“Yeah, you haven’t seen your birth father for years and years, either, have you, girl?” I leaned over to rub her head.
Father Gribac had been the pastor at St. Czeslaw’s, the church my aunt Marie attended. Actually, nobody had blown up St. Czeslaw’s, but Father Gribac sure had fanned fires of hatred in South Chicago after the riot-filled summer of ’sixty-six. Marie was just one of the crowd of furious St. Czeslaw parishioners who vowed to do everything they could to show King and the other agitators he’d brought with him that they should stay in Mississippi or Georgia where they belonged. She was furious that the cardinal made every priest read a letter to the parish on brotherhood and open housing.
“Our Chicago Negroes always knew their place before these Com munists came to stir them up,” Marie fumed.
Father Gribac read Cardinal Cody’s letter, since he was a good soldier in Christ’s Army, but he also preached a thundering sermon, telling his congregation that Christians had a duty to fight Commu nists and look after their families. We heard all about it from Aunt Marie when she dropped in on my mother a few days after my tenth birthday.
“If we don’t stop them in Marquette Park, they’ll be here in South Chicago next. Father Gribac says he’s tired of the cardinal sitting in his mansion like God on His throne, not caring about white people in this city. We’re the ones who built these churches. But Cardinal Cody wants to let those ni—”
“Not that word in my house, Marie,” my mother had said sharply.
“Oh, you can be as high and mighty as you like, Gabriella, but what about us? What about the lives we worked so hard to make?”
My mother had answered in her ungrammatical English. “Mama Warshawski, she tells me always the hard times Polish peoples have in this city in 1920. The Germans are here first, next the Irish, and they are not wanting for Polish peoples to work at their work. Mama Warshawski tells me how they are calling Papà Warshawski names when he looks for work, stupid Pollack and worse. And Tony, he must do many hard jobs at the police, they are Irish, they not liking Polish peoples. Is always the way, Marie, is sad, but is always the way, the ones coming first want to keep out the ones coming second.”
I hugged my knees, shivering as my sweat dried. It seemed as though everywhere I turned these days, I was being forced to think back forty years to those hot riot-filled days. Or to the January blizzard that followed. Johnny Merton, Lamont Gadsden, and now, tonight, Arnie Coleman, with his veiled racist comments: That’s when this city started going to hell . . . cops forced to turn on their own neighbors.
They had busted up the South Side, those riots. My father, coming home after four days on shift without a break, had been shaken by the hatred he’d experienced, directed at him and his fellow officers, and even at some nuns who were marching with Dr. King. “You can’t believe the insults these Catholic boys shouted at the sisters. People I went to Mass with when I was a boy,” I’d heard him tell my mother when he finally got off duty.
I pulled on a sweatshirt and shorts. Peppy followed me into the dining room, where I knelt in front of the built-in cupboards and pulled out the drawer where I keep a photo album of my parents.
I brooded over their wedding picture: City Hall, 1945. My mother, in a severely tailored suit, looking like Anna Magnani in Open City. My father, in his dress uniform, bursting with astonished pride to be marrying “the most extraordinary woman I ever met.”
Petra’s father, Peter, a late thought in my grandparents’ life, was a child in a sailor suit in the family photo. My grandfather, who died when I was small, was there, tall and big-boned like all the Warshawskis. Boom-Boom’s parents appeared in several photos, my aunt Marie characteristically looking sourly at her immigrant sister-in-law, my uncle Bernard giving Gabriella a most unbrotherly kiss. I looked more closely at that picture. Maybe that explained some of Aunt Marie’s sourness.
Pictures of me didn’t appear until much later. I was a late thought, too, in a way. My mother had three miscarriages before I was born, and two more after, a sign, or maybe a cause, of the cancer that grew inside her and silently overwhelmed her.
I found a family shot at the beach when I was three: my mother, in a rare moment of relaxation, looking more like Claudia Cardinale than Anna Magnani; me, grinning over my sand bucket; my dad, in swimming trunks, bending over her and me. His two pepperpots, he called us.