Billy preparing to leave for Seattle, 1974.
That September of 1972, I stared at the blank walls of my corner classroom, light pouring in from a wall of windows, an expanse of trees and trimmed grass across the street. In just two weeks, this room would hold twenty-seven eleven-year-olds, the children of educated, achievement-oriented, and mostly wealthy parents. Winnetka teachers were expected to be creative, to individualize lessons, to engage students in their learning. Fear crawled from my chest to my brain. My only experience had been the previous year of teaching fourth grade in a Chicago public school, where I shared one class-room’s teaching duties with another MAT student.
That year, we had far exceeded the expectations of the working-class parents. Instead of dividing up the responsibilities, we divided up the class into small groups to maximize each kid’s learning. With no school music program, we led the students in weekly songfests, accompanied by my partner’s guitar, as well as organized an all-school assembly and, later, a science fair.
I asked Dad to bring his boa constrictor, Lucifer. Engaging his usual flair for showmanship, he pulled the snake’s six-foot length out of a burlap bag to a chorus of oohs and aahs and fake shrieks by some of the girls. After holding the snake above his head and wrapping it around his neck, Dad moved slowly down each aisle of desks, allowing the kids to feel the snake’s scaly skin and muscular coils, to see up close its reptilian, tawny, vertically slit eyes as he explained its habits and habitat. Feeding the boa was not in the lesson plan.
After placing Lucifer back into the sack and knotting the top, Dad again walked among the desks, holding in the palm of his hand five hairless, sightless, day-old baby rats, their tiny pulsing bodies virtually transparent. “Co-ol! Co-ol!” declared one boy, as he rocked back and forth in his chair.
But despite these successes in Chicago, I worried if I could be creative enough for the demanding Winnetka parents. Panic fired up my neurons, and plans began falling into place. First I had to make the room cozy and welcoming. I turned to Dad and his junk. He rented a trailer, loading it with a worn but usable couch, a large carpet remnant, a couple of bookcases, an easel, and two glass tanks—one for fish, the other for reptiles. Out of these cast-offs, a reading corner emerged. I stacked books on the cases’ shelves, and prepared folders with questions the kids could answer about each book to get reading credit.
“Don’t smile till Christmas,” urged one book on maintaining classroom order. I couldn’t do that for even the first hour of my first day. As I got comfortable in my role, the whimsy I’d absorbed from Dad popped out. To the kids’ delight, I repeatedly sat on the whoopee cushion they placed on my chair, arm-wrestled the boys, and joined all the kids at recess in “maul-ball,” a rendition of football. One parent told me at the open house, “When my friends ask what kind of teacher you are, I tell them you’re a cross between Mary Poppins and a drill sergeant!”
Just as I started teaching, Bill bought a three-flat with a fire-gutted coach house at the alley. It was located on Chicago’s Near North Side, in a transitional neighborhood named DePaul, after the nearby university. An old Italian immigrant owned the corner grocery store, and fireworks shot off well into the night on Puerto Rican Independence Day. The community was a little dicey, with dog poop marring the sidewalks fronting small, weary apartment buildings, but its proximity to downtown Chicago and the university made its future bright.
Following our upbringing, we became landlords. I was in my element—eager to jump in and help with everything from showing apartments to patching drywall. Bill tackled the coach house, devouring how-to books on HVAC and electrical, hiring other tradesmen for the skilled work he couldn’t learn quickly. Dashing home from his public defender job, he started in on the construction, working late into the night and devoting every weekend to the renovation. At the end of my teaching day, I came home to a cacophony of banging hammers or the high screech of bending metal—Bill was screwing together and installing metal HVAC ducts or calibrating a special tool to bend electrical pipes into just the right angle to traverse the inner walls.
Once drywall was up, I took over taping and plastering the seams, painting walls, and grouting tile, skills I had learned working with my parents. My efforts gave Mom another tactic for imploring me to get married. “You have no security or guarantee for the work you’re doing,” she said. “Don’t you see, without that ‘piece of paper,’ as you call it, you have no legal rights—and all your efforts are for nothing!” I understood her point, but I also knew Bill would never leave me.
We moved into the finished coach house in July of 1973.
One of Mom’s favorite tenants, Mrs. Barlow, was also moving that summer, from the basement of our former home. Mom was especially pleased that Mrs. Barlow cut and watered the grass—and had even planted a garden—unlike many of the neighbors, whose yards were weedy patches of dirt. “It’s an achievement to have everyone’s cooperation,” Mom later wrote. “Patience and politeness win out in the end.”
After admiring the robustly growing collards, mustard greens, and cabbages growing in the backyard, Mom launched into a torrent of complaints. “Today’s youth have no morals,” she bemoaned. “My older son has moved in with a woman, but that’s her mother’s problem. It’s my daughter that bothers me. She’s living with a man she’s not married to, and won’t listen to logic!”
Mrs. Barlow said, “Sense cannot be taught. It has to be bought.” She spoke of her own children. “I ain’t gonna try to change them so long as they leave me alone. If they wants to listen to my advice, they can, but I ain’t forcing them. Like my daddy said, ‘If you makes your bed hard, you sleep hard.’”
“I really like my tenants’ down-to-earth philosophy,” Mom told me more than once. “They have a maxim for everything, and they’re so true!” Mom probably had nodded in agreement at Mrs. Barlow’s comments, and then, just as quickly, had forgotten them. The opinions of others blew away like chaff in the wind, leaving only the original kernels of Mom’s own ideas settled in the basket of her mind.
When Mrs. Barlow moved, her apartment had been left in “immaculate condition,” Mom wrote. “Our tenants surely take excellent care of everything. My faith has been restored.” Nothing could have bolstered Mom’s pride more. Her and Dad’s nurturing attention had borne fruit. “My success on the West Side is the greatest achievement of my life!” she wrote in her diary.
Mom found the admiration and approval she so craved only in the suffering, beaten-down West Side. One tenant told her, “I envy you, Mrs. Gartz. You know how to do everything.”
When Mom explained in great detail how leases worked to Lonnie Branch, he said, “You’re a good salesman, Mrs. Gartz.” (Apparently, he was as well. A few years after he moved from my parents’ building, Branch was arrested as one of the city’s biggest heroin dealers.)54
Another tenant called my mother “glamour girl.” Mom loved her tenants, despite the risky neighborhood. “I never feel as alive as I do on the West Side,” she said. “And the tenants are all so nice to me.” One had given her a gift of flower vases. “I get respect from my tenants, not from your father.” She ignored or overlooked the fifteen years he had respected psychotic Grandma K’s presence in our home—and the multiple times he had intervened, saving Mom from her mother’s physical, sometimes life-threatening, attacks.
After Bill and I had settled into the now-finished coach house, we invited Mom and Dad to see its transformation from a burned-out shell to a bright, two-floor, two-bathroom living space. We gave them a tour, made a gourmet dinner, and then took them to the movies. In a brief moment of clarity, Mom wrote after the evening, “I accept their relationship because he is good to her, and they are happy. I’m happy to have them in Chicago, with Paul in New Jersey, and Billy going away.”
The previous four years, Billy had been the only kid still living in my parents’ house, during which he had spent two years as a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. He had developed coping skills to survive in a household that seemed like a set for the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Mom screamed. Dad responded by tossing out subtle zingers, escalating her fury. When Mom went on a rampage, Billy sat down at the piano, drowning out the cacophony of anger and bitterness by banging out the theme from the movie Exodus—appropriate since he had been planning his own escape. He and Paul had taken a cross-country trip together in 1970, including a stop in Seattle, where Billy fell in love with the city. He decided to move there for his junior year and complete his degree at the University of Washington.
After saving money from part-time jobs, he bought a 1967 Buick LeSabre for $750. He’d drive to Seattle, move onto campus, and start a new life in the Pacific Northwest, close to the great outdoors and far from Chicago. Neither of my parents questioned whether their nineteen-year-old son could safely drive a used car solo the two thousand miles from Chicago to Seattle. They took their children’s self-sufficiency for granted. We, too, were selbstständig.
On Monday, September 10, 1973, the Buick was packed. Crying, Billy hugged Mom. “Goodbye, my little Billy,” she told him.
“Don’t leave me alone with her,” Dad whispered when Billy embraced him.
“It’s time for me to go, Dad,” he said, pulling away from the hug, but keeping his hands on Dad’s shoulders. “You two will be all right. Just be nice to each other.” He gave Dad a final slap on the arm, walked down the front steps, climbed into his car—with every available space packed to the brim—and headed west.
Contemplating her youngest child’s departure, Mom wrote in her diary:
It seems right in a way—almost as though everything is falling into place like a giant jigsaw puzzle. It sounds insane, but I feel “I am the chosen one” by God for some purpose. Because it’s all too strange.
After all we’ve been through, suddenly everything is getting straightened out, after eight years.
Eight years earlier, in 1965, they had bought the North Keeler house and acquired the six-flat, more than doubling their workload. They had expended relentless effort and planning during that time to get it all done, so it was not sudden. And “the chosen one”? Mom had said of Dad, “He lives in his own little world of delusion,” but Mom had her own delusions. Raised as a child to feel special, and now, living in an insular microcosm, with little time to read, she had neither witnessed firsthand nor learned of the extraordinary accomplishments of striving, hardworking people throughout the wider world. She viewed her determination and success in a riot-riven community as so exceptional, there was only one explanation: she must have been chosen by God.
Perhaps she had been “chosen” to spiral down into an ever-more bitter and frustrated mental state. The last buffer between her and Dad left with Billy. She had cultivated few real friends over the years, and her tedious bragging about her accomplishments drew scorn (or possibly envy) rather than praise. “Lil, you’re nothing but a drudge,” said one of her supposed friends after Mom expounded on her work.
The constant recipient of her ire, Dad tuned her out. “I’m an executive secretary,” she cried at him in frustration, “and I’m scrubbing hallways on the West Side!”
“So what?” he retorted. “I’m a chemical engineer.”