Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (56 page)

He met regularly with a psychiatrist, who diagnosed the condition as “severe anxiety and depression.” It was in October 1986 when Dad took to the razor blade, cutting his wrists just enough to convince Mom to commit him to a mental hospital.

To everyone’s relief, the nine shock treatments he received at the hospital took him from being utterly delusional and depressive to being utterly lucid and blissful. He experienced a bit of short-term memory loss as a side effect, but even that appeared to be an added benefit, because he forgot about only the days right before the treatments when he had been in the deepest depths of his depression. Those were excellent days to forget. Within a week of his first treatment, he was joking, laughing, and charming the nurses.

“
Oh, those shock treatments were BYOO-tiful!” Mom heaved repeatedly. “They saved his life!” They also left him as witty and engaging as she had ever seen him.

But Joe knew that the effects of shock therapy wear off. He realized that the window of opportunity for a bold new strategy could slam shut at any moment.

He huddled with Mom and Genie. The three of them came up with an elaborate plan for Joe and Mom to pool their resources to buy a house together near Genie and David. Mom would secure Dad’s signature for a down payment to cover half the house, and Joe would pay off the mortgage for the other half. That way, Dad’s money would be locked up in the house, unavailable for insurance companies or other unworthy causes.

The plan offered the added comfort of a rich tapestry of benefits. Mom and Dad would never again have to pay rent or worry about a mortgage. Because Joe would own half the house, nothing could happen to it without his approval. As neighbors, Genie and David could check in on Mom and Dad when Joe traveled. Genie was pregnant with her first child, so Mom and Dad could watch their grandchild grow up. Everyone would live near the airport, which was ideal for Mom and Joe. Mom would drive five minutes to work at United Airlines. Joe would have a quick getaway for work, play, girlfriends, and intermittent retirements. It was a plan designed to mend an intricate family fabric.

Mom and Joe found the house they wanted and made an offer. Mom caught Dad in an unusually compliant mood between shock treatments and almost overplayed her eager hand. “If you don’t sign the papers for this house, I’m gonna divorce you!”

“
All right, Zhona,” Dad politely obliged from his hospital bed.

In early 1987, Joe moved with Mom and Dad from Redondo Beach to a street in Westchester called 75th Place. Genie and David lived a block away on 75th Street.

Both homes had been built in the 1940s around the time that Mom and Dad first met each other in Westchester two miles away outside the Jim Dandy Market. Back then, Mom was living nearby with her brother, sister, and best friend from Mason City, Iowa. In the late 1980s, Westchester was beginning to look like Mason City all over again.

Joe astounded everyone by following through with the whole scheme to buy a house with Mom and Dad. None of us ever would have predicted that when Joe completed his tour of duty, equipped with an elite degree in a lucrative field and pursued by women from across the country, he would move back to the Los Angeles area to live with Mom and Dad, let alone to commit himself to joint home ownership with them.

Here was Joe, the only one of us kids who’d been bold enough to strike out on his own at the age of 18. Here was Joe, who’d fanned the flames of condemnation from Dad by letting a golden opportunity for an annulment slip away. And yet here was Joe, at the age of 30, tethering himself physically and financially to Mom and Dad.

But Joe had no second thoughts about the matter. To him, living with Dad when he became ill in the late 1980s was like living with Geri when she became ill in the late 1960s. Back then, Joe had accepted Geri as she was and tried to calm her down so she wouldn’t hurt herself. Twenty years later, Joe accepted Dad as he was and tried to settle him and Mom down so they wouldn’t hurt each other. “I saw no good reason to become upset with someone who was mentally ill,” Joe looked back on the decades.

Besides, the family was thrown on defense. Joe was the only relief pitcher in the bullpen. As Dad fell ill, Stan was stationed in Korea and then in northern California. Genie was pregnant. Geri was living in a board-and-care home. Mary Jo was jamming with her angry bands in Long Beach. And I was bursting out of the closet with a holy vengeance in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Joe assessed the situation. “You couldn’t expect Stan and Genie to look after Mom and Dad, and it wouldn’t’ve been therapeutic for the other kids to get involved. But somebody had to be with Mom and Dad. They were dangerous living alone. Someone had to support Mom in managing the crisis scenarios.”

Superficially the most aloof of the children, Joe became the most attached. He threw himself back into the middle of the game to defend the team against a common foe. He held the team together, but he did so on his own terms. His finest plays, by and large, were on defense.

Peace reigned in little-Mason-City-by-the-sea for five years, from 1987 through 1992. Those were heady years for many people accustomed to perpetual conflict. It was a time when the Berlin Wall was falling, the Soviet Union was crumbling, the Cold War was ending, and the United States was emerging as the sole global superpower.

In the house on 75th Place, prosperity and confidence ruled the day. Joe traveled freely and always came home to a stocked refrigerator. Mom played with her friends at the best job she ever had. Dad preoccupied himself with worthwhile things like termites, water damage, and a new roof instead of things like insurance companies and suspicious gazes. He itemized the household expenditures and divided the bills into thirds.

“
Perfect occupational therapy,” Joe nodded to himself. Because the situation seemed stable, he didn’t flinch when Dad proposed a new financial arrangement in 1992.

Dad was 68 and had started to worry again about dying. “I don’t want my entire inheritance tied up in the house,” he told Joe. “I’m offering to sell my half of it to you.”

“
That sounds fine,” said Joe, “but only if you give me a lease agreement.” With a lease agreement, Dad could distribute his inheritance however he pleased, but he would still be financially and morally beholden to stay in the house with Mom and Joe.

Deal.

Joe took out a loan and bought the other half of the house.

Dad signed a ten-year lease. It had an escape clause that allowed him to cancel the lease after three years, but the clause required all three owners to agree to the escape.

Dad and Mom started paying Joe rent.

At about that time, love blossomed anew for Joe. He began dating a student in a physical therapy class that he was teaching in Torrance. Her name was Arlette. A former Swiss Olympic swimmer, she could run, bike, and ski as fast as he could, if not faster.

After several months of running, biking, and skiing together, Joe proposed to Arlette in early 1993, when he was 36 and she was 28. She said yes. Although she had also been raised Catholic, she was not a hardcore Catholic girl who demanded an annulment or a church wedding as a condition for marriage. Upon Joe’s request, she moved in with him, Mom, and Dad on 75th Place in anticipation of the wedding.

Dad remained silent about the living situation. He voiced no qualms about Joe and Arlette “living in sin” before marriage. At least they were engaged. The cohabitation would be sanctified soon enough. Maybe.

Dad knew there was a much bigger battle to wage than the skirmish against premarital sex, a bigger battle that had been brewing for ten years. The engagement of Joe and Arlette reignited the dispute over the never-resolved issue of the annulment.

“
I beseech you to resurrect the annulment proceedings once and for all,” Dad pleaded with Joe night after night, “so that you and Arlette can be married by a Catholic priest in the Catholic Church.”

Joe would have none of it. In the decade since the scatterbrained chaplain had lost the paperwork, Joe had lost his four original motivations for getting an annulment. It was no longer important for Joe to please Dad, because Dad’s disapproval no longer caused Joe any anguish. It was no longer important for Joe to put a painful chapter of his life behind him, because the chapter was already behind him. It was no longer important for Joe to remain available for a hardcore Catholic girl, because he probably would no longer be interested in that kind of girl, even if he hadn’t met Arlette. Most of all, it was no longer important for Joe to stay in good graces with the church, because he no longer viewed the church as a great organization to stay in good graces with.

“
I saw no point in trying to make myself part of an organization that I didn’t care to be a part of,” Joe recounted. He assessed the value of the organization by looking at its people, and he had little respect for the people either in the pulpits or in the pews. Sure, there were some standouts, like Father Ferraro. “But there were a lot more people like Dad in the church than people like Father Ferraro.”

Joe didn’t think the Catholic Church was any better or any worse than any other church. He didn’t believe that his spiritual values had changed, but neither did he believe that spending more time with people in church would elevate his spirit. He still believed himself to be a Christian, although “a very liberal one.” But he didn’t believe himself to be a Catholic, because he no longer felt that he was part of the Catholic community, which had demoted him to a second-class citizenship. “If I could find a healthy spiritual community, I might join it, but it doesn’t have to represent any particular denomination.”

His closest community had become his profession and its people. Physical therapy was his preferred method of touching and healing others. His well-trained hands earned him fame for their powers to detect misaligned joints and muscles, to manipulate the human anatomy, and to loosen layers of stiffened tissues. He lectured about his techniques from coast to coast.

The organization to which he became most devoted was the American Physical Therapy Association. He became a high priest in that church, donating his free time for national projects. He helped the group implement a national strategy to establish clinical residency programs in hospitals, private practices, outpatient clinics, orthopedic medical centers, and collegiate athletic departments. He trained the therapists in the programs to become “orthopedic clinical specialists,” which qualified them to train other therapists. In short, he trained therapists to train therapists. He was at the top of his game.

But for Dad, the game was still very much on the line. Joe was at bat in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, bases loaded, and a full count. Dad made one final pitch for an annulment. He wrote Joe a three-page letter as a “last, desperate effort” to stop him from “jumping off the spiritual cliff.” Dad cited the establishment by Jesus of the sacrament of Matrimony, the delegation by Jesus of the “one church” to Saint Peter, and thus the obligation to have a marriage sanctified by the one church.

In his letter, Dad expounded on the primacy of obedience over free will. He argued—just as he had learned from one of his earliest religious lessons as a boy in Poland—that free will had been given to people by God so that they could choose to be either obedient or disobedient to God’s will. Dad distinguished between God’s laws (of marriage) and man’s laws (of divorce), emphasizing the eternal rewards for obedience to God’s laws and the eternal punishment for disobedience to the same.

Dad gave his pitch a financial spin: If Joe and Arlette refused to have their marriage blessed by a Catholic priest in a Catholic Church, then Dad and Mom would refuse to renew their lease when the option came due in 1995 and would request to move out. On the other hand, if Joe and Arlette did have their marriage so blessed, then Dad and Mom would abide by the lease, remain in the house, and continue to pay rent.

Joe didn’t need the rent. Besides, the pitch looked like a curve ball to him. Once again, he checked his swing.

Game over.

Dad saw it as a strikeout. Joe saw it as a walk.

Only one thing was clear. There would be no annulment.

Joe released Dad and Mom from their lease early. They could leave at any time.

In February 1994, Dad and Mom moved to Leisure World, a retirement community in Seal Beach, about 30 miles south of Westchester. Mom took the move the hardest. She had never wanted to move, but she became caught between her husband and her son. She chose to go along with her husband, but it distressed her that he had forced her to make that choice. She had to move away not just from Joe and Arlette but also from Genie and David and, by that time, two grandsons: Jonathan and Daniel Killoran.

Worst of all, Mom had to move away from her job. She loved that job. She used to shoot out of the driveway like a torpedo on her way to work each day, yearning for the time with her friends at the gates, on the ramps, in the terminals, and in the Red Carpet Room. United Airlines named her “Employee of the Month” twice, granting her a prime parking spot with her name on it.

“
Please stay, Ida,” her bosses begged. “We’ll have to hire two people to replace you.”

But Seal Beach was too far down the congested San Diego Freeway for a 68-year-old woman to make the daily commute. When she moved to Seal Beach, she retired.

For Dad, moving out was not enough to convey his moral outrage. His scrupulous conscience forbade him from attending the wedding of Joe and Arlette in May 1994. “It hurts me when I see that Joe is scandalizing his faith,” Dad wrote to us. “I will not jump off the spiritual cliff with him.”