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  “Mommy, why is your tummy getting so big?” I asked one day.

  “I’m making a baby, and you’re going to be a big sister,” Mom told me, gently circling her hand around her expanded belly under the loose maternity dress. “I’ll need your help to change the baby’s diapers and give the baby a bottle.” I envisioned the fun I’d have feeding a real living doll—not one I had to just pretend to feed and change.

  Dad waited until a week before the baby was due to inform his boss about the imminent birth and tell him that he couldn’t travel for a while. Dad doesn’t explain his reticence on the subject, but I think it may have been to allow his superiors, who had no empathy for family life, minimal maneuvering room to possibly replace him if he couldn’t leave town on their schedule.

  “Well … I suppose we’ll have to go along with you on that one,” was his boss’s unenthusiastic response.

  I stayed with family friends when Dad drove Mom to Garfield Park Hospital. She gave birth to my brother on November 12, and, as was typical of the era, stayed in the hospital for several days. When Mom and Dad arrived to pick me up, Mom carried a pale-blue bundle in her arms and laid it on the couch. “Here’s your new little brother, Billy,” she said, pulling away layers until the baby’s puffy red face, scrunched-up eyes, and shuddering little body appeared. This baby didn’t look anything like the baby dolls I’d played with. He was all twitchy! His eyes stayed tightly shut, and his head moved in random movements. And there was more that was strange. “What’s that on his leg?” I asked Mom, pointing to something hard and white.

  Mom’s voice cracked a bit. “That’s a cast,” she said, gently running her hand down Billy’s encased leg. Her eyes glistened. “My poor little baby has a twisted foot. The cast will help fix it.” Billy was born with a clubfoot, his right foot turning inwards at the ankle, a common birth defect, easily correctable in the 1950s. Doctors turned the foot outward in stages, casting each rotation to hold the new alignment, replacing the cast often as the leg grew. Within three months, his foot was in the right position.

  Mom was instructed to massage the leg twice daily. By this time, Billy looked to me like a real baby. His eyes were open more, and he smiled at us all. I could tickle him or make funny faces, or imitate his gurgling and cooing noises—and he’d laugh. I couldn’t wait to help with the massage.

  Mom laid Billy onto a waterproof pad she had placed atop the white chenille bedspread on the double bed; she then spread cream onto his newly straightened foot and leg, and showed me how to rub and turn the leg to keep it in alignment. We cooed and smiled into Billy’s happy little face, squeezing and rubbing, singing him songs. An easy baby, he was a tonic for my mother, adding sparkles of delight to her life’s stress and slog.

  In late January, Mom and I sat in Tilton Elementary School’s yawning assembly hall, surrounded by other moms with children spilling across their laps or crawling over the wooden seats, waiting to register for half-day kindergarten. I would begin two months before my fifth birthday, and I felt very grown-up, going to school like Paul. Starting midyear was common in many Chicago schools at the time, allowing what would otherwise have been an enormous class in the fall to be broken into two sections.

  My kindergarten class photo shows no African American kids. Chicago schools were de facto segregated because attendance-area boundaries were determined by neighborhoods. But in the Jim Crow South, forced segregation was the rule of law at that time. Living in a child’s world, I couldn’t have known that just three and a half months after I began kindergarten, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decreed that the “separate but equal” doctrine, underpinning southern school-segregation laws, was unconstitutional.

  Mom had little time to contemplate the historic significance of Brown v. Board of Education. It was probably more important to her that my entry into Tilton meant she would have a break from managing three children all day, now that both Paul and I were in school. The worst of the remodeling was over, but not the stress of eleven tenants, two still renting bedrooms in our own flat.

  At around midnight of the same day I began school, Mom wrote Dad a ten-page letter, filling him in on her latest woes. Never one to let weariness interfere with duty, she often relinquished sleep to update Dad on the home front. It must have felt good to unload her frustrations in every letter.

  “I was not able to get to bed one single night before twelve thirty, one, one thirty, or two, and then get up by eight. It has been just miserable being so far behind in everything,” Mom explained. She ended with: “No break at all— never reading, never having time to read to the children or even sit down and talk to them or Mama.”

  Dad offered several possible remedies to her grievances in his February 9 response. First he suggested that when he was home on a weekend, once or twice a month, he would relieve her of all childcare and housekeeping duties, so she could “devote undivided time to keeping up-to-date” on income-tax preparation throughout the year, so as not to be overburdened at the last minute. He added:

  It’s high time you GOT SOME HELP for cleaning day. We are not so impoverished that you should do all that yourself… . It’s not the cost I’m worried about, it’s YOU YOU YOU. Please, Lil, let’s do something about it while you still can enjoy all those little moments which mean so much to you; moments with some reading, the children, and whatever else you want. These are times I feel utterly helpless and useless in not being able to give more of myself to you.

  In Mom’s ten-page letter, she had included this comment after her exhaustive list of completed chores: “As your mother so aptly puts it, ‘No use in complaining.’”

  The remark was classic Grandma Gartz. Even though they lived only a half block east at this time, my grandparents seemed content to watch their daughter-in-law twist in the wind during Dad’s lengthy travels. Mom had written to Dad, “As you know, your mother seems determined not to do anything for us or let Pop or Will either… . She’s always belittling me.”

  Dad was in solid agreement with Mom on his family’s condescending attitudes. Throughout his life, Dad had experienced firsthand his mother’s controlling and belittling nature. Will was in the thrall of their mother, and easily controlled by her, while Dad resisted. But still, Dad valued family, and he could never fully withdraw from her psychological grasp.

  Grandma G’s disdain for my mother probably arose from jealousy, recognizing that Mom was at least as competent and hardworking (the latter being the pinnacle of life values). Perhaps, like many mothers-in-law, she was in competition with her son’s wife. I believe she put Mom down so she could feel superior.

  One winter, when Dad was gone for six weeks, a defective load of coal was delivered to our two-flat, and Mom awoke in the middle of the night, shivering in a freezing house. To check the furnace, she exited the back door to a blast of frigid air, walked down the stairs and around the house, and descended into a dark gangway, where she entered the basement and tried to relight the bad fuel.

  Grandpa had spent the previous thirty years working with furnaces, but he didn’t come to her rescue. Mom dropped by her in-laws’ house one day during the crisis. “That furnace is driving me crazy,” she said. “I have to dig out that bad coal and replace it over and over. I go back upstairs covered in coal dust.”

  I know the dismissive, disdainful look that would have settled on Grandma’s face, the wave of her large, veined hand as if shooing a fly. “You’re young yet!” she admonished. “That work is nothing! At your age, no work should be too dirty or low.”

  Mom concluded her letter to Dad with the implication that he was on a vacation: “So enjoy yourself, dear. There’s work when you get home. I feel like an army that’s just holding on until help comes.”

  Four and a half years earlier, Mom had been able to rely on Grandma K as a comrade-in-arms, but by the time Billy was born, Grandma K was sixty-seven years old and declining mentally and physically. She hadn’t spun out of control prior to Billy’s birth, as she had before Paul’s
and mine, but her behavior had grown unsettling in new ways. She wore the same dress for days at a time, refused to bathe, complained of pains in her legs, and fainted.

  My parents never used the term mental illness or discussed Grandma’s condition with us. The subject was taboo— and shameful. Neighborhood kids sometimes taunted me, “Your grandma’s crazy! She was in the nuthouse.”

  How they found out, I don’t know. Had Mom mentioned it to a neighbor, and the osmosis of gossip spread it around? A hot wave of shame washed over me, and I wasn’t even sure why, so I just screamed, “You’re a liar!”

  But I knew things weren’t right. I never doubted Mom was in control of the household and us kids, and I never saw my parents fight openly. But she couldn’t control Grandma. If she tried persuasion, such as “Mama, let me wash your hair. It will feel so good,” Grandma lashed out at her, “Mind your own business!” or screamed non-sequitur epithets: “Streetwalker! Whore.” I could see in Mom’s eyes a hesitancy in dealing with her mother that I never observed in her interactions with tenants, Dad, or us kids.

  I understand now that, just as she had been as a child, she was still afraid of her mother.

  CHAPTER 19: Barbara

  Linda and Barbara play dress-up, 1961.

  1956–62

  Oblivious to the family drama, I lived happily in a child’s world. West Garfield Park in the 1950s was like a small town, where we knew our neighbors and shopkeepers and could walk to nearby Madison Street, our business district, to purchase whatever we needed. For a kid, it was a place of freedom and adventure. The children played in the back alley, where we pitched balls, ran races, and exchanged gossip. (“Boys pay Rita a nickel to show them her underpants!” we passed on in scandalized whispers.) We shimmied up gutters, hauling ourselves onto garage roofs burning with sun-baked, melting tar. From our perch, we copped a bird’s-eye view into unshaded windows at unguarded couples, prompting giggles and whispers, and dared each other to leap from one roof to the next.

  One day in 1956, at age seven, I was bouncing a rubber ball against my garage door, attempting tricks: catching it under my leg or spinning around to grab the ball before it hit the ground. I was determined to master these acrobatics, doing each over and over as if preparing for the Olympics. At some point, I glanced west and saw a new girl exit the gate three houses down. She walked toward me, her eyes flitting around, shy and hesitant. There weren’t many girls my age on the block.

  “Hi!” I said, tossing the ball lightly in the air and catching it. “My name’s Linda. What’s yours?”

  “Barbara,” she said in a lilting southern accent, ther softened to Bah-bra.

  “Wanna bounce a ball with me?”

  Barbara had gentle, olive-green eyes and wispy brown hair framing a soft, cherubic face. Light freckles dusted her creamy skin. I bounced the ball down to the ground and caught it over and over as we talked, forgetting my practice. I learned Barbara Hendrix’s parents had eloped before finishing high school, then left Mississippi with Barbara and her brother for Chicago, where her dad hoped to find better-paying work. He landed a good job in an engineering department at Western Electric, where he would remain for thirty years.

  Mrs. Hendrix was a stay-at-home mom and housewife, but once her children were older, she, too, got a job at Western Electric, testing rocket capacitors. A housekeeping perfectionist, Barb’s mom kept every surface of their first-floor flat gleaming and shiny. Her family’s crisply starched and freshly ironed clothes, folded like a display in a department store, looked as if they could stand on their own. Some kids in the neighborhood called Barb and her brother hillbillies, but we never did. My parents admired the Hendrixes, with their hardworking, clean, child-centered lives. They in no way fit the stereotype, held in our community, of the “slovenly hillbilly.”

  We were the perfect friends for each other at that stage of our lives, soaring together into imaginary worlds of pretending at an age that would stun a twenty-first-century girl into humiliation. At eleven, we still played dress-up, taking turns being “prince” or “princess,” donning flowery, flowing dresses or velveteen waistcoats and shirts with wide, lacy cuffs Dad had picked up at a Salvation Army store.

  Who started each foray into fantasy, I can’t say, but we were simpatico to each other’s ideas. We were best friends, before that concept became cheapened by a universal acronym, BFF, tossed indiscriminately into texts and greeting cards. We told each other family secrets and knew they were safe; we lay next to each other on sleepovers and talked late into the night, our parents repeatedly threatening to separate us if we didn’t “stop talking and go to sleep!”

  Barb and her family adored their fellow-Mississippian Elvis Presley, whom my parents viewed as vulgar. When I passed on this judgment to Barb, she laughed at me, especially when she caught me trying to emulate Elvis’s moves. Without Barb, I might have kept my parents’ parochial views of music, at least for a few more years. Instead, Barbara and I would try dancing the jitterbug to the irresistible beat of “Hound Dog” or “Jailhouse Rock.”

  We each had different strengths, and I don’t recall any competition between us. I was a better student, but I think Barb was smarter. She had what we call today “EQ”—a genius for emotional intelligence—and would say just the right words to make someone feel good. Mom often told her, “Barbara, you are a master diplomat.”

  On our front sidewalk, we jumped rope or danced self-choreographed routines while belting out songs we’d learned watching the Saturday night television show Your Hit Parade. Barb and I stabbed each other’s fingers with thick sewing needles, pressed the open wounds together, and declared eternal loyalty to one another as blood sisters, then bound the ritual by solemnly burying a cigar box of personal treasures beneath our crabby neighbor’s lilac bush. We rode our bikes under the flickering sun and shade cast by L tracks, unable to talk above the screeching metal wheels and wheezing brakes of elevated trains whisking commuters to downtown Chicago. When we found a loading dock at a nearby factory, we were certain it was a stage, and then and there planned a huge production with song and dance. Since we weren’t the likes of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes in Arms, our grand fantasy never came to fruition.

  Unlike many neighborhood kids, we were expected to touch base with our moms off and on, but they didn’t keep tabs on us every minute of the day. If Mom sent me to the grocery store, I’d stop by Barb’s to bring her along for company. “I can’t go until I clean the kitchen,” she might say, so I’d pick up the broom and start sweeping or wiping counters until we were done. When I returned home more than an hour later, Mom would say, “For heaven’s sake! What took you so long?”

  “I had to get Barb.”

  A simple jaunt to the local library, four blocks distant, turned into a journey of exploratory pleasures as we walked past neighborhood icons on Madison Street, the West Side’s vibrant business district. We ogled and giggled at the rocket-shaped breasts of mannequins in Three Sisters dress shop. At high-end Madigan’s Department Store, we rode elevators operated by ladies wearing white gloves and fine wool suits. They sat on small, round, black-lacquered benches and asked, “What floor, puh-lease?” We got off at women’s clothing and lingerie, where we clucked over the ridiculous prices of expensive outfits and surreptitiously held bras up to our chests.

  Leaving Madigan’s, we walked past the Marbro theater, promising each other that we’d go together the next Saturday. The Marbro was an expansive movie palace, its interior walls draped in red velvet, its wide, winding, white marble staircase bordered by thick brass railings. On Saturdays, gaggles of children ascended to the balcony, jabbering, joking, poking, and spilling popcorn behind them like Hansel’s breadcrumbs. For twenty-five cents, we could watch a double feature, preceded by cartoons starring Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, or Sylvester and Tweety Bird. Parents thought nothing of sending their young children alone to the movies.

  Barb and I skipped farther east along Madison Street, past Kresg
e’s five-and-dime, where we gawked at unattainable treasures in the toy aisle or posed with our cheeks pressed together in the photo booth. Giggling at our likenesses, we continued toward Pulaski Road, where we turned south for the final block to the library. Inside, we pulled book after book off the shelves, sharing our thoughts about them, trying to decide. Our quietest whispers elicited a scolding “shhhhh” from the stern, eyebrow-raised librarians.

  At the high, oak check-out desk, we stretched up our arms to hand our chosen books and library cards to the librarian. After placing one book at a time under a huge, glowing machine, she pressed a button. Karumpf. An eerie green light bathed each book and card, documenting the loan. Kachunk. She stamped the due date onto a slip of paper glued to the inside back cover. I wished I could do that.

  Our selections tucked under our arms, we walked the half mile back home and plopped down side by side on the grass, opened our books, and drifted off on more adventures.

  CHAPTER 20: Thief, Robber, Crook

  Mom reads to us kids (and puppy, Buttons) around our campfire at Devil’s Lake State Park, 1956.

  1954–56

  When my parents felt they had saved enough of a financial cushion, they moved the tenants from the two hallway bedrooms out of our flat and into vacant sleeping rooms on the second floor. Paul and I, who had slept on cots in the dining room with Grandma K in her nearby alcove, would share the west bedroom. We joined hands on the big brass double bed Dad had bought for five dollars at the Salvation Army. Bouncing up and down in gleeful brio, we shouted over and over, “We have our own room! We have our own room!” Paul was eight, and I was nearly five.

  For the previous five years, my parents had been sleeping, first with my crib, now with Billy’s, crammed along one wall of the small, dark bedroom off the kitchen. That bedroom was more suitable for Grandma K, a single person. Dad wanted the now-free bedroom across from Paul’s and mine so he and Mom could have more space and be closer to their children.