We had a variety of boarders over the years. There was Captain Eddie, a middle-aged bachelor, who always laughed to hysterics. There was also Teodoras, who lived there only a month but was my favorite because he taught me how to tango and flirt, and Antanas, who lived with us so long he became part of the family, like an eccentric uncle. He was a short, sturdy man who always seemed put upon and too lonely for any human to bear. Sometimes he drank too much. I had wondered why these people had no homes of their own. Where were their families? My child’s sense of order had been disturbed by these solitary men. They disappeared behind their doors and led their secret lives. Captain Eddie even managed to get married and moved away.
Antanas was the only boarder who stayed with us after the others left. Eventually, my father remodeled our basement into a recreation room with a bar, sofas, and a piano. My mother had parties there after the opera or for the radio show where she worked. Antanas had a room in the back with a small kitchenette, though he still ate with us on weekends. I remember coming down to the basement to practice my piano lessons, turning on the light, and finding Antanas sitting in the dark, in the middle of the room, wearing a robe. It would always startle me, no matter how many times it happened. He would apologize with an embarrassed laugh like a little boy. He rarely laughed unless he was drinking. Otherwise, it looked as if his mouth wasn’t used to it. Once, after too many highballs during some party, I heard him talking about how beautiful my mother had been at her wedding. There was a softness in his face that was uncharacteristic of him. Maybe she reminded him of his wife left behind in Lithuania. When I asked my father, he said that Antanas had been handsome in his youth, with so many girls after him, but had his eye on my mother. He and my father had both been rivals for my mother, but my mother chose my father instead of Antanas. “I don’t know what she saw in me,” he said, smiling as he remembered those long-ago days, but when he turned to me there was a twinkle in his eye. “She said I made her laugh.”
It was painful to imagine my white-haired mother in the nursing home as young and beautiful. She was no longer reachable, having retreated into some deep part of herself that none of us could touch. Perhaps in some inner place she was still young and beautiful.
Antanas had worked at the railroad yards and saved every penny he made to send packages to his wife and children in Lithuania. I was a high-school sophomore when I saw him go on a bender that lasted three days. He cried and talked nonsense, so I asked my mother what was wrong.
“Leave him alone,” she said. “The man is grieving for his dead wife.”
A few weeks after his wife died, Antanas took his money out of the bank and decided to buy each of his four children a car. He bought four new, blue Chrysler sedans in cash and had them shipped to Lithuania at great expense. After that, he seemed agitated and angry and soon started drinking again, often staying out all night. My father would search the neighboring bars for him, sometimes finding him and other times not. Once or twice we got a call from the police saying that Antanas had been wandering the neighborhood in a drunken stupor, talking nonsense. This went on until he had another nervous breakdown. He sat in the basement crying about his wife and children. No one could talk him into doing anything—not eating or bathing, or seeing the doctor. “Why can’t I go home?” he sobbed. “I want to see my wife’s grave. Who’s taking care of it?” he wanted to know. “I have three grandchildren I’ve never seen.” He beat the table with his fist.
“Calm down, be reasonable,” said my father. “You can’t go there, and they can’t come here, but maybe someday…”
“How long can a man wait?” he asked. My father had no answer. He too was waiting. All of them counting the years, waiting to return to old lives, but Antanas couldn’t wait any longer.
I saw him a few times after that at the Amber Tavern. He seemed the same, only quieter, sadder, older. My father said he had moved in with another friend, an old bachelor. The two of them lived a quiet life in an apartment in Town of Lake.
With time I moved away from home and forgot about Antanas, forgot about my life as a refugee. Cutting my ties, I exiled myself from the cloistered community of Lithuanians and went to Los Angeles, where all the disillusioned go. Where once I had been a displaced person, I now became a misplaced person. What happens when you leave your people? Who are you then? My family had been forced into exile, while I went into voluntary exile from all that had rooted me, given me identity. I tried to reinvent myself like all good Americans do, but I failed. I was a boarder in my own life, as if I had no family, no roots, no graves to tend. And then I gave birth and then my mother became ill, and in that scramble of emotions, I ran into Antanas again, quite by accident, in the nursing home. Once again, he was my mother’s neighbor, once more under the same roof, together again near the end of their lives, and yet neither one knew the other was there. God must love irony.
Antanas died a few months after my mother died. Once a year, like a tropical bird, I fly to Chicago to visit my father. It turns out that the ties of family and friends are still binding. Every year, my father takes the time to teach my son a few more Lithuanian words. Next year, Nick and I will spend the summer with him in Chicago. He hopes to take us to Lithuania someday to show us his ancestral home. With these small sacramental acts, something in me can heal a little each time.
This year I even worked up the courage to write Al Vitkus a letter. When I go to Chicago, I hope to see him and my old friends Vida, Connie, Milda, and even Ona, who recently divorced and moved back to Chicago from Oregon.
When I visit my mother’s grave, I put flowers there and then on Antanas’ grave as well. They are in the same cemetery, the Lithuanian one. Antanas never returned home to his farm in Lithuania, nor did he ever again see his wife or his four children with their new blue Chryslers. He died thinking he was back in the Nazi labor camps, regretting having walked too far.
It’s October again, and the hills are burning as usual. Tonight I can see the ridge of the canyon burning like a snake of fire. There’s an eerie beauty to it.
I, too, regret having walked too far and having walked so long. I find that I don’t always feel at home when I get there. Antanas and my parents were homesick all their lives for that patch of earth where they were born. I too suffer a homesickness, but for something more elusive that I can no longer name.
A Foreign Country
Agota Janulis, 1988
For the second time in her life, Agota Janulis found herself in a foreign country. The first was when she fled Lithuania during the war and eventually came to Chicago. The second was the day she realized her neighborhood had changed so completely she hardly recognized it any longer.
When Agota first arrived in Marquette Park, she found an earlier wave of Lithuanian immigrants who had come at the turn of the century and built schools, churches, and a convent. Agota was part of a post-war second wave, adding a youth center, newspapers, restaurants, and even an opera company. Now, all these years later, most of the bars and businesses were closing as people moved away. Young Lithuanian families were moving to the suburbs, abandoning the old neighborhood to their aging parents, while African-American families moved in, changing the sounds, tastes, and even the religion of the area.
An insistent, percussive rhythm passed beneath Agota’s living- room window. Peeking through the nylon curtains to see who was carrying the loud boom box, she clucked her tongue in disapproval as she unfastened one of the three safety pins on the bib of her apron to use as a toothpick. She surveyed her elm-shaded street filled with girls playing double-Dutch the way her daughter, Ona, used to. Across the street, grandmothers kept watch from front stoops as sullen teenage boys watched the girls through lidded eyes. The woman who lived in Regina Vitkus’ former home walked down her front steps with a head full of pink rollers, her terry-cloth slippers slapping her heels, as she yelled at her two daughters to get inside. A young retarded boy sat on Marcele Gudauskas’ ol
d stoop with his grandmother, his tongue resting on his lower lip, reminding Agota of Magda, who used to roam the neighborhood like a stray cat. Next door, her neighbor, Mr. Lewis, who helped her whenever her fuses blew or the unreachable light in her bathroom needed changing, was watering his pink hollyhocks. Ever since the neighborhood had changed, she’d been a bit uneasy. If her Pranas were still alive, she wouldn’t feel so vulnerable.
The third wave of Lithuanian immigrants had started to trickle into the old neighborhood after Gorbachev and his glasnost. They reminded her of her own family when they came to America. Sajudis was stirring talk of freedom in Lithuania, while Solidarity was doing the same in Poland. After all this time there was a glimmer of hope for freedom for Lithuania. But if by some miracle her country regained its independence from Russia, it would still be too late for Agota to return to her birthplace. Her life was almost over. More than half of it had been spent in this house on Talman Street.
She had never thought that this was where she would end her life, where she would be buried, so far away from her birthplace in Lithuania.
Ever since Pranas died, it was the loneliness of old age that she hated most. Daydreams filled her head of what her life might have been had she remained in her village with the company of those she had grown up with. How strange that the whole direction of your life could change in an instant. Ah, what’s the use of old regrets? she chided herself.
Out her window, Agota could see Odell Givens, who used to sing the blues on her cookie line at Nabisco, crossing the street. She had recently moved into Ema Bartulis’ old house—that sad house where her daughter, Vida, grew up motherless. The doorbell rang and Agota opened the front door to greet the gray-haired woman, who hadn’t bothered to take off her flowered cotton apron to visit her neighbor. Odell had grown old and heavy since their days at Nabisco, with several folds on her neck holding up her chin.
“Well, good morning, honey, did I wake you?” asked Odell.
“No, no, of course not, welcome to my home.” Agota nodded primly. She disliked the easy familiarity of Americans and had never gotten used to acquaintances calling her “honey” or “sweetie.”
Odell shifted her bulk from foot to foot like a listing boat. Both women smiled politely for a few uncomfortable seconds, and then Odell came into the house.
“You know, don’t you, that I moved into the house across the street about two weeks ago?”
“Of course, into Mrs. Bartulis’ house. Remember, I brought you a box of candy and a tomato plant?”
“Oh, Lord, that’s right.” Odell laughed. “I swear I sometimes forget if I ate breakfast or not.” She shook her head.
Agota smiled. “In my country they say that old age is no sweet roll.”
“You’re right about that. It ain’t for sissies, is it?” Odell nodded. “How are your children?”
Agota smiled sadly. “My Ona got a divorce and moved back to Chicago with her daughter Amy. She teaches college on the North Side and wants me to move in with them, but I tell her that I’m used to my own home. And my Jonas has a house on the market for six months and no sale. He and Vida have no luck.”
“Tell him to bury a small statue of Saint Joseph in the front yard. Make sure it’s face down and toward the door.”
Agota thought this sounded like some kind of voodoo.
“I’m telling you, works like a charm. Tried it myself. Learned it from a Polish lady at the factory.”
Agota frowned. “Saint Joseph is a powerful saint.”
“I guarantee he’ll get an offer soon.” Odell cleared her throat and shifted her weight for a few uncomfortable moments. Then she scratched her ear but wouldn’t look Agota in the face. “And speaking of problems, I came to ask if you could help me with the one in my new house.”
Agota’s brow knit together. “Me? I know nothing about fixing houses. Get a carpenter.”
“No, no, not that kind of a problem.” Odell looked around the living room at the family photos, the crystal vase, the lace doilies, and the linen runner on the coffee table. “It’s worse than that.”
“Please sit down,” Agota offered.
Odell sat down heavily on the slipcovered sofa. “My feet don’t stop talking to me for a minute. And I can’t take too much excitement because of my high blood pressure. My heart isn’t strong anymore. You know I’m living with my daughter, Betty and my grandson, Darrell, a good boy. I want to make sure he stays out of trouble, keeps away from the gangs, but the world has become a dangerous place, not like when we were growing up, ain’t that right?” Odell said nothing for a moment, and then she frowned and looked sideways at Agota.
Agota had forgotten how much Odell liked to talk, how she could go on and on, spilling out words from her generous mouth. She was known as the “clattering pan” on the cookie line. And whenever she finally stopped talking, she would sing those Billie Holiday songs so often that even Agota learned the words to “Gloomy Sunday” by heart.
“What year did you come from that old country?” asked Odell.
“1950.”
“Same as me, I came from Alabama in the 50s looking for factory work. I was part of the Great Migration. Seven million of us left the South and now we’re pushing into Marquette Park.” She smiled broadly. “Only took a year out to have Betty. She’s a good girl, works as a teaching assistant, going to school to become a teacher. Still goes to church with me on Sunday.”
“Nativity?”
“No, Trinity Baptist on Damen. Used to be some Lutheran church. But I didn’t come here to talk about churches. I need some help. I even had Reverend Williams come over, but he couldn’t do anything with that spirit. She just kept right on talking her talk, you know?”
“No, what do you mean?”
“Well, there’s a woman ghost in that house, and I can’t understand a word she’s saying. I thought that maybe she was, you know, Lutherainian.”
“Lithuanian or Lutheran? I’m Catholic.”
“Well, never mind. Anyway, I figure you might understand what that ghost is saying. I don’t know what else to do. We’re all scared to death. Thought you could help us.”
“A ghost?” Agota’s face puckered. “Please, what can I do?” She was uncomfortable.
“Honey, if you could just talk to her, find out why she’s there. Maybe then we’d know what to do because, I tell you honestly, my nerves have just about had it.”
“Oh, I can’t help you.” Agota wished Odell would just stand up and go home.
“Now, listen, you don’t have to do a thing,” pleaded Odell, grabbing Agota’s hand. “Just listen to her. Just come over for dinner tonight? She always comes to the kitchen at dinnertime. Please come, just this once.”
Agota didn’t want to go to dinner to meet a spirit who spoke Lithuanian. She just wanted to shut the door behind this large black woman and pretend she had never had this conversation. But she was too polite to refuse her. “What time?”
“Six. She always comes around that time. You like barbecue chicken?”
Agota nodded politely, feeling angry with herself for not saying she was busy.
Odell looked relieved. “Thank you, you’re our last chance,” she said, pushing herself up from the sofa. “If this doesn’t work, I’m putting the house up for sale. I’m not living with ghosts, no sir.”
That evening Agota put on her favorite navy dress, pinned an amber brooch on the collar, hung a gold cross on her neck, and tucked her rosary and her favorite holy card of Saint Jude in her purse. Her navy low-heeled pumps squeezed her bunions as she walked across the street for dinner, dressed as if she were going to the Lithuanian opera. Odell led Agota to her backyard, where her daughter was grilling chicken and her grandson was shooting baskets in the driveway. Agota was introduced and seated at the redwood picnic table.
“We don’t eat inside no more,” said Odell as she nervously
turned a plastic fork over and over. When Agota raised her eyebrows in question, Odell shook her head. “Honey, we don’t set foot in that kitchen during dinnertime. I make everything ahead of time and then we hightail it out of there. Here, try some of my corn bread. Chicken’s almost ready.”
Agota chewed the crumbly yellow bread, thinking how dry it was. The chicken tasted good but a bit burned and the greens were bitter, but she liked the black-eyed peas. Both Betty and Darrell ate quickly, looking as if they wanted to get away as fast as they could. Soon Betty got up, excusing herself.
“Girl, where you going?” Odell shot her question out.
“Night school, Mama.” Betty looked sideways at Agota.
“Oh, yeah, sorry, sugar. I guess it’s my nerves,” said Odell, pushing her bulk up from the table and watching her daughter disappear down the gangway to the street. Darrell slipped out behind her with a wave, his basketball tucked under his arm. “Agota, we better go have our dessert in the kitchen.”
“With the ghost?” Agota felt her skin prickle at the idea.
“I don’t wanna go either, but how else you gonna hear what she wants?”
Agota wanted to spit three times to ward off the evil eye or any other bit of bad luck that lurked nearby. Touching the cross on her neck, she asked Odell, “You’re coming too, aren’t you?”
Odell took the hanky out of her apron pocket and blew her nose. “I am, though, God knows, I’d like to stay out here with the lightning bugs.” The two women reluctantly climbed the five stairs that led to the small kitchen. “Cookies or ice cream?” asked Odell.
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