Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (29 page)

“
Don’t you ever go fight a war for this country!” Dad commanded Stan over the explosions on the television. “I’ve done enough of that for this family for generations!”

But Stan felt trapped in a dead-end school. He knew where he needed to go, but he felt that Bishop Montgomery High School wouldn’t take him there. He knew he needed good teachers who would take a personal interest in him, but he was not the least bit impressed with his teachers at the Catholic high school. According to Stan, many of them were “incompetents” who had failed to obtain their teaching credentials through standard channels; instead, he suspected, they were “exploiting” the private school as a backdoor way to gain enough experience for their teaching credentials so they could then flee in a hurry for better-paying jobs in the public schools. “The only thing Bishop would do for me,” he said years later, “was make damn sure I’d end up in Vietnam.”

As a sophomore, he heard stories about guys from the school kicking “gooks” out of helicopters. He went to study hall, and the seniors didn’t even bother to study. They knew they were doomed to Vietnam anyway. Some guys already knew the lottery numbers for their birthdays, and the numbers weren’t good. Stan saw no hope of an academic deferment in his future. “The school was not preparing me for college.”

He began to prepare for the inevitable. “There was a war every ten years,” he recalled. “That’s just the way it was.” The 1940s and World War II. The 1950s and Korea. And then the 1960s and Vietnam. His turn was up.

In religion class, he raised his hand and asked the priest a pointed question. “If you commit suicide, would you go to heaven or hell?”

“
You’d go to hell,” the priest answered.

“
Damn—I mean, darn!” Stan shot back. “There’s no easy way out!”

Stan saw his future getting only worse. He felt he had no choice but to stick around and suffer through it. He was 15 when the counselor from Bishop Montgomery High School called Mom in for a meeting in the spring of 1968 to deliver a dire warning: “It has come to our attention that your son has suicidal tendencies.”

Stan dreaded the evils of the outside world, but Genie looked to it for her salvation. Even as little kids, the brother and sister had begun to form their diametrically opposite perspectives on the world while watching the same wholesome family television comedies of the 1950s and 1960s:
Father Knows Best
,
The Donna Reed Show
,
My Three Sons
,
The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet
,
Leave It to Beaver
, and
Dennis the Menace
.

Stan and Genie both liked those shows—but for completely different reasons. For Stan, the shows represented everything he’d been given in life and wanted to retain: a solidly middle-class family with a working husband and a stay-at-home wife who was there for her husband first and her children second. That was the ideal. The outside world threatened that ideal. For Genie, the shows represented everything she had
not
been given in life and wanted to attain: a family that could be lighthearted. In watching those shows, Genie saw that there was another way of family living that was not centered around crucifixes, nuns, damnation, hell, guilt, Jew-hatred, and fear of the outside world. She saw that a family could focus on cheerier things. A family could accept the foibles of daily life and laugh about them. The television families never put a lot of stress on themselves. Some viewers may have derided those shows as sugar-coated portrayals of complacent American life, but for Genie, they were the rallying cries for revolution.

Genie and Geri shared the bedroom with the only window that looked directly out onto the rest of the world from the front of the house. In early 1967, a hippie drifted down Prospect Avenue right in front of their window. Genie, then 13, ran to look at the man, who had brown hair down to his shoulders, a bushy beard, and a haggard face. He wore baggy pants with wild red-and-yellow paisleys and a tattered blue-and-gray Pendleton shirt. He plodded along in his worn sneakers, drifting with a spacey gait. Every move looked like a philosophical statement, but he didn’t seem to know where he was going. “He looked like Jesus Christ with a hangover,” Genie remembered vividly. He captivated her. She hid in the corner of the window to sneak a good, long look at him. “Oh, my God,” she shivered in delight upon viewing the sight. “The revolution is here!” Curious as hell, she followed his path for as long as she could, worried that the revolution might end as soon as he shambled beyond view. He frightened her a bit, but she also wanted to know more about this whole other world outside her window. The free-and-easy hippie bore no physical resemblance whatsoever to the spic-and-span Beaver on television, but both the hippie and the Beaver symbolized the one thing she felt she didn’t have: freedom. The freedom to be who she wanted to be. The freedom of the great unwashed universe beyond. Both the hippie and the Beaver represented a way out.

Genie was in such a hurry to follow the cues from the outside world, though, that she believed all the bad things that the other seventh-graders started saying about her. For years, she had been the model student. But in the seventh grade, her academic excellence brought her little more than torment.

“
Hey, professor,” her classmates taunted her in the schoolyard. “What can you teach us today, professor?”

“
I don’t want to become a professor,” she defended herself. “I want to become a lawyer!”

The kids laughed in her face. Girls weren’t supposed to be lawyers.

Genie learned that girls weren’t supposed to be smart at all. She’d always thought that the most important things were getting good grades, writing good essays, and winning saints bees, in which she identified more saints by their stories of righteousness than any of her classmates. But as far as the other seventh-graders were concerned, those things were suddenly less important than how she looked or if she knew how to dance to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Mamas and the Papas—and most definitely
not
to the songs from
The Sound of Music
.

Eager to follow the cues that bombarded her from the outside, Genie rebelled against all that she was on the inside, beginning with her own intelligence. For a class collage, she had begun to gather photos of spaceships, rockets, and the outer planets from
National Geographic
magazines. But noticing that the other girls were making fashion collages with photos from
Seventeen
magazines, she switched her project from space to fashion. “I figured those girls must’ve known something I didn’t know,” she rolled her eyes in embarrassment years later.

Genie then rebelled against Dad, Mom, and the nuns, because they represented a huge part of who she was. She argued with Dad and Mom about things that mattered most to 13-year-old girls: wearing nylons, buying skimpy dresses, and going to parties. She argued with the nuns about loftier subjects.

“
Why are there no altar girls? Why are there no women priests?” Genie interrogated the nuns during religion class. “The Baltimore Catechism has no good answers to these questions.”

Neither did the nuns.

Genie hated her seventh-grade homeroom teacher, an ancient nun who spoke in a scratchy voice, stood less than five feet tall, and liked to swing her rosary beads at her frisky adolescents. Genie was fed up with all the rules and regulations. At the end of the seventh grade in 1967, she lit up a cigarette in the middle of class and took a puff.

“
You!” the bead-swinging nun snapped at Genie. “To the principal’s office! Right now!”

The principal sent the carcinogenic Genie home.

By the eighth grade, Genie had been pegged by the nuns as a troublemaker. They couldn’t rein in her defiant thoughts and words. It was too late for them to kick her out of school in the middle of the year and to find a last-minute replacement for her 16 square feet of space. But she had tried their patience too many times. The nuns made sure that Genie, despite her stubbornly stellar grades and high test scores, was rejected from Bishop Montgomery High School on the grounds of bad conduct alone and would be consequently consigned to four years of purgatory in a public high school.

As far as Genie was concerned, it was one of the best things the nuns ever did for her. She felt that Redondo Union High School was far superior to Bishop Montgomery High School. The public high school had more of everything: music, theater, sports, arts, and sciences. Everything, that is, except for religion. All the better for Genie. Even Stan followed her to the public school in the fall of 1968 when he heard about all the advanced science courses he could take there but not at the Catholic school.

Neither Stan’s suicidal thoughts nor Genie’s rebellious actions were ever as disturbing as Geri’s emerging symptoms of mental illness. As a child, Geri had appeared to be the “normal” daughter. Unlike her troublesome big sister Genie, Geri had seemed to be the perfect little girl.

Geri was the pretty one. Genie was the ugly duckling.

Geri was the petite dancer. In ballet class, the instructor routinely asked Geri, at the age of seven, to display the complex movements to the other budding ballerinas. She twirled, pirouetted, and flitted across the floor with grace and flair, grinning from ear to ear. Genie had two left feet. At the age of eight, she could only gape at Geri in awe.

Geri had perfect pitch. Genie couldn’t carry a tune.

Geri loved purses, dresses, laces, frilly things, and kiddy cosmetics—and knew how to wear them. Genie hated those things and had no interest in wearing them.

Geri wasn’t academically extraordinary, but that didn’t matter, because she always made perfect grades in conduct, winning the class citizenship award four years in a row. None of her siblings ever won that award even once. And while the rest of them practiced their scales on the piano, Geri learned to play by ear. She was the artist, the singer, the dancer, the creative one, the fashionable one, the alluring one. Genie was not.

But at the age of 12, the initial symptoms began to appear. The stylish Geri started to have trouble dressing herself. She donned a parka in the middle of summer. The genteel Geri started to have trouble grooming herself. She stopped brushing her naturally curly hair. She smeared lipstick on her sweetly pointed chin and rubbed eye shadow on her rosy red cheeks. She squinted her eyes, sun or shade.

“
Wassamattayou, Geri?” Mom asked on numerous occasions.

The first time Geri noticed anything terribly wrong herself was at the end of October 1967, when she was in the seventh grade. She just tuned out in class and stopped listening. When the nun asked her to read aloud, she read aloud. But even though she could hear herself reading, she still wasn’t listening. Her seventh-grade report cards showed seven D’s and one F. “My brain went to sleep for a year,” she remembered.

She withdrew physically and socially. Her snowy bright face turned ashen. Her jet-black curls became dirty and unkempt. Her once-mirthful eyes sank into their sockets. The change occurred so suddenly and so dramatically that it almost appeared to be just a physical illness. But then her behavior became more baffling as well, as if she were retreating into her own world. She started wandering the house at night. She started talking to herself, saying odd things, and repeating herself. Or she talked to people who weren’t there. Or she responded to people who
were
there but who hadn’t said anything.

“
I knew what they were thinking,” she recalled with absolute certainty decades later. “I started reading people’s minds in the seventh grade. They knew what I was thinking about, and I knew what they were thinking about.” Most of the time, she said, her classmates were thinking about clothes and shoes.

Her symptoms worsened as she turned 13 in March 1968. She slept long past the morning alarm and into the afternoon. She became moody. Really moody. She occasionally punched herself or someone else for no apparent reason. She cursed people who weren’t there. She erupted in anger at the slightest provocation—or no provocation.

Mom had no idea why these things were happening. They were happening only at home and usually when Dad was at work. Dad had no idea what to make of the crazy stories Mom was telling him about the crazy things that were happening at home.

“
I need your help with Geri,” Mom confided in the nuns in the schoolyard. “Something’s wrong with her. She’s acting really strange, like she’s crazy.”

“
Geri is an angel who earns perfect grades in conduct year after year,” the nuns walked away from Mom, dismissing her. They knew their mission, and they stuck to it.

Rumors started to fly around the school that Mom, who rarely drank, was an alcoholic. “She must be a real drunkard,” a few lay teachers were overheard gossiping. “Otherwise, how could she say such appalling things about her very own daughter?”

In fairness to the nuns and lay teachers, mental illness was an object of intense stigma, deep shame, and widespread lack of understanding in the 1960s. Even the nuns became ensnared in the evil grip of the prevailing social attitudes. Nobody at the time could explain what was happening with Geri. But nearly everybody around her tried.

Stan blamed Genie, because “Genie always argued about everything.” Stan couldn’t understand what Genie was up to. Here Stan felt he was doing his darnedest to uphold the family honor and to keep everything intact and everyone together and safe despite the dark clouds collecting around him, and yet Genie seemed to him hell-bent on tearing everything down, ripping everything apart, and just breaking free. To him, she was forever finding fault with the family and its beliefs. No wonder Geri went nuts, Stan thought. All those endless arguments and questions from Genie about everything from skimpy dresses to altar girls only confused Geri, he figured. “Geri was delicate,” he empathized. “She wasn’t tough like Genie.” He felt it was a damn shame that Geri had to follow just a year behind her big sister Genie, Little Miss Academic Superiority.