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  She was aware of a high-school hierarchy. I had been unaware of any such hierarchy at Tilton, where I’d had the modest goal of being a good student, and like-minded strivers were my friends. We Tiltonites worked together on the school newspaper and volunteered during recess or in the front office. That seemed cool to me. Kids hung out with like-minded other students, tough kids with tough kids, science geeks with science geeks. I was friendly with all, but I didn’t discern that one group was more desirable than another.

  Peggy had gone to a school where she felt left out of the popular crowd, and she wanted to find a way in at Luther North. I was definitely not the ticket into the cool crowd, but we had become best friends anyway. I’ve come to realize a great truth of Peggy’s soul. She’d put aside her dearest adolescent desire (at least what she thought it was) for real friendship. But she would have to shepherd me along—and I was in great need of shepherding. I just hadn’t realized it until I met Peggy. She must have seen a glimmer of potential.

  She insisted we go to football games, where I quickly learned the sartorial expectations. I met her at the field for the first game on a Saturday dressed in a sweatshirt and velveteen pants, onto which Mom had sewn satin fall leaves. She exclaimed, “Gartz! You can’t wear an outfit like that to a football game!”

  “Oh.” Pause. “I thought the fall leaves looked nice. I mean … it is fall, right?” Chagrined, I found more casual pants for the next game. Raised by parents with zero interest in sports (a complete waste of time, in their minds), attending a football game never would have even occurred to me, if not for Peggy.

  Above all, she and I never ran out of things to talk about— which boys we liked, whether we could ever make cheerleader (we never did), or who was in the popular crowd—and how the heck did one achieve that pinnacle of high-school success? She regaled me with advice on improving my appearance. “Gartz! You have to do something with your hair.”

  I had no idea how to create a stylish coif. Peggy told me I needed rollers to set my hair, and she demonstrated. I bought a plastic bag of large rollers and a card of bobby pins. Each night, I struggled with manual gymnastics, holding a roller in place with some fingers while using others to wrap hair around the prickly cylinder, wisps flying out, finally securing it in place with a bobby pin, my arms growing numb in the process.

  I seldom had seen Mom set her hair. She had a natural curl she just brushed into place. About every two months, she went to the beauty parlor for a permanent and a haircut and came home looking like a stranger.

  She wore slacks and a simple top every day, clothes easy to work in. But the few times we went out as a family, like for Mother’s Day or birthdays, she always looked classy. As a young woman, Mom dressed with great élan. Photos show her wearing fabulous clothes with impeccably matched costume jewelry, hair perfect for the times. Yet she never passed on a sense of style to me. Shopping had to be accomplished as speedily as possible, a chore she squeezed in between her other duties.

  Despite my attention to Peggy’s expert clothing and social advice, I also had a rebellious streak, picked up from Dad, to not kowtow to fashion. “Fashion,” he used to spit out. “Changing styles every year. That’s just a ruse to get people to dump perfectly good clothes and spend money they don’t have!”

  Just around the time I started high school, Dad had bought me a raccoon coat (one of those 1920s fads) at a Salvation Army store for five dollars. I cut the tail off an old Davy Crockett hat and had a matching outfit, which I wore to school. Peggy advised against the coat (“It looks ridiculous!”). But a lot of kids thought it was hilarious, in a fun sort of way. At lunchtime, I’d find some students traipsing around the halls in my coat, like the Pevensie kids in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

  The laughter was mostly good-natured. They had never seen such a coat, bristling with thick brown-and-black fur and wide, capacious sleeves and shoulders.

  More than once a kid mocked me, asking “Where’d you get that big animal on your back?” or baring teeth, growling, hands pawing at me like claws. My face flushed hot, but my innards went steely. My dad bought me this coat! I don’t care whatyou think. For many mornings, after I’d eaten the soft-boiled egg and grapefruit Dad had prepared for me, I was pleased at his happy smile when he watched me draw my arms through the thick, heavy sleeves and let the full heft of the coat settle on my shoulders. I kissed him goodbye and walked half a block to the bus stop.

  I defiantly wore the fur coat every day for at least a week, until any negative comments died down. Only then did I return to my more typical teen coat, which I’d left hanging in my closet until I was certain I had been unbowed by the comments. I wanted to fit in, to absorb Peggy’s adolescent wisdom, but I wouldn’t succumb to intimidation and abandon a sense of self just to please others.

  Peggy and I walked and gossiped together between classes, worked stage crew for the thespians, and wondered if all that guys really wanted from a girl was to make out. We had in common the same sort of thirteen-year-old naiveté when it came to any aspect of sexual matters. We went to parties and had crushes on various boys, but neither of us had a clue as to how to attract them. We admitted to each other that we used our pillows to practice kissing. We were filled with sexual longings we couldn’t identify. I felt a sucking deep in my belly drawing down into a place I couldn’t name, sometimes catching my breath short. But Peg and I felt certain (based on our mothers’ admonitions) that going all the way was for trampy girls who thought sex was the only way to get a guy.

  Peggy’s parents rented the second floor of a two-flat brick building in a modest and pleasant neighborhood on Keeler near Montrose, five miles directly north of our home at Keeler and Washington. We walked up carpeted stairs to her door, which opened into her living room, taking off our shoes before stepping on the pale-gold carpet to enter into the thoughtfully decorated two-bedroom apartment. No dogs or cats were allowed. Unlike our house, which overflowed with a menagerie of animals that came and went, Peggy was permitted only a small blue-green parakeet in a cage.

  Mom and Dad had spent years of personal labor to beautify our home, but we lived with a different mindset. Our house was our business. I just accepted that I grew up with tenants living in bedrooms down the hall, who came and went in our apartment at will and who shared our washroom. Second-floor roomers and basement tenants rang the bell and walked through our flat to pay rent or use our phone, dropping ten cents per call in a coffee cup Mom had set nearby. Mom’s office was the dining room, where the table was covered in the sorted piles of her bookkeeping, insurance policies to read, bills to pay, and magazines she might speedily flip through once every two months in search of articles to clip (like “How to Make Old Furniture New Again” or miscellaneous homemaker advice).

  Some project was always underway. A tiny sampling: Dad plastered, painted, built shelving, stripped woodwork, and hung wallpaper. Mom taught me to pull out a root-bound fern from its pot, lay a clay shard over the hole of a slightly bigger pot, insert the plant, pour fresh soil around the perimeter, and tamp it down. As we got older, we kids were taught (and expected) to prep and paint the back porch, fences, screens, and storm windows; cut grass; rake leaves—to lend a hand to all maintenance. I recall nothing labeled “boys’” or “girls’” work.

  Mom refinished lamps, picture frames, and, most memorably, a Victorian oak desk, its varnish blackened by the passing of time. Dad had purchased it for a song at some secondhand shop. “I’ve always wanted my own desk,” Mom said, inspecting it longingly, opening the drop front, revealing upright file-folder slots and drawers for office paraphernalia. She frowned and looked at Dad. “But when would I ever find the time to work on it?” We could all see the beauty beneath the blackened surface, but the elaborate filigrees, spindles, and raised relief carvings presaged hours of tedious labor. Mom took it on.

  That desk squatted on newspapers in our dining room for months, as Mom devoted a little time each day to its renewal. She painstakingly strippe
d off the sticky black finish, sanded and wiped the wood with a tack cloth to remove vestiges of wood dust—until it stood naked and pale like a freshly scrubbed country gal, ready to be dolled up for a dance. When mom brushed on fruitwood stain, the colorless oak leaped to life; its grain emerged, zigzagging in broad swaths or swirling around the delicate details. After two coats of varnish, it was the belle of the ball. Dad snapped photos. We kids oohed and aahed at its glorious transformation.

  I often thought of Mom’s months of commitment whenever I saw her working at the desk, a daily reminder of the power of perseverance.

  Peggy’s apartment was a mere fifteen-minute bus ride east of LHN, so I often spent the night at her house if we stayed after school to practice baton routines, memorize songs for a musical, or write German conversations. She and I were the same size, so I could wear one of her oh-so-cute outfits to classes the next day, thrilled with how fashionable I looked.

  During my years at Luther North, the racial change in West Garfield Park continued until it was nearly complete. Returning home to the West Side from Peggy’s, I walked two blocks from her house to Pulaski, where I boarded a southbound bus, watching the neighborhoods grow progressively poorer as we bumped along: more currency exchanges with giant yellow signs, more trash in the streets, more bars on the corner, more paint-starved houses, more wan and worried faces. The ethnicity of the people changed, too, first to Hispanic, then Hispanic and black, and finally all black several blocks north of my street, Washington, where Dad always waited at the bus stop to walk me home after dark.

  CHAPTER 14: The Long Goodbyes

  Dad sleeping on train to Ft. Worth, Texas, January 24, 1956.

  1950–51

  At the start of 1950, Dad was settling into a watershed period of his life: a new house, a new baby, and a new job traveling to never-visited states. Taken together, these life-altering changes were probably his inspiration to start a diary on January 1, 1950, the beginning of the twentieth century’s second half. He could look back someday and recall his thoughts and experiences as they occurred—not through the distorting lens of foggy memory. He had no idea what insights, joy, and sadness his diary entries would bring to me so many decades later.

  Dad’s diary and the letters between him and Mom during his travels create for me a rising scrim on the set and drama of our lives. The diary entries are a direct link to Dad’s internal thoughts. The letters expose their raw loneliness and longing for one another, Dad’s arduous life on the road, and Mom’s exhaustive accounts of managing alone at home.

  Besides taking care of tenants, the building, and family finances, Mom also worked part-time as a bookkeeper. All of this was on top of what was considered a woman’s job— keeping house in an era when every dinner was made from scratch, every dish was washed and dried by hand, laundry was squeezed one piece at a time through the washing machine wringer, and clothes were hung on a line to dry outside during the summer or in the damp basement during the winter. The mostly cotton clothes of the period demanded hours of weekly ironing.

  None of these chores, not even caring for little children, appealed to her. “I never liked women’s work,” Mom often said. “It’s so repetitive. I like men’s work—projects where you can see progress.” Mom became increasingly dependent on live-in Grandma K for housework and daily childcare, but her presence came with an emotional cost.

  If my parents had wanted a crystal ball to see what future challenges lay in store, they needed only to look at the events during the first week of January of 1950. On New Year’s Day, Grandma K had a paranoid breakdown, raising her fist to attack Mom and stopped only by Dad’s calming intervention. The next day, one of the roomers in our own flat lolled drunk in his bedroom, soaking the sheets and mattress with a profuse nosebleed. This had all occurred just before Dad had to leave for a week in Ohio. Then he’d be home for less than two weeks before his next trip.

  The whole family clustered around the front door on January 22, waiting for Dad’s NBFU colleague to pick him up for the long drive to Austin, Texas. I was ten months old and Paul was three—both too young to comprehend how long a twenty-one-day absence would be. But Mom would feel it acutely. Dad’s coworker pulled his Studebaker up to the curb as our family exchanged hugs and kisses and “I’ll miss you. I love you.”

  Dad pushed open the outer glass door and walked down the concrete steps into the cold, gray Chicago day. Smiling, Dad waved back at us from inside the car, but a hollow must have settled under his ribs.

  Their first evening in Austin, the men sat around an outdoor table at a local tavern, drinking beer in eighty-degree weather, gentle breezes caressing their winter-worn cheeks. Dad wrote to Mom:

  I can hardly believe we’re here to work. It’s like a vacation paid for. I give thanks to God every day for the blessing of this job. I know it’s not easy for you sometimes to take care of everything, and I sure want you to know that I think of it and appreciate … what a good soldier you are. Few women, very few indeed, can compare with you. I miss you and the kiddies so much.

  It wasn’t long before any notion that he was on a paid vacation was knocked out of Dad’s head. The temperature dropped to fifty degrees the day after the engineers’ arrival, and the work became a relentless grind. Wistful longings fill my parents’ letters to each other. From Dad: “I love you so much. I miss snuggling up to you. I’m tired of sleeping alone and getting no kiss good night.”

  From Mom:

  Home is not the same without you. Paul needs his daddy. On cold nights, I take Paul close; I’m not used to sleeping alone. Poor you, with no one to snuggle. I feel like I’m a widow and the kids are “orfinks.” You’re gone so long. We miss you so much.

  Dad got back to Chicago on February 10. He was home for three weeks before leaving for Beaumont, Texas, on March 1, and returning a month later. Our lives became a frantic rhythm of Dad’s travel for up to three or four weeks at a time, sometimes longer. When home, he wrote up reports at the office during the day. Every weekend and evening, well past midnight, he stripped woodwork, painted, scrubbed, and varnished.

  As 1950 went by, Dad traveled to Ohio, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. I stood at the back door, calling for him, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” My one-year-old self couldn’t comprehend his disappearance. I lifted the lid of the pink wicker clothes hamper in our bathroom, hoping to find him there. When we heard the bell ring upon his return, I ran to greet him on my clumsy toddler legs, stumbling with my heavy cloth diaper dragging me down. I pushed myself off the floor with both hands to race to the front hallway. Looking way up, I saw his smiling face, framed by the door window, arriving like a big present.

  When Dad’s travels were close enough to Chicago, he came home for weekends, scrunching himself into a coach seat on a Friday overnight train and settling his wide hat over his eyes. Jostled by the rocking and endless clickety-clack of iron wheels rolling over rails, he slept only fitfully, arriving home to nonstop work on the house. He hadn’t known he’d be traveling six months of the year when he’d committed to renovate the two-flat, but he’d do it all anyway.

  After two sixteen-hour days of physical work, he rode a Sunday night train back to the target city, arriving bleary-eyed on Monday morning. Images of wood and walls and paint were replaced with mind-blurring city maps, numbers, and calculations—no slowdown allowed. His father’s boast, “When I was younger, no one could work me tired”; his mother’s refrain, “Sei Selbstständig!” (“Be self-sufficient!”)— each surely played like an admonishment in his subconscious. Working through exhaustion was expected.

  A lifelong achiever, Mom drove herself, too. During the day, she dove into remodeling projects. It was nine thirty or later, after putting Paul and me to bed, racing through our prayers with the speed of an auctioneer, before she could start on the business of the building—noting every expense on her neatly laid-out lined green ledger sheets, paying bills, balancing the checkbook, organizing her figures year-round in anticipation of income-tax seas
on.

  By September of 1950, after Dad’s first year of travel, Mom’s nerves were frayed. “Lil is crabby for some unknown reason,” Dad wrote. “As usual, I didn’t participate in lengthening an argument, which irked her to no end and she began to cry.”

  I was eighteen months old at the time of this scene, probably sleeping peacefully in my crib. I only learned of these early conflicts, which they hid masterfully from us kids, through Dad’s diary and their letters.

  Dad’s words “crabby for some unknown reason” tell me that he apparently didn’t discern that Mom was becoming ever more resentful of his traveling job, which, just twelve months earlier, she had extolled as “a wonderful opportunity,” encouraging him to do all he could “to excel” at the work.

  But neither had the skills to resolve their differences. Dad had learned early in childhood to skirt conflict with his overbearing mother—better to say nothing than to fan the embers of acrimony. Mom, raised by a volatile and combative mother, was tenacious and wanted a fight. When Dad wouldn’t participate, she cried in frustration. What did Dad do then? Did he attempt to hold her close and kiss her? If so, did she turn away with more accusations or try to talk?

  They couldn’t get down to the essence of the problem, which was that the strain of living apart for weeks at a time was taking its toll on their marriage. Because of Mom’s overachieving competence, Dad never questioned that, even without his presence half the year, she could handle it all: manage the building along with the quirks and stress of three tenants living with our family in the same apartment, and another tenant in the first-floor flat; care for two little children; handle all the financial details of which he had little, if any, understanding. Of course, Mom pushed herself, too—taking on the additional work of sanding, painting, and varnishing.