C Hribal - The Company Car

If you asked, our mother would admit to none of this. She rarely admitted to our father that she had ever been depressed at all. She was a gamer, our mother was, and once she got over a funk she refused to admit she’d been in one. “I was just a little out of sorts.” It was amazing to watch her, as we grew up, determined always to make the best of things, regardless of how she felt. She rewrote history as she went, removing the rubble from how she used to feel so the new edifice could exist quite prettily on its own terms.

One wonders: Was her weeping on Route 66 a giddiness that her loneliness was behind her, that she was now embarking on a new and real life with our father, one in which she would have, finally, a partner? Or was it that, for all her sadness, she had finally gotten used to being alone, and had our father not returned she’d have been an anomaly, certainly, a single mother in the fifties, but she also would have been her own woman, and she could have carved out a life for herself as she saw fit, and not simply tagged along behind our father’s cockamamie schemes, the wedding on television being only the first? And instead she saw the future—the arrival of which she could not have waited for impatiently enough—suddenly closed to her, rendered familiar, expected, ordinary. Par for the course, our father would say about expected outcomes, be they good or ill. How our mother had once longed to be anything but par for the course!

She was better by the time they got to Chicago. Somewhere along that long drive back, with fruit by her feet, she readjusted herself to the presence of our father. Readjusted herself to the new realities. She was going to start over on new turf, and once she got used to this new fact, which is to say, to our father’s way of thinking, she’d be fine.

It was, however, a long drive. One that took them past every landmark they’d seen on the way out, only they were seeing them in reverse, as though they had slipped into their rearview mirror and were seeing things from their mirror’s perspective. “It’s déjà vu all over again,” Yogi Berra once announced. Exactly. And just as she had on the drive out, our mother threw up on every cactus and cornstalk they passed.

The fifties don’t make a whole lot of sense to anybody who didn’t live through the preceding decade. For my siblings and me, that the lot of us were born in a dozen-year span starting nine months after our parents’ nuptials—seven of us spat out like so many watermelon seeds—seems unfathomable. (Watermelon seeds—our father’s view, not our mother’s. “Watermelon seeds, Wally? Try giving birth to a water melon. ”)

Besides having us, they were also getting a house built. After his discharge our father was out of work. A lieutenant JG with a B.S. in biology and skill with an accordion was qualified for what? He was returning home to find out. Only Grandma and Grandpa Cza-Cza wouldn’t have him. Or rather, they wouldn’t have his wife and her children, as though our mother had picked us up somewhere, like a cold. They’d just bought a house in Morton Grove, a three-bedroom ranch, and there simply wouldn’t be enough room for five more people—I was due any day—while our father got on his feet. Our father was welcome, provided he came alone. So our parents moved into Nomi and Artu’s two-bedroom apartment on the Near North Side above a Thom McAn shoe store. While our father looked for work, Nomi and Susan Marie took the kids in a double stroller on long walks—to the Lincoln Park Zoo, to Lake Shore Park and Washington Square, to the river, to Navy Pier.

Our mother, as much as she was able, was getting her life back. It was not so different from her life in San Diego—Lake Michigan subbing for the Pacific Ocean, with more wind and snow and cold—but she had a companion now to whom she could talk about movies and plays and music. She had once shared all that with our father, but then he’d gone away, and his leaves had been so infrequent and intense—they literally launched themselves into bed upon his return and emerged only days later, stunned, disheveled, in need of orange juice and vitamins—that she’d lost it. Now she was getting it back. She felt good. Better than she had in years.

It helped, too, that she was over her nausea with me. Her belly was a fine round thing. Our father would come home in the evenings, usually after “a quick stop with the boys,” and pat our mother’s belly—this was the first birth he’d be around for—and our mother would beam. She ignored the raised eyebrows of her parents, who disapproved of our father’s frequent nights out. Our father’s old bandmates gathered at a downtown watering hole after spending their days selling insurance, or shuffling paper, or looking in people’s mouths. The Navy had trained Louie Hwasko as a dentist, and now he had a private practice, which he was moving to Caledonia, out near Rockford. He’d bought five acres of land, on which he was building a dream house for his wife, who amazingly enough, was our mother’s friend Helen Federstam. They’d gotten married the year previous, and our father and Louie now spent nights at the Deluxe, talking about their new occupations as country gentlemen and husbands. Our mother made allowances for this—he was just out of the military, just reunited with friends and family, he was entitled to blow off a little steam. Mostly, though, she liked having him around, liked the proprietary pat on her belly.

One of the things they liked to do in the evening was look at their house plans. Our father had found work as a detail man for Dinkwater-Adams, a pharmaceutical company based in Dinkwater Park, New Jersey. His job was to travel all over greater Chicagoland, calling on doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, and pitch the Dinkwater-Adams line of pharmaceuticals and hospital supplies. And while the company certainly wanted him to work the downtown and Near North Side, they saw the future in the suburbs.

Which was fine with our parents. They’d been dreaming of owning their own house since they first started taking the trolley out to Butterfield and York Road. Elmhurst was perfect for them, a new suburb recently carved out of the prairie and one of the last stops on the trolley line. In picking this hamlet they thought—like thousands of other young couples making the postwar move to the suburbs—that Walter would take the trolley to work. The interstate would soon put an end to that, though, and our father would instead spend all his time on the highway.

Now the house was becoming a reality. A loan for the down payment from Nomi and Artu, a VA loan, and some help from Ernie Klapatek, who’d gone into construction with his father. It would be finished in January. Our father often drove out there, eating his lunch and drinking coffee from a thermos as he watched the house take shape before his eyes.

Charlie Podgazem, Dad’s old drummer, was now working for Ernie Klapatek. He was in charge at the site. Sometimes he’d come over to our father’s car, take out a hip flask, and add “a little taste” to our father’s coffee. “You’re in good hands, Czabek,” Charlie told him, and our father nodded agreement. It was nice knowing you were in good hands. Then our father came home after stopping for “a quick one with Louie” and repeated this slogan to our mother. Our mother had heard it before. Benny Wilkerson, the Cicero Velvetones’ bass player, sold for Allstate now. Their homeowner’s and life insurance would be handled by him, which pissed off Bernie Zanoni, the clarinet player, who sold for Prudential. But you couldn’t please everybody, could you? “At least let me do the car insurance,” Bernie said. “Can’t,” said our father. “It’s a company car. Company insurance. Some outfit out of New Jersey.” “Criminy,” said Bernie. Our father said he understood, it was just Benny got to him first.