‘What guys?’ I asked.
‘There’s a huge luxury yacht moored down by Navy Pier. It’s owned by some very wealthy Arabs. I went to a party there, had some drinks, danced, had a fabulous meal prepared by their own chef. It was amazing. When it was time for me to leave, they gave me this gift, in appreciation of my company.’
I was flabbergasted. ‘You didn’t have to have sex with anyone?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘They’re having another party tomorrow night and they’ve asked me to bring some friends. Do you want to go?’
Well, it sounded interesting, but suspicious. I declined. I’d been single for just a short time, but I’d already had enough of going out with strangers.
At about that time, Dr H. started asking me to deliver packages to rooms in various hotels. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but one day I peeked inside a bag. I had learned a lot about prescription drugs while I’d been working for him, and I recognized the names of many. The bag was full of amphetamines. Oh, my God, I thought. He’s using me to deliver illegal drugs. What would happen if I was caught? I should look for a different job, I decided, but in the meantime I just had to be careful.
During the time I worked for the doctor, certain men came in regularly, supposedly to be sobered up. I had learned this from the nurses. They were, most often, politicians and bigwig executives and, for the most part, disgusted me. Usually they’d had too much to drink at lunchtime and now had meetings to attend, or speeches to make, and I’m sure they paid dearly for the doctor’s services.
One of the regulars was the executive director of the Chicago Convention Bureau, whose assistant always accompanied, supported or dragged him in. Occasionally, they both needed treatment.
The assistant was good-looking. He was about thirty and, according to his file, single. A closer look revealed that he lived just a few streets away from me. While he waited for his boss, he’d chat to me and he seemed like a nice person. He was always polite and always wore a big grin. I was intrigued. One day while we chatted, I mentioned that I’d noticed we lived a few blocks apart.
He laughed. ‘Maybe I’ll have to come over to borrow a cup of sugar some time,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ I answered, and that, I thought, was that.
It was shortly after that that I quit my job with Dr H., and went to work as receptionist for a company called Owens Corning Fiberglass in Chicago’s ‘Loop’ the downtown area defined by the overhead train tracks that circle it. It was closer to my apartment, so I cut down on my travel time, and my working hours were shorter, which helped with the childcare situation. The office staff and salesmen were pleasant, with one exception. Today he would have been fired for his lewd comments and constant pawing of the girls in the office. I became frightened to go into the file-room because he would soon be breathing down my neck. I talked to the office manager about it but he laughed and asked where my sense of humour was.
While I was working at Owens Corning, my good friend Bobby McCarthy was working nearby for Mitsubishi’s Chicago headquarters as the receptionist. Since she and I both operated switchboards, we often chatted when the bosses weren’t around, but I’ll never forget one particular call I made to her some time after I’d left my job. It was 11 November, Election Day in America. The phone rang for an unusually long time before someone answered, and it wasn’t Bobby. A Japanese-sounding male voice said, ‘Mitsubishi International.’
‘Hello, is Mrs McCarthy there, please?’ I replied.
‘So solly,’ said the voice. ‘All of Mitsubishi crose today in honah off National Erection.’ I thanked him, hung up and almost fell out of my chair laughing. I couldn’t wait to tell Bobby. After that we always called each other on Erection Day.
Bobby also told me of the time that the president of Mitsubishi Chicago showed up unannounced at her apartment one Sunday afternoon and scared her half to death.
‘I come because I hear your morals are low,’ he told her, but how wrong he was: her immediate boss had reported that Bobby’s ‘morale’ was low due to her recent divorce.
‘I sent him away,’ she said, ‘telling him I was expecting company, but I was never sure if he’d come to take advantage of my low morals or to offer support after hearing of my low morale.’
In those days, we were naive about many things and often embarrassed due to our ignorance of worldly matters.
‘I’ve been dating a Sikh Indian,’ Bobby told me one day, soon after the Mitsubishi incident.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked.
‘You idiot,’ she said, exploding into laughter. ‘He’s not ill. Sikhism is an Indian religion.’ Well, how was I supposed to know that?
It was around that time that I learned Bob Irvine had remarried. Wow, I thought, that was fast, but when I talked to him, I wished him all the luck in the world and told him that I hoped he would find true happiness in his new partnership. About a month later, I received a phone call from his wife, Rosemary, asking if she could see me. Confused but curious, I agreed and arranged a time. She arrived at the apartment looking as nervous as I felt. What could this be about? I wondered.
We had coffee, to give us time to settle down, and then she burst into tears. As she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, I noticed that she was wearing my old wedding and engagement rings. I wonder if she knows he didn’t buy them new, I thought. I couldn’t believe anyone would be callous enough to give his ex-wife’s rings to someone else. Then I realized: it was something else Bob’s parents must have been behind. I’d had to return other valuables to them and the rings had been included on the list.
Finally, when she stopped crying, we got round to the reason for her visit. ‘I don’t know how to make him happy, Iris. He keeps talking about you. He’s still in love with you, you know, and I wondered if you could give me some advice on how to deal with him, what I need to do to make him love me.’
What could I say to her? Bob and I were divorced. I hadn’t known how to make him happy and he hadn’t been able to make me happy. How did she think I could help? ‘Look, Rosemary,’ I said, ‘I doubt very much that he’s still in love with me.’
‘Oh yes he is,’ she interrupted. ‘I hear it from him all the time, especially if he’s been drinking. He keeps telling me I can’t hold a candle to you.’ Now she was sobbing again and I had a hard time keeping my own emotions in check. I felt so sorry for her. ‘Do you think he remarried too soon? Do you think it was just on the rebound?’
‘I can’t answer those questions,’ I told her, ‘and all I can tell you is that he’s a simple man with simple wants and needs. He wants a clean house, dinner on the table when he gets home from work, and he doesn’t particularly like going out. Oh, and he wants sex often.’ Then it was my turn to ask questions. ‘Does his family still expect you to come for dinner every weekend?’
‘We go there pretty often but not every weekend.’
‘Lucky you,’ I said, and that brought a laugh from her.
We continued talking for some time. I don’t think I gave her any real answers but I think she was relieved to have shared her problems with someone who understood. Shortly after our little meeting, I learned that Bob and she had split up. Apparently, after one of their fights, she had followed him to the bar where he hung out and hit him over the head with her stiletto-heeled shoe, leaving a rather nasty hole.
My letters home were probably giving clues as to how unhappy I was and how hard I was finding it to manage, both physically and financially. My parents’ letters back to me were encouraging and they tried to cheer me up, but I was still hurt that they hadn’t supported me when I’d begged to stay with them in England. If it had
n’t been for the other GI brides I had met, I’m sure the situation would have been far worse. Our shared stories, both funny and heartbreaking, helped me. I’m not sure how I would have coped without those girls: they were a lifesaver. Occasionally, I saw my brother and his wife, but with them now living in the suburbs, our visits were rare. I had no car and there was no public transport to where they lived.
It was about that time that I first applied for credit: if I had to stay in the US, I should try to make a real home there. I was now twenty-one and living in my own apartment; it was time to put my own mark on the place. Goldblatt’s Department Store granted me fifty dollars’ worth of credit and I bought a large picture to put on the wall over the apartment’s non-functioning fireplace. Now it felt a little more like home, so I dug my heels in and decided to get on with it.
12: Enter Robert Lee Palmer
As I tucked four-year-old Wayne into bed for the night, the telephone rang. I dashed into the kitchen and picked it up. The man’s voice at the other end was unfamiliar.
‘Do you think you could spare a cup of sugar?’ he said.
At first, I thought it was a crank call and was about to hang up when it suddenly dawned on me who he was: Bob Palmer, the nice-looking man I’d met in Dr H.’s office. I laughed, and we talked for half an hour. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, why don’t you just come over and get the cup of sugar?’ I said eventually.
Bob lived within walking distance of my apartment and was soon ringing the doorbell. We drank coffee and talked for hours until I finally had to put a stop to it it was after midnight. ‘Look, I don’t know about you but I have to get up early for work. You’ll have to leave now or I’ll be a dead duck tomorrow.’
He apologized for keeping me up so late and, with no fuss, off he went. ‘I’ll call you again soon, if that’s okay with you?’ he called back to me. I said that would be fine; he had been so polite, and I’d been interested in all he’d told me about himself and his life. I’d learned that he was an only child, that his parents, Dan and Esther Palmer, lived in Peoria, Illinois, and that his father worked at Hiram Walker Whiskey Distillers. His millionaire Uncle Art, his father’s brother, had put him through college at Bradley University in Peoria. He had lived with this uncle and aunt for much of his life and claimed that if I ever met them I’d be far more likely to think he was their son and not the son of his actual parents. I got the distinct impression he was ashamed of his parents and considered himself better than them. I also discovered he had served his two years of national service in an office in California doing accounting and negotiating military contracts. Apparently, Uncle Art had connections in all the right places and he had used them to keep his favourite nephew out of active service.
Bob, I learned, was a bit of a namedropper. It was obvious that he was trying to impress me. He told me that his uncle had initially made his fortune in whiskey distilling and filmmaking, but was now a major shareholder in Phillips Petroleum Company; he was also part owner of the Houston Oilers football team. I could certainly understand why Bob preferred to consider himself his uncle’s son, rather than the son of a lowly labourer who lived in an attic apartment. He made a point of telling me that his uncle and aunt had no children of their own and, since they had practically raised him, he would inherit most of their fortune.
Bob, or Palmer as I came to call him (it was less confusing since I had just been divorced from a Bob), was at the time second in command at the Chicago Convention Bureau. His position afforded him the privilege of wining and dining many of America’s rich and famous people on his seemingly limitless expense account. The responsibility of the Bureau was to woo corporations and organizations to hold their meetings, conventions and exhibitions in Chicago. There were many millions of dollars at stake each year so it had carte blanche to do whatever was necessary to persuade groups to make Chicago their choice of venue. At that time I knew little about the use of credit cards and was shocked to see how many Palmer had in his wallet. The only previous knowledge I had of credit was my recently acquired fifty-dollar account with Goldblatt’s and buying things on the never-never back in England never-never meant you never finished paying for whatever you had purchased and the ‘tallyman’ came to the door every week to collect the instalments. Things were different in America.
Palmer wined and dined me in grand fashion, and from the first week of our friendship, I received a dozen red roses every Friday. He bought little gifts for Wayne too. He had once been engaged to a Jewish girl, but for a very short time. They had met at college but her Orthodox family had threatened to disown her if she married outside the religion so the romance had ended. He explained that in Orthodox families, if someone married out, the family sometimes held a funeral and considered the person dead. I had never heard of such a thing and was shocked.
Another thing that impressed me about Palmer was that sex wasn’t high on his list of priorities. When we eventually made love, it was not particularly successful. I put that down to us both being nervous.
Palmer was an avid golfer, card player and drinker. I didn’t recognize that his drinking might become a problem: I thought it went with dating, socializing and his job. There were a number of times when he failed to show up for a date, or was extremely late and had obviously been drinking, but the excuse was always that he had been with clients. I came to accept it, but hoped it wouldn’t happen too often.
Palmer had a small circle of male friends whom he golfed with, and all but one were unmarried. His poker-playing friends, most of whom lived in a funky old residential hotel called the Central Plaza, were what you might call classic Damon Runyon-type characters. The hotel was where many of the racetrack crowd stayed during racing season it was always full of colourful characters.
One of Palmer’s friends, an elderly Jewish woman named Merle Schneider, had lived in the hotel for many years, and worked for the City of Chicago in the Mayor’s office. Merle had a deep, gravelly voice, always had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, and called everyone ‘kid’. She often called Palmer in the evening, sometimes even if it happened to be one of our date nights, when Wayne and I were at his apartment sharing a pizza or such.
‘Hey, kid, ya wanna play a little poker?’ she’d ask, and if a game started, it would invariably end up an all-nighter. Wayne and I would leave them to it and walk home. Merle wasn’t happy when I came on the scene: it interfered with her social life. She’d shuffle into the apartment, cigarette dangling. ‘Hiya, kid,’ she’d say to me. Then, ‘Hey, kid,’ to Wayne.
Joe Kalny, a travelling salesman, was another character. I’ll never forget him telling us that, when he travelled, he travelled light. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I just take one white nylon shirt with me. I wash it on my body when I take a shower at night, and then I hang it up to dry and it’s ready to wear the next morning.’ I thought, Wow, that’s clever, but I also thought it a bit weird.
Then there was Pete Huber, one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. Pete, to the envy of the rest of the group, made tons of money selling Titleist golf balls. His job was to travel the golf-tournament circuit and socialize with the big-name golfers. Everyone teased him about his easy life and the fact that Titleist golf balls didn’t need anyone to sell them: they sold themselves.
Yes, most of the people in Palmer’s circle of friends were not only single but also heavy drinkers who played hard. I was never aware of any of them dating they probably didn’t have time and I’m sure it came as a shock to the group when Palmer suddenly produced a girlfriend. I sometimes got the feeling I was messing up their routine but they always treated me with the utmost respect, especially since I didn’t interfere with their golf or card games. W
ayne was the only child around and everyone made a fuss of him, which he thoroughly enjoyed; Palmer would even take him to the golf course on occasion, which I thought was sweet. I began to think that this relationship might be worth keeping.
After Palmer and I had been dating for a couple of months, two things happened that just about knocked me off my feet.
It was Saturday morning. I opened my mail to find a sizeable international money order from Chuck, the man I’d dated in England who was not interested in marriage or a serious relationship. There was a letter with it saying he’d visited my parents, who had told him I was struggling financially and that they were worried about me. The letter went on to say that he just wanted to help since he made more money than he knew what to do with and that this was a gift. As I sat there staring in disbelief at the money order and the letter, the doorbell rang. It was Western Union, delivering a telegram.
WANT TO MARRY YOU STOP IF YOU SAY YES WILL ARRANGE TO COME FOR YOU OR USE MONEY TO BUY TICKETS HOME STOP REPLY BY RETURN PLEASE STOP MISS YOU STOP LOVE CHUCK
I sat there in stunned silence. My head felt as though a herd of wild horses was stampeding inside it. The shock had paralysed me. I don’t know how long I sat there, shaking from head to toe. The telephone rang, bringing me back into the moment, and like a zombie, I stood, walked to it and picked it up. At first I couldn’t speak.
‘Hello, is that Iris? Can you hear me? This is Chuck. Did you get my letter? Did you get the telegram?’ He sounded nervous and excited.
‘Yes,’ I managed to croak out.
‘I couldn’t wait for your answer,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
‘I can’t think,’ I told him. ‘I’ve only just got your letter and telegram and it hasn’t sunk in yet. It’s too much of a shock. I don’t know what to think, I just don’t know, I’m sorry,’ I blabbered, then broke down and cried. Oh, my God, I thought, I’ve just got over him, pushed him out of my mind, and now this. At last I was able to gather my thoughts. ‘It’s too much to take in right now, Chuck. Please don’t do anything drastic. You have to give me time to think. It’s all too complicated there’s so much involved.’
The GI Bride Page 12
