Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (31 page)

“
Joe?” his secretary interrupted him. “It’s your doctor on the line.”

Dad walked to the phone.

The doctor explained the situation. “It’s best for Geri and for your wife that Geri return to the hospital and be admitted into the adult psychiatric ward.” The doctor informed Dad that Mom and her three friends were planning to drive Geri to the hospital that day.

Dad did not want this to happen. Just 11 days earlier, Geri had been safe and secure in her home and Catholic school, he had believed. He didn’t know what to believe anymore, but he couldn’t believe that it was necessary for Geri to be ripped away from her home and placed into a psychiatric ward. When he called home, the line was busy. Racing out the door, he asked his boss to cover for him during the family emergency.

Haunting memories of his own abrupt departure from Poland flooded into his mind as he drove the 20 miles home heading south. He knew that he had to intercept the four women from Saint Lawrence before they could run off with Geri forever.

When he arrived home, they were already gone. He turned around and sped to the hospital another 30 miles in the opposite direction and then east all the way past downtown Los Angeles. But again he was too late. The four women and Geri were too far ahead of him. By the time he arrived, the hospital had already admitted Geri into the adult psychiatric ward.

When Dad entered the ward to visit her, he heard wild men shouting obscenities and taking the Lord’s name in vain. Dad’s pretty little girl’s girl—the one who had earned perfect grades in conduct, who had won citizenship awards year after year, who had dreamed of becoming a nun, and whose singing and dancing had reminded him of his own mother in Poland—had been snatched from his embrace and sent into a corrupt hell, as if the most painful chapter of his life were repeating itself after all in some sort of cruel twist despite his relentless efforts to make sure nothing of the sort would ever happen. He grimaced in anguish and disgrace.

The next day, Dad paid a heavy toll at work as well.

“
You abandoned your responsibilities on the most important auditing day of the year,” his supervisors berated him. “From here on out,” he was informed once again, “your position classification has been frozen.”

That meant there would be no possibility of further promotions at the firm. The most he could hope for was to hang on to his job long enough to cash in his stock options and maybe to earn more retirement benefits. Otherwise, he might not be able to put his kids through college. He might not be able to save Stan from Vietnam.

That evening, Dad drove home his message to Mom: “I hope you’re proud of yourself. Our finances are once again in jeopardy because I ran to the hospital to try to stop you and your friends. Now we will all have to pay for it!”

They avoided each other for the rest of the night. It was their 19th anniversary.

Geri stayed in the adult psychiatric ward for 18 days. “Everyone there was okay,” she reminisced. “I don’t remember men cussing.” She did remember good food, chocolate milk, and ice cream. The nurses hosted a Halloween party with game booths and trick-or-treating in the halls. “We all had a good ol’ time!” said Geri. As the youngest person there, she received the most candy. “I was the star of the party.”

But the fun did not last. On November 15, 1968, L.A. County U.S.C. Medical Center transferred Geri to the juvenile ward of Camarillo State Mental Hospital in Ventura County.

In one respect, Geri was lucky to be there. One of the four women from church had pulled her political strings with the local Republican Party to secure a bed for Geri in Camarillo. Of the many patients at the county hospital who needed to be transferred to the state hospital in Camarillo, only the fortunate few made it there.

But Geri could not feel fortunate to be admitted to the state mental hospital. Even though she could have a good time in the adult psychiatric ward of the county hospital, the state mental hospital was something altogether different. It was, by definition, the state mental hospital. The loony bin. The nuthouse. The whole idea of it terrified Geri.

“
I cried a lot there,” she recalled. “I cried all night. I didn’t want to be there. It was a pretty-near insane asylum.”

Dad’s anxieties boiled to a head a couple weeks after Geri had been admitted to Camarillo. It was Thanksgiving weekend. Genie, Joe, Mary Jo, and I were hanging out in the playroom and listening to
The White Album
by the Beatles. Genie had just brought the album home. Brand new. The album’s first song, “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” enticed us with its impersonation of our own local heroes, the Beach Boys. The lyrics of the song echoed their surfer paean to “California Girls.” The melody sounded suspiciously familiar, too, and the background harmonies interjected the sing-songy catcalls that were typical of other surf tunes. The Beatles had expropriated the method of the Beach Boys for an entirely contrary message. We cranked the song and sang along:

Something sounded very wrong to Dad. He was the kind of guy who faithfully hoisted the stars and stripes every Fourth of July, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and Flag Day. When he detected something disloyal in the lyrics being sung over Thanksgiving weekend, no less, he decided to monitor the music more closely, creeping out of his doghouse toward the staircase that led down to the playroom. Standing atop the stairs where we couldn’t see him, he listened more intently. We didn’t refrain on the refrain:

It was too much for his Polish immigrant U.S. Marine Corps core. He gritted his teeth, flaring his temples in disgust. This is not why he had come to America, fought in three beachhead invasions, and earned his citizenship. This is not why he had brought six children into the world, given them piano lessons, and built them a sanctuary where they could appreciate the sound of music. Upon weighing his courses of action, he stomped down the stairs in his polished Florsheim shoes on a mission to ambush the stereo. As soon as he came within reach of it, he yanked the spinning album off the turntable in the middle of the song, gripped the album between his fists, and smashed it over his knee.

Mary Jo and I froze, our mouths and eyeballs agape.

Joe thought Dad’s reaction was a little extreme.

Genie promptly protested: “It’s just a satire of the Beach Boys, Dad!”

But he had no time for satire. Besides, he correctly surmised that satire was not the only message. Genie knew it, too. The Beatles spoke for people like her in the younger generation who had felt betrayed. The Beatles released
The White Album
on November 22, 1968, the fifth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and just months after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. No wonder
The White Album
struck such a visceral chord, becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time. The three greatest national symbols of hope and heroism that Genie and many others like her had ever experienced had been summarily blasted away.

Meanwhile, the vaunted nobility and heroism of the World War II generation, with its epic black-and-white war movies and its myths of moral greatness, began to ring deathly hollow to many in the younger generation as they marched off to die in Vietnam for no clearly articulated purpose. World War II had made the world safe for democracy, but the only apparent purpose of the Vietnam War, at least to many of those who were being forced to fight it, was to make the world safe for capitalism
at the expense
of democracy. Even that dubious purpose wasn’t clear to people like Genie.

The three assassinations might have amounted to a senseless loss of innocence, but the Vietnam War was amounting to something far more sinister. The Vietnam War was becoming The Great Betrayal. The generation that had fought so valiantly in World War II seemed to be throwing away its own children for an unjustified cause. For Genie, American moral superiority in world affairs had been exposed as a grand delusion.

The White Album
rallied the revolutionaries. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was the first track on the album for a reason. When Genie played the song, it spoke to us in a way that we instantly grasped. The subversive lyrics, mocking catcalls, angry attitude, and jabbing rhythm set the agenda, tone, mood, and beat for our generation.

And Dad would hear none of it.

Geri heard mostly soft and soothing voices at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. The hospital grounds consisted of 85 buildings, many in stately California mission architecture, spread across 600 landscaped acres. Geri attended school there every weekday with other girls between the ages of 11 and 15. In December 1968, the girls sang Christmas carols on the radio and then for a Christmas play attended by Dad, Mom, and Genie. Geri received free ballet lessons.

“
It was a really nice place except for it being a pretty-near insane asylum,” she recalled. “It was a real nuthouse.” The notion of Camarillo as an insane asylum agitated her more than Camarillo itself. Besides, she was sad and lonely. She hated being cut off from everyone else, as if cast adrift from the family. She once tried to run away.

The doctors diagnosed her as paranoid schizophrenic. They prescribed long-term medication and taught her how to take her pills. “They were nice to me. I just didn’t like it there. I just wanted to be home.” After two months, the doctors sent her home on January 18, 1969. She had no complaints about the outcome of her hospitalization or the effects of her medication. “I became sane.”

She didn’t know what it meant to be diagnosed as schizophrenic. “Maybe that I just bent everything out of proportion,” she speculated. “I still blamed myself for it.”

She returned to Hillcrest Junior High School as a seventh-grader rather than as an eighth-grader. She passed her classes, but several of her symptoms persisted.

At home, she sometimes sat in her bedroom all day, incapable of doing anything. Then she stayed up all night, walking the floors. She tore the tags off clothes, lopped off hunks of her own hair, flooded the bathrooms, burned holes in sweaters with an iron, tried to bite chunks out of frozen burritos, and then threw them in the trash.

“
She was wilder than hell!” Mom shook her head.

It was hard for Dad to believe what Mom kept saying about Geri, and it was hard for Mom to fathom the difficulty Dad was confronting. Nothing in the lives of Dad or Mom could have prepared them for Geri’s mental illness. If anything, some of their most painful childhood experiences had left them each wounded in different ways, permanently partially disabling them for this enormous challenge.

Dad had found himself torn between his two parents. He ran away from his mother under false pretenses. When he later chose, of his own volition, not to return to her, it was once again a choice made under duress, and his mother could never tell him her side of the story. He learned to blame her for having rejected him, but he could never be certain if he hadn’t been the one who had rejected or abandoned her. He couldn’t change the past. He couldn’t change anything that he had done or that either of his parents had ever done or failed to do for him. He could change only the future, and he remained determined to make the future as different from the past as possible, especially with respect to rearing a morally upstanding family. He vowed never to abandon any of his children or to abjure any kind of responsibility for them. That would be the greatest sin of all. If he were ever to commit such a heinous act, he could never live with himself. He had learned to cope with his pain magnificently.

Mom had found herself unable to communicate verbally with her parents. As they mashed together the bits and pieces of two different languages, she could understand the feelings but not necessarily the words. In response, she grew up talking to people as much as she could, bouncing from one topic to another in an emotional stream of consciousness and grasping for any imaginable way to express herself in a compelling fashion, usually throwing in a gesticulation here or a sound effect there to amplify the point. She often didn’t remember the literal meaning of what she’d said. That wasn’t the most important thing to her. The words never mattered as much to her as the feelings behind the words, the crack in her voice, the inflection, the momentary getting choked up in the middle of one sentence and then quickly regrouping, suppressing her tears, and standing on her own two feet in the middle of the next. Her way to talk was not so much to talk as to feel. Most of the time, people not only understood her; they empathized with her. She resonated within them like music. She had learned to cope with her pain magnificently.

When confronted with Geri’s mental illness, both Dad and Mom faced their ultimate tests. They became torn in separate ways, leading them to tear further away at each other without intending to do so.

The medical diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia did not relieve Dad of the compulsion to view the illness as a moral challenge. Even after Geri came home from Camarillo with her long-term medication, he tried feverishly to discern some kind of moral reason for her psychotic behavior. Maybe it was just “teenage rebellion,” he suggested to us, although Geri never rebelled against any particular rule, restriction, or commandment. In fact, she was the most likely of his children to fear the consequences of disobedience. She was the dainty one, the most demure, and the least likely to buck authority—parental, religious, or otherwise. When his theory of teenage rebellion fell flat, Dad then surmised that Geri must have “gotten lost in the shadow” of Stan and Genie. If so, he concluded, then Geri needed nothing more from the family than “love and acceptance for who she was.” That sounded fine until we realized that it pointed the finger of blame indirectly at the rest of us for having failed to love and accept Geri for who she was. If Geri didn’t get any better, then it was
our
fault. Dad was struggling his hardest to interpret the illness through the unforgiving prism of right and wrong.