Notes on Faith

One weekend afternoon in May of 1986, two of Faith's teenage stepkids, Stephen and Jonathan, were having a heated argument in the kitchen of 48 Broad St. What were they bellowing about? Oh who knows? It probably started as something you and I would consider innocuous. Stephen and Jonathan never got along from the word go, but more on them in their own posts. For now, suffice it to say that these two behemoths looked ready to come to blows when their stepmom came down to the kitchen using the backstairs that led to and from the master enclave on the second floor.

It's too bad that Stephen and Jonathan were most likely arguing about so much bullshit, because our Faith here, her bullshit quotient was a flat zero. Yes, that's probably what you need to know up front about the matriarch of this three-story Queen Anne. The bullshit needle started at zero. And it stayed at zero. We're talking frozen, okay? So when she came upon these two going at each other, she said bluntly and with a volume slightly lower than normal that they should knock it off. Of course Stephen and Jonathan did no such thing. They'd been fighting on a regular basis since they were old enough to raise their fists, long before their stepmom entered their lives. They certainly weren't about to stop just because she said so. Of course, like most teenagers, they grossly underestimated adults, and no adult more so than their stepmom. Keeping her temperament and tone level, she reiterated that it really would be a good idea if they stopped. Again, nothing. Then Faith, rather than upping the volume a notch or two, suddenly spun the dial full blast and told them to KNOCK IT OFF!

This at least shut them up, but not for long. Faces glowing red and chins decorated with spittle, they turned to their stepmom, whose eyes bored holes through their heads. They considered her with mild curiosity, as if she were a new pair of salt and pepper shakers, before turning back to each other and going right back at it, this time with some pushing and shoving thrown in.

That did it. With all the purpose of a Major League pitcher, Faith retrieved a can of peas from the cupboard, did her best windup, and hurled it at her two stepsons. Seriously, Faith didn't just toss it or chuck it. She Nolan Ryan-ed it.

It smacked Jonathan square in the temple.

While secretly he reveled in Jonathan's pain, Stephen exploited the incident to advance his mission of convincing his father that Faith was a stark-raving lune. That night he marched up to his father and said, "See?! She threw a can of peas at Jonathan! She's crazy!" To which Frank, buzzed from his nightly dosage of Scotch and soda, waved away his first-born's concerns with a heavy-lidded smile and a slurred, "Bullshit. You and your brother shouldn't've been fighting in the first place." He paused to take a sip before saying, "And besides. You two are twice her size. Consider the situation from her point of view."

Ah yes. Point of view. This concept is key when discussing Faith. Well let's be honest, it's important when talking about most people, but when it's a tough nut like this woman... Consider: At dinner one night, within a week or so of the pea incident, the Roggebusch clan was sitting around the table having tacos. At one point the topic of Boss Hogg, the next-door neighbor, came up. I'm not sure why. I think Dan or Louis was talking about all the cats the old coot seemed to have. Nine-year-old Barry, the youngest of the clan and the protagonist of 48 Broad, giggled and remarked on how ugly Boss Hogg was. To which Faith immediately bored her eyes through his soul and said, "You can be ugly and nice." Frank looked at his wife and said, "Faith. Calm."

That remark was like a figurative can of peas to the head. It hurt Barry quite a bit because it was a cheap shot at the lingering after-effects of an illness that had nearly killed him three years earlier. For two weeks he'd been bedridden with a double-whammy of Bell's Palsy that paralyzed the left side of his face and a virus that had kept his fever consistently above a hundred. When he came out the other side of that ordeal, the left side of his face had suffered permanent muscle tone damage so that it always looked lopsided. In a family chockfull of handsome and charismatic siblings, Barry came down with a four-alarm case of ugly duckling syndrome. Faith's telling him point blank that he was ugly didn't help matters.

Now consider Faith's point of view. Barry was the youngest of the house and was accordingly, in her opinion, a whiny little brat. From her perspective, Frank wasn't remotely the disciplinarian Barry needed. Or the other siblings needed, too, for that matter. But as she did with Frank's other kids, Faith never got too involved in telling Barry what to do. She'd tell Frank, and he'd pass it along to him. Sometimes, though, her no-bullshit policy would mandate a circumnavigation of the usual chain of command. Just ask Stephen and Jonathan.

Her two biological kids, John and Alexander, were no safer just because they were, ya know, actually related to her. One of the gang's favorite pastimes during the eighties was playing video games on the Commodore 64. If you think having a video game platform of any kind in a house with seven kids was like sending an open invitation to disaster, you'd be right. Frank and Faith tried to structure the kids' time around when they did homework versus when they watched TV or played video games. They set aside an hour a night for homework. The kids couldn't stay up past a certain time, depending on the age of the kid in question. It didn't always work, though, and Faith's two kids were as guilty as anyone. On one particular evening she was stomping down the first-floor hallway from the living room to the kitchen. When she passed the game room (officially known as the pool room since it originally contained a pool table), she saw Alexander watching Barry play the Commodore and cried out: "I'll blow it up! I'll blow that fucking thing up!"

By now you might think Faith's approach to parenting veered toward the harsh side. Maybe it's harsh for you, but for her course, it was par. To understand why, we should probably go a few decades back and a few thousand miles west.

Faith Roggebusch was born Faith Drummond in El Cerrito, California, a suburb of San Francisco on the east side of the bay, about ten or so miles north of Berkeley. She was the second of three kids, with an older brother named Stevie and a younger sister named Sarah. When she was still in grammar school, the family moved to Berkeley. Their house was perched on a hill with a gorgeous view across the bay.

Soon after arriving in the new digs, Faith befriended an elderly man who lived in a house on the way to school. She would often find him outside tending his lawn and flower beds. Most of the time they wouldn't exchange more than a hello, but now and again Faith would stop at the guy's fence to chat about this and that. She'd vent about the kids at school who made fun of her nerdy glasses and bony figure. He would offer advice about how to deal with it, the recurring theme being patience: This too shall pass. But if the kids were persistent enough, maybe they should all get together in the principal's office to talk it out. This old guy, by the way, was none other than Chester A. Nimitz, the five-star admiral who commanded the entire U.S. fleet in the Pacific during World War II. Indeed, Admiral Nimitz was one of only six men to achieve the five-star rank during the war (he got his in December of '44). Only two others got it after the war. That's pretty huge, right? We're talking the largest naval operation and fleet of any kind the world had ever seen. To this day there's never been anything like it. And the man who ran it all retired to Berkeley where he dabbled in gardening and befriended a little math whiz named Faith.

A house with a view and having Admiral Nimitz as her pal were the only good things about Faith's childhood. Her father was a raging alcoholic who liked to pass the time by backhanding Faith and Sarah. Literally. And often right there at the dinner table. Now and again Dad would whack Faith so hard that she'd fall out of her chair unconscious. Mom wasn't exactly a vast improvement. For starters, she was riddled with arthritis, and so accordingly would rarely be in a good mood. But Mom went beyond grouchiness. She figured her kids were no good, and it made no difference how much they excelled at school. For her part, Faith was a math genius. While other people banged their heads over geometry and wept at calculus, Faith wasn't fazed by any of it. She eventually went to UC Berkeley and scored a degree in math. Then she went to the University of Colorado in Boulder and got her master's. While being away from home at least meant Dad couldn't clock her, her scholastic success didn't make so much as a nick in her mom's displeasure.

For reasons neither Faith nor her siblings could ever discern, their mom held in much higher esteem the family of her sister, Faith's Aunt Suz. Mom thought Suz's kids, Faith's cousins, were far superior to her own. The reason that baffled the hell out of everyone was because there didn't seem to be an obvious reason for it. If Faith's cousins had all been rocket scientists, that would've been something, but none of them excelled at school like Faith did. Family gatherings? As they say in Jersey, fuhgeddaboutit. Mom would always find a way to make Faith feel like shit. More than once this took the form of Faith not having a boyfriend. Her cousins, all three girls, never had much trouble finding a man. They weren't exactly supermodels, but they weren't, as Faith's mom liked to dub her second born, a pirate's dream (sunken chest). The only comfort Faith could take away from these get-togethers was that she wasn't alone in Mom's crosshairs. Stevie often had to endure his poor grades being called out. Again, the cousins weren't exactly straight A material, but at least they never got Ds and Fs, which Stevie routinely did. And so on. It didn't really matter in the end. Even when Faith did land herself a man, Mom found something else to criticize.

When Faith left Berkeley for Colorado, she never looked back. On her way to getting her master's, she met and fell for a fellow math student named Ford Peterson. While Faith stopped with her master's, Ford continued up the ladder until he scored his PhD. With five degrees between them, they settled in the Boulder area where Ford scored a teaching job at the school. Faith had a tough time finding work that didn't involve teaching in a high school. When she suggested going for a doctorate herself, Ford said no way. In fact, he sort of suggested she not pursue a career in math at all. Although he never said it outright, Faith would forever think her first husband just didn't want a spouse competing with him in his field.

As good a sport as one could be in that kind of bind, Faith went back to UC Boulder, this time to get her bachelor's in music. She and her sister had taken piano lessons as children. Maybe they weren't the best at practicing, but they always had Dad to beat the shit out of them if they ever wavered. Even with that kind of motivation, Faith never viewed the piano as more than her parents' lark, something to do simply because they mandated she learn it. For some reason, perhaps because her brain handled notes like it did numbers, she excelled at it. But then she was off to Boulder. Outside her parents' sphere, she promptly let go of the instrument. When she enrolled in UC's music program, she chose the organ as her specialty. It was different from the piano, but not so different that she couldn't start out with a wee bit of a head start. In fact, Faith aced the program and graduated summa cum laude in three years.

Before going into the dissolution of Faith's marriage to Ford, I should mention what happened to her siblings. Like Faith, they pretty much fled the nest as soon as they could. Stevie moved up to Sacramento where he could nurture his cocaine addiction in peace. After two overdoses and two near-death experiences by the time he turned thirty, he finally went clean (as clean as you can be smoking a pack of cigarettes a day) and found work appraising the value of tree plots that were candidates to be cut as timber.

As for Sarah, she went south. She graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in history. Then as now, UCSB was renowned for its party scene. It was at one such party where she met her future ex. No sooner did they get settled somewhere in Ventura County than this guy realized it'd be so much easier if he could strum his guitar and smoke pot while wifee went to work and took care of their two kids. Whereas Faith didn't take much shit, Sarah had a habit of taking a lot. Call it a hangover from her childhood. But she did have her limits. When her man joined a society that conducted ceremonies requiring supplicants to bathe in sheep's blood, she'd had it. Sarah divorced him and, no surprise, had no trouble convincing the judge that she should have full custody of the kids.

Faith, meanwhile, had two kids of her own before she and Ford split. Alexander and John Peterson are, of course, two of the seven kids who end up at 48 Broad in the eighties. When they were still in elementary school, their parents attended a math conference at UC Boulder. Also attending was an economist (and married father of three) from Washington, D.C. named Frank Roggebusch. If you've read the post on Frank, you know the score. He and Faith hit it off right away. She represented a new beginning for him. And now you can see how he did the same for her. They eventually got married and bought that three-story Queen Anne on the corner of Broad and Buttonwood.

And talk about bouncing back, before you could say "infidelity," Ford landed on his feet in the San Fernando Valley married to another woman. This is where John and Alexander would spend their summers during the eighties, and where they'd eventually relocate after high school.

Now I can't talk about Faith's marriage to Frank without relating how Frank had to meet Aunt Suz. After Faith accepted Frank's proposal, they flew to the west coast to meet the fam: Faith's parents and siblings, the fearsome Aunt Suz, the hated cousins, and more. The aunt and cousins, in particular, were all fired up to give Frank the proverbial third degree. Not only was Faith's father not much of a threat, but he and all the other men involved were disgusted at the prospect of Aunt Suz sounding off. Which is why, as soon as dinner was over, the men bolted. That's when the interview, such as it was, began. It was pretty much what you'd expect. They were especially interested in Frank's scholastic and professional background. With a PhD from Johns Hopkins and a CV that included the Department of Energy, it wasn't much of a problem for Frank. Further, he'd had a few Scotch and sodas at this point and so was able to take it all in stride. Finally Aunt Suz announced that the interview was over and that Frank had passed inspection.

"Oh," Frank said. "I hadn't realized that I was being inspected."

"Yes," she said, "that was the point."

"Well actually, I thought I was meeting you and yours for the same reason. And so far, I've yet to make up my mind."

I don't need to tell you that Aunt Suz became livid. Frank and Faith had their cue to go back to the hotel. Faith was ready to do cartwheels. It was hard for her to talk about her aunt and cousins without using words like "flaming douche bags."

When they were settled in Jersey, with Frank teaching econ at Temple University while still moonlighting for Energy, Faith scored a plum gig with a firm up in Princeton writing software for industrial robots. And she kept up with the organ. Those extra college years studying the instrument had gotten her hooked. If they paid organists what they paid people who worked with robots, she'd've picked the organist job any day. As it was, she could only do it on weekends. At first this was simply playing Sunday mornings at a Methodist church in Riverton. By the time May of 1986 arrived, when 48 Broad takes place, she was ensconced as weekend music director at the Episcopal church in Medford, while her robotics career was thriving.

All was well on the professional front. Now on the home front...?