Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (58 page)

Her intuitions were almost always right. They served her far better than any kind of fickle logic. She agonized the most on those rare occasions when her intuitions failed to give her a straight answer. At those times, she talked to lots of people and found herself changing her mind as quickly as any person or event could convince her of a different way of seeing something. She could never be accused of being inflexible.

Dad resigned himself to Mom’s indecisiveness. “It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind,” he often teased her.

She never relinquished that prerogative.

For at least the first 19 years of their marriage, Dad set the agenda, and Mom followed. “He’s a good man and a good provider for the children,” she told people. “Things could be much worse.”

Sometimes she differed with him intuitively on matters of religious dogma. But if hypothetical questions arose in a family discussion about such arcane matters, she squelched her doubts in deference to a higher authority. “If it’s good enough for the pope,” she used to say, “it’s good enough for me.”

That handy maxim allowed her to avoid conflicts with Dad when they weren’t necessary or when she wasn’t prepared. But once in a while, his train of logic collided so forcefully with her intuitions that she could no longer deflect a conflict. At those times, she had only two ways to defend herself. One way was to repel his force of intellect with an overpowering force of emotion. The other way was to leave.

Nothing polarized Mom and Dad as much as Geri’s mental illness.

The schism rankled for decades, ever since that night in 1969 when Dad and Mom ended up arguing about the illness so intensely in the playroom that Stan jumped between them and threatened to call the cops. When it came to Geri and her mental illness, both Dad and Mom felt like they were going it alone. From his perspective, Dad was the only one who loved Geri enough to be patient, understanding, and encouraging enough to help her make something of herself. From her perspective, Mom was the only one who realized that Geri needed the kind of help that nobody in the family—no matter how loving, patient, understanding, and encouraging—could give. Dad believed that Mom was abandoning Geri time and time again. Mom believed that Dad was setting up Geri for crushing disappointments, if not hospitalizations, time and time again.

For years, Dad argued that Geri could live at home if she wanted, and Geri always wanted to live at home. So she came home to live, at the age of 25, in June 1980—but wound up in a hospital four months later. She again came home to live in December 1980—but again wound up in a hospital four months later. Tensions mounted the most between Mom and Dad during those months when Geri was living at home as an abjectly dependent young adult. I was the only other person living at home at the time.

Geri knew how to make Dad angry with Mom. “Dad,” Geri grumbled during a dinner prepared by Mom, “Mom never thinks I can do anything for myself.”

Dad consoled Geri. “Of course, you can do plenty of things for yourself.”

Mom kept quiet but paused as she washed the dishes. She stared out the window, turned her rubber-gloved palms toward the sky, and tried to comprehend how she could be doing so many things for Geri only to be criticized for thinking that Geri couldn’t do things for herself.

Geri also knew how to back Mom into a corner. “Mom,” Geri turned her head toward the kitchen, grousing. “Dad says I can get married and have children. That I’m just as good as all my brothers and sisters. And that I’m able to have children, too.”

Mom could suppress her feelings toward them no longer: “Face reality, dammit!”

“
Zhona!” Dad yelled. “Must you yell at her?”

Geri growled under her breath: “Bitch.”

The outcome was always the same. Mom and Dad were fighting a battle with no winner. Whenever Mom yelled at Geri, Mom proved to Dad that she was intolerant. Whenever Dad yelled
on behalf
of Geri, Dad proved to Mom that he was in denial.

Geri lost, too. She couldn’t handle the pressure from either of them. She felt underrated by Mom’s exclamations and overwhelmed by Dad’s expectations. Whenever Geri moved back home, she wound up back in the hospital a few months later.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, as Geri migrated between hospitals and board-and-care homes and finally settled into a stable medication regimen at one of the homes, Mom watched her five other children grapple with their own priorities in life and find their own places in the world. She became introspective as she watched from afar.

She watched Stan, who had worked so hard to become a dentist and an officer, realize, as he approached 40, that a newborn son was more important than any material riches he could have ever imagined. She watched Genie, who had bucked tradition by living with an agnostic man before marriage, baptize her two sons and raise them Catholic anyway. She watched Mary Jo and me carve out decent lives despite social and religious presumptions about the indecency of lesbian and gay people. And she watched Joe uphold the sanctity of the family, even as he violated the sanctity of a sacrament.

All of her children, in their own ways, had struggled with right and wrong. All of her children, in good conscience, had done what they felt they needed to do without being reckless about it. All of her children had made mistakes along the way, but she didn’t expect her children to be saints.

Most of all, her children loved one another, including Geri, who was doing her best as well. Nothing was more important in life than loving one another and doing your best. Mom was wildly proud of her children. She couldn’t ask for anything more in life, certainly not from her kids.

“
Now let’s enjoy them,” she told Dad. “We have so much to be grateful for.”

Over the same decade, Mom watched three of her sisters die: Aunt Bessie of colon cancer in 1983 at the age of 63, Aunt Leola of lung cancer in 1990 at the age of 73, and Aunt Mafalda of colon cancer in 1991 at the age of 75. All three deaths were hard on Mom, but the death of Aunt Mafalda was the hardest. It was like Grandma Di Gregorio dying all over again—but worse. Mom cried and cried and cried and just couldn’t stop.

In some ways, Aunt Mafalda had been the real mom for Mom ever since she was a kid. If it weren’t for Aunt Mafalda, Mom would’ve had nobody to translate the Italian of her parents in the 1920s and 1930s. If it weren’t for Aunt Mafalda, Mom would’ve never moved to California in 1944. Over the ensuing 47 years, Aunt Mafalda and Uncle Bill had spent nearly every Christmas with Mom and the rest of us.

Aunt Mafalda never had kids of her own, but she treated Mom like a daughter and the rest of us like grandkids. She devoted weeks of her time each year to making doilies, desserts, pillows, and Christmas ornaments for all of us. When Grandma Di Gregorio died in 1973, Aunt Mafalda became the matriarch of the family. As Aunt Mafalda neared her own death in 1991, Mom had no one else to look up to.

Mom literally lost her footing. She lost her knees. She could not walk through the parking lot of the hospital where Aunt Mafalda lay dying. Genie hoisted Mom’s arm around her shoulders, conveyed Mom from the car to the hospital room, did the same from the hospital room to the car, and then set Mom down in the car seat. She was 65.

Aunt Mafalda spent her last days at home under hospice care. Mom stayed with her in the bedroom, determined to accompany her until the very end.

On that evening, as the stillness of midnight approached, Mom fell asleep in the bedroom chair. She was awakened by a cold blast of wind that blew through the windowless bedroom at the moment that Aunt Mafalda died.

“
VROOM!” Mom sliced her hand through the air at full force. The departure was that tangible.

At the funeral Mass, Genie stood next to Mom, propping her up in the pew. Mom could still not stand on her own.

At the reception, family members and friends shared memories of Aunt Mafalda.

“
She lived simply. She dressed like a classy Gypsy in long flowing black clothes, beaded black veils, and bead jewelry that she’d made herself.”

“
She adhered closely to the fundamental truths.”

“‘
We’re all gettin’ older,’ she always used to say. ‘Life is short. Life is gonna go by so fast. Make the best of the time you have here. Make sure you’re ready for the inevitable.’”

She was ready for the inevitable. “I’m looking forward to seeing my sisters,” she had reassured her visitors.

“
She was at peace,” the guests at the reception concurred.

She had passed along one final message to Mary Jo. “If your mother outlives your father, she’s gonna be fine.”

Mary Jo passed along the message. “Mafalda said you’re gonna be fine, Mom.”

“
Oh, really?” Mom answered, struggling to regain her ground. “She said that?”

A few days later, Mary Jo passed along the message again. “Mafalda said you’re gonna be fine, Mom.”

“
Oh, really?” Mom answered again, still regaining her ground. “She said that?”

The more siblings Mom lost, the more she wanted to cherish her own kids. “We’ve got beautiful kids and beautiful grandkids,” she beseeched Dad, pressing her palms together. “What more could you want? Now let’s enjoy them!”

But Dad’s work was never done. Less than a year after he had lost the battle of the scandalous wedding of Joe and Arlette in May 1994, Dad began preparing for his next mission. As he turned 71 in January 1995, more than eight years after his nine shock treatments, he determined that it was his duty to liberate Geri from her board-and-care home and to win her independence. “I will not allow her to decay in a human warehouse for the rest of her life!” he recited his oath to each of us. It became his war cry.

“
He always had to be fighting for something,” Mom rubbed her eyes in reflection. “When there was nothing left to fight for, he had nothing left to live for.”

His was a lonely crusade. Mom did not want it to happen. None of us kids did, either, except for Geri. The rest of us knew that it had taken 26 years to get her stabilized where she was. We all agreed with Mom that removing Geri from her board-and-care home would be the worst possible thing for her. “She’ll have to start all over again,” we warned one another, “as soon as Dad fails and she winds up back in the hospital again.”

But Dad was driven by a belief that none of us could defile. After 26 years, he still thought that Geri’s hospitalizations had been the result of something far more sinister than mental illness. According to a 1992 psychiatric evaluation of Geri, “the father thought many of the hospitalizations were due to the mother pushing the daughter out of the house.”

In late January 1995, he made feverish arrangements and phone calls to relocate Geri from her board-and-care home in Los Angeles to somewhere near his home in Seal Beach. He advertised in the local Catholic church bulletin: “Room to Rent Wanted” with “NO kitchen privileges” for a “single, 40-year-old, practicing Catholic lady” who doesn’t smoke, drink, or take drugs “unless prescribed by a doctor.” Please call this number and ask for her father.

Mom was beside herself. She knew that Dad’s crusade was directed, in part, against her. At a loss for what to do, she talked with lots of people. But for the first time in her life, her intuitions told her that talking with others wasn’t enough.

Turning inward, she let her introspection span the arc of her entire life, and she realized that her nearly 70 years of life had been a virtually unbroken string of dependent situations. She had gone from her parents’ house to her big sister’s bungalow to her big brother’s house to her husband’s house. The only break in that pattern was when she rented a cottage alone for a few months right before getting married, and that had been psychologically draining for her. After all those years of depending on other people, Mom concluded that she, not Geri, was the one who needed to become independent.

“
All my life,” she proclaimed to us over the phone, “I learned from you kids. Now, maybe it’s time for me to grow up, too.”

She bought “textbooks” of her own, novels like Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple
and Amy Tan’s
The Joy Luck Club
. Mom found herself riveted by the stories of sisterly resilience and resistance against pan-cultural patterns of patriarchy.

She tuned in to the afternoon talk shows on television. She learned the meaning of the word
misogyny
from Oprah Winfrey. Many of Oprah’s guests were middle-aged or elderly women who talked about how many decades it had taken them to emerge from the shadows of their husbands. Some of the women said they had waited too long—until after their husbands had died—only to find themselves unprepared to take care of themselves in a dizzying world of health insurance policies, tax forms, housing codes, retirement pensions, disability benefits, and scam artists who preyed on the elderly women who were unprepared to manage such things.

Mom made a solemn vow: “It’s time to start taking care of myself
now
.”

Mom knew that the first order of business in taking care of herself was to stick up for herself and her beliefs about what was right, wrong, and reckless with respect to Geri. But how could Mom command the attention of Dad, who distrusted her on this issue like no other? The answer dawned on her: the same way he had commanded the attention of defiant family members for decades, from the time he kicked Taco out of the house to the time he kicked Genie out of the house to the time he kicked himself out of Joe’s house. Each time, Dad had delivered an ultimatum. It seemed to be one form of communication that he understood well. Mom decided to give him one.