The Girls from Ames (8 page)

She was horrified. She asked Jane what she should do. Should she confess to her parents that she had a party? Jane, a habitual good girl herself, argued for honesty, and Marilyn agreed. Marilyn couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t tell her dad right away. He was on call at the hospital emergency room, and she went to see him. “I did something very wrong,” she told him, and then it all came out in one run-on confession. “I had a party, Dad, with lots of kids, I’m so sorry, and something happened, the plate-glass window in the family room is broken, really, Dad, I don’t know what to say, except that I’ll pay whatever I have to pay to fix it.”

Her father listened to her story without saying a word. Then he shrugged. “Well, I know you learned something from this whole experience,” he said. “I bet you won’t do it again.” He told her he’d see if their homeowners’ insurance policy would cover the damage. Just before she left, he gave her a hug and told her he loved her and appreciated that she’d been honest with him.

As soon as Marilyn walked in the house and saw the window again, she burst into tears—tears of relief that this was off her chest and that her father had been so forgiving and understanding. Her older sister Sara asked why she was crying, and Marilyn pointed to the window. Sara took a closer look. “Well, what do you know?” she said. Turned out, this “crack” was actually a long strand of tinsel from the McCormacks’ Christmas tree that had somehow adhered to the plate-glass window. Maybe some kid had soaked it with beer and stuck it there. Whatever had happened, there was no crack in the window at all. Marilyn called her father. She called Jane. She also called herself an idiot for confessing so quickly and unnecessarily. She could have gotten away with the whole party! And yet, a good part of her was glad she had gone to see her dad about this. She had learned something about him, about how he’d react when she disappointed him. At the same time, he had learned something about her and her conscience.

 

 

H
earing about how Dr. McCormack reacted to Marilyn’s lapses left the other Ames girls envious. Somehow her dad was a mixture of square and cool—sort of like Marilyn. In their own homes, some of the girls had to go to diabolical lengths to keep their parents in the dark about their activities. More than once, they’d impersonate their own mothers on the phone, to give reassuring explanations about what they were up to. Once, Kelly wanted to go to Iowa’s Lake Okoboji with Karla and two male friends. They planned to stay by themselves in a summer home owned by one of the boy’s parents. Understandably, Kelly’s mother wanted to know: “Will his parents be there?” Kelly told her: “Oh yeah, for sure. Just call Karla’s mom. She has the details.”

Kelly quickly called Karla, told her to expect the call, and hung up. Two minutes later, the phone rang at Karla’s house. “Hello, this is Mrs. Derby,” Karla said in her best mature-woman’s voice. She proceeded to reassure Kelly’s mom. “Don’t worry about a thing. Kelly will be fine.” Kelly’s mother said she appreciated the call, and off the girls went.

The girls knew Marilyn was too much of a Goody Two-shoes to try something like that. But they also knew that part of what attracted her to the larger group was her unstated urge to be in the vicinity of thrill-seekers. She was a funny mix: careful, reserved, prudish. And yet she had a longing for adventure. She also had a father who, given his eagerness to teach sexuality, seemed to be giving her more than a few green lights.

The girls, of course, found that side of him fascinating and quirky. One day, when they were in their teens, he sat some of them down in his family room for a sex education speech. He used a pointer and diagrams on the chalkboard he kept there, and spoke so frankly that the girls blushed. They still giggle about it today. They have shorthand references for what happened that night: “Marilyn’s Father’s S-E-X Talk” and “The Day We Got Too Much New Information.” Cathy recalls leaving Marilyn’s house shaking her head and saying to the other girls, “Wow, what was that? Did that just happen? Did you hear what I heard?”

Marilyn’s father was unlike most of the other girls’ parents in another respect. Not only did he understand the hormonal urges of teens, he also believed in accommodating them—within reason. There was the time Marilyn was setting up for a party, this one with her parents’ permission, and her dad offered a suggestion. “You need more than one couch over there by the fireplace,” he said. “Pull a couple more couches over there. You can’t have just one couple getting cozy.”

Kelly’s father, the junior-high guidance counselor, oversaw sex education presentations at school assemblies. For years, teachers had made fumbling attempts at addressing the issues. Too often, however, they spoke cryptically, confusing the kids. Proof of that would come during the question-and-answer sessions that followed the talks. Once, a seventh-grader raised his hand and asked: “When adults want to have babies, where do they go to have sex? Do they go to a doctor’s office and do it under the doctor’s supervision?”

Such clueless questions convinced Kelly’s dad that students needed more explicit information. He decided that Dr. McCormack was the man for the job. Dr. McCormack was happy to come to the school with his diagrams and slides. He spoke all about how sex was enjoyable, how feelings of love enhanced it, how using contraception was crucial. He delivered all the key words without flinching. “It’s healthy to have sex,” he’d say, and the kids paid close attention. By the end of his talks, they certainly knew they’d never have to go to a doctor’s office for supervised sex.

 

 

F
or Marilyn, it was exciting being her father’s daughter, but it wasn’t always easy. For one thing, there were high expectations. Her older siblings all performed well in school. She felt she had no choice but to equal them. And she was always aware that adults she met could be the parents of her dad’s patients. Being “the doctor’s daughter” could feel like a burden, especially when some of the other Ames girls seemed to care more about good times than what adults thought of them.

At the same time, Marilyn was enormously proud of the impact her father was having on his patients and community. One of Dr. McCormack’s patients was Jane’s older brother, who in tenth grade was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Dr. McCormack oversaw the boy’s treatment and was a reassuring presence for Jane’s worried parents. A bond developed between the two families that remained in place for decades. Maybe it was because Dr. McCormack had lost a son—and his children had lost a brother—that he gave so much of himself to this case. Jane’s brother survived and is a doctor himself today, crediting Dr. McCormack as his role model.

When they were young, both Jane and Marilyn knew that part of what they loved about each other was how comfortable they felt with each other’s family. They would invite one another on week-long summer vacations. They could raid each other’s refrigerator without asking permission, or lounge around each other’s house in their pajamas all day, or take over each other’s kitchen to cook whatever concoction struck them at the moment. Marilyn’s diaries are filled with detailed descriptions of meals she and Jane made together, often serving them to their families. Almost always, Marilyn ended her culinary tales with the same word and punctuation: “Yum!”

It was reassuring to both girls to know that there were people outside of their immediate families who loved them and wanted the best for them. In fact, all of the Ames girls’ parents had a similar connection with at least one or two or three of the girls.

Given her attachment to Jane and her family, Marilyn was curious to learn about Judaism. Jane’s father was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and unlike most Jewish-Americans, he had roots in the United States going back to the early 1840s. Two of his great-grandfathers fought in the Civil War, one for the North and one for the South.

Jane’s mother, Hanna, was not American-born. She left Nazi Germany in 1937, just shy of her second birthday, and her family settled in Lincoln, where there were about five hundred Jewish families. Hanna’s family was lucky. Many other relatives, including her father’s parents, were unsuccessful in their quest to obtain exit permits and visas. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, they wrote increasingly desperate letters to children and cousins who had emigrated to the United States, Palestine, Egypt, Cuba and Argentina, seeking their assistance in surmounting the bureaucratic hurdles. More than a dozen of these relatives never escaped and died in concentration camps. Some fifteen hundred of their letters remained boxed up at Jane’s grandmother’s house, their pleas too painful to talk about. (In more recent years, Jane’s parents began translating the letters and presenting the family’s story in schools, helping to explain the Holocaust.)

Jane’s parents knew each other as toddlers in Lincoln and began dating in high school. They married in 1957 and moved to Ames in 1962, when Jane’s dad was hired at Iowa State. There were only about twelve Jewish families in town then, which was a challenge. On the East or West Coasts of the United States, Jews could drop their kids off at well-staffed Hebrew schools. They could nod off during services in giant synagogues, letting the rabbis and cantors lead their services. But in Ames, Jews had to roll up their sleeves and get involved—reading the Torah, crafting sermons, taking turns teaching the community’s few kids at Sunday school, keeping Judaism alive. “If we’re going to be Jewish in Ames, we have to do it all ourselves,” Jane’s father would explain to Marilyn. “There’s no magical religious specialist to do it for us. But that’s good. Because it forces us to figure out why we’re here and what we believe. In Ames, we know who we are, because in a way, we’ve chosen to be Jews.”

In the 1960s, some Ames residents had never even met a Jew before, and a few would say objectionable things. A town leader once announced at a public hearing that he had gotten a great price from a supplier. “I was able to Jew him down,” he said proudly, and couldn’t understand why a Jewish woman in attendance found his remarks offensive. Mostly, though, the Christians in town were welcoming and accommodating, and Jane rarely felt self-conscious about being Jewish. One big reason for this was that the other Ames girls seemed unfazed by her religion. Especially when they were young, it hardly even registered with them.

For years, the tiny Jewish congregation in Ames held services in the lounge of a Baptist church. Later, as the Jewish population grew to sixty families, they moved into a former bowling alley. Jane didn’t have a bat mitzvah. Instead, she was confirmed at age fifteen, with the Ames girls at the ceremony. The confirmation was a reminder to them that Jane was different, and they were curious and respectful; for some of the girls, so accustomed to church, it was as if they were given entrée into a secret society.

Dr. McCormack was a spiritual man whose faith was based on the wonder of life and the daily practice of the Golden Rule, rather than the precepts of organized religion. He appreciated differences in people’s beliefs, and would tell Jane and her parents that he admired the Jewish people because so many of them valued education and had stable families.

Marilyn liked to ask Jane questions about Judaism. She followed along closely when she was invited to Passover seders at Jane’s house, and she thought of Jane when she stepped into the world beyond Ames and saw hostility toward Jews. When Marilyn was sixteen, she went alone to Europe for a summer tour, and made a stop at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. Stepping through the bookcases to the Frank family hideaway, she began crying, unable to get Jane out of her head. That night in her journal, she described how enraged she felt. She had the first homicidal urges of her life. If anyone ever comes for Jane and her family, she vowed, “I will kill them first!”

 

 

F
or Jane and Marilyn, being exposed to each other’s family offered not only lessons in cultural differences, but also in how families overcome obstacles in their own way. Jane saw firsthand that in the decades after losing his son, Dr. McCormack was able to persevere and develop this contagious positive attitude. He came to look at life as a glorious adventure, and he threw himself into hiking, skiing, geology. One of his favorite words was “magnificent.” “Did you catch the sunset tonight? It was magnificent!” “That concerto? Magnificent.” “Marilyn, your friends look magnificent!”

And when Marilyn was feeling vulnerable or afraid, Jane always encouraged her to talk to her dad. So often, Dr. McCormack knew just the right words to say. A few nights before Marilyn was about to head off to college, she went into her parents’ bedroom. Her dad was there alone, and she asked if he had a minute.

She’d been accepted at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Jane would be going to Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. “I’m not sure I want to go so far away,” Marilyn said flatly, and a good part of her meant it. “I don’t know that I can be away from my friends or from Ames. I just don’t know that I can be away from home.”

She was also worried about how her parents would cope with her absence. “Won’t you be sad when I go?”

“Sad?” her dad replied. “I won’t be sad. Not sad at all. In fact, I can hardly wait!”

He told her that he was thrilled when he thought about the “magnificent” adventures that awaited her. He said her friends, especially Jane, would remain in her heart, and she could write them every day if she wanted to. She could call them from the dorm phone. She could visit them. She could conjure up her happy memories of them. As for Ames, it would always be there, locked in the middle of Iowa, waiting for her. “Mom and I will be here, too,” he said.

Marilyn was near tears. “But you’ll be so far away from me.”

“No, don’t think of it that way,” her dad told her. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’re going to keep you at the end of our fishing line. And if you ever need anything, you just give a little tug and we’ll reel you back in.”