy: “The clock strikes one, the thread of life slips from my grasp, the clock strikes two …” There was a midnight supper of black coffee, bananas and cold pork. All through the night the singing went on, Old Man Bulas’s voice cracking and shrill under the strain, and at dawn they said the last prayers for the dead and Old Man Bulas started the Angelus,
I now bid you farewell.
At seven the undertaker’s men loaded Hieronim into the hearse and the singers followed in cars with the windows rolled down even though it was a raw morning, the men still singing, seeing the cold sweat of the grass, their heads aching and vocal cords so strained they sang with a kind of breathless roar.

The next day the two sons had a ferocious battle for Hieronim’s accordion, Rajmund crying out and dramatically striking his chest like Tarzan, and screaming that Joey was tearing the bonds of family apart, that their father had promised it to him, that their father would twist in his grave like a worm. It was an unfortunate simile; Dorothy shrieked and Joey cursed. It was all show, for in his heart Rajmund was indifferent to the accordion.

With such a funeral, thought Sonia, no wedding, not even a Polish wedding, could compete.

She was wrong. Old Man Bulas, galvanized by an atavistic need for ceremony, slept for eighteen hours after the wake, rose, made a list and sent his grandson as messenger to the parents of the bride and the widowed mother of the groom and to many others. He told his wife it was necessary to balance the solemn death rites of Hieronim with as much of the old
wesele
style as possible, although the bride and groom had sent invitations by mail instead of calling on the hoped-for guests to invite them personally or sending a
druzba
. Since the freshly buried father of the groom had been a part-time musician, and the groom himself played semiprofessionally, there had to be a good showing of musicians, beginning with a fiddler to play “Be Seated in the Wagon, O Loved One,” as Sonia left her parents’ house. “Ah,” said Old Man Bulas. “I remember as a boy all the men shooting off their pistols and the bride-to-be getting on the wagon all covered with ribbons. It was too bad. By accident someone shot her in the heart—an accident. So the wedding became a funeral.”