Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (40 page)

The year in Korea was the beginning of the end of Stan’s military career. In Korea, he came too close to all-out war. According to Stan, the war had never ceased on the Korean peninsula despite the existence of a demilitarized zone. He saw too many gunfights during the day and heard too much gunfire at night. He reconstructed too many torn up mouths and faces. He knew of too many suicides of lonely, homesick soldiers.

The one thought that sustained him throughout the year in Korea was imagining everything much worse that Dad had endured in combat for nearly a year in the Pacific. “If Dad could do what he did,” Stan pushed himself, “then I could do this.”

The experience left Stan admiring Dad all the more. “There’s no way I could’ve done what my father did,” Stan pondered years later. “Coming to America with no mother. Having a difficult father. Going to war. Raising six children.” He sighed deeply. “I could never live the life that my father lived.”

Stan returned to northern California, remaining on active duty one more year to fulfill his obligation. When he left active duty in 1986, he and Cathie moved to the San Francisco area, where he joined the private practice of an old friend from dental school.

Yet Stan still clung to what he loved about the army. In fact, he remained in the army reserves and kept moving up the ranks, from captain to major to lieutenant colonel. One thing that he cherished was the ability to keep honing his skills in continuing education courses at army hospitals. He became so proficient in his field that in 1994, the Pierre Fauchard Academy, an international dental organization, named Stan among the top two percent of dentists in America.

In 1998, he left the army reserves after more than 20 years of service, but he still took courses with the army and the navy. He still saw old friends at the Post Exchange (the military general store). He still treasured the camaraderie. He still yearned, most of all, for the ability to perform ideal dentistry without having to worry about the money.

It was difficult for Stan to stay in the army, but it was difficult for him to leave. Except for the year when he came too close to war, the time he spent in the army gave him a profound sense of peace.

“
Once you’re in the military,” he declared fondly, “you’re always in the military.”

He never let go.

At the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, Genie blossomed into the most popular girl at Redondo Union High School. The ugly duckling of grade school had grown up to become the high school swan. Her off-white complexion, derided by her parents in her childhood years, became a thing of golden beauty among her tan-conscious teenage peers. So did her sunbleached long straight hair that stretched all the way down to the base of her spine with nary a natural curl.

Genie was the laid-back surfer girl who nonetheless had a brain, and just about everyone on campus loved her: the surfers, the rah-rahs, the low-riders, and the GDIs. The surfers were her regular crowd. She laid out at the beach, rubbed Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil with its coconut-scented emollients deep into her skin, and slowly basted herself from olive to tan to royal golden brown. She found her spot in the sun just south of the Topaz Street jetty in Redondo Beach where her boyfriend—the muscular blond star surfer of the high school, the King of the Beach—ripped the biggest waves.

Back at school, she mingled with the other social groups, too. The rah-rahs were the smart kids with school spirit who ran the student activities. Genie was smart enough to get along with them just fine. The low-riders were the Mexican kids who liked to ride their cars very low to the ground. Genie spoke their language to them in the advanced Spanish classes that they had taken for easy A’s. The GDIs were the “goddamn individualists.” They could tell that Genie had a mind of her own.

In her senior year, her classmates voted her homecoming queen in the fall and prom queen in the spring. The unprecedented feat of dual royal recognition earned her the nickname “Queenie Genie” and prompted the high school administrators to rig the system so that no future individual could attain such doubly exalted status ever again.

Genie had escaped to the outside world and thrived among its diversity of people. There was not a lot of racial or ethnic diversity in Redondo Beach during those years other than the Mexican kids, but there was a lot of religious and socio-economic diversity. Genie befriended Catholics, Protestants, Jews, agnostics, atheists, kids from poor immigrant families, and kids, like her boyfriend, from broken families. Several of the kids impressed her with their grit and perseverance through emotional and financial struggles far greater than her own. Most impressive of all, she remembered, was “the fact that there was very little snobbery at the school.” By and large, the kids knew they were all in it together: surfers, rah-rahs, low-riders, and GDIs.

The Vietnam War reminded them that they were all in it together, said Genie, because “we were all opposed to it together.” She and her friends bought anti-war bracelets on campus and wore them throughout the year. The bracelets resembled the I.D. bracelets that the kids had grown up wearing during the 1950s and 1960s: simple curved rectangles of silver that bore one’s inscribed name, address, and phone number and that clung to the wrist with a thin chain. The anti-war bracelets, known as P.O.W.-M.I.A. bracelets, bore the name of either a U.S. prisoner of war or a U.S. soldier missing in action. In buying the bracelet, each teenager identified with a certain soldier and made a small contribution toward possibly bringing him home. The kids wore black armbands to protest the war once every few months, but the bracelets were worn all year long.

Near the end of her senior year in 1972, Genie received acceptance letters from UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. A couple days later, an application to Loyola Marymount University, which Stan was attending at the time, mysteriously landed on her built-in desk. The formerly all-male Loyola University had virtually absorbed its sister school, the all-female Marymount College, and become a fully coeducational institution called Loyola Marymount University—just in time for Genie to enroll.

Genie glanced wryly at the unsolicited application.

Dad then appeared at her door and pulled her aside for a talk. He stated his terms. “I promise you, Genie, that I will pay the full costs of your undergraduate education, including room and board, if you attend a Jesuit university.” At a time when California public universities offered perhaps the best education at the lowest price in the history of the world, and at a time when the family finances were hardly flush, Dad leveled his unusual ultimatum: “If you do not attend a Jesuit university, then you’re on your own.”

That meant no money for tuition, books, food, housing, transportation, bikinis, tanning oil, toothpaste, jeans, movies, or record albums, except at a Jesuit school. Those were tough terms for an 18-year-old to refuse. The rest of us kids took careful notes.

Genie picked up the Loyola Marymount application. She filled it out in ten minutes. In long hand.

And got in.

“
I understood that I’d be attending Loyola Marymount because it was my father’s school and because he expected me to find a nice Catholic man there to marry,” she said.

As Dad dropped her off at the dorm, he left her with one final thought. “In educating you,” he told her, “I am educating not just you, but I am educating a family.”

She said nothing. She was five minutes from freedom. It didn’t matter what he said or expected of her. She was getting what she wanted. Freedom. For free.

She had one nagging doubt. There might yet be a cost. She had broken free of the Catholic culture of her grade school and had flourished in the ecumenical culture of her high school. She worried that she might revert back into a cocoon in college.

The first anti-war demonstration she joined on campus was not encouraging. She and her new friends, “the only five hippies on campus,” scoffed at the sorry excuse for a demonstration, which had been staged by someone in student government. “It’s totally timid and inauthentic,” Genie belittled the event. There were maybe a hundred people. “Big deal. Get real,” echoed one of her friends. The same campus protests that ashamed Stan because they were so powerful and provocative embarrassed Genie because they were so puny and pathetic. She yearned for the real thing at UCLA or UC Berkeley.

But she soon realized that Loyola Marymount University was a much roomier cocoon than Saint Lawrence Martyr Elementary School. As Stan retreated to the science labs, Genie explored the vast world of literature. As Stan homed in on his dental school target and competed for grades, Genie expanded her philosophical horizons with the encouragement of a cooperative literary community. As Stan avoided confrontations with the rigid Catholicism of his father, Genie found herself drawn to the fatherly figures of the university English department, who offered her a different way of understanding Catholicism—a “benevolent Catholicism,” she said—through the language of poetry.

She discovered that the world of God was more than black-and-white formulations of right and wrong that instilled obedience and fear. Rather, the world of God was a multihued creation of grandeur and magnificence that inspired awe and joy. The world of God “was not, in fact, a world of precepts and punishments,” she realized, but rather a world of love and beauty.

Her insight found its most exuberant expression in the poem, “Pied Beauty,” penned by the 19th-century Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins. He venerated the variegated, whimsical nature of life around him:

“
Poetry flourished amid turmoil and questions,” Genie recalled her college days, “especially the eternal questions. Is there a God? If so, how do we find God? What do we do in the meantime? How do we treat each other? Poetry never settled for black-and-white answers like the Baltimore Catechism.” Poetry always left her questioning, but she learned that the questioning was the highest form of living. Poetry taught her that the mind
should
question, that the mind was
made
to question, and that “the act of questioning was the purest and often the most rewarding kind of human activity.”

Poetry and literature gave Genie peace of mind in her search for meaning in the world. No matter how alone she ever felt in the search for answers to the eternal questions about God and humanity, she belonged to a community of literacy and literature that fostered the soul-searching of its members. The people in the university English department revealed to her a type of love that she had never experienced before.

Genie was so emotionally and spiritually buoyant that even confronting her own mortality became a marvelous experience. It occurred when she fell ill with hepatitis at the beginning of her junior year in the fall of 1974. She stopped attending classes and eventually moved home, occupying the quietest place in the house: the in-law suite.

Late one night, she rose from her bed to walk to the bathroom. She never made it. She fainted in the hallway. Nobody heard her collapse on the carpet. She remained there on the floor for two or three hours, unconscious. In the middle of the night, she awoke on the floor and crawled back into bed.

“
I must be really sick,” she thought to herself. “I must be so sick that I could die.” She didn’t have the extra energy to think of much else or even to be scared of dying. She just kept thinking to herself, “I might die.”

At that moment, the ghost or image of Grandma Di Gregorio appeared at the foot of Genie’s bed. Genie didn’t need to adjust her eyes. In the moonlight streaming through the two windows, Grandma looked just the way she had looked when Genie had last seen her in 1967. “Grandma was sitting there. I saw her profile. She was rubbing my feet. She was a big person. Her presence was just so profound.”

Genie didn’t know if the presence was a mirage or a hallucination, but she found it very comforting. “If I die,” she thought, “this is okay, because Grandma’s with me.” Genie drifted off to sleep. When she arose the next morning, she began to feel better.

“
I couldn’t say I know for sure that Grandma was there,” Genie recollected years later, “because I was really sick. It may have been just my imagination. But the most important thing was that it was so soothing at the moment. I was really happy that it happened at the time. I remember feeling, ‘Oh. I’m not alone.’”

Genie recuperated at home for several weeks and then returned to school. She resumed her dalliance with the variegated and whimsical things of life by making friends with a bunch of characters from the theater arts department. The thespians exposed her to a social realm vastly different from the one at the beach where she had reigned supreme. She had no theatrical skills, but this new social realm enchanted her. She liked her new friends who couldn’t surf if their lives depended on it but who could sing, dance, and act their way through college.