A Reason to Believe (12 page)

Diane and I have offered that same kind of parenting to other young people as well. Our home has always been something of a magnet. Given the number of children who have lived with us or have been central to our family over the years—sometimes we affectionately call them “the strays”—it is no small wonder that Diane feels we have rarely been alone. It’s hardly surprising, though; it’s how we both were raised. We have gotten as much out of it as we have given.

Not long after we were married and still living in Brooklyn, a friend from Massachusetts called to ask if her son, a budding dancer with the Boston Ballet School,
could spend the summer with us while he studied with the School of American Ballet in New York. Of course we said yes, and Alex Brady arrived, all of fourteen or fifteen years old, trim and athletic, carrying a small duffel bag of belongings and a box of Cheerios. That summer turned into nearly three years as Alex’s talent was recognized and SAB begged to keep him on and develop him. He went on to dance with the Miami Ballet and Twyla Tharp, but while he was with us, we were both learning how to live with a teenage boy. He was adventurous and wanted to explore the city and make friends. We tried to strike a balance between giving him room to experiment and keeping the eye on him that his parents expected. The call to come for him at the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital was our worst nightmare. He had been stuck in the eye accidentally by the wooden sword of one of his friends during a medieval festival in Central Park. We arrived at the hospital to find a collection of his buddies dressed as serfs and knights sitting uncomfortably and conspicuously in the waiting room. Fortunately, it was a minor injury, and Alex recovered quickly.

My cousin Renae, Uncle Sonny’s daughter, came to live with us for a while in Brooklyn, too, after the last of her immediate family passed away. She was not prepared for moving into the world of working adults. Diane took her shopping at Lord & Taylor for a suit for job interviews, something without sequins or her midriff showing. We practiced mock interviews and helped her write a résumé, and with her common sense and genuine warmth, she
landed a job quickly. But when Diane came home from work one day to find her sitting in our front parlor with a guy she had just met on the subway, Diane had a firm talk with her about the proper way to introduce a new friend to the house: over Sunday supper, thank you very much, when we were both at home to greet him. Renae is now back in Chicago, married and raising a son of her own.

Soon after we moved to Milton in 1989, when Katherine was an infant, we became the host family for a Milton Academy freshman on scholarship from the South Bronx. Doug Chavez was an ABC student just as I had been nearly twenty years earlier, just as eager and earnest and just as clueless. Thin and small, he was carrying the bravado that he had used as protection at home, hoping it would do the same for him now. It all felt so familiar to me. Our responsibility was to befriend him, have him to supper a few times, and be a resource to answer questions if he needed us. We had a regular early supper on Sundays for our family and all comers. Doug came once and, in many ways, never left. He brought with him his rich Colombian-American heritage, his complicated family history, his hip-hop dance steps, his aspirations, and his friends whenever we invited him for Sunday supper or a family gathering. He had an opportunity to take a semester abroad in Spain, but it required that he offer his Spanish counterpart a place in his own home for a subsequent semester. We took in the exchange student as well. Doug became part of our family.

Doug had plenty to learn. Diane once heard him berating a girlfriend during an argument on the phone at our house. This was especially troubling because Doug had told us about his father’s abusive behavior toward Doug’s mother. He had no idea, of course, of Diane’s own history. She went over to Doug in the middle of the call, hung up the phone in midsentence, and told him that that kind of language and treatment toward anyone, especially a woman, was unacceptable. He listened, and she made him a better man. Doug went on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and worked in marketing in New York. When I started my first campaign for governor, he left his job and moved back in with us for nearly two years to work on the campaign. Of course he remains in our lives today.

Though Diane and I loved having a full house, it sometimes took a toll. Shortly after Sarah was born, both my mother and father were living with us in Brooklyn for a time. (For various reasons, they both needed a place to stay.) We already had Alex with us. A colleague from work was going through a nasty divorce and was living with us, too, and his girlfriend visited for a time as well. Then our two golden retrievers had nine puppies the week before Sarah was born.

For some strange reason, everyone seemed to wait for Diane and me to get home from a full day’s work to arrange meals and serve them. The dogs as well. This got old, especially for Diane. We lived in a wonderful, old,
four-story row house, with the kitchen and dining room on the ground floor and Sarah in a bassinet in our bedroom on the third, and we managed this arrangement with a baby monitor we kept in the kitchen and regular trips upstairs. Sarah was colicky, so we were in the midst of that classic new parents’ debate about how long to let her cry at night before going to her. We were exhausted, and one evening it all bubbled over when we came in from work to find everyone, once again, waiting for us to organize dinner. When we heard the baby start to cry on the monitor, I could see the tension rise in Diane’s shoulders. We waited to see whether the let-her-cry school of thought (mine) or the rush-to-her-side view (hers) would prevail. Diane threw down her spoon and mixing bowl after a few minutes and rushed up the stairs. I thought it best to follow her.

When I reached our room on the third floor, I found the bassinet empty and Diane sprawled out on the bed, exasperated. Sarah was gone. My mother had come down from her room on the fourth floor to get the baby by the time Diane had reached our room, and she had had it.

“I can’t stand having all these people around anymore,” Diane ranted. “No one lifts a finger to help. We work all day and come home to them just sitting around and waiting for us to serve them, and I can’t even comfort my own daughter without your mother intervening!”

She went on for a few minutes while I stood there nodding pathetically and feeling responsible. Then I pointed to the baby monitor, which was broadcasting her frustration
to the kitchen full of houseguests. Diane’s shocked expression is still one of my funniest memories.

“But we love all these people,” she finally said to the monitor. After a few minutes in which we got our game faces on, we descended again to the kitchen; no one said a word, and everyone pitched in heartily. Most of our houseguests moved on not long thereafter.

Over the years, we’ve opened our doors to these and many other people who were hungry for company, attention, and affection. Growing up, I know that I too longed for these things; to give and to receive. I saw what happened with my own parents. While they were loving in their own way, their inability to express it to Rhonda and me not only withheld something from us but hurt them. Giving love freely is enriching for both the giver and the recipient. As a child, the love I did receive strengthened my foundations. As an adult, it makes me feel like I have value in the world.

When we have dinner parties, I like to go around the table and say something about each guest and our special connection to him or her. In addition to being a good icebreaker, it gives me a chance to testify publicly about the value we place on our friendships. Often, others at the table will follow my lead and describe how the other guests have contributed to their lives. It is like a snowball of goodwill. I think it catches everyone by surprise when we say aloud that we appreciate their presence in our lives.

Ironically, however essential it may be for our own souls to show that love, we often don’t do so until it’s too late. That came to mind when I visited an old friend, Morgan Mead, whom I had first met at Squam Lake as a teenager through Will Speers. I happened to catch Morgan after he had recently attended several family funerals. “You know,” he said wistfully, “I’m giving all of these eulogies, and I’m getting pretty good at them.”

“Morgan,” I said, “that’s fine, but you have to learn to tell people you love them before they die.”

When I was at Harvard, a fellow student who was a jazz aficionado figured out who my father was. I acknowledged the relationship and added gratuitously, “But he’s a jerk.” Jerome Culp, a black coal miner’s son from Pennsylvania
who was a resident graduate student tutor, took me aside afterward and encouraged me to respect my father publicly and keep our differences to myself. “One day you will find your way to each other,” he said. “Save a place.”

I was skeptical. The strained relationship between my father and me seemed irreparable, and the distance between my mother and me, for that matter, was wider than it should have been. But by the time Diane and I moved to Brooklyn and got married, my outlook had changed. When you’re young, it’s easier to hold grudges, I find, and allow conflicts to simmer. It almost comes naturally. But as an adult, you become more conscious of the passage and limits of time, and you realize that your ability to resolve personal differences is a sign of maturity. You come to understand that forgiveness is sometimes needed to heal ancient wounds. That’s particularly true if the wound was inflicted by a parent.

My father—Laurdine Kenneth Patrick—had an unusual first name. As the story goes, my great-grandparents lived on a farm in Colorado Springs, some distance from their best friends, Laurence and Nadine. They promised their friends that they would name their first child Laurence if a boy, Nadine if a girl. After a series of miscarriages and stillbirths, my great-grandmother gave birth to a healthy son. Fearing he might be their only child, they invented the hybrid name Laurdine. Except on legal documents, my
grandfather stopped using the name as soon as he was old enough to get away with it, preferring “Pat” instead. Growing up, we knew him only as Grandpa Pat. Still, he named his son, my father, Laurdine Jr. My father disliked the name as much as his father had and also used “Pat” professionally and socially. Even my sister and I called him Pat. But he passed “Laurdine” on to me as my middle name. There the tradition ends.

My father was skinny and tawny colored, with a black goatee, light brown eyes, and a bad left hip from a teenage football injury. He walked with a limp but otherwise never seemed to age: He credited health foods and herbal teas, long before they came into fashion. He thought that horehound tea, whose odor was comparable to that of a rotting carcass in the woods and which tasted like poison, cured anything. When I visited him as a kid, once I was given the tea for a cold. I concluded that the bad taste just made you forget what else ailed you. My father had a special charm, especially with women. There were many. Though I have no idea how he reconciled it with his black militancy, his girlfriends, for the most part, were white. It was one of many contradictions in a man I often found inscrutable.

My father inherited more than his first name from his father. Both were accomplished professional musicians. Grandpa Pat was a superb professional trumpeter who performed with and was close to Art Tatum, the great jazz pianist. Even so, my father had the real gift. As a student at
DuSable High School in Chicago in the 1940s, he studied saxophone and other reeds with the legendary instructor Walter Dyett. He was best known for baritone saxophone, for which he was routinely ranked in
Downbeat Magazine
. Over the years, I saw him perform every other saxophone and reed instrument, most wind instruments, the keyboard, and the bass as well—all with ease and confidence. An intense man with great powers of concentration, he was his most engaged, his most emotionally present, when riffing a jazz set.

He was also passionate about football. He knew the players, the teams, the standings, the history. When the televised games were blacked out in New York, he was known to drive his little VW bug to Connecticut, pull over to the side of the interstate, and plug a small portable set into the power jack to catch the game. Sometimes his music and his football collided. While my father was performing in the touring orchestra of the Broadway hit
Bubbling Brown Sugar
, the conductor chastised him for watching football on his portable television during performances. My father had a single earphone connected to the set to catch the game—and still never missed a cue.

My most vivid early memory of my father centers on the day he left. It was warm, and my mother was especially short with Rhonda and me that afternoon, which I attributed to the heat. I was oblivious to the mounting hostilities in our basement apartment. When my father came home, my parents started to argue, and their voices became loud
and abusive. Rhonda and I were uncomfortable and a little scared. As my mother, in tears, slumped in a chair, my father stormed out of the apartment, up the stairs to the street, and was gone. I chased after him, a four-year-old in despair, while he strode away angrily, shouting at me, “Go home! Go home! Go home!” About a block down, he lost his patience, turned suddenly in a rage, and slapped me. I sprawled out on the sidewalk, burning my palms on the pavement. From that position, I watched him walk away.