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