Page 5 of The Bootlegger’s Bride
They stepped through the heavy plank front door into an expansive room lit by beer signs, pinball machines, and a glittering jukebox.
Jan found that it also smelled like a fishing shack.
The aromas of beer, fried fish, and cigarette smoke thickened the air.
In lieu of artwork, mounted fish adorned the slat walls.
As Hazel slid into a wooden booth he went to the bar and got them two highballs from a smiling gray-haired woman.
“You’re not from around here.”
“My lady friend is. Recommends your tavern as a friendly place. I come in peace and goodwill.”
“In that case, happy to have you, handsome.”
He winked at her and left a tip. Jan sat across from Hazel. They touched glasses together and drank. He gestured with his toward the unvarnished floor.
“Sawdust. This a dance joint?”
“More of a hoe-down venue. On Saturday nights they have a fiddler and banjo picker who play cornball country music.”
“Cornball’s okay sometimes.”
“Yes, it is. Everybody enjoys themselves. As little girls Helen and I came here with our parents and danced. Lovely times.”
“Family’s important to you.”
That seemed to register with her, as she bit her lip. However, he had misjudged her thoughts.
“I overheard your conversation with Raymond… Sorry about your father, him not speaking to you.”
Jan acknowledged her gesture with a nod. His youthful loathing of the old man had tempered over the years. Still, he had no desire to see him.
“A mixed blessing. Now I don’t have to endure his lectures.
And lectures in Polish are somehow more bellicose and discouraging than in English…
He’s like a lot of the Poles here. They come to get the aristocratic boot off their necks yet never really embrace America and all it has to offer them, all the opportunities.
“In my neighborhood all you hear is Polish—in the shops, the taverns, the church. My mother’s been here thirty years yet still hardly speaks a word of English.
An arranged marriage, working-class style.
My father paid her passage over, and they married within a month even though they had never before met. She was eighteen, he over forty.”
Hazel pursed her lips trying to imagine such a union. “Marrying without courtship, without love. They come from a different world and different time.”
He nodded. “Which is why I’ve done my best to leave that all behind—particularly the working-class dread, self-abnegation, and resignation.
Slogging away like a serf your whole life, forever doing the bidding of others, always looking fearfully over your shoulder…
Not to mention mercantile marriage. You’d think that if two people planned to spend their lives together, might help if they knew each other a bit first. Perhaps shared some values.
Maybe even liked each other, at least a little. ”
Hazel shrugged. “Guess it couldn’t hurt.”
Jan smiled. He already liked her—at least a little.
“I was fifteen when I first started working for Leo Gold supplying liquor to the Cass Avenue people and places. My old man soon heard about it. Told me he wouldn’t have a criminal for a son or have him living under his roof.
Said he could get me on at the steel mill, make a man out of me.
When I refused he threw me out of our flat—literally. I’ve been on my own ever since.
“It’s been ten or fifteen years since we’ve spoken. I sometimes visit my mother when he’s at work. She’s afraid to tell him, though I suspect he knows. He’s got eyes everywhere.”
Jan excused himself and again went to the bar, Hazel watching how he walked.
Everything he did was easy, deliberate, and graceful yet manly.
He got change from the woman there and moved to the jukebox.
What a strange man. But his own man, seemingly.
She’d never met anyone anything like him.
After a minute, she heard the string introduction of the new Judy Garland hit—her favorite.
How did he know? Jan returned and extended his hand to her.
“May I have this dance?” She smiled, stood, and moved into his arms. He led her over the saw-dusted slats, the music running through her, heart and soul.
Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.
Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.
Ah, thought Hazel. If only they would. She laid her head on his shoulder.
§
At Pontoon Beach Jan turned right as she directed him. It was dark now. The light from the dashboard gauges seemed to make her glow. Soon she told him to pull to the curb. Jan looked past her to a white clapboard bungalow.
“This where you live?”
She lifted her chin toward the other side of the street, where sat a two-story brown-brick building with tall windows, surrounded by stately trees. “This is where I work. Nameoki School.”
He sat staring at it. Smaller than Webster School in St. Louis where he first studied and Beaumont High, where he didn’t, at least not much. It brought back to him the smell of chalk dust, pencil shavings, and moldy textbooks.
“Great that you got to go to university. To get a real education and learn a profession. I’m envious.”
“I thought you had. You’re so well spoken.”
“Never finished high school. When I dropped out I couldn’t tell my father for fear he’d thrash me and kick me down the stairs—which he eventually did anyway. I got up every morning to walk to school then instead headed off to the Central Library downtown.
“After a while the librarians noticed me lurking about and took me under their wing, gave me books to read: Shakespeare, Whitman, Twain. Plato, Gibbons, Montaigne. Nothing all that useful, but I loved it. Even after I started bootlegging, I still spent long hours at the library reading.”
“I think it was very useful. Helped make you into an interesting and sensitive man.”
Jan wondered about her “sensitive” claim. Things he had done—and still had to do from time to time—might undermine it.
He stroked his chin. “Thanks, but that means I’ve been talking too much. Now tell me about your studies and your students.”
She again pursed her lips. “I’m thinking maybe we’ve done enough talking for now.”
He stared at her crimson lips, now parted, nodded agreement, and leaned toward her.
§
Hazel stayed up late writing it all down in her journal while it still sat fresh in memory, with pertinent dialogue and sensory details, like a real writer—the smell of the lake, the feel of sawdust beneath her soles as Judy Garland warbled, the press of Jan’s lips against hers. “A magical day,” she wrote.
Hazel finally fell asleep, believing that her life had been touched by beneficent spirits.