The GI Bride (16 page)

‘You bitch,’ he spat out.
‘I believe you would, wouldn’t you?’

He was right. I didn’t care who he was
or what his connections were, I was not about to be bullied by a jerk like
him. Yes, I was stupid to have put myself in such a situation and I
had a lot to learn, but I was learning fast. I would never allow myself to get into such
a fix again.

One day at work I felt terrible I had been
up all night with a sick Wayne and could hardly keep my eyes open. One of the nurses, a
second-generation Lebanese girl with great almond eyes and jet-black hair that came down
to her waist, told me she had something that would help me get through the day and
handed me a capsule. She didn’t tell me what it was but assured me it was safe and
that she often had to take one. I swallowed it and was soon wide awake and blabbering
away like a chimpanzee to anyone and everyone. I was in love with the world and everyone
in it. I thanked Faith, the nurse, for saving my life and for helping me to survive the
day. It was nothing short of a miracle.

When I got home that night, I crashed. I was
so tired that Wayne and I went to bed at seven o’clock and slept straight through
I hadn’t even undressed.

‘What the heck did you give me?’
I asked Faith the next day.

‘Just Dexedrine,’ she said.
‘It’s a stimulant. We keep loads of it here. Doc gives it to the Chez Paree
Adorables. It gives them energy and keeps the weight off. Lots of his patients come just
for that, but keep it under your hat,’ she added.

Well, I certainly didn’t need to lose
weight: I was still skinny as a rail.

Faith was to surprise me again. One day, she
asked me if I was interested in becoming an escort.

‘What’s an escort?’ I
asked.

‘Well,’ she explained,
‘it’s someone who goes out for dinner or to a show with men who are in town
and don’t want to go out alone.’

‘Are you kidding? Isn’t that
prostitution?’

‘No, no, no,’ she said.
‘It’s nothing like that but you can have sex with them if you want to.
They’re just lonely men, mostly travelling executives, who want to be seen with a
pretty girl on their arm, and you get to have a good time and go to places you
couldn’t afford to go otherwise.’ Hmm, I thought. Sounds fishy to me.

‘Here, look at this,’ she said,
and pulled a fabulous piece of jewellery out of her pocket. ‘I got this from the
guys I spent a little time with last night.’

‘What guys?’ I asked.

‘There’s a huge luxury yacht
moored down by Navy Pier. It’s owned by some very wealthy Arabs. I went to a party
there, had some drinks, danced, had a fabulous meal prepared by their own chef. It was
amazing. When it was time for me to leave, they gave me this gift, in appreciation of my
company.’

I was flabbergasted. ‘You didn’t
have to have sex with anyone?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said.
‘They’re having another party tomorrow night and they’ve asked me to
bring some friends. Do you want to go?’

Well, it sounded interesting, but
suspicious. I declined. I’d been single for just a short time, but I’d
already had enough of going out with strangers.

At about that time, Dr H. started asking me
to deliver packages to rooms in various hotels. At first I didn’t think anything
of it, but one day I peeked inside a bag. I had
learned a lot about
prescription drugs while I’d been working for him, and I recognized the names of
many. The bag was full of amphetamines. Oh, my God, I thought. He’s using me to
deliver illegal drugs. What would happen if I was caught? I should look for a different
job, I decided, but in the meantime I just had to be careful.

During the time I worked for the doctor,
certain men came in regularly, supposedly to be sobered up. I had learned this from the
nurses. They were, most often, politicians and bigwig executives and, for the most part,
disgusted me. Usually they’d had too much to drink at lunchtime and now had
meetings to attend, or speeches to make, and I’m sure they paid dearly for the
doctor’s services.

One of the regulars was the executive
director of the Chicago Convention Bureau, whose assistant always accompanied, supported
or dragged him in. Occasionally, they both needed treatment.

The assistant was good-looking. He was about
thirty and, according to his file, single. A closer look revealed that he lived just a
few streets away from me. While he waited for his boss, he’d chat to me and he
seemed like a nice person. He was always polite and always wore a big grin. I was
intrigued. One day while we chatted, I mentioned that I’d noticed we lived a few
blocks apart.

He laughed. ‘Maybe I’ll have to
come over to borrow a cup of sugar some time,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ I answered, and that,
I thought, was that.

It was shortly after that that I quit my job
with Dr H., and went to work as receptionist for a company called
Owens Corning Fiberglass in Chicago’s ‘Loop’ the downtown area
defined by the overhead train tracks that circle it. It was closer to my apartment, so I
cut down on my travel time, and my working hours were shorter, which helped with the
childcare situation. The office staff and salesmen were pleasant, with one exception.
Today he would have been fired for his lewd comments and constant pawing of the girls in
the office. I became frightened to go into the file-room because he would soon be
breathing down my neck. I talked to the office manager about it but he laughed and asked
where my sense of humour was.

While I was working at Owens Corning, my
good friend Bobby McCarthy was working nearby for Mitsubishi’s Chicago
headquarters as the receptionist. Since she and I both operated switchboards, we often
chatted when the bosses weren’t around, but I’ll never forget one particular
call I made to her some time after I’d left my job. It was 11 November, Election
Day in America. The phone rang for an unusually long time before someone answered, and
it wasn’t Bobby. A Japanese-sounding male voice said, ‘Mitsubishi
International.’

‘Hello, is Mrs McCarthy there,
please?’ I replied.

‘So solly,’ said the voice.
‘All of Mitsubishi crose today in honah off National Erection.’ I thanked
him, hung up and almost fell out of my chair laughing. I couldn’t wait to tell
Bobby. After that we always called each other on Erection Day.

Bobby also told me of the time that the
president of Mitsubishi Chicago showed up unannounced at her apartment one Sunday
afternoon and scared her half to death.

‘I come because I hear your morals are
low,’ he told her,
but how wrong he was: her immediate boss had
reported that Bobby’s ‘morale’ was low due to her recent divorce.

‘I sent him away,’ she said,
‘telling him I was expecting company, but I was never sure if he’d come to
take advantage of my low morals or to offer support after hearing of my low
morale.’

In those days, we were naive about many
things and often embarrassed due to our ignorance of worldly matters.

‘I’ve been dating a Sikh
Indian,’ Bobby told me one day, soon after the Mitsubishi incident.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ I
asked.

‘You idiot,’ she said, exploding
into laughter. ‘He’s not ill. Sikhism is an Indian religion.’ Well,
how was I supposed to know that?

It was around that time that I learned Bob
Irvine had remarried. Wow, I thought, that was fast, but when I talked to him, I wished
him all the luck in the world and told him that I hoped he would find true happiness in
his new partnership. About a month later, I received a phone call from his wife,
Rosemary, asking if she could see me. Confused but curious, I agreed and arranged a
time. She arrived at the apartment looking as nervous as I felt. What could this be
about? I wondered.

We had coffee, to give us time to settle
down, and then she burst into tears. As she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, I
noticed that she was wearing my old wedding and engagement rings. I wonder if she knows
he didn’t buy them new, I thought. I couldn’t believe anyone would be
callous enough to give his ex-wife’s rings to someone else. Then I realized: it
was something else Bob’s parents
must have been behind.
I’d had to return other valuables to them and the rings had been included on the
list.

Finally, when she stopped crying, we got
round to the reason for her visit. ‘I don’t know how to make him happy,
Iris. He keeps talking about you. He’s still in love with you, you know, and I
wondered if you could give me some advice on how to deal with him, what I need to do to
make him love me.’

What could I say to her? Bob and I were
divorced. I hadn’t known how to make him happy and he hadn’t been able to
make me happy. How did she think I could help? ‘Look, Rosemary,’ I said,
‘I doubt very much that he’s still in love with me.’

‘Oh yes he is,’ she interrupted.
‘I hear it from him all the time, especially if he’s been drinking. He keeps
telling me I can’t hold a candle to you.’ Now she was sobbing again and I
had a hard time keeping my own emotions in check. I felt so sorry for her. ‘Do you
think he remarried too soon? Do you think it was just on the rebound?’

‘I can’t answer those
questions,’ I told her, ‘and all I can tell you is that he’s a simple
man with simple wants and needs. He wants a clean house, dinner on the table when he
gets home from work, and he doesn’t particularly like going out. Oh, and he wants
sex often.’ Then it was my turn to ask questions. ‘Does his family still
expect you to come for dinner every weekend?’

‘We go there pretty often but not
every weekend.’

‘Lucky you,’ I said, and that
brought a laugh from her.

We continued talking for some time. I
don’t think I gave her any real answers but I think she was relieved to have
shared her problems with someone who understood.
Shortly after our
little meeting, I learned that Bob and she had split up. Apparently, after one of their
fights, she had followed him to the bar where he hung out and hit him over the head with
her stiletto-heeled shoe, leaving a rather nasty hole.

My letters home were probably giving clues
as to how unhappy I was and how hard I was finding it to manage, both physically and
financially. My parents’ letters back to me were encouraging and they tried to
cheer me up, but I was still hurt that they hadn’t supported me when I’d
begged to stay with them in England. If it hadn’t been for the other GI brides I
had met, I’m sure the situation would have been far worse. Our shared stories,
both funny and heartbreaking, helped me. I’m not sure how I would have coped
without those girls: they were a lifesaver. Occasionally, I saw my brother and his wife,
but with them now living in the suburbs, our visits were rare. I had no car and there
was no public transport to where they lived.

It was about that time that I first applied
for credit: if I had to stay in the US, I should try to make a real home there. I was
now twenty-one and living in my own apartment; it was time to put my own mark on the
place. Goldblatt’s Department Store granted me fifty dollars’ worth of
credit and I bought a large picture to put on the wall over the apartment’s
non-functioning fireplace. Now it felt a little more like home, so I dug my heels in and
decided to get on with it.

As I tucked four-year-old Wayne into bed
for the night, the telephone rang. I dashed into the kitchen and picked it up. The
man’s voice at the other end was unfamiliar.

‘Do you think you could spare a cup of
sugar?’ he said.

At first, I thought it was a crank call and
was about to hang up when it suddenly dawned on me who he was: Bob Palmer, the
nice-looking man I’d met in Dr H.’s office. I laughed, and we talked for
half an hour. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, why don’t you just come over
and get the cup of sugar?’ I said eventually.

Bob lived within walking distance of my
apartment and was soon ringing the doorbell. We drank coffee and talked for hours until
I finally had to put a stop to it it was after midnight. ‘Look, I don’t know
about you but I have to get up early for work. You’ll have to leave now or
I’ll be a dead duck tomorrow.’

He apologized for keeping me up so late and,
with no fuss, off he went. ‘I’ll call you again soon, if that’s okay
with you?’ he called back to me. I said that would be fine; he had been so polite,
and I’d been interested in all he’d told me about himself and his life.
I’d learned that he was an only child, that his parents, Dan and Esther Palmer,
lived in Peoria, Illinois, and that his father worked at Hiram Walker Whiskey
Distillers. His millionaire Uncle Art, his father’s brother, had put him through
college at
Bradley University in Peoria. He had lived with this uncle
and aunt for much of his life and claimed that if I ever met them I’d be far more
likely to think he was their son and not the son of his actual parents. I got the
distinct impression he was ashamed of his parents and considered himself better than
them. I also discovered he had served his two years of national service in an office in
California doing accounting and negotiating military contracts. Apparently, Uncle Art
had connections in all the right places and he had used them to keep his favourite
nephew out of active service.