Memoir: Chapter 49: Finding a doctor I could trust on the psych ward

I tried not to panic about being committed to a psych ward.  The armed officer told me that I had the right to make one phone call before we left the university.  The only one I considered calling was my Grandfather Wilson, but since he knew so little about me from not ever having having had a meaningful conversation with me, I knew he just would not understand why this was happening, and would likely be a bigger distraction than help.  So I turned down the opportunity, and we traveled to the Salt Lake County Hospital in silence.
It seemed that this was the teaching hospital for the University of Utah medical school.  I did not know it at the time but I was now under the jurisdiction of Dr. Branch, head of the psychiatry department in the medical school at the University.  I did not see Dr. Andersen, who had committed me, for ten days.  I figured he anticipated that I would not be happy with being committed in the shockingly short time he did it, so avoided me. 
And my dad thought I could teach school in Utah schools with no problem!  I had only begun to go another route to try to surface the molesting I had endured in childhood a relatively short time and here I was on my way to a psych ward because of my unusual and disturbed behavior, I took it.  Even I was in quite a state of shock over this totally unexpected development.  Dr. Lees had had the capacity to ignore for two years what I thought was a distinctive cry for help in a paper I had written. This had lulled me into thinking that it would not matter what I did no one would respond.  So I was going to have to get used to Dr. Andersen, the university psychiatrist,  overreacting.
I found out by asking around later that Dr. Andersen was a Mormon psychiatrist, so I figured he had a gut reaction to a female student challenging him right off with silence to one of his questions. Well, not just one question actually, but three!
My reason for doing this was because I felt I had not been able to engage his whole attention from the beginning.  Like many men, and Mormon men of authority in particular, he just was not used to focusing intense attention on a female, except for sexual reasons, I did not think, as though what she was in his office for and was going to tell him was not likely to be important. Since I now felt that I had committed myself to leaving the University and knew that all hell was going to break loose when my father heard about it, his relatively offhand manner annoyed me almost at once.
I was tired of being ordered around by men and having no choice in the matter.  Now that I no longer had to worry about staying in good standing at the university by not creating any problems for anybody, I figured I could risk more with this psychiatrist.
My reasoning was what could he do to me in such a short time.  I planned to resume talking after three questions, having perhaps shocked him into more intensity, and we could maybe have a chat that would mean something before I left the university forever.
In fact, if he had been one minute later in returning to the office, I would have been gone, unless he had stationed someone outside to make sure I didn't leave.  Of course, in his mindset, he might have sent out search parties to apprehend me had I somehow gotten away from him.
So now that he had deemed me disturbed enough to commit to a mental ward, what now?  The armed officer left me at the desk of the locked ward to be admitted and left.  My glasses were requested from me, which I did not like because I was extremely near sighted, but I was told that this was just a precaution and as soon as my doctor gave permission they would be returned to me.
Okay, I would have to comply with the rules.  I was shown a room where I would be sleeping and introduced to a woman who was already assigned to the only other bed in the room.  She was so emaciated,  I was alarmed but she explained to me after the nurse left that she really wasn't a 'nut case' but had transferred here from the cancer ward.  She said she was dying and she wanted someone to talk to her before her demise, but nobody on this ward had time to talk to anyone.  All they wanted to do was electric shock people she said and fortunately she couldn't have electric shock because she was dying.  They seemed to have no idea how talking could satisfy her.  She was surprised and very disappointed. This was not what she expected to find on a ward for the mentally ill.
I did not like the sounds of that at all, and decided I had better talk to someone in authority about shock treatment as soon as possible.  Thelma, a woman I judged to be in her fifties, got her emaciated self up off the bed with great effort and dragged herself slowly out of the room in search again for someone to talk to her.  She seemed very determined she was not going to give up, she was going to make someone say something significant to her before she died.
I would have made time for her, but she like me was hunting someone in authority, and she apparently judged me to be too young to know what to say to her about the big change she was facing.  I didn't know if she could find anyone here who was an authority on death, but I thought they should at least make the effort to grant her dying request.  Wasn't it their proclaimed job to help the mentally disturbed? I was sure she was after the same thing I was, some attention that was intense enough to make a difference.
After she left I went out in the day room where a very young woman was causing a ruckus.  She was lying in front of the locked door wailing that she did not belong here, she was not crazy.  She was praying for Clark Gable to come and rescue her. I assumed her God of choice, Clark Gable, was one of the eccentricities that had landed her here, but I noted that it might be wiser not to panic and show fear as she was doing.  We were probably close to the same age, but I couldn't imagine losing control of myself as she was doing. I was anything but not controlled.  In fact, I had been calculating the effects of everything I said to anybody for months, practically down to the last word. 
While I was sitting there an older doctor, I would say in his fifties, introduced himself as Dr. Bliss and said that he had been assigned to ask me questions about why I had been committed.  Oh, this was what I had been waiting for.  I started to describe to him my interview with Dr. Andersen and what I had done and how Dr. Andersen responded.  I could see almost at once that it was going to be very hard to impress Dr. Bliss, who I found out later was probably the most prominent and well known psychiatrist in the city with a big private practice, and Mormon, of course.
It soon occurred to me that I might have to act the same way with him as I had acted with Dr. Andersen if he continued to act too damned unimpressed in order for him to get the complete picture of why I was in here.  He had a built in attitude toward women that was beginning to offend me.  I was soon sure this man was not going to be able to help me, that in fact, that it was dangerous for me to continue to give into him a minute longer. I would lose more stature even to myself by the second if I did.  I forced myself to go silent, keeping my eyes fixed on him, to see how he took it.  He immediately conveyed to me by turning away that he was a very busy man who did not have time to waste trying to fathom what some patient was trying to get across to him with a sudden silence.  He just folded his notes and left with no further ado.
I thought well, good.  They would have to find somebody else to talk to me, as I could never have gotten this man to understand why I had done what I did in a million years.  His complete attention was not to be had.  At that moment I might have been just a random student charity case to him on my way to shock treatment. He surely did not need me as a patient if I was going to give him static. 
It finally really came home to me that shock treatment did not require talking to the patient.  The treatment was what restored the patient to sanity and therefore normalcy.  How did it do that?  Could it be because it was viewed by the mind under siege as torture, and naturally the message to the patient would be to get the hell out of this place as fast as you can.  Start doing what you used to do when you were considered sane.  Stop rebelling.  Stop making demands.  Be sensible.  Above all, cut the drama.
Shock treatment started to seem to me like a pet alligator that was kept on site despite being very dangerous.  The pet alligator was probably to blame for the disturbed male patient who kept me awake that night bellowing from across the receiving room from the male ward.  He bellowed for hours.  How anybody got any sleep around there I did not know.
People were also in and out administering shots for pain to Thelma, the cancer patient. During the night she moaned that she just as well go back to the cancer ward because nobody was talking to her in here.  I thought good luck, lady, all these people are not in practice, because they don't really have to talk to anyone.  Shock treatment does the job. You said it yourself.  This mental ward is not about talking to people.  It is about administering shock treatment and restoring patients to normalcy the fastest and cheapest way possible. 
From then on a whole phalanx of students and one resident came to talk to me.  I did not know why they thought it was important that anyone keep talking to me, but I suspected that they thought it would keep me preoccupied until I got used to the idea of shock treatment.
One student even came to try to engage me in an exchange of words I had dated the year before who pretended not to recognize me.  In fact, it is very possible he had not paid enough attention to me to recognize me under these circumstances even though he had spent the evening with me. I was not able to be polite to him very long.  I wasn't here to help self centered students like him feel good about becoming doctors.  God help the patients, if this one ever became a psychiatrist I thought. Oddly no women at all were ever sent to try to interview me.
I thought I was going to be able to get along with an Oriental intern or possibly resident, but after talking to him a couple of  times we suddenly reached an impasse, and I was forced to go silent.  He simply could not stay interested, although he might have thought it was the other way around after I went silent with him, too.

I thought the fuss they were making over Thelma in the middle of the second night was because she demanded to be taken back to the cancer ward.  Instead I found out she actually died, and that was why her bed was empty the next morning. I was a little bit shaken by how fast she went.  She really had meant that she was dying, and people had better talk to her before it was forever too late.  
That same day another woman who seemed to be in one of the worst rages I had ever seen was assigned to the empty bed in my room.  She was seething all the while the nurses were getting her settled. She told them that she would have killed the bitch if she had not decided to come and commit herself.
I took it that the bitch was a younger woman who had flirted with her husband, slept with him, something, but she kept saying she had committed herself to keep from committing murder.  While she was grinding her teeth, a tall man in a white coat came in and said to me that he had been assigned to my case.  He was an intern he informed me who was on a months' rotation to this ward.  He got so rattled while he was talking to me, he dropped the glass syringe he was carrying with him to take blood he said from another patient.  The syringe broke and he had to pick the pieces up.
My new roommate was eying him and me balefully.  I was a little bit horrified to realize after he left that she had started to confuse us with her husband and his younger girlfriend.  I hoped that this did not mean she would try to kill me later on.  I was supposed to go talk to the Intern that evening around seven o'clock when he said he had some time to try to get into my case.
My new roommate continued to make threats and send burning glances in my direction that I hoped did not mean my life was in danger.  I had not imagined I might be attacked by a very dangerous mental patient because she was confusing me with a woman she wanted to kill.
Around seven I went to talk to the new Intern who said I could call him Dr. Davis.  He warned me that he was not even going to become a psychiatrist, but a doctor of Internal Medicine.  He did not know very much about mental illness, but he had been told I was not responding well to anyone.  So he asked me tell him why that was.
Since he had been so forthcoming about himself, I asked him where he was from.  He said, California, that he was the son of an architect but had decided to change the family profession and become a doctor instead.  He was a war veteran, 30 years old.  All this was good news, I thought, he was not a Mormon, maybe he could take a more objective view about women than they could, not having been influenced from birth by Prophets of God and their inherent attitudes toward women.
He said he did not know much about Mormonism. He was so busy he did not have a lot of time to learn about it either.  So what were my issues with Mormonism?
I started telling him my story which he actually showed a great deal of interest in.  I mean, I told him parts of my story, as much as I could in the time he allotted.  He also mentioned he was married and his wife had been working to help put him through medical school, but I thought he was beginning to act more like a man on an interesting date with a new girl than a married Intern.  He immediately caught himself and said that I reminded him of a girl he had met in Italy during the war.  He said he had not met anybody like her ever again until now.
I thought that it figured, since I had been at war since I was five years old with the molesters, at war with my alcoholic, suicidal but very domineering father, at war with professors and students who reminded me of my father, and had gone to war enough with a Mormon University psychiatrist to get committed to a mental ward.

All this had taken place by the end of my third day in the psych ward. This business of getting a doctor to talk to me satisfactorily had been occupying my mind ever since I arrived, but now I seemed to be succeeding with Dr. Davis. I really did not think anybody else cared whether I formed what I considered a successful relationship with a doctor at all, because talking was not considered that important.  They all seemed to be waiting for something else to take place in regard to my case,  I was not quite sure what it was, but I suspected it was my own prescription for shock treatment.  Dr. Davis assured me that he did not have the authority to prescribe for me.  Dr. Branch was in charge of my case and he would do that.  I had not even seen him.  I wondered if Dr. Branch would actually prescribe shock treatment eventually without even seeing me!  The thought was chilling. 
I went back to my room after two hours of satisfactory conversation with Dr. Davis, but my roommate was still awake still spitting fire.  Now she seemed more jealous than ever.  She seemed to think that I had been out all night having sex with her husband, and it sounded like she was planning to leap across the room and kill me before anybody could stop her.  She was too enraged and too jealous even to stop herself she was saying.  She said she did not want to do it, she knew the punishment would be severe but she couldn't help herself.  The bitch was going to die!
I was prepared to scream if she took one step but I did not know if they could get to me in time before she did something that was bound to be life threatening as she probably had the strength of a man eating tigress!
Just as she appeared ready to spring at me with a final guttural snarl, she let out the most blood curdling scream I had ever heard in my life.  Nor have I heard anything since that could be compared to it. Everybody in authority that was in running distance dropped everything and sprinted like mad to my room.
My roommate lay back on the bed, gasping.  What is wrong with you, they yelled.  "I even scared myself!" was all she could utter in explanation.

But the ungodly scream must have vented enough of her mad rage that she turned over and went to sleep.  But I could not sleep.  I felt I was still in extreme danger from the pet alligator they kept on this ward, electric shock therapy.  I had to escape that somehow before I dared to sleep.  The pet alligator was a lot more dangerous to me, I knew instinctively, than the disturbed woman.  Set loose on the hapless mental patients by too many doctors, the alligator's lust for victims probably could not be contained without a battle to the death.  

Memoir: Chapter 48: The die is cast

I thought I only had two classes that I thought were going to give me serious trouble, after I had been in school a couple of weeks and had time to see how my changed  policy was going to go.  Both were education classes, and it was easy to see how I might get into serious trouble with those.  All my education classes had been dull and unsatisfying, but these two had problems that bordered on the extreme.  One had the worst teacher I had ever encountered in college or high school. His lectures were so hard to sit through, that it finally occurred to me that this is was also what I needed to rebel against.  What did I have to lose?
I had tried to tell my dad every way possible that I had been shaped by the fierce and scarring fire of his upbringing.  Because of that it was not going to be possible for me to teach unnoticed like his sister Nethella did.  She went on year after year highly respected in every single position she held in the community, from teacher in Sunday school to elementary school to County Supervisor of education. I just as well get thrown out of college now because of my behavior in one of these education classes as get thrown out of a job later because I taught a class the way I thought it ought to be taught and alarmed the parents.
Dull was safe.  That is what happened when a state was dominated by religion. The Mormon Church still revered the prophet's teachings who had introduced polygamy as a divine revelation.  Nothing had changed except the main stream Mormons had given up polygamy in order for Utah to enter the union without severe opposition and controversy.  These dull classes were what the parents preferred to a teacher who might spout opinions they did not approve of.
Utah Mormons were going to have their way in their own state, which is why educators, teachers, professors, everybody tended to conform to Mormon beliefs.  Dynamic teaching that seemed the least bit critical was always going to be regarded with suspicion.  Even other religions had never been tolerated to any degree. 
I was resisting this mold and was probably going to have to leave the state before I'd have any peace of mind. So I just as well get it over with.  If I had to leave college my dad could not very well demand that I teach.  I was going to hunt for some other job to earn money.  I was sick of agonizing.
As for the other education class, it was on how to teach English to high school students.  The Dean of Women was in charge, and she was an unbelievably eccentric lady I thought would have been driven completely up the wall had she tried to teach in high school.  In the first place she was obsessed by gum chewing.  The second she spotted a student in her class chewing gum she would immediately stop and give a considerably lengthy lecture on the evils of having to teach in the face of disrespectful chompers of gum.
I had not run into a teacher that hated gum chewing since grade school, but eventually all the students had found out about her obsession and everybody had quit chewing gum in class so she could settle down and teach what she was supposed to about how to engage high school students in English classes.  So the first thing I did as soon as she stopped looking for jaws that were moving suspiciously was dispense with taking frantic notes like all the rest of the students were doing.  I had always followed suit but now I figured if what she said didn't stick with me, it was not worth remembering, so I was the only one in class who was looking directly at her and carefully weighing whatever she said.
At first I received A's on some of my assignments, but then she would let down on her intensity, and I would respond accordingly with papers she decided were D grade.  Well, even I was somewhat disconcerted by the dizzying way I leaped from writing excellent papers to failing ones, but I was responding very honestly so I didn't protest any of her grades.
At about that time a new factor entered into the proceedings.  Lees called me to take a part in another play he was taking on the road.  When I went to rehearsal and read the part he wanted me to play, I considered turning him down but didn't quite dare.  I was to play the second female lead, a simple sweet innocent submissive Amish girl.  I thought well if I wasn't getting the message here of how he preferred me to act, I would never get it. After three years interacting with him, starting on my fourth year, he had no concept that I was rebelling against being this kind of girl with all my might.
In fact, I was at the very moment engaged in behavior that might cause me to be ridden out of college on a rail.  But I planned not to do anything too drastic so I would be able to finish the run of the play at least.  I rehearsed but the week before opening, I reached another crisis in the dull education class.  I just decided not to take the mid term on which my grade would depend.  We were only going to have two tests we were informed, a mid term and a final.  I wasn't going to stay in college.  I was going to leave because of this terrible class, if for no other reason.  It was time!
Poor Lees went on with his play, unknowing.  I wondered when one of the teachers, either the idiot male teacher or the Dean of Women would report my conduct to somebody.  I really thought it would be the Dean of Women who unexpectedly called me in a couple of days before the opening of the play in a town three hundred miles away fairly close to the canyon country where I had been raised.  She said to me that she simply could not teach with me in the class just looking at her.  She told me the amazing decision she had made that she would give me the credit for this class if I simply would not attend.
I nodded, trying to take in the connotations of this unheard of concession. Remembering the other guy, I finally said, "Oh you don't have to do that, I am in trouble in my other class.  I will be leaving college very soon."  I was finished talking but before I left I decided I would just look at her directly in the eyes a second or two, something I had been trying lately, because I never expected to see her again.  I wanted her to remember this moment.  I felt because of how rattled she was I was looking into her soul, and then I got up and left and never went back.
So now I had told her I was more or less through with college, how long would it be before Lees got this information filtered down to him?
The opening of the play was routine on Friday night. Mormon audiences were of course pleased that there was nothing in this play from the University that might disturb.  They seemed to applaud with guarded enthusiasm.  The next day we all got in our caravan of cars and headed for another location.  That night to my surprise, Robert, the sadistic professor I did not like, showed up at the play.  Afterwards he and Lee acted gloriously happy.  I thought this was curious.  This was not a play that the sophisticated and intellectual Robert could possibly have liked. Somebody said Robert was on vacation, and he, and Lees, and several others of the merry band all went over to the motel where Lees were staying, but of course I was not invited to attend the party, and went to my own motel with some other players who were not invited to go to the party either and went to sleep.
The next day on the way home, Lees demanded that the cast who were all riding in the van with him, do a line rehearsal.  I hated Lee's line rehearsals.  He did not want you to put any emotion in your lines, you just had to go through the play with as little feeling interjected as possible.  Talk about a way to make being in a play dull!  Lee's line rehearsal ruined my night.  Why didn't he just leave us alone.  I had too much I needed to think about that was worrying me.
I woke up just as we started to climb up the University hill on the way to my room in the Phi Mu house.  I became aware that my head was on the shoulder of some unknown male and he was holding my hand in the darkness with such warmth and passion I was surprised he had not progressed further into intimacy.  Maybe because I was asleep.  I did not even know who this was.  I had not noticed the male sitting next to me.  I glanced at him as I got out of the van and recognized him as a tech person.  I needed to ask Marilyn about him!  He was blond, quite handsome.
So on Monday I finally found out who he was by asking Marilyn who confirmed he was a tech person, and he was also married.  I had appreciated his genuine raw passion for me under the circumstances, but I was going to have to nip this delightful interest in me in the bud, if he was married. I was sure he would expect more of the same on the trips to the hinterlands to come, 300 miles from home.
I also found out about a month later that people who were present to the line rehearsal that night said that right in the middle of it, I fell into a profound sleep.  They tried in vain to wake me up to continue, but I did not respond.  I was sure that this delightful act of rebellion was what inspired the passion in the guy sitting next to me.  Nobody I had ever heard of would have dared fall asleep in one of Lees' line rehearsals.  But it figures that I did it considering my state of mind, and didn't even know I had done it!   
I was busy thinking about him that Monday when I was notified Lees wanted to see me in his office. This was sometime toward noon.  I was to see him at 2:30.  I was thinking the Dean of Women must be the informant if I was in trouble. I doubted that the news of my missing a mid term could have traveled that far yet. 
Well, 2:30 came and went, and an hour later the secretary said that Lees must have had something come up, so he would have to see me the next day.  We made another appointment for Tuesday.
I slept well.  The die was cast.  In fact, I even felt fairly cheerful.  All this agonizing I had been doing would soon be over.
When I arrived to the appointment the next day, Lees was not in the office nor did he show up for close to another hour.  I could not help but feel that he really did not want to do this, so when he came, he said without any fanfare, "So what are your troubles?"
I just didn't answer him.  I looked at him, but stayed silent, according to my new stronger way of asserting myself.  So he didn't waste any more of his time.  He said, "If you won't talk to me, will you see the school psychiatrist?"
Well, this was an amazing new idea he was springing on me.  Why hadn't he thought of that novel idea when I wrote the paper about the student covered with sores everybody just ignored.  It was too late now.  I was gone, although I would reassure him as soon as I had a chance that I would finish the run in the play.  He didn't have to worry about that, if that was what was bothering him.  
I was thinking on the way over to the psychiatrist's office that I had never actually been to a psychiatrist before.  I needed to experienced everything I possibly could before I left. He probably led a very dull life administering to all these conforming students. Maybe I could give him a refreshing bit of honesty before I departed, too.
Dr. Andersen did look as though he had been bored for a month of Sundays when I met him.  He started asking me a few routine questions as though my answers would not have mattered to him if I had been stark naked.  I thought boy, he really needs to be brought back to life.  So the next question he asked me I held his eyes and did not answer.  It took quite a lot of nerve for me to do this to a psychiatrist, but I wanted him to remember this encounter.  So I did it twice more.
My theory is that Dr. Andersen fell madly in love with me on the spot and just could not let me get out of his office for fear I would be gone forever.  He was right.  I was well on my way to disappearing from the university.  I was just going to wait until that damn play was over with.
Dr. Andersen got up and abruptly left the room. I was confused.  I had thought I had surely gotten his attention but maybe not.  Maybe he was beyond hope.  After I waited another half an hour for him to return I decided just to leave.  This was insulting.  Such a shocking lack of interest.  Like Lees. What mundane business could possibly be occupying his mind elsewhere this long.
I was just going out the door when Dr. Andersen confronted me.  He said, "Geraldine, I think you should be admitted to a hospital." 
I immediately snapped back to what ever passed for the sane meet-the public state of mind I had been in before I started all this.
"No, I don't think I need to go that far," I said, "I am acting in a play, you know, for Dr. Lees, the head of the theater department.  I have to go to southern Utah this weekend.  Maybe I can receive some therapy?"
He said, "Geraldine, you are going to a hospital!"  I saw the armed officer standing just outside the door for the first time.  Dr. Andersen pointed to him and said, "I have arranged for this gentleman to take you there!"

Memoir: Chapter 47: Reasons for my madness

Before starting back to school in the fall, I went over and over the reasons why I needed to carry out my plan of reacting with truth and honesty in all my classes my senior year in response to whatever assignment I was given.  I was desperate. What was involved, I decided, had gotten too big and too complex for any one person to be expected to handle.  I had tried talking to just about everybody and had gotten nowhere.  The past 5 years I had lived in Salt Lake I had interacted with my Grandfather and Grandmother Wilson, especially the last year when Margie was in Salt Lake to go with me, and had encountered the same difficulties my mother complained about when she tried to talk about her troubles to them.
Mother still didn't know everything about my dad that I knew, but there was a lot she did know.  Now she had gotten involved with other men through contacts in her store, so had added another element of extreme danger to her volatile relationship with my father. She was far too engaged in battle with my suspicious dad and a cover-up of her own affairs for me to talk to her. 

But I had seen evidence of my Grandmother's distrust of my Grandfather in her determination to act as his nurse when he was giving chiropractic treatments.  My mother had often talked about her father's womanizing tendencies. I also found him to be defensive and guarded.  I knew he had a bad temper, so I did not go far enough for him to get angry to shut me up. It just was not possible to get into any depth with him. I had to give that idea up before I made any progress, even though Margie said he was acting different with her now she was going to become a nurse. 

I had gone down to the King ranch and had numerous conversations with my Aunt Nethella, who was now the female boss of the King ranch as much as the hired man allowed her to be.  She had taught all three of of my younger sisters in the local elementary school before they started taking the bus to Escalante. She could talk for hours about the problems she incurred teaching all the kids, but her interests were still relatively limited.  
My Grandfather King died at the age of 87 when I was away to college in my sophomore year, but I had not talked to him at all for years except on cattle drives.  He would always come to get some of us girls when the hired men were bringing the main herd up from the winter ranges in the big spring round-up. We would go down and drive the tired cattle home while the hired men came on ahead after days out on the range. He avoided any conversations except what had to do with the ranch work, even when he was up in his 80's. He was too old for anyone to challenge. 

I would listen patiently to Aunt Nethella's analyses of how my sisters all did in school and I asked questions.  But I never had enough of a breakthrough with her to talk about any of the ways males connected to the King ranch had impacted my life and well being.  I thought I could have talked to her forever and gotten nowhere when it came to what the women did not know and the men were not about to tell them.

As far as I could see, the theater department as well as the English department at the University were where male students most apt to be gay were enrolled.  I thought Lees probably had a good idea of who was gay and who was not.  But this subject had long been so taboo that married playwright Oscar Wilde had been jailed in England for being too open about a homosexual affair.  Homosexual activities were on the books as against the law then. The father of the young man he was 'befriending' charged him with the crime.  Of course, Wilde's plays had been done at the University of Utah, one while I was there, but nobody talked about the homosexual problem in connection with a married Oscar Wilde, least of all not Lees.
I thought society had made very little progress since Oscar Wilde's time.  Gays were accepted who came out but mostly in the cities like New York, which had long been hospitable to them because of their talent. Gays who came out were still not accepted well in Utah so dominated was it by religion.  I thought the more people were able to be honest about their homosexuality, the less problems there were going to be, resulting from secrecy and cover-up, which ended up with wives who were ignorant of their husband's bisexuality and children disturbed and victimized by the secrets and lies, as I had been after I became suspicious.   
I thought there was probably so much knowledge of the cover-up of homosexual tendencies among the married in the theater department that people had gotten used to devaluing honesty in any number of ways. Which was why I could probably cause quite a stir just trying to cut through all the fat that lies and cover-up engendered.

I talked about what I was planning to do enough that Margie became uncomfortable. She did not like the sounds of it. She said she did not understand my thinking. Was rebelling what I expected her to do? I told her I did not mean that she should do that now in her nursing classes. Maybe she would run into a problem later on in her training but had not gotten far enough along now to be concerned.

But I was a senior.  I did not have a whole lot longer to act if I was going to accomplish anything important while in college.  I had not told my sisters about the molesters because of their connection to my dad. I thought it was also possible my dad had molested the under aged  at some point in his life, if he had gotten the opportunity.
The molesting was the main reason I felt I had to keep on trying to reach somebody with authority. But since I could not burden Margie with explanations, it was no wonder she was uneasy.  I tried not to say enough that she would become suspicious that I was concealing something from her, but to tell one of my sisters was to tell all, so I thought I had better anticipate the result.  Margie especially would resist, because she always opposed what I thought, and would especially if she was upset by my conclusions.  I was not ready for them to become that reactive.  I had all the opposition I could handle as it was. They were victimized, too, by my dad's alcoholism and his subsequent violent conflicts with my mother, so they could not help me.  I had to help them!   
I had not been able to protect any other underage victims of the second molester especially, but the almost universal cover-up of homosexual activities gave protection to bisexual men who turned molester.  Oscar Wilde was reputed to like underage boys. I read this in one of the many bios written about him.  The married French author, Andre Gide, went on vacations  to foreign countries in search for underage boys, which he confessed in his journals I found in the University library.
If women were kept in ignorance, they could not even protect their own sons.  If I was able to surface my own experiences, I might convince wives and mothers to look for this kind of activity.

Dr. Lees had ignored my first attempt to get his attention about my problems when I wrote him the paper about the students covered with sores.  Had he been the least bit inquisitive I could have opened up more, but he turned away instead. This suggested to me that he was probably covering up homosexual tendencies of his own and always feared a student might be coming dangerously close to bringing the subject up.  He wasn't going to take a chance on that happening. I had been dealing with defensive evasive men all my life.  I thought I knew the signs. 
So I needed to get more teachers besides him involved.  I needed to get their attention, which I could do, I thought, if I insisted on more depth in all my classes by my honest response to the lack of it. Plenty of times in Utah schools I thought my classes were short of content I could respect, so I thought that I probably would not be satisfied long with any.
I knew if a head of a department was covering up, the teachers would become careless and lazy and unfocused on what they needed to accomplish.  If the head of their department did not require sharpness on their parts because it was threatening, the whole department was apt to suffer from a loss of integrity.
Dr. Lees had been head of that department for a long time, and I thought I was running into his lack of standards.
I suspected that he used his out of town theater productions to get away from home where he could more safely make connections. That was possibly why he directed these plays, even though he was the most prestigious director on campus and only had to direct the big productions if he chose.  Lees directed those, too, but the out of town ones were what caught my attention when I got a part in one almost as soon as I enrolled in the university. 
These productions on the road reminded me of down 'below' to the cattle ranges which had been used for years by men like my father to have a safe, unobserved period of time with desirable male employees.  School boys talked knowingly about "Down Below", suggesting that for unsuspecting boy victims along, this might be 'hell on earth' for them. It was one of the trips "Down Below" my cousin Ray was trying to avoid, but was forced to take when he was 14 years old.  He acted very upset afterwards, but typically would not talk about it, but his tormenter on that trip was also my tormenter when he got any opportunity. So I had a good idea what had taken place.  Some sort of violation of his person. 
I always refused to drive cattle anywhere, over night, even with my dad. As a girl, I could get away with refusing to go, but as a boy, he could not, so the boys were actually more at risk than the girls.  
There might be safety in numbers.  I needed to alert more of my teachers and get them wondering why in the world I was acting like this, teachers that had not been involved in any cover-ups as well as some who might be.  I did not see any other way now to get more supporters.
My dad was too brutal, too ruthless when he felt threatened.  He was too dangerous for me to accuse him of anything.  I had already experienced a loss of physical strength coping with him when I was twelve.  I had experienced too many crises under his jurisdiction for too many years.  They had taken their toll of my health.
No, I could not leave this university without allies.  I needed protection when I did surface the truth.  
It was going to take strength to get past my dad's defenses to a place where he could not affect the outcome.  So I was instinctively charting a path for one purpose, I had to be able to tell someone with authority about the molesters!  I had never told anyone  that I was molested, not even one person.  And it looked as though I was going to have to go to extremes to be allowed to talk about what nobody want to hear. Only then could I go to the second part of the story, about what else some of these men were covering up which the women were too submissive and ignorant to detect.
First these men were unfaithful to the women in a way they were not encouraged to think about, and then some targeted children for their fun.

Memoir: Chapter 46: Last summer at home before implementing the policy of telling the truth in all my classes my senior year

I knew I had just one more year to make my mark in college and since this was not going to be possible with any significant acting roles or other achievements in my major I did not think, it was going to have to be accomplished in my classes.  I had an increasing sense of strain about what this truth telling I was planning might involve.
I thought I had barely escaped serious trouble when I started this policy in the third quarter of my junior year.  If I had encountered any teacher but that particular one, I would probably have had to pay dearly for my honest but irreverent opinions about the high school text books I was assigned to review.
I thought through once again what would happen if I just coasted on through as I knew I could easily do.  I didn't have to rebel.  I did not have to risk my degree by saying what I really thought in my classes, but it was just that not saying what I really thought would lead to no progress whatsoever in dealing with the criminal behaviors of my molesters or with what I thought was a major problem in Utah, men like my father behaving the way he did while believing he had covered the tracks of numerous affairs he had while partying with males and even working with them so his wife and daughters would not suspect.
I just could not recover from the arrogance of him driving to Salt Lake, screaming like a maniac, accusing me of having sex with my Escalante boyfriend who I rarely saw and threatening to cut off my school funds entirely because of it.
My sister LaRae had staged a mini-rebellion of her own, marching off to Salt Lake to work in a jam factory for the summer, so she could get away.  I tried to talk her out of it, but she said she could not stand one more summer at home.
My God, I thought, she had not been able to escape as I had at the age of 13. So she was willing to labor in a jam factory at the age of 15, the only job she could find at her age, for a break before she had to come back and finish high school in Escalante.
I was troubled by her rebellion as I had not been able to establish a satisfactory relationship with LaRae during the busy summers when I was home. Now I was losing another summer without contact with her. I feared she would get into trouble, or her rebellion could lead to it, if she was not close to anybody in the family, intellectually. I questioned my younger sisters, Ann and Linda, trying to find out if she had been having bad clashes with our dad.  They said no, she just didn't like working with him.  She said he was too mean.  She had been rebelling against 'boys' work for some time, so Ann and Linda were called upon to do most of it.

I actually had not minded working with Daddy in the summer, but I didn't have to put up with him the year around. I had even broached the idea to Mother and Dad of sending LaRae away to school in the city because she had proved to be an absolute whiz in her typing classes.  I had an awkward two fingers that made typing difficult for me, but she was soon typing over a hundred words a minute with no problem.  Daddy had a top future secretary in her, but she was also smart enough to be her own boss, start a business of her own, become a lawyer instead of working for one, any number of alternatives besides becoming some man's Girl Friday.
Mother and Dad ignored my advice.  That would cost money.  Besides if it wasn't LaRae's idea it might not be safe to send her into the city as  Mother and Dad were already having a tough time keeping track of her in Escalante.  I thought they hardly had any influence over her, anyway, since she did not respect them. Who really could?

As for the University of Utah, I kept thinking about how Archie was celebrated when he made his appearance.  At last, my theater professors could show real enthusiasm for a student actor who was not a returned veteran, but an attractive, talented, impertinent kind of guy, made even more affecting by serious health issues. If their marked enthusiasm for a student like Archie had not convinced the girls that they had no real place in the theater world I don't know what could.  The girls didn't even have to be talented to play their parts.  But it was better if they were really pretty.
A female bookworm?  Who needed one of those.  Utah was not a book reading society.  The church provided.  Voracious book readers like me risked being treated as though we were poor unfortunate nerds with nothing else going for us. But I would say I was practically one of a kind, so it was not really necessary to discourage book reading.  Girls were still proud they preferred to sew.  
Ambitious females seemed to elicit little more than a sense of unease.  I had taken Robert's first play writing class as a junior and he was not impressed with anything I wrote.  I was just so clearly the wrong sex  He was markedly conflicted, hostile, or indifferent in his general attitude toward female students.
Both Sharon and I had failed to hold Ghiselin's attention.  Sharon finally gave up trying to get any respect for her poems, which she had been writing half her life.  I had hoped to write some short stories for his class and for the school literary magazine that would illuminate what it had been like to be the daughter of a troubled and conflicted man.  I thought I could have impacted the college literary scene just as Laurence had, if Ghiselin had been the least bit receptive. 
As it was, the student literary magazine was completely dominated by male writers.  If there had been another notable female writing talent Sharon would have found her and formed a coalition if at all possible.  Nobody with writing talent ever escaped her eagle eye.
In the theater department, while riding the bus out to my aunt's house, I had become closer friends to Marilyn, my best friend in the theater department, who lived along that route.  She was the daughter of a doctor, and several times she invited me to get off the bus and have a cool drink to her house where we proceeded to have somewhat crippled discussions about theater.
Marilyn had gone to school with June, another theater major our age, for years.  We were the young girls amidst the returning veterans, probably seeming like still children to them.  June was a very bright young Mormon theater major.  She had been raised, Marilyn told me, in a very religious home, one of the youngest of a large family. She just could not help being as totally nice, committed, and thoroughly admirable as she was. I naturally did not know June as well as I did Marilyn, because she was kept so busy with church, family, and her studies she had no idle time for talking. She was already planning to go to BYU, the church university, to get her masters degree in theater. 
H.E.D. Redford was still tearing up the theater department with his acting genius, but he would probably be gone when I returned.  He was a veteran almost ten years older than the three of us. H.E.D. marched entirely to his own drummer, so he was not susceptible to the favoritism  bestowed on Archie that caused us all jealousy.  Archie just had to bat his incredibly long eyelashes, it seemed, and another plum role was his.  Not that he could not act.  But I did not think he was nearly the thinking actor that H.E.D., the older veteran, clearly was. 
Marilyn was an attractive girl and quite observant, but I thought she reflected the rather undeveloped personality of her mother, who seemed to have spent her life just being there but without meaningful work.  She kept house and took care of the two children, Marilyn and her brother, so the doctor did not have to worry about anything when he was gone long hours from home.  I thought Marilyn was trying to make more of an impact on the world than her mother, but she did not try to act.  She wasn't going to teach.  She didn't aspire to write. I was not quite sure what she did intend to do with her degree in theater.
But she was interested in everything I was doing. She was of such a conventional mind set, I could not tell her very much at all about the quandary I was in about how to be more effective in reacting to my father and other men like him I had met at the University of Utah on the teaching staff. The professors didn't drink and carry on as my did did, but I did not think some of them were being honest with their wives.  Their dishonesty could not help but affect their students.
The cover-up of male interest in other males was I was discovering wide spread. I only knew one student who had come out as gay in college.  The rest all gave the distinct impression that marrying some unfortunate girl was an option.
Gail was a cheeky defiant young modern poet, who seemed to take perverse pleasure in declaring he was gay and shocking people, but I was sure he was going to pay a price for his dreadful decadence.  At that time in Utah, a bold guy like him would have been deemed a very pernicious influence on the young.
Well, what message did people imagine a cover-up of such traits would send, once detected.  I had detected my dad's tendencies when I was only five.  Was that all my extraordinary powers of observation were going to merit me, a stubborn wall of silence and denial among the males?  I did in fact think that homosexuality was widely accepted in my dad's world as something to experiment with.  No problem with the women finding out and voicing any objections, generally speaking.  They were too ignorant.  Too unsure of themselves when it came to these practices ever to accuse a man of unmentionable acts!
No wonder many men did not find women to be challenging enough to satisfy. The young male who knew all his secrets might be the one who seemed more his match.  We young girls in Utah were growing up in the dark ages of female development. We had not really advanced much further than Shakespeare's time.  No wonder Shakespeare was so popular in Utah! 
Until my mother could figure out my dad, he was going to thwart and frustrate her.  In fact, she acted like she hated his guts but had no alternative but to live with the bastard until the kids were grown.  So far he had not killed her when he suspected that she was straying!  So far so good! 
The male students at the University, normal or not,  accepted favoritism as their just due, while the females did not rebel, they never rebelled.  That was generally a good Mormon girl's main characteristic.  She did not question male authority. My mother was an exception.  She had rebelled against being a good Mormon girl even by marrying a skeptic like my dad. But I did not want to follow her example, because she was resigned to being bad.  She did not seem to think she had any other choice, if she was not going to be thoroughly dominated by my dad.
I knew how confused my mother's thinking was.  A couple of years later I finally dared to voice a protest to her about her affairs with other married man while still married.  She drew back her fist as though she was going to hit me in the face full force, then instead began jumping up and down and screaming, "I want to be bad, I want to be bad!"  I knew she was dangerous at that moment, so I shut up.  Taking Gary, my first child with me, who was still a baby in arms, I walked in the fields all day, thinking my mother was clearly insane.  But so was my dad!  Great!   
The church dominated society in Utah, which my mother tried to escape by marriage to my dad, was a patriarchal one.  Men knew best.  They were the only ones who could hold the priesthood.  God had invested his authority in them.  Women supported them, bore the children, and were generally expected to be meek and submissive.  They did not do the important thinking, and so therefore they were incapable of doing important writing. This was my grandmother's attitude, on my mother's side.  My mother rebelled because she had come to hate her mother's submissiveness to her dominating husband, my grandfather, so was not an ally to her daughter in her conflicts with him. 
I thought this was the message I was getting at the University of Utah as well as at home from my dad.  There was no sense of a girl trying to become an important writer. Especially of the world.   
Yet, in my family there were no sons, so out of necessity we daughters had had to take on boys' work whenever it was physically possible.  My younger sisters were now expected to punch cattle, scatter hay, ride horses, and drive trucks. Mother was as good a driver now as Daddy was, and often did the driving because Daddy was apt to get drunk.  She had also become a Case Farm machinery dealer and would go down in the fields with her book of instructions to help the ranchers fix the machinery they bought from her.
The only paying jobs Daddy could think of that educated women were good for were secretarial work and teaching school.  The idea of a woman becoming a playwright was so far fetched I had not even bothered to mention this goal to him.  Where was I going to do that?
Well, the truth of the matter was that woman playwrights rarely made it to the top anywhere.  If I ever wrote plays I was going to have to break into a field that was easily dominated by males, whether in Utah or New York.
I really felt discouraged about where I was headed in the job market as a female. I still thought I would get into almost instant trouble if I tried to teach in Utah schools.  Why I could probably go back to the University of Utah this coming fall and get into almost instant trouble by trying to say what I thought in my classes.  What kind of crazy idea was that?  What did what I thought have to do with anything important?  As a matter of fact, I might not even be able to graduate if I continued to assert myself.
If I did try to surface the secrets I had been keeping and was punished by having to leave the University without a degree, how would my dad react? 
I figured he might threaten me with extreme violence, but it was hard to imagine how he could top the fit he had thrown over me possibly having sex with my boyfriend.  Someone might have to step in to protect me.  I might have to run away.  I would probably need to get entirely out of Utah.  I could go to Spokane to visit Dean, maybe.  Rent a room and try to find a job.  I could tell Dean that we would probably have to get married, or I would just have to leave there, too, as my dad would not allow us to have sex without benefit of marriage.
Dean was still acting as though he could go on forever writing to me and seeing me once in a while.  I needed for that all to end.  I needed to give him an ultimatum!  A commitment to me or an end to this dabbling with my sexual feelings through the mail!
Dean was writing that summer he did not think he could get a leave to come home now until Christmas or even later.  This was ridiculous.  I could not continue to be emotionally and sexually tied to a young guy I never saw.  This situation was going to have to be resolved one way or another.
So my fevered thoughts ran as I was bottling away as we had to do every summer, no matter what went down.  LaRae came home, tired from her long hot summer bottling in the jam factory in Salt Lake. We made a few jokes about her wonderful job in the city bottling jam. Gee, she must have learned a lot. And it was so different.
She just ignored us, and said what is more she planned to escape her dreary home every summer.  When she was sixteen she would go back to Salt Lake to work as a waitress and would make a lot more money.  We would think make fun when she was rich from all her labors.
But if I rebelled too vigorously and did not get my degree, who knew, I might be trying to find work as a waitress or a store clerk before long, too.
Oh now I was really looking forward to going back to the University that fall, about like I would have looked forward to a trial where it would be decided whether I lived or died.
But by now I was committed.  I was definitely going to rebel.  I was going to speak the truth in my classes as it had rarely been spoken by a student in a Utah university.  Oh, rebel boys did it after a fashion, and got thrown out, usually for substance abuse, absenteeism, and bad grades, but Daddy was used to well behaved daughters.  He would have been very upset had we become little drunkards.  This privilege in our family was reserved for him alone.
Well, he was just about to find out what it was like to have a rebel daughter.  Good luck to him, and to me.  We were both going to need it.   A dangerous plan to respond with my real thinking which previously had to be concealed was just about to be implemented into my daily rounds of senior college classes.  Fall quarter.  I could not put off this move any longer.

Memoir: Chapter 45: Starting to feel pressure building in my Junior year and wondering if I am not headed for another frightening bout of chronic fatigue

I had been trying to keep the fatigue symptoms at bay ever since the frightening episode I experienced the summer I was twelve.  I was beginning to wonder if I could manage all the requirements of a theater major without bringing on another bout.  I knew I had managed my recovery only by resting enough and avoiding stress.  More crises during my junior year began to worry me. 
The first upset happened after Christmas when Margie and I returned from our trip home for the holidays.  Dean had come from Spokane, Washington on a Christmas furlough. He had been assigned to the base there for what he thought would be the duration of his enlistment. He had learned sheet metal work in Los Angeles and said this was where they repaired airplanes.  He would not be sent to Korea he was told.

I was happy because I had gotten to wear my new black velvet sheath to one of the dances we attended together.  Dean and I continued to correspond and because Pole was also still dating Margie, I thought we were pretty much set as couples, even though Margie wanted to be able to date others now that she was in college.
I said I was certainly looking around, too,  as I didn't see how Dean and I could ever go together with him stationed in Spokane and me in Salt Lake.  After I graduated I would be expected to find a teaching job somewhere in Utah.  It looked as though I would have to marry the guy even to stay long enough in the same place with him to say I actually knew him.
Margie had a bigger opportunity to get acquainted with Pole going to the same high school, but even though she said her interest was waning in him, she still could not resist double dating with Pole, Dean, and me when we were home, we always had so much fun.
By this time I had heard them sing and I was shocked at what a unique voice Dean had.  Haunting. He could sing harmony with anybody.  Pole's voice was good, too, but I could see why Dean had been called 'the voice' in high school.  I thought he had good enough voice to make some kind of name for himself, but I thought he was too much the country bumpkin to do it.
In the first place you had to coax him every time to sing. To heck with that.  I entertained thoughts of becoming his manager if I ever did marry him.  I did have to consider marrying him because we were so physically attracted, but there was something about his attitude that bothered me.
He seemed to have some kind of idea that sex was just wrong.  So I didn't think he showed enough determination to take these feelings anywhere.  I would have had to resist, just because if I did get pregnant I would have to take a slow boat to China.

The way Mother and Dad acted when they found Pole's wallet after the holidays and looked in it convinced me once again that I had better never get pregnant while unmarried.  Pole worked for Daddy off and on and sometime in January, Mother found his wallet in the couch.  Mother looked in it and found a condom and immediately told Daddy.
The first I heard about it was when Margie called me on the phone saying she had been fighting with them ever since they arrived in Salt Lake.  It seems that as soon as they found the condom they jumped in a car and drove to Salt Lake as though they might not arrive in time before one of us got pregnant.  They accused us of having sex with Pole and Dean, and what is more Daddy shouted he was going to stop paying any more of our college expenses.  If those boys wanted to have sex with us they could just damn well pay our bills!
I was so indignant to think Daddy especially would take this attitude, and even more so since I had so carefully refrained from taking any chances and they were as good as calling us damned liars.  We were finally able to convince them that they had not used any condoms on us enough so they could go back home and quit harassing us. 
Of course, when Dean heard this bit of news I was sure that he would regard sex with an unmarried girl as even more of an evil act.  I was just so tired of Daddy being such a tyrant, considering what I thought he had been doing all his life when it came to sex.  Mother, too, although I doubted if she would have acted nearly so abusive, if it had been up to her.
For this reason I was so happy when a handsome returned missionary fell in love with me.  His name was Robert.  It was during the same year that Archie, another returned missionary, put in his appearance at the University and became a superstar almost over night.  Archie's eyelashes, so long and beautiful, were what had obviously caused him all his trouble.  He had probably been madly pursued by both sexes since he was a tiny child because of those eyes.  He did admit to having issues on his mission, but the way Lees and Robert, his protege professor,  went crazy over him was a dead giveaway.  Archie also informed us that he only had one lung and he was expecting the other one to go after a few years and he would be gone from this earth.
I thought the professors were going to kill him that year giving him so many wonderful parts.  But Archie seemed determined to live out his last days with maximum exposure so he did not turn down anything. And all of us theater majors who had been trying to get big parts on the main stage were jealous of him, which Archie anticipated.  He was prepared with little barbs about our acting abilities in his own defense.

My returned missionary named Robert happened to run into me coming down the corridor in Kingsbury Hall where the students rehearsed their productions.  He stared into my eyes, so I stared back.  Rapport was instantly established without a word being spoken.  He said, 'Will you go out with me?"   I said, "Yes,' and that night he told me he had never had such an intense experience, meeting a girl for the first time,  would I accept his fraternity pin, he wanted to take me home to meet his family.
I then happened to remember there was a Dean out there somewhere who was never totally shocked at how my mother and dad acted since he had been observing such people all his life.  He had gone through the same schools and even had some of the same teachers as Daddy did.  His father was just as bad an alcoholic as Daddy was. 
I knew I could not take Robert, the missionary, home to meet my mother and dad.  He played the violin.  He had served his mission without excessive conflict it appeared.  What was I?  He had no idea.  We had just met one night in the corridor and felt an instant marvelous attraction, but I had to tell him I already had another boyfriend.
He probably suspected he had gotten carried away, so he did not argue with me. He was smart enough to trust me on this. It turned out that he had only been checking out the University and decided against going there.  I never saw him again. 
Later on during the year Daddy did something else Margie and I could tell Pole and Dean about, but I could never have told Robert. He came to Salt Lake to get a truckload of something or other and got totally whacked out on something and was picked up and jailed.  Mother called Margie and asked her if she please would not pick him up from jail and drive him and his loaded truck home, as she did not know how else to get them there. She told her to ask me to come with her to handle Daddy. She told Margie to drive very carefully because the truck was probably overloaded. 
I said I would go, of course, as this was something Margie could not do alone.  When she picked me up in the truck with Daddy he was still so out of it, he was not making a lot of sense.  I could not smell liquor on him so gathered it was some potent pills he had purchased somewhere.  I got between them and off down the road we went.
Margie had not had a whole lot of experience driving the big truck, but she had been driving with great enthusiasm since she was 15, so pretty soon she was handling the truck I thought perfectly well.  Every once in a while Daddy would demand we stop so he could relieve himself, and I could see he was taking more pills.  He probably would not stop dosing himself until they were entirely gone.
For this reason he did not even realize there was a crisis at all.  He did not wake up.  We were going up the summit of the Escalante Mountain when on the steepest part, the truck went out of gear.  My heart leaped.  My God, what was going to happen now.  A runaway over loaded truck? But Margie instantly struggled with those gears like a professional, and to my surprise she managed to get the truck back into compound.

We were totally exhausted by the time we met Mother on the road to Escalante.  Margie got out and went up to her and I could see she was crying.  I started crying, too, when I realized how horribly stressed and strained Margie must have gotten on the summit of that mountain.  It was almost a matter of life or death whether she got the truck back in gear.
Otherwise the brakes might not have held and we could have had a bad wreck any number of ways.  She knew what a close call we had.
Mother drove us back to Salt Lake the next day so we could get on with our studies.
I am sure one of the reasons Margie went on talking to and dating Pole from time to time was because he had worked for Daddy.  She did not have to explain to Pole what Daddy was like.  Pole knew what he was like.

Memoir: Chapter 44: In demand for student plays if not for the main stage

I hoped that I would be able to help Margie more during her first year at the U of U if I lived with her than I had been able to help Connie, my friend from Escalante, the year before.  She had elected to try a year at the university and secured a room at the freshman dorm.  I had thought she would benefit from living there as there would be many girls she could interact with and might enjoy herself more.  I was too busy to be able to see her often as I was in demand for student productions.  The theater majors were always looking for actors, and since I memorized fast and well I got cast.
I went over a few times to help Connie with some of her English papers, but she became increasingly frustrated with the difficulty she experienced in some of her classes and began to wish she had done something else with the money her Uncle Hymie had left for her to attend college.  We always saw each other at the dances and celebration days in Escalante and Boulder, but there was nothing like them away to school.
I thought it was too bad Connie hadn't decided to go into the nursing program, but she was discouraged by the degree of difficulty she experienced in her freshman classes and gave up on a college education instead.
I hoped that Margie would not get similarly discouraged if I was there to read some of her English themes and help her with those if she needed me to.  I thought she had a good journalistic style, and a good reception from the English teachers seemed to keep her going her freshman year.  Her goal was to become a graduate nurse so it was important for her not to get discouraged the first year while she completed some of her requirements.
And as for me, I was busier my third year in student productions than I had been as a sophomore.  We rehearsed in the afternoon so we could all get home fairly early.  Myrna Mae, a senior theater major, chose Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms" for her big student production. She wanted me to play the very long part of the only female in the play, the young wife of the old farmer and the step mother to his two sons. Myrna Mae was never anything but ambitious, but playing this long role turned out to be quite a thankless one since I felt totally incompatible with the fellow playing my old husband farmer.
He was a very earnest and willing actor, but he was simply lacking in authority and appeal for me in the role of my farmer husband.  I knew farmer types very well, but Phil did not! He and Myrna Mae were going to form a theater company as soon as she graduated she told me, so she naturally did not perceive anything wrong with his acting.
I was quite proud of myself for learning every word of the longest part I was ever to have in my life, but Dr. Lees, sitting in the audience through the long damned thing, did not seem to appreciate my efforts.  Instead, I thought the production probably brought him one step closer to his grave, judging from the look on his face throughout.

Another student production earned the dubious distinction of being the least rehearsed of any play I was ever in.  None of us liked the play, so we played around during rehearsal and did not apply ourselves.  When the night came for us to perform in front of Dr. Lees for the theater major's grade, none of us were sure of our lines and were in a constant panic through the eternity we were compelled to try to remember our lines.  I did dimly perceive that one of the actors leaped ahead in the script at least three pages, which I don't think the other actors even detected, but I vainly tried to remember what this actor had left out that might give some coherency to the proceedings.  I think the theater major got a C- on this production and richly deserved it, since she had failed to bring a whip to rehearsal to sting us into rehearsing.
I don't know whether the other actors ever even acted again.  So this was the sort of theater activity that kept me very busy during my junior year, so that I did not have time to put into play the plan I had of telling the truth in all my classes.  I thought this would be a very novel thing to do, since everyone at college it seemed to me were reduced to regurgitating back to the teachers what they wanted to hear, regardless of whether it was meaningful or not.  We students had been doing that in classes I thought since time immemorial.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if somebody dared to break the mold and said hey, this is stupid, this does not make sense.
I did get around to carrying out my plan somewhat in a five credit class I needed in my third quarter.  I was to read and review a bunch of textbooks that were to be used for teaching purposes in high school.  I absolutely delighted in writing exactly what I thought of each text book, even if I couldn't stand them.  I would write, oh this one is absolute garbage.  I had never dared write such a thing about a sacred text book in my entire life, but to my surprise this teacher took my  reviews in his stride.  We did not know each other, so he must have thought I was just a very critical student who just happened to be gifted with the nerve to say what she thought.  I think he gave me a B in the course and made no comment on my acid opinions of most of the books.
I thought oh this is fun.  Maybe this is what I should have been doing all along if I had not been such a craven coward.  I was sorry I had not started on this truth telling policy in my classes earlier, and was looking forward to my senior year when I planned to go into full truth telling mode.  I thought I would surprise myself as well as the teachers the following year.

I also had a somewhat rocky junior year with some of the geniuses I had been nurturing, some referred to me by Sharon, and one I had found on my own.  Sharon had apparently said something to Laurence about my shock at being told he was in love with me, since I would never have guessed it from the way he acted.  He didn't talk to me for a quarter or so, but finally settled for just being a friend and discussing books, which I was sure he would also quit doing as soon as he could find more eager girl candidates for the honor of being his token wife.
John was the other genius I had collected who attracted my attention by telling me his IQ measured over 200, the highest ever recorded in Ohio history.  Nobody believed this statistic, but I was sure John would not have taken so much pride in his achievement if he hadn't been telling the truth.  Besides this was mainly what the poor guy had going for him, since he had also inherited the shambling physique of a big bear, a broad peasant face, and eyes set too close together to convey attractiveness.  He was taking a lot of hard classes, too, which I would never even have gone near, but he was sure a mistake had been made on my I.Q. test.  He could not believe I had scored a lowly 130 points, but I kept assuring him that it was an accurate assessment, sadly, and that I had scored an abysmal 14% on my placement tests in math.  If my I.Q. had just been higher, he thought we should marry and have a number of little geniuses.  It was our duty.
But that winter John called and begged me to meet him downtown he wanted to show me something.  I finally agreed, and he walked me toward the west side along the rail road tracks.  At this point I called a halt and told John I had to go back home at once.  He hesitated but finally stopped dragging me along on this dark mission.  I just did not like the feel of the whole thing and never again agreed to meet John at night.  He had to be content with chatting with me when we met up at school.  Genius did not always mean stability I was finding out.

And Sharon, who also had a genius I.Q., had finally gotten so disillusioned with Ghiselin, she said she was going to start her underground paper on campus for sure.  She asked me to be one of her first contributors. I looked through my writings and gave her a short piece that reminded me of her a little bit.  It was about a fairly young couple having an affair and getting tired of each other, so that not even a daring love affair without benefit of marriage held any excitement anymore.  I pictured this being Sharon's state of mind just before she broke poor Dick's heart and found someone else.  She tells the hapless lover that she does not want anything from him before bed except a glass of milk.  His appeal has waned.  The milk symbolized the virginity she had sacrificed which she wished she had back again since she was no longer enjoying her affair.
Sharon published this little piece I had written long before I met Sharon in her first issue of the underground paper which I simply named "Louise", I think, the name of the young woman.  The next thing I knew Sharon was calling me outraged because she said the Dean of Women, the very one who had tried to refuse me permission to go out and talk to the suicidal Dick, had been shocked at reading my piece, and ordered all of Sharon's underground paper copies picked up, and she was banned from printing any more!
I could not imagine what the Dean of Women was objecting to.  I knew there were still a lot of virgins going to the University of Utah, but why had Louise's affair with her boyfriend gotten to this woman? The affair had not made the young woman happy, I clearly implied.
The Dean of Women did not relent.  Sharon was denied permission ever to do an underground paper again. And it was all my fault, or Louise's. And I had to take a class the coming fall from this woman, which I had been putting off as long as possible. She had quite a bad reputation as a teacher.  I understood now why.
She taught the most important education class I needed for my education degree. I wondered if she would remember me, well, undoubtedly she would, since I was notorious for a day or so as the author of "Louise".

But some of the highlights of the year were going with Margie to Wilson family reunions.  She was happy because she said now that she had declared her major was nursing, Grandpa Wilson was talking to her more frankly than he ever had before.  Grandpa even started to treat me with a little more respect, although he had yet to talk frankly to me.  Margie was the only person I knew of, besides maybe one of his sons that Grandpa did talk honestly to.  He even implied he had not talked to a female in the family like that  for years.
He always seemed to be trying to avoid talking to Mother.  He hated her complaints about Daddy.  She always said that his attitude was that she had married him, against his advice, so she would get no sympathy from him.
Grandma and Grandpa seemed surprised we were staying to Darlene's house so we could get better acquainted with her and her little girl. They seemed resigned to the fact that they were never going to know them very well.  
And that was the year I finally met Varl, Aunt Anne's boy, to a family reunion, who had finally returned from the service, all done with that he said.  He was the handsomest thing I had about ever seen, but best of all we loved each other on sight.  He took me home and we talked for hours.   We even exchanged a kiss or two, but I decided that actually dating him would be a bit much.  Cousin Varl nodded when I said that I thought we were just too closely related to take this attraction further.  He had probably had so many girls in love with him by then, he knew very well he might not be faithful long.
Sometime later I heard from Aunt Anne that he had found a very nice girl he was marrying.  Then I heard that they were having a child, a son, and then another one.  The reason I am telling more of this story was because then I heard that he was drinking and partying again and breaking this wife's heart.  But that spree did not last any time at all. He did not see a truck stopped ahead while driving up the highway with a girl until too late, and plowed into it, and they were both killed instantly. 
I went to the funeral and saw Jerry, the young second cousin who had lived across the street from me when I lived to Great Grandma's, grieving his heart out over his brother, just older than he was, dying way too soon.  He was comforted to see me.  Varl must have told him that he had met me and we shared great rapport. My Wilson cousin soul mate was gone to the other side but that was not the last time, I would ever feel Varl's presence.
One night traveling along that dark highway where he was killed, I felt him in the car, strong as could be.  I said, "Varl, why are you here?"  I had gone along that highway numerous times before and never felt Varl's presence in the car with me. I went around the curve and there was a car with its rear end stuck quite far out on the highway, wrecked.  The people were gone out of it, but the car itself had not yet been removed. Seeing that battered car, I knew that spirits really do exist. "Thank you, Varl,"  I thought.

Memoir: Chapter 43: Tending my little cousin Sue while my Aunt Vesta has a hysterectomy and deciding to live with Aunt Darlene for a year because my Uncle Crae was still missing in action

Just as I was getting ready to go back to Boulder, Mother called and said that my Aunt Vesta needed someone to come to Washington and take care of her baby while she had a hysterectomy which just could not wait.  Margie had gone to high school in Richland a year, but for some reason she could not go or Mother thought I should.  I don't know all the reasons that she decided I needed to go up there immediately.
I was mainly worried that Dean would end his basic training and would come home while I was gone, and I would miss him altogether.  But I knew if Margie couldn't go there was nobody in the family old enough to take that responsibility besides me.

Baby Sue had nearly lost her life when she was very young. When she was born she appeared to be so healthy that the doctors decided she had not been affected by the incompatible blood types of her parents, one positive and the other, my aunt, R-H-negative.  Then suddenly Baby Sue started to fail and had to be hospitalized immediately and her blood transfused.  She had recovered but now, sadly, Aunt Vesta was telling Mother that she was showing some signs of brain damage they thought, which her older brother Jim had escaped when he was transfused.  They had gotten to him in time. 
When I saw Sue after I took a plane to Pasco, I thought she was such a beautiful child I could not believe anything could be wrong with her.  She had black curling hair and the most gorgeous big blue eyes.  But after I took her and started handling her I could see that at nine months old she was slightly stiff.  I did not want to think it, nobody wanted to think it, but she did seem somewhat brain damaged.
I thought the very least I could do is give a month out of my life to her.  What kind of life was she going to have if she was indeed impaired. Nobody really knew then what that damage was going to consist of, but she was a pretty easy baby for me to tend.
She turned out to have quite a severe case of cerebral palsy and was completely deaf, but my Aunt Vesta went to college and learned to teach children who were handicapped as she was. Eventually she learned to read lips so well that her boss was not aware for three years she was deaf.  She continued to work until she was very close to retirement age.  She is one of the biggest success stories I know about of someone conquering such a severe handicap.  How could I possibly complain about my lot in life I always used to think when Sue with cerebral palsy had risen to the challenge of making a life for herself with such perseverance and courage. 

In those days women stayed in the hospital longer after an operation.  Aunt Vesta did not come home for ten days or so, and I stayed a couple of weeks more so that she could have time to recover before she started to lift Sue again.  She needed me there to lift her until she would not risk her stitches tearing loose if she did.

That was a sobering time for me, but I did not regret helping her out, and tending Sue caused me to start thinking about another plan I had to get better acquainted with another little cousin, the daughter of my Uncle Crae, my mother's brother, who was still listed as missing in action in the war with Japan.  His plane had gone down in 1945, and in spite of ground searches, had not been found.  The pilot had radioed they were going down on land.
Crae's wife, Darlene, lived with her daughter Trudy in a house on the east side in Salt Lake owned by her mother.  Her youngest brother was still going to high school.  Her youngest sister had just graduated from high school and was going to BYU. Her mother worked and Darlene took care of the housekeeping and cooking while staying at home with Trudy who was about five years old.  
I was thinking about asking Darlene if she and her mother would rent Margie and me a room.  We could easily take the bus to the University from her house.  It was a very safe neighborhood.  I didn't know if Margie would be willing to share this room with me, as I thought since she was planning to enter the nursing program, she would soon be going to live in the nurse's dorm, after she had completed her first year of requirements.
Margie wasn't too excited about the idea.  She had been thinking she would go to the freshman dorm as I had.  But I tried to convince her this was probably our only chance to interact with this little girl and her mother.  I thought that it was best thing we could ever do for our missing Uncle Crae, as I didn't see how we could even know Aunt Darlene or Trudy just seeing them to an occasional family reunion.  We could talk to Aunt Darlene if we stayed with her, and try to draw her out about her loss.  I knew it was tremendous. I thought we could also catch up on some sister talk we had been missing all the years she and I had been separated.

 
Well, maybe because Margie had not gone to Washington to take care of Sue and I had, she agreed to go along with my plan even though I knew she doubted she could have as much fun as she could to the freshman dorm.  And our experience staying with Aunt Darlene proved to be even more austere than I feared.  Aunt Darlene was absolutely convinced that Crae had made his way to a Shangri-la from the plane and was still alive and happy and would come home someday.
But I talked to her a lot.  Margie and I had classes at different times.  I don't know what she did, but I found out Darlene had lived a very hard life.  As the oldest of eight children, she had always been the babysitter while her mother worked, as her father had deserted the family.
She said one night she was home and she looked up and saw her father on the back porch.  He looked back at her, and then he just simply walked away again.  I thought that was such a sad story.  Her mother was a more cheerful sort than the melancholy Aunt Darlene who found her comfort in the church.  Her mother, who had a steady boyfriend, was not religious but expressed some pride because the daughter who had just graduated from high school was engaged to one of the Prophet Brigham Young's great grandsons, I have forgotten how many greats.
Darlene was one of the few Mormon girls I knew who had insisted on going on a mission.  That was where she and Crae met.  They married, and Crae had not lived to see Trudy who was born after his plane went down.

But Crae was a good guy.  I always felt his spirit was close.  He was happy that Margie and I were trying to do something to help Darlene get over her grief.  Darlene had a hauntingly beautiful face, but I thought she had been damaged by the restricted life she had been forced to lead after her father abandoned his family.
One time I was talking to Darlene in the kitchen, and suddenly there was an exchange between us that I can only describe as a contact of our spirits.  That is the only time I have ever experienced such a thing.  I thought this woman had one of the purest spirits I have ever known even though her opportunities had been so limited.
Not long after we left, Darlene's mother had to have a knee operation if she was to keep on working and supporting her son, and she suffered a fatal heart attack after surgery.  Darlene really was the head of her family now but fortunately her brothers and sisters were independent.  She just had Trudy to worry about, but she never married again. The church was always her comfort. 

Trudy, her daughter, grew up to be a very beautiful young woman who proceeded to have a large family.  She made sure she would never be lonely, but her husband stuck around to help her raise hers.  She had all but forgotten us from the year we spent living in their home.  But I know it made a difference to Crae who I thought looked down from heaven and smiled at us.