Bandit

by Molly Brodak

  Besides, an addict is already faithfully committed to something he prioritizes above all else. Gambling addiction, particularly, is easy to start; it usually requires no elaborate or illegal activities, no troublesome ingestion of substances, and programs the body using its own chemicals: adrenaline, endorphins, spikes of joy. Only once did I see Dad’s face after a night of gambling. I was eight. It was early Sunday morning, before Mom or my sister were awake. I was belly down on the carpet with a small arrangement of Legos, singing to myself, light still gray in the living room. The front door unlocked and opened and I looked, petrified with fear. Dad, obscure in silhouette, but shining somehow, his hair wet, face wet. Stony expression: eyes set steady, mouth drawn in. His shirt hung heavy on him. I stared from the floor, silent. He didn’t see me. He turned, still blank, and disappeared down the hall. A dark V of sweat running down the back of his shirt. Quietly I turned back to my Lego arrangement, looking at it, but not seeing, quiet.

  What did I know about gambling? Even as I grew older, I avoided sports, avoided casinos and card games, avoided even the lottery. As an adult I wasn’t equipped to understand him, having no understanding of gambling.

  At first I thought gambling was about chance, just the possibility to make something out of nothing, to multiply money just through pure cleverness. He’d like that: something from nothing.

  And that is the first charm. But I know now that gambling is about certainty, not chance. Outcomes, whether win or lose, are certain, immediate, and clear. In other words, there will be a result to any one bet, a point in time when this risk will be unequivocally resolved and the skill and foresight of the gambler can be perfectly measured. A shot of adrenaline will issue into the bloodstream, win or lose. It’s not messy, not indefinite or uncontrollable, like love or people, things Dad labored to control. The space of gambling absorbs its players away from uncertainty, the unknown: how the world works.

  7

  My dad was born August 19, 1945, in a refugee camp set up for the survivors just liberated from Nazi concentration camps. This is how he first lived: being carried by his mother, in secret, while she worked silently as a slave for the Nazis in Kempten.

  The previous year his mother and father and five siblings were moved out of their home in Szwajcaria, Poland, by the Nazis and forced to board a train. My Aunt Helena, a few years older than my dad, told me she remembers the train. She recalls their mom, Stanislawa, hopping off the train when it stopped to hunt for wood to start a cooking fire. Stanislawa’s parents and three of her siblings had died a few years before in Siberia, having been shipped there to cut trees for the Russian supply. “The trees would shatter if they hit the ground because it was so cold. No one had enough clothes or food, so most people died there,” Aunt Helena told me in a recent letter replying to my inquiries about our family history. She has memories of their life during the war, “but they don’t seem real,” she told me. She remembers the mood of the train: the animal-like panic any time the train stopped, the worry of the adults, and her worry when her mother would disappear. They were taken to the Dachau concentration camp, where my grandfather was beaten and interrogated daily because they suspected him of being a partisan, like his brothers.

  My dad’s dad was separated from the family. The rest of them lived and worked together, hoping he’d be returned.

  After a few months all of them were transferred to a subcamp in Kempten, Germany, where they worked the farm that fed the captives. This is where my grandmother became pregnant with my father. She hid her pregnancy because she was afraid she’d be forced to abort it, so she worked like everyone else and hid her body. Everyone had to work to be fed, even the children and the sick. My aunt remembers little about this time, and won’t say much. “There were horrors every day,” she says. I don’t press her. The war was over in April and my dad was born in August.

  After the war they were moved to a refugee camp while trying to find a way out of Germany. My grandfather felt strongly that they should move to Australia, since he liked the idea of working a homestead and living freely, as a farmer. But a few months before they were to leave, he died, and Australia no longer welcomed a widow with five children. They were offered a passage to America through a Catholic sponsorship program, and they took it. My dad’s first memories were of this ship: troop transport, cold and gray all around, the sea and metal smell.

  They arrived at Ellis Island on December 4, 1951, and Dad’s name was changed from Jozef to Joseph. They traveled by train to Detroit. Their sponsor took them to St. Albertus Church, on the corner of St. Aubin and Canfield Streets, on the other side of I-75 from Wayne State University, an area that used to be called Poletown. They lived on the top floor of the adjacent school, built in 1916, until my grandma found work in the cafeteria of the Detroit News and rented an apartment for them. Now St. Albertus, no longer a parish as of 1990, stands among abandoned buildings and urban prairie.

  Inspired by the family history illuminated by my aunt, I emailed Dad asking him to tell me about his life growing up in Detroit. I had no idea where he was born, and I had no inkling of the incredible ordeal his family shuffled through. He’d never told me any of this. Was it shame? Would he even reply? Quickly he wrote back to say he’d write me a letter, two letters in fact, since he was sure he wouldn’t be able to fit it all in one envelope. I waited a month, two months: it wasn’t like him. I thought maybe he was sick or worse. Eventually it came—he’d gotten in trouble at his job, he said, for disobeying an order, and had been in solitary confinement for the past few weeks.

  The first letter, written on yellow lined paper, was long and cheery. I was suspicious. I’ve always been both suspicious and suspicious of my suspicion when listening to Dad. What if it wasn’t all lies this time? What if he let me in—would I be strong enough to follow? But mostly I knew it would be what it was: an innocuous and slightly heroic vision of himself, his official story, nothing deeper.

  He described the neighborhood, a tight-knit, mini Eastern Europe: small blocks of varied ethnicities grouped around their churches, family-owned shops, and split homes. They were terribly poor, living off charity and the small salary that his mom made washing dishes in the cafeteria of the Detroit News office downtown. He described her as “superstitiously religious.” Every day before school he attended service at St. Albertus, and also on Sundays, leaving only Saturdays without church. His whole world was built on the church—his family, his neighborhood, his education, his citizenship in this country. When they did move out of the school, they lived only a few blocks away. He said he was almost never too far away to hear the church bells chime every fifteen minutes. He said he loved the church. The overwhelming detail of the stained glass, the painted ceiling, the enormous organ, the grand, formal rituals—all of it must have been a steady comfort to him, to all of them, in a new country.

  It was nice to hear, I must admit, and it made sense. I didn’t much see the impression of the Catholic Church on him, but for his love of luxury. It contrasted with the moral tone of my upbringing by Mom: the blue-collar, midwestern work ethic that identifies laziness, indulgence, and shortcuts as serious sins, having nothing in common with Catholicism besides guilt as a motivational technique. Luxury disgusted me. It all seemed false, however real the materials, however deep the ostentation, or honest the funding—it was all predicated on the notion that money itself meant something big, was glorious. I know if I had grown up as poor as my dad I would most likely see this differently.

  Dad’s mom eventually remarried, to an older Lithuanian man whose money helped the family enormously. They moved into a real house, out of the fleabag apartments they’d been moving through, and he suddenly had a stepdad. He would only describe his stepdad as “crabby.” His brothers fought with him regularly, and so he kept his distance. In one letter he tells me his stepdad carved for him a toy wooden rifle—the one and only present he ever gave him—and how much he loved it. My dad devoted one whole letter to describing him, the houses
they lived in, and which of his siblings moved out when. The second letter is colder and hesitant. Dad was the last to leave home. I can see him there, with his mother to whom he could hardly relate, and his distant stepfather, a non-dad, for whom there was no real role in his life. He turned inward. I know how that works. Perhaps he felt abandoned or lonely.

  By the time he was leaving elementary school his neighborhood started to change too. As the Polish immigrants moved to Hamtramck and other white neighbors moved to the suburbs, black folks replaced them—people whom my father had, until this point, never met. “With them,” he wrote, “came crime and drugs. It was demoralizing, to see these strange black people that I previously saw at a distance now living next door to us.” His childhood world, as small and culturally monolithic as most childhood worlds, was cracking open. The Polish family on the corner moved out and the property became a post for drug dealers in just a few months. The family-owned businesses he grew up with closed or moved. Tensions boiled. Newly established black-owned businesses were torched. Vigilante “patrols” were established to keep one group away from another group’s street. White immigrant families abandoned entire blocks together, chasing hopes for reestablishing homogenous neighborhoods elsewhere. This is the story all over Detroit throughout the fifties and sixties, White Flight, how abandonment began to build a “white noose” around the city. In his letter he says most people do not have a “good reason” to dislike black people, but he does. I am ashamed by this and I wonder what potential warmth was cut from his personality in his turn toward hatred of his neighbors.

  He stayed in Detroit until he left for Vietnam in the midseventies. When he returned, he moved to a flat just a few blocks away from St. Albertus with his first wife and their daughter, my half-sister. And every letter he has ever written to me about his life story ends there. Perhaps this is just practical—he thinks I know the rest of the story. But, this is important. This part of his life—everything before he met my mom—this is the part he can present as wholesome. He was innocent then, not a criminal yet—or at least, could say he was innocent then. All the letters end there.

  8

  I know my dad feels a hole where his father should be. Everyone in his family knew his father except him. His first letter to me starts with “You probably know that if my father had lived, my life would have turned out much differently.” On the surface I know he means they would have moved to Australia. But there is more to it. I don’t think he really knows how well I understand this.

  I’ve seen a few photos of him when he was a child. One I remember hanging in a frame with other photos—he was a child and someone was holding him; a man, possibly his stepfather, was standing with his mother and siblings in front of a house and landscape. He had a serious face but a tree trunk had aligned just perfectly behind him so it looked like it was growing straight out of his head. My sister and I used to look at this and laugh about it. I’d look closely at this small black-and-white photo, sad and stiff, but laugh at it.

  One photo I own—it is a new and glossy reprint of a photo and I’m not sure how I came to have it. Probably I stole it from a photo album at some point. Dad’s family is all clustered around his father’s fresh grave. They must be in Germany, at the camp where Dad was born. His oldest sister is standing, looking down at the grave, next to a wooden cross at the head of the grave, a small photo of his father’s face nailed to the center. His two brothers kneel at the foot of the grave, looking with sad, small faces at whoever was taking the photo. Worn faces, especially for children. His other sister, next to them, is looking into the camera, brows knitted, hands pressed in prayer. She looks serious and intelligent. And then, in the middle, his mother, kneeling in black, holding Dad. His mother looks directly into the camera, chin down, mouth open a little as if she was just saying something. She is pretty and tough, with high, wide cheekbones like mine. Dad is just a baby, wrapped all in black. He is looking somewhere else entirely. His face is neutral. Pudgy cheeks bulging downward. He is the only one there who doesn’t understand.

  The background is just gray, vague hills. Ghostly gray blankness. I keep the photo facedown in a folder with the letters he has written to me. It confronts me. Who would have taken this photo of a family in their most private and serious moment of grief, not posing but mourning next to their father’s grave? And is this what I am doing now in writing about my family?

  My dad’s father’s name was Kazimierz and he was a farmer, famous for breaking horses in the river Strypa. His parents were killed in Poland in 1941. Before he died he received news that his four brothers had been executed for treason. He died from a heart attack on his thirty-sixth birthday in March, 1948, when my dad was two years old.

  Aren’t we together on this, Dad, together on missing our dads, and what it has done to you and me? You left an unknowable self behind, with us, your cover story, your dupes, and I kept following. And I’m still following, somehow more than ever, in love with this trouble, this difficult family, in love with my troubled mom and sister and you too, maybe most of all you, the unknowable one.

  9

  From the window of the cab our beachfront hotel approached like a dream, as wrong as a dream, and I felt sickly overwhelmed with the luxury of the fantastic palm trees and clean arched doorways. This could not be right. I hung my mouth open a while in joy and suspicion as we left the cab, for him to see. He made a goofy roundabout pointing sweep to the door and said “Lezz go,” goofily, like he did. Thinking about it now, the hotel was probably nothing special, maybe even cheap, but I couldn’t have known.

  This was the longest period of time we spent alone together as father and daughter. I was nine or ten and he’d brought me to Cancun, an unlikely place to take a child on a summer vacation for no particular reason. He had a habit of taking vacations with just me or just my sister, never both of us together, and never with Mom, even when they were married. I imagine we never went anywhere all together as a family because Mom and Dad usually hated each other, but I didn’t get why my sister and I couldn’t go somewhere together. Now, reasoning it out, I run through a spectrum of guesses: on the practical end, there is cost and scheduling logistics, and on the other end, the darker end, there is purposeful isolation.

  During the day he would leave me. I’d wake up and find a key and a note atop some money: Have fun! Wear sunscreen! I’d put on my nubby yellow bathing suit and take myself to the beach or the small intensely chlorinated pool and try hard to have a fun vacation as instructed.

  What was he doing? Was there somewhere nearby to gamble? There must have been. Or was there a woman he met? He’d return in the evening and take me to eat somewhere nearby. He always ordered a hamburger and a Coke for me without looking at the menu, even though I hated hamburgers and Coke. Mom wouldn’t let me drink soda, and it seemed important to him to break her rules.

  “Hahmm-borrr-gaysa,” he’d say to the waiter, childishly drawing out the words and gesturing coarsely as if the waiter were near-blind and deaf, “and Coca-Colé!” he’d finish, pronouncing the “cola” part with a silly “Olé!” paired with an insulting bottle-drinking mime. He was condescending to waiters everywhere like big shots often are, but especially here. “This is the only word you need to know,” he told me from across the dark booth. “Hamburguesa.” I tamped down my disgust with obliging laughs, since clearly this show was for me. I did not recognize his gold chain and ring. I watched him carefully, waiting for a time when we’d say real things to each other.

  I didn’t tell him that I liked my days there, on the beach, alone like a grown-up. But anxious. I knew the untethered feeling I liked was not right for me yet. If he asked, I would have told him about my days lying on a blue towel, just lying there for hours, burning pink in the sun, listening while two Mexican teenage girls talked next to me, oblivious to my eavesdropping, alternating between Spanish and English. They talked about how wonderful it would be to be born a gringa, the kind of house they’d live in, what their boyfriends wou
ld look like, and how their daddies would spoil them with cars and clothes and fantastic birthday parties.

  One of the days he didn’t leave, he waited for me to wake up and took me to a Mayan ruin site. Before the tour we foreigners drew in automatically to giant steep steps of a pyramid and began to climb. It was so soaking hot, and I felt so young and small. The other tourists seemed to have such trouble climbing. I bounded up the old blocks, turning to the wide mush of treetops below and smiling. Dad down below. I waved to him but he wasn’t looking.

  We were herded up for the tour and kids my age and even older were already whining. I couldn’t imagine complaining even half as much as my peers did. It frightened me, the way they said what they wanted. Hungry and tired and thirsty and bored and ugh, Dad, can we go? At the edge of the cenote nearby a tour guide described how the Mayans would sacrifice young women here by tossing them in; “girls about your age,” he said and pointed at me. The group of tourists around us chuckled uncomfortably but I straightened up.

  I rested on a boulder carved into a snake’s head, wearing the only hat I owned as a child, a black-and-neon tropical-print baseball hat I am certain came from a Wendy’s Kids’ Meal. I feel there was a photograph taken of this that I remember seeing, and I wonder if it still exists somewhere. I remember resting on the snake’s head and I remember the photograph of myself resting on it equally. I liked this day, seeing these things that seemed so important, Dad mostly hanging back in the wet shade of the jungle edge, not climbing things. He had brought me here and I loved it. I felt the secret urge children have to become lost and stay overnight somewhere good, like a museum or mall, as a way of being there privately, directly. I circled the pyramid hoping to find a cave where I could curl up, so I could sleep and stay inside this old magic, like a good sacrifice, just right for something serious. But it was hot and we had to go. Dad seemed tired, suspicious of it all, not especially interested in learning too much from the guide or in looking too hard at the ruins. I was happy, though, and he was pleased with that. He seemed to want to let me have my happiness without necessarily sharing in it or talking about it. Perhaps it’s easy to dismiss children’s happinesses because they seem so uninformed.