Page 12 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

W hen the song ended and The Blue Note customers applauded the band, Raymond Lomax raised his beer glass toward Hazel and Jan.

“Happy anniversary, Mr. and Mrs. Nowak!”

“Happy anniversary!” echoed his wife, Helen.

Jan lifted his highball from the café table, leaned to his left, and kissed his wife. “The fastest two years of my life. And the best.”

He said it with conviction. His journey had always boasted intrigue, drama, great pleasures, fortifying camaraderie, and fantastical elements.

But this was the most surprising and gratifying turn, one he never could have predicted.

His life had somehow morphed from a gangster movie into a fairy tale.

Gazing at Jan, Hazel nodded. “True enough. But the best is yet to come.” She noticed her sister staring at her. Helen reached across to touch her earlobe.

“Are these new?”

Hazel crooned:

“On our second anniversary,

My true love gave to me,

Two pearl earrings…”

Raymond shook his head. “Lovely gift, Jan, but you’ve set a costly precedent. Next year she’ll be expecting three rubies, then four sapphires, et cetera, et cetera.”

Jan spread his hands. “Now you tell me? Thanks a million. I’ll be bankrupt by our fifth.”

The five-piece combo—piano, drums, two horns, and clarinet—began a slow number, “Moonlight Serenade,” and couples moved to the dance floor. Jan reached out his hand to Hazel.

She pressed herself to him as they glided to the music, breathing in the musky scent of his skin that mingled with his citrus aftershave, bourbon, and tobacco.

She felt so safe in his manly arms, all sinew and muscle, enveloping her as if no harm could ever reach her.

He still carried the physique of the young gymnast in photos taken when he competed for the North St. Louis Polish Falcons.

A body she had come to crave in a way she never dreamed.

The visceral sexual attraction had been apparent and compelling for them both from the start.

Yet over time their bond had grown far beyond the physical aesthetics and chemistry that first drove them together.

Jan shared her love of books and film as well as a curiosity about the world and nature.

As she deepened his appreciation of English literature he expanded hers for fine food and drink.

Most of all their shared dreamy natures gave birth to a contemplative and deliberate rhythm that shaped and seasoned each day.

They spent winter evenings together on the couch before the fireplace in each other’s arms silently reading—when A.J.

allowed them—or listening to Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Lux Radio Theater.

Sometimes she read him poetry or played the piano.

Jan taught her how to win at poker and make pierogi.

They danced to big band music on the radio and ice-skated hand-in-hand on the lake.

She led him to Shakespeare plays in St. Louis whenever possible.

They went to the movies sometimes twice a week—Helen and her mother always eager to babysit A.J.

In summer, they passed hours at the lake.

Jan showed her how to cast a fly and row the boat.

Together they learned how to plant and nurture a vegetable garden.

To her mind their life together seemed like a present-day Eden.

God had sent her a soul mate, the one man for whom she was destined. And no serpent in sight.

As they moved to the music Hazel took in her surroundings. Dimly lit by small spotlights shining from a dark ceiling, The Blue Note, all navy and silver, resembled transatlantic steamship ballrooms as depicted by Hollywood. The décor, the music, and the two gin rickeys she’d drunk transported her.

“A nice nightclub,” she said over the music. “Pretty classy for Long Lake. You been here before?”

Jan, too, seemed far away for a moment. Then he came back.

“Raymond brought me one Saturday afternoon for a beer and a bump after duck hunting. Nobody here then except us and the bartender. Nothing like tonight.”

“Glad they planned this evening for us. So were Mom and Dad, so they could keep A.J. for the night.”

“You didn’t tell them he wakes up crying every hour?”

She smiled. “Not true! Though I suspect they’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a one-year-old on their hands overnight.”

Enveloped in the otherworldly atmosphere of the club Hazel imagined herself and Jan dancing on an ocean liner traveling to Europe and seeing the world. Someday. When the war was over. When the U-boats disappeared.

“Dear, that tall man standing at the end of the bar—I guess he’s the manager. He keeps staring at me and frowning.”

Without looking in that direction Jan replied: “He’s staring at me.”

“Why’s he doing that?”

“Trying to remember where he knows me from.”

“Who is he?”

“Richard Dupuis. We did some business years ago.”

They danced to “Moonglow.” Hazel pictured them moving arm-in-arm on their tenth anniversary and their twentieth and thirtieth. What adventures did Fate have in store for them? Only time would tell.

When the band began “Pennsylvania Six-Five-Thousand” they returned to their table. The two women soon excused themselves. Raymond ordered another round from the waitress.

“Did you see, Jan, that they raised the draft age to forty-four? I hear they’ll start taking married men sooner or later, though not fathers.”

“I’m not so sure. But I’m likely safe long as I stay sober.

After Pearl Harbor, when Germany jumped in on the Japs’ side, Bogdan and I went to a Cass Avenue bar to mull over the world situation.

A half-dozen boilermakers later we decided to enlist in the Navy and liberate Europe and Poland—along with five other Poles we were buying drinks for.

“Next day when I told Hazel our plan she started crying. Begged me not to leave her and A.J. So, I finally relented and admitted I might not have been thinking straight the night before.”

“A valid defense. Temporary insanity. Nothing you do when drunk should be held against you.”

“Hard sometimes to remember I’m a married man.”

“Always comes on after a few drinks, don’t it?”

The waitress, a young blonde in a slinky, blue, off-the-shoulder cocktail dress that matched the décor, brought their drinks. Both men studied her retreat.

“Guys at the mill are talking about enlisting. They’ll need some new people, Jan. Might be able to get you on if things change for you. Then you wouldn’t have to go.”

Jan pretended to think about it for a moment. “Thanks, Ray. I know it’s good, honest work. Just not for me. I’d rather take my chances.”

Raymond appraised Jan. After a moment he said, “I understand.”

Jan nodded his thanks. Likely he did understand, at least in part.

Going into the steel mill as his father had once urged him, belatedly succumbing to his wishes not to get beyond himself, would be a humiliating admission of failure on his part in the old man’s eyes.

Who would surely rub his face in it whenever he could, if they were ever to meet again.

What Raymond didn’t understand, however, was that Jan wasn’t about to break his back for a few lousy bucks and a legal dodge.

He’d handle it in his own way. He had connections.

“Don’t mention your offer to Hazel if you can help it. She wouldn’t get it. Let’s hope I won’t need a deferment.”

Lomax nodded. “Lips sealed. Nothing to Helen, either. Just an idea.”

The two Robinson sisters returned as the band broke into a swing number, “Tuxedo Junction,” a Glenn Miller tune—or was it Benny Goodman, Hazel wondered.

She linked her arm in Jan’s as she sat. “This music puts me in a gay mood. Or maybe it’s the gin. Then it might just be my spouse of two years.”

“Or maybe all three in a happy conspiracy… Same here.”

Though in fact Jan felt less reassured by the jazzy music and the celebration.

A wife, a child, and a war. Where would it all lead?

He didn’t control the future. Not his family’s and not even his own.

It bothered the hell out of him. Ever since his father threw him out at fifteen like so much trash, he’d been his own man.

Called his own shots, for better or worse.

Beholden to no one. Now he felt his independence slipping from his grasp, along with his own family’s sovereignty, thanks to events far beyond his control.

Other entities—the government, society, the economy, foreign dictators—were now setting the odds and laying bets that would determine his future and millions like him.

For the first time as an adult, he felt powerless. Either go to work for U.S. Steel and become a sheep or go into the U.S. Army and become ground lamb. Some choice. He prayed it wouldn’t come to that.

§

Hazel lit candles on the dresser and strode to Jan the way he liked it—nylons, garter belt, and nothing more, as on their first night together.

One crying baby deleted, a few drinks added, and it felt for her as it had at the start, fated and frantic.

All of nature and God (and perhaps the Devil) conspiring to bring them together to advance the species, as if on a sacred mission.

And perhaps they were, if one was inclined to believe in God and Fate as she did. Though Jan did not.

His scent made her crazy. And the taste of him.

Maybe that’s all it was, mere chemistry and aesthetic preference.

But that didn’t mean God didn’t have a hand in it.

With Jan she had come to understand what D.H.

Lawrence had written about in Lady Chatterley’s Lover .

Hazel’s English professor had once loaned her an unexpurgated copy of the banned novel in a clumsy attempt at seduction.

While the graphic depictions of sex stirred her, she could not grasp the deep connection between Constance and Mellors on a primordial physical level, as woman and man. Now she did.

She stopped thinking about it all and tumbled into a sensual paradise—stepped outside herself and fell deeper into herself, morphing into a voracious creature that earlier she hadn’t known existed.

Demanding and submissive, rough and tender, debauched and divine.

The essence of existence rippling through her as she felt their orgasms pulsing in unison within her, trembling with the unequalled pleasure of it.

She lay motionless as if semi-comatose in the arms of this enigmatic creature with whom she had merged, waiting for him to fall asleep and then follow him there. But when she glanced to Jan in the dying candlelight she saw him staring at the ceiling.

“Can’t you sleep?”

“I will in a minute. Just savoring the moment.”

But she sensed there was something on his mind.

“Everything okay?… Was it that bar manager who was staring at you? What’s his name?”

“Dupuis. Most likely the owner… No, I’d forgotten about him.”

“He stopped staring after awhile.”

“I think he figured it out, where he knew me from.”

“Yet didn’t come over to say hello.”

Jan smiled. “Maybe unsure what sort of greeting he’d get.”

“Some tension between you?”

“He was working for people trying to muscle into our business in the neighborhood. He could have been the one who had my boss Leo Gold shot.”

She gazed at the man to whom she was wed body and soul, wondering whether she knew him at all.

“You’re serious? He killed your business partner?”

“Likely. Though it didn’t help them. Leo had loyal customers, loyalty that I inherited and benefitted by. So, you might say Dupuis did me a favor.”