The GI Bride (8 page)

Later, after I’d left that job, Mr
Morris phoned me. He instructed me that if anyone ever contacted me to ask how I had
kept his records, I should tell them that I had never altered any of the figures, that
we did not keep two sets of books, and that we always reported honestly and accurately.
Who knows what might have happened had my employer or I been found out? Fortunately, no
one ever approached me for information. I learned that, in those days, most things were
run that way in Chicago’s political ‘Machine’. In later years I was to
learn how different Chicago politics were. On Election Day, or on the days leading up to
it, people would come to your door and offer money, bottles of whiskey or boxes of
chocolates to swing your vote their way. They would drive you to the polls too. The
Machine was powerful.

While I worked for the Morrises, who now
insisted that I call them by their first names, Harry would often say, ‘How about
some lunch, kid?’ Sometimes I went with him. Occasionally the parks commissioner
joined us and I listened to their conversations. I’m sure they thought I was too
naive to understand their business relationship, but I had my suspicions. I knew the
commissioner was receiving kickbacks from the ice-cream business, but when he and Harry
whispered behind their hands, I wondered if more shady deals might be going on. I once
overheard something about a shipment of condoms that had come into the
commissioner’s possession the pair discussed how much they could make selling them
by the gross. Weird.

Harry and Joan treated me with great
kindness, and Joan and I became friends, which was a good thing because I had realized I
was pregnant and had no idea what to do about it. Joan, who was expecting her fourth
child I can’t remember ever seeing her when she wasn’t pregnant insisted on
taking me to her obstetrician.

My first visit to him was traumatic. I had
never had a pelvic examination before and found it embarrassing and uncomfortable. I
couldn’t believe that I had to lie on an examination table, skirt up, panties off,
so that this stranger could insert his rubber-gloved fingers inside me. I couldn’t
stop shaking: with my feet in stirrups and legs apart, my knees flapped up and down,
like a bird’s broken wings. I couldn’t control them.

‘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 conversationalist 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.