Chapter 1 ■ Father’s Last Wish
Jan Erteszek
The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.
Chapter 1
The massive trunks of the coral trees lining the median of the San Vicente Boulevard drew my father’s attention as I drove us in the spring of 1986, the trunks reminding me of naked brown bodies, their determined limbs boldly reaching toward the sky. Orange flowers hung from branches like ornaments, the clusters matching the coral earrings I remembered Mother wearing when I was a child.
My eyes fixed to the road, I heard him speak, but his voice was low and nearly inaudible.
“Coral trees present like fruit trees,” he said. “Flowers show first, ahead of the leaves.”
I gripped the steering wheel, conscious of the fragility of the man beside me whose dark, intense eyes were taking in the magnificent specimens along the grassy median as we headed south toward the ocean. A scattering of joggers ran up and down the San Vicente as we sped past in his maroon 1984 Cadillac DeVille. It was like my father to notice trees. He had the eye of a farmer, the hand and mind of a gardener, and he liked to quote an allegory from the Bible: the well-tended seed reaped the best crop. My mother was like a hothouse flower, father said. And like the flower, she was so beautifully fragile she thrived best with his special attention. Mother accepted this comparison, comforted by her husband’s desire to protect her while expanding her horizons. He was her Pygmalion, father claimed and mother acquiesced. Jan J. Erteszek had groomed Olga since she was but a child.
Father took another whiff of oxygen from the tube that snaked over his lap down to the tank at his feet; his brown-flecked hand pinched the nasal cannula to his nose as he breathed in. He seemed small right now, almost weightless, nearly insignificant as his lips quivered with alarming weakness. He held tight to the armrest, uncomfortable in his seventy-three-year-old body, but when I looked in his eyes, I could still see his essential self—thoughtful, intelligent, dark with knowing—his reality tinged with fear, his skin jaundiced and sallow despite years in the sun tending his beloved ranch in Tehachapi.
He coughed suddenly, bringing me back to the front seat of the Cadillac, back to him as he began to speak. “When I first arrived in Los Angeles forty-five years ago, a streetcar ran beneath these trees.” He laughed softly, likely recalling the first time he and Mother left the horrors of war, and traveled to the Southern California coastline, riding the trolley up to the Palisades cliffs at Ocean Avenue. “When I was a boy in Krakow, the thought of coming to Los Angeles was like imagining going to the moon.”
I had heard his story many times before, just as I had heard my father tell innumerable other ones about his past, yet as I grew older, I also understood that there were just as many untold tales and hoped that this might be the day I would hear them. Instead, my father would repeat the same old ones. He didn’t do this because his memory had failed; it was a calculated plotting on his part, a desire to control and shape his life’s story as he told it.