The Company Car Page 10

  It was better visiting Great-Grandma Hluberstead, Artu’s mother, even though that house was filled with old people. For one thing, we could entertain them by showing we remembered how Hluberstead was spelled by singing it to the Mickey Mouse Club theme song: H-L-U-B-E-R-S-T-E-A-D! For another, they didn’t mind us crawling all over their furniture, which was old and nubbly and draped in antimacassars. For still another, though Great-Grandma Hluberstead herself was old and nubbly—she looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy at age ninety-seven—she encouraged us to call her Hubie. Our mother insisted we say Grandma Hubie, at least.

  I don’t think our father ever felt comfortable at Grandma Hubie’s house, which was a shame—and a problem—because we drove down there a lot now that Nomi was living with us.

  Our mom was pregnant with what would prove to be her penultimate child, Ernie. Artu was still keeping up their apartment at Wilson and Malden, a mile north of Wrigley Field—which pained him, being a White Sox fan—but it was quiet there, with cemeteries at both ends of Malden and the lake not too far away. Artu would stay at the apartment when he was pulling a late shift as an elevator operator, but mostly he worked days, and during the week he stayed with us. Although he owned a car, he usually took the train into the Loop, and our father picked him up either at the Lowell-Wackstein building or at one of the coin shops he liked to frequent. Then he and our father would drive to Elmhurst along with everyone else heading out to the booming western suburbs. Nomi had broken her hip falling down the back stairs of their apartment. She’d just wanted to put out the milk bottles, but it was March and icy. With Artu gone all day, it wasn’t a good idea for Nomi to be laid up all by herself. Dad and Artu had set up a bed in our upstairs front bedroom—the room that was supposed to be our mother’s I-need-my-privacy getaway room. The back bedroom was for us boys. There were four of us at the time—Robert Aaron, me, Ike, and Wally Jr.—and we were very curious about this contraption that Artu and our father had built to help Nomi’s recovery. It looked like a huge steel fishing pole with a pulley and a rope for the line. They baited it with house bricks left over from when they built our house. They were sand-colored with flecks in them like freckles. “Iron-spotted,” said our mother, “the best kind.” She still believed ours was the House That God Built, all evidence to the contrary. We touched the bricks and wondered what on earth they were trying to catch at the foot of Nomi’s bed with this. A closet monster? Something that lived under the floorboards? Traction, Artu told us. The bricks were a counterweight for the cast on Nomi’s hip, which was heavy and uncomfortable.

  “Can we see it?” asked Robert Aaron. “The hip, I mean.”

  “It hurts her to move,” said Artu. “We have to be very careful.”

  What did it look like, a smashed hip? Was the bone showing? Was there a scar? We didn’t know. Nomi was pretty open with us about everything, forthright and plainspoken, so her reticence in this matter puzzled us.

  “Why won’t Nomi let us see her hip?” we asked our mother. We were downstairs now, finishing our lunch.

  “It’s the first time she’s ever been really hurt,” said our mother. “I think it pains her to be getting old.” Our mother was washing dishes.

  “Will they shoot her?” Ike asked. He was a year and a half younger than me, which made him not quite four.

  “Shoot her? Why on earth would anybody shoot her?”

  Ike said, “Daddy says it’s what they do with horses.”

  Robert Aaron said, “Dad says, ‘You know what they do with horses?’ when we get hurt. Then he makes his finger into a gun”—Robert Aaron demonstrated, his forefinger extended, his thumb up in the air—“and pulls the trigger, pkew!” He did this right at Ike, who started crying.

  “Nobody’s shooting anybody!” shouted our mother. She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Your father, really. Sometimes I wonder why I married him.”

  Statements like this made us wonder, too. What if she’d married the Italian? Would we look the same, only with black hair? We were all blonds except for Ike, who had auburn hair, like our mother. We didn’t wonder for long, though. Your parents were your parents. Even with that one night when our mother raised the subject of the unthinkable, that seemed irrevocable. What we did wonder about was that traction business—those bricks suspended by a rope. We were in Nomi’s room constantly. Evenings we’d arrange ourselves around her pillows while she read to us, but during the day we’d sneak in while she was dozing so we could study the bricks, the rope, the bright chrome arm, the pulley. If we touched anything, Nomi would say, “Don’t. Don’t mess with that,” and we’d jump. We thought she’d been sleeping. “Eyes in the back of her head,” said our father. “Just like her daughter.” We were alarmed that there seemed to be this symbiotic relationship between this contraption and our grandmother.

  We got a glimpse of Nomi’s hip only once, when our mother was giving her a sponge bath just before a trip to Grandma Hubie’s. We were leaving as soon as Artu and our father returned from work. Artu, an elevator operator, had much the better job. Our father’s work, as he explained it, consisted of calling on doctors all over Chicago and trying to get them to buy something from his big brown valise, what he called his sample case. As with Nomi’s cast, we weren’t allowed to examine its contents, either.

  Our mother needed our help rolling Nomi up on her side. Nomi kept herself covered in blankets, and when we pushed it was like trying to get a boulder to roll uphill. It was easier to get on the far side and pull her toward us. Our mother washed her back while we stared at a mass of blankets and didn’t see her hip at all except for the crazy railroad spur of the scar end, which looked like it’d been spun by drunken spiders. Its purple thickness scared us. It was like something was living beneath the cast and was sending out tendrils.

  Nomi said, “I could use a beer before you leave.”

  “You want anything with that?”

  “Sausages. Them little bitty breakfast sausages and some eggs and a nice glass of beer.” Nomi was staring up at the ceiling. I thought maybe she was imagining herself back at the diner she and Artu had owned during the Depression. We had heard all those stories. Beer and breakfast sausage and eggs sounded like something you ate for dinner at a diner. A meal like that was something both she and our father loved. Except for the politics, she and our father actually got on well together. They shared the same tastes, greasy breakfast foods with beer for dinner being only one of them. At Hubie’s, Nomi would not be the only woman over fifty drinking beer. She hated not going.

  While our mother made the sausages and eggs, I was dispatched upstairs with the beer.

  “You want a sip?” asked Nomi, pouring her beer into the short glass she always used. “It bites,” she said when my face scrunched at the taste of it.

  “How can you drink that?” I asked.

  “It’s an acquired taste,” said Nomi. “Some people acquire it, some don’t.”

  “I’m never going to acquire it.”

  “Don’t be so sure you won’t. Your father thought he wouldn’t acquire a taste, either, God bless him, and you see how much he likes it now.” Nomi looked out the window. She had a long thin face with high cheekbones and heavily lidded eyes that reminded me a little of a frog’s eyes. I didn’t realize it at the time, but once she had been very pretty.

  “How do you acquire a taste, Nomi?”

  “Lots of ways,” said Nomi. “Out of hope, out of disappointment, out of other people’s example or expectations. Mostly, though, you just keep on drinking the stuff until you like it. Me, I’m half Irish; I was born with a taste for it. And that makes you an eighth Irish, so you better watch out, or you’ll acquire a taste for it, too.”

  That day at Grandma Hubie’s was a special event. Our great-uncle Harold had brought his fiancée home to meet the family. Nancy was a skinny redhead with her hair done up in a low beehive and a swoop of bangs over her forehead. She had plucked her eyebrows, then drawn in new ones that looked like the way I drew cro
ws at a distance, had the crows been flying upside down. Her skirt was too short, showing a good two inches of thigh, which endeared her to no one but Grandma Hubie. “Sit down, my dear, sit down,” Grandma Hubie cried, and Nancy was left to her fate while everyone else went about their business. Even Harold eventually removed his hand from hers and went to have a cigarette in the backyard. Hubie and Tillie and Eunice took turns reminiscing to the girl about their own families, then she was released to (or rescued by) the other women, who had their own inquiries to make.

  It was spring, but there was still snow on the ground and the air was chilly, especially on the sunporch behind the kitchen, which was where all the men were, playing poker. Artu; our father; Aunt Gwen’s husband, Bruno; Irene’s husband, Frank; Aunt Margie’s husband, Alvin; and Margie’s three sons, Harold, Howard, and Stephen.

  Alvin was a nice man, but his face looked like he used it to stop trucks for a living. He had a bullet-shaped head and a gash for a mouth and bad teeth, which was all right because it looked like he possessed only seven or eight of them. He loved to laugh, though, like our father, and after a while you got used to seeing those exposed horrible teeth. It helped that he had a habit of elbowing his stack of winnings—the coins anyway—onto the floor. “Get that, would you?” he’d ask us, and we’d dive to the linoleum, then proffer him our gleanings. “Keep it,” he’d say, and we’d snug in close to his elbows, sentries to his needs, fetching him another braunschweiger and onion sandwich, or another of the pickles he liked to gnaw on for his poor sore gums. The others took to elbowing their winnings on the floor, too, and we fanned out, each of us picking a great-uncle or grandfather whose elbow movements we shadowed.

  We had one other favorite uncle, Stephen, but he played only a few hands before he said he had to get back to school. He was a sophomore at Notre Dame. “Midterms,” he said as he put on his jacket. “Major parties,” said Aunt Margie, sighing after he left. She’d come into the sunporch with a warm glass of milk for Alvin, who loved the food he ate but suffered from heartburn. “You’d think he’d stay to chat with Nancy.”

  “Why?” Harold asked. “He’s not marrying her. I am.”

  Margie cuffed Harold gently on the back of his head.

  “It’s okay, Ma. We already agreed, he’s going to be my best man.”

  “All the more reason he should be visiting with Nancy.”

  “Mom, give him a break. It’s Friday night. I’d be out partying with my friends, too, if I wasn’t here.”

  “The point is you are here.”

  “If you ask me he should be in the service,” said our father, shuffling the cards in his hand. “Stephen, I mean. It’d do him a world of good.”

  “Nobody asked you, Wally,” said our mother. The women had come into the sunporch. It was growing dark, and with Stephen’s departure you could feel the day closing in on itself.

  “Last fall they had me on call-up duty, you know that?” said our father. “The Cuban missile thing and they had everybody in the reserves all charged up and ready to go.”

  “They could have sent Wally-Bear back to San Diego,” our mother said. “And me, big as a house here with our sixth.”

  “It seems crazy,” Margie said.

  “Frightful,” said our mother. It sounded like our mother was confessing something, which indeed she was. This was our mother’s way: something horrible would happen, and you would only find out about it later, when she had surmounted it enough to make light of it. You could tell she had been cut, but the wound was healing. That, anyway, was the image our mother wished to present to the world, an attitude no doubt ingrained in her by Nomi, whose motto could have been “Never let ’em see you cryin’, girl, never ever.” Inside her own home, however, was another matter. And even then it was a matter more of our eavesdropping than of her giving vent to her emotions in front of us.

  That whole fall had been a tense time in our household. There had been a letter from the government, and our mother had cried when she opened it. Our parents spent a lot of time in front of the TV, which they didn’t usually do, and ushered us out of the room when the news came on. Our father started coming home earlier than usual, and after we were in bed he and our mother would talk in hushed, plaintive voices. Or at least that would be our mother’s voice. Our father’s was calm and accepting, as though the balance of power in the family had shifted back toward him. One evening we heard our mother wail, “But they can’t make you go, Wally, they can’t make you go!” and our father answered, “I’d have to, Susan. I have a commission. I’d have to report.” We peeked over the railing to see our father comforting her. She sat on his lap, folded into his shoulder, her just barely pregnant belly bumping into his. Our father had his arms around her, and he was kissing her hair, saying, “There, there. There, there,” while our mother cried, “I can’t do this again, Wally, I can’t, I can’t.”

  The whole scene scared us. Usually our mother was the indomitable one, putting up with our father’s absences, or lambasting him when he did get home—but here she was weeping on our father’s shoulder like a little girl who’d skinned her knee. Without a word passing among us, we agreed not to speak of this. It just settled into our consciousness, that everything could change at a moment’s notice, the world turned upside down. Your parents were your parents, sure, but evidently one of them could leave and call that duty. We didn’t understand this. That evening, behind the closed door of their bedroom, there was a desperate furtiveness to their noises, a plaintive urgency, as though they felt they had to use up everything inside them prior to their world coming apart. That knowledge seeped into us as well.

  “It would have been my third war,” said our father. “All under Democratic presidents, if you get my drift.” He winked at everybody around the table. I hadn’t been counting how many beers he’d had, but it had been a lot. Our father drank beer in short glasses quickly and refilled them often. He had acquired the taste.

  “Wally, don’t be bringing up politics. You know how I hate that,” said our mother.

  “Facts are facts,” said our father. “You want peace and prosperity, you get a Republican. You get a recession under a Democrat, and the first thing after that you got a war on your hands to balance the budget.”

  “World War Two was about balancing the budget?” Artu asked.

  “It got us out of the Depression,” said our father. “Don’t think Roosevelt didn’t know that. He let Pearl Harbor happen just so he’d have an incident to get us involved.”

  “Don’t answer him,” said our mother. “It’ll just keep him going.”

  “I thought this one was about keeping the Communists out of Asia,” Harold said.

  “It is. But you watch. If the economy takes a tumble, it won’t be just advisers going over there. That’s why Stephen should enlist now. ROTC. Life’s a lot better for you as an officer, and that’s the name of that tune.”

  “It’s not okay as a civilian?” Harold asked.

  “Real men serve in the military,” said our father. He looked around the table. Bruno had a bad knee that kept him out of the Big One, Artu had come of age between the wars, and Howard had done a very uneventful hitch in the late fifties. That left Harold, who had a soft, serious look on his face I could identify with. Harold was a watcher and a listener. He cleared his throat.

  “I’m getting married,” Harold said.

  “Real men—” said our father. “Enough, Wally, I mean it,” said our mother. Our father poured himself another beer. As though he were speaking to the beer he said, “And that’s the name of that tune.” Then he put his fist to his mouth and quacked like a duck, his fist opening as he did so to let the noise increase in volume. He had this tight, befuddled little smile on his face, as though he wasn’t quite sure what line had been crossed, but he was pleased one had.

  Nobody said anything. Then Artu, who usually ignored our father when he got like this, said to him, “You fought the Battle of Lake Michigan in World War Two, didn’t you
, Walter?”

  “I served my country in her hour of need,” said our father.

  “In the Coast Guard, wasn’t it? Stateside?”

  “I served my country,” our father repeated.

  “And in Korea, you hauled troops and ferried refugees around, right? You didn’t see any real action, did you?”

  “I could hear the guns,” said our father.

  “But you didn’t see any action, did you?”

  “I fucking served my country, you son of a bitch!” our father roared. He was standing now, swaying forward on his fingertips. He refilled his glass again. “And that . . . that is the name of that tune.” He sat down again.

  Nobody had knocked their coins to the floor in some time. This was how family gatherings with our father ended these days. Edgy. Our mother stoic but near tears. Her eyes were glistening as she got us our coats. Artu said Irene and Frank would give him a ride home.

  “Are you coming, Walter?” Our father hadn’t moved while our mother got our coats. He sipped from his glass, then refilled it. He held up the bottle and toggled it back and forth, meaning one of us should get him another. We didn’t move. Our mother would yell at us if we did. Our father shrugged, put the bottle down. In the dining room we heard Sarah complaining. Why did we have to leave so early? Why couldn’t she stay? Our mother explained icily that nobody was driving out of their way for us. And Sarah Lucinda was old enough to help with getting Wally Jr.’s coat on. Did she need to be reminded that she was part of this family, too? “I hate this family,” said Sarah Lucinda. This was followed by a loud smack.

  Our mother reappeared in the sunporch’s doorway. She was furious and resplendent, her green eyes blazing, her pregnant belly lending her a power she didn’t usually have. “Walter,” she said, in clipped syllables that made it sound as though she were cutting them off her tongue with a knife. “Are you coming home with us or not?”

  Our father studied his cards. “I believe I’ll let you play this hand out,” he said, tossing his cards into the pot and rising heavily to his feet.