Home. Now there was a real joke for me. It had been a joke for a few years by then, but really turned into a laugh-a-minute that autumn. My home was a distinctly unmusical one in those halcyon Carter days, in many respects. I was bored to tears with the gooey, synthesized mush Top-40 music had become, and was proud of being the only member of my class that had neither seen "Saturday Night Fever", nor bought its soundtrack. All of a sudden, here came this young bear of a teacher, a real-life human teacher, completely in love with all these dead composers who got talked about and played with openly expressed love, love which flowed right into all of us. And that was it for me. I had become a regular listener to a small, "mom & pop" classical radio station, and went out and bought almost every record Nicolasha played in class, much to the chagrin of my Dad, who had evidently come to the conclusion that a Brink's armored car might actually go to the cemetery with him when he died, because he resented my acquisitiveness, or the impermanent happiness the music gave me, I couldn't tell.
Our eyes met again, and I knew. Nicolasha saw all of this, and let me see something inside of him, whatever it was. I was eight years younger than he was, yet he trusted me, which I thought was pretty cool.
The final bell rang. The rest of my classmates threw in their papers and charged out the door to begin the much-anticipated Turkey Day weekend. I had put the finishing touches on my last sentence and handed it to Nicolasha, who stood near me in the doorway, wishing his students an enjoyable Thanksgiving, a happy holiday, a safe weekend, and a good evening for good measure. I gathered my books and put on my Dad's old pea coat while Nicolasha followed suit with his papers and the KGB-style black leather trench he had worn since the cold weather began, probably the only piece of clothing he owned that was worth more than twenty bucks.
(Nicolasha had two suit jackets to his name, one grey and the other brown, both tweed and fallen on hard times, as well as a couple of identical pairs of tight blue jeans, white button-down shirts, and a few lackluster knit ties, all in earth tones. He never wore a belt, or any other jewelry, and had a single pair of black loafers worn with a series of grey wool socks, all in desperate need of replacement. What did he do with his salary, I used to wonder, gamble?)
"You played that solo really well, Papa Rozh."
"It is one of my favorite Shostakovich melodies. I could not resist." He tucked the violin case under his arm and waited for me to exit before him.
"It sure is sad, though. Are you thinking of home when you listen to it?" I peered at the album cover in Nicolasha's brown leather tote.
"Home?" He handed me the record.
"You know, Russia," noting the album number in my mind.
We walked down the cavernous, nearly empty hallway, past a couple of lower graders, who got patted on their backs and shoulders while they bundled up at their lockers. He remained silent until we got outside, where a few parents waited in their idling cars for their kids. The sky was already beginning to darken, and the cold lake wind hit us hard on the face.
"It certainly feels like Russia here sometimes!" His rich, pleasant voice had only a tiny trace of accent. I went to give the album back to him, but he held up an unlined hand. "You can have that, if you would like. I have a different reading at home."
I smiled happily. "Are you sure? This is really cool. Thanks, Nicolasha."
He put his free arm around my shoulders and gave me a gentle cuddle. "Happy Thanksgiving." My eyes closed with a smile as I leaned into his embrace.
I thanked him again and ran off to catch my southbound commuter train. Up on the thick wooden beams of the platform, I watched Nicolasha walk slowly towards the lake, and waved at him when he turned around to glance at something. A silver double-decked electric train rolled to a halt in front of me. I couldn't see if he waved back.
* * *
I I
A surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The turkey was dry and tepid. The cabbage was strained poorly, the mashed potatoes weren't mashed very well, the stuffing had too much celery in it, and nobody looked twice at the lima beans, not even my mother, who prepared the meal. A completely inconsequential football game between two teams who were already out of the playoffs droned on in the background. Every light in the living room, kitchen, and family room was on, yet, the small dining room in which we struggled through the Thanksgiving meal seemed ill-lit. Certainly, my spirits were.
I think my family was cursed.
My mom, Frederika, was a tall, well-proportioned woman with thick, dramatic brown hair. A real hard case, some cop might have said. As passionate as she was hard, the kind of passion that let the heart and the soul control a life that would otherwise have been regimented and accomplished, passion that remains an anomaly for a pure-bred German.
Her parents gave up a small foundry and the rest of their family in Saxony after Hitler took over. The rest of their relatives died during the war. They moved into a small apartment above a bakery in Roseland, the largely Catholic, multi-ethnic neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago. Her father went to work at the nearby steel mills, and her mother worked in the bakery downstairs. Mom was born a year after that, right there in the bakery. She grew up to be a strong-willed, bright woman, raised by the hard-working women of the bakery. Grandfather died in an accident at the mill when she was ten, but they were able to make it through on the last of their savings and the kindness of the bakery women.
OK. When Mom was downstairs one morning, she heard the women gossiping about one of their neighbors, a Polish laborer with two young boys. The laborer had gotten blind drunk the night before, which had been his wedding anniversary. Mom was intrigued. He was despondent over his wife's death to tuberculosis earlier that year, and confided to the bartender that his younger boy, Simon, wasn't really his, but rather the illegitimate son of his sister from Cracow, who fell in love with a young German Jew refugee. They both died during the war, too. He had been visiting Poland weeks before the invasion, and she gave him her baby to take back to America. My Mom went to school with Alex and Simon, and had a crush on both of them. They were inseparable, but polar opposites: Simon was gregarious and visceral, tall for his age and wiry, with trim, curly brown hair and eyes, while Alex was a shy, artistic, private child, somewhat short and plain-looking. Their bond was baseball, and they attended almost every White Sox game together, first with their father, and then alone, as soon as they were old enough to take the street car to the park.
Simon and Alex came to the bakery one rainy afternoon. The White Sox were playing in Cleveland, and the ladies had the game on the radio. They came to buy some bread for dinner that night, but really wanted to hear the game. So, business being slow, the old ladies, Frederika, Simon, and Alex huddled around and listened with glee as the Pale Hose crushed the Tribe, 10 to 2. The whole time, Simon and Frederika's eyes were never far from each other. Before leaving, he asked my mom if she would like to come home and have dinner with them. My grandmother waved her off with a smile.
Mom and Dad pretty much fell in love that night.
High school went by quickly for both of them: they excelled in their studies, both competed in sports, and went to a lot of White Sox games with Alex, who really didn't have any other friends and had a tough time getting along with his hard-working father. Alex liked painting and drawing, which weren't very reputable pursuits to anyone who lived in Roseland, and was a sharp contrast to Simon, whose sterling academic record and athletic accomplishments had gained the notice of the local congressman, a big-hearted Machine hack named Kasza, who also attended too many White Sox games. Alex's father (and Simon's guardian uncle) worked for the honorable gentleman's ward organization from time to time, and Kasza liked the idea of promoting a fellow Pole to one of the national military academies. However, the glow of Simon and Frederika's romance dominated everyone during what always sounded to me to be a warm, happy time for both families.
Until our curse made another appearance.
As they all geared up for graduation week, one night, a massive fire swept through the corner bakery, and killed both Frederika's mother and Simon's uncle, who became trapped in the upstairs apartment. The entire neighborhood grieved for Alex, Simon, and Frederika, who spent the rest of that horrible night crying in opposite corners of Palmer Park.
Their adult lives began there. Alex blew off the cap and gown ceremonies and took a train to New York and fell in with the Greenwich Village art scene, where he began to make a name for himself as a painter and a sculptor. Simon and Frederika decided to marry, but Simon wanted to wait until he finished college. He was overruled by the Machine pol, who virtually bribed him into marrying beforehand. So they did, at Holy Rosary, a small turn-of-the-century Catholic place of worship near the ruins of the bakery.
Simon graduated from Annapolis in 1962. I was born a year after that. Mom and Dad went back to the old neighborhood to baptize me. Uncle Alex was my Godfather. His second wife was my Godmother. I don't even remember her name, and I'm not sure Uncle Alex does, either. I saw very little of my dad in my early childhood, since he was a young officer with the Pacific fleet. Mom refused to accept life on some drab military base from day one, so I did most of my growing up in a large Roseland bungalow "loaned" to us by the now-retired Congressman Kasza. Mom enrolled in and struggled to finish nursing school at night while she worked at the local bank during the day. Dad got around to resigning his Navy commission in 1970, came back and moved in with us, and went into law school at Northwestern a few months later.
I swear, my parents were closer when Dad was in Asia, writing letters back and forth almost every day, than when he finally came home.
Both of them came from families broken apart by some tragedy or another. They raised themselves while others worked or became distant memories. Their ultimate tragedy was that they became the kind of invisible parents to their only child that fate had cruelly given to them in their youth.
Dad was a smashing success as a brave officer and then as a lawyer, a right corporate torpedo with a six-figure income, a beautiful wife, a beautiful little boy, and a beautiful house in the suburbs, an upper-class burg where a lot of the exiles from Roseland ended up after the neighborhood changed a few years ago. And now he had our beautiful life ruin, sitting alongside him at Thanksgiving dinner, to add to his list of accomplishments.
Mom's natural tenacity and ruthlessness found a home in her nursing career. She wasn't content to check pulses and stick needles in the asses of sick children. No. In less than a year, she was not only assigned to, but running, the night shift at a large inner city Chicago hospital's emergency room like she was a Kriegsmarine admiral. I guess you need someone like that dealing with gunshot wounds and diseases of the poor. I just didn't like the cold, driven, Cybernaut mom she became (to spite my absentee Dad, I often believed).
They were in the trenches, and had been there once Dad's stud lawyer career was matched by Mom's stud nursing career. They were always driven to bigger and better things, sort of the "American dream" gone berserk - work, damn you, work! Make more money! Be better than everyone else, and you can have a piece of this rotten pie, this confection of moneyed culture and cultured money! (And I say 'culture' like a virus culture, from a lab that should have been blown to smithereens a long time ago).
I know they saw themselves in my cherubic features, my light sand eyes and small ears and full lips and long fingers, my test scores, my home runs, and my growing, terrible loneliness. I was twice the athlete and the intellect my parents ever dreamed of being, but half the child. My parents may have been alive, I was having dinner with them, but they sure didn't feel that way, to me. When I was little, I had every toy and gadget on the market bought for me at Christmas, which was cool, I guess, and I won't lie that all the birthday parties at Comiskey Park with my baseball buddies were the best days any kid like me could ever want, but I had this lawyer who I had to call up for an appointment to see as my Dad, and this Emergency Room chieftain who could handle twenty traumas, an overworked staff and green interns with a shrug, come home and be a crack suburbanite social butterfly while she ignored my silences and closed doors and late baseball nights off with the aplomb of a true, upwardly-mobile busy-body. I'd have given every single one of my things for either of them to show up one night when I played ball with the local guys, and maybe even thrown in a few of my Opening Day visits for a joint parental appearance, since the White Sox usually lost their home opener, anyway. You know, just to prove to everyone I had some parents, too.
On the rare, latter-day occasions they had put in an appearance together, it was only by accident. Like a car accident. It wasn't at any of my games, that's for sure. Maybe that's why I had stopped playing so much, that junior year. You always knew when they were within striking distance of each other, because you could cut the tension in the room with a butter knife. The only saving grace to the whole meal was my Mom's homemade bread, a recipe given to her by one of the bakery ladies. It certainly wasn't my feeble attempt to pretend either of them felt like parents anymore.
"One of my teachers gave me this really cool album yesterday. Would you like to hear it?"
"You mean I won't hear it tonight, when I'm trying to sleep?" Dad even looked at me when he spoke. Wow. I stared back into his eyes. They used to be clear and sharp. Now they were just haggard and angry.
"Maybe later, baby. Let's finish eating first." Why? You don't look like you want to, either, Mom.
"I'm finished now." My voice slipped. It was harsh and abrupt. I looked downward at my lap. All I could hear was a fork hitting a plate and the football game far in the distance of the family room.
"So am I, with that sullen attitude of yours."
"Let it go, Simon. We're all tired right now."
"Tired of what, Rika? You said you were tired of waiting for me to get home. Well, I'm home, honey. Can't I be tired of something, too?"
"No, Simon. Just let the whole Godforsaken thing go. You're not in front of a jury that's impressed by you, so ease up on the dramatics and my china."
I pushed my chair backwards and went to leave the room. My Dad's tight hand grabbed my shirt sleeve and pulled me back down. I kept looking at my lap. He wouldn't let go.
"I'll tell you what I'm tired of, Rika. I'm tired of my son always walking away and closing some damned door behind him. I'm tired of getting home just in time for him to go out. And I'm really dead fucking tired of coming home and feeling like I went through some vortex and ended up back at work!"
I pulled my arm out of his grip and stared at him with wide eyes. I felt empty inside, even though I was stuffed with homemade bread and milk. Mom glared at Dad like he was suddenly some alien life form. My bottom lip began to quaver. I had heard them do battle at night, the yelling and swearing, the occasional broken knick-knack, and the silent meals the next day. I heard it coming. I felt it coming, but, when it finally came, the night we all stared at each other in despair, hurt, and anger, that barren Thanksgiving night, I felt afraid and alone with the two people who used to cuddle me to sleep between them in bed.
Mom's eyes began to fill with tears of sorrow. Was that her only response? "I'm tired, too, Dad. I'm tired of both of you."
His hand slapped hard across my face. It sounded like a rifle shot. The corner of my lip split on my front teeth. I let out a single, soft cry as I landed on the thick shag carpet at the base of the dinner table. He never used to touch me when I was little, never, no matter how much of a brat I was. But since my teenaged voice changed and Mom and Dad became East and West Berlin, evidently my remarks and responses stopped being cute and started cutting closer to the bone, and getting me slapped a lot. I guess I had become used to it.
With as much dignity as I could muster, I stood up and walked out of the room, ignoring the verbal explosions erupting behind me.
* * *
I I I
My mind is troubled, like a f
ountain stirred;
And I myself see not the bottom of it.
Troilius and Cressida
I spent the rest of the night in my bedroom. My desk lamp and the dial of my stereo receiver were the only sources of light. I switched on the classical station, turning the volume loud enough so I couldn't hear anything else, knocks on the door, phone rings, or my own empty thoughts. They had just started broadcasting a performance of Mozart's Le Nozze de Figaro, a sweet, exquisite opera whose joy really magnified how shitty I felt. I had put on a thick sweater over my dress shirt, a pair of thermal socks, and an old pair of Dad’s hiking boots, and kept my pea coat, black wool scarf, leather gloves, and surplus French Army beret at the edge of my bed, in case I got thrown out of the house, or decided to leave. I laid on top of the covers of my new king-size bed, a birthday present from last year I pretty much hated, and buried my head in four pillows, trying not to cry, which was hard, and made the tears that eventually came that much more painful.
*
I could feel winter coming and Nicolasha's arms around me, squeezing me against his cold leather coat, my lips touching a snowflake on his lapel, tears running down my face, and his soft voice whispering a Russian song into my ear, rocking me back and forth as we stood together at the edge of the large, rocky steps that led downward to the icy waves of Lake Michigan, his hands slowly rubbing my back.
I woke up with a start, my eyes fixed on the orange glow of the stereo receiver. My face and pillow were damp with sweat. I peered out of my bedroom's large window at our vast and empty backyard. I could see the corner of one of the village's dainty little parks beyond it. The sky was black and starless. I stumbled over to the receiver and turned it down to a mere roar. It was four a.m., and the deep-voiced announcer read a brief news update while I took off all of my clothes and crawled back into the womb beneath the quilt, blanket, and bed sheet. My God, the station then started playing The Age of Gold Suite.
Miles Page 2
