The GI Bride

by Simantel, Iris Jones

  ‘Just take deep breaths and try to relax,’ the doctor kept telling me. I wondered how he’d feel if he’d had to get himself into this weird position. I felt like a turkey or chicken, waiting to be stuffed. How could I ever look him in the eye again after he’d had a good prod at my naughty bits, as Mum used to call them? Anyway, I survived the ordeal and the soft-spoken man did his best to put me at ease and to make the examination tolerable.

  His name was Edward Crown, and he was the brother of the famous Chicago industrialist Colonel Henry Crown. The Crown family, who were among the city’s most prominent citizens, at that time owned the Empire State Building, the Material Service Corporation and General Dynamics to name but a few. Dr Crown, who certainly didn’t need to continue as a doctor, was still involved in the family business but took care of the obstetric needs of a few select society women and only because he loved his work. He agreed to be my doctor as a favour to Joan Morris, and perhaps because he felt a bit sorry for the skinny little sixteen-year-old immigrant girl.

  My in-laws were pleased to hear that their son was to be a father, but they took little interest in my well-being. They had no sympathy for my debilitating morning sickness, which turned out to be twenty-four-hours-a-day sickness and lasted for more than six months. My own parents were excited to hear that they were to be grandparents but they were understandably worried. My mother started knitting baby clothes and repeatedly reminded me that I was now eating for two. She also sent me some second-hand maternity smocks that were so ugly they went straight to Goodwill Charities. Besides, I’d had enough of wearing other people’s cast-offs.

  Shortly after we moved into our apartment, something miraculous happened. An English woman and her Ukrainian husband moved into the apartment next door. The first time I heard that English accent in the hallway, I thought I was dreaming but, thank God, I wasn’t. The Hawryluks, Alice and Bill, had no children and were quite a bit older than we were, but we immediately became good friends. How wonderful it was to have someone nearby who not only spoke my language but ate the same food. In the meantime, I had also heard from Barbara McCarthy, the girl I had met on the ship, and although she lived on the other side of Chicago we could see one another now that we knew how to use the buses. Barbara was also pregnant so we always had lots to discuss.

  As soon as Bob had finished with the army, he’d gone back to his old job as a carpenter for Western Electric Corporation. He worked all the overtime hours he could get so that we could prepare for the baby and be able to afford a larger, nicer apartment. Because of his hours, I spent a great deal of time alone so it was wonderful having an English neighbour, who provided proper cups of tea, baked beans on toast and regular doses of sympathy.

  By then, summer was upon us and the temperature was rising. I had never been so miserable in my life. Our apartment had a flat, tarred roof so our rooms were like an oven. My pregnancy was taking its toll on my energy, I felt nauseated most of the time and, no matter what I did, I could never get cool enough to have a good night’s sleep. We borrowed an ancient oscillating fan from Bob’s parents but it didn’t help much.

  There was no breeze for weeks on end and our few windows, the ones that were not painted shut, were positioned in such a way that we couldn’t create a cross-breeze.

  One day at lunchtime, Harry said, ‘Come on, kid. Let’s take you somewhere cool. You look ready to cave in at any minute.’ He took me to a small air-conditioned restaurant where, for an hour or so, I was able to relax. When we left, he told me he was taking me for a ride to give me some more cool air. We drove to the Lake Michigan shore, where we parked the car and sat on a bench in the shade, chatting for a while. Then he went and spoiled it all.

  ‘Ya know, kid, I’ve become very attracted to you. I’d like to make love to you.’

  What? Oh, no, I thought. What in the world is he talking about? By now, I was visibly pregnant: how could he possibly be attracted to me, and what was I supposed to say? So, I did the only thing I could. I laughed right in his face. ‘You really had me going there for a minute, Harry. I thought you were serious,’ I said.

  ‘I’m dead serious, kid. I think I’m falling in love with you.’

  I couldn’t stop laughing, but the look on his face told me I’d hurt him. Did he think I was interested in him, or was he trying to take advantage of me? I didn’t know. Then, stifling my laughter, I suddenly knew what to say. ‘Harry,’ I began, ‘you know what your problem is? You have a thing for pregnant women. Now, let’s get back to work before someone thinks there really is something going on between us.’ Neither of us ever mentioned the incident again, but every time I looked at him, I wanted to slap him for being so stupid.

  With the record heat of that summer, I would go into the ice-cream storage rooms at work and sit on top of the chest freezers, or I would ask Harry to place a huge block of dry ice in front of a fan to blow a bit of cool air on me. At home, I would strip off and sit in a bath of cool water, and at night I slept naked on the cool marble bathroom floor. Sometimes, in the evening, when I was tearful and desperate, we would take a blanket down to North Avenue Beach on Lake Michigan and lie on the sand for hours. Occasionally, finances permitting, we would find a cinema with air-conditioning and sit there until closing time. I had been miserable before, but now I was sure that the summer heat was going to finish me off. All I wanted was to go home to England but, of course, I couldn’t tell anyone that.

  When I was six or seven months pregnant, Bob surprised me with a day out at the Indiana sand dunes. It was a beautiful place, crowded on that hot sunny day. Once we were on the beach it seemed cooler and I settled in for the first comfortable day I’d had for weeks. A non-swimmer, I waded in the cool water while Bob swam and floated, enjoying every minute of it. We had a simple picnic lunch and afterwards I settled back for a snooze. I must have slept for a long time because Bob had to wake me to get ready for the long drive home. When I tried to stand up, I couldn’t bend my legs. In fact, I felt stiff all over.

  Eventually, Bob got me back to the car and we realized I had been in the sun far too long and was severely burned. I became so ill that he had to take me to a hospital emergency room. We also called Dr Crown, who was furious that we had allowed it to happen, but also worried. He told us there wasn’t much we could do because of my pregnancy, which was exactly what the emergency-room staff had told us. We should just keep applying cold compresses and lotion. I certainly couldn’t take anything for the pain and, believe me, there was plenty of it: the blistering was severe and took for ever to heal. I swore then that I would never again lie in the sun.

  It wasn’t just the record high temperatures that made the summer of 1955 nightmarish: it was also the year of the cicada invasion, and what a freaky experience that was. I had heard of locusts laying waste to places in Africa, but I hadn’t expected such a thing to occur in Chicago. I had never heard of cicadas before, but now swarms of them filled the air and covered the trees, and the sound they made was deafening. It was most unpleasant going outside in the morning and having to walk on a carpet of dead ones or maybe it was their empty shells: the crunching sounded as if I was treading on broken glass. It still gives me the shivers to think of it.

  At weekends, we made the obligatory visits to the in-laws and, oh, how I dreaded those Sundays, especially since Grandma Neuhaus had moved back in. It drove me crazy listening to her and my mother-in-law chattering away in German. They seemed to forget that I was there, which made me feel even more excluded. True, Grandma spoke little English, but my mother-in-law, Clara, could have explained what they were discussing. I was always afraid they were talking about me. I suppose Bob was used to it. He wasn’t much of a conversationali
st himself, which often left me with the old familiar sensation that I was invisible, as I had so often felt during my childhood: my mother had been preoccupied with concerns about my father and had little time or patience for her children.

  I still had to help wash all the dishes in the hotter-than-hell kitchen, with my feet swelling until they looked like great water-filled balloons. All I wanted was a cool, quiet spot in which to have a nap. The Irvines were not happy when we took some Sundays off to go apartment hunting. I knew they thought it was my fault and that I was being selfish, but Sunday was usually the only time we had together, since Bob worked on most Saturdays, and we simply had to find different accommodation before the baby arrived.

  Soon after we had missed a Sunday at the Irvines’, Bob received a phone call from his mother. In the course of the conversation she told him that their dog had died. I had never paid much attention to it because they always kept it tied up on their back porch. Once, on a particularly cold day, I’d asked if I could bring the dog inside but the Irvines had informed me that he was not a house dog. I never understood why people had a dog if they kept it outside. Anyway, on our next visit, I expressed my sympathy at their loss and asked what had happened.

  ‘Well, sometimes he just went crazy,’ said my mother-in-law, ‘usually if he got overexcited, like if he saw a squirrel or something. He’d go mad trying to get at it.’ It didn’t sound crazy to me. That was what all dogs did. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘he tried to jump over the railing of the back porch and he hanged himself on his leash. We found him there when we got home from shopping. We thought it was strange that he didn’t bark when we came in.’

  ‘How awful for him,’ I said, then added, ‘and for you, too, of course.’

  On our way home that evening, I couldn’t hold back my laughter.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Bob asked.

  ‘Well, I know how miserable I was living with your family. Maybe the dog was too. I was just wondering if maybe he committed suicide,’ I replied, laughing so hard I could hardly get the words out.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ he said, looking very serious, but then he saw the funny side and joined in. ‘Yeah, if we think those Sundays are painful for us, that poor dog didn’t even get to come in for dinner.’

  ‘Yeah, but he didn’t have to wash all those flippin’ dishes either,’ I said. Poor dog, I thought, but at least he doesn’t have to put up with them any more. Bob was right, though: it wasn’t funny, poor little guy, tied up on the porch no matter what the weather. He’d earned his place in dog heaven.

  We finally found an apartment, still on Chicago’s west side but in a far nicer neighbourhood: it was quieter and more residential. After much deliberation, Bob decided we might just about be able to afford to go from fifty-five dollars a month in rent to seventy-five, even though it would be hard when I had to give up my job.

  The apartment was on the second floor, had much larger rooms, a separate bedroom and a ‘sun-porch’. It also had laundry facilities in the basement, which meant I would no longer have to go to the Laundromat. It was more convenient to do the washing down there, but I still hated it. The basement was dark, dirty and draped with enormous cobwebs. Bob’s parents gave us their old washing machine, an ancient top-loader with a wringer on the side. You had to fill it using hoses, which you attached to the taps, one for cold water and the other for hot. At least a dozen lines were strung across the basement for the building’s occupants to hang their washing to dry.

  Worse than doing the laundry, though, was the ironing. At work, Bob wore what he called wash-pants and wash-shirts. In those days, they were made of heavy 100 per cent cotton twill and were almost impossible to iron. My mother-in-law told me I needed ‘pants stretchers’, which was what she used for Daddy’s bus-driver uniforms she always called him ‘Daddy’ when speaking to or about him so Bob and I duly bought some. They were metal frames in the shape of a trouser leg that you inserted into each leg while they were wet. The frames were expandable and once you had them inside the legs, you stretched them as far as they would go. This stopped the trousers shrinking and supposedly made them easier to iron. Ha, I thought, easy for them to say. But I digress.

  The new apartment was directly across the street from Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church on Iowa Street, which turned out to be a source of free entertainment as there were always weddings to watch on Saturdays from the glassed-in sun-porch. We moved in when I was seven and a half months pregnant, which was also the right time for me to stop working. I hated to leave my job with Happy Harry’s, but since the season was slowing down anyway, it seemed perfect timing. Besides, I knew the Morrises and I would remain friends, and that I could rely on Joan if I needed advice or help, but I hated leaving my British friend Alice Hawryluk and all those lovely cups of tea.

  Bob and I enjoyed shopping for our new home. We’d had to do it quickly because we had no furniture, except the kitchen table and chairs, which had been a gift. We bought a suite of living-room furniture, including curtains, table lamps, rugs for the floor and a TV set. We also bought a bedroom set, complete with cut-glass dressing-table lamps, and put it in the dining room, leaving the bedroom as a nursery for the baby. Everything we bought was the latest fashion. The couch and chair were covered with turquoise bouclé fabric, which had silver thread running through it. The curtains were bark cloth, with huge country scenes, in pink, turquoise and grey. The bedroom furniture and living-room tables were in blond wood. I thought it was all very posh, and although it would take a long time to pay it off, the whole lot had cost only about three hundred dollars. The entire apartment had recently had a fresh coat of paint heaven compared to our previous, rather grim home. There were plenty of windows, too, making the rooms light and cheerful, and we could open them and enjoy refreshing cross-breezes. Summer had finally ended and the weather began to cool. I could now see a strong possibility that I might survive in this strange country, after all.

  Shortly after we moved into our lovely new apartment, I received some bad news. Alice had had a freak accident about two weeks after we’d moved out of our old place. She had fainted in the bathroom one day when no one else was at home and had lain unconscious, her face wedged against the radiator’s hot-water pipe where it came out of the floor. It had burned her flesh to the bone and left her terribly disfigured. I wanted to visit her but she wouldn’t let me. ‘I don’t want you to see me like this while you’re pregnant,’ she said. ‘It might not be good for you or the baby.’ I didn’t understand at the time but someone later told me that, according to old wives’ tales, your baby could be disfigured if you looked at someone’s deformity. I was surprised that Alice still believed such nonsense but I appreciated her concern for our unborn child.

  7: Our Baby, Motherhood and My First Visit Home

  We walked into Bob’s parents’ house one Sunday and I almost had a heart attack. About forty people were crowded into the living and dining rooms and they all shouted, ‘Surprise!’ I hadn’t a clue what was going on so I just stood there, shocked, and gaped at everyone.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Bob. I knew it wasn’t a birthday party and it was the wrong time of year for any other celebration.

  ‘It’s a shower,’ he said, with a huge grin. ‘Presents for the baby. It’s what people do here.’ Oh, Lord, I thought. These Americans are so weird! Fancy making all these people who hardly know me buy gifts for a baby who isn’t even here yet.

  Bob’s family certainly had surprised me. I was almost knocked off my feet which wouldn’t have been easy to achieve, given the size, shape and weight of me. Even my usually sensible husband had begun teasing me about my pregnant self.

 
Until that moment, I’d had no idea what a shower was. We didn’t have them in the UK back in those days well, not that kind anyway. The only showers in England were more like torrential downpours.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw so many people gathered, and with all those gifts too. Even people who were unable to attend had sent something. All we had left to buy was a pram. I still hadn’t felt much warmth from Bob’s family in fact, mostly what I felt was disapproval, impatience or resentment but when it came to gifts, they were tops.

  By now, I had given up my job and was trying to enjoy our new apartment, but it wasn’t easy. I had no friends nearby, and Bob was still working long hours, including most Saturdays. He would come home from work exhausted, eat his dinner and fall asleep before we had any chance to engage in conversation. I was desperately lonely. My only activities were the now more frequent visits to my obstetrician, talking on the phone to my friend Barbara McCarthy, or Bobby, as I now called her, taking short walks, cooking and cleaning, and re-organizing the baby’s room, which I did every other day.

  I loved putting the tiny baby clothes in the drawers and arranging the stuffed toys and other paraphernalia. I often took all the little things out to look at them if the truth be known, it was like playing house. But this was no game because I was about to become a mother, and soon. Oh, how I wished my own mother could have been there to help me, not that she ever had in the past but I knew she loved babies and I was sure this would have brought us closer. It would have helped to talk to her on the phone, but that was impossible too: Mum and Dad still didn’t have one.