The GI Bride (7 page)

‘Do you think it’s his?’ I
asked Bob.

‘I can’t think why not,’
he replied.

‘Where do you think he keeps it? I
didn’t see anywhere to park cars at their camp last night.’

Bob laughed. ‘You don’t
seriously think they live in those tents, do you? They all live in suburban houses now.
They make tons of money entertaining people like us.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I thought
it was real.’

The older man in his regalia, with an
enormous feathered headdress, now stood alone close to where we had parked our car.

‘Do you think he’d let me have
my picture taken with him?’ I asked Bob.

‘Well, there’s no harm in
asking,’ he replied, and I surprised myself by going up to the man and asking his
permission. The man nodded but said nothing. I stood as close to him as I dared and
smiled, while Bob focused and took the picture. As I stepped away and started to thank
him, he stuck out his hand for payment. My jaw dropped but Bob
took a dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to the Indian ‘chief’.
‘It was worth the dollar just to see your face,’ he said to me.

‘I’m such a gullible
idiot,’ I said, and we laughed as my flushed red face began to fade back to
normal.

Initially disappointed that I had not
visited a real Indian encampment, I was still happy to have seen the show. At last I had
seen a little of the America of the Technicolor movies, and I loved it.

After our few days alone, it was time to
return to our own reality. I wasn’t looking forward to going back, but now, with
renewed strength, I was ready to try again.

Once we were home, Bob and I began looking
for an affordable apartment and what a nightmare that turned out to be. The only
inexpensive places we found were in the run-down and slum areas of the city. I certainly
didn’t fancy living like that. We finally settled on a two-room, third-floor
walk-up apartment on Division Street on Chicago’s west side. It wasn’t the
best neighbourhood in the world, but it wasn’t the worst either. The apartment was
like something out of a B movie. It had a bed-sitting room complete with a pull-down
Murphy bed concealed behind mirrored double doors, a small kitchen and a bathroom. When
I wrote home, I told my parents that, besides the kitchen and bathroom, the apartment
had a living room, dining room and library but unfortunately they were all in one room.
They found that very funny, especially the Murphy bed, which they’d never heard
of. I had to send them pictures of it both behind the door and pulled down, ready for
business. That crazy bed turned out to be a source of
great fun for my
usually sensible husband: he was always folding me up in it to wake me in the
mornings.

‘You bugger!’ I’d shout at
him, and he’d laugh his head off. I tried to do the same to him, but he was too
heavy for me to lift, worse luck. ‘If I ever get you up in that bloody bed,’
I told him, ‘I’m going to close the doors on you and leave you there until
you beg for mercy.’

The apartment was on a busy main road, above
shops that included a Jewish restaurant and a Polish delicatessen; the smells that
drifted up from below made me feel more nauseous than ever. Next to those shops was the
Adelphi Cinema, which added an even more B-movie atmosphere, with its marquee lights
flashing on and off outside our window all night. I’d lie in bed, trying to get to
sleep, but even though we pulled the window shades down, those flashing lights still
crept in around the edges. Yes, I thought, I’m living in an American film now, but
it was not the Technicolor one of my dreams. The good news was that this area felt far
more European than the sprawling strip malls in the suburbs, or what I now thought of as
‘the wasteland’. I often wondered what all those other GI brides thought of
America and if they were as disappointed in it as I was; I suppose it depended on where
you went. Many years later, my old friend June Gradley (now Armstrong), who went to live
in Vermont, said she loved it there because it was so green and mountainous; it sounded
a lot different from Chicago.

Before we’d moved into the apartment,
we’d had to scrub down all the walls from top to bottom: they were filthy with
black soot. On the advice of Bob’s mother, we cleaned the torn and faded wallpaper
with damp bread.

‘Hooray! At last I’ve found
something worthwhile to do with your horrible American sliced bread,’ I told
Bob.

‘We’ll probably be able to get
some fresh baked in this neighbourhood. They’re bound to sell it at the bakery or
the Jewish deli but maybe only pumpernickel or rye bread,’ he replied.

‘What the heck are they?’ I
asked.

‘Oh, God, something else you probably
won’t like.’ He laughed. ‘You might have to bake your own.’

That was a joke: I didn’t know how to
fry an egg. Poor Bob, it would be his turn to eat things he couldn’t recognize
once I started cooking.

We continued to scrub and scrape for days,
but our sad little apartment hardly looked any different when we’d finished. The
windows had been caked with dirt and we’d had to use razor blades to scrape off
the encrusted grime.

‘Jeez, I thought I was moving up in
the world but, so far, this is definitely a move down,’ I commented, to my poor
husband. I immediately regretted what I’d said because he lost his usual
smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Don’t be. I was only
joking,’ I told him, but I wasn’t.

At the time, we couldn’t afford to buy
paint so, other than a coat of cheap whitewash in the closet where we were to hang our
clothes, we were stuck with the ancient wallpaper and scuffed, peeling paint.

‘Too bad we can’t take off this
wallpaper,’ I told Bob. ‘It might be worth something on the antiques
market.’

We unpacked our bounty of wedding gifts and
set up housekeeping. It was exciting to have my own home for the first time ever, even
though it was a bit seedy. We no
longer had to worry about upsetting
anyone and could even invite people to visit.

I’ll never forget the first time the
Irvines came for a meal.

‘I’ve asked the folks to supper
next Sunday,’ Bob announced.

‘Oh, God, what am I going to feed
them?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry about it. I’m
sure they’ll enjoy whatever you prepare. Just relax, and it’ll be
fine.’

Hmm, I thought. Easy for him to say. At
least they were coming for supper and not dinner: that meant I wouldn’t have to
cook a big meal.

After much agonizing, I remembered the big
fancy salads my posh aunt used to serve and thought I could manage something like that.
I covered a large platter with fancy foil doilies, arranged lettuce leaves artistically
around the edge, then layered all the other salad vegetables in decreasing circles,
ending up with a vase of celery sticks in the middle, surrounded by radish rosettes. It
looked beautiful. To go with the salad, there was a plate of sliced ham and cheese, and
bread and butter. The family said how pretty it looked and then we dug in. After
they’d finished with the salad, they all just sat there. I thought they were
waiting for dessert and went to get the pie I had bought.

‘What’s the main course?’
enquired Bob, who had not had any input before and hadn’t seen what I was
preparing.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘You know, silly, the meat and
potatoes.’

I stood there, stunned, looking from face to
face.

‘Haven’t you cooked anything,
honey?’ he asked.

‘No, of course I haven’t. You
can’t have cooked meat and veg as well as salad. You have ham and cheese and bread
with it.’

‘Don’t worry, Robert,’
said his mother. ‘We’ll just eat when we get home.’

What?

I disappeared into the bathroom, where I
stayed until my embarrassment and nerves had settled down. When I came back, the family
was on their way out of the door.

‘I’m sorry,’ I called
after them, hoping they didn’t think I was a complete moron. How was I to know
that Americans didn’t consider salad a proper Sunday-evening meal? It took me for
ever to recover from that soul-destroying incident. All I could think was how my family
would have laughed at what had happened; it was just another example of the
Irvines’ lack of humour.

While we lived in that apartment, I had to
take our washing to the laundromat down the street. I’d carry the heavy bag of wet
clothes home, then hang them out on a line to dry. Attached to the railings on our open
back porch, it ran across to the porch of another building. I’d have to lean over
the railing, peg an article to the line, then carefully move it along by means of a
pulley so that I could add the next item. The first time I saw lines of washing
fluttering outside between old, soot-grimed buildings, I was reminded of the tenement
blocks of flats I’d seen in the London slums. I’d always been glad that
I’d never had to live like that in Britain. Now I wondered how I’d ended up
living in just such conditions in bountiful America.

I used to swear when I dropped a clothes peg
down all
three floors of the building to the ground: I wasn’t
about to go down all those stairs just to retrieve a peg. It was a different matter if I
dropped an article of wet washing, though. I’d watch it sail down into the grimy
courtyard, then reluctantly go down to rescue and rewash it. I almost cried if I dropped
a sheet.

No, this was
not
the America
I’d had in mind. It was no better than my home in England in fact, it was
decidedly worse. I was determined to get a job so that we could afford a better place to
live.

While we were still living with the
Irvines, and before we found our own place, I had begun checking the newspapers in
search of a job. I knew it would be difficult to find something suitable as I had only
worked in shops, and I couldn’t do that in America because I didn’t
understand the money well enough. I also needed a situation that would be no more than
an easy bus ride away. Finally, I called an advertiser who was looking for someone to
help care for her three children and made an appointment for an interview.

I took the short bus ride to their house.
Mrs Joan Morris, the mother, and I hit it off right away. The Morrises were Jewish and,
to me, appeared well off. I remember how impressed I was by their living-room sofa and
armchairs: they were in white brocade trimmed with a heavy silk-bullion fringe. They
were also sealed in clear plastic. I was fascinated. Were they new and still wrapped, or
was the plastic intended to keep them clean? I do remember that they were uncomfortable
to sit on and made rude noises when you sat down or stood up.

Mrs Morris was loud, animated and glamorous.
She talked so fast my ears had a hard time keeping up with her mouth. We chatted over
coffee for quite some time and then she told me I could have the job if I wanted it. I
accepted and told her I could start the following week,
just a few
days away; I couldn’t begin immediately because we were moving into the apartment
that weekend and she assured me that would be fine. However, that evening, at the
Irvines, I took a telephone call from her, which scared me to death: I thought
she’d changed her mind. Instead she told me that her husband might have a more
suitable job for me and would like to talk to me as soon as possible. I was
intrigued.

Mr Morris owned a business that sent
salesmen out with hand-pushed or bicycle-propelled carts to sell ice cream in the parks
and streets of Chicago. He needed help in the office and was willing to train me. I
would earn more money and work more regular hours than I would if I worked for his wife.
I couldn’t believe my luck when he hired me on the spot. ‘Glad to have you
aboard, kid,’ he said, and from that day forward, he always called me
‘kid’ or referred to me as ‘the kid’, like John Wayne or
Humphrey Bogart. The icing on the cake was that Happy Harry’s Ice Cream Company
was based around the corner from our new apartment so I’d be able to walk to work.
Who says there’s no such thing as miracles?

One of my jobs, at the end of each day, was
to check the salesmen in, tally up the unsold products against sales and collect the
money they had taken. Sometimes someone would not show up with his day’s takings
and I soon learned that men with drinking problems often took these jobs. They would
abandon the ice-cream cart, make off with the money and find the nearest bar. On those
occasions, Happy Harry became Unhappy Harry. It would take hours to find the abandoned
vehicle and its now ruined contents, to say nothing of the lost income.

I kept records of the amount of money taken on
each vending route, especially the parks. It seemed that Happy Harry’s had the
sole concession to sell ice cream in Chicago’s city parks, which apparently was a
very big deal. There were much larger ice-cream companies, such as Good Humor, which
might have expected to be granted the park concessions, but in those days, it was
definitely whom you knew that determined how contracts were handed out. Apparently,
Harry was a good friend of the parks commissioner and money changed hands regularly
between them. I had to work out the percentage of income from all park sales, of which
ten per cent went directly to the parks commissioner. In fact I kept two sets of books:
we did not report the correct gross amount to him, thereby cheating the cheat out of
some of his kickback.