Redlined

by Linda Gartz

  “I can’t stand myself for being so stupid!” she wrote, regarding her in-laws. “Here they have $250,000 in the bank, and the Gartzes have me mopping halls and scrubbing floors! I have to risk my life! Humiliate myself to survive!”

  Mom’s handwriting looks so agitated in this entry, it appears as if her brain were exploding on the page. She had other choice descriptives for Grandma Gartz:

  dreary, self-righteous bitch; that tyrant with no pity, no mercy; she could leave her daughter-in-law to fight for her life like an alley rat doing her son’s work.

  Mom wrote repeatedly of her desire for a loving relationship with Dad and with her children, but her only role model for dealing with frustration was her volatile, insane mother. Now an empty-nester, and surely menopausal to boot, Mom, though certainly not mentally ill, acted increasingly like Grandma K, ranting and accusing, viewing her children’s busy, adult lives and long-distance jobs as a personal insult.

  Linda can summarily walk out on me after coming home from Europe.

  Paul didn’t visit me when he was on a business trip to Chicago.

  Billy doesn’t write me letters. They’re so important and so BUSY! I don’t have the treatment I deserve!

  As the only child in the Chicago area, I hosted my parents for occasional dinners and celebrations, like their anniversary, Mom’s birthday, and Mother’s Day. After we invited Mom and Dad for another evening at the coach house, a few positive thoughts again slipped into her mind.

  They made a lovely dinner and drinks, and I was treated nicely. I’ve adjusted my thinking and accept their living together and won’t consider it a personal affront. Bill is really brilliant, and I hope someday they will be married. She would do well to marry him.

  Then she’d fall again into wailing self-pity, her self-imposed pain so palpable, it tears my heart:

  From this point on, I have no children. Linda is lost to me, and I will have no more family gatherings.

  My heart is so very heavy, and tears are welling up in my eyes. I should do what orthodox Jews do if a girl marries outside the faith: hold a funeral for all my children, because to me and Fred, they no longer exist. I have a new prayer: God, please protect me from my children.

  A lot of what Mom wrote in her diary she also said aloud, but I hadn’t heard or seen that last sad, misguided quote until after her death. By 1974, a combination of Mom’s unrelenting anger and misery, and the past three years living with Bill, made me question our philosophy on marriage. We had loved, lived, and worked together harmoniously since 1971, and been a couple for nine years. With our similar upbringings, we seldom disagreed on work ethic (important) or money (spending little and saving were priorities), and we respected each other’s space. When we did argue, we made up quickly. I believed strongly that I wouldn’t bring children into our relationship without that “piece of paper,” and I knew I wanted kids someday. I’d brought up the marriage and kids idea to Bill a couple times, but his iconoclastic nature avoided the subject. “Who cares?” and “It doesn’t matter,” were typical responses.

  One evening, as we sat in our living room, throwing a dish towel for our Labrador retriever, LeRoi, to fetch, I was direct. “Look,” I said, “you know we’re going to stick together. We might as well get married so Mom isn’t freaking out all the time.” LeRoi grabbed the towel in his teeth and tossed it at us, barking, staring with eager eyes, until we threw it again—and again.

  Bill tossed the towel up the stairs. LeRoi bounded after it and returned for more. “Do we really want to give in to her rants?”

  “Bill,” I said, with stern resolve, “we’ve been together nine years! What do you mean, ‘give in’? I think we’ve pretty much proven to ourselves that we’re meant to be a team. We’re great together. Let’s just take the anxiety out of my mother’s life—and ours. I’m serious about this!”

  He turned to me, his brow furrowed. “What worries me is that your mother might literally go insane one of these days,” he said, throwing the towel for LeRoi one more time. He drew me toward him and gave me a long kiss. “I think I can put up with you for a few more years,” he said, and smiled into my eyes.

  “But can I put up with you?”

  He rolled me onto the floor. “Do you know how much I love you?” he whispered in my ear. I pushed him back to see his face, those hazel eyes taking on a vulnerable tenderness that enveloped my heart. I held his gaze; my mouth moved toward his.

  “Tell me again,” I said, a tease and a choke in my voice. LeRoi barked at us like he always did when Bill and I fooled around, ready for love.

  The following week, we drove north to my parents’ house to tell Mom about our decision. We didn’t know that she’d been stewing all day about our “sinful living.”

  I rang the bell. Mom answered the door, scowling. Before we could even say hello, she lit into us. “So, it’s you two. Listen, I can’t take it anymore that you’re not married.”

  I tried to stop her. “Wait, Mom. We have something to tell you.”

  Bill interrupted. “No, let her talk.” He put his hand on his hip and cocked his head. Uh-oh. He was ready to engage. Mom turned on him.

  “I was always nice to you and treated you like a son, and now you’ve done this to me! If I had to do it all over again, I would have sent all my kids out to work. Other girls with a high-school education treasure their mother, but mine—Northwestern and a trip to Europe to boot! And she’s living with a man like a common whore!”

  Before I could open my mouth, Bill jumped in. “I resent that remark,” he said, his eyes flickering with anger. He drew himself up and faced her directly.

  “Tough!”

  A visit that I had expected to bring Mom joy had turned on its head. I ignored her unfiltered epithet to get us back on track. “We really came over here to tell you we’re getting married.”

  “In the meantime, Mr. Gartz can take the garden, the buildings, and the kids and shove the whole thing up his ass!” Now that she had an audience, she was covering all the built-up resentments that tortured her psyche.

  “Mom. Mom!” I was yelling now. “Listen to me! I said we came over to tell you we’re getting married.”

  She paused for a moment, looked from one of us to the other, as if she were emerging from a trance, and finally said, “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Her eyes opened wide and her expression switched instantly from bitter to delighted surprise. “That’s wonderful. That’s great news!” She hugged me, then Bill. “Congratulations! You know, Bill, I always did like you.”

  “I like you too, Mrs. Gartz, but you’re a manic depressive.” He smiled ruefully at his nutty future motherin-law. We said we had to get going and just wanted to tell her the good news.

  As we left, Mom shouted after us, “Take good care of my little girl!”

  CHAPTER 43: End of an Era

  Bill and Linda’s wedding, May 30, 1975.

  Bill and I wanted low-key nuptials—no hall, no band, no wedding party—not even a new dress. I’d wear my mother’s flowing, 1942 satin wedding gown, which Bill’s mom, a superb seamstress, fitted for me. Bill and I stuck by our notion that it was our relationship—not the marriage—that was important, so we kept as much the same as possible: no rings, no name change for me, and no new anniversary date. We would get married on the tenth anniversary of the day we met: May 30, a Friday in 1975. The following day, our families and friends would celebrate in my parents’ beautiful backyard.

  On May 30, the yard was lovely with spring-green grass, tall purple Allium giganteum, red roses, white-edged hosta, freshly unfurling ostrich ferns, and late-blooming multicolored tulips—a perfect setting for our garden wedding. But the day was chilly and overcast, rain spitting down intermittently, so we moved the flower-festooned arbor, under which Bill and I would take our vows, into the family music room.

  I descended the winding front staircase, my mother’s shimmery gown grazing the steps, my two closest friends holding the train. At
the bottom, Dad smiled broadly, took my arm, and led me to the arbor. There he kissed my cheek, gave Bill a hug, and told us both, “Be happy.” The judge read our simple vows; we each said, “I do,” and kissed. Afterward, Mom, in a pretty flowered dress, smiled and shook our hands. Mission accomplished.

  The December following our wedding, Bill sold the three-flat with its renovated coach house, and together we bought a home in Evanston. It was a sturdy, redbrick two-story in a quiet neighborhood, but the previous owners’ slovenly habits presaged plenty of work.

  With my summers free from teaching, I tackled the redecorating. When I pulled off the ugly green-flocked wallpaper in the front hallway and living room, I discovered why such a hideous choice looked brand-new: it had been installed solely to hide walls riddled with thousands of cracks. Following a rigid daily schedule of patching, sanding, and painting, I planned to finish the first floor by September. I may have been a little less compulsive than my parents, but not much. There was no way I was going to hire out what I could do myself.

  A few months after Bill and I had moved into our new home, Grandma Gartz insisted Grandpa wait while she bent over to secure his shoelaces before he left to drive around Villa Park, still looking for cast-offs “too good to throw away.” At nearly eighty-seven, with a lifetime of savings, he still couldn’t escape his impecunious childhood.

  After he left, Grandma lay down on her pink, bloom-covered couch. When Uncle Will came home, he called her name. No response. He gently shook her shoulder. “Mom?” Silence. Surely consumed with dread, he called an ambulance to rush her to Elmhurst Hospital, where the whole family gathered to visit the next day. She lay in a stroke-induced coma, tubes up her nose and needles in her arms, her twisted, tiny figure all but dissolving into the white sheets.

  I stared in disbelief. Could this be the same strong, invincible woman who so intimidated our family and ran rough-shod over Dad? Whom Mom hated with an outsize passion? She had shrunk, it seemed, to one-fourth her size, her desiccated lips white and peeling. Having never seen Grandma look frail and small, I sobbed uncontrollably at her bedside—not because I loved her, this woman who seldom had a good word for her only grandchildren and who had been so unkind to Dad and Mom—but because death became real to me for the first time. I now viscerally understood mortality in its finality and inevitability, a shroud hovering to envelop strivers and slackers with equal dispassion.

  Mom, her mouth set in an angry grimace, gazed down at her motherin-law’s withered form without a scintilla of compassion. After we returned home from the hospital, Mom said to me between clenched teeth, her voice venomous, “I wouldn’t put a drop of water on those parched, dry lips. After all she’s done to me, she can very well go to hell!”

  Grandma died on May 22, 1976, and Dad drove up to Evanston to tell me. We had no first-floor furniture yet, so Dad sat next to me on the edge of my bed, his shoulders heaving, then settling. “You must feel free now, Dad,” I said, my hand on his shoulder.

  “Yes. Yes, I do.” He took a deep, trembling breath, letting it out as a sigh. “She tried to be a good mother, but just didn’t know how.” I threw my arms around him, kissing and wiping away his tears. We hugged for a long time. She was, after all, his mom.

  Despite our family’s fraught relationship with Grandma G, one thing had been clear: in more than six decades of marriage, she and Grandpa had always been in love. Of course, they’d had their share of disputes, but when they posed for photos, Grandma laid her head against his shoulder or grasped his arm tightly, holding him close.

  In my naive youth, I was stunned to see him weeping uncontrollably throughout her wake, regaling each visitor with the same account—over and over. “She bent down to tie my shoes,” he cried out, his voice breaking, his eyes red and swollen. “She tried to help me, but she was dying.”

  Grandma had been the love of Grandpa’s life, the woman whom he had exhorted in letters sixty-five years earlier to leave Transylvania and come to Chicago to marry him:

  If you love me, I hope that you also will come here… . I would greet you with greatest joy and thankfulness, and take you in my arms… . If you don’t want to come, then I also know that you don’t love me. Because if you loved me, you wouldn’t do anything other than come here.

  Grandpa didn’t last long after the death of his beloved Lisi. The following March, after several hospitalizations, his heart just gave out, broken and battered, the will to live gone. He passed on to find his Lisi, wherever she might be.

  CHAPTER 44: Dad’s World

  Mom plays cello for the family, December 1977.

  About the same time as Bill and I were planning our wedding, Mom welcomed her eighty-two-year-old uncle John, Grandma K’s brother, to live with her and Dad. Ever loyal and duty bound, Mom took on the responsibility for not only his care (he was in failing health), but also for renting and maintaining his house in Elmwood Park, about a thirty-minute drive south and west of their home. I’m quite certain that Mom presented this situation to Dad as a fait accompli. He was probably happy to have another man in the house.

  As if the three West Side buildings weren’t burden enough, Mom and Dad now drove regularly to Elmwood Park to meet with tenants and handle maintenance. Dad’s secretive nature kicked in when he spotted a small side door that led to an abandoned room in the basement, dim and cobwebby. He immediately saw its possibilities and began fixing it up as a hidden personal retreat. When Mom wasn’t around, he cleaned it out and added a desk, a lamp, office supplies, a small rug, pictures on the wall—even a bed. Unobservant to subtle changes, Mom focused only on her to-do list and the task at hand. One Saturday, he noted on his calendar, “Worked at Uncle John’s. Lil noticed nothing.”

  While Mom wrote compulsively and about little else other than her fury at Dad or me, Dad, too, had his own journal—his Fireman’s Fund daily planner, in which he wrote notes on his inspection appointments and details about his clients. But he also included brief diary entries, like the one above, about his hideaway.

  On November 8, 1975, my parents’ thirty-third wedding anniversary, he made a comment which exposed the anger he, too, felt in the marriage, but which he seldom spoke aloud. Bill and I treated them to dinner at a cozy German restaurant, Zum Deutschen Eck, on Lincoln Avenue. Afterward, Dad wrote about the evening: “Lil started an argument about how she put the building inspector in his place. I told her, ‘That’s not how you handle a building inspector.’ There was truce at dinner. No talk on way home. Happy anniversary. Humbug.”

  And a few months earlier: “Lil started her usual argument about her being overworked and me running around to all sorts of parties. She made supper for herself alone. I didn’t eat.”

  Dad’s personal entries throughout 1977 make one thing perfectly clear—he was spending lots of time with Lena, a secretary he’d become close friends with at Fireman’s Fund. He took Lena to work several times a week (she lived about twenty minutes from my parents’ house) and often drove her home at the end of the day. When Mom had the occasional play or concert for the evening, Dad picked up Lena. If he came home late from work, he had been either with Lena or with his other coworkers.

  Dad didn’t want to be alone with Mom, so he arranged to spend every holiday, every outing to German dances, every Fireman’s Fund event with Lena and her family (Lena’s mother, as well as her sister and brother-in-law), and often Lena’s ex-husband, with whom she’d remained friendly. Dad made the plans and Mom went along because she enjoyed Lena and her family’s company and had had few other options for making friends.

  My parents took turns hosting holidays with Lena or her sister. Every New Year’s Eve, they went out as a group. Mom felt Lena was her friend as well as Dad’s. It seems Mom had no clue that the woman whom she entertained and socialized with was having an affair with her husband. Mom would have exploded, broken down in tears, or both, had she known.

  It was Dad’s diary entries that tipped me off. Some of them were cryptic, and I had to tease mea
ning out of his entries. I figured he was taking Lena to his secret hideaway at Uncle John’s Elmwood Park house based on a symbol he had created: a circle with a cross inside. Lena and Dad saw each other multiple times during the week, sometimes for coffee before work, sometimes for supper. Because he had a more flexible schedule than she, he might spend a day dictating reports at Lena’s house, waiting, as a favor to her, for a delivery she was expecting. If he just met her for coffee, he used her name in the diary. If it was something more, she was represented by the symbol.

  One day during this time, I was chatting with Mom in her dining room. She leaned back against the long, perforated white radiator cover, her hands behind her back, a confessional, embarrassed look on her face. In a moment of rare and uncomfortable intimacy, she said, “You know, Dad and I haven’t had sex in more than twenty years.”

  “Oh,” was all I could muster. My face heated. She had never spoken to me about sex, unless it was to warn me against the premarital kind. But I knew one thing for sure: if Mom wasn’t having sex with Dad, her sex life was over. Her moral compass precluded any affair. Not so for Dad. He was fulfilling his needs independently, secretly.

  One of the few groups of friends Mom hung out with regularly was the Tri Psis, mothers of Tri Deltas, into which she was invited after I graduated from Northwestern. When Mom left town for a weekend with the Tri Psis, Dad spent the night in his Elmwood Park grotto with Lena, thrilled with reactivating his sex life. “Three times. Three times,” he wrote. “Spring has come. Like a couple of teenagers!”

  Should I be shocked? Furious at his betrayal of my mother? Or should I look at it as the consequence of Mom’s out-of-control rants and unkind comments over the years?

  Or, on the other hand, should I blame Dad for Mom’s anger? He’d foisted the basement apartments on her, despite her vehement objections, and expected Mom to manage a rooming house with eleven tenants, several living in our own apartment, while he traveled half the year.