A Reason to Believe (11 page)

Bill did not go quietly. Diane continued to believe that he was going to try to kill her. Though he did not know where she lived, he knew where she worked, and he stalked her there. Every receptionist on every floor in her building had his photograph and would call security when he showed
up. She felt safe in her office and with me, but hardly anywhere else.

I was eager for her sake and the sake of our future together for her to make the divorce final once and for all. Ironically, on a weekend getaway to San Francisco, it was Diane who asked if we should take our relationship to the proverbial “next level.” I told her candidly that it was hard to know where it could go until her marriage was resolved.

Diane finally hired a lawyer to draw up divorce papers, but she did not want the Los Angeles County sheriff to serve them formally because she feared that Bill would be even more provoked to seek retribution. So she kept the papers in her purse and hoped to find the right time to deliver them herself. Her hand was forced when some joint financial matter came up. She reluctantly called him at his office at the
Los Angeles Times
, where he was an advertising rep, and spoke to his assistant, who didn’t even know that he had separated from his wife.

The assistant said that Bill was in the hospital, having a medical procedure. Perfect, she ruefully thought. Assuming that he’d be in no position to hurt her, Diane decided this would be the time to give him the divorce papers. At the hospital, however, a doctor said that he had operated on Bill to remove hemorrhoids but had then discovered that Bill had advanced leukemia. He had six to nine months to live. When Diane saw Bill, he asked her to come home and take care of him. She could not do that,
she told him—nor could she bring herself to serve him with the divorce papers.

Diane called me from the hospital, her voice shaking, and I met her back at my apartment. She was visibly upset as she explained that she felt sorry for Bill and trapped by his illness. She was stung by guilt but also confused. I cooked her dinner and spent the night trying to comfort her, trying to figure out a way forward for us both.

Events took another bizarre turn a few weeks later when Bill’s disease went into remission. Once the hospital released him, Diane was really petrified. If he thinks he’s dying, she thought, maybe he’ll want to take me with him. I was soon heading to San Francisco for my next job, and we didn’t know what our next move should be.

The following spring, when we were both working in her office, a senior partner dropped by and asked Diane to move to New York to help open the firm’s new office in Manhattan. It was a huge vote of confidence, and she came into the empty office I was using to tell me the news. I was thrilled for her—but baffled when she told me she had turned it down. It would not only be a great professional opportunity and would reunite her with her family, but it would also put her at a safer distance from Bill.

“What’s the real reason you’re not going?” I asked.

“The real reason,” she said, “is that I would love to have a future with you, and there’s a better chance of that with you in San Francisco and me in Los Angeles than with you in San Francisco and me in New York.”

“Well,” I said without hesitating, “what if I went to New York, too?”

“Then I would go in a heartbeat.”

“Then I’ll go to New York.”

And that was that. Without ever really saying as much, we were moving to New York together. She told her law firm that she would accept the assignment and move. I told my San Francisco law firm about my change of heart. With the help of Jim Vorenberg, my beloved college and law school mentor, I ended up with an even better opportunity in New York, working as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In many ways, it was my dream job.

Just as we were moving, Diane filed the divorce papers with the Los Angeles County sheriff, who served Bill. We made our engagement formal and public. Diane still feared for her safety; even uncontested divorces require a waiting period, so several months had to pass, which they did fortunately without incident. We made a smooth if hasty move to New York. In a fateful visit, Diane told her parents all at once about divorcing Bill, her plans to marry me, her move home to New York, and the house we were buying together in Brooklyn. They took it all in stride, and her anxieties gradually subsided. Finally, on Valentine’s Day 1984, the divorce was made final. Two days later, Bill succumbed to his leukemia. We were married later that spring.

Diane gives me credit for helping her out of a dark
phase of her life, but in truth, I got as much out of those early experiences as I gave. I had had girlfriends before, some serious, with all the usual highs and lows. I had never been involved with anyone as deeply as I was with Diane, however, or who was in as complex a situation. Fresh out of law school, with my whole professional life ahead of me and still trying to find my way, I didn’t really want more complications. But there was a lesson here in unselfishness, a reminder that deeper love is less self-involved. My giving became a salve to Diane’s wounded spirit, but once her self-confidence was restored, she gave back abundantly. Our marriage has now held strong through many personal and professional changes, and I believe our one constant has been our ability to give and receive selfless love.

I had learned from teachers and mentors how to love openly, generously, and conspicuously. I’ve also tried to impart high standards and accountability, which is its own expression of love. As our daughters arrived—Sarah in 1985 and Katherine in 1989—I tried to parent in that same fashion. Of course, I say that now. At the beginning, I was mainly a soft touch.

When Sarah was an infant, one of the first things she learned was how to kiss her dad. Good-morning kisses, good-bye and welcome-home kisses, good-night kisses—we grabbed every opportunity. We were (and are) a very tactile family, and I took special delight in the girls’ plump
little lips and the way they would hold hands by tightly gripping just a finger or two. Even as we were working hard to raise our family, though, I was mindful of how important it was for Diane and me to maintain our own relationship. So when Sarah was not quite two, I prevailed on Diane to take a short vacation alone with me to Bermuda. She was reluctant to leave Sarah, but I pestered relentlessly until she agreed. Diane’s sister, Lynn, came up from Atlanta to collect Sarah for the few days we were away. At the appointed time, we were all ready to depart at Logan airport, Lynn with Sarah to Atlanta and Diane and I to Bermuda. I handed Sarah to her beloved aunt and said good-bye. When she reached back to me from Lynn’s embrace, I burst into tears. We were well over the Atlantic before I composed myself. Diane still gets a good laugh out of that.

I won’t claim that our daughters had typical childhoods. As well as providing emotional riches, Diane and I were learning as young downtown lawyers and business executives to navigate a new world of privilege and even occasional luxury, and the girls came along for the ride. We traveled all over the country and much of the world together. There were summer camps and riding lessons and dance recitals and town soccer, a hilarious affair where all the six- and seven-year-olds chase the ball without regard to zone or even who is on the same team. We took winter trips to the Caribbean with family friends, and the girls shook the hand of the president of the United States in the White House. They knew how to pronounce
concierge
and how to use one. At five or six, Sarah asked her aunt Lynn why there was no avocado in her salad.

When Katherine was in kindergarten, her class was studying the changes in the seasons—what happens in winter, spring, summer, and fall. Her homework assignment was to describe the four seasons to Mom and Dad. When she was ready, she proceeded to describe her several visits to the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. “First you drive up and the doorman takes your car,” she said.

“That’s exactly right,” said Diane gently. “But that’s not what the teacher is asking.”

In other ways, however, Sarah and Katherine were typical. Though they are close friends today and marvelously composed, witty young women, they bickered constantly as preteens. During one family visit to the Greenbrier in West Virginia, they harangued each other so bitterly in the dining room that Diane swore they would never come on a nice trip with us again. Once, driving on the Jamaicaway in Boston, they were so unbearably fussy in the backseat that I pulled over and put them both out on the side of the road and drove off. They were on to us, of course. When I circled the block to pick them up, confident that I had scared some sense into them, they were hiding in the bushes, purposely giving their parents the fright of their lives.

My work often took me away from home, and I readily acknowledge that Diane carried the parenting load far
more than I in those years. I often took tearful calls from one of the girls complaining about a setback or mishap or their mom, only to be followed by a similar call from Diane. While everyone knew what I was trying to do for us as a family, I still carry a lot of guilt about having been absent. Yet the girls know that I love them. I say it and show it often and randomly, and it sometimes embarrasses them when I do, but it’s important to them and to me that they have no doubt. That was a hole that my surrogate parents helped to fill in me, and I have tried to ensure that my own children never feel that absence. I’ve also tried to provide the girls with a love that reinforces their own self-worth.

Katherine, for example, once asked me to take her to a 50 Cent concert. I knew she was a big fan of the infamous rapper, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, but didn’t know much about him or his music. I agreed, so I drove Katherine and three of her friends to New Hampshire for the event. Of course, taking a teenager to a rap concert does not actually mean attending it with them. In my case, it meant driving a few hours up to Nashua or Manchester and waiting in the bank parking lot across the street until it was over. Luckily, the producer was a friend of a friend, and I was invited, quietly and without Katherine’s knowledge, to watch and wait from backstage.

When 50 Cent came on for his show, he wore two ammunition bandoliers across his bare, muscular chest. The sound effect between each number was the ratchet of a gun clip. To the screaming delight of a hall filled with
hundreds of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls, he rapped about “bitches,” “ho’s,” and violence. I got a glimpse of Katherine in the crowd, though she never saw me. Like the rest of the audience, she was completely beguiled.

Later, after we dropped her friends off, I asked Katherine about the concert. She said she had enjoyed it. I asked her if she knew what a
ho
was. She clearly knew, but she sighed, rolled her eyes, and said it was “just a word.” I told her that it was important she know that she was neither a “bitch” nor a “ho,” and that I never wanted her to accept being called that by anybody.

“You are a jewel,” I said. “Nothing less.”

Katherine scoffed at the time, but she got my message. I think her taste in music has “evolved” since then as well.

Years later, the summer after her nineteenth birthday, Katherine kept asking Diane and me when we would all be in the same place so that she could tell us something important. We were spending a weekend together at our home in western Massachusetts, preparing a picnic lunch, when she came into the kitchen and told us she was a lesbian. We both hugged her, told her we were there for her no matter what, and asked her to grab the mustard jar so we could get the picnic going. That was all she or we needed right then. The time for the endless questions would come in due course.

Alongside unconditional love, I’ve also tried to create expectations for our daughters. They know that I place a high value on decency, respect, and etiquette, all of which
were emphasized in my youth. If one of their male friends came into the house with his hat on, I would politely ask him to remove it. We would not tolerate profanity or any other form of lazy speech—say what you really mean and feel without shortcuts, especially crude ones. We held our daughters accountable for the actions of their friends. Once, on the eve of her SAT exams, against strict instructions to stay home, prepare, and get to bed early, Sarah decided to go for a ride, and she gave her friend and study partner—who had no license and no driving experience—permission to back our Toyota SUV out of the carport. That was two strikes. Her friend proceeded to back the car into the front of the house, nearly knocking down the porch. Fortunately, no one was hurt. But that was strike three. The repairs to the house and car were costly, and I told Sarah that even though she wasn’t behind the wheel, she would have to work all summer to pay off the bill. Diane thought I was being severe, but I felt it was an important lesson in responsibility and its consequences. Every two weeks, right after she got her paycheck, Sarah gave us a share until the bill was retired.

Despite such episodes, or maybe even because of them, our daughters know they are loved, and for me, being a father, like being a husband, is another lesson in selfless love. It’s what you are no matter what else you are. Lately, it’s finishing a press conference, a community meeting, or an important bill signing, then having one of the kids call when you are trudging home at 8:30
P.M
. to ask, “What’s for
dinner?” It’s feeling that same silly blend of pride and longing watching them graduate from college that you felt watching them graduate from preschool, children we have known, as my grandmother would say, since “before they knew themselves”: children we have held and rocked to sleep, whom we have tickled and have gone swimming with and have taken to countless movies, whose heads we held while they threw up or brows we wiped when they had fevers, whom we read to and taught to ride bikes, whom we scolded and fussed at, who made us laugh at ourselves, whose greeting of “Hi, Dad” is enough to erase our every care and lighten our day, whose every smile makes us remember their first smile as clearly as if it were yesterday, whom we would walk through fire for, whom we have stayed awake worrying over long after they drifted off to sleep. Still do.