My Mom

Part 2, part 1 is here https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2020/11/i-watch-trust-on-fx-and-old-blood.html 

My grand parents arrived in USA in 1900 at age 20, coming through Ellis Island.  PROUDLY they proclaimed their religion as Atheists, indeed it was the First Amendment right to believe in whatever religion you believed in including no religion at all that drove the two to move from Warsaw to USA.  Janik was of Christian, likely Catholic, background, Waja hinted of Jewishness but she refused to identify as a Jew. Both were adamant that being atheist was their right, their reason for coming to America. They identified as "intelligentsia." So my mom was raised by militant atheists in a Polish ghetto in Gary, Indiana in the early 1900s.

Lucille Jendrzewski grew to just under five feet tall, with D cup breasts, a sweet face, and a vulnerability that caused her to never have to work hard for anything in her life. Even in 1929, when the stock market crash caused her to have to get a job and quit school at Chicago Art Institute, she ended up waitressing in the restaurant that George Ebeling was managing, Harding’s downtown. My mom knew “Bud” was a good catch, working his way through law school in the Great Depression by managing this downtown restaurant. By marrying him, my mom never had to work another day of her life.  I wonder sometimes what kind of connections dad had to get that job in the first place. There are lots of Chicago cops on my family tree.  

My mom used to tell me, forget about a career, find a good husband, but in the 1960s that was the opposite message from what I was getting from my peers. Now at age 72 in my low income senior housing, I see, the women who have comfortable retirements in my generation are the ones who had good marriages. My mom was right. But I digress.

Mom charmed and married the boss at Hardings within weeks of being hired. She had been a flapper in the 1920s at night clubs in The Loop. She was amoral and a-religious, once, in her 80s, beckoning me to her room to show me nude photos taken of her in 19 teens, black and white snapshots she had in her lingerie drawer. In order to marry my dad the German Irish Catholic, because of laws in his religion, she was required to convert to Catholicism. My mom had studied music and art in school, but had never been to church in her life, and had no idea what it meant to convert to Catholicism except it meant she could marry this great catch, so of course she agreed enthusiastically.

But she never went along with it, at all, she was barren spiritually, as were my grand parents. There was a gaping hole in their souls that allowed sarcasm and meanness to have easy reign. My grand parents would laugh out loud at my dad when he mentioned something to do with the church, my mom just batted her eyes. She feigned a dotty innocence all the time, like you see in female characters in black and white films from the 1930s, pretending to be dumb was a coquettish trait of femme fatales of the times. In reality mom was a schemer who knew how to get what she wanted, and knew how to get away with ignoring things she did not want.