Chapter Seven
John hated everything the sixties represented: license, irreverence, disobedience, questioning of authority. As a Cub Scout leader, he liked to call the boys to attention and strut up and down the ranks like a drill sergeant on inspection. But a scout pack in the New York suburbs wasn’t the Marine Corps, and few parents in Westfield were prepared to allow their boys to be publicly rebuked by a man in a Cub Scout uniform, so John kept his disapproval to the level of a sneer when he found a boy with hair creeping down past his collar.
At home, he was afraid of Helen. But the children were a different story. He insisted on his right to approve their playmates. He drilled them in religious doctrine and school lessons. He was the final arbiter of their daily schedules. The children, at least, were under control. They obeyed—until Patty became a teenager right at the height of the counterculture movement and the Vietnam War. For John, deeply alarmed by the moral decay that he believed had begun to pervade the nation, the sixties barged in the door every time Patty walked in from school with her leather jacket and her waist-length blonde hair.
Worse, as far as he was concerned, the girl had obviously inherited certain personality traits from her headstrong mother.
“Pat at sixteen was the most independent young woman that I have ever known,” said a Westfield friend of the girl’s, Barry Cohen. “She had an attitude and an outlook that people her age admired, and even envied. She had outward qualities of brazenness, haughtiness, and nonchalance, but inward qualities of warmth and kindness. She had tremendous allure for a girl of sixteen.”
Like her mother, she also had a mouth that she sometimes used to great effect. Once, after being lectured snidely by an imperious male high school teacher for some minor inattentiveness, Pat was heard to mutter “Oh, go fuck yourself” as she buried her head in a book. While the suggestion caused merriment and even prompted murmurings of “I’ll second that!” in the classroom, the resulting phone call to her father was no laughing matter. John was horrified that any daughter of his would be heard using such language. She was grounded for what her friends believed was an inordinately long time.
The boys were still too young to sense the trouble that was gathering. John was just turning fifteen, with Fred two years behind him. Their father still accompanied them on Scout functions, including camping trips in the summer. On occasion, John would even play catch on the lawn with his sons. One neighbor noticed that John threw a baseball from the wrist, with his elbow bent, “like a girl—before girls began playing baseball that is.” Whatever, John was proud of his sons. Young Johnny was a budding athlete, a strong boy with a quick temper who played on his junior high school soccer team. Freddy was a cherub-faced charmer who covered games for his school paper and had dreams of being a sportswriter. Both boys were avid fans of the New York Mets.
As to Helen, the children’s classmates have differing recollections. Some say they seldom saw her. “She was always sick in bed,” said one. To others, she was a gracious presence who welcomed her children’s friends into the home and often served them snacks after asking them not to make noise that would disturb John at work in his ground-floor office.
The boys clearly believed that their mother was ill. But they told friends that she was gradually getting better. All she needed, they said, was rest.
Pat—the only people who called her Patty anymore were relatives—sensed that this was not the case. Pat didn’t say much at home, but she took it all in. She knew her mother was seriously ill, and she knew there were severe problems between her parents.
Pat had noticed that her father did not spend every night with her mother. Sometimes John slept in one of the boys’ rooms. Sometimes he spent the night in a spare room down the hall. She had heard him crying in there more than once. Sometimes, she knew, he even spent the night on a cot in the room where he kept his games and books, under the ballroom.
And Pat knew something else. She knew they were poor. It was clear that her father was struggling miserably all day in his office, sitting there in his suit and tie with his two dozen file cabinets and his envelopes. Oh, he was on the phone; he had stacks of mail. But the man did not have a job. You could see it in the haunted look on his face.
Without making a major issue out of it, at the end of her sophomore year in high school, the girl went to her guidance counselor and switched her curriculum from college prep to vocational. That way, she could take advantage of the work-study program in the fall, attending classes in the morning and working in an office, for credit and pay, in the afternoon. That way, she at least would have a job, help out at home, and have a few dollars of her own. Pat got an after-school job as a file clerk at KMV Associates, an insurance agency in downtown Westfield. Shortly afterward, she got her kid brother Fred a job at the same office. For ninety minutes each afternoon, the thirteen-year-old boy came in to do basic janitorial chores such as sweeping floors, emptying trash cans, and cleaning ashtrays.
Pat kept her worries to herself as a matter of course. As the sixties swept over Westfield, the girl bought a second-hand guitar and even wrote her own songs. As a child of the Midwest transplanted into a new culture at adolescence, she overcompensated a little, affecting a coolness that one classmate said “struck some people as hoody.” But her friends, and she had a lot of them, boys and girls, mostly remember her as an earnest, friendly, and amusing teenage girl who had come to Westfield from upstate New York and wanted nothing more than to be liked and accepted as she tried to figure out who she was going to be.
And while she mainly achieved that acceptance with her teenage peers, it had become disturbingly apparent to Pat that she had failed abjectly with her father, that, whoever she was and whatever she was all about, he now did not trust her and, ultimately, did not even much like her.
Even in high school, Pat needed to obtain permission from her father for routine forays beyond Hillside Avenue. It always seemed to present some sort of a problem.
“Daddy, we’re going down to get an ice cream cone. And then we might stop at the Dungeon,” a Westfield friend, John Rochat, recalled Pat saying to her father after supper one evening.
Her father knew what the Dungeon was—a teen club operated by a local church, where kids came to dance to records on Saturday nights. They drank soft drinks. Even the bolder ones knew better than to try to sneak anything else in, or even to disappear into the parking lot for a nip. The place was always chaperoned. It was about as tolerant of teenage rowdiness as the public library.
But John, who was so unassertive when dealing with adults, liked to twist the screws when dealing with children. “There’s not going to be any liquor down there, is there?” he growled in disgust, needlessly embarrassing the girl in front of her friends.
Sometimes, the friends noticed, he even got in his car and followed her into town, to be sure they were going where she had said.
“John List was quiet, well-spoken,” Rochat said. “But he never seemed to have very much to say. He was the sort of guy I then classified as a bookworm. He had this air about him. He always seemed to be thinking.”
Rochat liked Pat very much. They did not date—dating even by then was something of an outmoded activity. Kids showed up at places, usually in a group. People would pair off eventually, but it would have been laughable for a boy to arrive at a girl’s front door with a bunch of flowers, stammering his greetings to the girl’s father. John always seemed to blame his daughter for not knowing that kind of boy.
“Pat wasn’t a straight-laced conservative,” Rochat said, “but she was by no means what you would have called a hippie. We had some hippies, and Pat was not one of them. In no way was Pat out of line. She wasn’t a bad kid. She wasn’t promiscuous. Now, I cannot say that she didn’t drink an occasional beer. I never saw her, but I’m sure she did. New York was a short drive away, and you could buy alcohol at eighteen in New York. Westfield had any number of teenage bootleggers. There was beer around. Big deal, right?
“I
also never saw her do any drugs, never. She might have smoked marijuana, but I never saw it, which is to say that she wasn’t making a big point of it,” said Rochat, who went on after college to become a small-town police chief in Ashland, Virginia. “Pat was a good kid. That’s what I remember. Now, she wasn’t any Holy Roller; maybe she wasn’t holy enough for her father. She didn’t go around talking about saving people. But she was what I would call a nice Christian girl.”
In the last eight months of her life, Pat discovered the theater.
Ed Illiano noticed the girl as soon as she strolled in. She stood there for a long time at the edge of the group, transfixed as she listened to the young people rehearse their lines. Actually, Ed thought she was transfixed, with her eyes wide and mouth agape. In fact, Pat List was stoned.
A girlfriend had brought her to one of the twice-weekly workshop sessions of the Westfield Drama Club, which was sponsored for local teenagers by the Westfield Recreation Commission. Pat had been reluctant. Drama workshop did not sound especially cool. It sounded something like marching band, which she had left behind with junior high. But she had shared a joint in the park; there wasn’t anything better do to. She decided to stop in for a look.
It turned out to be the best thing she ever did. Not only did she discover a love of the theater that she hadn’t known before, she also found in that group of perhaps thirty teenagers, about evenly divided between boys and girls, something that approximated a family. It would sustain her for the rest of the life she had left.
The drama workshop was begun in 1968 by Ruth Hill, the director of the recreation commission, who hired Ed Illiano, a freelance voice and drama teacher who had a number of private students in Westfield, to run it. In 1969, a group of students in Westfield High School, dissatisfied with what they thought was a timid and unimaginative school drama group, broke away to form their own splinter group, Theater 69, which affiliated with the recreation commission workshop and Ed Illiano.
A brochure published by the group at the time said, “Our young performers soon learn the sometimes harsh realities of theater … our ambition is to channel our graduates into professional theater.”
Ed, in his early forties at the time, believed passionately in community repertory theater and in the ability of young people, given hard work, to grasp the essentials.
“Ed was a good, strong coach, very traditional in his approach, with high standards,” Ruth Hill said. “He demanded a lot of the kids. They liked it—they put on one excellent production after another under Ed, who was a real taskmaster.”
She was amazed at how Pat List plunged right in, and at the positive change that came over her. A girl who had been a lackluster student in school suddenly was transformed into someone who studied scripts, showed up on time for rehearsals, and gave it all she had.
“This was a girl who was obviously having some difficulties, and the drama group was something, the one thing, she was really excited about,” Ruth Hill said. “She was really a very outgoing child, and this was an opportunity she had never known existed for her.”
Like most of the other teenage members of the group, she was in awe of Ed Illiano, an unlikely Pied Piper indeed at the end of the sixties. A Korean War veteran with extensive operatic training, a strict conservative in a room full of borderline hippies, Ed seemed to use the sheer force of personality to make his students pay attention.
“The man threw chairs,” said Barry Cohen, who belonged to the group. “He pounded his fist on walls. He shouted. But in spite of that, we came back for more. There was a charisma, a strength—we were all bound together tremendously. If anything happened to one of us, we all felt it.”
In the drama group, Pat List found a direction for the first time in her life.
One night, after members of the group had worked for several hours on scenes from Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Pat approached Ed with tears in her eyes.
“What beautiful, beautiful language,” she said.
Ed snorted. “It’s always been there. All you have to do is reach out and take it.”
The drama group met twice a week, on Wednesday nights for three hours and on Fridays for four hours. It was a tremendous investment of time for teenagers, who were also expected to memorize their lines at home and, when their twice-yearly stage productions approached, put in even more time on rehearsals and such mundane chores as building sets.
Ed was touched when Pat came to him one night in the spring and asked if he would take her on as a private drama student for lessons he gave several nights a week in the music room of a Westfield resident and friend, Barbara Sheridan, who served as the assistant drama coach.
He agreed. The fee was six dollars an hour. In Westfield, it went without saying that a parent paid for a child’s lessons. Later, Ed would learn that Pat, not wanting to burden her father with a request for money, was paying the fee out of the few dollars she made from her after-school job.
As a young aspiring actress, he said, “Pat wasn’t the type who hit you between the eyes. She wasn’t one of these sweet-faced sexy kids at all. After a while, you just knew she was there, but it took time. But her staying power was very great, and she got better. Sometimes you see some in the beginning and they’re spectacular, then they fade, they drop out after the first week. But there was something about her. She just stayed and stayed with it.
“I have never in my life, before or since, known a girl like Pat,” he said. “She wasn’t a child. She wasn’t giddy, wasn’t pretentious. She had the face, the figure, the intelligence, the stick-to-itiveness. She could have made it. The kid wanted to work. She’d show up with her lines memorized, every time, without fail. And we’re not talking about easy stuff.”
Actually, Pat’s stage debut was easy stuff. The spring production in 1971 was Li’l Abner, the first musical the group had attempted, and all that was required for the small part she was considered for was the ability to act comically sexy, which she had, and the ability to execute a small bump and grind, which she lacked.
“Mr. Illiano,” she asked him during a lesson. “Would you teach me how to bump and grind?”
It must have been an interesting sight to see this fierce-some Italian taskmaster demonstrating the bump and grind to a sixteen-year-old. “It was only a side-grind, very modest, even for Westfield,” Ed laughed years later. It seems to have gone over fine.
The role Pat played in Li’l Abner was Stupefyin’ Jones, the sexpot who appears at various points in the play. Both of Pat’s parents were in the audience in Edison. Junior High School’s auditorium on May 22, 1971, when Pat made her stage debut in Li’l Abner, which was presented with a full cast and an orchestra. The happiest moment in her life came during the curtain calls after the last act, when she stood in a spotlight on the stage basking in enthusiastic applause and scattered anonymous wolf whistles.
The only person in the audience of several hundred who did not seem to join in the fun was Pat’s father, who sat rigid in his seat, his face and lips taut. While Helen came backstage after the production to congratulate Ed and the cast, John waited in the car in the parking lot with the engine running and the windows up, even though it was a warm spring evening.
“He must have died to see that because she was wheeled on stage in a box with a curtain in front of it, and she stepped out,” said Eileen Livesey, a friend of Pat’s from the group. “She didn’t have any lines. All she had to do was bump and grind, and she certainly did that,” she said with a laugh. “She really had the physique for it.”
Pat mentioned to only a few people that her father had expressed serious objections to any notion she might have of a career in the theater. That might well have been because no one talked about their parents anyway. “Parental influence was the thing people were trying to get away from, so that’s why I didn’t know anything about Pat’s family life,” said Eileen, who added, “Pat was no shrinking violet. She was a very strong-willed individual.”
So she stayed in the drama gr
oup despite her father’s disapproval. Moreover, in Ed Illiano, she had now found a new authority figure.
In the summer of 1971, she told her drama teacher that she was in love with him, a declaration she reiterated in letters to several friends at the time. “She told me that she wanted to marry me,” Ed said, though she added that this would, of course, have to occur at some point in the future. “She was very matter of fact about it.” Illiano knew that Pat had several boyfriends, none of whom her father approved of. He dismissed her talk as adolescent prattle.
All the same, he was strangely taken with the girl. He found himself paying more attention to Pat than might have been considered appropriate in a male-female teacher-student relationship. They met in innocent social situations, such as when group members would adjourn to a local diner after workshop. Knowing that she now loathed calling her father for a ride home, Ed began driving her, even though he lived in the opposite direction. And sometimes, when Pat wanted to talk things over, they began taking the long way home, and then even pulling over to sit and talk. It was just talk. But he knew well the peril if some people in Westfield, ever mindful of the comings and goings of teenagers and out-of-towners (Ed lived well on the other side of the tracks, in Elizabeth), began gossiping about a relationship.
“I was close to Pat,” Ed said. “She confided in me, and I liked being with her.” He believed he had helped her channel her energies and deal with some frustrations. But he wasn’t a social worker or a psychologist. He was a teacher, employed by the town. And he was uneasy—undoubtedly more in hindsight—about being too close to the girl.
Another proclamation Pat made that summer was that, the sorry and hypocritical state of the godfearing world being what it was—with bombs raining down on Vietnam and students being mowed down by the National Guard at Kent State—she had turned her back on religion. Even though she continued to attend church at Redeemer every Sunday, she was doing it under silent protest. She didn’t tell her father about renouncing religion, but she made it very clear to her friends. Just to drive home the point, she announced in the summer of 1971 that she was becoming a witch.
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