Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (55 page)

Dad kept calling. “Have you given any more thought to an annulment?”

“
I still hope to reunite with my wife,” Joe told Dad, “and I’m praying the Lord’s Prayer to help make that happen.”

Dad couldn’t argue with the Lord’s Prayer.

At first, it was easy for Joe to deflect the nudging calls from Dad. But then her divorce papers arrived at Fort Polk, and Joe lost his argument along with his wife.

He contacted the Catholic chaplain on base and prepared the paperwork for an annulment. “I did it partly to please Dad,” Joe explained in hindsight, “partly to stay in good graces with the church, partly to make myself available if I fell in love with a hardcore Catholic girl, and partly to help me close a painful chapter of my life.”

But Joe thought the paperwork was stupid. As he answered the dreary inquiries about his personal flaws, he saw that there were three types of reasons to justify his annulment. Either he had been physically disabled at the time of marriage. Or he had been mentally impaired at the time of marriage. Or he had been psychologically immature at the time of marriage. He clearly hadn’t been physically disabled. “And so I had to testify either that I’d been too stupid to realize what I was getting myself into or that I’d been too immature to handle the responsibility. Yet by testifying to my stupidity or immaturity, the church would let me try again! The whole concept seemed stupid to me. But you did it because there was no real reason against it.”

Dad was delighted—even honored—when Joe asked him to write a “witness statement” to the chaplain in support of the case. Dad conducted research into the pertinent facts. He wrote and rewrote the statement. He wanted to bolster the case with fresh evidence from Father Ferraro, who had performed the marriage and therefore would have eminently credible knowledge of the personality defects of the newly divorced.

Father Ferraro had since been assigned to Vatican City, but that was no deterrent for Dad. Extreme circumstances called for extreme measures. So Dad flew standby to Rome in 1982 and tracked down the priest in the Vatican. They had a three-hour dinner together to review the annulment proceedings.

“
Your dad was very polite, very respectful, and very proper,” Father Ferraro remembered the dinner in Rome. “I felt affection for him. But he was also very insistent, very persevering in getting done what he needed to get done. It was as though their salvation was at stake. He wanted to become an annulment expert right then. It was his mission at the moment. To save Joe.”

“
Don’t you think they were awfully young when they got married?” Dad asked the priest during the dinner.

“
I did consider them to be quite young when I married them,” Father Ferraro admitted. “But I complied with their wishes to be married before the eyes of God.”

“
Don’t you think they were also quite immature?”

“
I wouldn’t say that. And you wouldn’t need to say that in your statement, either. Anyone who’d been married for that short of time at that young of an age is a slam dunk. It’s an easy case. Because of their age and the length of their marriage, the annulment is very likely.”

Dad found this testimony—given by a priest in the shadow of Saint Peter’s Basilica, the very founding rock of the church—to be extremely useful. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” Dad vigorously shook Father Ferraro’s hand at the end of dinner.

As they left the crowded restaurant, Father Ferraro left Dad with just one cautionary observation: “It looks like
you
want the annulment more than Joe.”

Dad neither agreed nor disagreed. He flew home, made the final revisions to his statement, had it witnessed by the pastor of Saint Lawrence Martyr Church, and then mailed the statement to the chaplain in Louisiana, with a copy thereof to Joe. The annulment seemed like an open and shut case.

Until the scatterbrained chaplain at Fort Polk lost the paperwork. “I don’t know where it is,” he apologized to Joe. “I’m truly sorry.”

“
I did my part,” Joe informed Dad over the phone. “I filled out the paperwork. I sent it in. It’s lost. And I’m not gonna do it again.”

Dad was stunned. “Have you forgotten the spiritual consequences?” he asked Joe. “Please resubmit the paperwork. Please restart the process.”

But the paperwork had soured Joe against the process. In fact, the paperwork had begun to sour Joe against the entire church. He would risk an eternal argument with Dad. He would risk falling out of good graces with the church. He would risk falling in love with a hardcore Catholic girl. But he would not fill out that paperwork again. For Joe, the absurdity of the lost paperwork typified the absurdity of the whole annulment process.

“
Here,” he characterized it sarcastically years later. “Check a box to indicate how God never put you two together: (a) you never consummated the relationship; (b) you were mentally or physically disabled; (c) you were immature; (d) you were spiritually underdeveloped; or (e) you failed to fully comprehend the nature of the lifelong commitment. Duh!” he rolled his eyes to heaven and back. “Those could apply to anybody!”

And if anybody could get an annulment, then Joe felt it meant nothing. He felt that most of the criteria lacked criteria. He felt it was doubly absurd that a church tribunal would presume to act as an objective judge of such intensely subjective criteria. The church began to lose its credibility with Joe.

So he pulled back from a second swing at the paperwork and decided to let the Great Big Umpire in the sky make the call. Whenever a pitch was just too hard to read, the batter was often better off pulling back from the plate and letting the umpire call it as he saw it. Joe checked his swing and put his faith in a higher power.

Understanding the game of baseball is the best way to understand Joe’s view of the world—and his view of his place in it. There is no other major sport with such starkly distinct roles for offense and defense.

On offense in baseball, each individual must step up to the plate, take the initiative, and accept sole responsibility for his performance. It doesn’t matter what the other teammates in the dugout say or do. The batter can get on base only by himself.

“
Hey, batter, batter!” we used to chant from the bleachers at Joe’s Little League games, chiding each boy at bat with the obvious message: “This play comes down to you, buddy. You’re on your own. You alone will account for the consequences.”

As the batter racks up his balls and strikes, no more than three teammates might be on base already. If the batter makes a hit or draws a walk, he advances himself and perhaps the other players, allowing everyone on the team to benefit from the ability of one more player to hold his own. If the batter advances the position of a teammate at the expense of his own advancement, the action is rightly deemed a “sacrifice.” Though recognized as noble, a sacrifice is an exception to the rule. The rule is that the batter is alone in the face of a hostile foe.

On defense in baseball, however, nine players with unique jobs to perform must coordinate their efforts for the good of the team. Each defensive run, catch, throw, and tag depends on the runs, catches, throws, and tags of every other player. Each defensive player takes responsibility for a separate segment of territory, but no territory can be defended if any single segment is neglected. Once on the field together, the nine governors of their sovereign grassy domains must put aside their selfish agendas to guarantee the common defense, or else they will be vanquished together.

On offense in the game of baseball, it’s all about self-reliance. On defense in the game of baseball, it’s all about mutual dependence. The great all-American paradoxical game of baseball swings back and forth for at least nine innings of pushing and pulling between the polar extremes of individualism and communitarianism.

With regard to the annulment, nobody was surprised with Joe’s determination to check his swing at the plate. He had become a pro at playing by the rules and accepting the consequences. As a kid, he had chosen sports over music, knowing he’d have to buy his own gear. For college, he had defected to a Protestant school, knowing he’d have to pay his own way. As an adult, he had snubbed an easy annulment, knowing he’d have to distance himself from the church. Each time, he’d stepped up to the plate to play offense.

Joe was more self-reliant than ever in 1985. At the age of 28, having completed his active duty in the army, he was armed with one of the country’s first master’s degrees in physical therapy. The handsome young officer was dating girlfriends nationwide, from the “happy jazz” nightclubs along the Paseo del Rio in San Antonio to the ski slopes of the Rocky Mountains to the canoeing expeditions through the Louisiana bayous. He was performing an innovative deep-tissue massage technique, called Rolfing, in the country’s three meccas of massage: Berkeley, Boulder, and Santa Fe. He remained in the army reserves as a captain so he could enjoy the annual “vacations” of reserve duty and cycling for two weeks in the Arizona mountains near Fort Huachuca. He could live happily, work irregularly, and retire intermittently just about anywhere he pleased. He was free.

He had no interest in settling into a regular job, confining himself to a single city, or paying rent for an apartment. So he camped out with Mom and Dad in the morning shadow of the church in Redondo Beach and flew away whenever he felt like it.

While at home, he noticed that Dad started worrying more and more about routine things. At 61, Dad grew increasingly nervous about matters of money and morality and ever more overwhelmed by the pressure of juggling the two. Other than Mom, Joe was the only one in the family who witnessed the full sequence of events. The events began months before Dad cornered Mary Jo in a back room of the same apartment in the fall of 1985, and the events continued long after I drove home from Berkeley in the fall of 1986.

From Joe’s perspective, Dad’s initial symptoms appeared to be standard behavior. Dad and Mom always refused money that didn’t belong to them. Whenever grocery store clerks or health insurance companies refunded them too much money, they gave it back. Honest business. Simple as that.

But Dad’s conscience began to hound him in the spring of 1985. He calculated that he had received too much money in mental disability insurance payments over the entire previous decade of having received the disability benefits. According to his calculations, painstakingly scratched in pencil at his old doghouse desk, the insurance company had sent him nearly $5,000 in excess of what he had deserved. He could not live with himself. He had to pay the money back.

Dad called the disability insurance company to report the error.

A company employee disputed Dad’s calculations. “According to our records, Mr. Godges, the payments have been accurate all along.”

Dad checked his numbers again. He called back several times and argued at length with company officials over long-distance phone calls to New York. He wrote the officials detailed letters outlining why he needed to reimburse the company $5,000.

The officials stood by their numbers.

Dad kept arguing with them.

“
Dad,” Joe put it bluntly one night, “you’re proving to them that you’re disabled. You’re causing them to spend more than $5,000 just so you can send them $5,000.”

“
But it’s wrong,” Dad stood his ground. His body shook. He seemed to be filled with both valor and fear. “I want only what I’m entitled to, not any more.”

“
So just put the darn thing in a separate bank account,” Joe suggested, “and don’t spend it. Tell ’em they can come get it if they want it.”

But the money drove Dad nuts. He continued to badger the company officials, who continued to decline his money. He sent them a check anyway. They sent it back.

Joe didn’t mince words. “Dad, they are laughing at you.”

But derision in
this
life meant redemption in the next. And it was well worth it. “If I don’t pay the money back,” Dad paused, his voice cracking, “I’ll go to hell.”

“
But they seem to know what they’re doing,” said Joe.

“
Oh, no,” said Dad. “I’m right.” He dropped his chin. “I can’t go to hell.”

As far as Joe could see, Dad might have been battling demons, but they weren’t demons based in reality. Dad lost his credibility with Joe.

The torment worsened for Dad. Nothing could shield his scrupulous conscience from the immense guilt provoked by a completely ordinary encounter at a Torrance supermarket. Upon paying his bill in the checkout line and walking out the door of the Gemco store on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Hawthorne Boulevard, Dad crossed paths with a security guard. Doing his job at the exit, the security guard apparently gave Dad a curious look. And that was all it took.

“
The security guard looked at me like he knew who I was,” Dad reported breathlessly to Mom when he returned home. “Like he thought I’d stolen something. Like he was going to put me in jail.”

Dad believed that the cops were after him. He feared they might show up at the door at any moment to take him away. Nothing Mom said could convince him otherwise.

He started imagining the cops throwing him behind bars. He became hopeless, lethargic, and resigned to his fate. His gloom deepened from week to week and from month to month. He couldn’t see a reason to live anymore. So he started preparing to die. He stopped eating. He lost weight. He stopped bathing and taking care of himself. His bedroom began to smell. Mom kept opening the windows. Dad kept closing them. He declined mentally and physically from the summer of 1985 to the fall of 1986.