Dad easily accepted my apartment decision. Even Mom calmed down a bit after she got used to the idea of my own apartment, especially when she realized the tangible benefit to her: an opportunity to unload scads of Dad’s compulsive saving. He felt vindicated that his prediction had come true: “Someday, we’ll need this stuff!”
He and I walked down into the basement, where a dim yellowish glow was cast by fluorescent strips Dad had hung from the ceiling with thick chains. Off a tall shelf, he hoisted plastic blue and red milk crates, packed with an assortment of wooden spoons, pots, pans, bowls, dishes, and other table-ware. Holding his treasures, he grinned. “Here’s all you’ll need for your kitchen.” It was.
After poking around to find mops, brooms, dustpans, and an upright vacuum cleaner, he drew out one wooden drawer after another from his self-constructed tool bench and found picture-hanging supplies, flashlights, and baby-food jars of screws and nails.
Mom had her own stash of extras. She gathered towels, pillows, and several sets of weary but perfectly usable bed sheets she’d saved from the rented bedrooms of the former second-floor rooming house. In the basement of the six-flat, Dad and I picked up a couple of bedframes and mattresses, a medley of lamps, chairs, a Formica table for the kitchen—even pictures for our walls.
After loading up our station wagon with all my apartment goods that could fit, Dad smiled proudly at his handiwork: the legs of a dresser, a floor lamp, and an oak desk stuck out the rear of the station wagon, with red cloths, for safety, flying off the ends of each. He closed the rear-hatch door as far as possible, then secured it with rope tied to the bumper. Pillows and bedding scrunched into large garbage bags blocked the side windows. Later, Dad would bring us a cast-off couch he’d found who knows where.
Katy and I had settled into our apartment on Paulina Street in a Chicago neighborhood on the border of Evanston, affectionately known as “The Jungle.” Because Evanston was dry (home of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union), Paulina was lined with bars and liquor stores. Within two blocks were ill-kept multistory apartment buildings, Laundromats, and a popular Mexican restaurant, La Choza, that served delicious and inexpensive food. The Jungle came by its name because of alcohol-driven visitors, crime, and prostitution, but I knew how to watch my back.
The lower-end neighborhood meant Katy and I each paid only eighty dollars a month for a two-bedroom, third-floor flat with a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room. Unlike my parents, who gave tenants one freshly painted room every year, Heil and Heil Realty said they’d provide paint, but the labor was up to us. I painted my room Dresden blue.
I started my secretary job seated right behind the secretarial-pool supervisor, Libby, a woman of about sixty, who rolled her chair up to mine, invading my body space. I drew back a little, trying not to be obvious. Her upper lip twitched, and she repeatedly touched her graying curls as she talked, her eyes squinting behind narrow, out-of-date glasses. “Arrive well before nine o’clock, when the office opens. Never be late. Your duty is to be fresh and ready for work every day. Address all your managers by ‘Mr.’ and their last names. Every letter that goes out must be error-free. No erasures. Start over, but of course, you’ll make few mistakes.” Uh-oh. Trouble. I always made some error.
“Do you have any questions?” She raised a penciled-in, narrow eyebrow.
“Um, no. I understand.”
“Good. Well, welcome to Arthur Andersen!” Visibly pleased, she gave me a tight-lipped smile, and turned to her desk.
That first afternoon on the job, my shorthand five years rusty, one of the five managers I worked for called me on the phone. “This is Mr. Robinson. Is this the new girl?”
“Hi. Yes, my name is Linda.”
“Okay. Take a letter.” Robinson rattled off sentence after sentence as I scrambled to keep up, panic freezing my brain and fingers. After his curt introduction, I was afraid to ask him to repeat anything. The other four managers were pleasant. They at least said “Good morning” after buzzing me into their offices, usually to take dictation or to bring them coffee. Robinson never even looked up when I brought the morning mail to his desk.
By early spring, I was ready for my next move. I’d always loved little kids, so I applied to Northwestern’s Master of Arts in Teaching program and was accepted. In May of 1971, I gave Libby notice. Her rheumy blue eyes bored into mine, her red lips twitching as if writhing insects crawled inside them. “Think of what you’re giving up! There’s a glut of teachers out there. You won’t find a job.”
“I’m pretty sure I will.” Two weeks later, I bade her goodbye.
With student loans and government programs that supported teacher training, I could pay for the master’s program myself. I knew my parents couldn’t help out. Despite their nonstop work, and the incessant repairs to keep their West Side buildings in perfect condition, they were barely making ends meet. The previous November, they had spent $4,000 on a new six-flat heating plant and rewiring one of the apartments.
In the spring of 1971, as I was planning my move to NU, their checking account was overdrawn, and Mom had to borrow eighty dollars from our next-door neighbor. In March, she wrote in her diary, “Quite broke this month.” It was as if they were paying for the privilege of running themselves into the ground in the increasingly dangerous neighborhood.
Accustomed to their kids finding their own way, Dad and Mom seemed only mildly interested that I was pursuing a master’s degree. Dad was enjoying his second youth at his Fireman’s Fund job. Mom’s biggest concern was my marital status. After all, at twenty-two, I was done with college (and Bill, at twenty-six, with law school). We had been dating six years, so, in her mind, marriage was next.
Bill and I had been together for more than five years, yet neither of us was ready for marriage. In the 1960s–’70s zeitgeist, my generation was scrutinizing every institution, including marriage, for meaning. Marriage was “just a piece of paper” and didn’t confer love or commitment. In 1970, one-third of all marriages ended in divorce,53 so what kind of “commitment” was that? And did we want to be tied down so young? According to some feminists, marriage was just another means for men to control women. Instead of making marriage my ultimate goal, I focused on building a career.
I knew Bill was my guy. He had proven his devotion to me over and over. Dad had always encouraged his kids to think independently. So we did.
One day that summer, I was working on lesson plans for my student-teaching job when Mom called me.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Linda. I’ve called to tell you something that’s been bugging me for a long time now. You and Bill have an immoral relationship. You’ve disgraced me!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” My throat contracted, raising the pitch of my voice.
“If you each have your own apartment, something immoral is going on!” she yelled. “Why aren’t you getting married?”
“Mom, this is outrageous! What the hell? You’re calling me to tell me this nonsense? We’re not ready to get married. Someday we probably will, but we’re not ready yet.”
“And I’ll tell you another thing. I’ll be damned if I’ll spend three thousand dollars on a wedding and then never be invited over afterward!”
“Mom, you need to calm down. I’m just trying to prepare for my classes.”
“Well, you’ve chosen your path. Now we’ll see where it leads!”
She slammed down the phone. Mom had always liked Bill. She often commented on how polite, witty, or smart he was. They frequently engaged in philosophical arguments—about politics, Communism, religion, and morality. It was the fact that we weren’t getting married that set her off on rants like the phone call.
Mom used the same approach to control Dad’s behavior. She screamed, “You son of a bitch!” when he brought stuff home. She threw it out the back door, or into his study (Paul’s former bedroom), then wrote everything she had said and done in her diary. It became her ersatz psychologist—but with no feedback to encourage reflection, she remained stuck in the same loop of recriminations.
Not privy to their personal world, I often broke down in tears over their rows. “I just want you both to be happy,” I sobbed to whichever one I was with. Dad embraced me, saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Mom insisted, “How can we get along if he won’t discuss anything?”
When I asked Dad why he wouldn’t talk things over with Mom, he said, “There’s no point. If I express an opinion, I’m one hundred percent certain the discussion won’t go my way. If I keep quiet, there’s a fifty-fifty chance I’ll get what I want.”
On occasion, Mom acknowledged Dad’s relentless toil in a diary entry. After a broken pipe in the backyard required digging up a deep trench, Mom noted: “Fred works hard! He moved all the dirt after the plumbers dug a trench. He has unlimited energy.”
But the bulk of her journaling from this era reveals a bitter, unhappy woman. When I first read her entries, three to five decades after she wrote them, I was plunged right back into the heart-thumping whirlwind of her tortured psyche and unfettered fury. Some sentences are followed by multiple bold exclamation points. Her handwriting is dark and agitated, the words embossed onto two or three of the following pages.
Unlike Grandma K, my mom didn’t suffer from psychosis, but like her mother, she became a screeching maniac, ranting accusations against Dad, me, and to a lesser extent, my two brothers. As men, the rules of sexuality didn’t apply to them. Paul was living with a woman in New Jersey, but Mom said, “That’s her mother’s problem.”
Older now than Mom was when she wrote her angry entries, I’m torn in my reaction to her diary rants. In one moment, I’m in tears over her frustration and plight; in the next, dumbstruck by her repetitive focus on her own certitudes and suffering, her lack of perspective toward young adults: “This is the most selfish generation. I can’t believe Linda walked out on me.” Reading Mom’s diary entry, I instantly thought of that judgmental letter Grandma Gartz had written to Dad’s younger brother, Ebner, in 1943, in which she’d declared, “Lil is only for herself.”
In the early seventies, I was too young to comprehend the complex torments and quotidian pressures that could gnaw away at a couple’s happiness during thirty years of marriage. Add in Ebner’s untimely death; thirteen years of Dad’s travel while Mom coped with the rooming house alone; fifteen years of dealing with Grandma K’s madness; Dad’s parents’ callous treatment of our family; the riots that undermined my parents’ greatest financial investment; and their continued devotion to buildings in a neighborhood tumbling into an abyss of poverty and crime—it’s no wonder their happiness unraveled, leaving behind a ragged trail of torn hopes and frayed dreams.
Mom wrote on July 21, 1971: “All the fun is gone because of the abandonment of moral values.” She was reading newspaper and magazine articles about the sexual revolution and free love with increasing horror and consternation. When a friend mentioned that her divorced daughter’s young son had blurted out, “My mommy is on the pill,” Mom was disgusted. “Unbelievable!” she wrote. Ever since she had found the Norman Vincent Peale Bible passage back in 1965, which had helped her cope with the stressful move from the West Side, she had been “hooked on the power of God,” as she often said. When Jehovah’s Witnesses left copies of their pamphlet, Awake! magazine, in her mailbox, she embraced its ultraconservative message about the Bible, God, and especially sex among youth. The latter, above all, reflected her own views. Sometimes she just picked up on a single phrase and sent me the whole article, obviously without reading it all the way through.
In one such article, a daughter asked her mother what made a good marriage. Mom underlined the sentences on the immorality of premarital sex, but obviously had read no further, skipping the section urging women to bend to the will of their husbands. She also overlooked the full page devoted to the evils of drink, her nightly habit.
I returned the article to her with the anti-drinking and “submissive to husband” paragraphs underlined in red. “Thank you for sending me this article,” I wrote on an enclosed note. “I’ve marked some parts you may have missed, so you’re sure to get its full message.”
Mom never responded, but when I pored through the family archives, I found she had saved my note still attached to the article, on which she had written, “Thank you, Linda!”
Early in 1971, Bill and I dropped by my parents’ house midweek to visit. We were watching television with Dad and Billy in the second-floor family room while Mom sat alone in the kitchen downing whiskey, dragging on Salems, and brooding in her bitter loop of suffering. Her often-expressed dismay at the “new morality” and her diary entries, often the exact same words she said aloud, give me a direct link to her thoughts. They go something like this: “These lousy kids today—how dare they! They use all these dirty words; think it’s just fine to have free sex. All the parents are working their asses off, and the kids are screwing around.”
Her mind twisted, exploding at the gall of today’s young people—thumbing their nose at her values, her generation’s values! It was all too much! She marched up the back stairs and entered the sitting area, where Billy, Bill, Dad, and I were watching television. Shoving her index finger into the air to punctuate each sentence, her face contorted with rage, she shouted at us, “Give me an F! Give me a U! Give me a C! Give me a K! GO TO HELL, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!”
She turned, stomped down the stairs and out the front entry, the door slamming behind her. Our mouths dropped. Dad shook his head in disbelief, then shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the TV. The rest of us looked at each other. “What was that?”
It was just the beginning.