Page 29 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

“You walk into a wall or something?”

A.J. frowned then realized what he meant, reaching up to touch his black eye. “Yeah, but the wall got the worst of it.”

Bogdan laughed. “Your father was a fighter too. Built like you. Not an ounce of fat.”

Then he gestured toward the book on the table. “What are you reading?”

“World War II history. I read a lot of it, along with other things. This one’s about Navajo code talkers in the Pacific theater.”

“I was there on a tin can—a destroyer. Could have been among the destroyed. Those Indians maybe helped bring me back alive.”

“Their culture’s interesting. Emphasizes strength—physical, mental, and spiritual—along with wisdom and courage.”

“Good words to live by if you can pull it off… Your father he was a book man too. Always hanging out at the library. History, like you. Philosophy, psychology…”

“I love books—Mom’s influence. Problem is I hate school. Don’t like being cooped up inside all day, just sitting around… I was thinking about joining the Marines.”

Bogdan nodded. “Now’s a good time. No shooting war, just Cold War.”

“A good time on a personal level too. There’s a girl I’m crazy about. But I need to leave town before I knock her up and ruin both our lives.”

Bogdan laughed. “There’s wisdom and courage! If she’s the one for you she’ll still be there in four years. If not, you’ve dodged a bullet.”

A.J. smiled then got serious.

“There’s something I want to ask… Before I go away I need to see my grandmother. It’s been a year or more. My aunt and uncle drove me over once, but it was awkward. We could barely communicate… I was wondering if maybe you could go with me sometime and translate.”

Bogdan spread his hands. “Let’s go!”

“Now?”

The older man rose. “Both your father and grandfather were men of action. Decisive men. You have the same blood. Let’s march!”

§

Bogdan led him down Hadley Street to Cass Avenue and headed west. A.J. looked around as they strolled and tilted his head right. “She lives on Warren Street now. Up that way, isn’t it?”

“I know. We’re taking a sentimental journey.”

After a minute they approached a vast area of high-rise apartments on the south side of the street, eleven-story buildings, more than thirty of them.

“This is where your grandparents lived, where your father grew up, in a two-story flat right about there,” Bogdan said, pointing across the street to a parking lot. “Now new public housing for the Colored.”

A sign there read: “Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments.” A.J. gaped at the massive structures and shook his head.

“I’ve always lived on the lake with my feet on the ground. Wouldn’t want to be up in the air in a box. It’s like a prison cell.”

Bogdan shrugged. “Depends on the box. When Jan met your mother he lived in a swank downtown hotel with room service and a nice bar where we used to hang out. You’re right though. Hanging out on the lake was even better.”

Bogdan gazed across the street at the high-rises.

“I guess they’re trying to help people. But you gotta help yourself, A.J.

You gotta fight for what you want in life—fight the gods, the other guy, and yourself.

Not sucking up but muscling up. That’s how you make a home for yourself.

And no one else can do it for you because no one else knows what’s in your heart. ”

They moved on past boarded-up storefronts and old brick homes with sagging roofs, picking their way over a herringboned sidewalk with missing bricks, like a mouth with rotting teeth.

“I always loved the neighborhood,” said Bogdan.

“It’s still home to me but who knows how long it’ll last?

The old people like your grandfather and grandmother, the ones who came over on the boat, are dying off.

The young ones are moving away. Who can blame them?

It’s crazy,” he said, stopping, spreading his arms, and gesturing palms up toward a dilapidated tenement.

“Two thousand years ago the Romans had indoor plumbing and these places still have outhouses.”

They moved on and he continued:

“No glue to keep young people here. Used to be the language and Polish culture. The food, the Falcons, and St. Stanislaus; the families and traditions. Now hardly no one speaks Polish. So that’s the end. So be it.

“Now we’re Americans not Poles. Not even Polish-Americans, which makes no sense once the language and culture curl up and die. Same with the Irish, Italians, Germans, and Jews who came here. Now we all embrace the new land. It’s all for the good…”

He shook his head and laid a hand on A.J.’s shoulder as they walked. “So why can’t I stand the thought of leaving? You’re planning your future. I live in the past.”

They headed north on 19th Street. Cars lined the curbs of the cobbled thoroughfare though little traffic passed to disturb the neighborhood. The leaves had turned from green to gold, ochre, red, and brown. A.J. noticed that the fall colors came later here than on the lake.

“Your grandfather took it hard when he lost Jan. I saw him first thing when I come back home after the war. How much he’d aged in four years!

How weakened. He thought Jan tried to prove something to him by going to war.

To show his manhood and win back his father’s respect.

Joseph scolded himself for being so tough on his only son.

For sending a fifteen-year-old away from home to live on his own.

Forcing Jan to do whatever to survive… Finally, the old man gave up and died. Nothing left to live for.”

After a few minutes they turned right on Warren Street and soon moved through a narrow passageway between buildings to a brick patio defined by tenements on either side and a cobblestone alley in back.

They climbed wooden stairs to the second floor where Bogdan knocked on a curtained door.

Soon through it came the clack of heels on linoleum. The curtain moved; the door swung open.

Maria Nowak stood rigid and unsmiling in a belted gray dress and black laced shoes with low heels, looking much the same as always: fearful.

In their few encounters over the years A.J.

never remembered her laughing or even smiling honestly.

Never recalled her touching him, much less hugging and kissing him like his other grandmother did.

Bogdan said something in Polish. She responded by nodding at A.J.

and stepped aside. A.J. followed his godfather into the kitchen, through the bedroom, and to the front room, which overlooked Warren Street.

There the leaves of tall sycamores had turned light brown and floated to the redbrick sidewalk and street below.

The apartment looked and smelled like her flat he remembered from early childhood—the same furniture arranged identically, the same aroma of floor wax and mothballs.

Bogdan and A.J. sat on the sofa by the front window as his grandmother disappeared into the kitchen.

She returned a minute later with two cans of beer that she set on coasters atop the coffee table before them.

She sat on a chair facing the windows behind them, a third beer can cradled between both hands on her lap.

His grandmother remained rail thin, as if she never learned to eat well or never embraced the pleasure of it.

Bogdan exchanged words with her and turned to A.J.

“I told her you were going into the army and might be gone for awhile. She wishes you safe travels and a safe return home.”

A.J. thanked her then said to Bogdan: “See if I can ask her some questions about her family.”

She responded to Bogdan’s query by nodding and sipping from her beer can.

“Ask about how she grew up, what her home was like.”

When Bogdan translated the request, she pursed her lips and stared off over their heads to the sycamores. Then she began to speak, and went on and on, Bogdan nodding to encourage her and translating on the fly sotto voce so as not to interrupt her.

“Their home sat outside the town where her father worked. She can’t remember what kind of work. Maybe a carpenter at times, maybe a carter… Her mother had a vegetable garden and pigeons… Two older brothers left home. One, Szymon, came to America.”

She told of her neighbor who had a daughter her age and how they taught Maria to read and write.

They became her second family. She described how cold it was in winter and how they strove to keep warm.

How frugal life was. How little they had to eat.

When she was twelve-years-old men on horseback rode through the village with sabers drawn, cutting people down.

When she was seventeen or eighteen—she couldn’t remember exactly—she was sent to America to be married.

After she arrived she wrote letters home.

She got no reply for years. Finally, her father wrote telling her that her brother Piotr had been killed in The Great War.

She also exchanged annual letters with the neighbor who had taught her to write.

Communication from her ceased in 1939 and never resumed.

At last, she fell silent and looked to A.J. as if ready for his next question. He held her gaze and said:

“How did you meet my grandfather?”

She raised her chin indicating she understood and began again to speak.

“She met him when she got off the train at St. Louis Union Station,” Bogdan translated.

“He was with her brother Szymon, whom she had not seen since she was a child. Within a month she and Joseph married, as had been arranged. After a year she had a child, Stanislaw. He died before he reached age two. Then she gave birth to your father, Janusz, who was a healthy baby, a strong boy.”

A.J. sat leaning forward studying this strange bird of a grandmother as she went on about her son, her days in America, Jan’s death, and her husband’s.

Within a half hour she had summed up her life.

Afterward the two men descended the stairs and moved across the brick backyard.

Bogdan laid an arm across A.J.’s shoulders.

“There you have it, my boy. The All-American immigrant tale. Remember it well when you get to boot camp and want to bitch about the food or cry about how rough they treat you. Remember it always.”

§

The silver-haired woman behind the polished bar placed two bottles of Falstaff on felt coasters alongside two short beer glasses.

“Sandwiches for you and your pal, Bogdan?”

“Sure, Anne. Whatever you got.”

When she moved to the back room to fix their lunch, A.J. asked, “Do I look twenty-one?”

“You look seventeen but you’re with me… I used to come in here before Prohibition when I was this high…

” He slid his hand off the bar top to indicate how small he had been.

“My father would send me down with two tin beer buckets for him and his pals.

We lived upstairs next door. Your father lived across the street.

“He was five years younger than me and had no big brother to watch out for him. So, I kept an eye on Jan, kept him out of trouble. Later helped get him in trouble. He helped me with my English.”

A.J. poured beer into his glass, sniffed the yeasty aroma, and drank. The tavern itself smelled of stale beer and cigar smoke. Its high tin ceiling had been painted white once upon a time. Tall windows facing the sidewalk had had their lower half blackened for privacy.

The tavern’s front door stood open. Two wooden-bladed ceiling fans turned lazily.

Flies buzzed above spittoons that sat on the unvarnished floor beneath the brass foot rail.

Three tables with cane chairs lined the wall behind them, where lighted beer signs hung, as they did above the mirrored back bar. There were no other customers.

“It was good hearing your stories about my father. I don’t remember him much. Most of what I know I learned from Mom.”

“As I said, love at first sight. Though it came to be more. Soul mates. He worshipped her and vice versa. Despite his past—or maybe because of it—she saw him as a knight on a white charger.”

Anne brought sandwiches of Polish ham on Jewish rye, kosher dills on the side, and two more beers. Bogdan sat chewing, thoughtful, as if he were time traveling.

A.J. was also pensive. “The knight’s armor,” he said, “got tarnished for her after awhile.”

Bogdan turned to him. “What do you mean?”

“Mom got it into her head that Dad was a murderer who took advantage of people. That he had hidden his true nature from her.”

Bogdan frowned. “Why’d she think that?”

“A guy who owns the nightclub up the road used to know my dad. Some old-time thug, Richard Dupuis. He told her.”

Bogdan took a drink. “Richard Dupuis.” Then he sat silent, jaw moving laterally.

A.J. studied him. “You know something.”

Bogdan stroked his mustache. “Nothing for sure… There was talk. When Jan’s boss Leo Gold got shot your father benefitted.

Took over the business though he wasn’t even your age.

None of the other bootleggers muscled in because it looked like just some Polack kids running a lemonade stand, though with a more potent product.

“And the neighborhood people liked Jan. He was one of them. They protected him and maybe were a little afraid of him, too, because of the rumors. Talk that he had Leo Gold bumped off. And he had his runners, tough street kids, to take care of him, and he took care of them…

“I do know this much to be true. His boss, Leo Gold, came onto Jan. Not sure how or how much. He asked my advice…” Bogdan sighed and shook his head.

“Your father depended on Gold for everything. Without him, Jan would have been living on the streets because your grandfather had beaten him and turned him out.”

Bogdan fixed A.J. with a gaze. “Whatever your father did he did because he had to. To protect himself, his name, his future. When a man is boxed in, he has to free himself. Sometimes that means doing things others don’t understand. Sometimes a man has to act.”