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  He was wrong.

  Eight months passed before Grandma K rented her own place, about seven miles away. Even then, she often stayed overnight, bedding down on their flowered sofa. My parents’ lives became entangled in Grandma K’s precarious mental state, as they simultaneously worried about Ebner’s destiny in flak-ripped skies.

  Ebner was assigned to the Second Bomb Group in Italy, where he flew twenty bombing missions from January through May 8, 1945, when the war in Europe ended. But he didn’t return to Chicago. At twenty-one, he had landed a coveted job, navigating to destinations surrounding the Mediterranean and transporting VIPs—generals and congressmen—who were arriving to rebuild Europe.

  Throughout his service, his most faithful correspondent had been his mother. I was dumbfounded by what I read. Instead of the cold, judgmental woman I knew and Dad had described, Grandma Gartz emerged as a loving, devoted, and worried mom. In her prayer-filled letters, she exhorted Ebner to care for his health, inquired into his studies, and often wrote about his at-home girlfriend, Cookie, whom Grandma cherished: “I like nothing better than you and Cookie spend the life together,” she wrote in her broken English.

  But Dad’s mom held no fondness for my mother. In one of Grandma’s letters, written just months after my parents married, I discovered her blatant animus toward Mom: “Your Cookie is 1,000 times Lil. Lil is only for herself.” For the first time, I learned that Grandma Gartz had disliked Mom from the get-go. Her antipathy would taint our family life for decades to come.

  On October 17, ten days after it had been written, a letter arrived from Italy that stopped my grandmother’s heart. Her beloved youngest son was “seriously ill … with infantile paralysis [polio infecting the spinal cord].”

  In a panic, every family member sent out a flurry of encouraging words to Ebner. A few weeks later, all their letters were returned with a bold DECEASED stamped in red across each envelope. Ebner had been dead for five days before the family even knew he was sick. A letter of condolence from Ebner’s commanding major confirmed Ebner had died at 10:15 p.m. on October 12, 1945.

  Grandma G had lost not only her son but also the treasured girl she was certain he would marry, stuck instead with my “only-for-herself” mom as her daughter-in-law.

  Ebner had been Dad’s best friend. Kind, sweet, funny, and adored by all, Ebner was the one son who could have brought together all the family’s disparate personalities. Like a stone to everyone’s hearts, the ripples of his death eroded the shoreline of our lives, deepening Grandma G’s ill will toward my mother and disdain toward my father.

  For the two grandmas, one mourning a son, the other a husband, grief was a rope, entangling the entire family, strangling and choking off love. As Ebner lay dying in an iron lung thousands of miles away, my parents conceived a baby, which Ebner had written he longed for.

  CHAPTER 7: Shock

  Fred and Lil with Grandma K in my parents’ Keeler Avenue apartment.

  1946

  Half a year after learning of Ebner’s death, and six months pregnant, Mom was feted by forty-six coworkers and friends at her farewell party in April of 1946. For nine years, she had devoted her formidable organizational skills and driven work ethic to serve as executive secretary to the president of the Bayer Company. With Mom’s departure, her boss had to hire two women to do the work she had done singlehandedly, a fact which Mom spoke of proudly, but which I see as sad and prescient. She would forever do more than was expected, gaining no recompense in return.

  At the end of my mother’s last day at the Bayer Company, Mom and Dad returned to their apartment to find Grandma K sitting silent and morose on their flowered sofa. “I’m very tired,” was all she said.

  “What’s the trouble?” Mom asked.

  “I walked all the way from my house to downtown.” It was a distance of eight miles.

  “Why on earth would you take such a long walk?”

  “Somebody told me to.”

  Two months later, frantic about her mother’s increasingly unstable behavior, Mom typed up a twenty-five-page report for the psychiatrist entitled, “Case History of Mrs. Louise Koroschetz, April 13, 1946 to June 18, 1946.” Until I dug through the archives, I had never seen this report and had heard only snippets of Grandma K’s bizarre behavior from this time. Mom had told me only, “I cried buckets of tears over my mother.”

  Just as a playwright presents characters on a play’s opening page, Mom listed the various people mentioned in the case history, followed by the role of each in the unfolding saga. Her words reveal a troubling drama, featuring a woman with an unraveling mind—in an era when treatment for mental illness was mired in the Dark Ages.

  Mom’s meticulous records drew me into her anguished helplessness with each of Grandma K’s heart-stopping delusions, exposing my grandmother’s fractured sense of reality, as if she viewed life through a broken mirror. Mom entered scores of examples in vivid detail. A sampling: Grandma believed people spied on her, that the landlord purposely didn’t repair a banging pipe in the bathroom so he could track when she was home, that the tenants one floor down burgled her apartment. She locked up her radio in a cabinet, fearing that Peeping Toms used it as a magical device to leer at her as she undressed. Dead Grandpa K spoke to her. With delight, she told my parents about an amusing speech she had made to the president, who had laughed good-naturedly.

  Leaning over her back-porch railing, Grandma K screeched at the women in the apartment below: “Why are you running a whorehouse here? You’re all WHORES!” She spoke in absurd riddles, about double-talk and signs and motions people made. Mom wrote:

  When she gets into one of these spells, her eyes get a rather wild look, and she will start raising her voice louder and louder, and then she pounds her fist on the table to emphasize a statement: “I’m an American! The red, white, and blue must fly all over the world!”

  The case history left me breathless with the impact of Grandma’s mental illness on both my parents. In the last few months of Mom’s pregnancy, they had no time or peace to relish the upcoming arrival of their first child, no privacy— only unending strife, worry, and aggravation. Dad was still grieving for his brother but had to draw upon his emotional reserves to support Mom.

  “Lee-lee-an! Lee-lee-an!” My grandmother stood on the front steps of her apartment building late one June night, crying out my mother’s name in a drawn-out Austrian accent as the summer breeze nibbled at her nightgown. Her landlady called my parents. Groggy and frightened, they drove the seven miles to pick up Grandma K.

  When they arrived, they found her sitting on the front steps still in her nightclothes and slippers, clutching her purse, her eyes unfocused and bewildered. “Mama, come home with us,” said Mom gently, helping her shaky mother to stand, leading her to the car.

  On the ride back to my parents’ place, Grandma held her purse close to her mouth, mumbling, “False alarm! False alarm!”

  “What are you doing, Mama?”

  “This is a microphone. I can hear better what they’re saying to me.”

  Over the next two days, my mother created the case history with its twenty-five pages of Grandma’s irrational behaviors. After reading through Mom’s document and meeting Grandma K on June 19, the psychiatrist prescribed electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), also known as shock treatment.

  ECT was a recent breakthrough in treating psychoses and mood disorders in the 1940s. It was used for the first time on a human subject in Italy on April 15, 1938, and seemed to cure the patient of his hallucinations. Enthusiastically embraced in the United States, shock treatment was to be administered to my grandmother, just six years after its introduction into this country.

  Following Grandma’s ECT treatments, Mom was distraught with what she saw. Grandma K didn’t speak a word, and she had no memory—not of her recent meals, nor any of Mom’s previous visits. The psychiatrist brushed aside my mother’s fear. “She’s nicely confused,” he said.

  Over the next two weeks, Grandm
a’s disorientation slowly dissipated until, by July 14, she was discharged from the hospital. “She seemed very normal,” Mom wrote. “We took her to Lincoln Park on a picnic. The psychiatrist performed a miracle on Mama, and we can really feel grateful.”

  I sensed Mom’s desperate and futile hope in those words. It was an era when few effective treatments existed for mental illness, when the very diagnosis was shameful and misunderstood. Families grasped at any straw that might hold them steady in the storms of insanity, so Mom eagerly believed this respite from her mother’s outbursts meant she was cured.

  The only real miracle in their lives occurred just three days after Grandma K returned to my parents’ apartment. On July 17, Mom gave birth to Paul Ebner Gartz, his middle name in honor of Dad’s dead brother.

  Grandma Gartz’s response to the usually joyous news of a first grandchild was grim: “Don’t have children. They’ll only be used as cannon fodder.”

  CHAPTER 8: The Best-Laid Plans

  Mom with baby Paul, summer 1946.

  1946–49

  My parents’ three-room flat was now tighter than ever, with Grandma K often sleeping overnight and the baby’s crib squeezed in. Mom didn’t write much the following few years, but photos show me that Grandma K was a constant presence in their lives—even on vacations. In one 1947 picture, she’s lying on a cot, reading the newspaper, outside two tents, camping with the young family in Wisconsin. Although Grandma K was capable of fending for herself, even working as a seamstress at a downtown women’s clothing store, my parents had virtually no family time without her.

  An exception was a June 1948 driving trip to America’s West, which Mom, Dad, and two-year-old Paul took with Dad’s parents and brother, Will. Grandma K rented her own place, but Mom invited her to stay in her and Dad’s more pleasant apartment while they were away. Upon their return, the neighbors reported that Grandma K had repeatedly lam-basted my parents for trying to starve her to death—despite the fact they had given her money to buy food at the A&P grocery store across the street.

  But soon a happy surprise offset their anxiety. While traveling, Mom had become pregnant with a second child, me. Their one-bedroom apartment was too small for the growing family and Grandma K. It was time for a major change. In December of 1948, Mom and Dad closed on their first home—a two-flat at 4222 West Washington Boulevard in Dad’s lifelong neighborhood of West Garfield Park, a block away from where Will and Grandma and Grandpa Gartz lived.

  Just in time to undermine my parents’ excitement over their new home and the anticipation of a second baby, Grandma K again careened into insanity, hurling outlandish accusations at Mom and Dad or staying in bed all day, arising only for meals. After reading Mom’s case studies, I detect in the timing of my grandmother’s downward spirals a pattern, which my mother apparently never grasped—or at least, certainly never acknowledged.

  Each of Grandma K’s mental breakdowns coincided with my parents’ most joyous occasions. Grandma K was belligerent and delusional just before their wedding, before Paul’s birth, and now, again, the month before I was born. It’s impossible to know whether Grandma K had some control over her mentally ill brain, although in many diary entries I see how deftly she played the guilt card against both my parents when it suited her.

  The timing of my grandmother’s serious meltdowns shows me that whenever Mom’s attention might be distracted from her mother, Grandma K turned sullen and confrontational, delusional and paranoid, forcing Mom to divert her focus away from her own family happiness and cater to her mother. Did Grandma give in to her psychosis at these times, drawing Mom tightly into an orbit with Grandma at the center?

  Dad hated argument, so I’m sure he hid his frustration at the volatile disruption his motherin-law injected into their lives. His childhood had taught him not to fight openly with his powerful mother, knowing he could never win. In Mom, he had found and married another strong-willed woman, and he would have had little luck convincing her Grandma K’s psychotic presence was undermining their marriage and family life.

  Mom called an ambulance on February 20, 1949, to transport her mother to Cook County Psychopathic Hospital, where two doctors evaluated Grandma K. They testified in Cook County Court on February 28, three weeks before I was born.

  We find that the said Louise Koroschetz is mentally ill and is a fit person to be sent to a state hospital for the mentally ill … that her disease is … psychosis… . We would respectfully recommend that she be sent to some public or private hospital or asylum for the mentally ill.

  Grandma’s symptoms certainly fit the diagnosis of psychosis: depression, anxiety, suspiciousness, delusions, hallucinations, ongoing unusual thoughts and beliefs. Medication would be the first line of treatment today, but effective psychotropic drugs were nonexistent at the time. Mom was caught in a quandary, both psychological and fixed in the real world.

  Mom had always feared her mother’s wrath, yet she also had absorbed Grandma K’s devotion to her as the only child. This potent combination of fear and love bound Mom to Grandma K even more tightly than the bonds of her ardor or concern for Dad. Swept up in the desperation her mother’s illness wrought, and within weeks of giving birth, I’m sure Mom had little capacity or energy for self-examination.

  In the outside world, perhaps she had seen the stark, gruesome photos of neglected patients in psychiatric hospitals featured in a 1946 Life magazine photo essay.6 She often talked about the movie The Snake Pit (nominated for Best Picture at the 1949 Academy Awards), which depicted staff at mental institutions as cruel and incompetent.

  Maybe those portrayals, combined with the fear and love she felt toward Grandma K, prompted her to ignore the doctors’ advice. Just two weeks after my birth on March 23, 1949, Mom had her mother discharged so she could move with us into our new home on Chicago’s West Side.

  Our two-flat at 4222 West Washington Boulevard.

  The two-flat at 4222 West Washington Boulevard was a fixer-upper for sure, but the bones were beautiful—leaded-glass windows facing the front, classic chunks of greystone lending weight and grandeur, a relief of vines and a carved birdbath decorating the concrete pinnacle. My parents envisioned a bright flower garden and space for the kids to romp in the compact backyard.

  A single family occupied the first floor. On the second floor, a seventy-year-old woman held the lease and rented out two of the four bedrooms. Subletting was against building code, but for many it was an easy way to make ends meet. If Chicago building department inspectors snooped around, a show of cash usually made them go away.

  My parents decided the second-floor apartment was best for us, but they didn’t ask any of the existing three tenants to leave. Our family just moved right in with them. “How could you share your living space with a bunch of strangers?” I asked my mom years later, incredulous at this setup.

  “It never occurred to me that it was odd,” Mom said. “Seemed like the most natural thing in the world.” The arrangement bemused me: my parents, newborn me, three-year-old Paul, and off-balance Grandma K would share the intimacies of their already-complicated family life with three people they had never met before. Mom’s childhood diaries held the answer for me: renting out half their apartment in the 1930s was how Mom’s parents had survived the Depression.

  The flats in the building were known as shotgun apartments because of their long and narrow design. If you thought to do such a thing, you could pull the trigger of a gun in the kitchen at the back end, and the bullet would fly straight through the dining room, hallway, living room, and out the front window.

  Each of the three live-in tenants on the second floor occupied one of three bedrooms: two on either side of the long hallway connecting the dining and living rooms, and one that overlooked the front porch. My parents took the back bedroom, just off the kitchen and across from the only bathroom, which would be used by six adults and Paul. Snugly tucked into a corner of my parents’ room, my crib stretched along one wall to the doorway.

&n
bsp; Grandma K and Paul, then almost three, slept in the “dining room,” Paul on a cot and Grandma K on a low bed that nestled perfectly into the twelve-by-six-foot alcove on the room’s west side. Dad rigged up a clothesline spanning her space so she could pull across a sheet, providing her with a modicum of privacy. A built-in, oak-trimmed china cabinet held her clothes and sundries.

  Overflowing with ideas for their new home, Dad pictured spending weekends and evenings together with Mom in domestic unity—painting, stripping woodwork, building shelves—to create the lovely home they both envisioned. But it didn’t work out that way.

  Instead, Dad lost his job.

  Mom, baby Linda, Paul, Dad: April 1949.

  It’s unclear why Hotpoint Refrigeration Company let Dad go that summer of 1949, but it threw my parents into a tailspin. Painful memories of her family’s possessions strewn across the sidewalk outside the Koroschetz home came flooding back to Mom. Would her family again be put out on the street? They would lose their down payment, as well as the $1500 they had already spent on a new furnace. They had set aside Mom’s entire secretarial salary for four years; all their savings were tied up in this house. Dad searched the entire summer in vain for a decent-paying job, each day tightening the knot of fear strangling their hearts.

  Relief came in August 1949, when Dad was offered a position with the National Board of Fire Underwriters, the NBFU. The starting salary was good, around $3600 a year, but there was one huge drawback: travel—and lots of it.

  The National Board’s Chicago office sent engineers throughout its territory, comprising Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Kansas, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Their job was to document a city’s preparedness for fighting fires and natural disasters. Winter was set aside for the lengthiest trips, to faraway, warm-weather states where, in January, fire hydrants could spout water (to test that the pressure was adequate to fight multiple fires at once), and the men could trudge across miles of city streets on outdoor inspections without freezing. Dad would be gone for up to seven weeks at a time during Chicago’s harshest months.