In elementary school, Sean had been teased for his halting, stuttering attempts to read. The words they’d used were branded into his psyche, and even now those wounds radiated their own special heat: slow, different, special. Words he had heard his parents use when he held his ear to their closed bedroom door. Cold, clinical words that sounded like the opposite of love.
When he looked at the pages of the books that filled every corner of his room, he saw shapes and sequences of letters appearing to move, disappear, or shrink, sometimes actually dancing across the page. The sight of all that induced a nausea that sickened him.
Eventually, he was enrolled in a pioneering school staffed by specially trained teachers, psychologists, linguists, and tutors with all the time in the world, all the time he needed, who crafted lessons just for him. There, he wasn’t broken. He wasn’t a problem. They told him his brain was healthy, it just took him longer to make the connections reading required. The walls of the bright, sun-filled school were plastered with posters of the pioneers of science, math, the arts, and culture who were dyslexic. He learned to read, write, and spell. But it was always laborious, and he still needed help, extra time on tests, and the forbearance of those in the real world beyond the borders of the special school. He was convinced deep down, in the place that was his alone, that he was a problem. The optimistic, experimental school couldn’t stop him from thinking that.
He was still a Tate, the son of a man whose buildings were part of the landscape of the city, whose mother judged and decided the fate of others, whose sister became the son, he knew this, that his father had always wanted.
Visiting Caldwell & Tate projects with his father, Sean had been mesmerized by the sight of the craftsmen at work. How a wall was built, how a buildings’ frame grew over time, became a massive skeleton that in his mind he compared to something spawned by the hands of Hercules or Goliath. This was the greatest show on earth.
One summer, he’d spent a part of every day watching a high-rise being constructed. He sat in a park in McPherson Square, across the street from the K Street building for three or four hours at a time, munching on the lunch his mother had packed for him.
He could read this; construction was a language he understood. Working with his hands had always felt like salvation. He was the handyman his mother never had to hire. Wood and brick, cement and stone were not inanimate but had sprung from the same soil that had given him life. But he wasn’t like Lauren, who could tell their father all this and thereby seal the lock on their father’s respect as well as his love.
If you were a Tate, you went to college, even if you didn’t learn a damn thing. While Lauren studied architecture at Cornell, Sean had sweated it out at a junior college in Maryland. He’d graduated but he still had trouble spelling and writing.
After college, for nearly a decade, he’d done it all—even selling pot, until a close call with the cops had reminded him that he could end up in a courtroom next door to his mother’s. He’d been a security guard in a building his father had helped design, worked on a construction site, washed cars, bartended, and driven a limo—anything where his weakness would not be exposed.
He had let the family down and he felt it every time he went to an obligatory holiday dinner, funeral, or wedding—rituals that even he could not avoid. None of them had told him he was a failure, they hadn’t needed to. His own mocking chorus was ever-present in his mind. The checks his mother wrote when he was broke, the pep talks from his father to help him find his way, the encouraging calls from Lauren. So much love. So much faith in him. And for most of his life he hadn’t felt he deserved any of it. Every family his mother reunited in court and every building Caldwell & Tate designed dragged him into the foaming undertow of self-doubt. It was hard to know which was worse: his father’s nagging that he had to do more, be more, or his mother’s seemingly patient acceptance of the leveling-off of his life. Both made him feel like shit.
Sean could hear the television in the bedroom he and Valerie shared but he chose to tackle the kitchen. At least he could do that. But neither rinsing the pots nor scraping the plates halted the rush of the longing for his father, the intrusion of the past.
“Haven’t you learned anything from me?” his father had asked once.
Sean had been working then at the big-box hardware store. He’d actually liked some parts of the job: helping customers find bolts, screws, lumber. Tangible items they needed to repair, fix, and build. Working with his hands, he was secure.
But on the day his father asked him this, he’d been thirty years old, making thirteen dollars an hour. If he ever wanted to get married, have kids, exist, and be visible to others and himself, how would he do it? Some days he was lodged in cement, other days sinking in quicksand.
His father had come by his apartment that evening without warning and when Sean opened the door, he’d known Gregory could see the sink full of dishes, could sense the creeping despair in the boxy, drab efficiency apartment in a complex where there had been two murders in the last year.
“You could’ve called,” Sean had said sullenly, sinking onto the dark-brown corduroy couch, picking up the remote, and turning up the volume of ESPN. Gregory had grabbed the remote from Sean’s hand and thrown it across the room, the instrument grazing Sean’s cheek.
“What the hell?” Sean sprang from the sofa, buzzed, belligerent, more angry at what his father saw than at what his father had done.
“So this is your life?”
“I guess it is.”
Gregory slumped onto the matching corduroy love seat. “I’d slap you if I thought it would do any good. Your mother’s worried about you. We both are. She wants to know why you don’t call. She expected to hear from you on her birthday at least.”
“Sorry, it’s not about y’all. It’s me; I need my space,” he said, in a muffled voice directed at the television screen.
“You don’t get to fire your family because you can’t handle your life.”
Sean had watched his father stand up and almost hoped he would hit him. He was ready to bleed. But his father had merely looked around the apartment and shaken his head.
“You think you’re damaged goods. You believe life is hard for you because of dyslexia. Sean, dreams are blueprints, dreams are first drafts. I didn’t raise you to be small. I’m expecting more. You’re expecting more. You’re just scared you can’t hold it in your hands.”
“You’re ashamed of me because I don’t wear a suit and tie to my job like you,” Sean had shouted weakly, knowing the words were a blatant lie.
“I’m ashamed of you because you’ve sold yourself short. You’re running from nothing instead of standing still and letting the thing that could ignite you and the talents you have catch up and claim you.”
Sean laughed contemptuously. He watched his father turn to look at the television screen and saw a new and unfamiliar pall of age on his face.
“What do you want me to tell your mother?”
“Tell her I’ll call her soon. Tell her I love her.”
“And I’m supposed to make her believe that? You don’t realize it now, Sean, but life is short. Whatever you do, you don’t want life to get away from you. Nothing is guaranteed. Not your health, not even the next day.”
“Dad, what’s going on?”
“I’m just saying, I mean, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s just that …”
The confused timbre in his father’s voice. The withered, drawn look on his face. The shadows in his eyes …
“What’s wrong?” he’d asked, although he did not want to know, was afraid to know.
“Nothing, nothing. It’s just that I’m starting to forget things.”
“Are you okay?”
“Health-wise, sure.” He had shrugged. “It’s my mind, my thoughts.”
“Dad, you’re strong. Whatever it is, you’ll beat it,” Sean offered, embarrassed by the hollowness of his pat response. He’d sat looking at his father wishing he had the nerve,
the courage, to ask more.
Gregory had taken a deep breath and said, “Stop being a stranger.”
Sean stood up and walked his father to the door. A space yawned between them that neither chose to close. He watched his father walk down the stairs and called after him, “Tell Mom I’ll call her. I’ll call her soon.”
His father had not answered.
And Sean didn’t call his mother that day. He couldn’t. He knew he would have had to ask about his father. He would’ve asked and his mother would’ve told him what his father could not. His mother would have told him the truth.
Sean sat in the kitchen flush with all the emotions of that encounter. All the longing for connections he had been too fragile and fearful to make. They’d been through so much as a family since that day with his father, nearly four years ago. Alzheimer’s had brought Sean back into the fold, stumbling, resisting as he was even now.
“You coming to bed?” Valerie called.
“In a minute. I gotta do one more thing.”
Sean wiped the counter with a paper towel and surveyed the order he had brought to the kitchen. Then he pulled out his cell phone. He dialed his mother’s number.
“Hello, Mom. How’d it go?”
Another sleepless night. But this time, night was frightening, nearly foreign. Diane had not imagined that on this, the first night of Gregory’s absence—or was it exile?—that she would feel their house, their home, cast upon her so brooding and heavy. So accustomed was Diane to her husband’s rambling expeditions through the house as she tried to sleep, that this new solemn silence was disquieting. The bedroom closet still held some of Gregory’s shirts and slacks, the drawers were layered with excess socks and underwear. The sum of the life they had lived together pulsed in the air she breathed, lying in bed, in the dark, unable to sleep, able only to remember.
Sean had called as she sat downstairs in the living room watching the ten o’clock news, asking her, timidly, how the day had gone.
“We got through it.”
In truth, the day had drained her: leaving Somersby and going to the superior court for two afternoon meetings, preparing for the next day’s docket of cases, opening the door to her empty house at eight thirty. So although she had rehearsed a soliloquy that would vent her disappointment, at the sound of Sean’s voice, the rage she had harbored and stoked felt inelegant and unnecessary.
“When you go see him I want to go with you,” he said.
“I won’t see him for three weeks. He needs that time to adjust.”
“Mom, I feel like shit.”
“Sean, you’ve spent too much of your life, too much of your time feeling that way. Your father wouldn’t want that to go on.”
“I let you, all of you, down.”
“We’ve got an unforeseeable future of days ahead with your father. Days on which you can do what you couldn’t do today. Give Valerie and Cameron a hug for me. Hold them close. Now you get some sleep.”
Forgiving her son felt like the one thing she had done right today. The one thing that unequivocally made sense.
And now she lay in the dark. Unable to sleep. Too tired to read. It was three a.m. In the quiet, alien confines of her house, Diane’s mind sifted, conjuring who she once was. How she had created and become Diane Tate. She found relief in the flashbacks that rained down on her in place of dreams. Who would she be without Gregory? How could she let him go and usher in even the barest outline of the woman she was bound to become? If she could not sleep then she could remember.
Chapter Five
1960–1977
Loving Gregory Tate had helped Diane reinvent herself, yet in some ways she would always still be standing in the doorway of her mother’s bedroom, watching her apply makeup as if she were an actress preparing to go onstage.
Ella would glide over to her closet to choose the dress she’d wear to go six blocks down the street to Jim Dandy’s, the neighborhood bar. Ella’s skin was the brazen, polished color of a raven. She had high cheekbones and small eyes that were wary, unbelieving, and distant.
Ella’s brittle laughter would rip open Diane’s and Ronald’s sleep when she’d come home with an “uncle.” They’d enter the apartment like burglars, knocking over chairs and lamps, their hushed whispers and giggles erupting in the small apartment’s darkened gloom. Her brother Ronald, two years younger but with a body that spoke its own language, more than once—pajama-clad and raging—had stepped between Ella and one of these men’s fists. It took Ronald longer to learn his schoolwork than Diane, but he could size up the men their mother brought home in a glance—a skill that turned into a steady surveillance.
Then there were the days and nights when Ella went without sleep and whirled through the apartment washing, cleaning, smoking, talking frantically to Diane and Ronald, and chatting on the phone for hours, her antic, frenzied voice signaling the cliff on whose edge she teetered.
But Ella Garrison was more than those crazed days and desperate rendezvous with men whose names she could not the next day recall. She was a nurse at Freedman’s Hospital, and over dinner, Ella often told Diane and Ronald about her patients, the ones she helped the doctors save and the ones they could not. Over time, she said, her patients told her everything: that they were afraid to die; that until this illness, this disease, they had been terrified to live; and that if God gave them another chance, they would live a full-blown life.
Ella witnessed the patients whose beds were surrounded by a steady flow of family and friends and those for whom no one came. And it was the lonely ones who sank into despair and refused to eat, that on her days off Ella would visit with Diane and Ronald in tow, bringing a get-well card purchased at People’s Drugstore on the way and signed by each of them.
When Ronald protested that they didn’t even know the people Ella made them visit, she scolded him, saying, “But I know them. I’ve emptied their bedpans, taken their temperature, and comforted them when their sickness made them mean and hateful. I haven’t met a stranger since I became a nurse. You all are my children and no matter what you do when you grow up, I want you to take care of somebody.”
Diane possessed faint yet stubborn memories of the father who had left them when she was five years old. She often rummaged through her mother’s drawers trying to find a picture, anything that would give her an answer to the question of why he went away, to which her mother simply responded, “He didn’t love me or you and your brother anymore.”
But Diane would never be released from the childhood terror she’d felt after her father had left. Stationed at the living room window for hours, looking for him to round the corner. Wetting her bed, refusing to eat, throwing toys at her mother. All to make her daddy come home. And then as the days and weeks passed, Diane had surrendered to her mother’s silence, her mother’s riddle-like explanation. She surrendered to the only person who was left. Over time, the anger and sometimes hate her mother inspired in her congealed in equal measure. What could her father have done to deserve to be so stoically erased?
Loretta Epson, Diane’s best friend in the fifth grade, visited her father at Lorton Prison in Virginia once a month. He had stabbed a man to death during an argument over a game of craps, yet Loretta was not denied the father who had committed what Diane learned in Sunday school was the greatest sin. Loretta’s mother told her that her father was the only father she had, so she had to love him no matter what. Diane convinced herself that it was Ella and her fearsome, wild moods that had made her father leave. Maybe there had been “uncles” too, who drove him away. Her anger was neither childish nor transitory. When she grew up, she vowed, she would find her father, and just like Loretta Epson, love him in spite of his sins.
If her childhood was one of concealment, her adolescence offered the equally searing pain of discovery. When Diane was thirteen and Ronald was eleven, Ella was hit and killed by a car speeding along Florida Avenue. The 1963 Volkswagen had been stolen half an hour before by the three teenagers and then barreled th
rough a red light as Ella stepped off a curb just blocks from where she nursed the sick and the dying.
Aunt Georgia, Ella’s older sister, swooped Diane and Ronald up and brought them to live with her. On Friday nights, Uncle Harold and Ronald would sit in the living room together watching boxing matches on television while Diane and Aunt Georgia folded clothes, warm and tingling with static, from the dryer. For Diane, there was a closet full of new dresses, and for Ronald, a Schwinn bicycle and skates. For neither was there any mention of their mother.
But when Diane was a senior at Roosevelt High School, Georgia finally felt it was time. Diane was parting her hair and pinning rollers tightly against her scalp when Georgia entered her room that night. The stricken look on her aunt’s face brought Diane from the mirror to her bed where Georgia sat.
“You’re almost grown,” Georgia said, “and I promised myself I would answer your questions about your mother and your father when I thought it was time.”
“Is it time?”
“I think it is.”
Georgia cupped Diane’s chin in her fingers, gazed at her niece, and said, “You look so much like her, you always have. I should’ve told you this years ago. I just didn’t know how.”
“I’ll go get Ronald.”
“No, I want to tell you first. If I can tell you, telling him will be a bit easier.” Georgia took refuge again in Diane’s face for several long moments and then said, “You were four and Ronald was two when it happened. I was watching you both for Ella that night. A man broke into your parents’ apartment. He had a gun. He tied up your father in the kitchen and raped Ella.”
“My mama was raped?” Diane clutched her stomach to still the queasy invasion of a lava of sickness slithering into her groin.
The Wide Circumference of Love Page 4