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 mother-in-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 there,” 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 mother-in-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:
My life while you are gone is equivalent to seven days per week of one of your weekends. You will never know or understand the hectic weekdays trying to get things done. No wonder you like your job—just pack up and go and forget the house.
Love,
Lil
P.S. Wanna trade places for a couple months?
In a rare rejoinder, Dad defended himself in a return letter.
Dear Lil,
I don’t think that I have ever failed to recognize or appreciate the excessive amount of responsibility, work, and worry that has, because of my work being away from home, chick, and child, been so unceremoniously heaped upon your shoulders. . . .
I wonder if you would care to “trade places for a couple months?” I wonder if you would care to be several hundreds of miles from home and loved ones, knowing that one or more are sick and there isn’t a damned thing you can do for them.
All you’ll have to do is wait till the survey is over or till the weekend comes so that you can snatch a few moments of normal life together with your family, even though all of that time is gladly spent on home activities, only to arrive back in the field Monday morning, so tired from a lack of a good night’s sleep that you can’t get a decent breath of air till after you’ve had a night’s sleep.
I’m not looking for sympathy. It’s just a little reminder that the hardships of life and livelihood manifest themselves in many forms and are not all one-sided. A trade in places can probably take place with the coming vacation. You and your mother can go someplace for a couple of weeks, and I’ll take care of the house and kids. Enclosed are my last two salary checks. I won’t need them.
Love,
Fred
Mom had plenty of reason to be frustrated at her predicament. Unlike the persistent image of a 1950s housewife, engaged solely in domestic duties, she had a full-time job, managing all the family and business financial details as well as eleven tenants, two living just down the hall, with the bathroom they all shared just steps away from her bedroom door. All of this with her husband gone half the year. Her work nearly doubled the family income. She was a woman ahead of her time, in a society that provided no support for such a dual role.
But what has struck me most in reading the letters and diaries from this era was Mom’s sad inability to recognize Dad’s efforts in containing her mother’s madness. Mom’s relentless and bitter complaints must have pained him even as he strove to demonstrate his devotion to hearth, home, and loved ones.