Read Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century Online
Authors: John Paul Godges
“
It’s Geri or me!” she threatened him one morning in late February 1995. “If you
dare
take her out of her board-and-care home, I’m moving back to Iowa!”
Dad walked away and said nothing, leaving Mom to await his next move.
A couple weeks later, when Geri turned 40 on March 13, Dad and Mom took her out to dinner. As soon as the entrées arrived, Dad proposed a bold toast: “To Geri. May all your future birthdays in an independent living lifestyle be even happier!”
As soon as Dad and Mom returned home that night, Mom moved out of the master bedroom. She started sleeping on the sofa bed alone.
Joe called Dad: “Geri should remain in an institution where she’s content.”
Geri told Dad she wasn’t content. “Men are trying to seduce me. People are stealing from me. What can you expect? They aren’t Catholic, you know.”
On May 20, Dad drove to the Villa Stanley board-and-care home in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles and started to load Geri’s things into his car. Mary Jo showed up from West Hollywood to try to stop him. “I’ll take care of her from now on,” Mary Jo insisted. “Let me do it.”
But there was no stopping him. He signed Geri out of the board-and-care home and drove her to Seal Beach, where he moved her into the guest room of a house about a mile from his place in Leisure World. He then made a promise to Geri’s new landlady: “I’ll cover whatever portion of the rent won’t be covered by her disability check.”
Mom flew to Iowa. “I could live up to my word, too,” she told us over the phone from Mason City. She would stay there with her two surviving sisters. Indefinitely.
One of the first things Mom did upon arriving in Mason City was one of the things she had done so many times before. She knelt, prayed, and listened for guidance at the gravesite of her parents, a site that had been freshly adorned with flowers by Aunt Elsie.
When Mom returned to Aunt Elsie’s home, the phone rang.
“
It’s him,” Aunt Elsie warned.
“
Hello,” Mom spoke into the receiver.
“
You left me with all the responsibilities of taking care of Geri!”
Back in Seal Beach, Dad settled Geri into her guest room. He took her out for meals. He bought her new clothes. He monitored her medications, medical appointments, finances, insurance forms, and disability benefits. At the age of 71, he single-handedly provided the structured environment of a board-and-care home.
In the months that followed, he sent form letters to family and friends, itemizing Geri’s “like miraculous” progress in several areas. He reported that she was eating better, exercising more, losing weight, practicing the piano, walking to the stores, filling her prescriptions, cashing her checks, and riding the bus. “She has more self-esteem and walks straighter,” he wrote. She “now understands that she has a God-given mind of her own and that she is responsible for the decisions that she makes.”
Dad and Geri attended Mass each weekday morning. Geri led the fourth decade of the rosary after every Mass. On Sundays, she sang along with the church choir.
“
Of all my six children,” Dad congratulated her over Sunday brunch, “you are the one who has the most properly formed conscience.”
In October 1995, five months after moving away, Mom moved back to Seal Beach to live with Dad. It had been their longest separation in 46 years.
Mom had found herself torn between two competing moral imperatives. On the one hand, the deepest core of her being compelled her to do whatever was in her power to keep the family together. She believed in divorce only under extreme circumstances. She believed that women who were pummeled by their husbands should leave their husbands. But in her case, divorce was not the answer. “If you married another man,” she used to say, “you’d marry the ‘same man’ again.” That would solve nothing.
On the other hand, she could not stand by and participate in what she believed to be the reckless and dangerous removal of Geri from her board-and-care home. Mom couldn’t break up the family for good by leaving Dad forever. But she couldn’t stay with him forever, either, at least not in the same subservient way.
Upon days of her return, she gave away the double bed in the master bedroom and replaced it with a single bed for Dad. He would sleep alone in the single bed. She would sleep alone in the other room.
“
You’ve got your bed. I’ve got mine,” she stated her terms to Dad. “We might be living under the same roof again, but don’t get any wise ideas. You made your choice. Things will never be the same again between us.”
Her bedroom became her place and her place alone, with her own brand new television and her own brand new treadmill. She put the treadmill next to her bed and in front of the television so she could blow off steam while watching Oprah Winfrey.
“
She is punishing me,” Dad groaned to Genie over the phone. “I don’t like my new bed at all. It’s very uncomfortable.”
“
If it’s good enough for the pope,” Mom huffed and puffed, marching on the treadmill in the background, “it’s good enough for Dad!”
Mom’s movement away from Dad and then back home again marked a milestone in her life. She could remain married to the same man, but from then on she would be her own woman. It would be her responsibility to make sure that her marriage would not extinguish her. She returned to California only when she could honestly stake her claim: “I could live in the same place and still lead my own life.”
Her own son had given her the vocabulary to make that assertion. The allegedly scandalous wedding of Joe and Arlette had inspired Mom to reassess her own marriage. All that poetic stuff about an oak not shading a cypress and vice versa meant that she had to lead her life and that Dad had to lead his. That meant the exact opposite of a divorce; it meant a healthy marriage. That was a downright revolutionary vocabulary.
During her five-month retreat in Iowa, Mom celebrated her birthday in a garden of sisterly resilience. At 70, she redefined her place in the family and in the world.
She was, first and foremost, an independent woman with a God-given mind of her own who could take responsibility for her decisions. She was, secondarily, a wife. But she would allow no man to own her. She was a mother of six, a sister of three surviving and active senior citizens, a grandmother of three enjoyable young boys, and a mother-in-law of three highly talkative and informative adults. She kept in touch with her friends from the 1930s in Mason City, the 1940s in south Los Angeles, the 1950s on Calle de Ricardo, the 1960s in Redondo Beach, and the 1970s and 1980s at United Airlines. Her communities had always been there, but she finally discovered herself within them.
If need be, Mom would spend less time with Dad and more time with the rest of her family and friends. And when she couldn’t be with them physically, she would go to church in her kitchen and consecrate the ingredients until she could stock the freezers of her loved ones with lasagnas, pizza crusts, and Rice Krispy chickens.
And then she would blow off steam on the treadmill.
In the spring of 1996, Geri became unhappy in her guest room. “My housemates are bothering me,” she told Dad. “I can hear the next-door neighbors talking about me.”
“
Well, Geri,” Dad proposed, “I think you’re ready to find a place of your own.”
A studio apartment became available in a building managed by a member of the church choir. He was a bodybuilder, a personal trainer, and Geri’s best friend. The apartment seemed ideal for her, and the muscular manager could watch out for her.
Dad sent an application to the property management company on Geri’s behalf. The company officials investigated her credit and discussed her application with an attorney. They replied to Geri, in a letter copied to Dad and to the attorney.
“
We must request and receive a certification from your present or past attending physician stating that you are capable of being self-independent, without any supervision or assistance,” the letter said. The company required the certification, because “the unit in which you are interested cannot provide for any possible ‘live-in attendant.’”
“
Beautiful!” Dad sighed when he read that line. He and Mom lived two miles away from the studio apartment. There was no need for a “live-in” attendant.
Dad phoned the doctor. “I need you to certify, on an urgent basis, that Geri qualifies for the apartment.” Dad sent the doctor a stamped and addressed envelope.
Within four days, the doctor wrote the letter as requested and sent it to the property management company. The company then offered Geri the apartment.
Dad moved her there in September 1996.
The following month, Geri sent a form letter to family and friends. “I now can feel truly independent in my little home,” the letter said.
The letter had been printed in Dad’s hand. He had drawn a line at the bottom.
Geri had signed on the solid line.
The rest of us kept expecting Geri to wind up in a hospital. But she never did. She fared better in her studio apartment than anyone but Dad had anticipated.
Her mental health kept improving slightly, month by increasingly lucid month. The reason for her improvement might have been the luck of the new drug Risperdal. If so, her lucidity might have increased as much if she had remained at the board-and-care home, where her improvement under the medication had begun. But nobody could say for sure what would have happened in that case. We just counted our tentative blessings.
Geri depended on Dad for many things. She began depending on Mom, too. But Mom could see that Geri was happier in her own home than she had ever been in any board-and-care home.
Mom watched what was happening with a mixture of gratitude and awe. “Maybe the right things are happening for the wrong reasons,” she mused. Maybe Dad had been wrong for taking Geri out of the board-and-care home as a way to avenge some misplaced sense of historical injustice. Maybe Dad had been wrong for taking Geri out of the board-and-care home as a way to prove to himself that she was not mentally ill. But maybe Dad had been right for taking Geri out of the board-and-care home.
“
Doggone it,” Mom shrugged her shoulders. “I guess he was right.”
Dad earned Mom’s respect for meticulously monitoring Geri’s medications and many other matters. More and more, Mom pitched in to help: cooking meals for Geri, taking her shopping for clothes, buying her a new bed, and cleaning her apartment.
Mom focused on the positives. Dad and Geri were stable together. Dad had someone who needed all the attention he could give. Geri kept Dad company when Mom flew to Iowa or anywhere else to lead her own life. Geri couldn’t cook, but she was learning from Mom how to vacuum, dust, make beds, and do laundry when Mom was away. As far as Mom could tell, Dad needed Geri as much as Geri needed Dad.
“
It’s like
they’re
the ones who’re married,” Mom shook her head.
In finding her own way, Mom followed the example of her children. “It was good to see how you kids could take off and go,” she said a few years later, “and how you were able to do your own things. You’re doing everything you want to do. What I am today is what I learned from you kids. You taught me how to think on my own.”
She stuck to her moral and religious moorings, but she also appreciated what lay beyond the horizon. “I’m glad I’m a Catholic,” she continued retrospectively. “I was born a Catholic, and I’ll die a Catholic. But I have love for the other churches, too. After all, in the beginning, we were all the same.”
She didn’t mention synagogues, mosques, temples, or other houses of worship. But her vocabulary was still expanding.
As her respect for religious differences grew, she recognized what kind of religious baggage she could leave behind. Yet she also came to a richer understanding of what she treasured most about her spiritual home.
“
You know, we should never excommunicate people,” she concluded. “We’re all sinners. Look how Jesus forgave the sinners. Let’s forgive each other and enjoy the time we have together.”
The drumbeat of World War II anniversaries finally commanded Dad’s attention. As the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Guam passed in 1994, he was licking his wounds from Joe’s falling off the spiritual cliff. As the 51st and 52nd anniversaries came and went in 1995 and 1996, he was consolidating his triumph in emancipating Geri from the board-and-care home. But as soon as he recovered from defeat in the first battle and shored up victory in the second, he turned his thoughts to the biggest war of them all. In 1997, he decided that he had to return to the scene of his finest hour at least once before he died.
Dad didn’t know where to stay on Guam, so he called the national headquarters of the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization to which he had belonged for nearly 40 years. “By any chance, do we have a chapter on Guam?” he asked.
“
We have six!” the receptionist boasted. “Which one do you want?”
Dad wrote to the president of the chapter in the town of Agat and began a regular correspondence. The man turned out to be a fellow former Marine, who had served for 22 years. His name was Felix Chaco, a 49-year-old native Chamorro. In his volunteer time, he helped the archbishop of Guam to organize Confirmation days for young Catholics. As if it were meant to be, Dad found a soulmate—a Semper Fi buddy and a Knights of Columbus brother all rolled up into one—way on the other side of the world.