Margaret’s heart attack, suffered when she was seventy-three, changed everything. Back then, Margaret was active in her sorority, was a member of the Mayor’s Advisory Board for Senior Issues, and held fund-raisers to raise money for Dorothy Height’s initiative to allow the National Council of Negro Women to purchase the building they were headquartered in on Pennsylvania Avenue. She served on the “Free D.C.” committee to gain statehood for the city, and in previous years she had taken Lauren and Sean to Paris for two weeks. Three months before the heart attack, she had journeyed to South Africa on a trip organized by her church.
Diane had come to admire Margaret, was inspired by the way that she had created a life for herself in these later years of widowhood, a life that included an ongoing relationship with a gentleman she referred to as “my old, new boyfriend,” whom she had dated before she met Ramsey and who was also then a widower.
The heart attack, which Margaret felt the first signs of while sitting in the pew at Metropolitan AME one Sunday morning, was significant, but not fatal. During the weeks of recuperation, when Margaret stayed with them, Diane thought more and more about mortality and aging and wondered about her father. The distance and brittle stance of indifference that Diane had perfected cracked.
One evening as they cleaned up the kitchen after dinner, Gregory said to Diane, “Thank God I’ve said everything I needed to say.”
“What do you mean?” Diane asked, pausing as she placed cutlery and plates in the dishwasher.
“She dodged a bullet. She’s always possessed an air of invincibility, but my mother, like everyone else, is a mere mortal.”
“Of course,” Diane said.
Gregory stopped wiping the stove and said, “Diane, if you make me, I will ask the question every day for as long as we are together, for as long as we have. When are you going to make the call?”
Before she picked up the phone to call her father, before she ventured across the country to see him, she had to give her children what she had denied them, a grandfather and the truth. All these years, Diane had told her children what she had been told: “He walked away. He didn’t love us anymore. I don’t know why.”
The truth would be more layered, tender, and raw than the hard-edged artifact she had been offered. Lauren and Sean were teenagers. And this would be the first time she had spoken to them at length about their maternal grandfather. Sitting beside Gregory on the sofa, enduring the quizzical, skeptical gaze of her adolescent children, who more and more seemed refugees from her love, who took every chance to brusquely struggle literally and figuratively out of her grasp, Diane, after days of imagining this moment, found herself speechless. It was Gregory who fueled the revelation, who found words she could not as he sat clutching Diane’s hand, looking squarely and fearlessly into the faces of their children. “Your mother has something to tell you.”
“Are you sick?” Sean asked, suddenly attentive and alarmed.
She wanted to say, Yes, I have been sick. Sick with grief most of my life and now I want to get well. There was nothing to say but everything, and so she used all the words she had sought to protect them from—rape, burglary, abandonment, and what she knew must be her father’s shame, what she admitted was her own desire to punish.
“Why are you telling us this now?” Lauren asked, thrusting it all back at Diane.
“You have a grandfather that you need to know. I have a father I need to forgive. It’s time.”
Sean rose and Diane prepared herself to watch him leave the room, but he sat down on the sofa beside her and buried his head in her shoulder. “When can we meet him, Mom?”
The children were in bed and Gregory sat in a chair near the bed watching her make the call.
Now she was walking in the shoes of all the parents and children whose lives she mandated and adjudicated from the bench. Reconciliation, empathy, forgiveness—she routinely prescribed them for others. Now she felt their weight, how they loomed so large and unapproachable, how humbling and confusing it was to feel the sheer burden of words that demanded so much.
She dialed the Las Vegas number and he answered. So this is all it took, she thought, all these years. The sound of her father’s voice, surprisingly soft and thin, halted her breath.
“Hello, can I speak to Samuel Garrison?”
“This is Samuel Garrison. Who is this?”
“This is Diane. Your daughter.”
Whimpers, cast up from a place beyond imagining racked her father’s throat. A convulsion he did not try to halt. Diane steeled herself against the sound of her father’s shattered voice as he said, “I was ashamed. I never forgave myself. For what I did to your mother, you, and Ronald. It just got easier to stay away.”
“Marcia gave me your number. Years ago. I could never use it till now.”
“She’s told me all about you. How successful you are. Your family.”
“You never reached out; you never looked for us.” When planning the call, almost as an act of theater, she’d imagined hurling the charge at a climactic moment, but the accusation tunneled out swiftly, would not be delayed or denied.
Then before he could answer, both to wound him and to acknowledge the depth of her own sin, Diane said, “I should have called years ago. I could’ve.”
“All things in time,” he said.
Not all things, Diane thought but did not say. “We needed you. All of us. I was five years old when you walked away.”
“I’ve had years to think of nothing else.”
In the calls that followed, she developed a friendship with this man, a stranger who reactivated a primal, unquenchable desire in her to be loved. Samuel told her that after he left Washington, he moved around for a couple of years, avoiding everyone he had left back in D.C. He’d finally settled in Las Vegas, played the casinos and got lucky. Won enough money to open a dry-cleaning business. After Ella’s death, he had remarried.
“I didn’t attend Ella’s funeral because I felt like it was me who had in some way killed her. If I had come, I felt like I’d have to turn myself in for punishment. When I heard about Ronald, I didn’t leave my house for a week.”
Diane sent him pictures of Gregory, Sean, and Lauren, and he sent her photos of his wife. Gregory talked to him on the phone. The children had stilted conversations with the man who was their grandfather.
“Can I tell you something?” Samuel asked Diane during one call.
“Anything. Everything.”
“I had nightmares for years after what he did to us. He had a gun and held it on me while he forced Ella to tie me up. Then he raped her. Your mother. My wife. I never got over it. She changed, too. I couldn’t touch her, comfort her after that. I could see it in her eyes … she hated me for not saving her.”
“Did you ever talk to anyone professionally about it? A counselor? A therapist?”
“No. I didn’t even know how to do that. When I met Inez, she made me feel as whole as I figured I’d ever be.”
Diane thought of the two years she’d spent in therapy, another suggestion Gregory had made, and how their marriage might not have survived without it.
Diane and Gregory made plans to visit her father when the children were out of school, but Samuel Garrison died six months after her first call.
Marcia delivered the news and her father’s wife, Inez, called Diane a few hours later and told her that she had discovered Samuel’s body in his house.
“We talked a couple of times a week and when I didn’t hear from him and when he didn’t answer the phone, I knew something was wrong. He’d been in the house two days before I discovered him,” she said. She told Diane all the arrangements were being made; all she had to do was come to Las Vegas.
Numbness returned, but this was different, not the numbness of before: a shellac around her heart, a glaze of resistance. This was a membrane separating Diane from the world, riddled with cracks and slivers. She had not cried where tears could be seen, but inside, she was sodden.
Inez met
her at the airport. She was a woman of medium height, olive complexion. Her hair was a long sheath of solid gray that reached her shoulders. She was dressed in white capri pants and a striped top. She stepped forward from the crowd and hugged Diane. Tensing in the woman’s embrace, Diane realized that Inez was her stepmother.
They walked silently to the parking lot and Diane loaded her suitcase into the trunk of Inez’s car. As they prepared to pull out of the garage, Diane asked, “So he died alone and you found him?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Do you want to go to your hotel?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go see my father’s body.”
On the way to the funeral home, Inez told Diane, “This is West Vegas. When we were married, your dad and I lived in North Vegas, but in a sense, this is where he always lived.”
Diane looked around at the streets. There were small businesses, boarded-up buildings, a pall of neglect and decay.
“He used to own a dry cleaners over there on that corner. This was before we met. But he got robbed so many times he closed it. But he always came back here. Even after we moved to the suburbs. He got people involved in clean-up campaigns and helped pressure the city to build a recreation center. He’d be in the library during election season registering people to vote. This was where his heart was. He didn’t have a lot of friends, but everybody knew and respected him.”
In the funeral home, Inez introduced Diane to the owner, Blair Harris, a small wisp of a man in a three-piece suit, his hair slicked back from a protruding hairline.
“This is Sammy’s daughter, Diane. She just flew in from Washington.”
“The state or …”
“The capital city.”
“Welcome to Vegas, and I’m sorry you had to come under these circumstances. The memorial service is later this evening,” Mr. Harris told Diane as he began walking toward the room where she was sure her father’s body lay in repose.
The solemn, austere feel of the funeral home brooded around Diane as she slowly walked toward the front of the room and saw the casket. This is what she had come to do. To see her father.
Samuel Garrison was a large man, his head shaved and gleaming. His fleshy face was studded by a moustache. The powder and embalming fluid cast a gray shadow over his face. This was the face of her father, dead. It was not, therefore, the face she had longed to see all her life. The face she had first seen in a picture just a few months ago. Her father was dead, and because she had not really known him in life, looking at him now, she did not know what to feel or what to think. She did not know what she saw on his face. They said that in the casket you saw the face that the person had earned, but you could only see that face if you knew the person. Then you could judge. She did not know her father. Not really. He was dressed in a blue suit and gray tie, his large hands folded atop his groin. Despite the sins of omission, her father’s face was a mask of calm. This was the posed theatrical face of the dead: cared for, designed to quiet the qualms of those who would have to look upon the face one last time. Diane searched the face for the story of her father’s love for her mother or what it meant to watch your wife’s rape. Her father’s eyes were sealed shut, so she could not look into them to see whatever had, in the end, remained in his heart.
Inez sat in the front row of folded chairs that would fill later in the evening.
Diane turned around and said, “I’m ready to go.”
“Would you like to get something to eat?”
Diane thought of the hotel room and wanted to delay her arrival there as long as possible. “Sure. I would like that.”
Inez drove out of West Vegas and stopped at a mall where they found an Italian restaurant.
“I thought I’d feel more,” Diane said.
“Trust me, you will.”
“Could you tell me something about him, anything? How long were you married?”
“We were still married.”
“I mean …”
“I met Sammy at a bingo game. I’m a midwife and still practicing. I was always delivering babies, making families happy, and I wanted a family of my own. I had given up. I was almost forty when I met Sammy. I never thought I would find love. I don’t know if that’s what I found with Sammy, but it was enough. There isn’t much of an Argentinian community out here; most of my friends are black. I had heard about him, this guy who a couple of years back won big at the casinos and owned a dry cleaners. I knew he had lost something that mattered to him and I knew that I would have to wait before he told me what it was. He seemed like a good man, though. We were both lonely and thought before it was all over, before giving up, we’d give love, give marriage a try. It was that simple. We were serious, at least I was. He said he was an old man but he wanted to start over. I wanted to try to have a child. But he told me he had a family once and something bad happened and he didn’t want to risk having a family again. I said if we couldn’t have a child maybe we could adopt. He didn’t want to.
“I was happy for a while. We were like a normal couple. He liked showing off our life. He said I was enough. He had run all his life and he wanted to stop running. I didn’t know what he meant until he told me everything. Everything about your mother, your brother, you. The terrible thing that happened. How he’d run away from all that, from you. I felt closer than ever to him because I finally knew what he’d been hiding. I felt so much love for him then. But the next day he felt ashamed for telling me. It’s like he grew further and further away the more I knew him and the more I understood. I told him that one day he might see you again.
“After a while he stopped coming home at night, wouldn’t tell me where he was, and so I left him. He had treated me bad, but after I left, he tried to make up. For a long time, I didn’t speak to him or see him, then he called me one day and said he was tired and afraid of dying alone. Said if I couldn’t be his wife, could I be his friend?”
“You said he didn’t have many friends.”
“People thought they knew Sammy, but they never did. People thought they were his friends but they weren’t. But when you called, he was happier than I had ever seen him. He went to a lawyer and revised his will. Made the lawyer the executor of his estate, told him on his death, to sell the dry cleaners and divide whatever he got between me and you.”
The next day at the funeral, Diane sat beside Inez and listened to the young men her father had hired to work in his dry cleaners tell stories of his mentorship, the young men he’d coached on the basketball team at the rec center, who’d called him “Pop.” One man who had promised Samuel Garrison when he got out of jail that he would never go back, didn’t, he said, because Samuel let him work in his cleaners.
At the repast in Inez’s neat bungalow, the old men and women came over to Diane and gave her hugs.
“Sammy never told me he had a daughter. He shouldn’t’ve kept you a secret.”
As the repast wound down, Diane sat alone in a gazebo in Inez’s backyard and that is where she finally cried.
She stayed an extra day in Las Vegas, remained in the place her father had called home. She lay in bed in her room the morning after the funeral meditating on the hypotheses, the lies, the secrets, the conjecture, and the final truth her father had told her. Samuel Garrison fled to Las Vegas, away from the scene of the crime committed against him and his wife, two thousand miles from all of it, left behind like scattered debris. Miles and miles, and he never looked back. Or so she’d thought, but he’d been looking back every day. Looking back when he hid it all from Inez, from the people in West Vegas who thought they knew him. And after he had revealed it, he’d had to hide it all once again—hide it or die. All those people he helped, were they stand-ins for her mother, for Ronald, for her? In the end, he didn’t want to be alone but died alone in his bed and in his house anyway.
Before she left, Diane walked the Strip, garish, overwhelming, a Disneyland for adults. She went into the casinos, saw the machines where her father had hit it big enough to be written about in t
he newspapers, the sprawling rooms where he came weekly, up until the day before he died, still looking for luck. He must’ve thought luck was a form of forgiveness. When he won, he must have been able, for a moment, to put it all to rest. Before leaving for the airport she called Gregory.
“So, who was he? Who was Samuel Garrison?” he asked.
“He was my father.”
Mercer smiled in appreciation when she finished. “I thought I knew everything there was to know about y’all.”
Mercer had sat listening to the story Diane told, his eyes never leaving her face. Gregory had walked quietly into the room and sat on a hassock, oblivious to the fact that Diane was honoring him with piety and tenderness. “Even friends keep some secrets.”
Mercer reached for Gregory’s hand and shook it. “You did good, buddy, you did real good by this woman here. Do you know that?”
Gregory smiled broadly, his eyes aglow looking at Mercer. He shook Mercer’s hand vigorously up and down, until Mercer had to place his palm on their hands to quell the movements.
“And that’s the man that I’m now planning to put away somewhere, Mercer,” Diane said. “He did that for me.”
The Wide Circumference of Love Page 15