The Company Car Read online

  Billy Ray King was strangely calm, as though he knew this was an argument he was going to win. “How can you know ‘for a fact’ she’s knocked up?”

  “What, you can’t see? Take a look at her front porch. How can you not tell? I can tell, the audience can tell. The sponsors and the folks at home can tell. They can simply tell, okay? She’s pregnant, Billy Ray. She’s got a bun in the oven. The little tax deduction has declared itself. Billy, can’t you see? She’s as big as a fucking house!”

  “So?” said Billy Ray King, in the perplexed voice of a student who just doesn’t get what his teacher is saying.

  “So?” said Alan Pickett. “So we can’t have that. Hey, it happens, I understand that. But we can’t have that on the show. You know that, Billy. It’s your goddamn show.” Alan Pickett’s anger had subsided. He was speaking now in the exasperated voice of that teacher whose pupil refuses to acknowledge the truth of some simple fact like that rivers, in the Northern Hemisphere, flow south. And pregnant women are not married on TV.

  They were now arguing loud enough for the studio audience to hear them. Our parents had already been led to their respective toe marks on opposite sides of the stage when Louie got up from his chair and offered to cut the apparent Gordian knot. “I’ll marry Helen,” said the bespectacled and eager Louie, an announcement that was met with a roll of the eyes and a low groan from Helen, who found his chipperness irritating. Truth be told, Louie at that moment would have married Helen, or Agnes Guranski, another of our mother’s friends who came down to watch the wedding in person, or any other woman in the studio audience, up to and including the pregnant woman over whom Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King were arguing.

  Billy Ray King waved Louie back to his seat. “We’ll just show them from the waist up,” he said, as though he had solved everything.

  “She’s pregnant, Billy Ray. She’s all waist, don’t you get it? Her chest is surfing her belly. We can’t have that, okay? Okay?” Alan Pickett, who towered over Billy Ray King, was hiss-shouting into Billy Ray’s ear.

  Billy Ray King tilted his head away. With his face all scrunched up and his hand waving at his ear, it looked like he was trying to shoo away a particularly annoying insect. Then he leaned forward on his tiptoes and hissed into Alan Pickett’s face, “Yeah, okay, she’s pregnant. So what? She’s my daughter and she’s getting married on this television show. On TV, okay? On her daddy’s program. You got a problem with that?”

  Alan Pickett stared up at the ceiling, which you could hardly see for all the cable and lighting girders. He sighed, shuffled through several sheets of paper he gripped in his fist. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But you broadcast this and it won’t be a wedding anymore. It’ll be your funeral.” Then Alan Pickett went to his place by our father and waited to be introduced. The stage manager yelled, “Fifteen seconds!” and flashed his open hand three times.

  “Idiot,” said Alan Pickett.

  “Excuse me?” said our father.

  “That man is an idiot. And because of him you’re—” Pickett stopped. “You ready?”

  Our father said he was, but he was a little nervous.

  “We all are. But that’s okay. Make it work for you. Just be yourself. You sing, right?”

  Our father said he did.

  On the opposite side of the stage, our mother stood next to Billy Ray King. A believer in other people’s privacy, our mother had tried not to listen to King and Pickett’s argument. She had not heard what the argument was about, only that it had been intense and short-lived. She could not help smelling the man standing next to her, however. She had thought back in the lobby that there might be an odor of alcohol about him, but she wasn’t certain. Now she was. You don’t spend that long in a restaurant with drunken customers without recognizing the scent of gin on someone’s breath. Billy Ray King, in his cups, his mind reeling with everything he had wrought and the thought of its fragility—a daughter, pregnant, a show about to be taken away from him—misinterpreted our mother’s sniffing.

  “Aqua Velva,” said Billy Ray King. “It drives women wild.” His hand settled on the small of our mother’s back. It could have been taken as a friendly gesture if you were inclined to take it as such. Our mother chose to ignore it. But she couldn’t ignore the sight of the obviously pregnant woman dressed like a bride who was being seated right at the end of the row sporting our mother’s and father’s attendants.

  “That woman is pregnant,” said our mother.

  “So what,” said Billy Ray King. His hand slipped lower, coming to rest on our mother’s bottom. Our mother chose to ignore that, too. “You aren’t, are you? You wanna be? Ha-ha.” He gave our mother’s behind a squeeze. Our mother belted him with her flowers, which she’d already been cautioned by the show’s censor needed to be held in front of her voluminous chest.

  “Idiot,” said Alan Pickett. “You wait for your cue. Good luck, and have a good show.” Our father couldn’t tell if Alan Pickett was saying all that to Billy Ray King or to him, or if it was meant to be divided equally.

  “I will,” said our father, but Pickett couldn’t hear him. He was already strolling into the spotlights as the roll of drums and the brass fanfare swelled. Ready to do what evil needed to be done. Alan Pickett, waving at the home and studio audiences, his smile fixed and mammoth.

  And so our parents, scheduled to get married during the second half hour of It’s Your Wedding, With Your Hosts Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King, were instead married during the first. They answered Billy Ray King’s embarrassing questions, they nodded, they smiled, they were a perfect couple. There are no still photographs of them that day, no pictures of them standing stiffly with the TV cameras looming behind them like alien beasts threatening this union. But our parents assure us they wore the same clothes the next day for their church wedding, so we’ll have to go with that: our father in his Navy whites and a crooked grin, our mother in a short pearl-colored jacket over a tea-length pearl dress with a plunging neckline, a triangle of lace covering her cleavage. She is holding her carnations and lilies of the valley as if offering them to the folks at home. The nuptials were witnessed by their attendants and friends in the studio audience; other friends cheered in furniture stores or in frat and sorority houses.

  Their parents watched at home. Arthur, Naomi, Bea, and Charlie had chosen not to acknowledge this wedding, which was just as well since the Catholic Church and the state of Illinois did not acknowledge it, either. The priest was not a priest, or a JP, and nothing was going to be legal and official until the next day, though our parents did not know this at the time.

  After they chastely kissed, Alan Pickett said to the camera, his manner officious and pleased, “May I present to you our ninety-ninth happily married couple on It’s Your Wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Czabek.” There was polite applause, punctuated by Louie Hwasko’s and Helen Federstam’s wolf whistles, and then Alan Pickett said, “I understand that before our next couple comes out, Walt here is going to play us a song.”

  “That’s right, Alan,” said Billy Ray King, “and then we’re going to present our lucky one hundredth bride and groom!”

  By then our parents must have known they’d been had, snookered out of the good stuff by a desperate man who wanted his pregnant daughter to be the “lucky” one hundredth bride married on It’s Your Wedding, but to their credit they refused to cry foul or even let on they knew. A certain tightness showed in their faces as they dutifully chose their boxes, their smiles the fixed and nervous smiles of losers abashed at their own defeat, but still game and grinning, and you had to be pretty adept to notice even that. With flourishes inappropriate to the paucity of their haul, Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King presented them with their winnings: a hundred-dollar savings bond, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, fishing tackle, a GE blender, and a gift certificate good for dinner at the Sheridan Hotel, where our parents were going to start their honeymoon.

  And then our father was allowed to play. Billy Ray King, anxious to g
et his daughter off and married (she wasn’t getting any less pregnant while she waited in the wings), wanted our father to perform sans his polka and swing band. “Not enough time,” he said during the break, but Alan Pickett overrode him, saying simply, commandingly, “Let them,” and so Benny, Bernie, Louie, Ernie, and Charlie took seats with the studio orchestra, and our father strapped on his accordion, and when they came back from commercial Alan Pickett, this time with a flourish appropriate to the moment, said, “Take it away, Wally Czabek and the Cicero Velvetones!”

  And take it away they did. It must have been something to see. Our father skinny, sweating under the klieg lights, singing his lungs out. The accordion a huge black-and-pearl box strapped to his chest. He looked like he was stepping backward under its load. He was not yet the behemoth he would become, a three-hundred-and-fifteen-pound sagging walrus with a great belly hanging over his boxer shorts like a blunt-faced dead fish as he comes into the kitchen in the morning in a ratty mustard-colored robe, scratching himself in the groin, his fingers working through the not quite closed fly of those boxers while he waits for our mother to thrust a cup of coffee under his nose, which will cause him to open up the slits of his eyes and to stop, briefly, his tugging and scratching and rearranging of body parts while the smile of a coffee addict lights up his face.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let us remember him as he was in those early photos, a gaunt young man with a hawklike face and an ungainly instrument strapped to his chest. There he was, all one hundred and forty-seven pounds of him, the klieg lights beating down, sweat beading across his already receding hairline and trickling down his forehead. It is our father’s one shining moment of fame, and he is not about to let them take that from him.

  Let the other couple, the producer’s pregnant daughter and her beau, be the “lucky” hundredth couple. Let them be showered with balloons, confetti, and toasted with champagne. Let our parents be the good sports, humiliating themselves good-naturedly on TV for a pittance, saluted as the ninty-ninth couple to get married on the program and then forced to watch this other couple, Billy Ray King’s knocked-up daughter and her beau, get proclaimed the “Lucky Hundredth” and get showered with a thousand dollars cash, a Poconos honeymoon, a dozen place settings of Wedgwood china, a new TV, a Zenith hi-fi, and a brand-new, hot-off-the-presses-from-Detroit, Michigan, Chrysler Imperial. For right now our father, patronized, condescended to, smirked at, the soldier boy with the accordion who’ll “entertain” the audience, is playing and singing his heart out.

  And he is great. The band plays “In the Mood” and “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and our father sings “Night and Day” and “As Time Goes By” and follows that with “Ghost Riders in the Sky” in this powerful, haunting, vibrating tenor that brings down the house. Every time Billy Ray King tries to step in and stop our father, Alan Pickett thrusts a forearm across his chest and stops him. “Let him go,” Pickett says. “It’s the least you can do, you sorry son of a bitch.” And let him go they did.

  Frankly, I’m not sure they could have gotten him off the stage if they wanted to. He was already in the service, about to be shipped off to Korea. He could die before impregnating his bride, for chrissakes, and he was going to sing his goddamn songs if it killed him.

  And the whole while he was performing our mother was beside herself with joy. By the time he and the Cicero Velvetones closed with “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”—performed as a sing-along with the audience—Wally was a hit. A bona fide, ears-ringing-with-applause, standing-ovation-from-the-audience hit.

  Alan Pickett did one more nice thing for our parents when Wally and his band were through. He took our parents aside, thrust a hundred dollars at Wally, and said, “Beat it. Get started on your honeymoon. You don’t need to stick around for the rest of this travesty.”

  “But we’re supposed to be there at the end.” Our mother had seen the show to make sure she knew what was expected. “We’re supposed to be presented again, at the end of the show.”

  “Do you really want to be around when this particular show ends?” asked Pickett.

  “But Billy Ray King—”

  “Billy Ray King is history,” said Alan Pickett. “Fuck Billy Ray King.”

  Our mother blushed, but she shook Pickett’s hand when he offered it, and then he kissed her on the cheek, and shook our father’s hand, and got our parents and their friends out a side door while Billy Ray King was still fussing over his daughter. Our father started to say thanks to Alan Pickett, but Pickett waved him off. “You were great,” said Alan Pickett. “You were probably the greatest guest this sorry-ass show has ever seen, and you got screwed. I’m sorry. I can’t make that up to you, but don’t worry about His Highness. I can handle Billy Ray King.”

  And then our parents were outside, in the cold March evening, in downtown Chicago. A brisk breeze was blowing off the lake, and there were flurries twinkling in the streetlights.

  “Where are we going?” asked Benny Wilkerson.

  Our father waved his gift certificate and the five twenties given him by Alan Pickett. “To the Sheridan Hotel,” said our father. “For one hell of a dinner.”

  Walter Charles Xavier Czabek (Xavier was his confirmation name, given him the afternoon of his faux wedding to our mother) and Susan Marie Caroline Hluberstead were joined in holy and legal matrimony on the second to last Friday in Lent at Holy Redeemer of Angels Church on Chicago’s Near North Side. They got married before God, before a priest, before their parents and friends, a day after they had honeymooned at the Sheridan Hotel, unaware of the sham that had been committed against them by Billy Ray King and an actor named Joseph Clintsworth, who later played a judge on both Gunsmoke and Bonanza (which once caused our mother to yell out, “There’s the bastard who married us!” when he stepped off a carriage that had pulled up outside the Ponderosa). The bride on this particular Friday was giddier than a bride in Lent ought to be, but then how many brides show up for their church weddings just hours removed from a tumultuous and satisfying wedding night and wedding morning (this was 1952, remember), already initiated into the rites of connubial bliss, already a man’s consummated bride, already, most likely, pregnant for eight hours or so?

  Perhaps it was not so unusual. Perhaps it was a Korean War thing, just as a decade previous it had been a Second World War thing. Lots of couples were having quickie weddings prior to the husband’s shipping out, the friends in attendance with their university books stacked on the pews next to them—a wedding, then Chem 101. It’s just our parents got married on TV first, and exuberantly consummated their marriage a day early. As Billy Ray King might observe, So what? (It is testimony to our mother’s discretion and sense of propriety that she would not tell us the complete story of their false wedding until most of us were grown and had children of our own.) After their own quickie church wedding, after what our mother came to call their “real” marriage, the bride and groom had finger sandwiches and coffee in the church basement with their parents and friends, and then they left in a borrowed car for a weekend-long honeymoon in Madison, Wisconsin, the Terraplane being too unreliable for such an important mission.

  Back then Madison, Wisconsin, was not much. There were the lakes, Mendota and Monona, a few supper clubs, a few lodges, some craftspeople scattered about in cottages. The university was just beginning to be packed with soldiers in Quonset huts. Having saved the world and made it safe for democracy, they were pretty eager themselves for the white-collar union card that a diploma represented. Our father, squiring our mother about the lakes, looking at the bare trees and the lake homes and the ducks huddled in the reeds, kept driving by those Quonset huts as though they were a magnet. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like,” our father said. “We could be living in one of those. You think you’re ready for that?”

  Said our mother, still giddy, “Wally-Bear, I’m ready for anything.”

  Of course it wasn’t going to last. Nothing does. A weekend is not a life, af
ter all, and squeezing from a weekend every possible moment for romance, mystery, and happiness only confirms its exquisite finiteness. They returned to Chicago, returned the borrowed car, and headed out for San Diego in a new Buick Roadmaster, a drive-away vehicle that our father had contracted to deliver to a doctor in L.A.

  It is perhaps fitting that our father didn’t even own the car he and our mother drove out to San Diego. He sold his interest in the Terraplane to Ernie Klapatek, and the next car he owned outright was the one he got after he retired.

  The plan was for them to continue their honeymoon on the drive out, then our father would drop our mother off in San Diego and he’d motor up to L.A. alone and take the bus back, reporting for active duty just hours before he was due. They took Route 66 most of the way, following the song’s route except for when they dipped into Mexico for twenty-four hours of international nooky.

  While it’s widely believed in our family that Sarah, the oldest, was a consolation baby, the product of our mother and father administering solace to each other for not scoring the TV dowry, Sarah herself maintains she was conceived a day or so later, fully within wedlock, either in the woods ringing the shores of Lake Mendota or during one of those festive rest stops, perhaps even—she’ll waggle her eyebrows at the romance of this—in another country entirely. We don’t believe her because our mother already knew she was pregnant while they were driving across the Southwest. Fast-acting hormones, according to our mother. She says she must have thrown up on every cactus from New Mexico to Arizona.