The Company Car Read online

  It was a fine philosophy when prescribed for other people. For our mother it was a death sentence. She liked the house with its sweeping lawn and its views (it was set on a hill above San Diego Bay, and the street, gracious and old, was lined with palms)—she could see the ships enter and leave the harbor, and watch the planes take off from the Naval Air Station at Coronado across the bay—but she would have been happier being right on base with the other wives.

  That’s about all we know of our mother’s story from that time. Our father talks of his war years constantly, and we have his ship’s yearbooks, which chronicle his travels, but we know next to nothing from our mother’s perspective. I’m thinking of this as I hand another little stack of photos over to Dorie: our mother sitting on the big expanse of lawn with first one child and then two, our mother and Nomi, our mother’s mother, holding Sarah, who’s trying to walk while clutching Nomi’s and our mother’s index fingers in her chubby little fists.

  Dorie flips through them, saying, “You know what these remind me of? The aftermath of that famous photograph by Elliott Erwitt. You know the one I’m talking about? It’s called California Kiss or something, and it’s like from the mid-fifties and it’s in black and white and what you see is just part of the flank of one of those rounded fifties-bodied cars, the kind with the round rearview mirror, you know, that perfect circle, and there’s a couple kissing with the woman’s head thrown back, and her mouth’s open and her eyes are on the sky, and her husband or whoever she’s with is mooching her neck, and in the background is the sun setting over the ocean and all you see in that moment are possibility and romance. It’s like they’re so into the moment they don’t have a clue what’s coming down the pike at them, and even if you told them, right at that moment it wouldn’t matter anyway. They wouldn’t believe you.”

  I nod like I understand—and I do—but Dorie catches the consternation on my face.

  “What, Ace, you don’t believe me? You didn’t like what I said, what?”

  What bothers me is the offhand way Dorie said, “and her husband or whoever she’s with.” That’s what bugs me, but I can’t say that. I wonder about the way women can hold things in about themselves, can lead two lives, a hidden one and the one everyone can see, and the only clues to the hidden life are when something bubbles, however obliquely, to the surface. It’s popular to ascribe this dual life to men, but being married to Dorie, I know better. But because she’s so good at living this dual life with equanimity, I doubt I’ll ever know what’s going on in the life she’s kept hidden from me. All I can do is wonder, just as I wonder now why our mother, in driving back to Chicago, would burst into spontaneous weeping soon after the border guard let her and her contraband fruit out of California.

  Our mother claims that this was a singular occurrence, a stray moment when her feelings overwhelmed her—it was hot, she was pregnant with me—and she was fine after that, she just needed to compose herself. And we would believe her except our parents are great rewriters of their own history, our mother more so since she has few documents to contradict her. Our father, prompted by a ship’s yearbook or photograph, can slip back into exactly how he felt when that photo was taken, and even if the memory has too much rose around the edging, you get the feeling that for him it probably did feel pretty much that way. For him everything was a big adventure.

  Our mother, though, when confronted with a picture, edits. You can see it on her face, in the struggle on her lips, the slight misting in the eyes—she feels something intensely but can’t bring herself to say that, whatever it was she was feeling. “Oh, this,” she’ll say, biting her lip, “this is from when Darlene and I went up to Point Loma and the Sunset Cliffs.” The photo is of two silhouettes and what is probably a brilliant sunset, but rendered in black and white you can’t tell. What you can tell is that one of the silhouettes, our mother’s, is clearly pregnant. “It was before Sarah was born,” our mother says, and you can hear in her voice a trace of longing, a trace of disappointment. “Darlene was pregnant, too, only you can’t see it yet,” and we wonder: in addition to missing their men, what did they talk about? The babies growing inside them, yes, but what else? Did our mother feel a connection to this woman, did they feel they shared something, their blood thickening, their breasts getting fuller, their bellies distending, the bloat in their hands and ankles, the dark circles under their eyes, did they feel marked, set apart, bonded? They were taking part in an age-old ritual—women great with child going up the headlands to stare out at the sea over which their men had disappeared. Yet didn’t they also feel left out? Central, yet extraneous? Mere vessels, their personalities erased by their function, by the ritual itself? Wasn’t our mother suffused with loss even before she knew that loss was what she felt? You can’t tell unless you read into the photographs, those game grins our mother has, straining at the corners of her mouth to keep the smile in place for the camera, not letting it shatter, and the eyes, the eyes full up to bursting with squelched desires, with bitten-back thoughts.

  What is it that she’s leaving out? That she had no friends? That the women on the base had a camaraderie they extended to our mother only when they infrequently remembered her? That Mrs. Mapole, rather than being a comfort, was needy, dependent, and a little off, always dropping by for coffee and a monologue on her dead son, lost at sea (not exactly what our mother wanted to hear), and a different monologue on her husband, whose stroke had left him paralyzed and unable to communicate, a thin rope of drool hanging from his mouth while Mrs. Mapole talked to him, as she did to our mother, as though the listener weren’t there. Our mother, therefore, had a double burden, her kids and her landlady. “Hey, can I have a minute?” Mrs. Mapole would say, and that would be the end of the morning. Is it any wonder that Nomi came to visit? That our mother was desperate for company who might inquire as to how she was feeling? That our mother was going stir-crazy, a polite euphemism for going crazy period?

  “I cried all day today,” our mother wrote our father at one point. “I don’t know why, I suppose I must have been missing you.” She goes on to other things in the letter, private things, but the tone is of a woman who has ascribed a cause to her feelings that she doesn’t believe but is trying to convince herself is true.

  When we ask our mother what were her happiest moments in San Diego, she will say, “Happiest moments?” as though it would be a struggle to recall any. Then she’ll say, “Besides your father coming home?” and she’ll pause again before telling us that the moments she recalls most fondly are the laying-in periods at the base hospital after she gave birth to Sarah and Robert Aaron. “The maternity stays at the base hospital?” Sarah asks. Our mother explains. “They had you lay in for a week back then, and there might be fifteen or twenty of us, all pregnant from the same shore leave, all giving birth within days of each other. We didn’t even see the babies that much. The nurses did the feeding—this was in the bottle days, remember. We were to rest and recuperate, and we talked, and played games, and laughed.” Except for the fact that they were mostly officers’ wives (didn’t enlisted people get married and have families?), our mother almost made it sound like it was a dormitory for unwed mothers. As though it were a bit of a lark, and once you got past giving birth essentially alone (military doctors being notorious for their requirement that births be as convenient as possible for them, the mother’s comfort a distant secondary concern), it was like a party. Our mother goes misty-eyed on us. She did like parties. She’d been pretty, vivacious, gregarious, a young woman feeding on the energy of a bustling city like Chicago in the late forties and early fifties, dating a half dozen men at once and keeping track of them like beads on a string. What was it like for our mother suddenly to give all that up? To settle down with just one man and then not even to have the man? In the months before marrying him, she dropped out of school and got a job as an assistant to the ad manager at radio station WCHI. She wrote copy for supermarket ads, for car dealerships, for hardware and housewares stores, ev
en for the big department stores. She was smart, good with words. If she’d stayed at the station she might have wound up in charge of PR. She had dropped out so she could help our father, a mediocre student at best, get through school. She wrote papers for him, double-checked lab reports. She did this willingly, believing that a little bit of her was in everything she did for him. After work she could go out for a drink with her girlfriends, or meet our father and his bandmates for dinner, then spend the evening in a whirl of music and dancing, singing and romance.

  And now how did she spend her nights? Listening to the radio, turning pages in a newspaper, walking the night away with a colicky baby who spat cheese down her shoulder. Your best dresses all smelling of curdled milk. Your evenings spent sterilizing bottles and fake nipples. Meanwhile your own nipples were sore, full to bursting, and you just had to make the best of it. You had to make the best of everything, even if there was nothing special to make. Your hands chapped from wringing out diapers in borax, your hair brittle, the shine gone out of it, your figure a mess, and your insides slipping out of you every time you had to pee.

  I don’t think it’s an accident that on the leave before our father’s last trip to the Far East our mother was the only officer’s wife who didn’t get pregnant. This wasn’t like the previous leave, when the captain decided the men could take their wives to Hawaii for two weeks’ R & R and the whole ship got pregnant, even the old man’s wife, and she was forty. This time our father was in port three weeks, and our mother, fertile as always, didn’t pop like she usually did. “Wassamatter, Wally, your equipment ain’t workin’?” fellow officers teased him as they started getting letters, one after the other, about the new bundles of joy on the way, and our father got letters of yearning that remained politely silent on the subject of buns in the oven.

  Had our mother denied him access? Had she followed the old wives’ advice about douching in vinegar and sitting in hot baths after sex? Our mother’s not saying. She is amazingly reticent about the last few years in San Diego, as though her thoughts and feelings had gone into hibernation while she waited for our father to come home. Still, the largest gap in our family between siblings (before our mother’s body started slowing down) is between Robert Aaron and myself, and I was a mandatory pregnancy—our father coming home, sick and weak, suffering from a double ulcer, his weight below one thirty, being mustered out, his time up—how could our mother not welcome him home in the one way that would surely please him?

  If you asked, our mother would admit to none of this. She rarely admitted to our father that she had ever been depressed at all. She was a gamer, our mother was, and once she got over a funk she refused to admit she’d been in one. “I was just a little out of sorts.” It was amazing to watch her, as we grew up, determined always to make the best of things, regardless of how she felt. She rewrote history as she went, removing the rubble from how she used to feel so the new edifice could exist quite prettily on its own terms.

  One wonders: Was her weeping on Route 66 a giddiness that her loneliness was behind her, that she was now embarking on a new and real life with our father, one in which she would have, finally, a partner? Or was it that, for all her sadness, she had finally gotten used to being alone, and had our father not returned she’d have been an anomaly, certainly, a single mother in the fifties, but she also would have been her own woman, and she could have carved out a life for herself as she saw fit, and not simply tagged along behind our father’s cockamamie schemes, the wedding on television being only the first? And instead she saw the future—the arrival of which she could not have waited for impatiently enough—suddenly closed to her, rendered familiar, expected, ordinary. Par for the course, our father would say about expected outcomes, be they good or ill. How our mother had once longed to be anything but par for the course!

  She was better by the time they got to Chicago. Somewhere along that long drive back, with fruit by her feet, she readjusted herself to the presence of our father. Readjusted herself to the new realities. She was going to start over on new turf, and once she got used to this new fact, which is to say, to our father’s way of thinking, she’d be fine.

  It was, however, a long drive. One that took them past every landmark they’d seen on the way out, only they were seeing them in reverse, as though they had slipped into their rearview mirror and were seeing things from their mirror’s perspective. “It’s déjà vu all over again,” Yogi Berra once announced. Exactly. And just as she had on the drive out, our mother threw up on every cactus and cornstalk they passed.

  3. The House That God Built

  SIX OF ONE, HALF A DOZEN OF ANOTHER

  The fifties don’t make a whole lot of sense to anybody who didn’t live through the preceding decade. For my siblings and me, that the lot of us were born in a dozen-year span starting nine months after our parents’ nuptials—seven of us spat out like so many watermelon seeds—seems unfathomable. (Watermelon seeds—our father’s view, not our mother’s. “Watermelon seeds, Wally? Try giving birth to a watermelon.”)

  Besides having us, they were also getting a house built. After his discharge our father was out of work. A lieutenant JG with a B.S. in biology and skill with an accordion was qualified for what? He was returning home to find out. Only Grandma and Grandpa Cza-Cza wouldn’t have him. Or rather, they wouldn’t have his wife and her children, as though our mother had picked us up somewhere, like a cold. They’d just bought a house in Morton Grove, a three-bedroom ranch, and there simply wouldn’t be enough room for five more people—I was due any day—while our father got on his feet. Our father was welcome, provided he came alone. So our parents moved into Nomi and Artu’s two-bedroom apartment on the Near North Side above a Thom McAn shoe store. While our father looked for work, Nomi and Susan Marie took the kids in a double stroller on long walks—to the Lincoln Park Zoo, to Lake Shore Park and Washington Square, to the river, to Navy Pier.

  Our mother, as much as she was able, was getting her life back. It was not so different from her life in San Diego—Lake Michigan subbing for the Pacific Ocean, with more wind and snow and cold—but she had a companion now to whom she could talk about movies and plays and music. She had once shared all that with our father, but then he’d gone away, and his leaves had been so infrequent and intense—they literally launched themselves into bed upon his return and emerged only days later, stunned, disheveled, in need of orange juice and vitamins—that she’d lost it. Now she was getting it back. She felt good. Better than she had in years.

  It helped, too, that she was over her nausea with me. Her belly was a fine round thing. Our father would come home in the evenings, usually after “a quick stop with the boys,” and pat our mother’s belly—this was the first birth he’d be around for—and our mother would beam. She ignored the raised eyebrows of her parents, who disapproved of our father’s frequent nights out. Our father’s old bandmates gathered at a downtown watering hole after spending their days selling insurance, or shuffling paper, or looking in people’s mouths. The Navy had trained Louie Hwasko as a dentist, and now he had a private practice, which he was moving to Caledonia, out near Rockford. He’d bought five acres of land, on which he was building a dream house for his wife, who amazingly enough, was our mother’s friend Helen Federstam. They’d gotten married the year previous, and our father and Louie now spent nights at the Deluxe, talking about their new occupations as country gentlemen and husbands. Our mother made allowances for this—he was just out of the military, just reunited with friends and family, he was entitled to blow off a little steam. Mostly, though, she liked having him around, liked the proprietary pat on her belly.

  One of the things they liked to do in the evening was look at their house plans. Our father had found work as a detail man for Dinkwater-Adams, a pharmaceutical company based in Dinkwater Park, New Jersey. His job was to travel all over greater Chicagoland, calling on doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, and pitch the Dinkwater-Adams line of pharmaceuticals and hospital supplies. And whi
le the company certainly wanted him to work the downtown and Near North Side, they saw the future in the suburbs.

  Which was fine with our parents. They’d been dreaming of owning their own house since they first started taking the trolley out to Butterfield and York Road. Elmhurst was perfect for them, a new suburb recently carved out of the prairie and one of the last stops on the trolley line. In picking this hamlet they thought—like thousands of other young couples making the postwar move to the suburbs—that Walter would take the trolley to work. The interstate would soon put an end to that, though, and our father would instead spend all his time on the highway.

  Now the house was becoming a reality. A loan for the down payment from Nomi and Artu, a VA loan, and some help from Ernie Klapatek, who’d gone into construction with his father. It would be finished in January. Our father often drove out there, eating his lunch and drinking coffee from a thermos as he watched the house take shape before his eyes.

  Charlie Podgazem, Dad’s old drummer, was now working for Ernie Klapatek. He was in charge at the site. Sometimes he’d come over to our father’s car, take out a hip flask, and add “a little taste” to our father’s coffee. “You’re in good hands, Czabek,” Charlie told him, and our father nodded agreement. It was nice knowing you were in good hands. Then our father came home after stopping for “a quick one with Louie” and repeated this slogan to our mother. Our mother had heard it before. Benny Wilkerson, the Cicero Velvetones’ bass player, sold for Allstate now. Their homeowner’s and life insurance would be handled by him, which pissed off Bernie Zanoni, the clarinet player, who sold for Prudential. But you couldn’t please everybody, could you? “At least let me do the car insurance,” Bernie said. “Can’t,” said our father. “It’s a company car. Company insurance. Some outfit out of New Jersey.” “Criminy,” said Bernie. Our father said he understood, it was just Benny got to him first.