Young Hendrik was a sailor in the Kaiser’s navy. A year or two before the First World War broke out, his ship visited New York Harbor and he liked what he saw. He jumped ship and stayed in America. I don’t know how he spent the next fifty years, so this won’t be a very detailed story.
He lived in a rented room on the third floor of the house in Newark where my wife and I had our first apartment. He waited tables in a restaurant downtown.
Now about eighty years old, he still had a heavy German accent. My three-year-old loved listening to him talk, trying to figure him out. Henny loved him right back.
I had a wholesale bakery route, a good job for a morning person. I would set my alarm early enough to get to the garage, load the truck, and be on the road by six in the morning. I was usually back at the garage by three in the afternoon, leaving a couple of afternoon hours free.
I was a pretty good ten-pin bowler, and I believed that with enough practice I could improve my scores enough to become a professional. I kept my ball and shoes in the trunk of the car, and once or twice a week I’d stop at a bowling alley on my way home and roll some practice.
One day as I was bowling, the desk manager came over, asked if I was Mr. Smithee, and said I had a phone call. When I picked it up, it was my wife, and she said “Henny’s dead!”. I said “Are you sure?” and she said “Yes, he’s on the back stairs and mother says he’s cold.” They had located me by looking through the Yellow Pages for Newark bowling alleys.
A little family background – I knew Mimi’s mother had shared with her a suspicion that my afternoon bowling sessions might be something else. That was mean and destructive, but I understood her thinking – she had caught her own husband cheating. He had a thing going on with a waitress, coming home late at night with white shoe polish on the back of his pants.
When I got home, the mother said “We were so happy to find you at that bowling alley!” I wanted to say “Yeah, sorry to disappoint you”, but didn’t.
I went to see about Henny, and yes, he was dead. He was sort of wedged in on the landing halfway down the stairs. It didn’t look like he fell, it was more like he got tired and just sat down. You could see he’d been there a while.
“Take his ring off,” the mother said; “the ambulance people will steal it.” No doubt she had already tried to remove it. It was heavy and silver, with a worn-down coat of arms instead of a stone. His fingers were swollen and I tried to turn the ring to loosen it, but it was too tight. I left the removal to the slandered ambulance crew or the funeral director.
I don’t know who paid for Henny’s funeral; maybe he had insurance or they took up a collection at work. There was a visitation at the small funeral home a block away on Pennsylvania Avenue. Next day we drove to a memorial chapel in the middle of Rosehill Cemetery, a green parcel of land sandwiched between U.S. 1-9 and the Bayway refineries. After some words of prayer and farewell, the ushers led us next door into the crematory. They rolled in the casket, stopping by the steel doors to the furnace. A few more words were said, then we were asked to leave.
So long, Henny. Rest in peace.