The Stowaway

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  This early oceanic trip thrilled Billy, though, and after his months at sea as a three- and then four-year-old, he refused to take off his sailing suit. When anyone asked the articulate little boy, who could already read and write, what he wanted to be when he grew up, his mother answered for him: “He wants to be a sailor.”

  Billy smiled big in several photos taken upon his return to New York: on top of a pony in the East Village; astride other of the city’s horses. Police officers were happy to indulge his cheeky requests, happy to show off their horses, delighting in a little boy so fearless.

  The Gawronskis settled back into their lives near the Polish National Home, or as they called it, the Polski Dom Narodowy. This community center at the heart of a ten-block Polish neighborhood of tenement buildings centered on St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side, where neighborhood stores catered to homesick Polish-speaking residents, with pączki (jelly doughnuts) in bakery windows. Friends of friends held Bible study, and singing society get-togethers, and meetings of the men’s club to which Rudy now devoted most of his time: a gymnastic and political society called Dom Narodowy Sokot, or the Polish Falcons of America.

  An American outgrowth of a paramilitary fraternal organization started in Poland in 1867, the Polish Falcons adopted a strenuous program of physical education to do their part in bringing on “Polish national rejuvenation through self-discipline and physical fitness.” The falcon was chosen as a symbol of strength and self-preservation. Fittingly for a society named after a bird, each group was called a nest. The first was founded in 1887, in Chicago, and soon there were twelve nests across the United States; the one on the Lower East Side was called Falcons Nest 7. In Polish-language handouts, the Falcons stated that they hoped to “exert every possible influence towards attaining political independence of the fatherland,” then under the governance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They fought for their adoptive homeland, too. Throughout the twentieth century, many brawny Falcons ranked as officers, in peacetime and in both world wars, where they proved among the fiercest Americans in battle.

  Rudy, doing his small part to rebuild the Polish spirit, went to the gym religiously and took daily swims at the closest public pool. He never missed rowdy outings to Brooklyn’s Coney Island, at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean—and the group swims that took place even in the middle of the winter, with plenty of vodka to help the shock of the cold. Billy was excited to tag along on these manly swims. When the well-liked Rudy was voted in as president of Nest 7, he made sure his child learned not only to speak Polish fluently but also—and in some ways, more importantly to him—to swim better than anyone else. Billy was an impressive swimmer by the age of six.

  To give her son an outlet for his considerable boy energy, Francesca enrolled him in free acting classes offered by the church community. Amusing photos of the “actor” were pasted into a family album: Billy dressed in Polish national costume, as a soldier, and even as an Indian.

  A handful of especially precocious children were asked to recite poetry in front of the great pianist, composer, and political activist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who was visiting the St. Stanislaus Parish to garner American support for an independent Poland. Billy was a natural selection. For years to come, his father clung to this favorite story about his son, telling new decorating clients how the great composer Paderewski complimented him on his boy’s recitation. As a grown man, Billy would recall, “The parish was the heart of my parents’ world and kept us going as a family.”

  Polish politics were always on the lips of his parents’ friends. Fortunately, the kid with a notorious appetite had plenty to eat while waiting for never-ending partisan arguments to stop. Ladies in his church loved the way he complimented them at get-togethers, and they competed for his attention, waving and calling him over to try their home-cooked dishes. Potlucks were the highlights of church fetes, and each week, Billy stuffed his plate with competing offerings: a hunter’s stew called bigos; stuffed cabbage with mushroom sauce; a potato-lamb soup called z·urek (served up in a scooped-out loaf of rye bread); white borscht soured by sauerkraut; and comforting pierogies stuffed with each woman’s special filling, savory (meat, potato, kasha, sauerkraut with mushrooms or spinach) or sweet (cherry, blueberry, or white curd cheese). There were heaping servings of beef goulash and pork schnitzel topped with egg, and ogórki kiszone (dill pickles). But Billy always kept room in his belly for kielbasa, the spicy Polish sausage, which would be his favorite treat for a lifetime.

  Although the Gawronskis were among the most active parishioners of the church, they decided their child was better off in local Public School 64 on East Sixth Street. They wanted Billy to gain a native speaker’s advantage in their adopted country. But they signed him up for Sunday Polish classes, which turned out to be enough; he soon amused extended family members by telling long jokes in fluent Polish. Over his lifetime, he would master five languages.

  In 1918 the Gawronskis moved to yet another railroad flat, at 233 East Ninth Street, careful to rent in their parish. Even with two tiny bedrooms instead of one big one, life with an eight-year-old boy was still cramped.

  By 1920, Rudy was yearning for open space and wanting desperately to move back to the reborn Second Polish Republic, which had come into being in November 1918, in the wake of World War I. Rudy’s hero, General Józef Piłsudski, had recruited the great Paderewski to become the new prime minister. Although the virtuoso wasn’t used to handling political crises, he would keep the position for almost a year before resuming his musical career, for which he had a well-deserved fanatical following.

  Francesca preferred to stay put in a free America with its mind-boggling radio technology—a nation teeming with shops that sold things she actually wanted. Why go backward? To keep his struggling marriage, Rudy yielded first but decided he at least needed to see a free Poland once with his own eyes. In May 1922 he left New York with his émigré brother Walter aboard the Frederik VIII for a half-year visit back home. When he returned, there was still fighting, and financial struggle, and he and Francesca put off having more children.

  But an active boy such as Billy needed company. Over the next few years, the parents agreed to a cat, a snake, rats, and, finally, a dog. Enter Tootsie, a stray black-and-white mutt. Animal rights crusading had recently taken hold in New York, and a new sort of dog show had been organized by the New York Women’s League for Animals. Unlike the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden (then on Twenty-Sixth Street and Madison Avenue), which catered to fancy breeds, this one, held way downtown in a working-class neighborhood near Lafayette Street, gave prizes to stray animals that had been adopted into loving homes. Fourteen-year-old Billy was keen to have his Tootsie compete in the contest, confident he was a sure bet to win. What other dog had been trained to ride a horse? He had worked all year with a milkman he’d befriended; horses helped deliver milk bottles, clopping along the streets among the city’s growing number of motorcars. The man had laughed when Billy asked if he could put his dog on his horse. Tootsie’s triumph on April 21, 1925, was covered in the New York Daily News and the New York Daily Sun. Billy, as he’d promised to his peers, had demolished the competition. He ate up the attention at school and also at home, where his mother proudly clipped her son’s delightful achievement for her still-thin scrapbook. In a few years, it would become a lot thicker.

  • • •

  At fifteen, Billy had an exciting new hobby: girls. Pocket money was desperately needed so he could ask female classmates to soda shops and silent movies without begging his father for a buck. His way with languages helped his search for an after-school job. Not many Catholics had a solid grasp of Yiddish from the street, but he did, thanks to his many Lower East Side stickball friends. Besides, Yiddish was so close to German, which he’d mastered in school. Jewish parents shook their heads in disbelief at a Catholic Pole’s lovely Yiddish, and had a proposal for him. Did he want to earn a dollar? Billy was soon in high demand as a Shabbos goy: a non
-Jew hired for a bit of spare money to put lights on in Jewish homes on Friday nights and Saturdays, when the observant are forbidden by Jewish law to use electricity on the Sabbath.

  Meanwhile, Rudy was growing more frustrated with his overcrowded living situation. What kind of success story was he if he still lived in a Lower East Side tenement? He had long dreamed of his own mom-and-pop interior decoration business, and was grooming Billy to be his partner and heir. He wanted his son to go to college, learn the new business ways; then his Billy would join him, and they would build a mini-empire together. When the pickiest customers of his firm needed a master upholsterer for everything from drapes, to ottomans, to velvet chesterfield sofas, they always asked for the “Polish man.” Boasting to Francesca that he had enough clients and money in the bank, Rudy insisted he was ready to give it a go as a solo contractor. Many of his forward-thinking clients had started out poor; they would support a man who thought big. And it was a good time for an ambitious businessman. Investors were buying stocks with gusto. People buy a lot of furniture when they’re making a lot of money, and, by 1926, there was a citywide economic flush. Fruit mongers from Little Italy now owned large groves in Florida after speculating on land. Jews owned stores they’d once worked at. America loved strivers.

  When Rudy investigated storefront options outside the neighborhood, he didn’t mention his field trips, with good reason: his wife had happily found her own set of friends in Manhattan, mostly through the Red Cross, where she held an officer position. Francesca had been a budding suffragette and was quick to join the Democratic Party shortly after women won the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She had joined the local ladies’ political club, too. Rudy feared her reaction to his desire to move the family away.

  He was also finding his teenage son increasingly defiant, and on several occasions threatened a lashing when the boy played hooky from school. Because of Billy’s sophomore year finals, Rudy wouldn’t let him go to Richard Byrd’s parade on June 23, 1926, after having returned from the North Pole. What was more important, a parade or grades? Even in an era of triumphant tickertape parades for the likes of superstar athletes—including one that July for American golfer Bobby Jones, winner of the prestigious British Open; and one several months earlier for sea captain George Fried, who, with his heroic crew of the American luxury liner SS President Roosevelt, had rescued the sinking British steam cargo ship Antinoe in a winter hurricane—Byrd’s had been a noteworthy one to miss. The aviator had claimed a spectacular first aerial dash over the pole with his flying pal Floyd Bennett—although gadflies were already hinting that Byrd fudged the coordinates to heighten his profile. Nevertheless, most of America took Byrd’s word for it.

  Rudy’s widowed mother was also newly arrived from Poland, bringing with her a collection of amulets and a rich set of old-world traditions, such as telling the family’s fortunes from dripped candle wax and tea leaves. Rudy quickly had it up to here with the old woman stuck in her superstitious ways. Between her, his rebellious teenager, and the newly politicized wife, there was nowhere to go but the living room. Rudy, a traditionalist, believed in staying with a woman; especially the mother of his son. But he was more convinced than ever that he should find them a place to live with more space. Why not just get his mother her own floor? That might quell Francesca’s concerns about her mother-in-law’s interference.

  Still, it moved Rudy how tender his dear mother was with her only grandson. Billy always called Rudy’s mother Babcia, never Grandma, and she was so proud that her American grandson spoke to her in perfect Polish. When Babcia pinched her grandson’s prominent apple cheeks, kissing him on the head, Billy was anything but embarrassed. The stubborn modern youth and his antique grandmother with yellowed teeth and a crystal ball were the unlikeliest of allies.

  Without Francesca, Rudy continued to take secret subway rides to Bayside, in Queens, after hearing of a thriving, small Polish community centered around the St. Josaphat Parish. The boxlike one-story church was erected in 1901 to serve the determined Polish who had left the crowded Lower East Side for the outer borough. There was also a pleasingly active Bayside Polish Democratic Club. Rudy braced himself for a fight at home and told his wife that he had already befriended the club president, John Stroebel, who knew every Pole in town—a connection he was sure would bring bread-and-butter upholstery customers to his door until the neighborhood’s movie stars called on him for interior decoration.

  In the end, he was the husband, the breadwinner, and he had final say.

  Rudy avoided buying in Bayside’s “Polack Town”—where the Negro families lived, too—fearing it might turn off snobby clients. He picked a roomy house located in the business district: a green-and-white single-family dwelling with a half-story attic and a storefront on the bottom floor for his business. The address, 4021 First Street at Ahles Road, was almost the farthest you could get from Manhattan without leaving Queens, but it was still within New York City, so Billy could continue to attend his excellent all-borough public high school. It would now be an hour ride into Manhattan, but it was easily accessible by the Long Island Railroad. He didn’t have to lose any friends.

  To quell Francesca’s worries about losing her own friends, Rudy maintained that it would be a close enough walk to the new Polish church and club meetings. And so many people she knew were moving here, too! Fifteen thousand people lived in Bayside, double the number of a year before. Their new home wasn’t fancy like the grand estates near the Bayside Yacht Club, but it was convenient if she wanted to get into Manhattan without a car. It was only two blocks from the railroad, and it would be theirs alone—a triumph for two people who’d each arrived at Ellis Island with zilch.

  As added incentive, Rudy promised animal-mad Billy that he could set up a tiny bee apiary on their property; understandably, he had refused to do so in a Manhattan apartment despite the books Billy had excitedly checked out of the library. Not only that, Rudy would help his son learn the craft that he knew from his youth in Poland. Billy couldn’t believe it: an apiary!

  The Gawronskis took out a mortgage and moved in weeks later. They soon bought a car: a brand-new Ford Model A.

  Francesca made it known that her boy would have plenty of time to learn the interior decoration trade later. The new apprentice-type errands Rudy demanded cut into the time Billy could spend reading in the library like he had back in Manhattan. Billy agreed with his mother, thrilled that he’d found a branch library down the block from his new home. As was his gregarious way, he befriended the female librarian, who routinely put aside Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville for him. She soon learned that he liked any literature about adventure, really, especially to the polar regions, the least-explored lands on Earth. Adventure novels had been popular with boys since the early nineteenth century, and with the advent of long-distance flight, the mid-1920s was a particularly rich time for the genre. Such books led many an inner-city working-class boy like Billy to feel that he could achieve his dreams.

  Billy’s favorite librarian secured him an early copy of Dick Byrd: Air Explorer, an authorized biography in a series for boys that touted recent escapades by the most heroic. Roy Chapman Andrews discovered petrified eggs of a “million-year-old dinosaur”—he would later become director of the American Museum of Natural History; affluent Manhattanite (and great-great-grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt) Douglas Burden encountered the nine-foot-long giant lizards of Komodo Island; Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate R. Oglesby Marsh led a Central American expedition that brought back living specimens of “white” Indians of Panama’s Darién Gap to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. All were thrilling reads, but the book about his personal hero—which was reprinted five times in quick succession—captivated Billy most of all.

  Time in the library, fine. What kind of father would argue with that? But now that the boy was sixteen, Rudy expected Billy to increase his responsibilities, starting with acc
ompanying him in the new automobile to deliver finished work to clients. Why break his back when he had a strong son to balance the load?

  The upstart decorator had perfected the contemporary look of 1926. He wasn’t stuck in the frilly Edwardian or Art Nouveau style some of his competitors were. With a few wealthy clients to his name, Rudy set his sights on an even richer celebrity clientele. There were still plenty to be found in Bayside: in response to rumors earlier in the decade of a third major New York City film studio being built in Brooklyn, the silent-film stars of the metropolis had joined in a mad rush to grab homes.

  The first luminary to arrive and elevate Bayside’s reputation had been boxer-turned-actor James J. Corbett, who purchased 221-04 Thirty-Sixth Avenue, a Queen Anne–style house, with his second wife, Vera, in 1902. Corbett was a household name far beyond the two-block Bayside stretch that would one day be renamed Corbett Road. Nicknamed Gentleman Jim for his gracious manner, he was originally a bank clerk and was whispered to have had a college education. Way back in 1892, Corbett had knocked out the great John L. Sullivan in the twenty-first round to become the world heavyweight champion.

  Billy and his parents were surrounded by glamour just out of reach. Their lower-middle-class Bayside neighbors called the nearby posh stretch overlooking Crocheron Park “Actors Row”—understandable when this family of movie lovers took roll call of the colony of silent-film stars who lived there or had until recently. Comic actor and director Buster Keaton, nicknamed “the Great Stone Face” for his signature deadpan expression, was one of the bigger names. Gloria Swanson was as revered for her clothing choices as for her romantic leads. Bayside was also home to John Barrymore and his wife, the “Goddess of the Silver Screen,” Dolores Costello, whom he’d met (and begun an affair with) filming 1926’s The Sea Beast, a loose adaptation of Melville’s Moby-Dick—Barrymore played Captain Ahab. Costello was the daughter of another prominent Bayside resident: the first matinee star, Maurice Costello, who back in 1911 had starred in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s French Revolution novel A Tale of Two Cities.