Only Gypsies Move on Sunday

By Irene McCoy

"Irene McCoy's humorous memoir begins in a blue-collar suburb outside of Chicago. The precocious youngster comes of age during the 1950s while putting up with an authoritative father, fearing the dreaded Commies, and haunted by the horrors of a nuclear holocaust. Later, as a married woman, she resigns herself to repeatedly packing up and following her journalist husband from cramped rooms in the Midwest and New York to accommodations in post-war Germany, none of which were likely to be featured in Better Homes and Gardens. Early on, she finds herself with a two-year-old in a country where she's out of milk and diapers and stores are about to close for the weekend. Aha, so this is what angst is. While the author occasionally embellished a few facts and changed the names of some characters for the sake of privacy, Only Gypsies Move on Sunday will be welcomed by readers who enjoy a sly peek into the often-frantic lives of their contemporaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644718728

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my family. Without them, this book could never have been written. To Barbara Novack, members of the Oceanside Library writing seminar, and others who took time to listen to or peruse the manuscript, your comments, suggestions, and support are much appreciated. A big, special thank you to my husband, Larry, who pushed, shoved, and prodded me to the finish line.

Part 1

On the Brink

1

The Fifties—Indiana

The day Grandma died—a warm one in May of 1950—was a family reunion of sorts. Not the kind where you set up picnic tables loaded with food and string a volleyball net between a couple of trees. No, this was definitely different. The uncles arrived with their older children and were standing around in the living room, nervously shifting their weight from one foot to the other. Uncle Steve, the oldest and the one who usually made all the big decisions for the family, took the initiative. The others followed him, moving slowly toward the front bedroom where Grandma lay in an elaborately carved oak bed. The aunts, already in the house, floated quietly from room to room, plumping up chair cushions and centering already-centered doilies on armchairs and tabletops. They had spent the last two nights sleeping on mattresses set out on the living room floor. During the time they were here, they helped Mom care for their mother-in-law.

There hadn’t been much to do. Grandma wasn’t eating anymore and just needed to be turned from side to side every few hours, sort of like a roasting chicken I thought at the time, and immediately regretted my flippant attitude. Nope, this was more serious. Grandma had to be moved regularly to make her comfortable, Mom said, to prevent her from getting bedsores. There were the shots too. Painkillers and insulin. Doc Stecy had stopped by earlier and told us—in what seemed to me a too matter-of-fact way—that Grandma would probably last only a couple hours longer.

In an attempt to stay out of everyone’s way, I stood just outside the bedroom door. Leaning heavily against the varnished woodwork, I focused on Grandma’s chest, which rose slowly and then fell after a long pause. I tried imagining what it’d be like to stop breathing and attempted to hold my breath for as long as I could, which turned out to be not long at all, barely up to the count of twenty, at which point I hungrily gasped for air. At about the same time, the adults and my older cousins came into the bedroom and positioned themselves around Grandma’s bed. Uncle Mickey and his brother Alex were sniffling, which I thought unusual. They were the tough guys in the family, and their behavior seemed completely out of character. Dad stood by uneasily, watching his mother struggling to breathe. Steve told his boys to come closer. Their twelve-year-old sister, Carol, wasn’t there, I noticed. My cousin and I were just about the same age, but Aunt Mary must have decided her daughter shouldn’t have to witness this grim scene. I, on the other hand, the youngest one in the room, had been pushed even closer to the bed by Dad and got to listen to Grandma’s last labored breaths.

My aunts occasionally glanced at their mother-in-law, a strong-willed woman who years ago, according to Mom, had insisted that her daughters-in-law come over each week to clean her home. Why hire an outsider, Grandma asked rhetorically, when she had four strong women in the family. My aunts never protested openly to her face but told each other regularly what they thought of the arrangement.

Over the years the sisters-in-law swept the rugs and polished the furniture, wiped up after Corky the boxer pup and the two long-haired Persian cats, dusted the curio cabinet and its porcelain pieces, cleaned the bathroom, scrubbed the kitchen and pantry floors, and in springtime washed windows, aired out mattresses, and shook the tasseled, damask draperies hanging in the living room and dining area. Among other chores, Mom was regularly given the task of cleaning out the canary’s cage. She hated that assignment.

Grandma’s breathing had slowed noticeably, and after a last whispered exhalation, she lay still. Mickey, the youngest, sobbed Mama.

Alex mumbled flatly She’s gone. The women just stared.

And then Steve said, Okay, let’s take a look at the finances. What he meant was: get Grandma’s handbags and let’s see what’s in them.

Grandma had come over from Europe with her parents in the late 1800s, carrying everything she owned in a bundle. By the time she died more than a half century later, she’d left each of her four sons a small apartment building—mortgage-free. I always wondered how she did it. Mom often spoke of Grandma’s frugality and determination. Maybe that was the answer. Word was, she served a lot of potato soup to family members when they gathered around the supper table, which is not to say Grandma didn’t occasionally need some financial help. When that happened, she turned to a neighborhood bank. According to some family stories, the bank employees would commence to tremble when Grandma, who was hard to deal with, walked through the revolving doors. In her mind, going to the bank for a loan to finance some real estate was no different from going to Seifer’s furniture store to buy a bed. If the item was selling for $19.95, she’d offer the salesclerk fifteen. After considerable haggling and with some give-and-take by both sides, the final price would end up at about seventeen dollars and change. She applied the same technique to the unfortunate person at the bank who happened to ask, May I help you?

Outraged by the current interest rate, Grandma would hassle the poor clerk to lower it substantially. As usual, the bank manager would be called over to explain the situation. This wasn’t Seifer’s furniture store, he insisted. Neither was it Lipays’ Fine Clothing for Ladies. This was a bank, he continued, and banks don’t give discounts! Grandma and the bank manager would engage in a drawn-out staring contest before she finally backed off and considered the papers that had been put in front of her to sign.

During the Depression, handbags and mattresses became Grandma’s safety deposit boxes and remained such until she felt comfortable in handing over her money to strangers at a bank. Years later, leather purses, now cracked and lusterless, still held a reserve fund. Grandma kept the pocketbooks in the deep closet next to her bed, and it was in this direction that Mom headed at Uncle Steve’s request. As she opened the door to the long, dark storage space, I could see Grandma’s Navaho print bathrobe sagging from a hook on one side and a few dark dresses hanging from a pole at the back, reminders of better days when she had gone shopping regularly and attended services at the Hungarian church a few blocks away. Mom took two large black bags—sagging with what I guessed were wads of currency and loose change—from a shelf in the back and brought them into the dining room where she set them on the table. The men gathered around, counted the bills, and divided the cash among themselves. Dad, in what I thought was rather unusual, took over the proceedings.

Okay. So this is what I suggest we do, he began. I think we each ought to give my wife a little money for taking care of Mom during the past year.

All right, Mickey said.

Fine with me, Alex added.

Steve, after a considerable pause, silently nodded in agreement.

Dad went on. So how ’bout 10 percent of the total? and added as an afterthought, Steve, that okay with you?

My uncle shook his head again, this time a bit more slowly, and said almost as an afterthought, Okay.

After agreeing on what each would contribute, the uncles started to peel off bills and threw their contributions into a pile on the table. Steve stared at Dad. Okay, Johnny. Where’s yours?

Dad looked at his older brother, questioningly. You mean you want me to put in some money too?

Sure. Of course. We all agreed, didn’t we?

Yeah, but Theresa’s my wife. Why should I pay her for taking care of my mother? Dad’s voice was getting louder, verging on that angry tone we were used to hearing when something wasn’t going the way he wanted it to.

But it’s only fair, Steve was insisting. Each of us feeds the pot.

Not the way I see it. Dad was holding his ground. If I put in something, you guys can put in less. This is all in your favor.

Johnny, do what they say, Mom broke in. Don’t argue. Not today. I glanced over at her, astonished. Mom never spoke up. Not to her husband. And certainly not in front of her brothers-in-law.

It’s not right. Dad was being obstinate. Mom put her hand on his arm, as if to nudge him away from the table. He glared at her, glanced around the room at his brothers, who were staring elsewhere, and then looked at the pile of money on the table.

Dad sighed heavily and started counting off some bills from the stack he held in his hand. This isn’t right, he said again, his voice tinged with anger as he glanced at Steve, who was looking about the room—everywhere except at Dad.

I turned away from the table, headed slowly toward the living room, and stopped in front of the radiator under the large front window. I gazed out at the brick-paved street in front of our house and noticed that the hearse from Kosier’s Funeral Home was pulling up to the curb. I stood there staring and wondered about what had just taken place. Is this what happened in other homes when somebody died? If so, it was certainly a strange way to begin the mourning period.

2

All this happened way after Grandma and Grandpa met, of course, way after the refinery, where Grandpa worked most of his adult life, was built. Eons ago there was just the lake, marshland, and sand dunes, leftovers from a melting ice sheet that covered the land thousands of years ago. But by the mid-1800s, investors, land speculators, and immigrants flocked to the region, fired up by the low prices the state of Indiana was asking for its swamplands. Many of these folks came through Chicago on trains that skirted the southern shore of Lake Michigan. One of the trains made history. So did its engineer—Herbert Pop Whiting. Pop got himself into a pack of trouble one day when a local he was working on barely made it to a siding just before a fast-moving passenger train came barreling through. Pop’s train got out of the way in time, but Pop didn’t. He was killed stepping out from behind one of his cars into the path of the oncoming express. Over the next few years, a small community identified as Pop Whiting’s Siding developed near the site of the accident. Somebody eventually shortened that to Whiting’s, which, if you ask me, looked and sounded more than a bit weird.

During the 1880s, when advisors for millionaire industrialist John D. Rockefeller surveyed the sandy shores as a possible site for an oil refinery, the land pretty much looked as it had a couple thousand years earlier. The group must have liked what it saw, though, because by 1890 oil storage tanks, warehouses, and an office building—all now a part of the new Standard Oil Company—had blossomed on the dunes. At about the same time, someone must have decided to get rid of the apostrophe s in Whiting’s. It disappeared, and Pop took a backseat in the history books.

Laborers poured in to work at the refinery and the settlement of Whiting, Indiana, grew. By 1900, the area had all the trappings of a genuine frontier town. Saloons, boardinghouses, dancehalls, and brothels sprung up around the train tracks and formed the core of a rough neighborhood known as Oklahoma. In the early years of the twentieth century, after Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company had built and rented bungalows for its workers and larger homes for management, the town started to look fairly respectable. In addition to providing jobs, the city of Whiting had schools, churches, stores, and a post office to attract newcomers—many of them East European immigrants who helped swell the population. Grandma and Grandpa Kristoff were among them.

3

The boardinghouse where Grandma worked during the last days of the nineteenth century was a dark, three-story clapboard building that stood across from the refinery gates on 119th Street, Whiting’s main thoroughfare. During the day, she’d wash the boarders’ work clothes, then hang them on clotheslines in a weed-filled lot behind the building. The heavy, wet denim overalls and long woolen underwear she rubbed against the washboard’s deep grooves probably weighed as much as she did. Inside the boarding house, she helped with the general housekeeping. At fifteen, Gizella (Hungarian for Giselle) was barely five feet tall—a thin girl with large gray eyes, high cheekbones, pale lips that were tightly shut much of the time, and thick brown hair she always wore in the same fashion—braided, then twisted into a knot at the back of her head and fastened securely with long, metal hair pins.

On Saturday afternoons, at the end of every work week, she’d collect her meager earnings from the woman who managed the establishment and walked home past small, wooden houses bordering the train tracks. In warm weather, not particularly anxious to get home and help her stepmother with the new baby, she’d stroll slowly, her long skirt fluttering in the warm evening breeze. On colder days, she walked faster, pulling the heavy black woolen shawl she wore tightly about her head and shoulders. It was often a useless attempt to insulate herself against the freezing winds that blew down across Lake Michigan from Canada.

To her way of thinking, the unpainted frame house she returned to every evening was a mansion compared to the home they had left in Hungary, or Magyarórszág as she usually referred to it. Years later when I’d beg her to describe those early days, about the only thing she’d admit to was that their place in the Old Country had sat on land that was mostly mud when it rained and dry, swirling dust when it didn’t. What she seemed to prefer talking about was the good-looking guy who kept turning up at the boardinghouse where she worked. He was tall and had to look down at her when they spoke. One day he brought her a brown paper bag filled with oranges—items that were hard to come by in 1900 if you didn’t live in Florida or California. They’re for you, he told Gizella in Hungarian.

You shouldn’t waste your money, she advised him but took the bag anyway.

His name was Mike. Mike Kristoff. He kept coming back to see her in the evenings just before she left the boardinghouse. Sometimes he’d walk her home. A few months later, he spoke to her father and married Géza (the name he preferred to call her) in a local Catholic church. For the occasion, he bought a dark suit and a brown-and-white checkerboard tie, which he knotted loosely under the stiff collar of his white shirt. A neighbor lady handy with needle and thread made Géza a wedding dress of polished white cotton. It had a ruffled bodice and a high-necked collar and rustled when she walked. A thin, white veil, crowned with a wreath of fresh lilies of the valley, sat on top of her head.

Mike and Géza lived with her parents for a few years in one of the little houses that the company had built for its workers. They had five children—all born in the brown clapboard house that sat up hard against a wooden-planked sidewalk. Margaret, their oldest child and only daughter, died of diphtheria when she was seven. Decades later when Géza was in her sixties, she’d still get teary-eyed whenever she spoke of her little girl.

During the work week, Mike stoked the furnaces that helped refine the crude oil at the refinery. At night, he fed coal to the giant burner in the basement of the comfortable, two-family house they bought nearly twenty years into their marriage. Géza handled everything else, including most of the decisions involving money and what it would buy. One of the things it would not buy, she decided early on, was a car. In her way of thinking, cars were an unnecessary expense, with hard-earned dollars going out the window to pay for maintenance, gas, and oil. If you buy a car, she warned her four boys, you’ll never have any money! Steve, her oldest son, picked up the challenge, bought a Cole in the 1920s, and drove his parents to Florida to look at some property. Florida, he insisted, was the new frontier, a place where you could pick up parcels of land for almost nothing. Géza didn’t buy the sales pitch. Back home in Indiana, landless and still holding tight to her purse straps, she announced to no one in particular that there was nothing down there except mosquitoes and swampland. Florida was definitely not for her. A quarter of a century later, she may have regretted this decision. She was inclined to focus elsewhere when pictures of Miami’s luxury hotels and high-rise apartments came up on the TV screen. If she regretted her earlier disinclination to become a landowner in the Sunshine State, she never let on.

What Géza did do was recognize the importance of putting a little something away for a rainy day. And while she was putting a little something away, she’d also lecture her sons and grandchildren on wasteful spending and poor budgeting of personal finances. Misfortune, she claimed, was a good teacher. She admitted that her family had been taken to the cleaners twice in her lifetime: once, when FDR closed banks in the 1930s, and several years earlier when a Hungarian countryman promised to find her father a nice, new house in America. With an inside bathroom! For only two hundred dollars down! Her father handed over half the money he had brought to the United States and never saw the man or his money again. By the time she died, Géza had managed to put away a little something again. She’d also left each of her sons a handsome piece of income-producing property.

Her children often experienced Géza’s stinging replies to their excuses for not being able to squirrel away something for that rainy day. What d’you mean you can’t save any money, she’d say. Stop eating like kings! Eat more soup! Potato soup. It’s good for you. And what do you need a car for? Use a bike. Ride the bus. Cars are nothing but trouble. We used to have one, she’d remind them. A Cole. Took a trip to Florida once. What a waste of time and money that was. Nothing down there but swamps and mosquitoes! And stop complaining about your heating bills. Look at the size of your house. A bedroom for each kid? What are they, kings and queens? A kitchen and a couple of extra rooms. That’s all you need. Close off the ones you’re not using. Sit around the stove.

Her children countered with: It’s not just the house, Mom. A pair of shoes often costs more than some people make in one day.

Don’t tell me about shoes, she’d exclaim. I’ve seen your closet. You could open up a store. How many pairs can you wear at one time? And forget that vacation this summer. What’s wrong with the parks and museums?

They’d reply: Ma, even the parks aren’t safe. People get mugged and robbed in them!

Robbed? she’d interject. Don’t talk to me about getting robbed. Did I ever tell you about that no-good Magyar crook who took our $200 when we first came here…

4

Mom said it was a heavy stoneware beer mug. Her father had thrown it at her one Saturday evening in early winter, barely missing her head and crashing against the wall behind her. "You’re not going out tonight. Not to that place!" Grandpa Bokori was yelling. The cringing, worn-out woman in the corner was my stressed-out grandmother. Theresa, or Tess, as her four brothers called Mom, was a good-looking twenty-five-year-old, which made no difference that night. Old enough to do what she wanted, she was still too young in her father’s mind to think she could. The beers Ignatz had put away earlier in the evening only fueled his anger and strengthened his resolve. The son of a woman who never married, he recalled the frequent taunts and jeers of other children about his origins and grew up promising himself that no child of his would ever shame the family. No daughter of his was going to leave the house dressed in clothing that ended at her knees! Face smeared with paint! Looking like a floozy! But Tess had other plans that Saturday night. She grabbed her winter coat from the hook by the kitchen door, threw it over her red crepe dress, and ran out of the house. Her silver heels clicked rapidly along the brick path leading away from their small, weather-beaten home. The sprawling sheet metal plant where her father worked loomed a half block away.

Tess told the story often: the flying beer mug, her father’s disposition, and the events that followed at Madura’s Danceland. A hotspot in the 1920s and ’30s, with hundreds of glittering lights filling silken chandeliers over the dance floor, Danceland was a sprawling fire hazard located on the southeastern edge of Chicago’s city limits. Tess and her girlfriends caught a streetcar that night, taking them from East Chicago through Whiting to the heavily industrial blue-collar neighborhood that bordered Chicago’s far south side. Inside the smoke-filled dance hall, a band was playing the latest hits. The feverish rhythms of the Charleston alternated with the mellow tones of Ain’t Misbehavin’, Stormy Weather, and My Blue Heaven.

The girls danced with each other, but some guy—always the same one Tess noticed—kept asking her to dance. She wondered what was wrong with his buddies who stood nearby. Didn’t they dance? She especially had her eye on the short, good-looking one who stood around with a beer bottle in his hand. By the end of the evening, she and her friends were on talking terms with the boys. She even learned the short one’s name. Johnny. Johnny Kristoff. Lived in Whiting, he said. So did his friends. They came to Danceland often. Most of them, including Johnny, didn’t dance, though. They just liked to hang around. Johnny preferred a bottle of beer to the dance floor. Before Tess left that night, he got her name and said he’d be looking for her the next time he was there. She went to Danceland regularly after that evening and talked with Johnny but danced with his friend.

By spring, Tess and Johnny were seeing each other every weekend. He’d take the streetcar to East Chicago from Whiting, and they’d meet a couple of blocks from her house. Embarrassed by her family’s small, ramshackle home, she was reluctant to have him over. On rare occasions when he appeared on her doorstep, Johnny’d ask her father to have a beer with him at one of the corner saloons, an offer Ignatz accepted without missing a beat. At the bar, he’d introduce Johnny to his drinking buddies as his daughter’s steady.

One night in April, after they’d been to see Love in Bloom at a local movie house, Johnny asked Tess to marry him. She said yes. For the ceremony at a Hungarian church in South Chicago, he wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a striped tie. She had on a dark-brown dress of crinkly georgette. Buttons, covered in the same fabric, lined the front of her dress from neck to waist. Johnny had bought her a corsage of pink and white roses. She put a white carnation in the buttonhole of his lapel. His mother had her three other sons paint the brick walls inside the garage behind their home a bright sky blue. She’d set up tables inside for the party after the wedding ceremony and filled them with stuffed cabbage, sausages, fried chicken, coleslaw, and Hungarian nut rolls. Johnny’s brothers tended bar at another table.

During their first year together, Johnny and Tess lived with his parents in Whiting. In 1935, a year after they married, she had a baby, a boy who had intestinal problems from the get-go and died before he was three months old. The two of them had a hard time getting over that. After the baby’s death, Johnny made a point of heading for the Eagles, a social club he belonged to, on Friday nights where he’d drink and play poker until Sunday evening. At which time he’d come home, grab a few hours of sleep, and take off for work at the refinery on Monday morning. His mother kept urging