Losing her way

Janie #4

Janie’s belief in the social myths of her circle led her to fall in love at sixteen with a handsome and irresponsible young man from her set. No one around her thought that they made good match, but no one said anything either, when they married young and started a family. Janie’s husband Bob, although from a well-situated Irish family, lost sight of himself and like many others in their community turned to alcohol.

Bob and Janie shared a romantic notion of love that kept them married well past the time when he was available to love her and their children. Janie told me their sad love story:

“Bob and I met in eighth grade. We went to the same church, St. Peters, and they had a CYC (Catholic Youth Camp) where we both went during summers growing up. I also saw him at Sunset Hills Country Club at the swimming pool.

“Bob was my boyfriend, but I had a lot of boyfriends, but he was the most persistent. He was the one who said ‘Our marriage is inevitable.’ the kind of things that I believed. Just before Bob left for the army, we walked together around the Tidal Basin. We didn’t really say that we would marry, but then we wrote to each other for almost three years. He left early in 1942 and he didn’t come back until November of 1944.

“No one thought that Bob was the right one for me. He had a reputation when we were in high school. Some people thought that he was wonderful, while other people said, ‘watch out.’ One time in high school, I came down the steps at Visitation and saw my mother with the principal, Sister Ann Marie, in her office. I eavesdropped and heard them saying something about Bob and a girl that he was involved with who had left school. No one in our class knows what became of her. She sort of just disappeared. We all keep track of one another, but she is the one in our class who we think is still alive, but don’t know where she is and what happened to her. I’ve always wondered if it had something to do with her and Bob.

“When Bob came back from the war he called me immediately. I didn’t listen to anyone. I was terribly attracted to him. We were married the next November. I was one month from twenty-one. I think Bob won me over because he was so persuasive in writing, speaking, and touching. We didn’t have sex before we married or anything like that, but it got kind of scary with him. I thought, I guess I’ll have to marry him because he touched my breast.”

Janie started laughing. “Back in the 40’s you thought things like that. I might have imagined that I could get pregnant just by his touch. I really didn’t know much about anything.

“Our romance lasted until 1950. We had three children then -- first Michael, then Kevin and Stephen. It was the year that Stephen was born that we ended up kaput. Bob had insurance jobs and sometimes he worked for his father or sell tires out of a filling station in East St Louis, but he wasn’t steady.

“The last time we tried one more time was in 1952. I always tell my daughter Mary that she should be thankful for Maureen O’Hara in the movie, “The Quiet Man.” I’ve given Mary a picture of the little house from the movie called the “light of morn.”

“Bob came over one night and we watched “The Quiet Man” together. It was such a romantic story and then there was Mary. I am thankful for “The Quiet Man” because Mary is a delight in my life and without that movie she would never have been born. But Bob and I didn’t stay together.

“Finally, I got a divorce from him in 1957. At the time my children were eleven, nine, seven, and four. Bob went away and lived in California. We heard from him from time to time, but he never came and visited us.”

Janie struggled to feed and clothe her children, as well as provide them with the other things that they needed as they grappled with their father’s absence. Janie, the three boys, and her daughter lived in a small apartment over a store. She was gone from home, working much of the time, but she encouraged the boys to stay at home and to bring their friends there. She thought that they would be safer at home.

One night Janie came home and found not only beer cans, but also a condom under the couch. She announced that “This was it.” She rounded up the boys in the group and told them that they were going on a Catholic retreat at The Pius X Monastery by the Mississippi, near St. Louis. Janie thought it might save them from themselves and get them away from drinking and boredom. She piled them in her car and drove them down to the retreat center, turning them over to the monks. Her son Stephen and one of the other boys got up very early the next morning, snuck out, and floated down the Mississippi on a log. It was a magical moment for those boys, but it didn’t save them. They were both dead by their own hands within two years.

Stephen died in the summer of 1967. The following summer Janie and her teenage son Kevin, at his request, took an unhappy trip to San Francisco to visit Bob, Janie’s ex-husband and Kevin’s father. They had heard that he wasn’t doing well. Whatever Kevin had hoped for with that visit didn’t happen. Janie, Bob, and Kevin had little to say to one another. At the San Francisco airport, as Janie and Kevin were leaving to return to St. Louis, a sad Kevin asked Janie if he could fly to Woodstock to go to a concert instead of returning home with her. She said, “Yes,” thinking that at least he might get something out of the trip that he had wanted. However, she worried about him and hoped that he wouldn’t come to harm. He returned safely from that trip, but as with Stephen, Janie couldn’t keep Kevin safe forever. On October 3, 1969, Kevin was shot by the St. Louis police.

Janie told me about his death:
“Kevin was killed when he was twenty-one in 1969, two years after Stephen died. He and his special friend Claire were on their way to attend the anti-Veiled Prophet (VP) Ball. In St. Louis’ high society everyone attended the VP Ball and if you were anti-establishment you went to the anti-VP Ball. Kevin and Claire painted their shoes with day-glow and dressed up to go to the event. On their way to the dance, they went to a part of town that had lovely homes, but it was also a troubled area. Only a week before, a policeman had been shot by a druggy- type person, so the police were jittery. Claire told me that a young man came up to their car and told them first to get out of the car and then forced them back into the car. He had a gun and had just committed a robbery. The police came in to answer to the robbery, and this is where I blank out. I guess the police were suspicious when they saw Kevin, Claire, and the other man. They told them to get out of the car. The police assumed that the three of them had robbed the house together, and somehow in whatever followed they shot Kevin in the back -- five bullet holes in the back. They arrested the other young man.

“I never did anything about how the police shot Kevin. It wouldn’t have brought him back, and after Stephen and Kevin died, I didn’t know if I could go through this kind of trial. I had always told the children that the police were there to keep them safe and bring them home if they got lost. I had believed in them. You know it was 1969 and the 60’s were awful. I knew that Kevin was in trouble. I suspected that he was drinking and drugging too, although we didn’t find anything in his things.

“I first learned about Kevin’s death when two detectives arrived at my door. They wanted to take me downtown to identify his body. I got numb all over: it was so close to Stephen’s death. But I told the police that I could do this, and I went with them to the morgue. Kevin was on a big wide metal table and I touched him. I was in such shock. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. His eyes were open, and I wasn’t brave enough to close his eyes.

“Much later when I saw Midnight Cowboy, when Dustin Hoffman died on the bus and Jon Voight closed his eyes, I …” Janie started weeping. “I really wished I had done it, closed his eyes, but I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t do it then.” Through streaming tears, Janie said, “You learn it for another time or another person.”