Thing of Beauty (4 page)

There is perhaps no more significant time in a girl’s life than the age of eleven, when she is poised on the gangplank of adolescence and her body is about to confirm what her mother has always insisted—that girls are different from boys. It is a time that researchers in female development have come to single out as the pivotal “moment of resistance” against societal forces to which most girls eventually succumb.

And there probably had never been a more confusing time for a girl to turn eleven than in 1971, the year Ms.magazine first appeared on the newsstand and
All in the Family’s
Edith and Gloria Bunker first began debating feminist issues on television. Politics, The Pill and Pantyhose were conspiring to free women socially, sexually and comfortably. But, it was one thing to be an adult woman in 1971 and sense that a female’s place in society might be changing. It was quite another to reach the age when girls are taught to covet their first training bras just as public burning of brassieres became a symbolic sexual protest. When women’s liberation began, Gia was still a Brownie.

Even for girls in the most supportive households, it was a time of dramatically mixed signals. It wasn’t easy to become a woman when everyone seemed surer of what a woman
wasn’t
going to be anymore than what she
was.
In what was left of the Carangi household, a woman’s place was more precarious than ever. Gia was both the youngest child and now the only female in a house of very disoriented, and even vengeful, men.

It was a physically bruising time for the entire extended family, as everyone waited out what they initially believed to be a temporary separation. Joe and his brother Dan were convinced that Kathleen had abandoned her family for another man. “I saw her about a week after she left,” Dan recalled, “and I told her it was one thing to leave the boys but she had no right leaving Gia. She said, ‘You don’t understand, I have my own life to take care of.’ She was running with a bartender, a guy who knew my brother.”

Kathleen remembered that time quite differently. “I didn’t leave him for someone else or anything like that,” she said. “Dan doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t even remember him being around at the time: he was probably out gambling somewhere. He didn’t want Joe to marry me in the first place.

“Sure, I knew this bartender, but I also knew he was a gigolo and I had no intention of marrying him. He was a
bartender
, I knew he couldn’t keep me in the style to which I was accustomed. I convinced my husband I had to get out for my own sanity; he even helped me get my own apartment initially. When I left him he wasn’t aware that I intended
to divorce him off the bat. If he had known, I wouldn’t have lived to get out the door. When it started sinking in that this was for keeps, he started giving me trouble. When I filed for a separation agreement, he threw a ram. I wanted the kids, but I knew he wouldn’t let me have them. He wouldn’t even let me see them. He would call me and threaten me about the lawyers. He came to my apartment once and broke the window to get in to see if I was with someone else.”

The temporary separation began to look more permanent when, a month after she moved out, Kathleen met Henry Sperr at a local bar. Henry had actually been a high school classmate of Kathleen’s, although they hadn’t known each other then. He was now a CPA who had just left the grind of Price Waterhouse to make a career as an independent financial adviser. Beneath his drab accountant’s garb, Henry was nearly as lean and mean as he had been during his high school football days. An auto accident during tax season had left him with a permanent tracheotomy that occasionally made breathing difficult and day-to-day living uncomfortable, but Henry was still a steady, commanding presence, with a ruggedly spent look and a distaste for overly emotional outbursts. He was also a relatively social man, with a growing list of client-friends.

Henry had separated from his wife the year before, and he was already immersed in the growing culture of divorcées, recently single parents, remarried couples and holdout bachelors that was offering a new kind of adult teenagehood—the malt
beverage
shop—for Ozzie and Harriet refugees. In the record books, 1972 would go down as the peak year in U.S. history for remarriage of divorced men and women. Society might not have been quite prepared to embrace this new class of emotionally disenfranchised men and women in their thirties and forties, but the business community was more than willing to create institutions to serve their needs. There were boutiques for those reentering the social scene; bars and clubs where the newly single, and those “cheaters” who weren’t yet ready to make (or unmake) the commitment, might show off their colorful plumage.

It was a lifestyle that Kathleen Carangi immediately took
to, and Henry Sperr was her escort. “Henry swept me off my feet,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that a man could make you feel like that—especially after what I’d been through. I started living with him almost immediately after I met him.”

While all this went on, the Carangi children were the subject of the most concern but the least actual attention. “When Mom first left, we didn’t see her for a while,” said Michael Carangi. “She would call to tell us she loved us. Later she started to come around.”

Kathleen recalled the situation differently. “I know Michael
thinks
there was a time period when I wasn’t around,” she said, “but it isn’t true. Also, he was a boy, Gia was a girl. There were lots of times when I would go over there and Michael would have ten million pals around. I realized that was important to him, so I didn’t bother him … and, really, I don’t remember
any
of them begging for me to come back. For a while Joe wouldn’t let them come to visit me. Then he started letting me have Gia over for dinner.”

In the midst of all this, Joe Carangi felt he had no choice but to maintain his hectic work schedule. The Hoagie City chain was doing well—he would build up business at one shop, sell it off, and open another—but it required his constant attention. He was gone most days before the children rose for school and he often came home late. When he realized that his wife wasn’t coming back, he too began to socialize—he got himself fitted with a hairpiece, bought some new clothes and started staying out even later at night. Although he could afford it, Joe didn’t want to hire anyone to help him take care of the children. So, Joey, Michael and Gia were often left to their own devices. “It was real peanut-butter-for-breakfast time, at least from the way Gia described it,” recalled one friend. “Nobody was paying attention to those kids.”

“We could’ve used some discipline,” said Michael. “Every child needs it. We were allowed to do what we wanted. I could stay out as long as I wanted and nobody would know. I don’t think my parents ever talked to us about sex. In the back of your mind, you want discipline, you want to be told stuff by your parents—just to know that they care and that
they know what you might be going through. Gia was the youngest, the breakup affected her the worst. And I feel girls need more attention than boys anyhow.”

Since Joe’s own mother had died in the mid-sixties, some of the tasks of surrogate motherhood for the Carangi children fell on Kathleen’s mother and four sisters. Because of the wide range in their ages, experiences and religious beliefs, the Adamses were a catalog of the incongruities of womanhood—especially since each was so firm in her disparate perspective. “I never met a family with such strong personalities, especially so many strong women,” recalled one family friend.

Kathleen had been the first in the family to challenge her mother’s strictness. “My mother said she was so
defiant
when she was a child—none of her other girls were like that,” recalled her sister Nancy. “I remember my mother talking about disciplining her children and with Kathleen, she could beat her to death and she wouldn’t move, she wouldn’t bat an eye. She wouldn’t act like it bothered her at all. Kathleen and my oldest sister sort of grew up together, and everything the oldest sister did was wonderful and everything Kathleen did was all wrong.”

Kathleen’s contentiousness laid the groundwork for her younger sisters, Barbara and Nancy. Barbara was a child of the early sixties and grew up imbued with some of that decade’s spirituality and irresponsibility. She married, had a son, divorced and all but left the child to be raised by her mother, but she was still adored by her siblings in a way that Kathleen never would be. Nancy, considered the most physically attractive of the bunch and a wild child of the late sixties, never made any pretense to adulthood at all. She was the baby even to her siblings—her oldest sister was over twenty years her senior, her mother was old enough to be her grandmother—and she would forever remain a little young for her age.

Barbara was the sister with whom Kathleen had always been the closest: she had often been the Carangis’ babysitter before the separation. With Kathleen out of the house, Barbara, and occasionally Nancy, tried to fill in as something more than baby-sitters and less than a mother—especially for Gia, who appeared to be taking the breakup the hardest.

“She was spending a lot of time hanging out with her older brothers and just being lonely,” recalled Nancy, who might have been Gia’s aunt but, with only six years separating them, was young enough to be considered in many ways her peer. “She couldn’t understand why her mother had left, why her parents weren’t together. I don’t think she ever understood it. And she was totally unsupervised. I would go over to see if she had been at school, if she was planning to go the next day, if her father had been at home.

“And, at the same time, Kathleen was mad at us. I remember my sister Barbara coming home one day crying after baby-sitting for Gia. She said she was sitting on the sofa with Gia and Kathleen came in the house and grabbed Gia, stuck a finger in Barbara’s face and said, ‘You stay away from my daughter, she’s mine!’ She did the same thing to me once: she pulled me out of a car when I was with one of my boyfriends. She treated Gia like her possession. But, it was like a kid with a discarded toy: this is mine and even if I leave it under a sofa it’s still mine and I don’t want anyone else to use it.”

Kathleen believed that Nancy was more of a corrupting influence than a positive one. “When I left that house, Nancy would bring her boyfriends there and sleep with them in Gia’s bed,” she said. “She would stir up trouble between Gia and I. She could’ve helped Gia and all she did was make things worse. I have a lot of problems with Nancy. I think she was always jealous of me and of what Gia and I had.”

But the Carangi home itself might have been the most corrupting influence of all. The impressive stone house, wrapped in ivy and set back on one of the largest and lushest residential plots in the area, had once been a fitting symbol of how far Joe Carangi had come. He was a man who still basically made a living selling sandwiches in a smeared white apron and a T-shirt. Yet he lived in what anyone would describe as “a beautiful home,” where his children had large bedrooms of their own, his prized pool table had a separate room with plenty of space for tricky shots, and, for a time, his wife had plenty of space to decorate and redecorate as she wished. Now it was, in every way, a broken home. And
because Joe was rarely there, it was also becoming the big hangout spot for his sons’ school friends.

In almost every residential community, there was a handful of houses where all the kids hung out after school, in the evening, on weekends. Some were supervised playhouses where parents purposely created youth-friendly environments—even if it meant feeding everyone else’s kids—so they could keep an eye on their own children. The others were houses left unattended for such long stretches that anything went. These were the homes where adolescent rebellion was being pushed beyond even the thresholds dared in the sixties—when at least there had been some modicum of reverence left for the physical power of drugs, some residual respect for the emotional potency of sex. These were the homes where seventies kids would remember first trying marijuana, first vomiting from cheap jug wine, first acting upon sexual feelings. These were the homes where the minimum age for certain rites of passage had gone from twenty-one to eighteen to fifteen to thirteen in a matter of years, where high school kids were suddenly having college and postgraduate fun. These were the homes that were the epicenters of the quakes that were beginning to crumble the dream of the Great Northeast.

The Northeast section of Philadelphia—or the “Great Northeast” as it came to be called in the fifties, when its first major department store, a Gimbels, emblazoned those words in twenty-foot-high stainless steel letters on its facade—was the ultimate creation of the city’s burgeoning middle class. It was far more than just another faceless suburban development, another destination for white flight. Located just north of the center of Philadelphia, the Northeast was serviced by Philadelphia’s public transit system, educated by the city’s school system and policed by city cops, many of whom lived there to satisfy residency requirements for municipal employees. The area offered the inexpensive single-family homes and drivable streets of the bedroom communities, the ample parking and access to modern shopping. But, confined by the city limits, it eventually became relatively crowded for a suburb—mostly a sprawl of tract homes and twin houses with tiny yards. And it came to develop its own industries, its own class system and its own
ethos. It even had its own accent, a loud, nasal singsong that was instantly recognizable.
Gia
was one of those words most altered by the Northeast dialect. It came out something like “Jay-ya.”

Unlike a prefab, residential Levittown, the Northeast was really a whole world unto itself—or really two worlds, one predominantly Jewish, the other predominantly Catholic, roughly divided spiritually and physically by the sprawling sixteen-lane Roosevelt Boulevard. But in the Northeast, these particular Jews and Catholics somehow found they had more in common than not—adherence to middle class values, fear of blacks, dedication to an ethnic dream of prosperity. And they created something so attitudinally different from mainstream Philadelphia and its more traditional suburbs—it was a suburban city, a superburb—that local politicians were continually proposing that the Northeast should secede from the city, and maybe the state as well.