C Hribal - The Company Car

You see photographs like the ones I’ve described, and you ask yourself, What happened to these people? Did it work out okay for them? You wonder, coming back to yourself, sitting across from a wife to whom you may not be married for much longer, driving up to see the subjects of those photos, How did they start there and wind up here? And where, exactly, is here? And then you think, And what in God’s name are we going to do with them now? Do to them now?

It is, as is often the case, the children who save you. Henry pipes up from the backseat, “So did Grandma and Grandpa get married or what?”

He’s right. Let us get them married, let us let them begin.

“To begin this properly,” I say in my best once-upon-a-time voice, “you must know what a 1934 Hudson Terraplane looks like. Grandpa and Grandma fell in love in the back of one.”

___

The Terraplane was a big black clunky behemoth of a car that was old already when our father came to co-own it with his bandmates in 1948. It had dark green leather jump seats and a hood that tended to flap up like a huge bird’s wing in any kind of wind and then fold over and fall off the car into traffic, as though the bird had been shot and was cartwheeling into the water. It was a car they pushed more than drove, and it was a good thing it was co-owned, since the hood frequently did its popping off act while they were careening down Cermak Road on their way to the Loop for a gig. Whenever the hood did this (and it did so frequently, the hinges holding it in place being rusted through), they had to pile out, four of the six band members, and run into traffic behind the car, lift the heavy and humongous dead bird, run it back to the car, and set the tin casing back into place, the driver or extra band member directing traffic around them. All this performed while they were three sheets to the wind themselves. The car was, however, indestructible. It once went through a solid oak garage door and survived. (This when our father tried to teach our mother to drive. Our mother, indomitable with eager servicemen, was helpless behind the wheel of a car. She never did learn how to drive.) Like most first cars, it used more oil than gas, a typical service stop consisting of twenty-five cent’s worth of gas, a quart of oil, and a refill for the radiator. The Terraplane finally died in 1953, when one of the few bandmates who hadn’t gone to Korea used only water during a winter refill and cracked the block.

It was the second to last car our father owned, and he owned only a sixth of it. It seated five guys plus their equipment, which was why they bought it. Our parents courted in it, smooched in it, fell in love in it. For his wedding, there could be no other vehicle, no other chariot to deliver him to his chosen maiden than that 1934 Hudson Terraplane, the hood of which kept flapping off in the brisk wind off Lake Michigan as he and his bandmates—Louie Hwasko (piano), Bernie Zanoni (clarinet), Benny Wilkerson (bass), Ernie Klapatek (trumpet), and Charlie Podgazem (drums)—howled up Cermak Road toward WILT’s television studio and our father’s date with destiny.

Our mother arrived by bus with her girlfriend, Helen Federstam, who was also her maid of honor. Both were sophomores at DePaul. Helen, nervously chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, asked her, “So, why are you doing this? What, did you fall in love with the accordion?”

A fair enough question. Of the other men our mother had been dating, Helen considered at least two of them superior—at least as musicians—to the accordion-wielding flyweight who was to become our father: a twenty-eight-year-old violinist with the Chicago Symphony and an Irish tenor who also sold insurance. Helen also thought the dark-eyed, jet-haired Italian (the one who wanted to “present” our mother “with many babies”) was “dreamy.” She did not think the hollow-eyed, skinny-limbed young man with receding hair cropped in a military crew cut a suitable match for Susan Marie. But Susan Marie did. Maybe it was the accordion.

She tried to explain this to Helen as they waited for our father and his buddies to show up. She thought it, well, very brave that a five-foot-eight man weighing one hundred and forty-seven pounds would even contemplate strapping that huge box onto his chest, and that he could sing, too, while laboring beneath that device, sing with a full, rich, resonating tenor—that in itself was something. But it was more than that, too. She thought their temperaments suited each other. They wanted the same things, she said, thinking of those trolley rides, those held hands, that prairie giving way to wood-frame houses. “And he isn’t stuck on himself,” she added, thinking of the Italian, the violinist, the tenor–insurance salesman, and others besides, all of whom, she thought, were filled with vanity, who wanted a beautiful young woman solely because her beauty complemented theirs. “He loves me for me,” our mother added, feeling a little defiant and pulling her woolen coat closer to her chest as a stiff March breeze rushed up East Wacker Drive.

Helen rubbed out her cigarette beneath her heel as the Terraplane roared up to the curb. “Suit yourself,” she said, putting on her best meeting-the-guys smile as she added, sotto voce, “Me, I wouldn’t have that surname if you killed me. It sounds like a rock on a garbage can lid, you know what I’m saying?”

The guys had their own story to tell, involving the Terraplane’s hood flying off ten feet in front of a cop directing traffic at the corner of State and Jackson. “It looked like we were performing a Chinese fire drill,” said our father. “He was going to write us up, obstructing traffic, I guess, only he was laughing too hard. The sight of these guys in uniforms and tuxes—”

“And Wally shouting, ‘Please, Officer, I’m getting married!’ ” Louie Hwasko, his best man, added. “That saved us. That Wally, always quick on his feet.”

“I’m sure,” Helen said. “Meanwhile, I’m freezing.”

“Allow me to fix that, little lady,” said Louie, offering his bent elbow and tilting his head to indicate somebody else should get the door. Ernie Klapatek, happy to oblige, stepped into the revolving door and set it in motion. The others followed one at a time except for Louie, who stepped in right behind Helen, and our parents, who tried to glue themselves to each other in the best tradition of the wackily in love but couldn’t because our father was carrying his accordion.

Inside, waiting, was Billy Ray King. Alan Pickett was still in his dressing room. He did not come out until just before the show started, when he would quickly introduce himself to the couple, shake hands, and smile distantly, conserving the wattage of his smile for the moment when the red On Air sign started flashing. Billy Ray King, however, was a worker. He worked the studio audience, he worked the staff, he worked himself, he worked his marrying couples. And Billy Ray King, already dumped to second lead on his own goddamn show, worried that he would be edged out completely by this upstart pretty boy, was in a lather.

“Good, good, you’re in uniform,” he said upon seeing our father in his dress whites. “We got problems.”

“Problems?” asked our mother. She didn’t want to hear about problems. This wedding wasn’t her idea in the first place. She was going along with one of our father’s crazy ideas—a pattern that would continue throughout their marriage, with decidedly mixed results.

“A couple canceled, it was a last-minute thing.” Already Helen and the groomsmen were being taken up an elevator by assistants. Billy Ray King needed to speak to this couple alone.

He leaned in confidentially. “They chose not to get married.”

“Not married on the show?” our mother asked.