Windy City Blues: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Renée Rosen is the bestselling author of White Collar Girl, What the Lady Wants, Dollface, and the young adult novel, Every Crooked Pot. She lives in Chicago.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Renee Rosen

The blues had a baby and they named it rock ’n’ roll.

—McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters

Prologue

“Sweet Little Angel”

1933

She did her worshipping from the hood of a rusted-out Chevrolet in a junkyard on Twenty-ninth and State Street across from the church. Leeba Groski felt closer to God there than she ever did in a synagogue. It was a Sunday morning and she’d tagged along with the neighbor boys, Leonard and Phil Chess. They sat three in a row on the hood, their feet resting on the bumper while they listened to the gospel music pouring out of the church’s open door and windows. Even in Chicago’s August heat the piano music and voices gave Leeba goose bumps as she clapped and sang along to “Jesus Gave Me Water.” Leeba didn’t have a great voice, but when she sang you couldn’t hear her accent. If she could, she would have said everything in a song.

She was seven years old when her family arrived from Poland. The only English word she knew back then was okay. So everything was okay.

“How old are you?”

“Okay.”

“Where do you live?”

“Okay.”

“Stupid kike.”

“Okay.”

Now she was eleven, sitting in a junkyard singing without holding back, tapping her toes inside her hand-me-down shoes. Music so magical, it made her body move, her fingers snapping as effortlessly as her heart pumped, as her lungs took in air. As Leeba swayed to the music all else disappeared. Gone were the rows of decrepit autos, the chain-link fence, the scent of gasoline and the stench from the nearby stockyards. Even the empty liquor bottles and trodden trash on the ground vanished. All that existed in that moment was the music. She surrendered to it, letting it lift her up inside.

When the song ended, Leonard tapped her on the shoulder, offering her a Lucky Strike before cupping his hand around a match, blocking the wind while he lit his. He was sixteen and had been smoking for as long as Leeba could remember. Phil, four years younger and enamored of his big brother, patted down his flattop and reached for a cigarette of his own. Leeba contemplated trying one, until she became distracted by a young girl standing outside the church in a flowing white robe, the breeze catching her sleeves, billowing them up like angel wings. The young girl with skin the color of cocoa tilted her head toward the heavens and opened wide, singing “Move On Up a Little Higher.” The words boomed from her with a force that seemed to shoot forth from the earth and move through her. Leeba watched, listened, astonished. Was that coming from her?

“Motherfucker,” said Leonard, as that was his favorite word, suitable for any and all occasions and often employed as a term of endearment.

“Yeah, motherfucker,” said Phil, nodding. He liked that word, too, mostly because Leonard liked it so much.

When the song was over, the singing angel kicked a cluster of pebbles that sent dust across the lot before she was summoned back inside the church.

“Boys, get back to work,” Mr. Chess called out in a thick Yiddish accent. He owned the junkyard and Leonard and Phil worked there in the summertime and on weekends. “Boys,” he called again. “We have lots to do.”

One by one they slid off the car hood, the brothers darting their cigarettes to the ground. The music in the church had stopped. There was no piano, no singers, just barking dogs, horns honking in the distance and the preacher delivering his sermon. The junkyard lost its sanctity and Leeba found herself back in a land of broken headlights and shattered windshields. Her friends had things to do, and Leeba was left with a long day to fill all by herself. Jacks, solitaire, her jump rope, a library book, the piano—she contemplated her substitute playmates.

Leeba left the brothers to stack tires and headed toward the bus, shuffling along in Cousin Eli’s shoes. They were a size too small for him and a size too big for her, but her mother wouldn’t spend the money for a new pair. Why, when those are perfectly good? Leeba polished and buffed them, but still they looked like boys’ shoes that didn’t fit. It was bad enough that she was taller than the other girls, taller than the boys, too. In the fifth grade she already stood five-four and she wasn’t done yet. Other mothers urged their children to stand up straight, shoulders back. But fearing her height would scare off the boys, Leeba’s mother never corrected her for slouching, her torso sunk in like a C. And even then she still towered over her classmates. Her father said her long legs were a fluke. Even the men in her family—on both sides—struggled to reach five-seven.

Twenty minutes later the bus dropped Leeba off in a section of Chicago called Lawndale. The Groskis lived over there on a shady, tree-lined street where everyone knew everyone else. Their house in the center of Karlov Avenue was a simple four-flat with a brick exterior. They had the first-floor apartment, three rooms for the four of them: Leeba’s parents, her younger sister, Golda, and her. Compared to how they’d lived in the shtetl, their village in Poland, this was a castle. Uncle Moishe, Aunt Sylvie and Cousin Eli had the apartment across the hall.

Leonard and Phil Chess lived in the building next door on the second floor. Leeba’s mother was the only person who still referred to them by their Polish surname, Czyz. She called the parents Cryla and Yasel instead of Cecile and Joseph. They never corrected her, but the boys, Lejzor and Fizsel, were quick to remind her that they only answered to Leonard and Phil. The Chess family had come over in 1928, a year before the Groskis, but to Leeba they were true Chicagoans who had American names and ate hot dogs and spoke English, their accents beginning to fade as beautifully as a setting sun.

Leeba entered the small foyer to the building where the wallpaper curled away from the corner seam. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage. Her mother was cooking again. Leeba wiped her big shoes on the welcome mat with Shalom running across the burlap in black Hebrew letters.

“Leeba, iz az ir?” her mother called out when she opened the front door.

Leeba saw the tips of her mother’s pink slippers poking out of the kitchen alcove. “Ya, Mama, ikh bin heym.”

Yiddish was the only language spoken in the Groski home because Leeba’s mother had never learned English. She claimed she had no use for it, whereas Leeba found it a necessity, even if confounding. When was a kernel something that got caught in your teeth and when was it an army officer? Words like choir, knife and gnat—even more puzzling. She wrestled with words in her diary, in the poems she wrote, in the little songs she made up. She mentally rehearsed each time she spoke, wanting only to sound American.

With the church music fresh in her head, Leeba went into the living room and sat at the piano. It was a secondhand upright with keys as yellowed as an old woman’s teeth and an F key that stuck in humid weather. Her father had splurged on the piano after her teacher at Theodore Herzl Elementary realized Leeba could play by ear. If she heard a song enough times she could play it back note for note. How her fingers knew which keys to strike she didn’t know, couldn’t explain. From the age of ten Leeba had taken private lessons at the J.P.I., the Jewish People’s Institute, on Douglas Boulevard. But even before that she had taught herself to play...