Redlined

by Linda Gartz

  Mom wrote on July 21, 1971: “All the fun is gone because of the abandonment of moral values.” She was reading newspaper and magazine articles about the sexual revolution and free love with increasing horror and consternation. When a friend mentioned that her divorced daughter’s young son had blurted out, “My mommy is on the pill,” Mom was disgusted. “Unbelievable!” she wrote. Ever since she had found the Norman Vincent Peale Bible passage back in 1965, which had helped her cope with the stressful move from the West Side, she had been “hooked on the power of God,” as she often said. When Jehovah’s Witnesses left copies of their pamphlet, Awake! magazine, in her mailbox, she embraced its ultraconservative message about the Bible, God, and especially sex among youth. The latter, above all, reflected her own views. Sometimes she just picked up on a single phrase and sent me the whole article, obviously without reading it all the way through.

  In one such article, a daughter asked her mother what made a good marriage. Mom underlined the sentences on the immorality of premarital sex, but obviously had read no further, skipping the section urging women to bend to the will of their husbands. She also overlooked the full page devoted to the evils of drink, her nightly habit.

  I returned the article to her with the anti-drinking and “submissive to husband” paragraphs underlined in red. “Thank you for sending me this article,” I wrote on an enclosed note. “I’ve marked some parts you may have missed, so you’re sure to get its full message.”

  Mom never responded, but when I pored through the family archives, I found she had saved my note still attached to the article, on which she had written, “Thank you, Linda!”

  Early in 1971, Bill and I dropped by my parents’ house midweek to visit. We were watching television with Dad and Billy in the second-floor family room while Mom sat alone in the kitchen downing whiskey, dragging on Salems, and brooding in her bitter loop of suffering. Her often-expressed dismay at the “new morality” and her diary entries, often the exact same words she said aloud, give me a direct link to her thoughts. They go something like this: “These lousy kids today—how dare they! They use all these dirty words; think it’s just fine to have free sex. All the parents are working their asses off, and the kids are screwing around.”

  Her mind twisted, exploding at the gall of today’s young people—thumbing their nose at her values, her generation’s values! It was all too much! She marched up the back stairs and entered the sitting area, where Billy, Bill, Dad, and I were watching television. Shoving her index finger into the air to punctuate each sentence, her face contorted with rage, she shouted at us, “Give me an F! Give me a U! Give me a C! Give me a K! GO TO HELL, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!”

  She turned, stomped down the stairs and out the front entry, the door slamming behind her. Our mouths dropped. Dad shook his head in disbelief, then shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the TV. The rest of us looked at each other. “What was that?”

  It was just the beginning.

  CHAPTER 39: A New Roommate

  Bill and Linda, 1973.

  I searched through Mom’s diary entries years after her death, trying to understand the source of her misery that was beyond my ken at the age of twenty-two. I learned she did have moments of clarity, which she promptly lost, drowned in a torrent of self-pity. One day, she notes, “Linda is a great disappointment to me.” A few days later, she writes, “Now we get along beautifully. She talks real nice to me now.” In reality, I was the same. In one entry: “I understand Fred. He’s ambitious but can’t achieve his goals.” In another: “He treats me like a dog.” Another: “Fred has a change of attitude… . I’m finally understood after all.” Her almost-daily entries were seldom positive.

  In June, she and I enjoyed two outings together: a ballet and a wedding shower for the daughter of a family friend, but her emotional psyche was like a sieve—any attention I paid her just drained out. When Bill and I drove up to Wisconsin for a weekend getaway with Peggy and Dietmar, Mom asked me, with hurt eyes and a childish pout, “Why didn’t you invite me along?”

  “Mom, it was a weekend with friends our age. You wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

  “Well, after all the times I entertained you young people, I’d think you’d want to include me.” Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Are you serious, Mom? What twenty-two-year-old invites her parents along on a double date?”

  In September, my NU master’s program assigned me and another MAT student to share teaching duties in a fourth-grade classroom at a North Side Chicago public school. Katy started Northwestern Law School at the downtown campus, so we went our separate ways, vowing to keep in touch. I found a perfect, light-filled, one-bedroom, third-floor apartment in a three-flat just a short bus ride from my school. Before classes started, I went to my parents’ house to borrow their station wagon and load it up with school supplies.

  Mom met me on the sidewalk outside our Keeler home, a grim expression marring her face, still pretty when it wasn’t warped by bitterness. She greeted me with, “I don’t even mention your name to my friends because I’m so ashamed of you.”

  “Ashamed! How can you be ashamed of me?” I cried out, tears spilling, my voice cracking. “I’m getting a master’s degree—and paying for it all myself! I graduated from Northwestern with great grades. I’m supporting myself. I just spent a whole day with you and Billy painting screens. I always help when you ask. I can’t believe you said that!”

  “What am I supposed to tell my friends when you’re not getting married and have your own apartment?”

  “You don’t have to tell them anything!” I tried to explain to her that Bill and I were trying to figure out if marriage even mattered. “We need some time. Besides, I only came to borrow the car. I have so much to do before school starts. Don’t you understand? This is my first teaching job! I have to be prepared!”

  Mom shook her head. “Well, you’re ruining your life.” We went inside to get the car keys.

  Mom thought about the conversation and later wrote in her diary:

  It’s unbelievable! She thinks she’s a pioneer of sorts, breaking through with a new concept. I know they’re good kids, but they’re all mixed up with this new philosophy floating around. To me, it’s been promoted by the Communists, trying to corrupt our youth.

  Mom didn’t have a life outside of her work on the West Side and home. Dad still had two jobs, his day job at Fireman’s Fund and his on-call and weekend West Side duties. The West Side brought in some money, but Fireman’s Fund gave them a steady income, retirement benefits, and good insurance. It was also a source of daily camaraderie for Dad, but Mom benefitted, too.

  She had a couple of friends she phoned now and then, as well as the Tri Psis, a group comprising mothers of my NU sorority, which met for outings about once a month. Other than that, my parents’ social life—boat trips, picnics, pig roasts, and weekend gatherings—were either through FF or friendships Dad had nurtured. Despite Mom’s constant nagging and screaming, he was making his own happiness, as he had since his youth, skirting her attacks by strategically including friends for all holidays and events.

  Mom, unable to recognize how Dad was managing their relationship, took to calling him Alfred E. Neuman, after the iconic character in Mad magazine. “What, me worry?” she mocked. “Sure, he’s everybody’s pal. He doesn’t have to solve any problems. It’s all dumped in my lap!” In the division of labor, Dad did all the physical work on the West Side, but the problem-solving, finances, and responding to tenants’ concerns fell mostly to Mom. When one tenant told her, “Mrs. Gartz, I just want you to know that we do appreciate all you do,” it was better than any tonic.

  In September of 1971, Bill moved into a large one-bedroom apartment a couple of blocks from Wrigley Field. He had finished law school, passed the bar exam, and was working as a Cook County public defender. After six years together, we still didn’t see any need to get married, and it wasn’t because we feared falling into my parents’ pattern of acrimony. Our temp
eraments and approach to life were simply different from theirs.

  Bill was logical and understood finances in a way my dad didn’t. Bill never would have worked so hard at a business that wasn’t making money. I had a more even-keeled temperament than Mom; I was neither quick to anger nor as excitable and emotional as she. Dad hated confrontation; Bill would engage with anyone if the situation called for it. Unlike Dad and Mom, Bill and I could talk through disagreements (we had few in the early years), but later, when conflict between couples is inevitable, each of us (usually) listened to one another and (usually) expressed opinions respectfully.

  So avoiding marriage had nothing to do with my parents. But I did want something to change. I was sick of our dating routine after so many years together. One fall evening, we sat at the Formica kitchen table in my apartment, sipping white wine while ’50s and ’60s rock and roll played from my turquoise transistor radio.

  Bill’s hair had grown back steadily since his army-regulation buzz cut, and it hung just below his ears. I looked up past his large-framed glasses into his eyes. My stomach clenched a little. I had a hard time making demands, but it was time. “I think this weekly dating is kinda juvenile after all these years. I’m tired of it.”

  “What’s the problem?” He seemed truly puzzled—which made me talk faster.

  “What’s the problem! Are we supposed to just ‘date’ forever? I think we should move in together and see if we can make a go of it.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Really? Your mother’s already acting nuts. This could put her over the edge.” He took a sip of wine, looking down into the glass.

  I shrugged. “I just won’t tell her. She’s already accused me of immorality for having my own apartment—so what’s the difference?” After three glasses of wine, self-righteousness had kicked in.

  He pulled me toward him and kissed me, a long, open-mouthed kiss, his smell clean and fresh. His hands moved under my shirt; mine under his. “You’re such a little trollop,” he said with a grin and the teasing tone I loved. We kissed all the way to the bedroom.

  I didn’t want to rub Mom’s nose in what would be devastating news for her, so I continued to pay rent on my apartment, hoping to put off her discovery for as long as possible.

  About three months after I’d moved into the Wrigleyville apartment, the phone rang one Saturday. “Hello?”

  “Linda?”

  I knew what was coming. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Linda, I’ve been trying to reach you, but you never answer at your apartment. Are you living with Bill?” She spat out the words.

  “Look, Mom, yes, I am. I know this is upsetting to you, and I’m sorry, but it’s for the best. We’ll get married someday. Just not yet.”

  She growled into the phone, “I should have sent you to work when you were seventeen. That was my mistake, letting you go to Northwestern!” She slammed down the phone.

  Mom’s ideal daughter was herself—the daughter who, at the age of seventeen, had worked to support her unemployed parents during the Depression; who had put her mother’s well-being before that of her husband or her children, and never questioned that choice. I was not that daughter. I was putting my relationship with Bill above my mother’s values.

  I was certain I was taking the right path, but I knew how deeply my cohabitation wounded Mom and violated her rigid morality. She couldn’t possibly understand. There was only one response: I folded my arms onto the desk, pressed my head against them, and cried.

  CHAPTER 40: No End in Sight

  Rats killed by Dad and Billy at the West Side six-flat.

  After sending out dozens of résumés to Chicago-area school districts, I was interviewed and hired to start in the fall of 1972, teaching sixth grade in Winnetka, a North Shore suburb renowned for its innovative, child-centered approach to teaching. Even Mom was happy, responding with real joy. She wrote in her diary, “Linda got a wonderful teaching job at the wonderful salary of $9,600 per year.”

  Winnetka was then, and is now, one of the nation’s richest suburbs, with a well-educated populace, lots of trees, large homes, expansive lawns, and safe streets. When I began teaching in 1972, it was virtually all white, including a smattering of Jewish families. The children were scrubbed, casually well-dressed, and privileged (though not necessarily spoiled). Most of my students were kind and motivated. Their parents held them to high standards of both achievement and behavior, but several kids still needed a good deal of guidance and a teacher’s loving attention.

  It was a solar system away from West Garfield Park, the stark difference manifested in my father’s recent close call. The same fall I started teaching in Winnetka, Dad was heading home after checking on his three buildings, all within half a block of one another on Washington Boulevard. Driving a couple minutes east, he saw lights flashing from a scrum of cop cars. The news reported that a twenty-seven-year-old man, his father-in-law, and an employee of a salvage company on Pulaski had been shot to death—just minutes before Dad drove past. The murders occurred shortly after fire had engulfed the nearby historic Guyon Paradise Ballroom, and around the same time the A&P, our family’s go-to grocery store on Madison and Keeler, had burned to the ground. Investigators suspected arson in both blazes.

  Not long after the shooting, Mom was collecting rent on the West Side, when she learned more frightening news from one of her tenants, Mr. Brooks. “A reliable source” had told him that fifteen women had been raped in just one week within a two-block radius of our six-flat. “A man sees a woman he wants and, as in days of old, just takes her,” Mr. Brooks told Mom. He added, “There’s a definite deterioration in the kind of people in the area in the past nine months.”

  “It looks like the West Side is headed for total destruction,” Mom wrote, as if this were big news. She told Dad, “We’d better sell that six-flat. We’re playing Russian roulette.”

  Believing that the West Side was still his neighborhood, Dad refused. But perhaps he also worried about his mother’s disdainful reaction should he sell the six-flat “gift.” I think he also relished how his fearless confrontation of daily dangers impressed his coworkers.

  Mom, however, was personally invested in doing her part to make the West Side buildings a success—to prove to herself, and naysayers, that their meticulously cared-for property would be respected by their tenants. Responding to every complaint, spending money on repairs and upkeep in no way commensurate with their income from the buildings, she was determined to do the right thing. Her biggest payback was recognition and appreciation, which she felt was in short supply from Dad. I’ve become convinced that the West Side, with all the fear, crime, and aggravation, somehow fulfilled both my parents’ deepest needs left over from childhood.

  As an only child, Mom had been showered with personal attention. Despite Grandma K’s fierce temper, Mom knew she had always been the focus of her parents’ lives. Why wasn’t Dad giving her the same kind of attention now for her intense efforts?

  I think Dad still felt the lifelong sting of his mother’s scorn. She had grabbed precious possessions from his hands and thrown them into the furnace; she had belittled his ideas. I believe that Dad, despite his college chemistry degree, unconsciously tried to garner his mother’s approval by maintaining buildings like his janitor parents had. It was a futile endeavor.

  In spite of my parents’ commitment to their tenants and property, some West Side problems were intractable. One tenant held back on signing her lease because of roaches in her unit, despite repeated visits from an exterminator. The vermin simply invaded again from neighboring apartments that weren’t kept clean. “Roaches have nothing to do with the lease,” Mom said. “I can’t come over there and hit them with my shoe!”

  Near their buildings, rats drank openly at a dripping faucet in the middle of the day. The city ignored West Garfield Park, as it had for years, so Dad fell back on his parents’ philosophy, selbstständigkeit: self-reliance. He had provided lidded and locked rat-proof garbage cans. But at t
he large apartment building next door to their six-flat, garbage was strewn all about, making easy pickings for rats. Each female procreated at the prolific rate of six to fourteen babies every three weeks.

  The rat dens were easy to locate in the yard by simply following the dozen or more paths that crisscrossed the back lawn, the grass worn away by the steady trudge of rats on the move. Dad enlisted Billy to attack the problem head-on.

  Dad found the location of a lively rat burrow, including its multiple ingress and egress holes. He plugged up all exits, save two. Into one he inserted a length of garden hose attached to a basement-sink faucet; at the other, he stationed my brother with that useful extermination tool, a two-by-four. Dad turned on the hot water. With a narrow tunnel their only escape route from the raging flood waters, the rats had to scurry one at a time to where Billy stood at the ready, whacking each with the weapon as it charged into the bright sunlight.

  Watching the spectacle like an audience at a Colosseum event, neighborhood kids sent up a rousing cheer for every rat killed. It’s no wonder: rats had terrorized them and their families. After nineteen direct hits, rodent carnage lay all about. Boys and girls ran into the yard, poking their dead adversaries with sticks, giving them another thwack for good measure. Always one for documenting major events, Dad carefully set out the curled-up corpses into three rows, like a series of apostrophes and quotation marks, for a photo op—a visual aid for another good story percolating in his brain.

  Perhaps Dad could have found a more efficient way to deal with the rats, but he seldom focused on efficiency. Besides, rat poison posed risks to other animals and children; it killed the rats over a period of days from inner hemorrhaging—a far crueler way to die. For the time being, he had rid his corner of rats, and he had another story to amaze his friends and coworkers. Providing entertainment for the neighborhood kids was a bonus, just as Dad had done for me and my friends in our childhoods. He always found a way to spark up the tinder of life’s tedium with a flicker of humor, a whoosh of drama, a crackle of the bizarre.