Crazy for God (15 page)

Grandmother Schaeffer came to live with us in 1962 (or thereabouts), after she broke her hip. She was my bad grandmother, as opposed to my good grandmother. (Our “good grandmother” was Mom’s missionary godly mom who had passed away many years before, though Mom’s dad went on living till he was a hundred and one years and three days old.)

“Grandmother Schaeffer believed nothing when she was raising poor Fran,” Mom would say. “She wasn’t even a
nominal
Christian. And now, look, we’re stuck with her!”

Grandmother Schaeffer had always been small and now was shrunk down to a barely-four-foot angry troll. She had a tough little wizened face and a perpetually sour frown. I resented her. We had no privacy in our home anyway, and now what little there was evaporated with my grandmother’s coming to haunt our top-floor apartment.

Grandmother had never been outside of Philadelphia until the day she flew to Switzerland. It was her first and last ride in a plane.

Years later, just after she broke her hip a second time, Genie and I visited Grandmother in the Aigle hospital on our wedding day. She glared and snapped: “How can that fool boy be married? He’s only twelve!” She wasn’t demented, just being her usual insulting self. I had it coming. I had teased her—a lot.

When Grandmother died, Birdie, a L’Abri worker who was a retired nurse, washed and dressed her body. (There were few undertakers in Switzerland in those days.) But Grandmother’s mouth kept falling open. I found the solution in my art supplies and sprayed fixative, the liquid spray glue used to “fix” charcoal drawings, into her mouth, over her false teeth and lips. It worked very well. My only problem was that I couldn’t figure out what expression to give her. To make her smile gave Grandma a false look, different than she ever had in life. On the other hand, to give her the frown that was so familiar seemed a mean thing to do. So I settled on flat, pursed lips, a quizzical what-now-in-the-afterlife? expression.

Knowing Grandmother Schaeffer explained a lot about Dad. For one thing, Mom wasn’t lying when she said that she had more or less saved Dad. His mother’s idea of a good time was reading the obituaries and muttering gleefully, “Outlived him, too!” She hated any food she was not familiar with, and Grandmother was familiar with two dishes: chicken soup and corned beef hash. She hated the classical music Dad played all day to create a wall of sound to block out the voices of the guests and—after Grandmother came to live with us—the sound of Grandmother talking to herself, often about the wrestling she had loved watching on TV and now missed.

Grandmother Schaeffer provided some unintentional insight into my family history in another way. Priscilla said that when she was a little girl (back in America), that her best
times were when Mom and Dad dropped her off to stay with Grandmother Schaeffer. If being with Grandmother contrasted so positively with life at home with Mom and Dad, it told me a great deal about the quality of life in the early, oppressive strict fundamentalist days of our household. Priscilla always said how free she felt with Grandmother.

Gracie had been living with us for several years before Grandmother arrived. And there was an instant rivalry between them that extended to them both trying to cheat while playing Pacheesi, arguing loudly, and my grandmother occasionally throwing Gracie out of her room with a “Git outta here, ya damned moron!”

Gracie called Grandmother “the bad lady.” And after my Grandmother broke her hip again and spent the last three years of her life stuck in bed or in her chair, Gracie would walk into Grandmother’s room clutching a pile of freshly ironed laundry in a triumphant show-and-tell, demonstrating how she was living a productive life while Grandmother was stuck. Grandmother would stare down at her paper and pretend she didn’t see Gracie. And of course I’d play one off against the other.

“Gracie?”

“Yes, dalin?”

“Grandmother says you don’t iron very well.”

“She is a bad woman! I iron lovely, dalin.”

“I know you do, but she says you should not be allowed to iron any more.”

“She is wicked.”

And: “Grandma?”

“Git outta here, ya brazen brat!”

“Okay, but Gracie said you cheat.”

“I don’t care what some retard says!”

Gracie was my coconspirator. When I was fourteen and got a Super-8 movie camera, Gracie was my main actress. The dramatic scene where Gracie got hit by the car worked fine, except that the blood mix accidentally got in Gracie’s eyes, and since it was red oil paint thinned with turpentine, I had to abandon filming, though her initial reaction fit my plot well since she was screaming very realistically. But that ruined her ability to “die” because she kept yelling at me that I’d blinded her and to “take me to Mei Fuh,” and wouldn’t lie still. Mei Fuh was what Gracie called my mother. (It was Mom’s name in Chinese, and for some reason Gracie learned it and always called her that.)

When the spastics next door got a small swimming pool installed on their property, The Ladies forbade anybody but the spastics to use the pool. This seemed grossly unfair. The pool was ridiculously small, but it was the only pool anywhere near us, and being banned disappointed me. So I would sneak over at night to swim. And once I took Gracie.

It was about 11 PM. Gracie didn’t have a bathing suit, so she went in her underwear; a large white bra and a pair of bloomer-type panties. Gracie panicked once I got her in, though the pool was barely four feet deep. Her bloomers floated up around her and seemed to suddenly have the volume of a parachute. She began to shriek. I tried to haul her out. She slipped on the ladder. When she came to the surface, she let out a loud yell followed by “You are so naughty, dalin!” repeated furiously at increasing volume. Then her false teeth came out and I had to dive to look for them in the dark.

Lights went on in Chalet Bellevue. I tried to tug, push, and pull Gracie out, but her wet soft flesh, her limp leg and arm, and my panic made it impossible. So I bolted and hid under the hedge. Moments later, Rosemary, one of the fiercest of the
three ladies, found Gracie more or less naked and spluttering incoherently in the pool. Rosie demanded explanations and didn’t get any, because Gracie was being loyal to me. Rosie had to go back inside to wake one of the other ladies up to help her fish Gracie out.

They got her back to our chalet and, of course, moments later Dad was looking for me. By then I was in bed pretending to sleep, but Dad knew. I told him what I’d done and he laughed. And Dad refused to punish me, other than making me promise not to endanger Gracie again. Dad was as resentful of the ladies as I was for not allowing me to swim in their pool.

M
ost L’Abri students were bright balanced people. A few were not. People with mental problems were the minority at L’Abri, but they found a welcome. I grew up experiencing a series of friendships with the sorts of people living in our house (or in the other L’Abri chalets) that most boys would only meet in the street when accosted by a homeless man or woman. There was Mr. Hamburger from England, who had been lobotomized and who would periodically throw himself down the mountainside in a half-hearted suicide attempt. There were the several students who were convinced that they were demon-possessed and heard voices. There were some who would sit and cry for no reason, or yell out in church. A few had done time in prison. So it seemed normal to have Gracie and other less-than-perfect people in our house, just as it seemed normal to have the occasional unwed mother stay with us.

Our “single mothers” were sometimes accompanied by Mom, or another worker, to the hospital in Aigle for the delivery. Sin was sin; but since we were all sinners who had fallen very short of the glory of God, there was no stigma attached to pregnancy. Nor was there a stigma attached to mental retardation, or mental illness.

I saw that my parents’ compassion was consistent. Their idea of ministry was to extend a hand of kindness, and to truly practice the rule of treating others as you would be treated. It was such a powerful demonstration that it gave me a lifelong picture of what Christian behavior and love can and should be.

My parents were not advocating compassion that someone else would carry out with tax dollars, or at arm’s length, but rather they opened their home. The result was that those gathered around our table represented a cross-section of humanity and intellectual ability, from mental patients to Oxford students and all points of need in between. My mother and father marshaled arguments in favor of God, the Bible, and the saving work of Jesus Christ. But no words were as convincing as their willingness to lay material possessions, privacy, and time on the line, sometimes at personal risk and always with the understanding that if they were being taken advantage of, that was fine, too.

Between my sisters’ pregnancies and the several unwed girls’ pregnancies, not to mention many of the workers’ wives’ pregnancies, baby-making was something I was completely familiar with. For a woman to be pregnant seemed normal and wonderful. I loved being allowed to place my hands on those huge bellies and feel the babies kick. I never heard a judgmental, unkind, or even condescending word spoken about our unwed mothers. In fact, my parents would express fury when they talked about “some Christian parents” who were “ashamed of their daughter” and sent them to L’Abri to be out of the way during an embarrassing pregnancy. Dad let it be known that if anyone in L’Abri had a problem with his non-judgmental attitude, they could leave.

I remember one young woman in particular. Jan was a
lovely breezy twenty-year-old. She had long brown hair and a freckled face and was an old-fashioned tomboy. She used to sit with her long tan legs splayed wide open and frankly push her cotton print dress down between them to be modest but never even pretended to cross her legs.

I was about eight or nine when she came to L’Abri. She stayed the better part of a year. Jan spent hours telling me how she had installed a truck engine in her car and used to race boys from the one stoplight to the crossroads in her small Michigan town. She loved the fact that she could always “blow them off the map” with that truck engine.

Jan was a mechanic, and her dad was, too. Jan was at L’Abri because her father was also an elder in their local Reformed Presbyterian church and didn’t want to be humiliated by his daughter’s pregnancy. Mom and Dad were enraged against her father on her behalf. Jan was one of the best people, and certainly one of the most attractive people, I have ever met.

After Jan came home from the Aigle Hospital—Mom went with her for the delivery—she stayed with us for about six more months. I would help bathe the baby, watch Jan breast-feed from hugely swollen breasts, and I noticed that she leaked milk. She always laughed about the way her blouse would stain. Jan would tell me all about how she planned to raise her son.

Jan became a helper. There were some evangelicals visiting who said they were a bit shocked that a L’Abri helper would be a single unwed mother. What kind of example was that? Dad went ballistic, as did Mom.

D
ad could be screaming at Mom one minute, or just bluntly muttering “I’ll kill myself one of these days,” and ten minutes later he would be down in the dining room earnestly answering questions from the guests. They never had any inkling about his state of mind—except when, once in a while, the yelling could be heard or when a tea tray or vase would be hurled down the stairs or over the balcony. But people pretended nothing was happening, except of course for Mom, who would work a sanitized version of her interminable fights with Dad into her talks as a demonstration of the way God was working in their lives “in spite of Fran’s weaknesses.”

I once thought Dad’s ability to present two very different faces to the world—one to his family and one to the public—was gross hypocrisy. I think differently now. I believe Dad was a very brave man.

Suffering from bouts of depression, I have come to understand that the choice is to carry on or not, no matter how I feel. And since my dad literally had no close friends, let alone a confessor or therapist to talk to, his suffering was in near-total isolation. When that bleak grayness envelops everything for a few days or hours and sucks all the joy and air out of a day, as a writer I can just shut the world out, if I want, and
retire to some inner cave and nurse my depression. Dad craved privacy, too, but his work
was
people. And Dad never sought counseling.

I was lucky enough to go to the same therapist (once every two weeks for about a year) who had helped my son Francis cope with, then overcome, his severe childhood dyslexia. I’ve also been fortunate to have several very close male and female friends about my age—not counting family and work-related friends—who have stuck with me through all the twists and turns of what feels like a long life. And even with the luxury of that support, I’ve found many days hard to get through.

Dad was incredibly alone. I can’t think of one nonworkrelated friend, let alone a contemporary, who he kept up with. Dad had adoring followers, co-workers, and family, but no equals, no one who knew him who he had stayed in contact with, no friend from school days, no one to pour out his troubles to, no one to tell him he was full of shit from time to time.

The only private space my father had was in his bedroom. And he spent every moment he could cloistered there. If he stepped out and went downstairs, a group of guests would instantly gather around him and follow him.

“Dr. Schaeffer, I have a question. . . .”

Dad sat in a small rocking chair pulled up to his bed, which he used as his desk. He worked on a tray, hunched over his papers. There were ink stains on the thick yellow wool bedspread. (Dad used three different colors of ink to mark his Bible and make notes in the margin.)

Dad’s bedroom/office was invaded by the voices of the students talking in the rooms below. The more students there were staying at L’Abri, the louder Dad turned up his music. I grew up thinking that classical music always has be played so
loud that the speakers bounce and that it is normal to play blasting music ten, twelve, or fifteen hours a day. My room was next to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Dad’s wall of deafening music turned my room into a concert hall. It is rare for me to hear a piece of classical music I can’t hum along with. (Even today, whenever I hear classical music played at anything below full blast, it sounds wrong.) “Dad’s music,” as I will always think of the classical canon, became part of me, as if it had been surgically embedded in my head. I still feel close to him whenever I listen to any one of his hundreds of “favorite pieces.”