Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (28 page)

It was a great night for Stan. He played the music for the songs from eight American musicals:
The Music Man
, which had originally been set in Mason City, Iowa;
My Fair Lady
;
Hello, Dolly
;
Annie, Get Your Gun
;
West Side Story
;
Miss Liberty
;
South Pacific
; and the finale,
The Sound of Music
. The boy who’d been born on the Fourth of July loved every measure of it. He directed the little band and orchestrated the show. He was the only performer who performed throughout the evening.

At the end of the show, the principal introduced the cast and crew for the curtain call. She saved the band for last and saved Stan for the very last. His classmates, their parents, the families, the teachers, and everybody congregated in the auditorium gave Stan the loudest ovation of the night. He had never been the star student or the star athlete, but that night he was the undisputed star of the show.

He was only 13, but everything came together for Stan that night. The rewards of a job well done. The joys of playing the piano. The songs of America. The power of his faith. The presence and pride of his family. The roaring adulation from almost everyone he had known in his entire life. It was the way life was supposed to be.

He would cling to that memory. He kept the program from the musical revue, called “Stagestruck,” with his report cards and other important papers. The program was a single sheet of paper with a list of songs that was crudely typed and mimeographed and only faintly visible. His name didn’t appear anywhere on the program. But it was one of the most meaningful pieces of paper he had ever earned.

One of the most meaningful experiences for all of us kids during those years was knowing that there weren’t just six of us in the family. There were ten of us, because the Godges kids and the Jersin kids grew up side-by-side. The back doors of our two homes became the opposite ends of one big common playground. The Godges house had the basketball hoop and the manicured lawn for volleyball or croquet. The Jersin house had the corner lot with sloping yards on three sides and a bunch of overgrown trees that made for terrific games of hide-and-seek. The Godges house had the cavernous fallout shelter, where the kids played church and where Stan, the oldest male, presided as the priest and passed out Communion butterscotches. The basement of the Jersin house had its own secret crawl space, which the kids christened their “clubhouse” and where no one else was allowed.

And we all shared the fruits of each other’s back yards. There was way more fresh fruit than our two families could ever consume before the rotting surplus fell off the trees and oozed back into the earth. All that fresh fruit had to be shared in the moment with one another and with other neighbors, friends, relatives, and coworkers. Peaches, apricots, tangelos, and figs from the Godgeses. White nectarines and two varieties of plums from the Jersins. The Godges trees were pruned severely in accordance with Civilian Conservation Corps guidelines. The apricots grew to the size of baseballs. The Jersin trees grew wild, with limbs and fruit falling everywhere. The loaded nectarine tree bent its brimming limbs down to our windows and offered its treats at eye level. The leftover, fallen nectarines were so plentiful that their fermenting residue cast a sweet, inebriating odor over the two yards for weeks at a time each summer. It was Mother Nature’s way of reaffirming Mom’s own instincts to abundantly love and feed an extended family.

The fruits had replaced the vegetables, but otherwise the California enclave resembled the one in Iowa. By the mid-1960s, Aunt Elsie had become the caretaker of Grandpa Serafino and Grandma Maria Di Gregorio at their big farmhouse in Mason City. Aunt Leola, who had once saved the farmhouse, lived next door. Grandpa and Grandma had granted her a corner of their lot so that she could build a home and raise a family right there. A third sister, Aunt Bessie, was raising her own family five blocks away.

In Mason City, the extended family had huddled closely together. In Redondo Beach, the Godgeses and the Jersins had created another kind of extended family and huddled closely together. Instead of a blood family, the Jersins became our godfamily.

In these ways, Mom had never completely left her hometown. Like her mother, who had stuffed her luggage in Farindola with pepper seeds destined for America, Mom had clung to what she loved about Iowa and transplanted the seeds in California.

For Mom, the whole point of clustering the extended family so closely together, whether amidst the deprivation of the Midwestern Depression or amidst the splendor of the California dream, sounded deceptively simple. “Let’s enjoy the time we have together,” she often told us.

But she meant more than having a good time. She came to a fuller articulation of the sentiment herself while talking with the other moms at Saint Lawrence.

Once a week, the moms volunteered at school to serve the kids hot dogs, chili dogs, and cupcakes for lunch instead of the typical sack lunches of bologna or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Lots of the other moms had bunches of kids just like Mom. Their common faith gave them a distinctive perspective on their roles as mothers, and the hot dog days gave them a regular opportunity to share that perspective with one another.

“
These kids don’t belong to us,” the moms told one another in a spate of unusual maternal surrender. “They’re just loaned to us from God. They belong to God. Let’s enjoy them while we have them.” The moms nodded their heads while stirring the chili.

The theological perspective carried some practical implications, Mom recalled. “We used to tell each other that ordinary household chores, like washing dishes or mopping floors, were God’s work, because they were done for God’s children.”

The moms inspired one another to resist the temptation to plan their kids’ entire lives. “These kids are on loan for only a short while and then have to be set free to follow their own paths toward God,” said one mom.

“
There’s only one thing left to do with them in the meantime,” cued another.

“
Enjoy them while we have them!” the group responded in unison.

Mom had sensed the truth of those words before. But she had never heard the truth
put
into those words until conversing with the Saint Lawrence community of moms.

Grandpa Di Gregorio died of cirrhosis of the liver on December 4, 1966. He was 80. His death was expected. His doctor had warned him to drink just one glass of beer a day. The trouble was the size of the glass. It was a pitcher.

At the ripe old age of 80, Grandpa felt that he could drink as much as he wanted. He’d worked hard. He’d lived a good life. He figured he’d lived long enough.

Mom didn’t make it to the funeral. She had six kids to care for at home. Dad’s Aunt Emily was no longer in California, having returned to Michigan just a few weeks before when one of her own sons died.

Mom cried for days on the phone with her brother and sisters. They kept reminding each other how happy Grandpa had made them, even during difficult times. “Remember what he always used to say,” they imitated his broken English: “Some-a day, we will all have a bigga party upastairs!” They laughed through their tears.

Mom told herself she wasn’t needed in Iowa. Mafalda, Leola, Bessie, and Elsie were there. But Mom’s grief overwhelmed her in California. She became so paralyzed by a heavy heart that it immobilized her back, which she couldn’t lift out of bed. Dad called in sick for her. Little by little over the next several days, she peeled herself from the mattress and forced herself to return to work.

TRW laid her off a few months later, and she was relieved. She had earned enough money to help Dad through a rough time, but she felt that her absence had been hard on the family. “I was needed at home full-time once again,” she recollected.

She rearranged the bedrooms. She moved Stan into the in-law suite so that he could have his own room for high school. She moved me out of Mary Jo’s room upstairs and into a bunk bed with Joe downstairs. All the girls upstairs. All the boys downstairs.

Mom continued to mourn the loss of her father, but she kept replaying the words of the other moms in her mind. More than ever, she knew that there was only one thing left to do: Enjoy her kids while she had them. The lesson that her father had taught her by his actions was the same lesson that the other moms had taught her by their words.

For Dad, the tight network of Catholicism that he and Mom had stitched together—the godfamily next door, the consecrated chili at the school up the street, the holy extended family stretching across the country to Mason City and Grand Rapids—meant something much different than simply enjoying our time together. For Dad, the purpose behind it all was far more missionary: to continue waging the eternal battle between right and wrong.

Growing up in Poland, he had learned that it was his duty as a responsible father to provide us with everything that was right in the world and to shield us from everything that was wrong. For that reason, he built us a sanctuary in which to reside, he sacrificed his own professional advancement so that we would never have to leave the sanctuary, and he made sure that we grew up spending much of our time as a family with other large Catholic families: Ralph and Mary Di Gregorio and their four kids, Bill and Jo McCarthy and their six kids, Ray and Pat Jersin and their four kids. All good, practicing Catholic families. The three sets of parents became our godmothers and godfathers. Dad was doing everything he could to surround us with everything that was right and good.

The danger for Dad was that the battleground brooked no room for middle ground. There was Catholic and non-Catholic. Right and wrong. In the lingo of the era to come, nothing could just be. But nothing would corrupt the sanctity of Dad’s domain like his own children.

7. Riots

Things began to go terribly wrong. In the late 1960s, as the three oldest Godges children entered their teenage years, they began to send out unmistakable signals that they could no longer be shielded forever.

Stan was so horrified by the prospect of being drafted to fight in Vietnam that he turned intractably gloomy by the age of 14. He imagined the hell that Dad had gone through in World War II. He then imagined himself going through that same kind of hell.

Alone in the fallout shelter, Stan broke into an old footlocker filled with Dad’s World War II memorabilia. Stan pored over the contents, handling the bayonet with Guamanian mud still caked on the blade, inspecting Japanese maps of the imperial realm, and wading through a pile of gruesome photographs of combat and its aftermath. The photographs were mostly of charred bodies, parts of bodies, and stacks of bodies oozing into the muck of Pacific beaches. Stan viewed those images and envisioned his future.

By the time he entered high school in 1966, hundreds of thousands of American combat troops were in Vietnam, and it looked like they would be just the first to go. Anti-war “teach-ins” and demonstrations at local colleges began making the news. Stan knew he was heading straight for one combat zone or another. “It was either Vietnam or college, and I sure as hell didn’t want it to be Vietnam.”

Dad was no proponent of the war, either. “Don’t you ever go to war,” he told Stan. “I’ve done enough fighting for everyone in this family.”

In high school, Stan studied harder than ever. Every night before going to bed, he prayed that he wouldn’t be drafted. But in case he’d be drafted, he was shooting for a 2-S student deferment from military service with at least a B average.

He knew exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up, thanks to a chipped tooth. The dentist who fixed the tooth drove Stan home in his Porsche. “Whoa!” Stan checked out the control panels. “This is for me!” He saw that he could make lots of money by working with his hands, rather than being stuck behind a desk all day and crunching figures like Dad. But Stan doubted that he could make it into college.

He sequestered himself in the fallout shelter and converted the underground bunker into his own private study. He worked late into the nights. He came out for air just long enough to check the nightly body counts from Vietnam on the CBS “Evening News” with Walter Cronkite. Hours afterward, he conducted his nightly security check, making sure that every door in the house was locked before going to bed.

He established minimal contact with us younger kids who were rolled up in Mom’s afghans in front of the television. He scoffed at us for watching silly sitcoms like “I Love Lucy” or “The Beverly Hillbillies” and for having such a good time. “Sheesh!” he shook his head contemptuously. “You guys don’t realize how good you have it.” We fought over the television set, but he always managed to flip the dial to Walter Cronkite.

Stan struck a brooding figure on those nightly rounds. His dark green full-length bathrobe drooped lugubriously from his hunched shoulders, with the untied belt from the bathrobe dangling at his sides. The tops of his thin black socks sagged and twisted around his pale ankles, with the loosened toes of those dusty socks flopping an inch or two in front of his feet. His black-rimmed eyeglasses slid down the ridge of his nose and nearly fell off his face.

On weekends, he emerged from his foxhole to watch the old black-and-white World War II movies, mostly the ones about the invasions in the Pacific, and he thought about Dad. “In just a few years,” Stan pondered, “I’ll be as old as Dad was when he enlisted in the Marines.” In watching those old war movies, Stan was steeling himself for the jungles of Vietnam. He looked for hints or pointers. He knew he’d have to get his hands on an M-16 or some kind of automatic machine gun. He knew he’d have to be trained in hand-to-hand jujitsu.