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  A month later, the moving van pulled up in front of the only home I’d ever known, loaded up our furnishings, and headed out of West Garfield Park, where Dad had lived his entire life—more than half a century. But Dad wasn’t really letting go of his old neighborhood. He remained tethered to the past by three buildings.

  CHAPTER 31: A New Life

  Dietmar, Peggy, Bill, and Linda: dressed for Luther North Homecoming Dance, 1966.

  I was fine leaving the West Side. All my grade-school pals were long gone, and my high-school friends lived on the North Side. I loved our new single-family house and was proud that I had found and helped to beautify it. On moving day, we trailed the huge truck carrying all our furniture until we arrived at our North Keeler house in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood. The community comprised apartment buildings, modest bungalows, and grand fin de siècle Victorian homes, fronting streets shaded by old-growth trees. Peggy, now my new neighbor, dashed out of her doorway when we pulled up. I jumped out of the car, and we grasped hands, leaping up and down in teenage glee.

  “Can you believe it?” I said.

  “This is so cool!” grinned Peggy. “Let’s talk to each other through our windows.”

  I raced around the movers scrunched over my parents’ oak dresser, dashed upstairs to my bedroom, now wallpapered in glowing yellow-and-orange daisies, and threw open the window facing Peggy’s. Across the divide, Peggy lifted her sash, and we both stuck out our heads, waving to each other in mock greeting.

  “Hi, Peggy!”

  “Hi, Gartz!” We laughed at the unlikelihood of our proximity. After almost four years as best friends, with five miles dividing us, we now lived next door to each other! We could ride the bus together to Luther North in fifteen minutes—but not for long. Graduation was a few weeks away.

  I’d been dating Bill for almost a year by this time. He’d asked me out for every Saturday night since we’d met at the Memorial Day party in 1965. Before meeting Bill, I’d gone out with only a couple of boys, but they didn’t interest me. With Bill, every weekend was a blast; we never ran out of things to talk or laugh about. His self-deprecating humor and witty retorts were funny not only to me, but also to my parents, who found Bill engaging and down-to-earth. Except for the fiasco at the hamburger joint, I always arrived home happy, most dates ending with a few kisses on the front porch.

  I just liked being with him, and it didn’t matter what we did. On our second date, we went to Kiddieland, a small-scale amusement park, where (he later told me) the roller coasters gave him an excuse to hug me tight. But he could also afford to take me on all sorts of cool dates because he had worked since the age of thirteen at a local real-estate office. By the time I met him, he was the owner’s man Friday. Bill did bookkeeping (he was a whiz at math), addressed hundreds of postcards for direct marketing campaigns, washed the office windows, made repairs—whatever the boss needed, Bill did. With his earnings, he took me to the movies, local teen dance clubs, and out for a nice dinner or a simple pizza.

  But I was really thrilled when he scored tickets for a Beatles concert that summer of 1965 at Comiskey Park, which was home to the Chicago White Sox. Like most teens at the time, I was enamored with these long-haired, “wild-looking” guys with their new musical sound and memorable lyrics— truly “the soundtrack of our lives.”

  Once the concert started, no one could hear the music or the Beatles’ voices. Thousands of young girls screeched, screamed, and pulled their hair as if possessed; they jumped in place like frenetic windup toys or bent over in paroxysms of sobs, tears streaming, hugging each other in the prepubescent sexual thrall of their idols. I gazed around in astonishment, mesmerized as much by the performance of the crazed girls as of the Beatles. I had just turned sixteen a few months earlier, but I couldn’t imagine putting on such a display. Bill and I nudged each other, discreetly gesturing to one wacky teen after another.

  Another time, he rented a Cessna 150 and we flew over all of Chicagoland, giving me my first aerial view of our sprawling city and its glittering lakefront. A private pilot since he was sixteen (he’d paid for lessons with his own money), Bill dove the Cessna into spiraling, downward turns so he could practice pulling out of a spin, and pointed the plane’s nose straight up into the air until it stalled, motionless for a few seconds until we plunged toward earth, regained lift, and straightened out. Both maneuvers are critical pilot skills, but they made me so dizzy, I thought I’d vomit. He stopped. But I wasn’t worried: I trusted his skill and judgment completely and always felt safe.

  Later that summer, and for the next several years, we wrote letters and sent cards to each other, even though we only lived a few miles apart. We’ve saved them all. Just as my mother’s diary introduced me to her young heart as she fell for Dad, Bill’s and my letters whisk me back to our youthful love. I wrote how much I missed him, asked him about his studies, made goofy jokes, or griped about the chore of reading Moby Dick for Honors English.

  I bought a coloring book of French words and phrases, designed for about a six-year-old. Every week, I colored in a picture of a little kid demonstrating a French word, made some silly comment on it relating to Bill and me, and mailed it to him. (It was obviously a procrastination tool as well.) He kept them all. They remind me of how truly naive and childlike I was at sixteen. We had an innocent romance in those early months. We made out, but we mostly just kissed; it was a long time before any petting started. I would have been shocked—and reluctant—had he expected sex.

  In the fall of 1965, his junior year at Northwestern, Bill was working with early computers (huge monstrosities that took up entire rooms). He often mailed me IBM punch cards, each printed with a short love note that he’d programmed. I tore open each envelope, warmed by his sweet and clever greetings.

  We were necking on my parents’ living-room couch on November 11, 1965, when Bill pressed his cheek against mine and whispered, “I love you.” A short pang of fear stabbed my chest. My family seldom used those three little words, and I didn’t know what to say. I hugged him tightly and continued kissing him, my emotional reserve holding me back. About a month later, I confessed that I loved him, too.

  By the fall of 1965, Peggy had captured the heart of a former Luther North basketball star with the German name Dietmar Faust. Graduating a year before Peggy and me, Diet (DETE) was finishing his freshman year at DePaul University, where he played forward under fabled basketball coach Ray Meyer. Bill and Diet had met the previous fall as both waited to pick up their respective best girls when Luther North let out. Pretty soon, we were double-dating every weekend.

  For the first time as teens, it was easy, not scary, for our friends to visit us. Both Dietmar and Bill lived just a couple of miles away, and Paul still lived at home, commuting to the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), on Chicago’s South Side. Our Keeler house became the place to hang out. Diet introduced to us his family tradition of card-playing. All the young people, including twelve-year-old Billy, now played rounds of pinochle on weekends. Even Mom or Dad would take a break on a Saturday night and join in. Diet usually brought over a couple of six-packs, sharing a beer with Mom or Dad. Enjoying the youthful camaraderie, neither of my parents gave a thought to his underage status.

  In between the good times, I was engaged in the serious business of applying to colleges. To keep costs down, I never even considered a school outside of Illinois. The University of Illinois was the most logical choice, with Northern Illinois at De Kalb as a backup, but one school kept popping up in my imagination. Northwestern University first blipped onto my radar screen in fall of my junior year, when our majorette troupe performed there on High School Band Day.

  A school bus drove us north along Sheridan Road under an arch of golden elms, shimmering in the low autumn sun. Spangles of light danced off Lake Michigan’s blue waters. Books cradled in their arms, girls in pleated wool skirts and angora sweaters sashayed in groups of three and four along the tree-studded campus. Northwestern’s whol
e atmosphere seemed to me an idyllic representation of what I pictured college should be. I imagined myself carrying those books, learning from those erudite professors—opening up a whole world of ideas. I was smitten, not by just the beautiful campus and the shiny-haired coeds, who seemed, at first glance, no different to me from Luther North girls, but by the complete package of the university. I didn’t worry about fitting in. I just went with my gut and persuaded my parents to visit.

  A campus guide led us along meandering paths snugged by foliage. Bells pealed from University Hall, a Gothic limestone edifice. A bit farther north, we entered Deering Library, another Gothic structure, where our footsteps echoed on the stone floor. I wasn’t hearing much of what our guide said. I was absorbing an emotion, a longing to be part of this beautiful university, to sit among the tight knots of students, discussing history or art or some great book.

  But would I be accepted? I was a good student, but not the very top of my class. Financially, it was a huge stretch, but more affordable if I didn’t live on campus. Bill commuted from home. Maybe I could, too. I applied.

  The following April, I came home from school to find Mom and Dad putting dishes into kitchen cabinets. Mom pointed to an unopened envelope—from Northwestern. I stared at it for a long time, preparing myself for disappointment. “Well?” asked Dad, smiling as he handed me a pair of scissors.

  I slit the envelope, pulled out the letter, scanned it, and looked up at them, grinning like a maniac. “I’m in! I can’t believe it!”

  Mom, then Dad, hugged me. “Oh, congratulations! That’s wonderful!” Mom effused. “My little girl!”

  “Good for you,” said Dad, embracing me. But beyond that, they didn’t make a fuss. Now they had to figure out how to pay for it. Tuition alone was a whopping $600 per quarter, $1,800 a year. We agreed I’d live at home.

  Most of my friends were going away to college, but Paul and I still lived at home, available and willing, along with Billy, to help ease my parents’ enormous workload. Over the years, we kids had also evolved into a buffer between them, softening the blows their marriage had endured from Dad’s absence, Grandma K’s insanity, and their time-sucking devotion to building maintenance. The newly gifted six-flat from my grandparents, an increasingly dangerous West Side, the Keeler home, and, ironically, Dad’s Chicago-based job, further battered their marriage.

  CHAPTER 32: Unraveling

  Anew kind of estrangement between Dad and Mom arose out of Dad’s job at Fireman’s Fund, where he’d worked since the fall of 1962. During his years at the National Board of Fire Underwriters, he’d seldom enjoyed peace or appreciation. Mom told him he wasn’t part of the family; Grandma K erupted in paranoid accusations when he came home; Dad’s boss and supervisor at the NBFU had harangued Dad and caviled over petty grievances. At Fireman’s Fund, Dad was surrounded by people who adored and admired him.

  When he started at FF, he was already forty-eight years old, with neither the temperament nor the desire to climb the corporate ladder. He worked with a pool of guys who were years his junior, many fresh out of college. The younger men were captivated by Dad’s out-of-the-box thinking, his ready jokes and cache of off-color limericks, his raconteur nature, and his crazy menagerie of pets. They called him “the Eccentric,” a moniker he accepted with prideful pleasure.

  The atmosphere and culture of Fireman’s Fund Loss Control Department was a perfect fit for Dad. FF gave him a company car and a list of businesses to visit during the week to be certain each had adequate fire and theft prevention to minimize or eliminate losses. He was the department’s expert on fire prevention, the nuances of which he’d mastered at the National Board.

  No one tracked his comings and goings. As long as Dad finished the assigned inspections each week and wrote up the reports, he was golden. For a guy like Dad, who loved kibitzing with people, it was heaven. Perhaps he chose to spend three hours at a fishing store while the owner regaled him with arcane details about scores of flies. Maybe he’d compare his knowledge of bullet caliber with the proprietor of a gun shop. He could be lost for hours in a used bookstore, poring over volumes of poetry or European history. He made about the same money as at the NBFU, for about a third of the time.

  The young men he worked with included him in their after-work barhopping. “He wasn’t a father figure,” one of the guys told me years later. “He was just one of the boys.” For Dad, the camaraderie was heady. Sometimes he’d call Mom to say he wouldn’t be home for supper, which she had already made. Angry and hurt, she ate alone. It evolved into a pattern: Mom excoriating Dad for his callous behavior, her anger driving him to stay with “the boys.” The barbs of resentment, sharpened by this vicious cycle of accusations, ripped further at the fabric of their marriage.

  Dad invited the impressionable young men from his office, many from small towns, on a tour of the West Side. As they drove from downtown Chicago past block after block of abandoned, burned-out buildings, the guys locked the car doors, staring wide-eyed out the windows. In the six-flat basement, Dad showed off his host of ancient collectibles: an old Victrola record player, his collection of vintage stained-and leaded-glass windows, a crossbow he had refurbished, scores of twin photos positioned side by side to create a 3-D image on an early twentieth-century stereoscope. The younger men were enthralled by Dad’s stories, but mostly they were astonished that he owned three buildings in this desperate and dangerous community. “No big deal,” he always said, shrugging. Deep down, he still believed it was his neighborhood.

  Mom had a different motivation for her continued work on the West Side. Never a volunteer or missionary type, Mom was driven by a sense of duty and accomplishment. She wanted to prove to herself, and to naysayers, that by providing well-cared-for apartments, their African American tenants wouldn’t “destroy everything,” as was the prevailing belief among most whites. Mom had faith that both the property and her hard work would be respected and appreciated by the tenants. She was big on gratitude, which she felt was lately in short supply from Dad. During his first years of travel, he had written her heartfelt poems to show his devotion. His early letters, and even his personal diary, had been filled with loving sentiments and admiration for her ability to hold down the home front during his long absences. But by now Dad’s expressions of tenderness and praise had been supplanted by avoidance and withdrawal.

  During the next several years, they could barely keep up with the criminal assaults on their West Side properties and renters. In February of 1968, Dad repaired and rehung a tenant’s door that had been smashed in a burglary attempt. Another tenant was robbed at gunpoint. Thieves regularly yanked the mailboxes out of the wall in the front vestibule to see what was worth stealing, or used the vestibule to shoot up smack, leaving used needles strewn about the tiled floor. Dad replaced the mailboxes nine times before he found the solution. He exchanged the glass door with a sturdy, solid one. At his tenants’ requests, he added bars to all first-floor windows. The six-flat was taking on the appearance of a fortress.

  The same month the bars went in, Mom hired a plumber to fix a leak and water damage in the bathroom of Lonnie and Annette Branch, who rented one of the six-flat apartments. Mom stayed for several hours to supervise the repair, returning the following week to be sure the pipe was no longer leaking. It was.

  “Why isn’t this fixed yet? It’s been two weeks. I wish the plaster had hit me on the head so I could sue you!” Lonnie shouted, patting his inch-high, neatly trimmed hair for emphasis. “I’m going to call the Board of Health and report you!”

  “Be my guest!” Mom retorted, getting hot, glowering at her tenants. “Listen! This isn’t an instant job. It took me four days to find a plumber who would even set foot in this neighborhood! Each step takes time.” When angry, Mom’s mouth turned down and her eyes narrowed, her whole face contorting in fury and hurt.

  “You two have stabbed me in the back. We try to provide a good building for our tenants, but no matter what we do, it doesn’t work. You�
��ve both completely disillusioned me.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  In turmoil all week over the confrontation, Mom called Mr. Ford, the African American painter who had become her friend, and shared with him her anguish. “Who would have thought Lonnie and Annette would turn on me like this!” she said.

  The following week, Mr. Ford arrived at the Branches’ apartment to finish up the decorating. “I almost didn’t let you in because it took you so long to get here!” Lonnie railed.

  “Listen,” said Mr. Ford. (I can see him straightening his wide, bulky frame and looking down into Lonnie’s eyes.) “I’m only here as a favor to Mrs. Gartz. If it was up to me, I’d just let you sit and look at that hole in your bathroom ceiling. I’m not doin’ this for you. I’m doin’ it for Mrs. Gartz. If you don’t like it here, you should just move on. This apartment can be rented fifty times over. You won’t find another landlady like Mrs. Gartz in the whole city of Chicago.”

  When Ford later related this conversation to Mom, he added, “You’re just too good to those tenants, Mrs. Gartz—offerin’ to scrape off all the paint and start over. I don’t want to say you’re crazy, but you are.”

  “I just don’t like to be aggravated,” Mom said. “Besides, I have a strong sense of responsibility.”

  We had all witnessed Mom’s loyal nature over the years, to both family and tenants. When Dad was on the road, she wrote him letters, no matter how tired or overworked she was. When our basement flooded the kitchenettes one summer, she and Dad invited the tenants to sleep in our flat for days until my parents could clean up the water. When an elderly roomer who had no family died, Mom arranged for him to have a “very creditable funeral,” as she described it. She had invited her uncle John to live with us when he was too frail to care for himself. And, of course, she had demonstrated unending loyalty toward her mentally ill mother. That last duty had come to an end.