The Company Car Read online

  At the time of these pictures our father has been through one war and he’s about to be sent off to another, though he doesn’t know that yet. He is not quite twenty-three. He’s been through the Depression and a postwar recession. He wasn’t cut out for medical school, but then school was an afterthought; four nights a week he was singing and playing in a band. He had his buddies, his bandmates, and a bevy of young women he was dating, one of them our mother. Our mother, not yet twenty when she marries our father, spends the three years between that photo’s being taken and her engagement keeping sometimes as many as seven or eight dates a weekend with five or six different boys. To the Melrose Park harness track with one, to church with another, to the museum with a third, meeting a fourth at the zoo or Navy Pier, a movie or theater date later, coffee with somebody else later still, when she should have been studying (or perhaps it was a study date that became something else). She had an Italian boyfriend who was constantly telling her, “I will present you with many babies,” as though they would be gifts he’d go out and get her.

  She thought she could love that guy but knew he wouldn’t respect her, and she didn’t like the idea of being barefoot and pregnant while he was off screwing other women. Our father said nothing about babies, he didn’t think he could be that lucky. He only promised he would love her. The babies would come later, fast and furiously, and every one of them, at the time anyway, seemed like a gift.

  And then, of course, came all the rest of it, what they couldn’t see, what they couldn’t possibly know was coming.

  Not that it mattered. Not that it mattered to anybody back then. Like most people at that time, our parents were young and scared and hopeful. They knew there were things out there that could touch them, could devastate them, but they also felt that they were the exception.

  It turned out they were the rule.

  But our parents didn’t know that. For some dates, especially after they got engaged—our father did the romantic thing, getting down on one knee in Grant Park while our mother sat on a bench, quivering with excitement—our parents took the bus out to Oak Park and walked around gawking at the stately old homes set back under the trees. They tried to imagine themselves inside these homes, but it was a stretch, a change in circumstance too large to contemplate. Mostly they took the trolley out to the intersection of Butterfield and York Road. The trolley shook something fierce, and our parents held hands, both for the touch and for the steadying influence of one hand linked with another. The trolley had a coal stove in the center of it to heat it in winter and it was a single line out and back and you had to wait in the cold for the next trip, which could take a while. But they would go out there, to York and Butterfield, and they would hold hands and dream. It was where they dreamed they’d live. It was mostly empty field and prairie, but in the stubble of cornfields powdered with snow they were putting up new houses. Skeletal wood-frame ranches and scaled-down foursquares with brick veneers. It looked lovely. It looked like obtainable possibility. It looked like the future.

  You see photographs like the ones I’ve described, and you ask yourself, What happened to these people? Did it work out okay for them? You wonder, coming back to yourself, sitting across from a wife to whom you may not be married for much longer, driving up to see the subjects of those photos, How did they start there and wind up here? And where, exactly, is here? And then you think, And what in God’s name are we going to do with them now? Do to them now?

  It is, as is often the case, the children who save you. Henry pipes up from the backseat, “So did Grandma and Grandpa get married or what?”

  He’s right. Let us get them married, let us let them begin.

  “To begin this properly,” I say in my best once-upon-a-time voice, “you must know what a 1934 Hudson Terraplane looks like. Grandpa and Grandma fell in love in the back of one.”

  ___

  The Terraplane was a big black clunky behemoth of a car that was old already when our father came to co-own it with his bandmates in 1948. It had dark green leather jump seats and a hood that tended to flap up like a huge bird’s wing in any kind of wind and then fold over and fall off the car into traffic, as though the bird had been shot and was cartwheeling into the water. It was a car they pushed more than drove, and it was a good thing it was co-owned, since the hood frequently did its popping off act while they were careening down Cermak Road on their way to the Loop for a gig. Whenever the hood did this (and it did so frequently, the hinges holding it in place being rusted through), they had to pile out, four of the six band members, and run into traffic behind the car, lift the heavy and humongous dead bird, run it back to the car, and set the tin casing back into place, the driver or extra band member directing traffic around them. All this performed while they were three sheets to the wind themselves. The car was, however, indestructible. It once went through a solid oak garage door and survived. (This when our father tried to teach our mother to drive. Our mother, indomitable with eager servicemen, was helpless behind the wheel of a car. She never did learn how to drive.) Like most first cars, it used more oil than gas, a typical service stop consisting of twenty-five cent’s worth of gas, a quart of oil, and a refill for the radiator. The Terraplane finally died in 1953, when one of the few bandmates who hadn’t gone to Korea used only water during a winter refill and cracked the block.

  It was the second to last car our father owned, and he owned only a sixth of it. It seated five guys plus their equipment, which was why they bought it. Our parents courted in it, smooched in it, fell in love in it. For his wedding, there could be no other vehicle, no other chariot to deliver him to his chosen maiden than that 1934 Hudson Terraplane, the hood of which kept flapping off in the brisk wind off Lake Michigan as he and his bandmates—Louie Hwasko (piano), Bernie Zanoni (clarinet), Benny Wilkerson (bass), Ernie Klapatek (trumpet), and Charlie Podgazem (drums)—howled up Cermak Road toward WILT’s television studio and our father’s date with destiny.

  Our mother arrived by bus with her girlfriend, Helen Federstam, who was also her maid of honor. Both were sophomores at DePaul. Helen, nervously chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, asked her, “So, why are you doing this? What, did you fall in love with the accordion?”

  A fair enough question. Of the other men our mother had been dating, Helen considered at least two of them superior—at least as musicians—to the accordion-wielding flyweight who was to become our father: a twenty-eight-year-old violinist with the Chicago Symphony and an Irish tenor who also sold insurance. Helen also thought the dark-eyed, jet-haired Italian (the one who wanted to “present” our mother “with many babies”) was “dreamy.” She did not think the hollow-eyed, skinny-limbed young man with receding hair cropped in a military crew cut a suitable match for Susan Marie. But Susan Marie did. Maybe it was the accordion.

  She tried to explain this to Helen as they waited for our father and his buddies to show up. She thought it, well, very brave that a five-foot-eight man weighing one hundred and forty-seven pounds would even contemplate strapping that huge box onto his chest, and that he could sing, too, while laboring beneath that device, sing with a full, rich, resonating tenor—that in itself was something. But it was more than that, too. She thought their temperaments suited each other. They wanted the same things, she said, thinking of those trolley rides, those held hands, that prairie giving way to wood-frame houses. “And he isn’t stuck on himself,” she added, thinking of the Italian, the violinist, the tenor–insurance salesman, and others besides, all of whom, she thought, were filled with vanity, who wanted a beautiful young woman solely because her beauty complemented theirs. “He loves me for me,” our mother added, feeling a little defiant and pulling her woolen coat closer to her chest as a stiff March breeze rushed up East Wacker Drive.

  Helen rubbed out her cigarette beneath her heel as the Terraplane roared up to the curb. “Suit yourself,” she said, putting on her best meeting-the-guys smile as she added, sotto voce, “Me, I wouldn’t have that surname if you killed me. It soun
ds like a rock on a garbage can lid, you know what I’m saying?”

  The guys had their own story to tell, involving the Terraplane’s hood flying off ten feet in front of a cop directing traffic at the corner of State and Jackson. “It looked like we were performing a Chinese fire drill,” said our father. “He was going to write us up, obstructing traffic, I guess, only he was laughing too hard. The sight of these guys in uniforms and tuxes—”

  “And Wally shouting, ‘Please, Officer, I’m getting married!’ ” Louie Hwasko, his best man, added. “That saved us. That Wally, always quick on his feet.”

  “I’m sure,” Helen said. “Meanwhile, I’m freezing.”

  “Allow me to fix that, little lady,” said Louie, offering his bent elbow and tilting his head to indicate somebody else should get the door. Ernie Klapatek, happy to oblige, stepped into the revolving door and set it in motion. The others followed one at a time except for Louie, who stepped in right behind Helen, and our parents, who tried to glue themselves to each other in the best tradition of the wackily in love but couldn’t because our father was carrying his accordion.

  Inside, waiting, was Billy Ray King. Alan Pickett was still in his dressing room. He did not come out until just before the show started, when he would quickly introduce himself to the couple, shake hands, and smile distantly, conserving the wattage of his smile for the moment when the red On Air sign started flashing. Billy Ray King, however, was a worker. He worked the studio audience, he worked the staff, he worked himself, he worked his marrying couples. And Billy Ray King, already dumped to second lead on his own goddamn show, worried that he would be edged out completely by this upstart pretty boy, was in a lather.

  “Good, good, you’re in uniform,” he said upon seeing our father in his dress whites. “We got problems.”

  “Problems?” asked our mother. She didn’t want to hear about problems. This wedding wasn’t her idea in the first place. She was going along with one of our father’s crazy ideas—a pattern that would continue throughout their marriage, with decidedly mixed results.

  “A couple canceled, it was a last-minute thing.” Already Helen and the groomsmen were being taken up an elevator by assistants. Billy Ray King needed to speak to this couple alone.

  He leaned in confidentially. “They chose not to get married.”

  “Not married on the show?” our mother asked.

  “Not married at all,” said Billy Ray King, which caused our mother to gasp audibly. How could you back out once you’d decided? It was something altogether understandable if you’d been asked and you simply said no. Our mother had done that several times already—the Italian was persistent and greedy. But to say yes and then change your mind—unthinkable!

  “We need you to be the first couple on today’s show.”

  “But we just got here.”

  “I know, I know, it’s a headache. My assistants even as we speak are scouring the list of upcoming couples seeing if somebody wants to make a move up. It’s not easy. People have plans, it’s a Thursday evening, who’s going to come downtown at a moment’s notice?” Billy Ray King, when the pressure was on, was at his unctuous best. He eyed our father’s accordion case. One of the program assistants had attended one of the Cicero Velvetones’ concerts to ascertain that the singing/accordion-playing groom was on the level when he listed himself as a professional musician and lieutenant JG. “Listen,” said Billy Ray King. “There’s even the possibility that your hubby-to-be here is going to dazzle us all with his singing for half the show if we can’t locate another couple. What do you say?”

  Our mother turned to our father. “Wally?”

  “Wally, I love that, Wally,” said Billy Ray King. “You kids are gonna do great. The audience is gonna eat you up. I could eat you up.” He kissed our mother’s forehead, then started pumping our father’s hand.

  The next thing our parents knew, the elevator doors had opened and they were being led away in opposite directions, somebody was slapping makeup on them, their attendants were ushered away from them again—only Louie and Helen would stand up for this wedding, the rest were seated in the audience, not needed till the next day’s ceremony, though Billy Ray King promised a camera would show them to the home audience at some point—“So be ready to wave, dammit, and look happy”—and told our father “there might be a possibility” that his band could sit in with the studio band when he played during the talent segment.

  I’m not sure when during the production of this broadcast our parents realized they were being had, or when they realized that Billy Ray King, a proud fat man about to lose his empire to the sleek and brainless, was truly desperate. Our father knew any number of club owners who could be shysters, so perhaps he wasn’t surprised. Then again, it was his wedding, his call to have it on TV, he’d been the one to deal with Billy Ray King in setting this up, and he wanted to trust the man. No, more than that. He wanted to believe in the man and what he stood for—marrying couples and sending them on their way, off into the world (with a little cash) to reproduce and make the world safe for democracy.

  That our parents ended up being married first on the show that day is important. It shouldn’t have mattered—it was the show’s seventy-third episode—but it did. For a season and a half It’s Your Wedding ran one wedding a show. Then they switched to two. Our parents were to be that second couple, but they got bumped up a spot on account of the couple that supposedly decided against getting married. But this seems unlikely. America in 1952 was in a marrying mood, and the idea of a couple backing out of a TV marriage at the last second seems downright churlish. Our parents were not churlish, our parents were good soldiers, which was something on which Billy Ray King counted. In fact there were only two things about which our mother, who didn’t much care whether she was married on TV or not, put her foot down. The first was her insistence that our father become a Catholic. Years later, when her children were marrying, this was less of an issue for our mother, but not then. Technically, our father was an agnostic, which to our mother’s way of thinking was both the worst thing you could be and the easiest to correct. He’d been raised in a godless household by people who simply didn’t think much about religion. He was a clean slate, ready to be written on with the finger of our mother’s faith. On the morning of his wedding he was baptized, by noon he’d had his First Communion, and by late afternoon he was confirmed in his new faith. He was willing to accommodate her on all this if she was willing to accommodate him on the TV wedding. From agnostic to Catholic, what did it mean? asked his friends. “It means,” said our father, “I’ll eat perch on Fridays.”

  Our parents were also in a bit of a hurry. Our father was scheduled to report to the San Diego Naval Air Station in a week, it being the Korean War and all, and he had his orders to ship out just a few days after that. Plus there was the matter of the honeymoon. Our parents wanted one. They were planning on a couple of days in Madison, Wisconsin, which at the time qualified as bucolic wilderness, and they’d then stop at various wayside motels on the drive from Chicago to San Diego, being of modest means and a semipractical bent. Practical because it was Lent, and the only way they could have a honeymoon and a party afterward was if they got married on a Friday, and getting married on a Friday in Lent in the Catholic Church required not only a special dispensation but also a quiet and somber ceremony. The church wedding would be small, the reception—featuring tea cakes, coffee, and a few delicately iced cookies—would be held in the church basement. A wedding more like a penance than a celebration. Compared to that, a TV wedding with a party afterward was like having their cake and eating it, too.

  Practical but only semipractical. How else do you explain them being on It’s Your Wedding at all if there weren’t something of the romantic infused in them, too?

  Practical and romantic, our parents were almost always guided by these antithetical impulses, and it was invariably to the wrong pole that they gravitated when decisions had to be made. This did not make them in any way
unique, and it was probably their desire to get married on TV that confirmed how much a part of the great wave of America they were, young and hopeful and not even conscious that if they were part of the wave, they were also subject to its undertow.

  The second thing our mother insisted on was that church wedding. They were going to have it the very next day, but according to our mother, unless a priest officiated for the TV ceremony, it wasn’t official. And if it wasn’t an official wedding—a JP marrying them didn’t count—then our mother would not be participating in Thursday night’s honeymoon, for which our father had booked a room at the Sheridan Hotel.

  Billy Ray King knew that, too, our father having pressed the point upon him. It had to be a priest, it had to be a priest, goddammit! But of course it couldn’t be a priest. Billy Ray King had already been over all that with our father. And no JP was going to agree to impersonate a priest just to salve this one couple’s conscience. So Billy Ray King did what he thought was the right, honorable, and expedient thing, knowing, as he did, that the couple was getting married for real the next day anyway. He told our father he’d located a priest willing to do the ceremony. This was what Billy Ray King called a necessary fabrication or, as Alan Pickett would have it, “utilitarian make-believe.” A lapsed Catholic himself, Pickett concurred with Billy Ray—Catholicism made good theater. On one set cellophane “stained-glass” windows and a plywood altar decorated with candles and daylilies served as a backdrop to the couple’s earnestness.

  Earnest, accommodating, practical, romantic. Our father terrified of being a day late and a dollar short. If our parents ever knew they were being snookered right at the moment of their snookering, their own character would have prevented them from saying anything. Still, they had to suspect something when, just before airtime, Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King engaged in a furious, sotto voce argument. It was about the couple Billy Ray King had “found” at the last minute to get married on TV. It was glaringly obvious that the other bride to be was pregnant. Alan Pickett, who usually didn’t care what went on during the show as long as he looked good doing it, was beside himself. “Knocked up! I know for a fact she’s knocked up!”