Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (41 page)

Several of her friends landed roles in the 1976 campus musical production of
Godspell
, the hippie rendition of the Gospel according to Matthew. The national popularity of
Godspell
had brought hippie culture into the mainstream. As Stan armed himself against the hippies on the streets of San Francisco, Genie surrounded herself with the hippies on the stage in Los Angeles.

In the show, the gospel passages were set to rock ’n’ roll, soul, ragtime, burlesque, and folk music. The hippies-as-apostles wore patched blue jeans, psychedelic shirts, and tattered skirts. One of Genie’s friends flopped around the stage beneath his massive blond Afro. Another friend flaunted her extravagant long red hair. The character who played Jesus wore a Superman shirt and clown pants. He and the apostles flitted about the stage as if they were on a natural high.

Genie knew she couldn’t pass up this opportunity. She bought tickets for the whole family to see the show. The only person missing would be Stan.

Genie wasn’t sure how Dad would react to the life of Christ being set to rock music and being portrayed by a bunch of people who looked like they needed to find jobs. But she was sure of one thing: She would show her younger brothers and sisters that there was a whole new way to follow the gospel. Better yet, she would allow Dad’s favorite Jesuit university to show her younger brothers and sisters that there was a whole new way to follow the gospel. The new way was joyous, colorful, playful, exuberant, youthful, irreverent, inclusive, long-haired, bawdy, and yet wholly sacred. Most audacious of all, women had equal standing with men.

Regardless of their genders, races, clothes, or hairstyles, the characters rejoiced in the magnificence of God in the language of popular music, which we could understand a lot better than the esoteric language of Genie’s poetry. Her friend with the floppy blond Afro captured the grateful mood of the evening in his solo performance of “All Good Gifts”:

Dad loved the show. And the performers. He hosted cast parties at our home, greeting the performers at the door with firm, hearty handshakes. Mom served homemade pizzas.

The rest of us enjoyed the show, too. Geri rocked to the music, both in the theater and on the radio. Joe bought the soundtrack. Mary Jo grooved to the vibrations on the turntable. I played the sheet music on the piano.

The funky little musical had brought the family closer together like nothing since
The Sound of Music
. Genie felt like she had staged a spiritual coup.

But she had no idea how difficult a real coup would be.

She reenlisted in the Loyola literary community to pursue a master’s degree in English. When she became a teaching assistant, she taught a class with one of her former professors, a man whose name was David Killoran. They started dating.

A year passed.

Mom and Dad met David only briefly—and accidentally. They didn’t know quite what to make of this lanky young professor. His dispassionate demeanor revealed nothing. Genie never talked about him, as if she had something to hide.

In the spring of 1978, Genie received her master’s degree. She moved into a house in Hermosa Beach, immediately north of Redondo Beach, and launched a career in public relations.

“
Why haven’t you invited us to your new home?” Dad asked Genie at the dinner table when she swung by to visit one Sunday afternoon.

“
You haven’t even told us where it is,” Mom echoed from the kitchen.

“
It’s just a temporary place,” Genie was ready for the question. “You don’t want to be bothered with the address. Here, just take the phone number.”

Genie then made sure that she was the one to answer the phone.

Dad wasn’t so easily deterred. For weeks, he called Genie and asked the same question: “When could I come for a visit?”

She begged a favor from a friend who lived in El Segundo, about three miles north of Hermosa Beach but in the same telephone number prefix zone. “Can I borrow your apartment for a day?” Genie explained the situation.

“
Sure,” the friend cooperated. “Hope it helps.”

Genie gave Mom and Dad the El Segundo address, extending an invitation. Dad took her up on it, and they agreed to a date and time.

It was one of those cold and drafty June days when the fog blew in thick from the ocean. Dad knocked on the apartment door.

“
Hi, Dad,” Genie greeted him with a kiss. “Come on in.”

“
Wow!” Dad’s eyes popped out. “Where’d you get all this nice furniture?”

“
It’s my friend’s,” she replied. “I told you I was just staying here temporarily.”

Dad left after 20 minutes. Genie knew that she was merely postponing the inevitable—that it was only a matter of time before the charade would be exposed.

Later that summer, Genie and David attended a faculty dinner dance at Loyola Marymount University. Dressed in their formal attire, David introduced Genie to the other faculty members, including the Jesuits—and among them, one elderly Polish Jesuit.

“
I’d like you to meet Genie Godges,” David said.

“
OH!” the elderly Polish Jesuit raised his voice and eyebrows. “Are you related to Joseph Godges?”

Genie’s jaw dropped.

The priest, who had befriended Dad decades earlier, was one of the Jesuits whom Stan had greatly admired for having rejected the vow of poverty.

The next morning, the priest called Dad and told him everything he needed to know. “Do you realize who your daughter is going out with?”

“
Who?”

“
The biggest playboy at Loyola Marymount University! He’s a horrible person! He dates one girl after another year after year!”

The priest confirmed Dad’s worst fears about his daughter. Like a feral, free-loving hippie hell-bent on disrupting the social order at its core, the social order of responsible parents in solid marriages rearing holy families—the order that Dad had struggled for decades to establish and to maintain in his own home—Genie had “shacked up” with her former professor. They weren’t just housemates. And David Killoran—well, he wasn’t even Catholic, despite his ostensibly holy Irish surname. “He’s not even religious,” the priest snarled over the phone. “He’s agnostic!”

Dad located the clandestine Hermosa Beach address of the infiltrating godless professor and conducted a reconnaissance mission outside the home. Spotting Genie’s green GMC pickup truck in the driveway, Dad corroborated the cohabitation of his daughter with the university’s “biggest playboy.”

The phone rang at the Hermosa Beach home a few days later. The one time that David answered the phone was the one time that Mom had called. “I want to talk to my daughter right now!” Mom demanded.

“
Uh, Genie,” David muttered. “It’s your mother.”

“
Hi, Mom,” Genie chirped.

“
You PIG!” Mom slammed the phone down on the receiver.

Dad went directly to the university president. “This is a disgrace!” Dad roared over the phone. “I did not send my daughter to Loyola Marymount University for her to be dating and living with this non-Catholic! This has to stop!”

The university president called the chairmen of the English department. “What should we do?” he asked them.

“
Nothing,” they replied.

So Loyola did nothing.

There was only one thing left for Dad to do. He invited Genie home for a family dinner on a Sunday evening late in the summer of 1978 when he knew that everyone in the family who was still under his authority would be home. Everyone but Stan and Joe. By then, Stan had been stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, having gained his rightful independence as a reliable ally fighting the good fight against tooth decay in the U.S. Army. Joe, meanwhile, had distanced himself from the family fold by opting to attend a non-Jesuit university. Joe was not available for dinner that evening.

But Genie was. The most traitorous of all, she was to be the subject of a public lashing. In Dad’s mind, she had stooped far lower than attending a non-Jesuit university; she had disgraced a Jesuit university. It was time for Dad to circle the wagons around the three children who still fell within his sphere of influence: Geri, 23, who was often visiting home while living at Hirschhorn Manor; Mary Jo, 19, who was then attending Loyola Marymount University herself; and me, 16, not yet a junior in high school.

In the middle of the meal, when each of us had a vested interest in remaining planted behind our plates, Dad issued his pronouncement. “Genie has been living in sin and scandalizing the university!” he charged. “Because she has chosen to lead this sinful lifestyle, from this day forward she will be banned from this house and cut from the will!”

Mary Jo and I dropped our forks.

Geri froze.

I looked incredulously at Dad, helplessly at Genie, and desperately at Mom for some kind of compromise. None emerged. Mom stayed silent, tacitly agreeing with Dad as she fumbled nervously about the kitchen. I had always looked forward to Genie’s homecomings, but now she might not come home ever again. I looked into Genie’s eyes directly across the table from mine. I dropped my chin and tried not to cry.

Genie couldn’t take it. She broke into convulsing tears of her own so that I didn’t have to. “All . . . right . . . Dad,” she heaved each word in a moist, gravelly crescendo, inhaling between each word. “I . . . don’t . . . want . . . any . . . of . . . your . . . MONEY!” She flung that last word at him like a dagger. He had tried to use money as a weapon, but she exposed its futility. She was no longer an 18-year-old girl who could be cowed by his financial manipulation. She was a 24-year-old woman with a career of her own.

The battle lines were drawn.

“
In that case,” Dad shouted at Genie, “it is the will of God that you be banned from this house and blacklisted from this family!”

“
But I haven’t done anything wrong!” she cried.

“
Carnal love is morally acceptable only within the context of a marriage blessed by God!” he delivered a forceful sermon. “Any deviation from that rule leads only to promiscuity and sinfulness. You have broken that rule. As a responsible father of four younger children, it is my duty to enforce that rule.”

“
But I haven’t just shacked up with a guy,” she argued. “We plan to get married anyway.”

“
Then why don’t you?”

“
Because David’s not ready yet. He’s ten years older than I am. He’s already settled in life. He needs to be absolutely sure about this before committing to marriage.”

“
If he’s not ready by now,” Dad dismissed her with a wave of the hand, “he’ll never be ready. If you really loved each other, you’d marry each other.”

“
We DO love each other!” Genie defended her honor. “My love for David is just as great, if not greater, than the love found in most marriages. I DO see my devotion to him as a lifelong commitment. And my love for him does NOT need to be restricted!”

Dad remained unimpressed. “Your mother and I have sacrificed to build an upstanding Catholic family and struggled to teach the six of you kids clear standards of right and wrong. Because you have chosen to set such an immoral example instead, you are no longer welcome here. You’ve become a bad influence, and nobody needs it!”

“
I’m leading a good and moral life, Dad, even if it breaks your rules!”

He held his ground. She held hers. There would be no peace.

She realized that if she were going to be true to herself, then she could no longer be part of the family. She could accept the excommunication from her parents, but the fact that they were also trying to cut her off from her brothers and sisters was too much for her to bear.

She pushed her chair behind her and stood straight up so that she could yell straight down at Dad. “You can’t do this to us, Dad! You can have your MONEY! But you can’t do this to US!” She turned to leave, went to her bedroom for perhaps the very last time, grabbed her keys, flew out the kitchen door, and slammed it shut behind her.

“
This is crazy,” the 19-year-old Mary Jo thought to herself. As soon as Genie ran out the door, Mary Jo followed suit and made a beeline for Genie’s truck across the street. “If the house is dividing,” Mary Jo decided, “so be it.” Mary Jo would split with Genie. No doubt about it. “If she’s leaving, so am I.” Mary Jo just wanted to make sure she could catch Genie before she drove off.

I didn’t know if I’d just lost my big sister forever. Or maybe two of them. I tried to stop my sniveling 16-year-old tears from dripping into my plate. I struggled to wriggle free from my chair. As I pushed back the chair and cautiously shifted my balance to walk away, I caught a rare glimpse of self-control at the opposite corner of the table.