Read Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century Online
Authors: John Paul Godges
For Stan, Geri taught us how to deal with her “problem” of not being like the rest of us. “We couldn’t make Geri into something that she was already not.” We couldn’t make her become a college graduate, a productive employee, or a devoted wife and mother. But by learning to accept her the way she is, Stan explained, we also came to appreciate the gifts and talents that only she offers. “She is very entertaining when she is singing, dancing, and just being herself.” And she is way ahead of the rest of us in one crucial respect, said Stan. “There’s no hint of evil. She’s very godly. She’s the only one of us who won’t have any problem getting into heaven.”
For Genie, Geri taught us that we cannot allow anyone who is weak in society to be oppressed or abused as long as we can do anything about it. “Geri is representative of all of the people who cannot help themselves. We as a society have a responsibility to protect them, because the rugged individualists of this world would crush them.” According to Genie, Geri taught us that we could never be self-satisfied, that we could always do more for others, just as we could always be more giving and more patient toward Geri. “We could always try harder to be a little kinder.” At the same time, Geri taught us about the limits of our own patience, charity, and tolerance. “We learned to appreciate all of the friends, social workers, psychiatrists, and special education teachers of the world who go the extra mile to help us when we reach our limits.”
For Joe, Geri taught us about our own behavior. “She personifies our ability to respond to a crisis, both positively and negatively.” Positively, we learned how fortunate we were to have the support of an extended family. It was “phenomenal,” said Joe, that Aunt Leola and Uncle Doc volunteered to take care of Geri indefinitely. Negatively, “we made her illness only worse with our constant bickering and blaming.” The more we blamed her or one another, the more paranoid she became that she was the cause of every family problem. “Our most difficult moments as a family had less to do with her illness than with our reactions to her illness.” Joe likened our behavior to that of witch doctors or the Catholic Inquisition. “We put so much focus on finding the cause and blaming people for being the cause—all based on mythology. With mental illness, there’s so much misunderstanding that it leaves so much room open for mythology and confusion.”
For Mary Jo, “Geri expanded our awareness of humankind and its infinite variations.” She taught us that not everyone can fit into a mold. Even more important, she taught us that everyone should
not
fit into a mold. We are not robots who are here to be dismembered and repaired so that we can function just like other robots. “We can’t all be Nazis,” Mary Jo quipped. She pinpointed something that makes Geri distinct from the rest of us and yet essential for the rest of us: Every word that comes out of her mouth, every facial expression, every gesture—whether it be of anger, joy, or boredom—is intensely pure, frank, and honest. “Even when she’s talking shit and making me mad, it still comes from a place of pureness.” Her wrath is intensely nasty. Her humor is intensely funny. Everything about Geri is intensely true. “She is what she is. She is the child in us. We have to have her.”
For me, Geri taught us many things that nobody else in school, church, or society could have taught us nearly as well. She taught us, in a way that is as undeniable as one of her bone-chilling screams, that there are many kinds of people in the world, that no set of rules can apply to everybody, and that one of the greatest things in life is to learn how to love those whom, at first, you can understand the least. I have often thought that maybe Geri became a kind of nun after all. Maybe her prayer at the age of 11 to become a nun, “just like Julie Andrews in the movie,” was answered soon thereafter in one of God’s mysterious ways that will forever elude our comprehension. Maybe God deemed her worthy of being a sacrificial lamb for the sake of the rest of us, so that we could learn some of the most important lessons about life right at home. And maybe her assigned ministry was much more ambitious still: to involve the entire extended family, to bring us all closer together across the country and beyond biological lines, and to connect us with others in our community and society whom we otherwise would have never met nor appreciated. I will never unravel the mystery of God’s ways, but I do know one thing that Geri taught us. Like nobody else could, Geri taught us how to love one another.
As ever, her timing was impeccable. She became the highest common denominator among us six kids in the immediate family, because the worst part of her illness occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those were the only years when we were all living at home and yet were each old enough to be directly involved in the family dramas. Geri became severely ill at the age of 13 in the middle of 1968. The oldest child, Stan, was turning 16 and still had a few years left to live at home. The youngest child, myself, was 6, barely beginning grade school and becoming cognizant enough to absorb what was happening. Because of the timing, Geri’s illness was the single greatest formative experience that we all shared in common.
The years 1968–1971 were the last years that we all lived together. We would soon go our separate ways in search of our separate places in the world. Our defining moments as individuals would not always come in chronological birth order from oldest to youngest, just as Geri, who was a middle child, had stolen the limelight from her elder siblings in the late 1960s. Among the five of us following in her shadow, we had plenty of lessons yet to learn, some of which we would still need to learn from one another. But no matter how far afield we would roam or how much we would clash with one another, we could never dodge the lessons that Geri had taught us.
She may have pulled us apart in the beginning, but she is a big part of what has kept us together in the end. She may have become the least capable among us of functioning in society independently, but she has become one of the most durable forces in keeping us united as one family, indivisible.
The story about Geri is the story about us all.
PART THREE: GOING SEPARATE WAYS
Stan and Genie continued to lead parallel lives but from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. The pattern unfolded during high school, throughout college, and beyond.
Stan couldn’t believe the difference when he transferred from the Catholic high school to the public high school in the fall of 1968. At Bishop Montgomery High School, his biology teacher was a coach who taught biology on the side. At Redondo Union High School, the biology, physiology, chemistry, analytical geometry, and calculus teachers were “unbelievably gifted,” he recalled. At Bishop, the English teacher was an immigrant who spoke English as a second language. At Redondo, the English teacher had a doctorate degree in English. At Bishop, there was no such thing as a band. At Redondo, Stan played piano for both the orchestra and the jazz band. With its mandatory driver education course, Redondo even put Stan behind the wheel of a real car for free!
He sped far away from any suicidal thoughts. However, he was already a casualty of the Vietnam War. The unrelenting prospect of going there continued to haunt him.
During school assemblies, he joined in prayers, benedictions, and moments of silence for the seniors going to war. “When in the hell is this war gonna end?” he and his classmates at Redondo kept asking one another, shaking their heads in aggravation.
But he also knew that he now had a decent chance of getting into college. Even if the lottery number for his birthday were low, Vietnam would not necessarily be in his future, thanks to his new school.
As a child, Stan had established two goals of survival for himself. One was to avoid the Vietnam War. The other was to safeguard the financial security of the family. Once he switched to a high school that he felt could lead him to a student deferment from the Vietnam War, he seized the opportunity, devoting his undivided attention to his other top goal. He would aim for college so that he could strive for dental school so that he could earn enough money to shield the family from the insecurity that he had experienced as a child. The weight of this burden would bear upon every aspect of his being for the rest of his formative years: his social life, his educational trajectory, his political outlook, and his spiritual orientation. For Stan, the pursuit of financial success would push aside the pursuit of happiness, a luxury that he felt he could not afford. If there was any Kennedy whom Stan sought to emulate at this point in his life, it was the patriarch himself, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the one who had amassed the family fortune in the first place for the benefit of everyone else to follow. In this respect, Stan’s pursuit of material wealth could be seen as a form of selflessness. He subordinated his happiness so that others could pursue theirs. That was the lesson that he had learned from his father.
Stan couldn’t be bothered with friends in high school, what with all the late nights of studying in the fallout shelter with pounds of Aunt Elsie’s homemade black walnut fudge shipped from Mason City just to keep him motivated. His closest companions at school were the other college-bound kids who took the same tough classes. “It was a goals clique, not a social clique,” he remembered. It was a source of pride for Stan that he and his classmates “rose above” the social life of high school. Of the 400 seniors in his graduating class of 1970, he and his closest companions were the aberrant 19 who were recognized at graduation as life members of the California Scholarship Federation. They went to different colleges and probably never saw each other again.
Stan followed in his father’s footsteps by enrolling at Loyola University of Los Angeles in the fall of 1970. Stan had wanted to attend Loyola ever since the seventh grade, when Dad showed him the campus. The appeal of the school only grew for Stan over the years, both because it was a small school where he could spend lots of time with the professors, especially in the science classes he needed to take for dental school, and because he could be surrounded by students with moral and religious values similar to those of his own. “It was all set for me,” said Stan. “I applied nowhere else.”
The school met his expectations, mostly. The professors were readily accessible. They practically held his hand through physics, chemistry, physical chemistry, organic chemistry, and endocrinology. But the anti-war teach-ins and demonstrations hit their peak at the school during his freshman and sophomore years. Inside the classrooms, students argued about the war. Outside the classrooms, students protested against the war. The alumni association demanded that the university curb the distribution of the 1971 school yearbook because of its portrayals of campus unrest. Stan identified more with the disgusted alumni than with his disgruntled peers.
Stan didn’t support the war, of course. But he thought the most compelling political argument against it came not from the communist sympathizers in his midst but from the capitalist critique of our next-door neighbor Pat Jersin. “This country could send a man to the moon and carry on a war at the same time,” she expounded. “With all the money we’re spending, we could buy each Vietnamese family a Chris Craft yacht, a Cadillac, and a split-level home. We could make them all capitalists and save a lot of lives. It’d be a lot easier. It’d be better to just buy them off!” Stan couldn’t agree more.
He avoided the anti-war rallies and focused only on the classes that he saw as a means to an end: dental school. “I forced myself to enjoy those classes,” he recollected. He sloughed off the other classes that were required for graduation. Philosophy. Logic. Sociology. “Those were just baggage.” He took the easiest baggage courses to bring up his grade point average. And then he ran back to the lab. To fulfill his foreign language requirement, he took Latin, because Latin would help him ace the medical vocabulary on the Dental Achievement Test. He knew what he wanted out of college. It was the A. The aced test. The dental school admission. Nothing else mattered.
Except for Cathie. She was the most influential person for him in college. They started dating in their freshman year and became partners in chemistry lab. “She was more intelligent,” he insisted. But because she wanted to pursue either library sciences or occupational therapy rather than medical or dental school, she was not a competitor for the grade. Perfect for Stan, she was an encourager who kept him focused and on track. He introduced her to the family as “the smartest girl in the class.”
Cathie had been raised in Hong Kong by a Catholic mother and a Buddhist father. The fact that Cathie was Chinese didn’t faze Mom and Dad. What mattered to them was that she was Catholic.
Stan felt the same way, if only for pragmatic reasons. “Marriage is difficult enough anyway, even when the spouses share the same religion.” He also believed that it would be too difficult for kids to have to choose between two different religions. “If I’d been raised Jewish,” he explained, “I’d look for someone Jewish.” He simply wasn’t looking to complicate matters by getting involved with anyone who wasn’t Catholic. “The thought never crossed my mind.”
Stan had only two nagging questions about his religion while attending Loyola. One had to do with the morality of money. It greatly relieved and impressed him that some of the Jesuits had refused to take the vow of poverty. It put his mind at ease to know that money had its place in the Jesuit moral universe. The trickier question had to do with birth control. Stan seriously doubted the wisdom of the Catholic ban on birth control. But once again, the Jesuits put his mind at ease.