Genie called her friend Denise and asked her to sneak into her bedroom and get her passport and send it to New York. And ten days later, and against her parents’ wishes (they wanted her to come home and start school), Genie, aided and abetted by my parents—GOD BLESS THEM!—got on the SS
Leonardo da Vinci
of the Italia Line. We sailed out of New York after my show’s opening and headed back to Europe.
During the seven-day voyage, Genie discovered that her period was late. So actually I must have gotten her pregnant before she left Europe, about a month before, and she went home, then came back to me unknowingly carrying our child.
A day later, I told Mom and she told Dad. He was furious, but only for a day. Years later, Mom said she had told Dad “It could have been me!” then added, “And
that
shut Fran up, because
he
hadn’t waited either!”
When we disembarked at Genoa, we found that there was an Italian train workers’ strike. Mom decided that given “the situation”—as she summed up Genie’s pregnancy, Dad’s grim Mood, and the lack of transport—we needed an impromptu
vacation to “use this time.” Mom booked us all into the Hotel Nazionale in Portofino. (Portofino is an hour’s bus ride from Genoa.)
Dad relaxed. Mom prayed. And Genie and I took a long walk down the familiar path to Paraggi.
I showed Genie my old childhood haunts, the spectacular cove, the turquoise water, the beach where my happiest childhood memories are locked. And on the walk back to Portofino, we stopped to sit on a sun-warmed wall overlooking the bay.
I asked Genie—for the hundredth time—to marry me. She said yes.
That morning, Mom took off her mother’s engagement ring and gave it to me, the one my grandfather Seville had given his future wife when they were missionaries in China. I had told my mother that I intended to ask Genie to marry me that day. Genie slipped on the ring.
I don’t know if Genie said yes because she was pregnant or because she loved me. My mind was blank, as if the circuits had overloaded. What I felt was apprehension. Genie cried for a moment. I stared at the bay and the anchored yachts. We held each other for a long time and said nothing.
Three days later Genie called her parents from Switzerland, and they said that she certainly didn’t have to marry me but could come home and have the baby and have it adopted, or keep it, either way getting on with her life. But Genie told them she loved me.
Genie still loves me, even though she knows me now. And thirty-seven years later, we have no idea what those children had in mind or who they were. And when Genie takes a trip alone, say to visit her mom, or the time she went with my mother to China for five weeks, to take Mom back to where
she was born, my life stops. When Genie comes home, life starts again. I cook for Genie. We drink wine every day at five. And standing in the kitchen together is the best part of any day. And it is hard to believe that someday one of us will die and leave the other alone.
39
I
hover over mother and child. Genie’s eyes are exhausted, dazed. Genie’s face is puffy. My neck is scarlet, chafed from wearing the surgical mask too tight. I’m afraid to ask the Swiss nurse how to adjust it. I see her looks, know the nurses and doctors think I’m just a child, pathetic, stupid, only “the boy that got this poor girl pregnant.”
Jessica stayed in the hospital in Vevey, Switzerland, for a month after she was born. She wasn’t gaining weight. The Swiss wanted to add something to her milk, thicken it, keep her sitting up while the sphincter of her esophagus finished forming, or something like that. It did, and she came home. But those first days were all about worry, sadness she wasn’t with us, a young couple at the mercy of doctors who didn’t take them seriously.
Genie pumped milk. So much for glamour and teen sex! We carried the little refrigerated bottles to the hospital each day, taking the bus to Aigle, then the train to Vevey. Some days, we stayed down in the valley at my parents’ hideaway apartment. (They had recently rented it, to get away from L’Abri once in a while.)
The universe bent, then changed form as everything centered on that child eating, gaining weight, what a doctor said, if another doctor said something else, if Jessica would be home soon. No one said she would die. They all said she would be
fine sooner or later, maybe with surgery, maybe without it. But from that moment at age eighteen, I learned that this force, this love, was going to override every other emotion, every other fact. In that moment, I had the first taste of days and nights thirty-two years later when another child, my son John, would be in Afghanistan, a young Marine on back-to-back combat tours in a war that started on 9/11, but never seemed to end.
With Jessica not keeping her food down, I learned the prayer that has no words, the one I’d be praying forever after I became a father, whatever I called myself, or converted to, or abandoned, when the feeling of dread
is
prayer—prayer and longing for what I could never give a child in danger, or myself: the guarantee of joy.
When Genie and I had gotten back to L’Abri (and the gossip spread about the fact that she was pregnant), several of the more Calvinistic, pietistic workers told Dad that they thought he should denounce Genie’s and my sin. They wanted him to state publicly that what we had done was wrong and that we repented and were getting married, but that Dad (and L’Abri) in no way condoned such behavior. They thought that as a pastor and L’Abri’s leader, Dad had to “make an example.”
Dad threw a fit. From then on, it was as if Dad was Genie’s and my second in a fight. He was in our “corner” and ready to literally tear off the head of anyone who so much as looked at us funny.
When Dad preached at our wedding (in the medieval Ollon church where my sisters also got married), he delivered his normal wedding sermon with no mention that Genie and I were so very young or that she was pregnant. The church was packed with everyone from L’Abri, as well as many of the villagers from Huémoz who I had known all my life.
My heart leapt when I saw Genie coming down the aisle. She had a crown of daisies in her hair and was wearing the simple white eyelet cotton dress I had designed for her and that Mom sewed. But other than that momentary spark of joy, I was out of it.
I spent our wedding feeling overwhelmed, cold, nervous, numb. I don’t know how Genie felt. All she says is that it was “a blur.”
Jane Stuart Smith sang “Ruth” at our wedding. I insisted that wine be served at the reception. And as Priscilla toasted us with a glass of good Swiss white Aigle, in a quiet and rueful aside she whispered that wine would never have been served in her day.
There was fog blanketing the mountains across from where we held the reception above Montreux. It matched my mood: everything-is-happening-too-fast. This mood of confusion continued through our honeymoon in Venice. That was where Genie’s morning sickness really kicked in.
Living in a community with two sisters on the same mountainside, a father and mother upstairs, and (mostly) friendly L’Abri workers around us was a perfect place to be a young foolish couple in. Everything that had previously driven me crazy about community life became the lifeline that was the difference between Genie and me surviving as a young penniless, immature couple and splitting apart.
We lived on the bottom floor of Chalet Les Mélèzes. The year before I met Genie, I had commandeered the living room as my studio; now Genie and I were given the whole floor as our rent-free apartment. One end of the living room remained my studio, the other end was our bedroom. My mother’s old office down the hall became Jessica’s room. We had a little kitchen across from our studio bedroom.
I was painting; and since there was no other way for me to earn a living, Genie and I became L’Abri workers for a few months. Our “job” was to serve some students a meal several times a week in our apartment. During those meals, we, like the other workers, were supposed to have a discussion that consisted of students asking questions and of me holding forth, honing my bullshit skills and trying to articulate all those things I’d grown up hearing my parents hold forth on. It was pretty silly. The students must have been biting their tongues. I was insecure and loud; and being sent to my table for dinner, when a student could have been with Dad, Udo, or John, must have been like winning a milk-shake while the guy next to you won the lottery.
Genie and I spent lots of time with my sisters. Debby and Priscilla were incredibly kind. Each week, we’d go to dinner with Debby and Udo on the evening when they read out loud to their students from all sorts of wonderful books like John Updike’s
Turkey Feathers.
We would bring Jessica, and she slept upstairs while we sat downstairs with Debby in the kitchen, as she prepared the meal for twenty or thirty students. After dinner, Debby and Udo would wait for the students to drift off, then sit with Genie and me and talk for hours.
We also hung around Priscilla and John’s chalet. No matter how many times we’d show up, Priscilla would welcome us. We’d sit in her kitchen and drink tea. And as the shadows grew long over the mountains, Priscilla would inevitably ask us if we wanted to stay for dinner. We always did.
Debby and Udo, and Priscilla and John exuded a sunny pro-marriage-in-spite-of-everything optimism that was infectious. They were rooting for us, and at the same time treating us as grownups, on a good path where the expectation was that we’d succeed.
My daughter got the benefit of being raised where her aunts could keep an eye on her. They also helped and advised Genie and me. They encouraged Genie in her new-mother role, answered my questions about married life, helped us heal wounds after our many tempestuous fights, and told us that they had “been through all this, too.”
My mother turned out to be the kindest and best mother-in-law. She never interfered, only came downstairs to our apartment when Genie asked her to, took Jessica any time Genie asked her to watch the baby, provided endless gifts for us. And any time we didn’t feel like cooking, we could go upstairs at mealtimes, help ourselves, and take the food back down to our apartment.
With my mother and dad upstairs and my sisters down the road, not to mention health insurance from L’Abri, our “worker’s” hundred-franc-a-month stipend, and a rent-free apartment, Genie and I were living in our own little paradise. It was like a miniature Scandinavian socialist state, with layers of safety net providing a sense of balmy security.
Genie’s parents also began to help. They sent a monthly check for several hundred dollars. And when we went to visit Susan and Ranald in England, we got a lovely welcome. However harsh Ranald had seemed when I ran away from school, he made sure I knew that he was completely on our side now. Susan and Ranald were also very encouraging of my painting. They purchased some work and were enthusiastic about the work itself.
If every couple received such love and care, the world would be filled with a lot more happy young families. In that sense, my parents’ idea that Christianity, or at least their version of it, could be proved is true. When it counted most, my parents stepped up for Genie, Jessica, and me. Mercy, grace, generosity, love, unconditional support were given us “pressed down and running over.”
Nevertheless, I was an immature asshole. I’d nitpick Genie and then we’d argue. We fought in our galley-sized kitchen in the Chalet Les Mélèzes basement. I took a swing at Genie, she saw it coming and picked up a magnum of red wine to deck me with. I grabbed a soup ladle. Ladle and bottle crashed over our heads, drenching us in red wine and splinters of glass. We slipped on the wine and slammed, clawing and screaming, onto the slippery floor.
I was violent in other ways, too. Jessica intruded immediately into our lives, arrived when we were so young, almost literally crashed our honeymoon. While she was growing up, I pulled her hair sometimes and slapped her, not every day, not every week, not every month, but enough times so that when I see a parent lose control with a child, I want to tell them not to do anything that, years later, they will feel sick about, so
very
sick.
I lavished Jessica with love, too. I got up in the night with her, held to my shoulder for hours, her cheek plastered to mine, almost drunk with glee at the fact that I had this daughter, this child, something real that did not depend on anyone’s ideas about me, just was.
Sometimes it was hell, a hell of my making. In thirty-seven years, Genie has never started a fight. But she has certainly won most of them. And our children always know whose side they are on. “Mom is right!” has been the family motto. I’m glad.
In any place but our tight-knit community, we would have divorced fifty times over. But within L’Abri, divorce was not an option. The only option was to talk to Mom, Dad, Debby, Priscilla, and a few of our friends among the other L’Abri couples, to hear how they had survived their worst fights, to repent, learn, and move on.
I remember some good advice I got from gospel singer
Gloria Gaither, of the Bill and Gloria Gaither Gospel Trio. “We didn’t have good sex for the first ten years of our marriage. You have to work at it,” said Gloria.
I have no idea why she told me this. We were standing in her kitchen in Texas or Indianapolis, wherever, somewhere in the vast nondescript middle, while I was touring with Dad several years after Genie and I got married. Gloria was advising me after we got talking and I told her how bad some days were, what a lousy father I was, how much I loved Genie, but how things didn’t seem so good a lot of the time. And that was what she blurted out.
Gloria was smart. The idea of working at a marriage was something that, for some reason, stuck after what she told me, although of course I’d heard the marriage-is-work advice many times before.
Stan and Betty Walsh, Genie’s parents, had asked us if we would rather that they come to the wedding, or for a longer visit later. We chose the longer visit. I was immensely relieved to not have to meet them right away!