by C J Hribal
Which is why our mother loved to tell the story of how they got married. It had “sexy” written all over it.
But before our mother can tell us how Billy Ray King oohed and aahed and drooled and slobbered over that picture of her, like a generation of boys had done over those famous photos of Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall, and Rita Hayworth, our father always jumps in to tell us about the photo taken of him.
It was taken in 1950. He is posing with his foot on the front bumper of a brand-new Chevy Deluxe. The driver’s side door is open. The art nouveau Winged Victory with its feet tethered to the hood looks like it’s going to take flight any minute now. His hat already has. There’s a big grin on his face—the car’s his for the day—and he’s posing in the narrow alley behind his folks’ house in Cicero. There’s a brick garage right behind him, then open space to the street beyond, where an open wood-frame garage yawns in the background. The arresting thing about this photograph is the fedora that’s blowing in the space between the garages.
What amazes me is that grin, a grin he maintained even while his hat was flying off his head. I’d like to think that wide crooked grin reveals something elemental about him. Our father is grinning, he seems ecstatic even, that this miraculous event—a car loaned to him by a friend, his hat dancing away behind him—is happening to him.
When our parents talk about their earlier selves, it does seem like it was a miraculous time—each and every minute of it. But I know that’s not the case, and I wish I had more to go on than the couple of pictures that were used on It’s Your Wedding and another dozen or two that our parents pulled out from time to time. I have them with me now, a tiny pile between me and Dorie, and I would hand them one after another into the backseat, Daddy’s show-and-tell, only Cinderella and Peg Leg Meg have made copies of these and other family photos, and scanned them all for a slide show, which will be shown at tomorrow’s dinner. My kids are more likely to pay attention to that than to me, but I plunge ahead anyway, certain I can’t do justice to what the pictures reveal, and—yes, Woolie—making up what I don’t know but certainly feel.
It’s an act of will as much as it is an act of imagination. Desperate, sure of their boredom, I want them nonetheless to feel the magic of those stories. As disjointed and piecemeal as they were often delivered, those stories still let me believe that, somehow, the world made sense, and if Dorie and I are indeed heading toward Splitsville, then I want our kids to have at least that—a belief that even in dark times the world still makes sense.
Besides telling us over and over again about their wedding, our parents loved to tell us how they had grown up in Chicago. For our father it was Cicero, land of bungalows and savings and loans, and home to Mr. Al Capone. Mr. Al Capone figured largely in our father’s childhood, or at least in his mental landscape of it.
The way our father talked about it, Cicero possessed a certain je ne sais quoi. In the early years of the Depression it was Poles and Czechs—Twenty-second Street was called Dwa-Dwa Avenue—and a smattering of Italians. Our father’s neighborhood boasted a Sokol, some bungalows, rows of two-flats, and not much else. An empty cookie company warehouse lined one end of his alley, with a brick garage behind it. Next door was an empty lot where a house had burned down. Across the street were more empty lots, where our father and his friends went skating. Enter Capone. He gets Cicero’s city hall built. He rehabs buildings. He buys the cookie warehouse and the garage behind it. He buys lots of other buildings. Clubs open—the Paddock Club, where Capone gambled, and the 4811 Club, a no-alcohol social club that always seemed to be jumping. Cicero—still in Cook County but outside the Chicago police department’s jurisdiction—was a wonderful place for Capone. He owned the town. And as long as he was hiring and spending and taxes stayed down, what was the problem?
Another photograph, this one taken at the Divisek School of Music in 1934. Our father, seven years old, is in the lower right hand corner of five rows of stacked students, every one of them swaybacked from an accordion. Eighty-nine of them, plus the teacher, on a stage with a wide gilt proscenium arch behind them. The people on the ends are blurry, as if the rows, with fifteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, fourteen people each, were so long the curvature of the earth had to be figured in as well, and the photographer had failed to consider that. You can tell our father from the sad, serious look on his hawklike face, the disbelieving eyes, and because his name is done in inlaid mother-of-pearl up the front of the accordion: Walter Czabek.
His mother wanted him to be a doctor. She was disappointed when he didn’t become one. She was disappointed when he married our mother. She was disappointed about a great many things, and this must have started early, judging from the look on our father’s face. Whether it was in addition to being a doctor or in preparation for it, she also wanted him to be an entertainer. Hence the lessons at the Divisek School of Music. And once she discovered he had some talent, that his fingers could fly over those keys, his mother shifted into high gear as a stage mother. In addition to the accordion lessons with the personalized accordion, he was given a costume, a stage name, publicity photos. More pictures tell the story: the silver cape, the cadet hat, the military-striped wool pants, and the corded and heavily buttoned tunic with the square-cut collar and braided piping at the cuffs. Our father is smiling shyly, his fingers frozen in place on the accordion’s keys and buttons, and white cursive script across the photograph’s bottom, almost as though the words alone are supporting his feet, proclaims that this is “The Little Bohemian Prince.”
If he escaped his own father’s fate—henpecked, cowed, constantly given his marching orders by his imperious wife—it came down to this: he could sing. He opened his throat and the most marvelous, mellifluous tones escaped from it, first a boyish alto, then a rich, mature tenor. His voice gave him a freedom he would not otherwise have; it took him places—clubs, weddings, bar mitzvahs, band shells, auditoriums—where his mother did not want to go.
But that came later. Let us put him back at the time of the photo from the Divisek School of Music. He is seven. It is February 1934. The Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution has just repealed the Eighteenth, but that hasn’t changed much the way things are run. Liquor licenses have yet to be granted, liquor is still tightly controlled, and Capone, though in jail, is still running hooch in from Canada and northern Wisconsin. Given that nobody was all that crazy about Prohibition in the first place, and given all that Capone had done for Cicero, it is easy to see how the romance and myth of Capone grew, especially if all the shooting was happening someplace else. Even as I’m telling my kids this, I’m lapsing into silence. What do Woolie, Henry, and Sophie know of Al Capone? Their figures of evil are Osama bin Laden and swarthy guys flying into buildings. There’s no romance there, and there never will be. And what do I know of Capone and everything else I’m telling them that I’m piecing together from all those shards given us by our father and mother? I know only what our father told me: in his mind there is a seven-year-old Wally Czabek, with the narrow serious face and haunted eyes, standing in his own backyard. A car comes roaring up his alley and drives full steam ahead into the abandoned cookie warehouse rumored to be owned by Al Capone. A few minutes later the same car, only with different plates, peels out. Seven-year-olds notice things like that. And the drivers of those cars notice seven-year-olds watching them as they speed by. The driver slows down, throws the serious-faced boy a dime. “You didn’t see nuthin’, kid,” the driver says and roars off. Sometimes they exit the other side of the warehouse, and our father runs around front to watch the cars roar by. And they always, always toss him the dime.
“You didn’t see nuthin’, kid, you didn’t see nuthin’.”
Our father played by the rules, but he was fascinated by those who didn’t. His admiration was purchased a dime at a time, and he came to believe that the rules were indeed suspended for those who acted as though the rules didn’t apply. Later, for example, when he was in college, he had a friend in “the syn
dicate.” Eddie Santucci. Our father double-dated with him at the Spring Formal. They were going to the Top Hat, where Eddie “knew some people.” There was a bouncer out front and valet parking. No cover and a show. Eddie and our father arrived with their dates. The best seats were taken. Eddie whispered to the bouncer. The bouncer went front, whispered something to a couple sitting at one of the front tables. The couple moved. Our father never got over that kind of magic. Maybe that’s why he became a company man. He thought things would happen for you if you just aligned yourself with the right people, people who got things done, and you agreed to look the other way.
No question, our father had a romance about Capone. When we were little he’d drive us all across north-central Wisconsin, and as we watched the countryside—fields, woodlands, marsh—roll across our bleary eyes, he would point out all the places where Capone allegedly had stills or hideaways or camps.
“They used the rivers and the lakes for transportation. That’s why all those communities along the Fox and the Wolf River prospered,” our father told us, his voice warming to the task. “They put the coils for the stills inside of silos, and did the cooking at night so the smoke couldn’t be traced.” And we would dutifully stare at the silos and barns and wonder if that was the one, if that was where it all happened. A lot of old money in New London, our father said, was Capone and Baby Face Nelson moonshine money, but nobody wanted to talk about it. “I suppose you can’t blame them,” our father said, “but if it was me, and enough years had passed, I’d say, Heck, sure we ran moonshine for Al Capone. It was a pleasure and an honor.”
I think he felt the same way about the dimes. It was a pleasure and an honor.
What our father liked about Capone was that he was a man who lived large, who remade the world as he saw fit. Our father wanted to do that. He wanted to be one of those people but knew he couldn’t, so instead he moved us to a place near where Capone did business, and regularly took us fishing where Capone fished. “C’est la vie,” our father would say, as though that explained everything, which maybe it did.
Our father believed in clichés. He had scads of them, which he trotted out with great regularity whether they were appropriate to the situation or not. If you hurt yourself: “Well, you know what they do with horses, don’t you?” On asking you to consume whatever noxious food was put in front of you, be it Brussels sprouts or broccoli or, later, beer mixed with tomato juice: “That’ll put hair between your toes.” At the beginning of all family projects, particularly the ill-fated ones: “We shall see what we shall see.” Or “I see, said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw.” If we protested the lunacy of his latest plan to make us rich, he’d say, “Another county heard from” or “No guts, no glory.” On allowance day, which in the fifties and early sixties meant a dime accompanied by a nickel: “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
Our father’s favorite cliché was “A day late and a dollar short.” He said it often, and we came to understand that, although he was frequently both, he was determined to be neither.
That was certainly the case on the day he married. And while he was determined not to be a day late and a dollar short, in some ways he was always that seven-year-old standing in the alley, waiting for his dimes with both hope and awe. And envy.
The danger is, has always been, what hope steeped in envy sours into. Bitterness? Despair? What? “You’re getting ahead of yourself, Em. We all know what he’s like now. Go back to the story of little Wally Czabek, round-eyed in an alley, waiting for his dime. It’s a cuter story.”
But I skip ahead nearly a decade to pick up the story. With Prohibition off, Cicero is booming. The Sokol gets itself a restaurant with a three-tier bar, and its horseshoe auditorium, complete with balcony, mezzanine, and a parquet floor, is used less for cultural events—folk dancing and such—and more for bands. Big bands upstairs, jazz combos in the basement. The Bohemian Prince (he dropped the “little” once he turned fourteen) plays the Sokol and clubs like it three and four nights a week. Everybody winks at his age because there’s a war on. All the men are enlisting, and somebody has to play the damn accordion and sing. Two years later he lies about his age and enlists himself.
Like many seventeen-year-olds in the spring and summer of 1944, our father fought the Battle of Lake Michigan in a Coast Guard cutter. In the spring of 1945 they attack the state of Michigan, landing on the dunes near Holland, Michigan, and charging up the beach—preparation, our father later found out, for an amphibious assault on Japan. The trainers toss equipment up and down the beach, and after the landing craft hit the beach everyone charges out, picking up equipment as they run. It takes a while to figure out why they might be doing this. “It’s like we’re stripping stuff from dead guys,” somebody tells our father. The antlike spots of families picnicking further up the beach make the idea that they could die unlikely. This is America, how could that happen? “They always use the new guys for these landings,” somebody else says. “They figure we ain’t smart enough to know how suicidal the whole damn thing is.” The drill sergeant’s whistle pierces the air. “Again!” he screams. “Hustle, hustle, hustle!” and again they run up the beach, grabbing what they can.
Then peace comes, and our father, like a lot of people, is out of work. It’s hard to believe that six months after the war there might be a depression again, but there is. Littler this time, but still. Our father tries making a go of the band, but it’s pocket money now, not a regular thing, so he goes back to school, courtesy of the government, and meets our mother.
Dorie says, “I’ve always wondered about your mother.” She taps the photo of that woman on the tricycle, the woman in the black fitted velvet dress with the broad shoulders and the arresting cleavage. “How’d she come to be sitting there?” Dorie’s interest is usually tepid at best. She’s heard bits of our mother’s story before: How she was a sickly child, the oldest of what would have been eleven (a brace of miscarriages and eight stillbirths, the final two being twin boys). How she missed a grade and a half from scarlet and rheumatic fever and pneumonia, yet when she finally got to school she skipped another grade and a half. There are only a few surviving photos of our mother from those years, and in them she looks preternaturally old and tiny, like Shirley Temple. What Dorie wants, I think, are the insides of that life, something that only imagination can provide. I could tell her about our grandfather, how Arthur owned a restaurant, which he lost in the Depression, and then owned a shoe store and a candy store, both of which he lost as well, and how he ended up an elevator operator, and how all through this his wife, Naomi, was getting pregnant and losing children, and how, when he’d finally, through Christmas tips and careful investing, reacquired a nest egg, he was approached by the milk shake machine salesman Ray Kroc, an old friend, and was offered to be one of the initial investors in a fast-food enterprise, which he turned down because, after three businesses had gone belly-up on him, he was wary of ever doing that again to his family, especially since he’d have to borrow money for his share of the investment, and how that fast-food business eventually became McDonald’s, but that’s Arthur’s and Naomi’s story, not our mother’s.
But our mother herself? I glance again at that picture of her sitting on a trike in a velvet evening dress. It is 1949, and our mother is working as a secretary for seventy-five dollars a week, taking night courses at DePaul, then scattered throughout the Loop in rented brick office buildings. It is just after the war. A lot of G.I.s have come back from wherever, and they’re getting themselves educated on the G.I. Bill. They’ve learned to talk dirty and to get what they want by speaking plainly. Our mother, seventeen, sometimes dates these twenty-five-year-old ex-servicemen, which frightens the bejesus out of Naomi and Arthur. Their baby!
They need not have worried. Our mother expects to be treated like a lady no matter the age or needs of her prospective dates. Tired of the wolf whistles and the excited sniggering, she takes action against all of them one evening by coming to class ar
med with a book bag full of Hershey’s chocolate bars and nylons and Kools and Lucky cigarettes. She throws open the door and rains these items down on the servicemen’s heads. Then she announces, “There! You might have been able to buy a woman with that over in Italy or France or England or wherever you were, but it won’t work on me here. I already have plenty, thank you.” Then she storms off, cutting class, and forever after, she loved to report, they were courtly and polite and correct, and damn near protective of her coming and going. They gallantly open doors for her, offer to carry her books. They have become boys again, and handsome young men eager to please.
This is the woman I see perched on a tricycle in a form-fitting evening dress and a look in her eyes that would melt ice.
Our father, of course, was one of those boys, though, not having seen action, he was never so forward, and so never rebuked. The picture was taken on their first date. She is wearing black stockings and heels and black gloves, the kind you have to pull off with your teeth. Her dress is clinging to her thighs, she’s sitting on a tricycle, and the curve of her chest is amazing. That’s what always gets me—this sexy young woman posing on a child’s toy with a starred ball at her feet and some Buster Brown shoes running off the photo’s edge behind her. The incongruity of it all. She is young, curvaceous, sexy, beautiful. She seems destined for better things.
Better, maybe, than ending up with the man in the other photo, the man with the hat blowing away behind him, the man who took this picture of our mother. That’s probably what Dorie is thinking; I’ve thought it, too. Yet they married each other. I suppose that’s not so amazing, yet it seems so to me. I’ve known them only in their later incarnations. They no longer grin like idiots at their new albeit borrowed cars, and they wouldn’t think of hitching up a dress and posing on a tricycle. So how did they get that way? And when did they start leaving themselves behind? Did it happen when the photographs changed from black and white to color?
