Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (30 page)

Genie blamed the nuns, because they hadn’t helped Mom when she had asked them for help. “They took their militarism too far,” said Genie. “They couldn’t see that someone right in front of their noses needed special help.” Genie also blamed the nuns for spreading the rumors about Mom. Genie was convinced that the nuns were doing everything they could to avoid the problem and to make Mom feel it was all her fault. Genie felt it was all their fault.

Stan blamed Genie. Genie blamed the nuns. The nuns allegedly blamed Mom. And that was just the beginning. The blame game trickled all the way down to us youngest kids.

Nine-year-old Mary Jo teased Geri with a song from
Peter Pan
: “I won’t grow up, I don’t wanna go to school,” as if Geri were acting like a baby just for the fun of it.

At six years old, I could say very little among the bigger mouths in that household, but I silently blamed Geri for causing the whole family blame game. She probably knew what I was thinking, too.

We kids wanted Geri to hurry up and snap out of it. So we yelled at her: “Snap out of it!” We then blamed her for not snapping out of it.

Worst of all, Geri blamed herself. “I was so damned lazy,” she said in retrospect. “I didn’t
want
to listen in school. That’s what I thought at the time.”

Decades later, she thought much the same way. “I
was
to blame,” she insisted. “I still think that. Who else’re ya gonna blame? You can’t blame nobody but yourself.”

Unbeknownst to those around her, the 13-year-old Geri imposed a penance on herself that only exaggerated the symptoms. “I was punishing myself by not shampooing, showering, or shaving my legs,” she revealed later in life. “I chose not to do those things because of blaming myself. I didn’t feel good about myself because of what I didn’t do. Not doing good in school. Not playing the piano. I was really hard on myself. I really wanted to take care of myself, but I was punishing myself instead. My brain was functioning at that level, at least.”

But her logic eluded everyone at the time, even the family doctor, provoking many people around her to interpret her inexplicable behavior in the only ways they knew how. At home, her outbursts and disheveled appearance alarmed us; in reaction, we assuaged our mounting fears of the unknown by giving it familiar names.

It was the summer of 1968.

Nobody could converse calmly with Geri except for 11-year-old Joe. He rarely spoke, but he became the envoy to her inner world. He calmed her down by talking to her like she was an excited puppy.

“
It’s okay, it’s okay,” he nodded rapidly to her in the midst of one of her disturbances involving a paroxysm of distraught and angry utterances. “Do you wanna tell me what’s wrong? You can tell me, if you wanna.”

“
Well,” she hesitated, “I hear what they’re saying. I know what they want.”

“
Who?”

“
You know,” she blushed in mortification. “Those guys outside. What do
you
think they want?”

Joe learned that Geri was genuinely tormented by what the walls were saying to her and genuinely afraid that men were coming after her to rape her. After all, she knew what men and boys were thinking about. They wanted to have sex with her, even though she was only 13. It was all too terrifying.

She hit Joe a couple of times. He restrained her. It was no big deal for him, because he knew she was not malicious, just delirious. “It’s okay, Geri,” he backed away from her and put up his hands. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Talking with Joe made Geri relatively content. Afterward, she still heard voices and endured hallucinations, but she was more mellow with them.

As Geri entered the eighth grade in the fall of 1968, Mom still didn’t know what to do, but she did know where to go for advice about kids: the weekly gathering of the volunteer moms at Saint Lawrence. “She acts like the perfect little angel at school,” Mom confided in the other moms, “but it’s like she loses her mind once she gets home.”

“
You won’t get any help in a Catholic school, Ida,” one of the moms empathized while stirring the chili. “We just don’t have the psychiatrists.”

The other moms, forming a circle around Mom, nodded in somber agreement.

Mom ceased what she was doing and just exhaled, slumping her shoulders as the gravity of the situation suddenly weighed down upon her. Even her closest circle of friends at the one place where she felt safest could not help her in this case, other than to point out their limitations as a community and to steer her toward her own difficult path.

Another mom put her arm around Mom, who shed a tear and wiped her eyes beneath her glasses. “We’re only on loan to one another for a short time, Ida,” the other mom commiserated in the gentlest way she knew how. “Just like our kids.”

Mom glanced around the circle of other moms and sighed deeply. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” she fought back tears, as if she were closing a happy chapter of her life. She knew she wouldn’t completely sever her ties to her friends at Saint Lawrence, if only because her younger children would still attend school there, but she knew she would have to loosen those ties nonetheless. Her attention would need to be diverted elsewhere, because Geri would need to be diverted elsewhere. It wasn’t clear to Mom exactly what Geri needed, and the prospect of searching for it scared the hell out of Mom. On the most imminent front, she knew she was in for the fight of her life.

“
Joe, do you think we should send Geri to another school?” Mom delicately posed the question to Dad in their bedroom later that evening.

“
No!” he bristled at the idea. “What would ever make you suggest such a thing?”

“
Geri needs help,” Mom replied, “but the Catholic school can’t help.”

“
Sure, it can,” he selected his clothes for work the next day. “The nuns make her stay after school for detention. They’re doing everything they can to help her keep up.”

“
That’s not the kind of help she needs, Joe.”

“
What’s that supposed to mean?” he took offense at her insinuation.

“
Something’s wrong with her. It’s not just her grades. Can’t you see how strange she’s acting? My God, it’s like she’s crazy or something.”

Dad averted his eyes and clamped them shut, as if repulsed. “How can you say that about your own daughter? She’s a beautiful child.”

“
Now you sound like the nuns,” Mom threw up her hands.

“
And what’s wrong with that? Maybe they’ve got a point.”

Mom took a deep breath. “The same nuns who called me an alcoholic?”

Dad just looked at Mom, raising his eyebrows.

She gasped in shock. “You believe them, don’t you?”

“
Given the way you’ve been behaving lately, sometimes I have to wonder.”

“
You think I’m the one who needs help, don’t you?” she raised her voice in disbelief. “Not Geri!”

“
I know Geri is going through a rough time, but that’s natural for girls her age. I’m not about to take her out of her Catholic school because of it!” he huffed in irritation.

“
But they can’t do anything more for her,” Mom persisted.

“
And a public school would be any better,” Dad dismissed her with a slam of a dresser drawer. “What good could a public school do that Saint Lawrence couldn’t do?”

“
I don’t know,” Mom conceded, “but they have professionals who might know. They have psychiatrists right there on the school grounds.”

Everything Mom said made Dad angrier. “Who said she needs a psychiatrist?” his face turned red as his blood boiled. “She’s not crazy!”

Mom dropped her forehead into her palm. “I don’t know, Joe.”

“
I refuse to uproot her from her school,” his jaws tightened. “That would be the worst possible option.”

Mom did not sleep well that night. She had never felt so alone. Her stomach churned as she considered the possibility of acting on her own, because she hated acting on her own. Moreover, if she were to do so, he would condemn her for it no matter the outcome, she supposed. She was feeling equal parts anger and fear. But she also felt, for the very first time in her life, a deadening numbness. As she lay in bed next to her husband of almost 19 years, she felt the marital tie fraying as it had never frayed before.

Nobody knew any good options for dealing with Geri. However, everybody around Mom—friends, relatives, neighbors, and our family doctor—agreed that the Catholic school couldn’t give Geri what she needed. Everybody, that is, but Dad.

Six weeks into the fall semester, Mom decided that she had no choice but to take matters into her own hands. On Friday, October 18, 1968, she made a “Hail Mary” play without telling Dad. She walked into the office at Saint Lawrence school, removed Geri from the school, drove her across town, and enrolled her at Hillcrest Junior High School, the local public alternative that appeared to be the only feasible alternative.

Geri’s symptoms immediately worsened. She thought her new teacher wanted to hit her with his pointer. When sitting in class or walking around school, it struck her with the force of an angry mob that because she knew what the other kids were thinking while they knew what she was thinking, then they also knew exactly
what
she was thinking about what
they
were thinking. When she fully absorbed the notion that all of her private thoughts about everyone else’s private thoughts were known to everyone else—and that there was no place to hide her thoughts from anyone—it all became too overwhelmingly threatening.

“
I went completely out of my gourd!” said Geri in retrospect. “I went crazy for some reason, and I didn’t know why.”

Within her first couple of days at the public school, she met with its professional counselors and psychiatrists. But they had no idea what was going on inside her head, and they didn’t know what to do with her any better than the nuns did.

On her third day at the public school, she became extremely agitated, unable to relax. At home that Tuesday afternoon, she trembled visibly and babbled incoherently.

Mom called our family doctor and got through to him directly. “This is an emergency!” she cried over the phone. “She’s shaking like a leaf. What do we do now?”

Mom hung up the phone with the doctor and instantly called Pat Jersin next door. “Oh, God, Pat. Can you come with me?” her voice quavered.

Mom hung up the phone with Pat Jersin and immediately called Dad at work. “Pat Jersin and I are driving Geri to Harbor General Hospital to try to get her to relax!”

Dad left his piles of papers on his desk and rushed from his office to the hospital.

A hospital psychiatrist prescribed Thorazine, an antipsychotic drug used to treat agitation or aggressiveness in disturbed children. The psychiatrist told Geri to take 300 milligrams four times a day. He then said she was okay and could go home.

Five days later, around midday Sunday, Geri felt like she was choking to death. Her neck muscles constricted and went into spasms. The whites of her eyes rolled back. She made hacking noises and gasped one faint sentence: “I’m swallowing my tongue!”

Dad rushed her to the emergency room at L.A. County U.S.C. Medical Center.

“
Too much Thorazine,” said another psychiatrist. He injected Geri with Artane, a drug used to manage the spasms caused by drugs like Thorazine. In five minutes, her neck loosened up. The psychiatrist said Geri was back to normal and could go home.

Later that day, her normal symptoms indeed reappeared, leaving Mom at a complete loss. The nuns hadn’t been able to help Geri. The public school psychiatrists couldn’t help Geri. The hospital psychiatrists hadn’t helped Geri, except to turn her off and on with their fickle prescriptions. Meanwhile, Dad seemed to be holding Mom accountable for everything that was going wrong since the removal of Geri from Saint Lawrence.

Throughout the week, Mom had been speaking with our family doctor, desperate for his advice. She called him again the first thing Monday morning, October 28. Upon his recommendation and referral, she took matters into her own hands once again, but this time she would not act alone. This time she would marshal her forces. She called Pat Jersin and two of her other closest friends from Saint Lawrence. The four women made arrangements to drive Geri back to L.A. County U.S.C. Medical Center, where they intended to admit her, at the age of 13, into the adult psychiatric ward.

Our family doctor called Dad at work to break the news to him.

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Dad. He had switched jobs twice in the previous two years and felt insecure in his new position. He had escaped the salary cap at Rexall Drug & Chemical Company by answering a newspaper ad for a senior auditor at International Telephone & Telegraph. Then an old colleague had recruited him to build an internal auditing department at a new computer-engineering firm, called Scientific Data Systems, in Santa Monica. The firm gave Dad only a modest pay raise but also 400 shares of stock options. At the end of October 1968, he was just beginning to feel that his career might gain some traction once again.

He was on the factory floor during the most important auditing day of the year. He was trying to complete the annual inventory, which meant ensuring that $35-million-worth of parts, assemblies, and computers in the production departments, the stockrooms, and the shipping and receiving docks were accurately identified and accounted for. To do the job, he was supervising three other internal auditors and five senior accountants.