I was born and brought up in Chicago, a first generation American born to Russian immigrant parents. My father was a salesman or something and was gone most of the time until I was fifteen, when he had an accident that hurt his leg and he had to retire. His early retirement put us in a poor financial position, and I had to struggle to go to college.
We lived on the south side, near 87th Street and Cicero Avenue, in a plain brick box of a house built in the 1960s. It was different from the others on the block only because it had a chimney; my father insisted on having a fireplace in the living room. The neighborhood was on the very edge of the city; the south suburbs began across 87th Street. It was an urban-residential place, missing both the dynamism of downtown Chicago and the serenity of rural Illinois.
For three years after high school, I lived at home and commuted to school. I majored in Chemistry at IIT - Illinois Institute of Technology - on 31st Street near the Dan Ryan Expressway. I earned some small scholarships and worked every third semester to make up the gaps in tuition. Everything worked out until I began to concentrate on my major.
It seemed that as my coursework became more demanding, so did my mother. I finally came to a difficult decision, financially and otherwise, and left home on a Wednesday during the first semester of my third undergraduate year. I had to leave. Life in my parents' house was intolerable and I could not study. My mother, God rest her soul, was impossible to live with and we were having a blow up on average once a day.
I remember my father standing in the doorway of my basement room, surveying the open suitcase and two cardboard boxes that held all my belongings.
"Anything I can carry up for you?" he asked.
I nodded, checked the closet again, and closed the suitcase. Papa left with a box, reappeared, and silently lifted the other box. The stairs creaked beneath him on the landing, echoing in the empty room, disturbing the silence of the house — a void silence, caused by the absence of noise, not the presence of peace. I took the suitcase off the bed and followed my father upstairs.
Outside, our goodbyes were sparse. "How about coming for dinner on Sunday," said my father. "For your mother's sake."
"I thought she never wanted to see me again," I said. I read the desperate warning look he gave me. "OK, Papa, I'll be here."
He closed my car door and ignored the rust chip that fell on his shoe. Stooping to look through the window, he said, "By the way, Father Paul wants to see you. He called while you were packing."
"Why?"
"He didn't say. Just stop by before you go...home."
Home. It lifted the tension a little to know that my father, at least, had accepted my leaving as a natural progression, not a betrayal.
I drove an old Volkswagen beetle at the time — very old. It ran well (when it ran), but it was not aesthetically pleasing to look at. People had a hard time deciding what color it was, and it had some nasty habits, like occasionally — make that frequently — refusing to start. I drove it out of love and poverty.
That day, the Volkswagen started on the third try. I ground it into an uncertain forward gear and lurched ahead, too busy trying to see the road through a scratched and dirty windshield to acknowledge Papa's melancholy wave.
CHAPTER THREE