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  It is little wonder that she began depending increasingly on Grandma K for help, either oblivious to, or ignoring, the tension and dangers that Grandma K brought into the household. Mom seemed unaware that Dad’s strategic interventions prevented Grandma K from seriously hurting his wife.

  They didn’t have Oprah or Doctor Phil or the now-ubiquitous concept of couple’s therapy or thousands of magazine articles to shed light on conflict resolution. They were both stuck with their own past experiences and personalities, and no guidance.

  At the end of 1950, we moved down to the first floor, but again, my parents rented out two of the three bedrooms to get ahead of their debt. Mom and Dad took the back bedroom, just off the kitchen, and tucked my crib along one wall. Paul and Grandma K slept in the dining room, through which the roomers walked to get to the only bathroom, a couple steps from my parents’ bedroom, where Mom would sleep alone when Dad traveled.

  Dad’s plan was to transform the second-floor flat into two separate spaces. He hired a carpenter to build walls in the front two-thirds of the second-floor apartment, creating a total of five furnished “sleeping rooms,” each to be rented to a single man, all sharing one bathroom, European pension– style. No women were allowed, as that would be unseemly.

  Dad would install a locked door between the sleeping rooms and the second floor’s back end, which would be remodeled into a furnished one-bedroom apartment. After these conversions, only the basement wouldn’t be generating income and adding to the family’s financial security.

  Dad’s vision was to keep the back two-thirds of the basement for his workshop, furnace, and coal room. At the front end, he’d create three furnished, studio-like apartments with a kitchen on one side and a living room/bedroom with a sofa bed on the other. As with the roomers, the three basement tenants would share a single bathroom down the hall. The rent for each would be fifteen dollars per week. If all were occupied, my parents would gross about $2,300 a year. Combined with the rent from the five second-floor rooms and back apartment, Dad’s NBFU salary would be more than doubled. But a loan of about $6,000–$7,000, almost 50 percent of the building’s initial cost, was needed to finance the construction.

  One problem niggled at Dad’s plan. Chicago building code disallowed creating residential units in any space two feet or more below grade, and our basement was two feet below grade. He met with a contractor, Krenwinkle, on New Year’s Day of 1951, while Mom lay in bed, nursing a hangover. The contractor brushed aside the building code issue. “We’ll just fix it,” he said. In 1950s Chicago, the common wisdom was that only a fool would let a little thing like a proper permit get in the way of construction. Everyone knew building inspectors had their hands out.

  Dad was scheduled to leave for Oklahoma City the next day, and he wanted the work to get started while he was gone. But coming to an agreement with the contractor without Mom’s explicit approval was a strategic error. A rigid rule follower, Mom was adamantly opposed to proceeding without a permit.

  After kissing Mom, Paul, and me goodbye on January 2, Dad walked out the door into a pouring rain, the neighborhood enveloped in a veil of gloom. Puddles reflecting a leaden sky hugged the curbs. Unable to hail a cab, he took two buses to Union Station, and climbed onto a train jammed with post-holiday travelers. Dad slept a scant four hours before starting work the next day.

  On January 5, a special delivery letter arrived for him from Mom. After two opening paragraphs of niceties, she got to the point: “This basement deal has me all upset.” She laid out her objections: “I don’t want to invest $6,000 without a permit. If he can’t get a permit, we shouldn’t work with Krenwinkle. What do you think?”

  Dad fumed to his diary. “That’s just great. Here I am, eight hundred miles away, and she says, ‘What do you think?’ When I’m gone, she goes behind my back and cancels all my actions.” He called her long-distance, and they talked for twenty minutes. His stomach sank at the cost of the phone call: eight dollars—half a day’s pay!

  Letters flew back and forth, one arriving every two days via airmail. Back in Chicago, the contractor told Mom that she was “unnecessarily concerned.” Mom was not mollified, worried the project could be shut down and they’d lose their four years of savings for the down payment, and besides: “I’m hesitant about adding more tasks to my list and having no one at hand to help half the time. This place is so much more work than you realize.” She included a multipage rundown of all the chores she had completed during his absence.

  Dad wrote calm, reasonable letters in response to Mom’s, but he vented to his diary. “After all the work and preparation and approved loan, she does this. What’s wrong with her intelligence anyway?” He reassured her that the apartments would be no work: “Once construction is complete, they’ll bring in forty-five dollars per week for no time on your end.” Mom argued persuasively that such thinking was a pipe dream.

  The idea of no work was delusional on Dad’s part. Advertising and showing the apartments, cleaning the bathroom weekly, resolving tenant conflicts, keeping up with repairs, tidying up after a tenant left, collecting and recording the rent, performing additional income-tax work, and more: all of these were Mom’s responsibilities.

  Despite the conflict, they still had tender words for each other. Dad wrote:

  Dear Lil,

  Here it is the beginning of the fourth week that I’m away from home, and it seems like ten years since I’ve been with you… . Eating in restaurants and sleeping alone is not all it’s cracked up to be. I miss you and the kiddies so much… . I love you. I love you. I love you. Give Paul and Linda a big hug and a squeeze for me and consider yourself thoroughly kissed and loved.

  All my love, Fred

  And crossing in the mail, from Mom:

  Dear Fred,

  Your January trip always seems the very longest in the whole year. I can’t wait till you come back. These next three weeks will seem like forever.

  Love, Lil

  By the time Dad returned home, he had been gone for six full weeks, from January 20 to the second week of March— the worst part of the winter.

  CHAPTER 15: Travelin’ Man

  Mom and Dad in happy times, Caruso’s restaurant, June 1958.

  1951–52

  Somehow Dad persuaded Mom to move ahead with the basement apartments in the winter of 1951. I have no idea how he pulled this off, given the strong arguments Mom made against the plan. I believe she didn’t want him morose and angry with her—because she still loved him. I know this from photos of the era: the flirtatious looks they gave each other; the broad, happy smiles of a couple in love.

  Even as a toddler, I knew my parents were in love. I saw it from my crib, tucked into the corner of my parents’ bedroom. One morning, I pushed up from sleep to stand, my hands gripping the back of the crib. My parents were sitting on the edge of their double bed, naked from the waist up, both in their underpants. Mom’s dark, curly hair was rumpled. With an adult understanding, I now know they probably had been quietly making love just before they heard me stir. They were smiling up at me when whimsical Dad initiated a simple real-life metaphor to entertain me. He pressed one of Mom’s nipples and said, “Bing bong!” He then looked to me with an impish grin. I jumped up and down, squealing in delight.

  Mom pressed Dad’s nipple. “Bing bong,” she repeated in a singsongy voice. Leaping up and down even more frenetically, I screamed out, “More! More!” Mom threw back her head, laughing at my reaction. Back and forth it went, until they probably had to move on with their day. I’m sure they never imagined such a young child would remember the scene. I think I recall it vividly because, even in that brief moment, their joy with each other, and with their little girl, enveloped me in the secure sense that I was in a loving home and had nothing to fear.

  When Krenwinkle showed up with the agreement to remodel the basement, Mom studied it for half an hour. Surely with a lump in her throat and a deep sigh, she added her signature to Dad’s. But a new crisis was ta
king hold. That very afternoon, strep throat raced through the family, requiring multiple doctor home visits to administer penicillin shots. Panic undoubtedly edged Dad’s gut. He was leaving for Shreveport, Louisiana, the next day.

  On the morning of March 6, 1951, Dad kissed Mom’s hot, flushed face farewell, promising that his parents or his brother, Will, who all lived together within a block, would take care of shoveling coal into the furnace until she was better. Despite their proximity, Dad’s parents offered little help or support to my mother as she struggled to manage without her husband. Grandma Gartz’s response to any complaints Mom made of her burdens was patronizing and predictable: “I made it. You will, too.”

  Until I found Grandma Gartz’s World War II letter to Ebner, I couldn’t understand her cold and distant attitude to us, but her cruel words exposed her animosity toward Mom, right from the get-go. Grudgingly, Dad’s parents agreed to take on the furnace while everyone in the house burned with fever.

  In his letters from Shreveport, Dad exhorted Mom: “Don’t do anything that’s not necessary. Hire out the wash and ironing. Don’t burn the candle at both ends. Go to bed by ten thirty. When I get home, I’ll help with the shopping.”

  Dad’s absence not only wore on Mom but also stressed out us children, especially Paul. He began acting out, defying my parents’ requests, or yelling at them to “Shut up!” Mom’s response, borne out of frustration and well learned at the hands of her “Mama,” Grandma K, was to give him a “good licking” as she called it, again and again.

  “He’s an emotional child,” Dad wrote to Mom, “and can only be reached through emotion.” But Mom was on the home front alone, and not inclined to listen to advice from several hundred miles away.

  I was simply born into the new order of things. Even as a toddler, I never expected my mother to entertain me, perhaps another reason why the “bing bong” game was so memorable. I invented imaginary friends with exotic names—Boozlebottom, Kukulook, and Zirah—who took me on adventures to magical lands. I recall Mom as a whirling blur, zipping through the house, moving from one project to the next, seldom able to give me her full attention beyond the basics of good mothering. When I was sick, she laid me on the dining-room couch and sat beside me, dipping a cloth over and over into cool alcohol-water, wiping my hot skin to bring down my fever. I never felt ignored or unloved by Mom, but I realize now, as a mother myself, that she had little time to truly get to know or understand me the way Dad would, despite his absences.

  After more than a year of traveling, Dad realized that his coworkers liked to spend most evenings hanging out at bars, drinking the night away, which Dad found both boring and a waste of money. Instead, he preferred to pass the time by himself.

  He wrote poetry, hooked rugs, and took up needlework. In Texas, Dad bought two little red felt vests, one for Paul and one for me. On the back of each he sewed our names, and on the front he embroidered western scenes—cacti, horses, split-rail fences, cowboy hats, and lassos. I wore the vest every day after he gave it to me, galloping on horseback through imaginary high chaparral, a landscape I picked up from TV westerns. On one trip around this time, he purchased a large embroidery pattern of Psalm 23 as a gift for Mom. Every Sunday while he was away from home, sometimes until one in the morning, he cross-stitched the words and flowery decorations.

  When Dad arrived home on May 4, Mom greeted him in a foul mood. “I’m shouldering all the responsibilities for this remodel alone!” she cried out, breaking down into sobs. They talked into the night. But no matter what reassuring words Dad could offer, they were stuck with a $7,500 loan and needed to finish and rent those basement apartments to pay it off. Mom’s bitterness continued for days after his return. He took note:

  Poor gal is still all down in the mouth. She’s resentful against the building, the basement apartments, and me for wanting them. I know it’s a lot of work, but it will be nice when they’re done. I just keep quiet and let her talk. No point in trying to reason with her when she’s in this frame of mind.

  Unable to change the reality, Dad let Mom blow off steam. Yet when I read his words, I also sense that he believed Mom would eventually just snap out of it, that he didn’t truly comprehend the intense stress she suffered. Mom’s goal-oriented nature meant she took on much more work than necessary, but she had argued vehemently against the basement remodel and had agreed only to please Dad—and now she was left holding the proverbial bag. Perhaps Dad believed he just had to weather Mom’s “moods” and all would be fine.

  It was a serious miscalculation.

  CHAPTER 16: Wanna Trade Places?

  1952

  Despite my father’s efforts to come home every possible weekend, Mom was cracking under the strain of his long absences. In June, the whole family went out for dinner to celebrate Grandpa Gartz’s sixty-fourth birthday. Dad looked at Mom across the table and saw a wife hardly recognizable from the ebullient, cheerful woman he had married. Her face was drawn and exhausted, with an unhealthy pallor. She had lost weight.

  Back at home, all the inner turmoil Dad had seen in Mom’s face poured out in her bitter words: “I’m sick of all your traveling.” Knowing Dad, he must have tried to console her, but Mom was having none of it. “You’re not part of the family!” she spat out. “You’re never here. I really don’t see why all the wives of the National Board engineers don’t just get a divorce. They certainly have the grounds for it! None of them have any husbands!”

  Dad wrote no condemnation of Mom in his diary, other than to record her words and note them as “spiteful.” He said nothing in return. A counterargument would have only increased my mother’s ire. I feel for Mom’s predicament, but I also understand Dad’s hurt and bewilderment at her vindictive reproach against his work for the National Board, when she had wholeheartedly supported the position. Hadn’t she written him, “Do all you can to excel at this job”? Hadn’t she called the NBFU offer a “wonderful opportunity”? Weren’t his travels supporting the family? Didn’t he come home every possible weekend to be with the family and work to exhaustion on the house?

  Except for a couple of mentions in Dad’s earliest letters about seeking work without travel, none of Dad’s or Mom’s letters, or Dad’s diary, reveal that Mom was pressuring him to look for a different position. Instead, she made lists of projects for him to start “at seven o’clock, right after dinner,” allowing him no time to think, much less start a job search.

  It’s clear from the letters and diary that Dad’s travel was undermining my parents’ relationship, so why didn’t they make a no-traveling job their highest priority? Dad’s diary reveals the most plausible answer. He recorded multiple incidents involving his motherin-law, but an event he wrote down in detail on July 4, 1952, when I was three, is an exemplar.

  Dad was in the basement when he heard Grandma K’s hysterical voice piercing through the kitchen floorboards. He dashed up the gangway steps, around the porch, up the back stairs, and into the kitchen where he saw Grandma shouting, jabbing her finger at Mom, whose face was folding, on the cusp of tears. The refrigerator door stood agape. “Who took my pills? Who? I put them in the icebox, and now they’re gone.”

  Grandma glared at Dad, her eyes “fierce with hate and anger.” She screeched, “You! You took them. You are to blame. There is always something missing whenever you set foot into this house. We have peace when you’re gone!”

  Dad spoke levelly. “Please don’t scream in my house.”

  “Your house? Your house?” Grandma shouted, her anger electrifying the air. “This is not your house. It’s mine and Lillian’s. We worked for it. Not you!”

  That says it all. In Grandma K’s warped mind, with Dad gone for weeks at a time, he was the interloper in the household.

  Paul yelled at Grandma K, “Keep quiet!”

  “Leave Mommy alone!” I cried out, my hands over my ears at all the screaming.

  They searched the icebox, finally finding the pills in the vegetable bin. “You put them t
here,” Grandma screamed at Dad, “so you can put me in the crazy house again!”

  As her mother’s agitation and accusations escalated, Mom stood by helplessly, sobbing. She recognized that Grandma K was exhibiting “all the symptoms of 1946 & ’49, when she was confined to a mental hospital in each case,” Dad wrote.

  Dad knew he had to take control and calm his motherin-law before she spiraled into a total frenzy, so he embraced her. “Look, we don’t want you in any hospital,” Dad said. “We want you here.” It was a strategic gesture on Dad’s part. I know nothing could have been further from his true feelings. She pulled away and shuffled to the living room, where she stared out the window at passing cars.

  A vicious cycle had evolved—a perfect catch-22. Dad’s long absences and the work of the rooming house made Mom reliant on her mother for childcare and housework. Mom’s insistence that her psychotic mother live with us made home an unwelcome place for Dad. Until I read Dad’s diaries and Mom’s accounts of incidents like this one, I hadn’t realized— whether I’d suppressed the memories or was simply too young to remember—the toxic effect Grandma K’s presence had on our family life. I now believe Dad probably would have sought a Chicago-based job if he hadn’t been subjected to Grandma K’s diatribes at home.

  The day after Grandma’s attack against Dad, he drove the family up to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for a day of swimming and splashing in its cool waters. He spent all day Sunday on house projects. At around ten o’clock at night, he grabbed a cab to the Greyhound bus depot, then tossed and turned on another miserable overnight ride back to Detroit.

  Less than a week after Grandma K’s attack on Dad, he received from Mom what he described in his diary as a “nasty letter.” I found the letter among their correspondence. In it, Mom made no comment of Grandma K’s cruel and delusional accusation against Dad—that he was an unwelcome intruder in his own home. Mom didn’t acknowledge his calming intervention, as she stood by helplessly and her little children shouted in distress. Among other details, she wrote: