C Hribal - The Company Car

And then our father was allowed to play. Billy Ray King, anxious to get his daughter off and married (she wasn’t getting any less pregnant while she waited in the wings), wanted our father to perform sans his polka and swing band. “Not enough time,” he said during the break, but Alan Pickett overrode him, saying simply, commandingly, “Let them,” and so Benny, Bernie, Louie, Ernie, and Charlie took seats with the studio orchestra, and our father strapped on his accordion, and when they came back from commercial Alan Pickett, this time with a flourish appropriate to the moment, said, “Take it away, Wally Czabek and the Cicero Velvetones!”

And take it away they did. It must have been something to see. Our father skinny, sweating under the klieg lights, singing his lungs out. The accordion a huge black-and-pearl box strapped to his chest. He looked like he was stepping backward under its load. He was not yet the behemoth he would become, a three-hundred-and-fifteen-pound sagging walrus with a great belly hanging over his boxer shorts like a blunt-faced dead fish as he comes into the kitchen in the morning in a ratty mustard-colored robe, scratching himself in the groin, his fingers working through the not quite closed fly of those boxers while he waits for our mother to thrust a cup of coffee under his nose, which will cause him to open up the slits of his eyes and to stop, briefly, his tugging and scratching and rearranging of body parts while the smile of a coffee addict lights up his face.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let us remember him as he was in those early photos, a gaunt young man with a hawklike face and an ungainly instrument strapped to his chest. There he was, all one hundred and forty-seven pounds of him, the klieg lights beating down, sweat beading across his already receding hairline and trickling down his forehead. It is our father’s one shining moment of fame, and he is not about to let them take that from him.

Let the other couple, the producer’s pregnant daughter and her beau, be the “lucky” hundredth couple. Let them be showered with balloons, confetti, and toasted with champagne. Let our parents be the good sports, humiliating themselves good-naturedly on TV for a pittance, saluted as the ninty-ninth couple to get married on the program and then forced to watch this other couple, Billy Ray King’s knocked-up daughter and her beau, get proclaimed the “Lucky Hundredth” and get showered with a thousand dollars cash, a Poconos honeymoon, a dozen place settings of Wedgwood china, a new TV, a Zenith hi-fi, and a brand-new, hot-off-the-presses-from-Detroit, Michigan, Chrysler Imperial. For right now our father, patronized, condescended to, smirked at, the soldier boy with the accordion who’ll “entertain” the audience, is playing and singing his heart out.

And he is great. The band plays “In the Mood” and “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and our father sings “Night and Day” and “As Time Goes By” and follows that with “Ghost Riders in the Sky” in this powerful, haunting, vibrating tenor that brings down the house. Every time Billy Ray King tries to step in and stop our father, Alan Pickett thrusts a forearm across his chest and stops him. “Let him go,” Pickett says. “It’s the least you can do, you sorry son of a bitch.” And let him go they did.

Frankly, I’m not sure they could have gotten him off the stage if they wanted to. He was already in the service, about to be shipped off to Korea. He could die before impregnating his bride, for chrissakes, and he was going to sing his goddamn songs if it killed him.

And the whole while he was performing our mother was beside herself with joy. By the time he and the Cicero Velvetones closed with “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”—performed as a sing-along with the audience—Wally was a hit. A bona fide, ears-ringing-with-applause, standing-ovation-from-the-audience hit.

Alan Pickett did one more nice thing for our parents when Wally and his band were through. He took our parents aside, thrust a hundred dollars at Wally, and said, “Beat it. Get started on your honeymoon. You don’t need to stick around for the rest of this travesty.”

“But we’re supposed to be there at the end.” Our mother had seen the show to make sure she knew what was expected. “We’re supposed to be presented again, at the end of the show.”

“Do you really want to be around when this particular show ends?” asked Pickett.

“But Billy Ray King—”

“Billy Ray King is history,” said Alan Pickett. “Fuck Billy Ray King.”

Our mother blushed, but she shook Pickett’s hand when he offered it, and then he kissed her on the cheek, and shook our father’s hand, and got our parents and their friends out a side door while Billy Ray King was still fussing over his daughter. Our father started to say thanks to Alan Pickett, but Pickett waved him off. “You were great,” said Alan Pickett. “You were probably the greatest guest this sorry-ass show has ever seen, and you got screwed. I’m sorry. I can’t make that up to you, but don’t worry about His Highness. I can handle Billy Ray King.”

And then our parents were outside, in the cold March evening, in downtown Chicago. A brisk breeze was blowing off the lake, and there were flurries twinkling in the streetlights.

“Where are we going?” asked Benny Wilkerson.

Our father waved his gift certificate and the five twenties given him by Alan Pickett. “To the Sheridan Hotel,” said our father. “For one hell of a dinner.”

Walter Charles Xavier Czabek (Xavier was his confirmation name, given him the afternoon of his faux wedding to our mother) and Susan Marie Caroline Hluberstead were joined in holy and legal matrimony on the second to last Friday in Lent at Holy Redeemer of Angels Church on Chicago’s Near North Side. They got married before God, before a priest, before their parents and friends, a day after they had honeymooned at the Sheridan Hotel, unaware of the sham that had been committed against them by Billy Ray King and an actor named Joseph Clintsworth, who later played a judge on both Gunsmoke and Bonanza (which once caused our mother to yell out, “There’s the bastard who married us!” when he stepped off a carriage that had pulled up outside the Ponderosa). The bride on this particular Friday was giddier than a bride in Lent ought to be, but then how many brides show up for their church weddings just hours removed from a tumultuous and satisfying wedding night and wedding morning (this was 1952, remember), already initiated into the rites of connubial bliss, already a man’s consummated bride, already, most likely, pregnant for eight hours or so?

Perhaps it was not so unusual. Perhaps it was a Korean War thing, just as a decade previous it had been a Second World War thing. Lots of couples were having quickie weddings prior to the husband’s shipping out, the friends in attendance with their university books stacked on the pews next to them—a wedding, then Chem 101. It’s just our parents got married on TV first, and exuberantly consummated their marriage a day early. As Billy Ray King might observe, So what? (It is testimony to our mother’s discretion and sense of propriety that she would not tell us the complete story of their false wedding until most of us were grown and had children of our own.) After their own quickie church wedding, after what our mother came to call their “real” marriage, the bride and groom had finger sandwiches and coffee in the church basement with their parents and friends, and then they left in a borrowed car for a weekend-long honeymoon in Madison, Wisconsin, the Terraplane being too unreliable for such an important mission.

Back then Madison, Wisconsin, was not much. There were the lakes, Mendota and Monona, a few supper clubs, a few lodges, some craftspeople scattered about in cottages. The university was just beginning to be packed with soldiers in Quonset huts. Having saved the world and made it safe for democracy, they were pretty eager themselves for the white-collar union card that a diploma represented. Our father, squiring our mother about the lakes, looking at the bare trees and the lake homes and the ducks huddled in the reeds, kept driving by those Quonset huts as though they were a magnet. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like,” our father said. “We could be living in one of those. You think you’re ready for that?”