Page 18 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

W ith A.J. and Hazel at his side Jan Nowak strolled over the herringboned redbrick sidewalk.

A morning downpour had cleansed the near North Side’s cobbled streets, and at midday they still lay damp, strewn with magnolia and dogwood petals.

The moist air hung cool, crisp, and fragrant, smelling of spring.

Low gray clouds skittered across a blue sky.

The benign atmosphere took him back to his boyhood days, blissful times when he roamed these same streets with Bogdan and other pals, searching for…

for something new, for any anomaly. For an adventure, even if it was make-believe.

Though as they grew those adventures gained substance.

Always doing whatever he could just to keep from going home to a mother who was distant and a father at times violent.

Life effervesced on the streets among his comrades, not, certainly, within his dour and confining home, where he felt watched, fearful, and alone.

They rounded the corner onto Cass Avenue and soon turned down a narrow brick walkway between two tenements.

It opened onto a large brick-paved backyard shaded by adjacent buildings.

Jan ducked under cotton clotheslines strung there and paused at the bottom of gray-painted wooden stairs leading up to the second-floor porch of the old redbrick building.

He took Hazel’s hand and gazed up to the porch.

“Last time I saw my father I was coming down these stairs head over heels.”

His wife stared at him askance. Just as well. Let her make up her own mind about the old man. Jan tilted his head toward the stairs and followed her up, hand-in-hand with A.J. At the top he took a deep breath. “He is risen!”

Hazel frowned at him and his dubious Easter jest, unsure what to make of his obvious nervousness and lurking family dynamics, about which he never spoke. Jan didn’t know either. Fifteen years had passed. How much had changed, if anything?

To his right on the wooden porch beside a tall curtained window sat a door framed by red bricks (as was everything in the old neighborhood). He rapped a knuckle against one of its four panes.

Soon the door swung open to reveal a petite woman of fifty, Hazel judged, with curled silver hair. She wore a long-sleeved blue dress belted at the waist, and short-heeled black shoes with laces. The woman stood rigid, arms at her side, eyes darting from Jan and the child to Hazel and back.

“Happy Easter,” she said somberly somehow, with a thick accent. “Welcome.” She stepped aside, inviting them across the threshold into a kitchen smelling of boiled cabbage.

Jan spoke to the woman in his impenetrable mother tongue, nodding at A.J. then his wife. “Mama” was the only word Hazel could make out.

The woman responded in Polish, looked at Hazel with pursed lips, and led them from the tiled kitchen into a spotless high-ceilinged room with polished hardwood floors.

It smelled of furniture wax and mothballs and contained a high bed and two towering wardrobes.

Next she spread large, oak sliding doors to reveal the front room, where a man sat in a wingchair smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper by light pouring through tall windows overlooking the street.

The man—thick salt-and-pepper hair, brown wool suit, white shirt, and black tie—put aside the newspaper and the sweet-smelling pipe and rose. Though broad-shouldered and trim, he stood well under six-foot tall. Jan stepped toward him.

“ Tato , this is my wife, Hazel,” he said in English, “and this is your grandson, Alexander Jan.”

The wizened man looked Hazel up and down with dark, penetrating eyes and nodded a greeting. Then he stooped and held out his arms toward A.J. “Come say hello to Grandpa!”

When the boy hesitated Jan put a hand to his back to urge him forward. The old man lay hands on the boy’s shoulders, pressed palms to the child’s cheeks, and bent to kiss his forehead. He straightened and said, “He is beautiful like his mother. You are lucky, Janusz, that he favors her.”

Jan smiled. This was a good sign. The needling signaled all was forgiven—at least on the old man’s part—though surely not forgotten by either of them.

“Very lucky.” Jan turned to his mother, who stood aside with vacant eyes, and spoke to her in Polish, translating. Eyes darting from Jan to his father, she managed a half smile.

Jan’s father, Joseph, moved to Hazel and took her hand. “Yes, the boy has the same dark eyes. You are Gypsy, no?”

He spoke English well though with a heavy-tongued Slavic accent.

“No, not Gypsy. Part Cherokee.”

“American Indian? Good! Now my family is a real American family. Right, Mama?” he said turning to his wife. When she made no response he spoke to her in Polish.

He told Hazel and Jan to sit on a tufted French loveseat by the front windows and followed his wife into the kitchen.

Hazel pulled A.J. up onto her lap. Jan took her hand and shook his head. “He seems to have shrunken. Always had such a commanding presence. An old man now but could still probably take me.”

“I’ve never seen such intense eyes. I sense his charisma.”

“A no-nonsense character if ever I met one. Why people trusted him.”

She studied the fleur-de-lis wallpaper, sparse furniture—old but spotless—the varnished floor. Not what she expected, though she hadn’t known what to expect. Hazel felt as if she’d stepped back into the 19th century.

“Is it always so clean and tidy?”

“Always. A matter of pride in their Americanization, such as it is.

They both came from the same small Silesian town, then ruled by Prussia.

Though he had immigrated here before she was even born.

Both families dirt poor—as with all peasant and working-class Poles then and there.

Though they hardly ever talked about it…

“Mother did once tell me about Cossacks, as she called them, raiding her village on horseback when she was a little girl and one lifting her neighbor’s infant from her arms on the tip of his sabre…”

“Here we are!” His father returned carrying three small tumblers of clear liquid. “Homemade lemon vodka,” he announced and handed them each a glass. He lifted his. “He is risen!”

Jan smiled, pressing his knee against Hazel’s. “He is risen!”

Hazel sipped at the burning liquor as the men downed theirs in a gulp. Joseph returned to the kitchen.

Jan shook his head. “First he throws me out for running booze and now he’s distilling his own hooch. Lots to learn about being a parent.”

The old man came back with a bottle and poured more for Jan and himself, its lemon scent perfuming the room.

“Did you attend Mass at St. Stanislaus this morning, Papa?”

“Of course.”

“Father Marek still kicking?” Jan asked, even though he had visited him in the confessional just a few months earlier, before reporting to boot camp.

As they gossiped about other parishioners Jan’s mother came from the kitchen with hors d’oeuvres: a plate of cold cuts and sliced Jewish rye bread from Lickhalter’s Bakery, she announced, and placed it on the coffee table before them.

“ Kielbasa krakowska, szynka , and kishka , my favorite,” Jan told his wife. “A spicy mix of pork liver and snouts, beef blood, and buckwheat groats.”

Despite the suspect ingredient list, she tried it and liked it. A.J. was less enthusiastic.

After a half hour chatting about neighbors and the neighborhood they moved to the dining table in the large kitchen, where ornate china and silverware had been laid on a white tablecloth.

The meal started with steaming cheese-and-onion pierogi topped with cold sour cream, moved on to go??bki , that is, stuffed cabbage, and finished with sernik —Polish cheesecake—and coffee.

Throughout dinner Joseph focused on Hazel, quizzing her about her family and herself.

“…It is good to get an education…” Here he cast Janusz-the-Dropout a meaningful glance. “…and to be a teacher. What ages do you teach?”

“I was teaching first grade when I got pregnant with A.J. I hope to return when he starts school and teach literature at the high school… Did you attend school in Poland, Mr. Nowak?”

He nodded, fists on the white tablecloth, pensive. “Yes, a peasant school where the Prussians had banned Polish. So, I learned to read and write my language from Father Kreminski. Then they sent a German priest.”

He went on about the Germanization of the Poles in Silesia, the exclusion of Polish culture and language, the expropriation of Poles’ land, and mass deportations—a script being replayed in the 20th century by the Third Reich, Jan interjected.

The Prussian repression had encouraged Joseph to flee to America penniless when he was eighteen. A ship took him from Hamburg to Baltimore, he explained. He found work at a steel mill in Scranton, joined other Poles in Chicago, and eventually migrated to St. Louis.

Jan listened in silence as Hazel and Joseph chatted. It felt so surreal—wedged between his former life and his new. And now he was leaving both behind, not knowing what lay ahead. He felt as if standing on a precipice.

After dessert he turned to his father. “ Tato , I am leaving this week. Overseas I suspect.”

The old man frowned. Jan explained how he had been drafted in December and sent to training camp at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Now, after a few days home, he was shipping out.

Joseph turned to Maria and spoke in Polish. She looked to her son then rose and fetched the vodka bottle from the front room. Joseph poured two tumblers, Hazel refusing more. The two men raised their glasses.

“ Powodzenia, synu !” said the old man, which Hazel guessed meant “good luck” or such. Then in English: “Any idea where you might go, Son?”

“Camp scuttlebutt was all about the upcoming European invasion. I figure that’s where I’m headed.”

In a front-page story of that morning’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch the House Military Committee chairman predicted that such an invasion would cost 150,000 American casualties in the first month.

Jan had tried to calculate the odds that he might be among them.

A long shot had he been a racehorse. Which suggested to him a morbid metaphor: Europe becoming a vast human glue factory.

“At least they let you say goodbye to your family before sending you off to war. When I was your son’s age,” Joseph said nodding at A.J.

, “the Prussians came and took my father right out of his field to fight the French. We didn’t know until a neighbor ran to tell us.

A year later he came home, walked back into the field, and went to work still wearing his Prussian uniform…

Now my homeland is again swallowed by the Prussians. Once more it has disappeared.”

“Maybe I’ll get a chance to help drive them out,” said Jan.

Hazel watched as father and son raised their drinks and made another opaque Polish toast. Joseph poured them more.

“Maybe you can work as translator.”

“Me and fifty thousand guys from South Chicago.”

“You will be the lucky one, Son, I know… To luck!” And they again touched glasses together.

§

The sun had set by the time they descended the back stairs, Jan again almost going head over heels after helping his father polish off a second bottle of bathtub vodka.

Hazel drove. A.J. slept curled on his father’s lap. She aimed the coupe east on Cass Avenue then north on Broadway to Salisbury Street and the McKinley Bridge. It carried them over the dark, swirling Mississippi and down onto the American Bottom.

As they moved past the rail yards in Venice, Illinois, headlights of passing cars lighting their faces, Jan noticed Hazel glancing at him from time to time and frowning.

“Sorry, Dear,” he said, “for subjecting you to all that. Too much Polish. Polish immigrants, Polish language, Polish food. Not to mention mercurial Polish souls. Too much vodka. All too much.”

She gazed at him then returned her eyes to the road ahead. “Jan, don’t let them cut off all your beautiful hair again.”

He laughed. “I’m afraid they might insist. But it’ll grow back. Doubt they’ll much care once the fighting starts. One way or another it’s out of my hands. It’s all out of my hands.”

He stared at the dark road ahead. It might have been different had he been on his own.

He could have put in a fix with the draft board or bought a doctor and a T.B.

infection. Some angle. But being a respectable family man meant they had you.

Now you had to worry what people might think, because it reflected on your wife and son and their reputations in the community, forever into the future.

If it was just him it might have been different.

In his milieu, people didn’t much care if a guy cut corners to get what he wanted.

His father had faced a similar dilemma as a young man.

Ruled by politics in faraway Berlin, he had no say in his own life or the life of his village.

So, he did something about it. He fled Prussia and came to America to gain control over his fate.

Ironic that Joseph’s son now was being sent back there by distant, faceless powers. With no say in the matter.

As Hazel turned up their driveway toward Long Lake, Jan stirred from his reverie.

“Maybe I’ll finally get to see Poland,” he said. “Whatever might be left of it. Though Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin could have other ideas.”