A Reason to Believe (13 page)

Soon we moved in with Gram and Poppy, and life more or less went on. I didn’t know for many years why my father left. All I knew was that he had moved to New York with his band, the Sun Ra Arkestra. An avant-garde ensemble full of virtuoso jazz artists, it had begun in Chicago in the 1950s and had an avid following. I met Sun Ra once or twice. He was a little creepy, his music definitely an acquired taste. It was not uncommon for him and his band to perform in aluminum foil suits or with hats shaped like planets. I met a diplomat once who told me that when he was stationed in Lagos, Nigeria, Sun Ra came over to perform at a Pan African music festival in an outdoor arena. When the band appeared in their space costumes and blasted their discordant tunes, mothers grabbed their children and fled the stadium, crying,
“Juju, juju,”
the equivalent of “black magic.”

In New York, Pat Patrick fit in naturally with the vibrant jazz scene and even became something of a phenom. In addition to Sun Ra, he played and often recorded
with such jazz greats as Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Mongo Santamaria. Our mother told Rhonda and me that, no matter what, he was still our father and we should always love him. She insisted that we write to him. We didn’t realize then that our mother’s goal was to save the marriage, to make him miss us so much that he would set aside his music adventures and come home, which of course never happened. He occasionally wrote back. He occasionally sent some money. Sometimes he would call us on the telephone, which was a major event. Then there were the trips to New York when we got a little older.

For a time I felt somehow responsible for the breakup, as kids do. I also felt disappointment and anger and a certain amount of shame in having an absentee father, though that was not uncommon on the South Side. At least he wasn’t in jail. He blew the sax, which other kids thought was cool.

My mother was brave but clearly devastated and maybe a little ashamed herself. In her youth, she had been known for her fine features and sassiness. She had clear, fair skin, auburn hair, a lithe, 5-foot-2 body, and a warm smile, dressed up in bright red lipstick. She liked to flirt. Old photographs show her sitting cross-legged and fetching at a jazz club or modeling for
Jet
magazine’s “Beauty of the Week,” wearing the fashions of the day, some borrowed from her job as a temporary sales clerk at the Saks Fifth Avenue on North Michigan Avenue.

But after my father left, the hardships on my mother
accumulated. She continued to flirt but with less conviction, sporadically dating an operative in the Young Democrats Club on the South Side. Her delay in getting a divorce doomed that would-be romance. Then her body turned on her. She developed discoid lupus, which attacks the skin, and was so irritated by it that she scratched deep, permanent scars on her face. For a young coquette who took so much pride in her beauty, these scars brought her overwhelming shame and despair. They disfigured her face, and struck at the core of her self-image and confidence. Her cherished good looks vanishing, her finances always on the brink, she started a long, slow slide into bitterness and depression.

Tensions between my parents continued on a low boil until I was twelve, when the pot finally exploded. I was right in the middle of it. Ironically, my father’s love for music, which brought so much joy to so many, led to disaster.

My father tried to nurture my interest in music from a distance, which wasn’t hard. In addition to Gram’s spontaneous hymn singing around the house, my mother had a small collection of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan albums she could play on my grandparents’ hi-fi. Soul tunes poured from the AM stations on our transistors or from the 45s of Aretha Franklin, the Jackson 5, and later Marvin Gaye, whom we listened to in the phone-booth-sized spaces at the record store. Music was all around us. But just as my mother’s urging us to write letters was as much about
her needs as ours, my father’s effort to interest me in music was also about him, not me.

When I was in middle school, he sent me a brochure for drum sets. At the time, I was taking lessons from a family friend, drumming on a set of practice pads and learning to read music, but I wasn’t very diligent. The drums in the brochure, however, sure looked beautiful. I thought if I had my own and heard how real drums sounded, I would dedicate myself, practicing in the basement of our apartment building. I even circled the set that I liked. I sent my father letters and made phone calls, lobbying for my own instrument. This was, my mother quickly reminded me, a crazy idea—we barely had enough money for clothes and school supplies, and my father had studiously avoided contributing funds for our necessities. Besides, I would wake the dead, not to mention the neighbors, banging away in close quarters. The last thing we needed was a drum set.

The issue might have died, except my father made one of his rare visits to Chicago and came to take me out for the afternoon—just me and my father on an afternoon outing. I was excited. My mother knew what he was up to.

“Don’t you get him a drum set,” she warned. It was practically a dare.

We promptly went downtown to the drum store.

“Which one do you like?” my father asked.

I told him that Mom said I couldn’t have one.

“Don’t worry about your mother,” he said. “You should have one.”

I sensed this was not going to end well, but I could hardly turn my back on new drums and even picked out some premium Zildjian cymbals. The set had to be delivered, but I was permitted to take the snare drum with me, packed in a smooth black leather case with a brand-new pair of drumsticks. I rode home in silence with a mixture of excitement and dread. I kept thinking how best to play quietly to avoid disturbing the neighbors.

We walked into the vestibule, where my mother was waiting. When she saw my snare drum, the screaming began. She and my father just went at it, with my mother yelling that we needed money for food, not drums, and my father shouting that the boy should have his own instrument. Then my mother looked out the door and signaled to someone across the street. A man got out of his car, walked up the steps, and handed my father his divorce papers.

I never touched the snare drum again, and the rest of the set was never delivered.

And once the divorce was final, my father ignored the child support payments. It was an all-around disaster.

The summer before my senior year at Milton, Gram told me why my father had walked out so many years before. The day he left, she said, the phone rang in our apartment and my mother answered. The caller was a woman who asked for my father. When my mother said he wasn’t home,
the caller said, “Tell him our baby needs shoes,” and hung up. The baby was my half-sister, LaShon, and my mother had known nothing about her or my father’s infidelities.

Gram said that friction between my parents had been building for some time before then. My mother had had one or two abortions after I was born—at great risk to her health, because the procedure was still illegal then. She didn’t believe my father could support additional children. When he learned what she had done, he flew into a rage. Their relationship never really recovered.

It is not surprising, in retrospect, that my visits with my father were never that joyful. He was invariably judgmental, as if he wanted to use our limited time together only to size me up. He would stand back and comment on my height, weight, haircut, clothing. He had very traditional views about what boys should do, with sports being high on the list. But I was not particularly athletic. My first real exposure to his beloved football was when our Cub Scout troop took a trip to a Chicago Bears game during a blizzard at Soldier Field, where games were played outside and the fans sat on concrete slabs. I was so frozen I could hardly walk by the time I got off the bus at home, and ever after I was lukewarm about the game, which probably disappointed him. He was also convinced that my mother’s singular mission after their separation was to turn Rhonda and me against him, so whenever we were together he exhaustively catalogued her shortcomings as a wife and mother.

His obsession with race could also be wearing, and his visits to me at Milton were always perilous. Every word, every motion, oozed his disapproval. “Damn,” he said when we drove around the neighborhood. “Everybody lives in a mansion around here.” He met June Elam and approved of her race, but not of her swimming pool. She was too materialistic and “siddidy”—the scornful term blacks used to describe other blacks who were putting on airs. I was afraid to introduce my father to Will or A. O. Smith or any of my other new friends who were white. I wanted to keep him as far away from them as possible.

That could be avoided no longer on graduation day. It was a significant milestone, and I wanted to savor every moment. My mother, Rhonda, Gram, and Poppy drove out together from Chicago to share in it, the first such visit for all but my mom. We were, of course, conspicuously out of place. Most of the ladies wore classic tailored suits with gloves and hats. My grandmother, having just returned from a vacation on Waikiki (which was her and Poppy’s first time on an airplane), wore a colorful Hawaiian muu-muu.

I had invited my father out of courtesy but admit to being relieved that he never replied, and I assumed he would not show up. Then, on the big day, while my family, friends, and I were having breakfast on the front lawn of Hallowell House, he appeared, grinning broadly if a little awkwardly. That familiar tension returned in an instant. I flashed back to the drum set debacle.

We made it through the graduation ceremony without a scene, but on our drive to June’s house for dinner, the tension erupted. My mother, father, and I were together in the backseat of Poppy’s car, my sister and grandmother in front next to him. Somebody said something, God only knows what, but it was enough to ignite the spark. In an instant, we had a full-blown conflagration going, my mother, father, and grandmother screaming at one another: assigning blame, settling old scores, reliving history. It was all about them and their issues. At a traffic light I just opened the car door, got out, and slammed it shut. I walked back to my dorm. They eventually found me there and reprimanded me for leaving them. But I didn’t care. The day had been ruined.

Apart from that episode, my years at Milton had begun to mature me. I was beginning to feel like an adult and was ready to communicate with the adults around me on a different level. One day, during the summer after graduation, my mother and I decided to take a walk. We started at the beach on Lake Shore Drive, around 57th Street near the Museum of Science and Industry, and headed north toward downtown along Lake Michigan. It was a clear, unhurried summer day, and I started asking her about the things Gram had told me the summer before, about the breakup of her marriage, about the poverty she tried to hide from us. She did not stop me or try to shut off the conversation, which was her usual way with delicate matters. Instead, with calm candor, she described her disappointment
with my father, the humiliation she felt at having to move in with her parents, the conflicts she had with her own mother, the indignity of poverty, the embarrassment about her scarred face. It poured out of her in measured, mature conversation unlike any I had ever had before with my mother. I think we were both surprised. I’m sure she had long thought that I was incapable of understanding her life and struggles. And I expected my curiosity to be met with her customary distance and emotional barricades. But we kept talking, each of us finally appreciating the other. She did not want pity, just understanding. We kept talking and walking—all the way downtown and back. We covered a lot of miles … and a lot of ground.

The terrain with my father proved more difficult.

The summer after my freshman year at Harvard, I was hired by a management training program at Chemical Bank on Wall Street. I initially stayed with a friend from Milton whose family lived in one of those opulent buildings on Fifth Avenue in which the elevator opens directly into the apartment. I had never seen that before. I had arranged for my own place with some other guys, but it fell through, so I had to ask my father for help. He was living in Queens with a black dancer named Marianne, to whom he was either married or about to be married. He told me I could sleep there until I figured out other housing arrangements. I ended up staying for the whole summer.

They lived in a one-bedroom flat in an apartment complex off Hillside Avenue, just blocks, as it turned out, from where Diane grew up. I slept on a pull-out sofa in the living room, between their bedroom and the bathroom. We could not avoid one another, nor could we connect. My father disdained Harvard as much as he had Milton, and he continued to openly disapprove of the man I was becoming. It did not help that every day, to his amusement or disbelief, I dressed in a business suit, a tie, and “big boy shoes.” I read the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
on the E train to Lower Manhattan, smack in the heart of the global financial district, and I walked confidently through the hushed corridors of the Chemical Bank headquarters.

The training program itself was mostly for minority students, and I became friends with other students from Princeton and Barnard. We were well paid for a summer job. We dined at nice restaurants, ordered drinks at the finest bars, and attended Broadway plays and the ballet. We were pretending to be part of the establishment—trying it on, so to speak, and having fun—but it was all just too much for my father. Our lifestyle was the final surrender to capitalism, in his view, to the white power structure, to the institutions that had oppressed blacks forever. This was what Milton, Harvard—and my mother—had begot.

The other thing going on that summer, I suspect, was a concerted effort by me to avoid spending much time with my father. We had a tiresome pattern of long, uncomfortable
silences, and I was in no hurry to seek out more of that. Toward the end of the summer, however, my father asked me directly to go for a drive so we could talk. He needed to get something off his chest. We pulled over just off the Grand Central Parkway, near Flushing Meadows, where Rhonda and I had spent such a wondrous time with him at the World’s Fair when we were kids. My father pulled out note cards on which he had collected his points and began speaking—a steady, passionate stream of frustration, accusation, and invective. He told me all the ways in which my mother had failed as a mother, why she had driven him away, why she had betrayed my black identity, and on and on. I found those notes in his effects after he died. They still sizzle.