Lauren watched her father look out the glass wall in her office at the designers at work, waiting for him to turn back to her, the moment between them feeling so tender, she dare not touch it.
“While I still have a mind, I get to say what’s on it.”
Lauren walked to the other side of her desk and fell onto her knees and held her father’s hands. “Daddy, please don’t go.”
“Honey, that’s the one thing we all gotta do. And we don’t get to say how.”
Chapter Eleven
FEBRUARY 2013
Diane was in community court—an effort by the city to place judges in the neighborhoods where lifestyle and life skills issues festered, creating breeding grounds for the most malignant forms of neglect. Parents who had dropped out of school in the tenth grade and now considered school to be optional for their children. Parents who had grown up hungry and now served Fritos and a Coke for breakfast. Parents who had never been to the dentist and couldn’t make or keep a doctor’s appointment for their child. This was how it started and ended in everything from teen pregnancy to murder.
Jacinda Reed was not sending her two daughters to school and she sat facing Diane across a conference table in a small room located in a recreation center on Minnesota Avenue, a room rank with the odor of cheap government carpeting and the nondescript furnishings to match. The weave that haphazardly crowned the woman’s head was matted and lint-filled. A dark space behind the her lower lip that signaled a missing tooth enticed Diane’s gaze each time Jacinda parted her lips and reflexively brought her hand to her mouth, too late to hide the sorrowful gap. Diane smiled at Jacinda to quell the judgment roiling in her mind, judgment that she had trained herself to keep at bay but that was becoming as unmanageable as an untrained pet.
In Jacinda’s eyes, there was the dullness. This was where the seeds of the story often lay, Diane knew. Often, in women, the light had been extinguished by a loved one, or there was a steely, icy glare—evidence of a conscience frozen, compassion unknown. When she saw either gaze, Diane knew that all manner of neglect and abuse was possible. What chilled her was when she saw either gaze in the eyes of both parent and child. Looking in Jacinda’s eyes, she saw the slack, glittering evidence of drugs and knew that the woman was high or coming down from a high. In Jacinda Reed’s case file, there were reports on her throughout the foster care system and her later arrest for prostitution. But Jacinda, buzzed and unkempt, had initiated this current process and asked for help after receiving a warning from her daughters’ school.
Nora Tolliver, Jacinda’s social worker, red-haired and matronly, sat beside Jacinda, her fleshy arms resting on several files pertaining to this case.
“Ms. Reed, your daughters have missed thirty-five days of school since the beginning of the school year. You’ve been working with your social worker, Ms. Tolliver, on strategies to address this situation but she’s told me you haven’t been cooperative.”
“How can I be cooperative? I’m on welfare, Judge Tate, your honor.”
“Do you realize how much your daughters have missed in thirty-five days of absences? I will give you credit for contacting social services before they contacted you, but we’re here today because you’ve been inconsistent in responding to the assistance of Ms. Tolliver.”
“I’m on welfare, and by the time I get my check, pay the rent, buy food, and pay the other bills, it’s hard for me to wash our clothes at the Laundromat, and I can’t send them to school in dirty uniforms. I sure ain’t gonna do that and have people thinking they come from a dirty home.” Jacinda spoke confidently and sat up straight, her eyes now raging with defiance.
Diane slid a legal pad across the table and told Jacinda to write down all her monthly bills. As she watched her labor over the figures and the spelling of words like electricity and Laundromat, Diane wondered if Jacinda was even functionally literate despite, according to her case file, having graduated from Cardozo High School. Graduates of the city’s school often read at a ninth-grade level. Over a third of the city’s black population was classified as functionally illiterate. She once had a client who signed a legal document with an x.
“Judge Tate, your honor, like I told Ms. Tolliver, a load of clothes costs a dollar and a half to wash and seventy-five cents to dry. On what I get in my check I have to choose sometimes between clean clothes and a meal on the table. Guess which one wins?”
Diane vetted the list of expenses three times, each time coaxing fuller disclosure out of Jacinda. Finally, the grubby sheet of paper that now served as a binding contract designed to alter Jacinda’s expenditures and behavior was completed. Jacinda Reed was followed by two other cases.
Two hours later, as Diane drove to the superior court, she thought of the cases awaiting her. She’d been appointed to the family court in the early nineties, when D.C. was a graveyard. Back then the number of murders in the city annually averaged four to five hundred. The city was gripped by years of bloodlettings fueled by the epidemic of crack cocaine, but the deeper root was the dark legacy of generations of neglect and indifference for people and neighborhoods that no one cared about until there was an election.
The emotional toll of working in the family court was often harrowing and so, twice, Diane had rotated out to serve three-year stints on the bench in civil court. But she had always felt her mission was on the bench in the family court. The families—mothers, fathers, and children—pulled her back again and again to a docket whose challenges and misery were often more raw and dramatic than those in criminal court.
Diane thought the Carl H. Moutrie Courthouse was an ugly building. It squatted like a giant gray lunch box in the center of Judiciary Square, the city’s nexus of local and federal law and order. The FBI’s Washington field office and the US Tax Court were among the buildings that occupied the six-block area. The National Gallery of Art and its spectacular east wing, guarded by the iconic sculpture of Henry Moore, was three blocks away. Each weekday, long lines of people snaked out the glass doors of the superior court, headed inside to get married, mediate a dispute, file for a divorce, seek child support, testify in a trial, or serve on a jury.
“It’s a building where people go to find justice, only to find that it looks like a stockade,” she’d often said to Gregory.
He’d explained that the superior court building was a classic representation of federal and judicial buildings designed in the 1930s and 1940s, which emphasized architectural stoicism, a style challenged in the city’s more recent designs.
“Granted it’s an expression of its time, but I would think you’d want the public’s first sight of a structure to be an invitation, not a threat,” Diane had said.
“Architecture is used to send all kinds of subtle and overt messages,” he’d said. “Some people might argue that a courthouse should instill trepidation.”
When Diane got to her office, she looked out her window and thought of how, more and more, she preferred the chaos of her work to the slow dismemberment of her life at home. As a judge, she had a reputation of being strict but caring, and she prided herself on her ability to listen to everything a person said—and sometimes could not say.
On this day, however, she shuddered at the thought that she would have to see Jacinda Reed again next week, and felt her temples throb at the thought of the cases she would have to hear after lunch. Gregory’s illness had accelerated a burnout that had been seeping into the lifeblood of her work. The insubordinate reality of her own life had Diane wishing for a judge of her own. A judge who would set her free. Her courtroom had become a hard-edged refuge from which she longed to flee, and she had begun to think about early retirement.
Diane heard a knock on her door. Her assistant, Rudolph, reminded her of the family treatment court graduation ceremony taking place in half an hour.
In the conference room, decorated with balloons hanging from the ceiling and vases filled with plastic flowers on the tables laden with food, she hugged the judges she had not seen in a while a
nd gossiped with them about pending cases. She thanked the stakeholders from the private and city agencies in attendance.
All of them in different ways had shepherded the women of the program through a grueling and strict process of therapy, drug counseling, job training, and parenting classes. Each woman had lived for six months in a residential treatment facility and earned the right to be reunited with her children by successfully completing the program. Unprepared for the rigors of the program, each year, nearly a third of the class found it easier to allow their children to remain in foster care or give up their parental rights than break the drug habit.
The room hushed as the six women walked to the front to sit near the podium. Kirk Franklin’s gospel anthem, “Imagine Me,” filled the room from a boom box in a corner. Each woman had charged the beaches on their own private D-Day in the past year and a half. Now each woman was clean. Each woman was sober. Walking down the aisle, they looked startlingly innocent, staring straight ahead, concentrating on a perfect march to the stage. Each woman carried a white rose.
Diane opened the program and realized that her thoughts had diverted from the welcome offered by the chief judge of the superior court and the remarks of the presiding judge of the family court. And then she heard her name and walked to the podium. Diane gazed at the family and friends filling the rows of aluminum folding chairs. This ceremony always made her emotional, and she gazed around the room to settle herself and to take in the full measure of what was about to take place.
“We call them ladies,” Diane said, turning to look at the six women. “When we first meet them in our courtrooms, they have lost their children and all that makes a good life, yet beneath that often frightened—and sometimes belligerent—demeanor, they are ladies. Ladies is an old-fashioned term that we don’t use much anymore, but we use it in the family court as a way of showing respect, because too often in their lives, these ladies were not accorded respect. They didn’t respect themselves, their children, or the gift of life. But now they do. They have followed the sometimes tough-love rules laid down by me and my fellow family court judges, and when they’ve fallen down, they’ve picked themselves up.
“These graduates are all first ladies. First ladies to themselves and their families and the children with whom they are now reunited. They are ready for the inevitable challenges of living a clean and sober life. They know they’re not alone. If they get scared or confused, they’ve got a friend in the alumni circle of the family treatment court and in their caseworkers. These ladies are now shaping a life they may have once thought they didn’t deserve. I call that a happy ending.
“These ladies have taught me how to be a judge, and how to keep the bar of my expectations high while at the same time keeping my heart open. The most underrated and yet important characteristic of the law is mercy. My fellow judges and I, we are gratified that they have fulfilled the requirements of the family treatment court. I congratulate you, my ladies.”
After the ceremony, Diane posed for pictures with several graduates as they held their certificates. She met fathers and mothers, beaming and grateful at the sight of their daughters’ resurrection. Rahema Elliot, chubby with eyes as bright and happy as those of the eight-year-old daughter whose hand she held, told Diane, “I’m gonna be honest with you, Judge Tate, Judge Bigelow told me if I didn’t get my act together she was gonna send me to your court. When she told me that, I stopped playing around and got serious.”
“You leave my judge alone,” Jenee Kelly, said, bustling into the group surrounding Diane. “That was some tough love, Judge, but you always made me feel like I could make it.”
This, I will miss, Diane thought, leaving the conference room and heading back to her office. This, I will miss.
Diane returned to her office and began attempting to bring order to the chaos on her desk. Overwhelmed and bristling with fatigue, she stacked files and assessed the significance of various forms and letters, deciding what to trash and what to keep. Another full day, a day of emotion, the frustration of community court, the joy of watching the women graduate. She twirled her desk chair around to face the wide picture window from which she could see not only Judiciary Square but the sky. How many times, she wondered, had she sat in this office simply gazing at clouds and finding in that act solace and hope? The five o’clock October sky was still studded with a few highlights of the day but showed signs of the impending evening.
Since Gregory had been formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Lauren picked him up in the morning and drove him to Caldwell & Tate. Having taken his medication, he could sit in his office much of the day, filing through the company’s archives and records for a project Lauren had initiated. Caldwell & Tate’s papers, some of its blueprints and digital files were to be donated to the D.C. Historical Society. A man who was losing his memory was in charge of compiling the history of the company.
Lauren had told Diane that most days Gregory managed well, and the younger designers still sought him out for advice. Either she or Mercer would take him to a nearby café for lunch or order something and eat with him in his office. She told Diane, “Mom, he remembers everything about the company, things even Mercer had forgotten.”
He remembered all that, Diane thought but did not say, because the past was where he was headed. The past was his destination. The past was where he would end up. The past, an island offering no escape. Sometimes, she thought, maybe that was best. Who would want to have to face, sip from the cup of the present he endured and the future that lay in wait? Gregory had a dreadful disease, but all this—going into the office, giving him his own “job”—spared his pride, gave his life meaning, for as long as that was possible.
Diane turned from the window, stood up, and stretched, literally shaking off the hold of these thoughts. Tonight Bruce would come to the house after Lauren dropped Gregory off at home. Diane had finally said yes to Paula’s invitation for an evening out.
“Can you believe the old geezer wanted to get with this, as the young folks say?” Paula smirked. “And on the first date!”
Diane was sitting with Paula in the basement of Westminster Church having a plate of fried fish, coleslaw, and greens. Diane savored the sound of her own laughter since it had become so rare and nearly unfamiliar. Paula was driving her to tears as she recounted her latest date with a retired engineer she had met online.
Paula reached across the table and handed her a napkin, which Diane used to wipe the moisture brimming in her eyes. “Hell, I didn’t even do that during the heyday of the sexual revolution. And that picture he sent me online had to have been thirty years old.”
“Stop, just stop!” Diane chided her as she put her hand on her chest to still the effervescent beating of her happy heart.
The Friday night jazz program at the church had been an easy and cheap date for Diane and Gregory for years. For five dollars, they’d heard jazz played by some of the city’s best musicians and bought soul food dinners. Mixed in with a crowd of retirees and seniors and the occasional college students or tourist, they’d hear a jazz standard by Ellington or Miles Davis, or a local singer belt out her version of a classic by Sarah Vaughan or Billie Holliday. The church was the citadel of old-school, straight-ahead jazz, and Gregory had enjoyed the music and the mingling. He and Diane never failed to find friends or associates also in attendance.
Diane hadn’t been to a concert at the church in several years but she found that nothing had changed. Paula had been coaxing her for weeks to join her for a night out—“A movie, dinner … something!”
Paula waved to a woman at a nearby table and bounded over to talk with her. Diane watched and thought about how far Paula had come, how far they had come together. Paula had stood beside her when she and Gregory got married and was godmother to Lauren and Sean. During Gregory’s battle with cancer, Paula had given Diane a key to her house and told her she could use her guest room as a refuge any time she needed to, night or day.
Initially Diane had thought the
idea generous but unnecessary, but the gift had quickly unlocked her need for solitude, silence, and self-care when she had grown weary of questions from friends and family about Gregory. The key opened the door to a room of olive green and a bed that cradled Diane as she’d closed her eyes for what she thought would be a quick nap only to find herself waking hours later. Sometimes Paula would sit on a recliner in the corner and watch her sleep. In the guest room, Diane’s loneliness and unexpressed anger could live and breathe, uncensored and unjudged.
When Paula returned from talking with her friend, she said, “If you hadn’t agreed to come tonight, I was gonna drag you out of that house.”
“Thank you,” Diane murmured, still warm from the onslaught of laughter.
She buttered a slice of cornbread and looked around the basement at the nearby tables. Men and women, not past their prime but seemingly entrenched in it, some heads bobbing, some fingers snapping to the beat of “The A Train” performed by a quartet upstairs in the sanctuary. A large screen on the wall showed the group playing.
“I feel like a widow. I don’t mean to compare my experience in any way to what you went through after George passed,” Diane said.
“You mean after George died. My husband died five years ago. He didn’t pass, he didn’t make his transition, he died. I get so tired of hearing all these useless euphemisms for a perfectly natural part of life, and you know I don’t expect such imprecision from you,” she said. “Rant finished, but I know what you mean. You have to face it though. You’re experiencing a lot of what I went through. It’s just that I’m a widow and you aren’t. I go on. But I still miss him.”
Diane pushed her plate aside and reached for the slice of sweet potato pie in the center of the table. She grazed at the pie with the tines of the plastic fork, carving Gregory’s name into the creamy texture.
She thought of the diary she had found yesterday when bringing order to Gregory’s sock drawer. The leather journal about the size of a paperback book was a heartbreaking testimony to what he had borne, what he feared, what he had found no words to say to her. The first entry was dated three years ago. The last was in May of this year, his script jagged and nearly unreadable. It had taken her several minutes to make out the last words he’d written: Of all the things I will miss most …
The Wide Circumference of Love Page 12