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  Mom arranged a vacation that August with her parents at Lake Como, a resort in southern Wisconsin, hoping the country air and peaceful surroundings would soothe her mother’s nerves and give her seventy-one-year-old dad a break. When they opened the door to their rustic cottage, a strong smell of gas assaulted them. “They’re trying to kill me!” Grandma screamed, backing out, her eyes wild.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” my mother said, running into the darkened room, straightening a burner knob left askew. “Someone just forgot to turn the stove all the way off.”

  Throughout the trip, Grandma K either remained locked in a morose silence or went on the attack. If Mom or her father attempted conversation, Grandma shook with a fierce anger and yelled, “Keep your big mouth shut!” or, “You’d be better off with plaster in your mouth!” When Mom was silent, her mother accused her of “hiding something.”

  “She told Papa to get out of her sight,” Mom wrote. “She said to me, ‘You do nothing but make trouble!’”

  Page after page, Mom documented her mother’s paranoid thoughts and behavior, but one scene captures it best.

  At two in the morning, the darkness blazed to light in their cottage. Grandma ripped off the covers from her sleeping husband and glared down at him, screeching, in her drawn-out Austrian accent, “You cr-r-r-rook, you!” He lay blinking and astonished.

  “You’ve hidden my pills in your bed!” she screamed, eyes blazing. “Get up! Get up! I want them. You’re both cr-r-r-rooks!” Mom and her father finally were able to calm her, but Mom’s dread and confusion wouldn’t let her sleep.

  After fourteen days of living with Grandma K’s frenzied accusations, Mom broke down. Wracked with sobs, she choked out to her mother, “You have made these the most miserable two weeks of my life.”

  1927–37

  Mom was bound to her mother by a paradox: “My mother was so good to me,” she told us kids, but just as often remarked, “I was afraid of my mother.” It wasn’t until I came upon Mom’s youthful diaries, which she began at the age of ten, in 1927, that I came to understand the provenance of her loyalty—and fear.

  Grandma K was good to her daughter. A graduate of a prestigious Viennese dressmaking school, Grandma often worked an entire weekend to create a gloriously detailed blouse or layered skirt for Lillian, her only child. Mom was the only girl in the neighborhood who had matching outfits for herself and her dolls. For birthdays, Christmas, and graduation, Mom’s parents showered Mom with the most beautiful gifts they could afford. She was the center of their world. At times my mother wrote, “I sure do love her.”

  But Mom’s diary entries also reveal swift and harsh punishments. Grandma K smacked Mom in the face, hit her on the head, or gave her a “good licking” for “not following the rules” or “being fresh.” Mom accepted consequences that logically followed disobedience, but Grandma K’s irrational anger gave my mother every reason to be “afraid of Mama.”

  Any minor misstep—placing cream precariously in the icebox, mixing Thanksgiving stuffing in the “wrong” way, smiling in a manner her mother didn’t like—triggered Grandma into a full-blown rage, raining blows on Mom and calling her “ass,” “animal,” “streetwalker,” and “whore.”

  Over the years, Mom wrote with deepening frustration about Grandma K’s explosions—like the time Mom mistakenly tossed out a scrap of fabric she found on the floor, intended as a pocket for a suit Grandma was making. Mom apologized and confessed her error.

  Grandma K raced at Mom, screaming, “You ungrateful wretch! You lazy hussy! Now that I’ve finished your suit, you don’t give two cents for how much I have to work!” Eyes alight with fury, she yanked Mom’s hair and smacked her about the head, hurling insults and blows. “Selfish ingrate! Careless, useless girl!” Mom vainly tried holding back tears.

  “She reminds me of the sea,” Mom wrote afterward. “First she’s calm, and suddenly, without warning, she’s so wrathful and furious you hardly believe she’s the same person.”

  Over the years, Mom’s parents had tried multiple ways to earn a living, modeling a striving work ethic and frugality. They saved their money and bought a two-flat. Grandma K started a dressmaking business; Grandpa K founded a small machine shop, skipping dinner and working late into the night. They even opened a delicatessen, but each entrepreneurial venture failed. Still, Grandma’s occasional seamstress work, their rental income, and the salary Grandpa earned as a talented tool and die maker gave them a decent life.

  Then the stock market collapsed in October 1929, plunging America into the Great Depression, devastating my grandparents’ income. The Depression hit manufacturing and machinists, like my grandfather, the hardest. Chicago lost 50 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 1929 and 1933. My grandpa K was one of half a million people in the city without work.

  In the spring of 1932, when Grandpa K was already sixty-one years old, my fifteen-year-old mom wrote, “The Depression is getting worse. Papa has had no work since before Christmas.” Hoping to garner some extra income, her parents divided their flat in two, planning to rent out the back bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom, hot water included, but renters were rare.

  By April the family’s finances were so desperate, they had to apply for food assistance. “Nothing fresh,” Mom wrote with dismay at the contents. “Rotten coffee, dried prunes, raisins, canned peaches, beans, split peas, etc. Five cans of tomatoes.” Later that summer, Grandpa K found temporary machinist work, making about forty-five cents an hour4 the few times he was called in.

  One of those calls ended in calamity. On January 19, 1934, a punch press crushed two of Grandpa’s fingers. Mom’s knees buckled. Her face turned white. “Papa lost two fingers when he was twenty-two, and now these two. Goodbye, guitar.”

  At the time of the accident, Mom was entering her senior year in high school. Her father couldn’t work, rental income was hard to come by, and the bank began harassing the family for missed mortgage payments. “Why don’t you pull your daughter out of school and send her to work?” one bank representative suggested.

  “Oh, no!” Mom’s parents were united. “Our daughter has to finish high school.”

  Mom graduated from Waller High School in January 1935 at age seventeen, the highest-achieving girl in her class. After a dogged search for a job, she landed a typist position at Sears Roebuck, earning a raise after just a few months for her “excellent work.” She became the family breadwinner, giving 75 percent of her wages to her parents.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Foreclosure and eviction notices began arriving at my grandparents’ house, but Grandma K declared, “These aren’t for us,” and scrawled, “Return to Sender” on every one— because the family last name had been misspelled.

  Arriving home from work on March 3, 1937, Mom came upon a devastating scene. Her mother sat on a chair in front of their house, head buried in her hands, Grandpa K’s arm around her shoulders. Tables, chairs, lamps, dishes, clothes—everything they owned—lay piled on the sidewalk, as neighbors gawked and whispered.

  Mom surely was overcome with guilt and despair. “My parents were so good to me” was true, but Mom’s fear of Grandma K would prove to be as potent as her love.

  CHAPTER 5: Resistance and Devotion

  Gartz Family: Lisi, Josef, Frank “Ebner,” Will, and Fred (Dad), 1926.

  Dad’s family fared far better than Mom’s during the Depression, despite the loss of all their savings in the 1929 crash. Dispirited, but possessed with entrenched optimism, resilience, and hope, Dad’s parents committed to starting over with more determination than ever. The janitor for up to sixty-five apartment units in West Garfield Park, Grandpa Gartz worked around the clock. Grandma helped manage the tenants, kept track of their finances, and did all the “women’s” work. With a free apartment thrown in, my grandparents saved an astounding three-quarters of Grandpa’s $200-per-month salary.

  West Garfield Park was just coming into its own when Dad was born in 1914, a year after his older bro
ther, Will. Forced to share attention at the tender age of twelve months, Will preserved his status through obsessive obedience. Dad, sensitive and whimsical, quickly learned he could never be as rule-bound as his older brother, so he carved out his own niche in the family by doing whatever came into his head. It was an approach that didn’t sit well with a young immigrant mother determined to raise “good boys.” Grandma Gartz, reared with nineteenth-century, small-town, Germanic values, punished both her boys physically for “bad behavior.” More prone to boyish shenanigans, Dad endured the pain and humiliation more often. When they misbehaved, Grandma G whacked their bare bottoms with a heavy, wet clothesline or made them kneel on hard peas. Will got into line pretty quickly, but Dad resisted however he could.

  Early in my childhood, Dad shared with me the rancor he felt toward his mother: how she took the side of the tenant children over his; how she slapped his face—back and forth, back and forth—when he tried to explain his side of an altercation; how, when he was five years old, she threatened to kill him with a two-by-four—after she found out he and a neighbor girl had played the age-old game “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Teeth clacking in fear, he admitted his moral turpitude and took his whipping.

  The stories of his mother’s harsh punishments tormented my young heart. I sobbed myself to sleep, thinking of the injustices he suffered, wishing I could be his mother. I’d be fair—and treat him with kindness! But Dad figured out the means to get around his mom’s demand for control.

  When she made him wear a dress to keep him grounded, he defiantly wore it outside to play baseball with the guys, figuring fun was worth a few jeers. I was captivated by his gleeful recollection at outwitting his mother. He would forever figure out how to maneuver around whoever tried to deny him happiness. He’d make his own fun.

  Dad mightily resisted his mother’s attempts to control him, but he could never, not in his lifetime, escape her scorn. He couldn’t free himself from her disdain at his ideas and interests, the way she would grab a cherished possession from his hands. A magic “glue” that made smoke rise from pinched fingers? “Foolishness!” she declared, and threw it into the blazing furnace. He protected his treasures by climbing to the top of the church belfry and hiding them in a dark corner.

  She succeeded only in driving his behavior underground, in fostering a fear of rejection and the thrill of “getting away” with something.

  In my parents’ attic, when I dug through the box labeled “Fred and Lil’s Journals,” I came upon two of Dad’s diaries from his youth. One started in 1933, when Dad was eighteen; the second continued through most of 1935. He made almost daily entries.

  Standing in the dim light, I fingered the embossed green cover of the first, gingerly turned yellowing but still-sturdy pages, and touched the words. Dad’s voice and personality emerged—like a ghost rising from its crypt, as if his spirit hovered beside me, whispering secrets no one else had ever heard.

  His youthful life unspooled off the pages like an old film, whisking me back to his everyday world, where I saw familiar traits manifested in his younger self: a poetic soul, a love of science and nature, a fascination with guns, a simultaneous pursuit of fun and devotion to work that tapped his boundless energy—and always, an abiding secrecy.

  Fearful that his parents might find his diaries, Dad devised a simple code.5 With a little analysis, I deciphered it, though it would have been incomprehensible to his time-pressed, foreign-born parents. Entries like kissing girls, making off with some high-school chemistry equipment, or quarrels with Grandma and Grandpa Gartz were encoded.

  Despite his mother’s harsh treatment, the family was close. My grandparents set aside Sundays to spend time together with their boys, whether by enjoying the simple pleasure of chatting on a bumpy streetcar ride, lounging at the beach, or savoring a picnic in nearby Garfield Park. Dad admired his parents’ grit, ambition, unrelenting work ethic, and determination to send their sons to college. Dad and Will pitched in with work, helping the family survive the Depression.

  After school and all day on Saturdays, Dad threw himself into chores until suppertime, squeezing in homework afterward. At various times, he cleaned the house, washed down the pantry, or scrubbed floors. He showed vacant apartments to potential renters, dusted hallways, cooked dinner, painted, sorted and repaired screens. He ran errands; washed dishes, laundry, and windows; chopped wood; and paid his father’s janitor union dues.

  In the winter, he rolled wheelbarrows of coal, shoveled it into voracious furnaces, removed the unburned “clinkers,” and disposed of ashes. He and Will helped his dad shovel snow from the front and back porches of multiunit apartment buildings and their surrounding sidewalks, sometimes until two in the morning, then started up again four hours later. On Saturdays, Dad worked all day on chores, from nine to five.

  But no matter how exhausting his schedule of school and household duties was, Dad never missed a chance for fun. The center of his social life was Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church, where his best friends in the active youth group rode horseback in the summer, jostled and found romance on hayrides in the fall and sleigh rides in the winter. He practiced weekly with the choir, sang at Sunday morning services, and performed in operettas held across the street in Tilton Elementary School’s auditorium. Movies, sledding, Ping-Pong, basketball, fencing, swimming, biking, baseball, reading, parties—he did it all.

  He had a romantic love interest at Bethel, but he hadn’t met anyone he wanted to marry—until he fell in love with Mom.

  1942

  After the Lake Como trip with her parents, Mom wrote little about her mother. She was juggling her demanding job as executive secretary to the president of the Bayer Company and pulling together every detail of her wedding. She commissioned a creamy satin wedding dress for herself and three bridesmaid outfits made from fuchsia and plum velveteen, the skirts overlaid with net. Typical of Mom’s life philosophy, they combined beauty and practicality. The festive net was removable so that the skirt could also be suitable for daytime wear.

  She decided on a bride’s bouquet of fat white mums, chose the reception hall, ordered dinner for thirty and a jukebox for music, and typed up a ten-page, minute-by-minute script to direct every participant in the ceremony. But Mom had no mother with whom to share her joy. The morose and erratic behavior she had recorded during the Lake Como trip continued into the fall. Whenever Mom tried to share her excitement about the wedding plans, Grandma K waved her away. “Why do I want to hear about that?”

  Dad and Mom wed, November 8, 1942.

  Grandma hadn’t expressed any dislike for my dad, but was it mere coincidence that her irascible and combative personality transformed into insanity just as Mom was about to be married? Or did the loss of her treasured child to marriage trigger such a transformation in her fragile mind?

  On November 8, 1942, Grandpa K walked his daughter, glowing in her shimmery bridal gown, down the aisle of Bethel Church and gave her hand to my dad. Standing at the altar, bathed in the golden November light streaming through Bethel’s soaring stained-glass windows, they made their vows, then exited down the church steps, ducking under a hail of flying rice. In the photos, they radiate hope and happiness, posing arm in arm on the church steps. Even Grandma K is smiling, perhaps caught up in the spirit of the many well-wishers.

  After what both agreed was a perfect reception at the Central Plaza Hotel at Central and Lake Streets, my parents drove to the small basement apartment they had rented two blocks east of the church for their first night together. Lifting Mom into his arms, Dad looked down into her smiling, eager face and carried her across the threshold to begin what they were certain would be an ideal life together.

  CHAPTER 6: Death

  Mom and her “Papa,” 1937.

  WWII Army Air Corps navigator 1st Lt. Frank Ebner Gartz, 1944.

  1943–45

  Among the treasures found in my parents’ attic was my grandma Gartz’s cedar chest, moved from my grandparen
ts’ house to ours after my grandparents died. In the chest, Dad’s mother had saved passports, postcards, love letters between her and Grandpa, scribbled notes, and letters from Romania. But my most exciting find was a plastic bag stuffed with nearly three hundred letters written to and from my dad’s kid brother, Frank Ebner Gartz, during his World War II service from 1943 to 1945. An electric rush prickled my skin. For the first time, I’d meet not only my uncle as a young man but also my parents as newlyweds and my grandparents in their regular, work-a-day world, and I’d see firsthand Chicago’s West Side home front during the war.

  Two months after my parents’ wedding, eighteen-year-old Ebner (everyone in the family called him by his middle name, pronounced “ABE-ner”) reported to the local military draft board on January 23, 1943, and shipped out that same day for basic training. The letters between him and his family and friends flew back and forth as he crisscrossed the country for two years, training for the Army Air Corps. By the spring of 1944, he had passed the grueling exams to graduate as a navigator for the B-17 heavy bomber.

  While Dad’s family fretted over Ebner’s safety, Mom and her mother faced the imminent death of Grandpa K from throat cancer. A lifetime smoker, he had inhaled each unfiltered Camel until it burned his fingertips, then inserted a toothpick into the glowing nub to suck out the last puffs of nicotine.

  By the summer of 1943, Grandpa had wasted away to a skin-wrapped skeleton, nursed at home through his final days by Grandma K. Her losses had been steadily mounting: their home, foreclosed in the Depression; her only child, married and moved out; and now her husband, terminally ill.

  Grandpa K died on September 17, 1943, plunging my bereft grandmother again into a black hole of delusions, each loss sinking her deeper into a dark place. She claimed Mom had killed her beloved “Papa” by giving him poisoned Coke. Despite this absurd accusation, Mom invited Grandma K to move in with her and Dad—a mere ten months after their wedding. Dad went along, undoubtedly to assuage Mom’s anxiety over her despondent mother, who now slept on the couch a few feet outside the newlyweds’ bedroom in their cramped three-room apartment. I’m sure he thought it would be a short-lived arrangement.