Enough of this moroseness, but perhaps it conveys better than anything else, how much I miss you and the emptiness of being without you.
I struggled to reconcile the enormity of these people’s young love and optimism with the behavior of the couple who’d raised me. Believing that they’d never been in love, as I had for so long, was much easier than knowing that they had been. Accepting this gave me something entirely new, and unexpected, to mourn. Falling out of love, or waking up in the middle of a life that you didn’t want, was one of the most painful things I could imagine.
My mother thought she had found someone as full of feeling as she was, and who offered her a love she’d wanted her entire life. That love and my dad’s defiance of his parents were more powerful than any oath.
When they returned from Europe, my father moved to Boston and my mother went back to Chicago. They wrote to each other constantly. My dad didn’t talk of his new job or coworkers, just of his longing.
It’s a cold and rainy night in dear old Boston…I miss my precious darling. We could be sitting here together—huddling warmly so that the chilling draft from that slightly open window would not be noticed—and, perhaps, even without a word, we would gaze out together into the darkness and hear and see the sounds.
My mother’s responses were just as affectionate, but also anxious. She talked about wedding expenses—$70 for flowers, $300 for liquor: “You have to figure four [hundred] drinks for one hundred people”—and the stress of applying to four different graduate programs while also battling a heavy academic load. “The exam question is unbelievable. I’ve spent all night on Aristotle and haven’t gained any headway.” She returned often to the expense of the wedding, but even more often to her feelings for her fiancé.
How I would love to lose myself into you now. Instead, I must to Plato and Aristotle. There is NO JUSTICE IN THIS SORRY WORLD…A honeymoon doesn’t matter as long as you will be there to squeeze my hand and we’re together…like we should rightly be now…
My father’s parents continued to oppose the wedding as it approached. When my father didn’t bend to their wishes, they told him they wouldn’t come. When this didn’t change his mind, his mother finally gave in and said she’d attend. Dymtro was livid and declared that she couldn’t go, and she told him that he couldn’t tell her what to do. Her decision was a necessary sacrifice; her duty to her son was as strong as the one to her husband.
She tried and tried to convince him to go as well, and when he wouldn’t agree, she sought help. She called Ruslan and begged him to convince Dymtro to attend. Ruslan agreed because he knew how badly my dad wanted his parents there. Irene made Dymtro drive to Chicago the night before the wedding, and they met Ruslan outside of the dorm where my father’s bachelor party was being thrown.
Ruslan was impressed with Irene’s determination. “All this stuff your grandmother did,” he told me, “standing up to her husband, driving all that way, it must have been very unpleasant.”
He got into their car and spent an hour talking to, and sometimes arguing with, Dymtro while Irene listened. Dymtro said his son was insensitive. Acting out both sides of the conversation to me, Ruslan said, “What do you mean insensitive? He loves her. What’s sensitivity got to do with it?”
Ruslan knew he wouldn’t succeed if he made flowery statements about America being a melting pot or love’s power to transcend differences. He told me that he understood Dymtro’s resistance. “It was the remnants of this nastiness that happened to him in his early years; he transferred it to her,” he told me. “Every day, the Poles caused you grief. They stopped you, asked for your identity card. They wouldn’t let you go to the university because only twenty-five Ukrainians were allowed to attend, and they already had their twenty-five.” Dymtro wasn’t upset because my mom “did some wrong to him, or she did some wrong to his son. It was the accumulation of old injustices.”
“I told him, ‘This is uncomfortable, the Ukrainian/Polish thing. I agree with you.” But he said it didn’t matter if they agreed or what they thought, because “this is what George wants to do, and he is going to do it, no matter what.”
The wedding was in less than twenty-four hours. My father had made his choice; now Dymtro had to do the same. Before returning to the party, Ruslan looked at him and said, “If you don’t come, you’re going to lose your son.”
His appeal worked. My dad’s parents made it to at least part of the wedding. Some people, including my mother, remembered them only attending the reception; others remember seeing them at both the ceremony and the reception. Lana told me that she had no idea; all she remembered was being worried about looking fat in her bridesmaid dress.
The ceremony was at the University of Chicago’s Bond Chapel. Guests sat on the bride’s or the groom’s side, per tradition, which meant the crowd was split between Poles and Ukrainians. Strangers did not introduce themselves or ask who they were related to. Even the people who already knew each other didn’t chat. “The tension between the Polish side and the Ukrainian side was intense,” Chrissy explained. “You expected them to go after each other with swords.”
The wedding was conducted by the chapel’s priest and an Orthodox cantor who spoke Ukrainian. The reception was held at a modest faculty club. Guests were serenaded by a strolling violinist as they ate traditional Polish food and later danced to a raucous polka band.
When my parents danced, guests thought they fit together perfectly and moved as if they were a single unit. When my mom grew tired, my dad picked her up, kissed her, and “carried her around like a prize.”
After the wedding, my parents moved into the small apartment my father had rented for them in the Back Bay. He liked the gas lamps that lit the streets at night, the neighborhood’s grand brownstones, and that it was close enough to the financial district that he could walk to work.
He’d established a simple life while he waited for my mother. He put on one of his two suits in the morning, spent the day learning about loans and credit reports, then returned and made himself a modest meal and drank a beer or two.
Though she had been excited to get married, my mother wasn’t prepared to be a wife. She sent her former college roommates a letter detailing a “day in the life of a young newly” that demonstrated just how different she was from the “budding balaboosta” she thought she was supposed to be:
Boy, married life is ultra cool…sleeping till noon…reading the paper in bed till 1 p.m. And ah, the lovely afternoons…lying around drinking beer and reading my darling husband’s old Playboy magazines…Sometimes, however, ugh, I have to get dressed and go to the grocery to buy more beer, frozen pizzas, and TV dinners…gourmet foods.
She included a sample of the nightly conversations that she had with her husband.
“What the hell did you do today…this goddamn apartment looks just like the day we moved in.”
“But darling, you know I haven’t been able to find a maid yet, and besides, I get all worn out, looking thru the yellow pages…have another beer and shut up.”
Since we haven’t bought a television yet, our delightful conversation, moistened with Schlitz, continues till the wee hours and then we rollllll into bed and…AH, begins another delightful day, around noon or so.
She acknowledged that she probably wouldn’t be able to maintain this languorous state forever. “Things may change ten years from now, when we have beautiful, talented, and intelligent little ones…I may have to get up a bit earlier or even have to cope with a nanny.”
My mother’s visions of marriage were gauzy and romantic, a formalized version of the life she and my father had had in Chicago and Europe. They’d spend their days discussing books, reading aloud to each other from the newspaper, and wandering through museums; their nights, watching foreign movies or debating politics as they drank in bed.
As time went on, though, my father had less time
and attention for her. His training program kept him away until seven. He brought work home because he wanted to get ahead of his peers and because he enjoyed it. He expected my mother to have something for them to eat when he returned, and that their home would keep becoming more of one as she unpacked and decorated. He didn’t want her to be a housewife, but since she wasn’t yet working, he thought she could do something. She did very little. Dodging domestic responsibilities could have been a feminist protest or laziness. Or, it could have been a way to deal with the frustration she felt upon realizing she now had to compete for my father’s attention.
Boston was conservative, not nearly as vibrant and diverse as Chicago. A friend of my mother’s told me that although both of my parents were outsiders in that somewhat provincial city, my father blended in. “That gray suit,” she said, “fit him like armor.” He was an expert at adjusting to new environments. He understood how he was expected to behave at the bank and knew how far he was allowed to deviate. He chose to keep his beard, but otherwise looked the part.
My mother, however, “did not fit the image of the Boston woman.” She had the education but not the pedigree. She didn’t want to play the part of a banker’s wife or be a homemaker who volunteered at museums. She enrolled at Northeastern for her master’s in political science, and found work as an editor for environmental and antiwar publications.
At parties with my dad’s coworkers and their wives, she was one of the few women working or in school, let alone doing both. She rounded out his somewhat two-dimensional work persona by charming his superiors with wit and compliments and ingratiating herself with hostesses.
Some of my father’s Ukrainian buddies from Chicago and Baltimore, including Ruslan and Natasha, ended up in Boston as well, and soon he was part of a tight group of young Ukrainian academics and professionals. “It was a totally different community from the kinds that usually formed around churches,” Natasha explained. “It was more intellectual.”
Their group worked to bolster Ukraine’s international profile and broaden the conversation about its history and current problems. They hosted talks with scholars, read the latest books about the country and the region, and discussed ongoing problems with human rights and corruption. They wanted to inspire other Ukrainians to be proud of who they were and become involved in establishing its place in the world. Their efforts contributed to the establishment of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 1973, which they supported through a smaller organization that conducted fund-raising, published articles, and promoted its efforts. “We all revolved around the institute,” Natasha said.
My mother wasn’t interested in being a part of this group, probably because my father’s friends referred to her as “the Polish girl.” “The whole community knew your dad married a Polish woman,” Natasha said one afternoon as we chatted in her wide, leafy backyard. “It was as if he married an American. It was negative.”
“He had married an American,” I said. “I know why his parents were upset, why did his friends care? They were young intellectuals, and it was the late sixties!”
“You were supposed to marry your own kind. You were almost excluded from the community if you married out.” She sighed. “I married out. It didn’t matter that Joe was at Harvard with the rest of them.” Her husband was Italian American, and like my mother, he wasn’t very welcome.
My mother and Natasha became friends, and my parents often went on double dates with Natasha and Joe to the beach or dinner. Their friendship worked, Natasha said, because Joe was also an outsider. Neither my mother nor Joe had to worry about the conversation falling into Ukrainian, which often happened when the group was larger. Despite their friendship, Natasha said my mother “didn’t have time” for the group as a whole, and believed that was because “she hated Ukrainians.”
After being rejected by my father’s parents, my mother was probably frustrated to find that the same nationalism ran through his peer group. She wasn’t Ukrainian, but otherwise she had a lot in common with them. I don’t know if my father ever encouraged her to study Ukrainian so she could assimilate, or if she considered studying the language after finding herself in the middle of yet another discussion that had switched from her language to his. She may not have been very interested in ingratiating herself with people who seemed determined to reject her. Her decision not to learn Ukrainian or find another way into this group, and my father’s failure to involve her, meant she was excluded from a big part of his life that would soon become even more meaningful.
In 1971, my father was offered the position of the vice president and director of corporate finance for the bank’s London branch. My parents were excited to live abroad; my mother was also probably excited to get away from the Ukrainians. Even more thrilling was the six-month leave that my father had negotiated. When he asked his supervisors for the time off, they told him no one had ever done such a thing, but my father was happy to be their guinea pig. He’d work for a few months in London, make sure things were in order, and create protocols for how things would run while he was gone. He and my mother had discussed traveling through the Middle East and Asia when they were in Chicago, and they wanted to do it before they had children or my father’s work made such a trip impossible.
They began their trip in Denmark, where they purchased a used, cream-colored Land Rover that took them the more than twelve thousand miles across India, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and finally Nepal. I’d heard about this trip as a child, though not many of its details. I learned more about it from the letters my mother sent Sylvia once she was back in London.
My mind is still full of a million impressions of proud Turks, Afghanis glorious in full beards and turbans, Arabs in flowing robes, people bathing in the holy Ganges, graceful sari’d women sliding through the countryside. The mastery of architecture and ceramics of Iran, the stirring biblical cities of Iraq, the marvels of Kashmir, the incomparable glory of the Himalayas.
She was particularly moved by Benares, describing the Indian city as
a prayer where one is surrounded visually by temples, shrines, and one hears the sound of sacred bells and holy chanting. Oh the serenity of Buddhists at Sarnath, where Buddha preached his first sermon and where he received enlightenment.
My mother also shared their inevitable lows. Their car broke down in rural Turkey on “what had to be the worst road in the world—we had two flat tires in one night and due to all the bumps, our Land Rover lost all its screws.” My mother stayed with the car while my father walked to “a teeny village in the middle of nowhere” and found a man to look at the car. He said the problem was the carburetor, and he offered to fix it with wire so they could get to a real town with a mechanic. When the car jack my parents had bought in Denmark failed, the man gathered a group of locals who “formed a human jack” and held the car up while he patched the faulty part. He insisted they take the rest of the wire in case the carburetor gave them more trouble. He “refused to accept any kind of payment. He pointed at Allah above, and then to his heart.”
They had a different sort of car trouble in India, where my mother said the roads were a “nightmare” because they were jammed with “people, bulls, cows, oxen carts, bicycles.” She claimed she lost twenty pounds during this portion of the trip—which meant she would have weighed eighty—“not to food but to tension.” She found driving in India so stressful that she often wasn’t able to eat at the end of the day.
They met a young Dutch couple, Theo and Annemarie, making a similar journey when they got stuck at the Iran–Afghanistan border, which had closed early for Ramadan. They parked their vehicles on the side of the road and shared bread, cheese, and cookies as they swapped stories and boiled water for tea over a low kerosene flame. In the morning, they hugged and planned to meet again and spend Christmas together in Kathmandu.
Kathmandu was my parents’ final stop. They set up an informal bazaar in front of their small hotel to
sell their camping equipment, clothes they no longer needed, and their battered truck.
Theo and Annemarie arrived, and they celebrated Christmas together as planned. My father bought a small pine tree and put it in the corner of their hotel room and topped it with a star he’d fashioned from gold paper. They ate ham from tins for dinner and drank too much Nepalese beer. A few days later, they gave away what they couldn’t sell and flew to Europe. They remained close with the Dutch couple, whom I met many times when they traveled to America with their daughters. When I spoke with them about the trip, they said my parents were both incredibly brave, but that my mother seemed a bit “traumatized.” They had the impression that she’d started the trip enthusiastically, but that my father pushed her limits of comfort and safety and she was eager to return to Europe.
My Dead Parents Page 18
