The Company Car Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I

  OBSERVATIONS FROM THE WAYBACK

  1. A Day Late and a Dollar Short

  2. Par for the Course

  3. The House That God Built

  SIX OF ONE, HALF A DOZEN OF ANOTHER

  4. The Kaopectate Wars

  THAT’LL PUT HAIR BETWEEN YOUR TOES

  5. And That’s the Name of That Tune

  6. The Company Car

  CAPEESH?

  7. Loose Lips Sink Ships

  8. Kids Bounce

  9. You Know What They Do with Horses, Don’t You?

  HOLDING DOWN THE FORT, THE BOAT, THE HEART

  10. The Big Halloween: We Shall See What We Shall See

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR

  Part II

  GOD’S GREEN ACRES

  11. Another County Heard From

  12. This Will Reflect on Your Merit Review

  13. Observations from the Wayback

  OUR MOTHER, THE TROUPER

  14. No Guts, No Glory

  FLYING PUMPKINS AND THE LATE GREAT DREAMS OF OUR FATHER

  15. Accidents and Acts of God

  16. Hook, Line, and Sinker

  STONE SOUP AND THE NATURE OF BELIEF

  17. Odysseus in Later Life

  THE DEMOCRACY OF FAILURE

  18. We’ll Put It on Your Bill

  THAT’S THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES

  19. Some Things Are Best Left Private

  20. The Balloon, the Roof, and the Kitchen Sink

  WILLY-NILLY IS A PATTERN TOO

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  To Claude and Mary,

  to Tosh and Roman and Hania,

  and to the Seven C’s

  OBSERVATIONS FROM THE WAYBACK

  It’s good what happened

  it’s good what’s going to happen

  even what’s happening right now

  it’s okay.

  —ZBIGNIEW HERBERT, “Maturity”

  1. A Day Late and a Dollar Short

  There are times on this drive when I have been tempted to turn to Dorie and shout, “Our parents have been dead for years! Our father died while piloting a La-Z-Boy into oblivion, the remote still warm in his fingers! Our mother died in her bedroom; her last whispered words being ‘More! More!’ That’s what happened to our parents! Not this! Not this!”

  But it’s Dorie’s parents who have been dead for years. Mine are about to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, hence the drive up from Milwaukee with our kids. (I say “ours” although Dorie had already had Woolie and was pregnant with Henry when we met—a complicated story I needn’t go into here.)

  I don’t shout out my denials, though, because (a) Dorie would point out my pronoun error, as well as the insensitivity of my having made it; and (b) Dorie, in her infinite wisdom, would simply shake her head and say, “Get a grip, Ace. What’s the real issue here?”

  In defense of the pronoun thing: because our parents beat it into our heads when we were younger, I have always thought of my siblings and myself as one unit, however scattered we’ve become. And it’s not as though Dorie doesn’t appreciate my referring to our three kids as “our three kids.” But she’s right about the other. The real issue here is that it has become increasingly evident to my siblings and myself that our parents may no longer be able to care for themselves. Besides celebrating our parents’ fifty years together, my six sibs and I are going to be talking about the disposition of our parents’ future. “The disposition of our parents’ future”—I don’t need Dorie calling me Ace again to know how ridiculous that sounds. The debate comes down to this: Should our parents, for their own good, be installed in the Heartland Home for the Elders? If I had a nickel for every flip-flop I’ve had over that I’d be a wealthy man. But it’s not often we’re all together in one place for a powwow, as our brother Ike would say, and this is not a question you answer by phone or e-mail. So along with the champagne and celebration, we have business to discuss. Messy business. Cloudy business. But then, when in our family have things been other than messy and cloudy?

  As our father would say, “We shall see what we shall see.” He could say a lot of other things, too: “Dollars to donuts,” “Par for the course,” “That’ll put hair between your toes,” and “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?” Though given the situation, I don’t know that he’d utter that last one.

  “Relax, Em,” Dorie says. “Don’t get your undies in a bundle. It’s not you deciding all on your lonesome. Let the Round Table do its work. No use feeling guilty over something you haven’t done yet.”

  “What about the things I have done?”

  She brings my hand to her lips and bites my knuckle. “I’ll be the judge of that, sweetie.”

  Sophie, our youngest, pipes up from the wayback, “Are we there yet?” She’ll ask this question at roughly three-minute intervals for the rest of the trip. My answer should be “No, not by a long shot,” but right at that moment I’m thinking about how I called where Sophie is sitting “the wayback.” Only, Mercury Villagers do not have waybacks. They have third seats, rear seats, or cargo areas, but not waybacks. Only station wagons—a species of family travel now largely extinct—have waybacks.

  “What’s up, Ace?” Dorie asks. “You’ve got one of your thousand-mile stares going.”

  I tell her about the wayback—those rear-facing seats where my siblings and I spent so much time on long family trips, though we had to fight each other for the right to sit there. We called it that because “Peabody’s Improbable History” (the show about a dog and his boy housed inside Rocky and His Friends, aka the Rocky and Bullwinkle show), featured a time machine called the “Wayback.” Looking out at every place we’d just been, we thought it worked like that for us, too. Which is how it’s working for me on this drive back up to our parents’.

  Dorie twists the cap off a water bottle. A modern woman, she likes to stay hydrated. “Tell me a story,” she says, grinning. “Tell me a story from way back.”

  I know what she wants. Something from our childhood, something light, like the time Wally Jr. got his head stuck in the porch railing and we had to call the fire department to get him out, or the time Wally Jr. and Ike went windshield-surfing buck naked over the Lake Butte des Morts Bridge, or Cinderella mooning over our mother’s bras, the fancy ones we found in our mom’s underwear drawer, bras Cinderella was destined never to fill, or how Ike managed to become a Native American, or why Wally Jr. is our lightbulb in a hailstorm.

  What she doesn’t want is the only story I want to tell. It’s our parents’ favorite story, though I’ve never heard them tell it. Not all at one time, anyway. Dorie has heard it in bits and pieces over the years—straight from the horse’s mouth, in all its convoluted permutations—and she’s tired of it. Tired of the bits and pieces themselves, tired of the way the story runs up cul-de-sacs and dead ends because one of the tellers ain’t so hot a storyteller anymore and the other cuts the first one off just as he’s revving his engines to take us all down another memory cul-de-sac.

  But then I’m not telling the story just for her. With our own marriage foundering, I know this is the story that someday I want our children to hear—a coherent story about things lasting, goddammit. Ours is not one of those “and they lived happily ever after” tales you’d like to tell your children. Our parents’ wedding and marriage, though—that’s a different story entirely.

  Our parents were married on television in March 1952 on a show called It’s Your Wedding, With Your Hosts Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King.

  It’s Your Wedding ran on stat
ion WILT in Chicago from 1948 to 1953, and for the first three-plus years of its existence the show was called Billy Ray King’s “It’s Your Wedding.” Billy Ray King was the show’s producer as well as its star. But like most people in television, Billy Ray King had his eyes on a larger prize. He thought the show could go national—like The Colgate Comedy Hour or This Is Your Life.

  For a while it did, but there was a problem. Billy Ray King, born Miles Otis Oblansky, was fat. Or beefy, if you prefer. This was in the days before game show hosts were stamped like cookie cutters from the men’s underwear section of the Sears catalog. In 1948 they could still look like real people, but by 1952 that was changing. Billy Ray King had three chins and looked as if he’d been stuffed into his suit like some pork-fed southern politician. His pants and sleeves were too short. He was frequently out of breath. He sweated under the studio lights. He looked like somebody’s fat, red-faced uncle making the wedding speech. This made our father, who was skinny then but destined not to remain so, trust him, which was a mistake, as anyone who’s worked with television people should know.

  But then Billy Ray King should have known better, too. In his desire to take his show national, he sold it to the network, giving up his role as producer so that he could concentrate on being the show’s star. The new producers brought in a pretty boy plucked from page 153 of the Sears Christmas catalog—Alan Pickett—and Billy’s days as host of the show were numbered. Television executives were already discovering that they didn’t want hosts who looked like they might drink too much at Aunt May’s funeral. It might have been different if Billy Ray King was funny. You could look like a regular schmo on television if you were funny. But Billy Ray King was dead earnest, breathing too hard, always looking as though he feared the bride might call the whole thing off right at the last minute and then where would he be?

  They made a strange pair, Pickett and Oblansky, that fourth spring season of It’s Your Wedding. You could tell Billy Ray King was not comfortable with the arrangement. He kept trying to step in, excitedly and impatiently, while Alan Pickett was announcing how the game was played and what the couple could win that day and asking them where they were from and who their attendants were and what they had for future plans. “Kids! They’re going to have lots of kids, whocka whocka,” Billy Ray would say, nudging with his elbow whoever was closer, the bride or the groom. Brides tended to give Billy Ray a wide berth, positioning themselves whenever possible on the outside of their soon-to-be spouses. Pickett would nod assent and smile benignly, almost condescendingly, on Billy Ray’s latest faux pas and then go on with whatever it was he was supposed to say next, oblivious to Billy Ray’s futile and frantic antics to keep the show from being wrested from him. Alan Pickett was cool. He ended up hosting any number of short-lived game shows and in his later years was a regular on The Guiding Light, becoming famous as one of the few doctors on daytime television who didn’t try to get into anybody’s pants.

  As television shows went, It’s Your Wedding was pretty dumb. How it worked was, first, a couple agreed to get married on television. Then they’d fill out forms, provide family photos, get dressed in their wedding finery, and come down to the studio with their attendants and families. There they’d answer questions from the host that were gleaned from the forms while stiff wedding photographs of their parents and grandparents were shown on-screen. This being Chicago in midcentury, people knew their ethnic origins and were proud of them. There were Poles and Slavs and Croats and Germans and Irish and Italians and Lithuanians and even some Cubans. Then came the family snapshots—the bride and groom as children, as teenagers, the requisite photos of the groom as a soldier, the bride’s high school graduation picture, maybe a picture of the two of them all dolled up for a fraternity dance or a night on the town. In between photos they cut back to the bride and groom looking nervous and a little silly as they answered Alan Pickett’s questions or fended off Billy Ray King’s clowning.

  If you were to see such a show today, you’d be struck by how serious these couples seemed, but also how comfortable they were with each other. They knew each other’s families, came from the same neighborhoods, had grown up together. Contrast that with the next generation of game shows that used as fodder people’s willingness to celebrate their coupleness with an audience of several million strangers: The Dating Game, in which Jim Lange hooked up total strangers, and The Newlywed Game, in which couples showed the world how little they actually knew each other. Given what came later—Blind Date, ElimiDATE, Temptation Island (has there been a devolution in this country or what?)—It’s Your Wedding was quaint and almost sincere. Billy Ray King was right. What lay in the future for these couples? Infants, offspring, foundlings, nudniks, bambinos, rug rats, little buggers, brats, sucklings, newborns, blimps, radishes, dumplings, cabbages, lumpkins, tax deductions—children. In the later shows nooky was naughty and occurred without reference to progeny, but on It’s Your Wedding Billy Ray King believed it was all about results. “How many ya gonna have? Who do ya think they’ll look like more, you or you?” The grooms all smiled politely. The wives looked pensive. They knew the whole deal was going to rest pretty much on their slim shoulders. And bellies. And backs.

  So that was the This Is Your Life portion of the show, only without the surprise guests. The next thing was the couple got married, sometimes with a bit of subterfuge. At that time no priest or minister would think of appearing on television for the purpose of marrying somebody in a television studio. And the logistics and expense of doing remote broadcasts every week would have been impossible given the technology at the time. This wasn’t, after all, the World Series. So the couples had two choices: Either they could really get married on the show by a justice of the peace, or they could get “married” by an actor sporting a collar and robes and after the show have the JP thing or a church wedding. “It makes no nevermind to me,” Billy Ray King would say, “but then, it’s not my family watching me get married on TV in front of a fusty old judge,” gently coercing them to get married by the Bing Crosby look-alike he’d hired to lend the proper air of beneficence to the occasion. After that the couple would kiss, shake hands with their attendants, and then either engage in a contest or perform some talent to receive their prizes. The talents displayed were usually the kinds of time-filling acts Ed Sullivan was fond of using in his shows: singing, dancing, plate spinning, playing the musical saw.

  The prizes were arranged in groupings of various-size boxes. Monty Hall would later borrow this idea, only he used doors. You might find anything in the boxes you chose: a pot with two rubber chickens in it, a color TV, a hi-fi radio, new tires, a set of cookware, a vacuum cleaner, cash, or a check. Billy Ray King took great delight in sometimes putting the smallest things in the largest boxes. The box that looked sure to hold an upright freezer held instead an egg. There was enough good stuff that it was worth going on the show regardless, but unless you got extremely lucky with your choices, Billy Ray King the producer was rarely nicked for more than a cheapo set of golf clubs, a lamp, and maybe a pair of his and her Timex watches.

  By the show’s fourth year on the air, Billy Ray King had the routine down cold, but when he got national syndication, he also lost control of the show. The national producers, in addition to bringing in Alan Pickett, wanted the show to move faster. Two weddings a show. Get rid of that hokey “my mama, she come from Albania” crap. Focus on the couple. Make it fun. More silly stuff. If you’re going to show pictures, embarrass them. Skip the talent showcase. Marry them at the top of the hour, side by side or sequentially, then pair them off in contests. Heck, why don’t we take them outside and have the brides and grooms and their attendants engage in a tug-of-war over a mud pit while still in their wedding regalia? Billy Ray King fought every change, but he had miscalculated his power and he was destined to lose the show the following season, when the fad for people getting married on TV had pretty much run its course. The show was canceled in February 1953, and Billy Ray King ended up selling a
ppliances in downtown Chicago, Hoover and GE being kinder to him than the producers to whom he’d sold his show.

  “How do you know all this, Dad?” Henry asks from the backseat. Henry is at the age when he wants to know how the world works. I’d explain it to him except I don’t know myself.

  “Because Grandma and Grandpa Cza-Cza have told him about a million and umpteen times,” says Dorie, leaning her head back and closing her eyes.

  “And what he doesn’t know he’s making up,” says Woolie from behind his Game Boy. So he is listening, despite his attempts to hermetically seal himself inside his electronic media. I’m almost touched.

  Dorie’s right. They love to tell this story about themselves. Big and boxlike as they are now, it is sometimes hard for us to imagine them young and willowy, as they were then. But we have seen the pictures. Photographs taken before we were born, the pictures they used on the show when our parents were married: our father in an alleyway in Cicero with his foot on the front bumper of a Chevy Deluxe. He is wearing a two-toned Western-style shirt with the yoke a contrasting color, his hat flying away down the alley behind him, his grin as wide as any man’s could be if he owned a car like that. And our mother, in a black velvet dress with a mock turtleneck collar and sun-ray cutouts from her neck to her bosom, the curvature of which is shown to best advantage by the dress’s snugness. She is sitting backward on a tricycle in front of a row house stoop and looking up into the photographer’s gaze, smiling. She shows us that photo and we ask her, Why are you sitting on that trike? And we don’t hear her answer because we’re too busy thinking: My God, our mom was sexy!