Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (36 page)

“
It bothered me to use my left hand,” Geri explained decades later. “Maybe it was the ‘second time around’ again.” C. So she tried to do everything one-handed.

Augie didn’t complain. He made Geri a meatball sandwich.

Mom and Geri stopped working at Augie’s and left it at that. They had given it their best shot.

Augie and Connie were happy to oblige.

At home, Geri continued to be a pressure cooker. Subdued one moment, she could explode the next.

One night, Mom asked Mary Jo to stir the corn. “Make sure this doesn’t burn,” Mom ordered. “And don’t eat it before dinner.”

Twelve-year-old Mary Jo guarded the corn, practicing self-restraint.

Sixteen-year-old Geri approached the corn with hunger in her eyes.

“
Stay away,” Mary Jo ordered, raising a slotted serving spoon. She had pulled rank on her bigger sister, knowing it could be suicidal.

Geri lunged at Mary Jo, knocked her down, and pinned her to the ground. Geri grabbed Mary Jo by the shoulders and shook her, leaving four fingernail scars on the back of each arm.

Mary Jo didn’t fight back. “I felt more scared for her than for me,” she recalled.

Several weeks later, Geri pounced on Mom from behind while she was sweeping the floor. Caught off guard by the surprise attack from an unknown assailant, Mom fought back so hard that she broke the broom on Geri.

Geri shrieked at Mom while Mom shrieked at Geri. And then, with half the broom lying on the floor and the other half remaining in her hand like a spent shotgun, Mom started sobbing and wailing in fear, once again, that Geri was “gonna be placed in a foster home.”

In her senior year of high school in the spring of 1972, Genie was at her desk, cramming for a test, when Geri began howling and slamming their bedroom door once again. This time, Genie broke down herself. She cried and screamed so loudly—“I can’t do this anymore! I can’t do this anymore!”—that Ray Jersin from next door heard Genie, came over, and hugged her.

“
It must be so hard,” he said as she wept on his shoulder.

He could’ve been talking about Genie. He could’ve been talking about Geri. He could’ve been talking about the whole family. It was all that anybody could’ve said.

During the roughest times, there was one person on earth, other than Mom, whom Dad counted on for moral support: his cousin the priest, Father Joe, in Grand Rapids. Father Joe consoled Dad over the phone and supported him in small but sustaining ways.

In the summer of 1972, Dad drove us along the open ribbon of highway on an immense loop around the country to see the various kinds of shrines—natural, patriotic, and religious—that make America great. He wanted us to know that this land was our land and to feel just as proud of America as he felt. So he piled us into a brand new 1972 Chrysler Town & Country station wagon and showed us the nation’s finest parks, monuments, and cathedrals, from the Grand Canyon to the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to the New York islands to the Boston Freedom Trail to Yellowstone to the redwood forests. When we weren’t sightseeing or splashing in pools at Holiday Inns from coast to coast, we rooted for Mark Spitz and the other American athletes competing in the 1972 Olympic Games.

But nothing during the national tour inspired Dad as much as the two days and two nights we spent with Father Joe at his rectory and convent in Grand Rapids. There weren’t any nuns in the convent in the middle of the summer with school out of session, and so we slept in the convent bedrooms. All of us slept there, except for Dad.

“
I insist that you sleep in the pastor’s bed in the rectory,” Father Joe prevailed upon Dad. “You deserve it as much as anyone I know, Joe.” The pastor relinquished his own bed and slept on a davenport in the parish elementary school instead.

The gesture meant the world to Dad. For 30 years, he had idolized Father Joe, “the pride and joy of the family.” Dad had derived hope from the priest’s perpetual offerings of prayers, Masses, religious medallions, and encouraging words, from the battlegrounds of the Pacific to the combat zones on the home front. Father Joe was the holiest person Dad knew. And yet Father Joe abdicated his holy bed to Dad. Father Joe signified to Dad that he, the struggling yet still-standing father of six children, was worthier of the pastor’s bed than even the beloved pastor himself.

For two nights, Dad slept like he had died and gone to heaven.

About five months later, Mom lost her own moral anchor when her mother, the stabilizing force of Farindola and Lehigh Row, died in Mason City, Iowa, on January 4, 1973. Grandma Maria Baccanale Di Gregorio was 79. She had been sick for two years with a series of overlapping illnesses: diabetes, a broken arm, a broken hip, and a stroke that left her helpless in a nursing home, where she died.

Mom, Aunt Mafalda, Aunt Leola, Uncle Ralph, Aunt Bessie, Aunt Elsie, and Aunt Angeline had cried and cried for months over the phone as Grandma became sicker and sicker. When she finally died, Mom was utterly inconsolable. She just cried and cried and cried and couldn’t stop. She had no control over her grief for several days. It was heart wrenching and frightening for us kids.

She flew home to Iowa with Uncle Ralph for the funeral. At the burial, Mom found it difficult to pull herself away from the gravesite of her parents.

She returned to the site many times before flying home. She knelt in front of the glazed brown headstone, made the sign of the cross, and wiped her tears. She spoke to her parents without saying a word and listened for any message they could impart to her. Any consolation. Any strength or wisdom to help her raise her own children as well as they had raised her. She stepped away only when she sensed that she had felt their presence strongly enough.

Long after the burial, the Di Gregorio siblings continued to cry together over the phone. They finally began to tell one another, “I’ve cried so hard I can’t cry no more.” They shed dry tears. “I’m all cried out,” they cried.

From then on, it was hard for Mom to talk about Grandma Di Gregorio without crying. Mom cried whenever we visited relatives who looked like Grandma. Mom got through it in 1973, but she never got over it. “The best I could do after that,” she said long after the fact, “was to try to live the rest of my life the way Grandma would.”

Throughout those years, Dad hung on to his position as an internal auditor at Scientific Data Systems, where his position classification had been frozen in October 1968. He also managed to hang on despite the sale of the company to the Xerox Corporation in 1969.

When Xerox bought the company, Dad’s stock options rose 50 percent in value. He heaved a sigh of relief just thinking back on the time. “It was a beautiful feeling of security to be in a company that was growing, that was financially strong, and that was the apple of Wall Street’s eye. I hope it added to Mom’s sense of security and also rubbed off on you children. Had I always been running scared for a job, I’m sure it would’ve left a mark on some of you.”

He had few prospects for upward mobility at Xerox, which had plenty of its own people to promote as part of its reorganization. But Dad wasn’t concerned about promotions anymore. He was content just to be acquired by the bigger firm, to accommodate to its ways of doing things, to help resolve its auditing problems, and to go along for the ride.

He felt blessed. “It was by the grace of God and thanks to the intercession of the Immaculata,” he said, in reference and in reverence to the Blessed Virgin Mary, that he clung to the job at Xerox long enough to cash in enough stock options to pay off most of his debts, to show us the best of America, and to send his oldest kids to college.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t cling to his capabilities as long as he could cling to the job. In 1974, at the age of 50, Dad found that he could no longer perform some of the regular duties of his work in a prompt fashion. He had been taking Geri to see a psychiatrist every week for more than three years, but then the psychiatrist diagnosed Dad as mentally disabled himself—his thought processes and speech patterns having been slowed by the wear and tear of decades of excessive stress at work and at home. Dad’s doctors concurred that the relentless toll of raising six children and caring for a mentally ill daughter had aged him beyond his years and left him mentally exhausted.

In 1975, at the age of 51, Dad stopped working and started attending Mass every day. He drew a pension plus permanent disability benefits from the Xerox Corporation. He was grateful, although his savings, stock options, pension plan, and disability benefits totaled less than his net salary would have paid him.

To prevent further losses, he invested in a bare-bones, do-it-yourself home security system called “Operation Identification.” The system required Dad to register all of our valuable furnishings and appliances with a private security agency and to engrave an indelible code number on all of those furnishings and appliances so that they could be identified in case of burglary and subsequent recovery.

He meticulously itemized each ill-fated possession: the two pianos, the piano stools, the free-standing desks, the dressers, the tables, the chairs, the couches with pee stains, the RCA television, the KLH stereo, the stereo speakers with pee stains, the Osterizer blender, the toaster, and even the electric can opener. It took him a while, but no belonging escaped his accounting. Neither his thoroughness nor his exactitude had been compromised in the least. With his soldering iron, he then set out to brand each item with the family code number: B478370. He couldn’t always find an inconspicuous spot upon which to emblazon the number.

Mom hated seeing that damned number on everything. She wouldn’t let Dad touch her favorite pieces of furniture. Instead, she pasted an adhesive mailing label on the undersides of them. The mailing label identified only “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Godges” and our street address. Therefore, Mom wrote “Ida” and our phone number in black ink on the labels. That way, the burglars could call her directly.

As Dad’s career wound down in the early 1970s, Mom grew increasingly enamored with the idea of getting the hell out of the house and going to work. Her stint at Augie’s restaurant in 1971 had whetted her appetite. But as long as Dad was still working and the kids were still at home, Mom knew she could roam only so far and work only so many hours.

In 1972, she looked out her kitchen window while washing dishes one morning and spotted the perfect compromise: the crossing guard at Tulita Elementary School, the public school down the street. The Redondo Beach Police Department hired Mom as a crossing guard, and she promptly bid for the Tulita location and got it.

When I was home on weekdays, either for lunches or Catholic school holidays, I looked out the window and saw Mom getting paid to do two of her favorite things: escorting kids when they were there, knitting afghans when they weren’t. The pairing of activities signified the greater meaning of Mom’s work: She was knitting together the neighborhood people of different generations, just like the loose balls of yarn that she fashioned into multicolored squares that she then connected into one great big cozy blanket. I watched her hold court at that crosswalk for three years, befriending not just the kids but also the moms and grandmoms who came to pick up the kids.

One of the moms had a bumper sticker for United Airlines on her car. The airline mom just so happened to be a parishioner at Saint Lawrence. “Oh, boy,” Mom dreamed one afternoon while watching the bumper sticker with the vibrant red and blue logo fade into the distance. “I’d love to get a job at United. For my next job, I want something with benefits. And traveling.”

It was December 1975. Dad was home full time by then. Geri’s eruptions were tapering off. The rest of us kids were at least teenagers. Mom didn’t need to stay close to home quite as much anymore. It was time for her to find a new life.

The bumper-sticker lady from United Airlines returned the next day and gave Mom a wealth of tantalizing information. “The head usher at Mass is the personnel director for the airline, Ida. You could meet him at the parish New Year’s Eve party. He also plays tennis with that young new Italian priest who just arrived at the parish.”

“
Oh, REALLY?!” Mom exclaimed.

That was the clincher. Mom loved that priest. Father Douglas Ferraro was her all-time favorite priest, because she found him to be unusual in many favorable respects. For one thing, he was not a middle-aged Irishman. For decades, our parish had been led by veteran spiritual shepherds from the emerald isle. They were good, upstanding men, but they didn’t seem to be the happiest people. One of them fulminated upon the altar with an angry brogue that aroused as much fear as fondness from the pews. In contrast, Father Ferraro alit at Saint Lawrence Martyr fresh from the seminary. Enthusiastic and engaging, he energized the parish, especially its young people. Mom loved him from the moment she met him. “It’s about time we got an Italian in here,” she raised her chin in salute.

From her stool at the crosswalk, she started knitting Father Ferraro an afghan with a handsome blue trim. She greeted him after church one Sunday. “Could you please put in a good word for me, Father?”

“
She’s industrious, hardworking, and a fabulous cook,” the priest told the usher before one of their tennis matches.

Mom introduced herself to the usher at the parish New Year’s Eve party, where they shook hands and chatted briefly. He seemed reluctant to hire anyone, but he invited her to fill out an application.