Redlined

by Linda Gartz

  But the animal problems were less volatile than the explosive situations that could arise like a thunderclap among residents.

  One warm summer day, Dad and Mom were trimming the bushes in the front yard at our former two-flat, when an altercation arose. They both told me what happened, each filling in vivid details. Ruby Montgomery, the twenty-something daughter of the man who rented the first-floor apartment, stood on the front porch chatting with my parents in the yard below, when a woman walked by and started talking trash. “Hey, Ruby. I seen you with that man I was sweet on. What you doin’, girl? You the hood ho now?”

  “Hey, bitch,” retorted Ruby. “Why’d he even look at you—with that shitty wig you always wearin’?” One hand on her hip, the other pointing at the woman, Ruby’s head moved in rhythm with her insult.

  Her voice rising in fury, the woman grabbed a fistful of her own hair, yanking on it repeatedly as she moved up the walk toward Ruby. “What you call this, bitch?” Riveted to the spot, hedge clippers midair, Mom and Dad hardly had time to register how quickly a few sentences were evolving into a physical confrontation.

  Before the woman reached the stairs, Mr. Montgomery stepped out the front door, shotgun in hand. He pushed his daughter to the side, simultaneously raising the weapon, nestling it into position against his shoulder, and taking a bead on the woman. “Move over, Ruby. I got her in my sights.”

  Dad leaped up the front steps, directly in front of his tenant, and shoved the gun to the side. “Fred! Fred!” Mom screamed. “Don’t get shot!”

  “Mr. Montgomery!” Dad shouted, his left hand grasping Montgomery’s shoulder, shaking him. “What are you doing?” Dad pressed down the gun-wielding arm to Mr. Montgomery’s side, looking him in the eye. The woman on the street backed away, screaming epithets back at Ruby as she walked east down Washington.

  Montgomery sighed deeply. “You’re right. You’re right.” He then turned and walked back into the flat where I used to live, his shoulders hunched, the shotgun dangling at his side, his daughter following behind. “Thank you, Mr. Gartz,” she said quietly before closing the door behind her. Mom and Dad finished their work, Mom chastising Dad for his rash behavior. Then they drove home.

  Dad’s friends and coworkers were once again agape at this latest story. “Freddie, don’t you think you ought to get out of that neighborhood?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Dad said.

  Yet one winter night, while shoveling coal into the furnace, Dad had left the basement door open behind him to release the intense heat, the blaze’s flames casting a gleam that rose up into the darkness and shone like a beacon. The basement entranceway, where Dad was working, was down several steps in a dark, cramped space, shielded from view by back stairs that rose overhead—no escape.

  A couple of young men moved silently toward the light, catching Dad unawares. “Hey, ol’ man.” They grinned wide at Dad, who had just laid down his shovel, about to close the furnace door. He turned to see their features flickered by flame; the gun, agleam with reflected firelight, pointed at his chest.

  “What do you want?” he asked quietly.

  “We want your wallet,” said one, extending his palm toward Dad. “Put it right here, and we won’t hurt you. Slow now. Just go slow.” Dad kept one hand in the air, pulling his wallet out from his back pocket with the other.

  “Why don’t you two get jobs?” Dad asked, extending the wallet, holding eye contact. “Then you wouldn’t have to bother with people like me who are just doing theirs.”

  “Just stay here, and don’t say nothin’ till we’re gone.” They turned and disappeared into the night.

  When Dad calmly related this story to me, he said, “I was so mad, my heart was pounding! I was more mad than scared.”

  “Dad, that is scary. If it happened once, it’ll happen again.”

  “I’ll be ready next time,” he said. “That won’t ever happen to me again. Punks!” His eyes turned fierce and steely.

  Dad later told me of how he planned to thwart future robbers and burglars at the six-flat basement. He would set up a crossbow on a trigger so that anyone who forced open the door (tenants didn’t have a key) might be skewered. Bill told him that it was against the law to create a potentially deadly trap, even against someone engaged in a crime.

  “A man has a right to defend his property!” Dad retorted.

  One day, he arrived at the six-flat to find the trigger tripped, a trail of blood spotting the steps. “I haven’t had a breakin since,” he said triumphantly months later. “Word travels.”

  “Dad!” I said, sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, looking at my aging father with alarm. “That’s dangerous! What if that guy comes back with friends and tries to get you when you’re there alone?” He waved away my worries.

  Others chided him, too. My father’s best buddy since his teen years, now a surgeon, said to Dad, “Sell those damn buildings! You’re pouring money down a sewer.”

  Even the family lawyer said to Mom, “You’d better get rid of that six-flat before you’re wiping Fred’s brains off the sidewalk.”

  The dangers were real—rapes, burglaries, muggings, purse snatchings, and Dad’s armed robbery. Mom focused on unloading the six-flat, the building with the most tenants and the most trouble. “Fred, we have to talk about selling that six-flat,” was her greeting when Dad returned home from work.

  His evasive response was maddening. “When do we eat supper?”

  Taking up Mom’s cause, I said, “Hey, Dad, you really should talk with Mom about selling the six-flat. We’re both worried about your safety.”

  “There’s no point in discussing anything with your mother,” he said. “She has to get her own way, so there’s no point in expressing my opinion.”

  CHAPTER 41: Home Alone

  Billy preparing to leave for Seattle, 1974.

  That September of 1972, I stared at the blank walls of my corner classroom, light pouring in from a wall of windows, an expanse of trees and trimmed grass across the street. In just two weeks, this room would hold twenty-seven eleven-year-olds, the children of educated, achievement-oriented, and mostly wealthy parents. Winnetka teachers were expected to be creative, to individualize lessons, to engage students in their learning. Fear crawled from my chest to my brain. My only experience had been the previous year of teaching fourth grade in a Chicago public school, where I shared one classroom’s teaching duties with another MAT student.

  That year, we had far exceeded the expectations of the working-class parents. Instead of dividing up the responsibilities, we divided up the class into small groups to maximize each kid’s learning. With no school music program, we led the students in weekly songfests, accompanied by my partner’s guitar, as well as organized an all-school assembly and, later, a science fair.

  I asked Dad to bring his boa constrictor, Lucifer. Engaging his usual flair for showmanship, he pulled the snake’s six-foot length out of a burlap bag to a chorus of oohs and aahs and fake shrieks by some of the girls. After holding the snake above his head and wrapping it around his neck, Dad moved slowly down each aisle of desks, allowing the kids to feel the snake’s scaly skin and muscular coils, to see up close its reptilian, tawny, vertically slit eyes as he explained its habits and habitat. Feeding the boa was not in the lesson plan.

  After placing Lucifer back into the sack and knotting the top, Dad again walked among the desks, holding in the palm of his hand five hairless, sightless, day-old baby rats, their tiny pulsing bodies virtually transparent. “Co-ol! Co-ol!” declared one boy, as he rocked back and forth in his chair.

  But despite these successes in Chicago, I worried if I could be creative enough for the demanding Winnetka parents. Panic fired up my neurons, and plans began falling into place. First I had to make the room cozy and welcoming. I turned to Dad and his junk. He rented a trailer, loading it with a worn but usable couch, a large carpet remnant, a couple of bookcases, an easel, and two glass tanks—one for fish, the other for rept
iles. Out of these cast-offs, a reading corner emerged. I stacked books on the cases’ shelves, and prepared folders with questions the kids could answer about each book to get reading credit.

  “Don’t smile till Christmas,” urged one book on maintaining classroom order. I couldn’t do that for even the first hour of my first day. As I got comfortable in my role, the whimsy I’d absorbed from Dad popped out. To the kids’ delight, I repeatedly sat on the whoopee cushion they placed on my chair, arm-wrestled the boys, and joined all the kids at recess in “maul-ball,” a rendition of football. One parent told me at the open house, “When my friends ask what kind of teacher you are, I tell them you’re a cross between Mary Poppins and a drill sergeant!”

  Just as I started teaching, Bill bought a three-flat with a fire-gutted coach house at the alley. It was located on Chicago’s Near North Side, in a transitional neighborhood named DePaul, after the nearby university. An old Italian immigrant owned the corner grocery store, and fireworks shot off well into the night on Puerto Rican Independence Day. The community was a little dicey, with dog poop marring the sidewalks fronting small, weary apartment buildings, but its proximity to downtown Chicago and the university made its future bright.

  Following our upbringing, we became landlords. I was in my element—eager to jump in and help with everything from showing apartments to patching drywall. Bill tackled the coach house, devouring how-to books on HVAC and electrical, hiring other tradesmen for the skilled work he couldn’t learn quickly. Dashing home from his public defender job, he started in on the construction, working late into the night and devoting every weekend to the renovation. At the end of my teaching day, I came home to a cacophony of banging hammers or the high screech of bending metal—Bill was screwing together and installing metal HVAC ducts or calibrating a special tool to bend electrical pipes into just the right angle to traverse the inner walls.

  Once drywall was up, I took over taping and plastering the seams, painting walls, and grouting tile, skills I had learned working with my parents. My efforts gave Mom another tactic for imploring me to get married. “You have no security or guarantee for the work you’re doing,” she said. “Don’t you see, without that ‘piece of paper,’ as you call it, you have no legal rights—and all your efforts are for nothing!” I understood her point, but I also knew Bill would never leave me.

  We moved into the finished coach house in July of 1973.

  One of Mom’s favorite tenants, Mrs. Barlow, was also moving that summer, from the basement of our former home. Mom was especially pleased that Mrs. Barlow cut and watered the grass—and had even planted a garden—unlike many of the neighbors, whose yards were weedy patches of dirt. “It’s an achievement to have everyone’s cooperation,” Mom later wrote. “Patience and politeness win out in the end.”

  After admiring the robustly growing collards, mustard greens, and cabbages growing in the backyard, Mom launched into a torrent of complaints. “Today’s youth have no morals,” she bemoaned. “My older son has moved in with a woman, but that’s her mother’s problem. It’s my daughter that bothers me. She’s living with a man she’s not married to, and won’t listen to logic!”

  Mrs. Barlow said, “Sense cannot be taught. It has to be bought.” She spoke of her own children. “I ain’t gonna try to change them so long as they leave me alone. If they wants to listen to my advice, they can, but I ain’t forcing them. Like my daddy said, ‘If you makes your bed hard, you sleep hard.’”

  “I really like my tenants’ down-to-earth philosophy,” Mom told me more than once. “They have a maxim for everything, and they’re so true!” Mom probably had nodded in agreement at Mrs. Barlow’s comments, and then, just as quickly, had forgotten them. The opinions of others blew away like chaff in the wind, leaving only the original kernels of Mom’s own ideas settled in the basket of her mind.

  When Mrs. Barlow moved, her apartment had been left in “immaculate condition,” Mom wrote. “Our tenants surely take excellent care of everything. My faith has been restored.” Nothing could have bolstered Mom’s pride more. Her and Dad’s nurturing attention had borne fruit. “My success on the West Side is the greatest achievement of my life!” she wrote in her diary.

  Mom found the admiration and approval she so craved only in the suffering, beaten-down West Side. One tenant told her, “I envy you, Mrs. Gartz. You know how to do everything.”

  When Mom explained in great detail how leases worked to Lonnie Branch, he said, “You’re a good salesman, Mrs. Gartz.” (Apparently, he was as well. A few years after he moved from my parents’ building, Branch was arrested as one of the city’s biggest heroin dealers.)54

  Another tenant called my mother “glamour girl.” Mom loved her tenants, despite the risky neighborhood. “I never feel as alive as I do on the West Side,” she said. “And the tenants are all so nice to me.” One had given her a gift of flower vases. “I get respect from my tenants, not from your father.” She ignored or overlooked the fifteen years he had respected psychotic Grandma K’s presence in our home—and the multiple times he had intervened, saving Mom from her mother’s physical, sometimes life-threatening, attacks.

  After Bill and I had settled into the now-finished coach house, we invited Mom and Dad to see its transformation from a burned-out shell to a bright, two-floor, two-bathroom living space. We gave them a tour, made a gourmet dinner, and then took them to the movies. In a brief moment of clarity, Mom wrote after the evening, “I accept their relationship because he is good to her, and they are happy. I’m happy to have them in Chicago, with Paul in New Jersey, and Billy going away.”

  The previous four years, Billy had been the only kid still living in my parents’ house, during which he had spent two years as a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. He had developed coping skills to survive in a household that seemed like a set for the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Mom screamed. Dad responded by tossing out subtle zingers, escalating her fury. When Mom went on a rampage, Billy sat down at the piano, drowning out the cacophony of anger and bitterness by banging out the theme from the movie Exodus—appropriate since he had been planning his own escape. He and Paul had taken a cross-country trip together in 1970, including a stop in Seattle, where Billy fell in love with the city. He decided to move there for his junior year and complete his degree at the University of Washington.

  After saving money from part-time jobs, he bought a 1967 Buick LeSabre for $750. He’d drive to Seattle, move onto campus, and start a new life in the Pacific Northwest, close to the great outdoors and far from Chicago. Neither of my parents questioned whether their nineteen-year-old son could safely drive a used car solo the two thousand miles from Chicago to Seattle. They took their children’s self-sufficiency for granted. We, too, were selbstständig.

  On Monday, September 10, 1973, the Buick was packed. Crying, Billy hugged Mom. “Goodbye, my little Billy,” she told him.

  “Don’t leave me alone with her,” Dad whispered when Billy embraced him.

  “It’s time for me to go, Dad,” he said, pulling away from the hug, but keeping his hands on Dad’s shoulders. “You two will be all right. Just be nice to each other.” He gave Dad a final slap on the arm, walked down the front steps, climbed into his car—with every available space packed to the brim—and headed west.

  Contemplating her youngest child’s departure, Mom wrote in her diary:

  It seems right in a way—almost as though everything is falling into place like a giant jigsaw puzzle. It sounds insane, but I feel “I am the chosen one” by God for some purpose. Because it’s all too strange.

  After all we’ve been through, suddenly everything is getting straightened out, after eight years.

  Eight years earlier, in 1965, they had bought the North Keeler house and acquired the six-flat, more than doubling their workload. They had expended relentless effort and planning during that time to get it all done, so it was not sudden. And “the chosen one”? Mom had said of Dad, “He lives in h
is own little world of delusion,” but Mom had her own delusions. Raised as a child to feel special, and now, living in an insular microcosm, with little time to read, she had neither witnessed firsthand nor learned of the extraordinary accomplishments of striving, hardworking people throughout the wider world. She viewed her determination and success in a riot-riven community as so exceptional, there was only one explanation: she must have been chosen by God.

  Perhaps she had been “chosen” to spiral down into an ever-more bitter and frustrated mental state. The last buffer between her and Dad left with Billy. She had cultivated few real friends over the years, and her tedious bragging about her accomplishments drew scorn (or possibly envy) rather than praise. “Lil, you’re nothing but a drudge,” said one of her supposed friends after Mom expounded on her work.

  The constant recipient of her ire, Dad tuned her out. “I’m an executive secretary,” she cried at him in frustration, “and I’m scrubbing hallways on the West Side!”

  “So what?” he retorted. “I’m a chemical engineer.”

  CHAPTER 42: Mom’s World

  By this time, Mom was fifty-seven, and her world was drawing down around her. Her repetitive diary diatribes focused not only on Dad but also on his cruel and overbearing mother. The unfounded praises she had heaped on her motherin-law in the letter to me in Germany just a few years earlier (“she was always right and actually my best friend”) were replaced by a vitriol that burst forth from feeling duped and manipulated. Mom had come to believe that the six-flat was not a gift from my grandparents when they left the West Side, but a form of vicious retribution to make her suffer.