Sam Weller - Shadow Show

That’s why I never told her about it. Not in so many words. I never told her none of it, although it’s wrong, to the church, to everyone, for a man to keep a secret from his wife, a gentle and true wife that Joanie is. I do believe she does know. It’s like something she was born knowing. But she never asked me anything but had I been with Nora before her and me married—and I hadn’t done anything but kiss Nora. I didn’t have to lie. I never been with no one but Joanie, the truth of it is, though she don’t know that either, and she has no need to know that, as a wife. A man has his pride.

She never met Jackie. Not to speak to. She did meet him, but she was a little girl. She doesn’t remember the party we had before Jackie went to war.

But she’s seen him.

You see me, you’ve seen Jackie Nickolai. That’s how it always was. I look in the mirror even now, I see him sometimes. Though I got a gut and most of my hair went gray when I was still young. I still miss him, almost forty years and more later.

It never failed with us, Jackie and me.

One of us come up the street alone, maybe trudging through the snow from the bus, and Mrs. Kozyk or Mrs. Peasley or Mrs. Finnian would shake her dish towel at us and ask, “Hey, Pete, where’s Re-Peat?”

Mrs. Kozyk, and all the neighbors, they knew we weren’t brothers. But other people, even in school, didn’t. See, it figured, how we looked—long rusty black hair, green eyes, nervous piano hands—us always together, having the same last name. People naturally assumed, not just when we was kids but all the way up through high school, that we were brothers. Some of them thought, maybe twins. Always. Almost as long as there was.

“Two of a kind beats a pair!” Mrs. Kozyk would tease us. She didn’t understand half of what she was saying in English. She just overheard things her husband said when he played cards on the porch and said them. It wasn’t no surprise, given the peculiar way we was related.

We were cousins, Jackie and me. But how many times you ever hear of this way? Me, I only heard of it one other time, and then long after Jackie was gone, from a girl that my wife knew at the place she worked before she formed her own cleaning company and hired girls to come and go with her and our daughter Eleanor in the bright Cleen Green vans.

See, Jackie’s father and my father were brothers and our mothers not just sisters but twins —identical twins. A twin is practically the same as one person divided in half. So I guess if you took slices of Jackie’s cells and my cells under a microscope, they would basically be the same as if we was brothers, because how could people’s cells line up with any more similarity?

Of course, they brought us up the same too. We learned Hungarian at home from Grandma Sala, before English. Then we went to the same grade at Saint Anselmo, though we was ten months apart. Both playing baseball—Jackie at short, me, right field—and Ghosts in the Graveyard and Kick the Can in the street at night. I took diving at the Y because it was good for me, after the polio, and Jackie took drawing, him being good with his hands. He didn’t need to get built up, being the kind of kid born muscled. Even when we didn’t weigh more between us than a man weighs grown, he would be the one showed up at dusk in the alley when one of the coloreds or the Carney brothers called me out. Called me “Gimpy” or “Hopalong” because of the brace on my leg and how it made me walk. And all I could do would be crouch under the lilac bushes that grew wild back there and watch him wade in, whack, twist, drop, butt with his head. The kid would be on his ass scrabbling backward in the gravel, not knowing what come at him out of that little body of Jackie’s. Afterward, he would never act like I owed him for taking my lumps. He seemed to think it was… his job. Jackie would look at you in a way, how do I tell you? Every one of the Carney brothers, them all the size of oxen, thirty of them it seemed to us like there was, they wouldn’t come on Jackie or me after the first time. He was just a small and gentle boy who never went looking for a fight. But once he was in something, he wouldn’t stop. Ever. That was what the look was. You knew Jackie would die before he backed down, and if you were ready to die, that would be all the same for him, too.

He never said an unkind word to me.

Only once.

This is confusing, although it was just normal to us.

Jackie was named for my father, whose name back in the old country was Jukka. They called my dad Jack. And I was named for Dad and Unkie’s father, Grandpa Ivan, who lived down the street with Grandma Sala.

He was called Jackie. I was called Jan.

All them names more or less mean John, you know. From John the Baptist, like my mother said.

Dad’s two older brothers, Josef and Gaston, called Jackie and me a pair of Jacks. Like, pair of jacks beats a pair of tens. When they saw us, they would laugh hard and then say, “Pair of jacks and the man with the axe splits the pot.” The man with the axe is the king of diamonds. They taught us to play poker when I was little, six. All kinds of games. Deuces and Baseball and Spit in the Ocean.

I don’t play cards anymore.

“Jacks are better,” they’d say to us at Grandma Sala’s after Mass, whenever they came home, to eat like ten men for a month and then leave again for six. Josef and Gaston were in the Merchant Marine. They were older than my dad, bachelors who hardly never came home. When they did, they would shove their big paintbrush beards into our faces, kissing us on both cheeks. I guess we felt special, being the only two boys. I was an only child. Jackie had a younger sister, Karin.

Josef and Gaston were the ones who came over first. From the money they made after they signed up, they saved for everyone else, long before Hitler took what we still called Transylvania, a land of dark cliffs and Gypsies. Now it’s Romania, yes, but also part of it is in the former republic of this or that, pulled back and forth between countries in Eastern Europe that never get any of it right and stay poor because of it. Grandma Sala would cry and pray in Hungarian for the mountains and their white flowers and birches. But no one in their right mind would want to go back.

Mama’s family, Papa and Nana, were already there when my father’s family came.

They were not immigrants anymore, even back then.

They were Americans of the third generation. They had lived first up in Wisconsin, then in Chicago since it was farm fields, just out past the El tracks. Our great-grandfather had served in the Civil War as a boy of sixteen. He survived and married a girl no older than he was, and had some acres until he had to give it up because of an accident with a plow blade, left him with a leg like my leg is, only the right not the left. He did various kinds of jobs then, until he come down to Chicago. Because he was good with style, if you want to call it that, he became a hatmaker. Men of business wore hats in his time, every day. He even shipped to Miami and Canada. At first he had to apprentice to an old Dago guy, even though he was already a grown man with a family. The Dagos made the beautiful hats. Shirts, suits, sweaters. Do still. Finally, he started his own store. Cornelius Hats. There was no Cornelius. Our great-grandfather just thought it sounded fancy when he started the company at the turn of the century. Papa grew up and made hats too. Then Papa’s son, our mama’s brother, decided he wanted to go to school for criminal justice instead. Dad let me know on the quiet that he thought hats were going out. He also thought they would squeeze your head until you went bald if you wore one every day. Dad himself never wore any outfit but his blue work pants and shirt. He owned one single suit he wore to every wedding and every funeral, and one blue sport coat. I myself only own one, my wedding suit. And it don’t fit no more, although Joanie keeps threatening to make me go walk around the block with her at night—like she doesn’t work hard enough in the day.