Buying the Night Flight (7 page)

Perhaps it all never would have happened if the women around me--women I loved very deeply--when asked their opinions on something, even something domestic, wouldn't have always said with such resigned submission, "I only think what Joe thinks." Or Jim, or Bob, or Louie, or whichever "good provider" they had opted for. I remember lying awake at night, not brooding but repeating to myself with a deep obstinacy, "They won't get me." It was T. S. Eliot's "Music heard so deeply that it's not heard at all."

Despite the fact that I was born in 1935 in the midst of the Depression and that my parents did not have the fifty dollars to pay the doctor, I was always what one would now call, like some bogus FBI poster, a "wanted child." My adored brother, Glen, was ten years old at the time, so I came as rather a surprise into a difficult world. The country was collapsing into bits, and our family was not spared. Relatives moved in with parents or with the one person in the family who had work. We were lucky because my father had his own business and helped everyone else in quite extraordinarily generous ways. Across the ocean, darkness was settling over Europe and my brother would soon almost be killed in the near-sunset of Western civilization, but our immediate world remained solid. There was always about our family, and inside us, like a hard rock of certainty, a strong sense of good and evil, of white and black, of sureness about the world and the generosity that comes from that. Moreover, in concert with this was the absolute assurance that the United States was not just "a" country--the United States of America was the lodestone, the central planet from which the rest of the world spun off.

Our house, too, was the center of everything, and this does certain very special things for a child. It was just a little house, a simple dark brick bungalow no different physically from the endless streets of bungalows and big comforting trees on the Far South Side, but it was very different inside. Everyone came to us. We did virtually all of the entertaining, and in the summer everyone came to our Wisconsin summer home. It seemed quite natural, and it also gave me a strong, secure sense of "being" very early on. Because of an odd mixture of personalities in the family--a mixture that could have been as disastrous as it was creative--we were the first ones to try everything. Much, much later, when we were both adults and he had children of his own, my first boyfriend, Richard Siegle, said to me, "Your family did everything first. You water-skied first. You were the first to slice open the hot dogs before you barbecued them." Big, important things like that!

When my mother died in 1979, handing me the one unsustainable blow in life that I never quite believed would or could come, the minister praised her so correctly as a "woman who created neighborhoods" wherever she went. This was so true; it was a gift of God that was hers. But we were also infinitely blessed in our neighbors, who became--and still are--our real extended family. There were the Siegle family next door, the Lengeriches across the alley (we had real alleys in those days too) and the Beukes and Bialleses next door. Our homes were extensions of each other. These wonderful people are still my rock and my solace.

But if ours was first of all a happy, prosperous family life, on the other hand hard work in the Germanic sense was expected of every body, and everybody, moreover, was expected to
enjoy
it.

My father had a dairy business at 7749 South Carpenter Street that thrived precisely off the sheer amount of blood and sweat he and my grandmother, "Oma," poured into it. He would get up at three in the morning and run two of the most important routes, then come home for a big lunch that was really a European-style dinner, sleep, and go back to the dairy to work. Oma, who had come over from the German section of Poland near present-day Poznan in steerage when she was sixteen, heaved the milk pails around with the best of the men. But when she dressed up in her fine lace and beaded clothes, in her elegant big house with the Czechoslovakian china and the German crystal, she was the envy of any grand lady.

In contrast to the hardworking but fun-loving nature of the house, my religious life hovered like a slightly threatening angel. I was sent to a Baptist Sunday school with a straitlaced, terribly decent and highly puritanical family down the block. Not only did I believe in God, heaven, and angels, but I took totally to heart the Baptist maxim that one must also "convert" and "bear witness to" one's loved ones. Whenever my mother's father and mother came out from the North Side, I became anxious and puzzled. My grandfather, Carl Gervens, a lovely, gentle, scholarly man from the Rhine- land, was a German socialist and skeptic. He was not about to be "saved." I simply did not know what to do.

But this early experience with religious absolutism is not some thing I really regret. It helped me to gain a strong moral sense--and a sense that life was meant to be a dedication, not simply a pastime. When, during my university years, I gradually lost an organized faith, it was a great and disturbing loss for me; I have wondered since whether work, when central and crucial to us, does not become an internal search or a substitute for the lost or wayward outer God we now seek inside us.

My propensity for otherworldliness fed by constant reading, I divided the world into two spheres, both of which were deep and sometimes terrifyingly real to me. One was the world here and now, the hearty bourgeois world around our breakfast table. The other world was the "heaven" of our Sunday school ... the languorous clouds in the sky ... the world beyond worlds beyond the horizon. I remember how excited I became one day when both worlds collided with a great
Götterdämmerung
crash in my mind. I was poring over the atlas, one of my favorite pastimes, and I discovered that Bethlehem, which had always been a metaphysical concept for me, really existed. On a map! I was overcome with a throbbing excitement for days.

Juxtaposed to my literary dreaminess was a very, very real world. There was Chicago with its political corruption, its racial hatred, and its Mafia operations and a citizenry that accepted all of this as natural. It was this tribal morality that fed the growing flames of my hatred for injustice and my desire both to protect myself from this parasitical world and to fight it and to try to change it.

Perhaps most important, hovering always just over the horizon, both terribly appealing and terribly threatening, was the black community. It hung there like a cloud on the horizon--but I had always loved the rain and the wind, and so I was fascinated by it. Most of the people in our neighborhood feared or hated blacks; to me they represented my first fascination with another culture. It was forbid den--and thus needed desperately to be known. I probed it, but carefully; occasionally I would venture a little way into it and sit on the stoops (we had stoops in those days and in those neighborhoods) and talk to the old "Negro" men and try to learn about them.

Much later, when I worked on the
Chicago Daily News,
I tried to repay the black community just a little for all it had suffered at our hands: I initiated and got printed the first series on the black community that any Chicago paper ever printed. We had thirty- eight parts to it -- in fact, once we did it, we overdid it!

But in many ways life was also so snug and cozy that to this day my closest and most loyal friends are those from the "old neighbor hood." We had "old countries" and "old neighborhoods" and "new neighborhoods" then, you see, and those who "made it" might move away but were never really hated for it -- envied a little, maybe -- because they always came back and never forgot their friends in the "old" neighborhood. Indeed, one success was everyone's in this basically tribal milieu.

In this environment my big, stubborn, honest father stood out like a beacon of honesty, if not always of understanding. Both an admirable man and a difficult man, he was a typical "mountain man" of southern Germany. He had hands like great hams, and he stood well over six feet tall and weighed sometimes more than 250 pounds. He terrified my boyfriends. He was absolutely incorruptible, with that dire, unforgiving honesty of self-made men whose honesty is both a heartfelt thing and a dare against the world they have bested.

In the midst of the Depression, before I was born, the dairy business on the South Side of Chicago was fraught with corrupt building inspectors looking for payoffs, with Mafia "enforcers," and with big dairies driving out small dairies like ours with bribes of five thousand or ten thousand dollars--substantial amounts of money at that time. If you were not Irish or one of the "machine" ethnic groups, you weren't in -- especially Germans, with their individualistic tendencies toward their own businesses. My father had the dubious "honor," when he was a boy at Twenty-first and Lowe, of having to avoid the Reagan's Colts, an Irish gang that included such boys as Richard J. Daley and his cronies. This left him with a deep hatred for "the machine" and its bullies. He overcame by being so big he simply threw Mafia bullies and others out physically.

I inherited this white, burning hatred. I was capable of being moved to tears when I was only seven or eight by the pictures in the paper of mobsters bombing union leaders' homes. I was never one of those suburban relativists, bred in suburbia where liberalism was easy; life for me was real because there was always a very real bully on every block.

In the early days of the Depression, before I was born, the White Castle route, a large and money-making route of hamburger stands all over the city, opened up for bids. They were little white-brick "castles" and the hamburgers were flat, good, and cheap--five cents in those days.

A story that became one of the little myths by which we lived was born when my father, Robert, went to Mr. Lewis, then president of the White Castle chain, and told him flatly, "I'm not going to offer you one cent in bribes. I couldn't, and I wouldn't if I could. But I'll give you the best milk and the best service you'll find anywhere."

Mr. Lewis, another rare, honest man, accepted the offer on the spot. The Geyer's Dairy chocolate milk was so rich that the White Castles just whipped it up and there you had creamy milk shakes. Thanks to all of those little white "castles," we became moderately well-to-do.

But my father worked so hard -- and he had been forced to do so since he had to quit school at thirteen when my grandfather abandoned the family -- that he had little time or few emotional resources for bouncing a blond little girl on his knee. Robert Geyer was an endlessly good man, but he was often, like many self-made men, remote, given to fitful rages, to lengthy soliloquies, or to endless silences.

I loved my father, and I never blamed him for anything, for how can you honestly blame someone for not giving you something he didn't have to give? I reacted with his same stubbornness and determination, by turning to work and accomplishment in order to "earn" love. I dealt with everything by going my own way; by doing, doing, doing. Later in my life it took me a long, painful time to figure out why my accomplishments didn't bring me love from other men, either, but instead only competitive resentment and rage of a new sort.

I guess I realize most poignantly what I missed when I was sixteen, already graduated from high school with highest honors, and we were out in Palm Springs visiting relatives. On a particularly pleasant starry night, after visiting relatives whom my father especially liked, we were walking across the moon-baked desert and my now more relaxed father put his arms around Mother and me. It was a singular, transcendent experience, just having my father put his arm around me. Although no one ever knew it, tears filled my eyes. It was the first time I could ever remember his touching me.

That a man as rough in manner and as remote in emotions as my father should have married my mother, a beautiful and refined young "lady" from the North Side, was still another curiosity. She was just as refined as he was rough; she was just as needing and giving of love and emotional expression as he was incapable of giving it. He was a "good provider," she always stressed, and he was certainly a good man; but he was a damned hard man to live with.

When I was born, for instance (and the birth took some forty- eight hours), my father used the time to put in the cement driveway beside the house, never once calling the hospital. He wasn't being intentionally cruel at all; he just thought that was a good time to put in the cement driveway.

It was my mother, Georgie Hazel, named after her grandfather, who taught me to read and write when I was four, sitting at a little table out in the sunlight at our lake house; it was my mother from whom I got affection and, generally, approval for my work. We traveled together. She laid the foundation for the curiosity that drove me to Siberia, up the Tapajoz, and down to Abu Dhabi (perhaps I
did
overreact a bit). And while the Geyers gave me their stubbornness and determination, I think it was her far more cultured family of Rhineland Germans who gave me whatever sensitivities I had.

But it was my mother, too, I think, who quite unknowingly instilled in me a deep dissatisfaction with the "woman's role." She always insisted she wanted nothing except a family; yet she always complained bitterly about "all the work" at home. I realized much, much later that this tall, graceful, lovely woman was complaining not about "all the work" but about the fact that she was not rewarded by my father with the outward shows of affection that she, a tender and affectionate woman who would have bloomed under the lifelong gaze of a man capable of tenderness, so needed. In turn she became somewhat possessive of her children, wanting us always by her side and wanting, I am certain, me to replace her in her position, as unhappy as she had often been with it. My choosing a profession, I am sure, struck her as a betrayal until late in life, when she came to understand and even prize it.