A Good American (26 page)

THIRTY

It was only as I lay in my bed that evening, thinking about my strange afternoon with Rosa, that I realized why my aunt had taken such a shine to me. She had grown up in Joseph’s shadow, and so she probably felt a certain kinship with me—the next generation’s forgotten child. Perhaps she thought that a little extra attention from her would boost my confidence and make me feel loved. I was unsure what to think about this. I liked my aunt, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend my free afternoons having my confidence boosted on a regular basis—even when there were ice cream sundaes on offer.

As it turned out, I didn’t have much of a choice. Rosa came calling for me again a week or so later, and after another trip to the ice cream parlor we returned to Jette’s house to continue my chess education. Over the months that followed, Rosa showed me moves and tactics, just as Lomax and Cora had taught her. An unfamiliar light shone in her eyes as she watched my fingers hover hesitantly over the pieces. I loved to hear about the games she had played with my mother when she was younger. Every so often she would nod approvingly and tell Jette, “He’s got his mother’s talent.”

Jette said nothing.

Before long I began to look forward to my afternoons with Rosa. She was a willing and discreet confidante. Over a succession of milk shakes and sundaes I confessed all manner of petty grievances against my brothers, my father, and my life in general. She listened to it all, her head cocked thoughtfully to one side. Not once did she offer me advice, but that was all right. I did not want advice. I just wanted someone to listen to me.

During those afternoons, Rosa also told me lots of good jokes. Even better, she taught me how to tell them. Boys tend to race through jokes, desperate to get to the punch line. My aunt taught me to slow down. She showed me how each joke was put together—where to pause, what to emphasize, how to deliver the payoff. She made me practice the same routine over and over again, and then sent me home to perform it for my brothers. The sound of their laughter was sweeter than any harmony we’d ever sung.

Encouraged, I began to study the professionals. Jette had a radio in her living room, and we would listen to the first superstars of comedy while we leaned over the chessboard: Abbott and Costello, Amos ’n’ Andy, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Edgar Bergen. Rosa liked Jack Benny best, but Eddie Cantor was my favorite. I adored his fast-talking, wisecracking delivery, but what I liked most of all was that he was a monologue merchant. The other comedians worked in teams and played off each other, but Cantor’s comic momentum was sustained by nothing more than the sheer, unrelenting force of his wit. Singing in the quartet had jaded my enthusiasm for group endeavors.

The next stage of my education in comedy began in the spring of 1950, on my thirteenth birthday. Rosa appeared at our house while we were still eating breakfast. “Here,” she said, thrusting a small package into my hand. “It’s time to introduce you to the master.” I eagerly tore off the wrapping paper and then had to try to hide my disappointment as I held up the gift for general inspection.

My aunt had given me a book.

I was at an age when covers were the only thing I ever thought of judging a book by, and this one did not look promising. There was a picture of a young man dressed in a tuxedo, leaning back against a table with an anxious look on his face. He had raised one elegantly clad leg, at the end of which dangled a small dog, hanging on to the man’s trousers with its teeth. In the background was a woman in a red dress, her hand raised to her face in consternation. I took all this in, dubious. At the time my tastes in fiction were limited to cowboys, aliens, and wartime derring-do. I gazed at the man in the tuxedo suspiciously, but it was the presence of the woman that really set the alarm bells ringing. I could not imagine why I would ever want to read a book with female characters in it. At that point in my life, my knowledge of women was derived exclusively from the lyrics of barbershop songs, and as a consequence I regarded all females with deep suspicion. They were to blame for all the mushy drivel that we had to sing week in and week out. Girls were to be serenaded, put up on a pedestal, and worshipped. Much of our repertoire was really no more than elaborate begging:
Won’t you please be mine? Dream a little dream of me! Let me call you sweetheart!
Women made men act like idiots, I knew that much. And I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be much use in a shoot-out, of either the intergalactic or terrestrial variety.

“Thank you,” I said politely.

“Funniest thing I’ve ever read,” Rosa told me.

The book was called
The Code of the Woosters
, by P. G. Wodehouse. Again, this was far from promising. I did not know if this P. G. Wodehouse was male or female. I turned the book over, looking for clues. “P. G. Wodehouse,” I mused. I pronounced it Woad-house.

“Wood-house,” corrected my aunt.

“That’s not how it’s spelled,” I objected.

“Yes, well, he’s English, you see,” said Rosa, as if that explained everything.

I greeted this news with mixed feelings. Everything I knew about the English I had learned from dime-store paperbacks whose stories were set in wartime Europe. It was not uncommon for a brave but stupid English pilot who had been shot down over France to stumble in halfway through the narrative and complicate matters for the gutsy American hero who was single-handedly trying to save the Allied war effort. The Englishman’s principal dramatic purpose was to introduce an element of levity. His attempts to help the gutsy American hero would be benign but hapless, and invariably ended up making things worse. Still, at least the English always acted honorably—which was more than could be said for the French.

That afternoon I settled down on a quilt in the backyard, the sun warming my back, and began to read. By the time Jette called me in for supper, I was lost in another world.

The plot of
The Code of the Woosters
is so convoluted that any attempt at summary is doomed to failure. It is a story of policemen’s helmets, antique cow-creamers, and temperamental French chefs. There are splenetic magistrates, weak-chinned aristocrats, doe-eyed maidens, and a would-be fascist dictator who designs ladies’ underwear. There is theft, burglary, and blackmail. All this is delivered in Bertie Wooster’s trademark high-narrative style. His rhetorical flourishes rained down on me like a shower of mud, obfuscating meaning. The combined complexities of plot and language made for a confusing but compelling read. By the time Bertie had left London on a mission to help his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle out of a romantic predicament, I was ensnared by the peculiar foreignness of it all. The world I had jumped into was so unrecognizable to me that it might as well have been about the aliens I was so fond of.

By the following afternoon I had finished the book. I put it down, walked thoughtfully around the yard once or twice, and then picked it up again and turned back to the beginning. Rosa had been right. It
was
hilarious. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure why. A slight fog lingered over matters as I finished the last page, which led me to suspect that I had sailed past large parts of the story without really grasping what was going on. Subsequent readings clarified certain plot points, and I soon stopped worrying about precisely
why
people behaved in the way they did. Instead I just reveled in the jokes, all those deftly delivered one-liners that I didn’t quite understand. Bertie describes Roderick Spode, his nemesis, as having an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces. I
knew
that was funny, but I didn’t have the faintest idea what it meant.

After three rereads, I had more or less worked out what was going on.
The Code of the Woosters
finally dispensed with, I asked my aunt for more. Delighted, Rosa sent me home with my arms piled high with Wodehouse. These were the books that I escaped to during those long Friday evenings on the baseball bleachers. While my brothers were heroically engaged in the quintessential American pastime, I was half a world away, swept up in the misadventures of silly English aristocrats.

I enjoyed all of Wodehouse’s creations, but I loved Bertie Wooster the most. I adored his loyalty to his feckless chums; his eloquent, if occasionally baffling, turns of phrase; and his manifest idiocy. I fancied we had much in common, he and I. In particular, we shared the same suspicion of women. (Bertie’s aversion to romantic commitment has often made me wonder whether he, too, had sung in a barbershop quartet while he was up at Oxford.) The books teemed with females, legions of them, and Bertie’s entirely sensible attitude was to stay as far away from them as possible. He left the mooning around to his imbecilic male friends, who were forever falling in love. I was grateful that the romances that drove many of the stories forward were devoid of the ghastly sentimentality that I had feared when I gazed down at that first cover. Hand-holding and the whispering of sweet nothings were largely conducted off-page. Instead amorous entanglements were more like business transactions. In Wodehouse’s world, falling in love was about far more than two people sighing sweetly at each other—that was the easy part. Every romance involved a series of knotty negotiations with an army of third parties, usually old and cantankerous family members, who seemed, for reasons that I could never readily fathom, to have the ability to kill the affair stone dead. It was years before it dawned on me that having two people simply fall in love just isn’t very funny. I wasn’t sure whether to be comforted or saddened by the news.

Over time I became more adept at parsing Bertie Wooster’s tortured way with metaphor, but there was nobody except for Rosa with whom I could share these linguistic glories. We developed our own dialect of in-jokes, and I delighted in the baffled looks on other people’s faces when we traded these one-liners. I loved to tease her with Bertie’s little speech to Jeeves: “
It’s no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof
.” She always laughed at this, albeit with a slightly pained expression on her face. We created our own little patch of Bertie’s Mayfair, right here in the middle of Missouri, and nobody but us could gain admission. P. G. Wodehouse forged a bond between my aunt and me that was stronger than one of Jeeves’s miracle hangover cures.

I soon shared her passion for chess, too. At the end of each lesson of drills and exercises, we would play a game or two. Of course, Rosa thrashed me every time, but I didn’t mind. In fact I adored the elegance of the checkmates that she inflicted on me. I would stare down at the board, taking in the treacherous pattern of pieces, and a smile would break out on my face. Not even the most felicitous of Wodehouse’s jokes could match the pleasure I got from those bloodless kills. My aunt would watch my beaming face with a frown. She did not wholly approve of my enthusiasm for her victories.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to mind losing just a
little
,” she said after one especially devilish checkmate.

“But that was so clever,” I replied.

Rosa sighed and shook her head. “You’ll never be a decent chess player if you don’t have a hunger to win.”

In fact, this was not true. Despite the fact that I had never won a game of chess in my life, Rosa was a good teacher, and I had become pretty adept. When I discovered that one of my classmates, Magnus Kellerman, also played, I challenged h
im to a game after school one day. I beat him so easily that I didn’t know where to look. After I checkmated him, Magnus looked at the board for a few moments and then stuck his hand out across the board. We shook solemnly.

“Play again tomorrow?” he said.

Luckily for me, Magnus did not mind losing. He was grateful to play at all.

Magnus was the only child of Reverend Kellerman, my father’s would-be spiritual savior. A lifetime of being told by his father that he was going straight to hell had equipped Magnus with a well-developed sense of his own miserable worthlessness, but not much else. He didn’t have much going for him in the first place. He was, for one thing, extremely fat—the result, possibly, of too many of Mrs. Heimstetter’s famous fried chicken dinners. Even in our awkward crowd of preadolescent misfits, he was painfully shy. He did his best to fade unobtrusively into the background, which was difficult, given his size. He scuttled about with his eyes lowered, the next whispered apology always forming on his lips. He never raised his hand in class. At lunch he sat behind the schoolhouse and watched the rest of us as we ran and yelled through the meadow and chased away the boredom of our morning lessons, sure that we would not want him to join in our games. About this, he was right.

Magnus must have known about our fathers’ peculiar feud. By then Reverend Kellerman’s face was scarcely visible behind a shaggy forest of gray whiskers, and it’s hard to fathom what reserves of courage Magnus must have plumbed to sit down with one of Joseph Meisenheimer’s boys every day, even for something as innocent as a game of chess. It was a profound act of rebellion. I was just delighted to find someone else to play chess with, someone I could beat. Rosa had given me a small chess set that I took with me everywhere, and when school was over Magnus and I would settle down to play. I moved quickly and aggressively. Magnus, by contrast, pondered everything at length, his face a pained knot of worry. When he finally reached down to pick up a piece, a small sigh of regret would escape him. He knew he was going to lose, but the inevitability of the outcome didn’t matter to him. Defeat beckoned on so many fronts for Magnus Kellerman that he probably regarded getting thrashed by me as its own small victory.

I had other friends I liked to pal around with at school, but I never connected with any of them in the same way that I did with Magnus. In chess we found a bridge over which we could flee together. The lure of those sixty-four squares was irresistible, and soon, to my surprise, I saw more of Magnus Kellerman than any of my other buddies. He and I didn’t talk much. There wasn’t an awful lot to say. During our games the rest of the world kept its distance, and for this we were each grateful to the other.