A Chance in the World

by Steve Pemberton

  “And I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, smiling, “but he is your father. I don’t know what picture you’ve seen, but you do look just like him. You tilt your head when you’re listening to somebody, just as he used to.” He stepped back for a brief second to look at me again; behind me, the students whispered excitedly. “A good man, Kenny was. Fierce, loyal, and would do anything for a friend,” he said.

  I remained unconvinced, yet I sensed the great respect Russell still held for his friend.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” he asked.

  I held my hands up, conveying that I was guilty as charged. “No disrespect, Mr. Almeida, but no, I don’t.”

  He nodded. “Tell you what. I am going to come by and see you Friday night.”

  I shook my head in protest. “Mr. Almeida, really, I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  He held his hand up, in a gesture that said this would be no bother.

  “I will bring a picture of Kenny with me. Maybe then you’ll believe me.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  —SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE SIGN OF THE FOUR

  I lived in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury, sharing a small two-bedroom apartment with a fraternity brother. At seven o’clock that Friday evening, the doorbell rang. I peeked through the blinds to see Russell standing there. With his left hand he lightly thumped a black leather briefcase against his leg.

  I showed Russell into the living room, settling into a chair across from him. He accepted my offer of something to drink. Our reflections shimmered in the glass of my old television set. Russell pulled from his briefcase a black-framed eight-by-ten picture. He held it out to me, his hands open and extended like a ring bearer gravely protective of his possession. “Here he is, Steve. This is your father.”

  The picture I had seen as a young boy years earlier—the one accompanying the announcement of Kenny’s death at age twenty-six—looked nothing like this one. In Russell’s photograph, Kenny’s hair was dark and had been straightened in the style that many African American men wore in the 1960s. Eagle-wing eyebrows framed deep-set, brown eyes. His nose was straight and lean, his lips gently curved, and there was just the shadow of a mustache and beard on a handsome face that bore no scars. Kenny was crouched in a boxing pose, leaning slightly to his right, his right hand positioned beneath his chin, his left a bit lower, poised to throw a jab. Veins bulged from his large forearms. He was bare-chested, and his lean, sculpted physique resembled a coiled spring. His face was as serene as a slow-moving river, giving no hint to the rage that seems to flow within boxers.

  I looked away for a moment and thought back to my stolen dash to the New Bedford library as a young boy. For years, I had believed that childhood quest to find my father had failed. So my search had continued. For many days after my library search, I had stared in the mirror, trying to determine who I resembled. Now, nearly more than a decade after that boyhood quest, I realized I had actually solved the mystery of my father’s identity that summer morning in 1978. There were physical differences—my skin and hair were lighter, and our eyes were a different color—yet I was, in essence, looking at a darker version of myself at the same age. The search was over: Kenny Pemberton was my father.

  The failure to find Kenny had been a blessing because it kept alive the possibility that my father would return one day. Perhaps some higher power had decided that knowing what had really happened to him was too much for a young boy. But now the truth, lying before me in an eight-by-ten picture frame, brought a harsh reality: Kenny was not here and never would be. The full weight of his absence overcame me as I mentally ticked off the things I would never know: a father’s pride and counsel, his strength and protection, and most of all, his love. I got up, walked over to the window, and sat on the small sill, looking out through the protective iron bars. The sun was setting, turning the sky a dazzling array of orange, purple, and yellow. I sighed deeply.

  After a few moments I asked Russell to tell me what he knew of my father. He said that my father was a local legend, and that he always would be for the people who had known him. “You ever see Sugar Ray Robinson fight?” he asked, referring to the great middleweight, generally considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in boxing history. I nodded yes.

  “Well, that was Kenny. See, I used to spar with your father. He patterned himself after Sugar Ray, stenciled his name on his gym bag, wore his hair like him, and fought just like him. Most fighters have one or two things going for them, but Kenny, he had them all—speed, power, toughness.” He nodded his head in approval at the not-so-distant memory. “He could take you out with either hand and his left hook to the body.” He stood up and threw a phantom left hook. “Well, it just took the wind out of you. He got that punch from watching Sugar Ray Robinson. Nobody wanted to fight him, and I think one of the reasons he liked me was because I would trade blows with him. Yeah, Kenny had it all. He was a man among men and a god among women. Yep, Kenny was going to be champ of the world, and everybody knew it.”

  I nodded. A short distance away, a car door slammed. “But he didn’t, right?”

  Russell sat down and shook his head solemnly. “No, he didn’t.”

  A few moments of quiet passed, and during that time I sensed there was another story about Kenny, one that Russell wasn’t telling me. I furrowed my brow and looked at him quizzically. “Why not? If he had all this talent and all these people who believed in him, why didn’t he become a champion?”

  Russell shifted on the imitation leather couch. “When all that stuff went down with Kenny, I wasn’t really around. There are other people who know more about it than I do.” He took a sip of water. “But I do know about his reputation in the streets. I actually saw it for myself.”

  I traced my finger around the black coaster that protected the table. “What do you mean?”

  Russell looked at the ceiling, searching for the right words. “He would walk down the street, and people just crossed to the other side. You could see the fear on their faces. He was a good man, but you didn’t want to cross him, because he would show you no mercy.”

  He fidgeted with his hands as he said this and looked away. He was struggling to protect me from something. But from what?

  Russell must have sensed my thoughts because he leaned forward on the couch and addressed me in a low, intimate tone: “Steve, Kenny was a man’s man. People loved your father, and not just because he was a great fighter. He was loyal and protective. If you were his friend and you needed something, he would give it to you, no questions asked. Most times you didn’t even have to ask.”

  Then Russell told me about riots that broke out in New Bedford in the summer of 1970. Massive unemployment, abysmal living conditions, and reports of police brutality had ignited the city’s southern and western neighborhoods in rebellion. “Your father was right in the middle of that—in a good way. There was all kinds of looting and burning, and he grabbed a bullhorn, jumped up on top of a car, and calmed everybody down. When that poor kid, God rest his soul, got shot, it was your father who came out of the crowd to pick him up and help get him to St. Luke’s Hospital. Senator Brooke came to town and created a committee to negotiate with the mayor and the police. Your father was on that committee, appointed by the senator himself. There was a picture in the paper and everything.”

  I looked again at the photo now standing on the coffee table between us and pictured my father as the community leader Russell described. And I remembered the headline relaying the news of my father’s tragic death: “Boxer Kenny Pemberton Is Slain in Fall River.” Only heroes are slain, I thought. Was he really a hero? The front page of the newspaper that day and articles the following day had hinted at a life that was less than heroic. Who was the real Kenny Pemberton?

  I asked Russell about the circumstances of my father’s death. He leaned back, as if fending off a jab. “I had left
New Bedford by then, so I don’t know all the details.”

  I pressed him. Was it true what I had read in the newspaper and what Betty Robinson had told me—that my father’s body had been burned in the funeral home? Who does that to a man already dead? Why wasn’t his death enough?

  Russell shook his head gravely and sighed. “That is true. It was different times. Harder times. But I know this. He would have been proud, real proud, to call you his son.”

  The phone rang, yanking me out of the 1970s and into the present. It was my friend Tim, asking when we were going to head out for a party. When I hung up, I pressed Russell about another topic that remained a great mystery to me. “Did you know anything about my mother? Who she was? Her name? Anything?”

  He eyed me for a long while. “Well, looking at you, I’d guess your mother was white. And that makes sense, too, because white women were all that your father dated. But no, I don’t know who your mother is. I do remember your father being with this gorgeous redhead; Evelyn Brown was her name. Could that be your mother?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have any idea. I’ve never heard that name before.”

  “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll ask around New Bedford and see what I can find. There are still a lot of people around from back then, and they might know something.” He grabbed his briefcase and stood up to go.

  I stood up with him and faced him squarely. There was another question I needed to ask him, perhaps the most important one of all: “Did Kenny know about me?”

  Again, Russell leaned away. “Well,” he said, rubbing his chin nervously, “I remember hearing a rumor in New Bedford about Kenny having a child. But he always denied it. If you want my opinion, and I know this may be hard to hear, I think he did know.” I folded my arms across my chest as if doing so would protect me from this crushing revelation.

  Russell put a hand on my shoulder. “You know, you might blame your father for how he treated you. But you’re like him, more than you know. I can see him in you. You’re a fighter and a leader just like he was. I could see it in the kids in the program and the way they talk about you. Those kids will never forget you for as long as they live. That was like him too. Kids loved him. They knew he was the real deal. When he walked down the street in New Bedford, they swarmed him. And he loved them back. You remember that.”

  CHAPTER 28

  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY

  For almost a year after meeting Russell, I did nothing more to learn about my parents.

  I didn’t want to dwell on the similarities I bore to my father, as Russell had urged. Part of me, maybe even the predominant part, didn’t want to know anything more about him. Thanks to this man, Kenny Pemberton, I had been abandoned to the foster care system and forced to suffer more than a decade of servitude to the Robinsons. To say that Kenny had abandoned me would not even be accurate; he had conceived me, and that was all.

  But Kenny had bestowed on me a lesson: an entire universe of difference existed between a father and a dad. He had lived for the first five years of my childhood, plenty of time to intervene, to do something, anything. But he had not. To hear how great a boxer he was, how much people worshipped him, and most of all how he loved children only made me angrier because, although I had been many things— foster child, college graduate, student-athlete, fighter—he had denied me the identity and role I had most wanted, that of a son.

  Like untold numbers of African American children, I had been consciously discarded by a man who seemed to define manhood by everything except being present for his son. That decision and its repercussions had blown across time, like tumbleweed in an arid desert. Immeasurable voids and endless questions are often created when a father deliberately abandons his child. Far too often, those empty spaces are filled by opportunists who see that vulnerability as something to exploit. In my case, it had been a cold and calculating foster family.

  Night after night, I sat on my bed with the picture of my father sitting on my chest, his face now frozen in time, recalling Russell’s fervent admonition that Kenny would have been proud of me. What right do you have to be proud of what I have become? Whatever I am, you had nothing to do with it. I can never call you Dad. As I held the picture, I noticed the burn scars on the back of my hands, courtesy of the Robinsons. The intervening years had faded them, but they were still there. Another harsh judgment arose within me. That was your fault. You sent me to them. No matter the circumstance, I was still your son. You were supposed to protect me. Yet despite that simmering anger, I couldn’t fully remove him from my heart.

  The summer of 1990, around the time I spoke with Russell, I had applied for and received a position in undergraduate admissions at Southeastern Massachusetts University. Driving a gray, beat-up Volkswagen Scirocco, with a cracked dashboard, temperamental heater, and car radio that did not work, I canvassed the state, extolling the virtues of higher education and the university and helping to make college a reality for low-income students. I found my thoughts drifting to my father, albeit in a more distanced, philosophical way. The college admission process is a life event for child and parent; in my daily work, the elements comprising the timeless child-parent bond—love, hope, sacrifice, letting go, and holding on—were on constant display.

  I’d come away from intense scenes of family pride and emotion between fathers and children and would conclude that a man could build whatever monuments he wanted in the worlds of politics, sports, entertainment, and business, but if they come at the expense of his children, then he has failed. Once the attention fades and the crowds stop cheering his name and his accomplishments are little more than fine print in a history book, the only thing that truly survives him is his child. That is his legacy. That is what defines him. All else is but a footnote.

  Kenny’s legacy was cemented in my mind, so I turned my attention to the person who could fulfill my last remaining hope to have a family: my mother. But I retained no more memory of her than I had of Kenny, and I had not the slightest clue who she was. The only thing I knew with any certainty was that she was white.

  In April 1991 I called Mike Silvia, my former caseworker. We’d kept in touch during my college years and it was always a pleasure to hear his voice. Mike told me that he wasn’t supposed to give out any information, but that he would see what he could find and call me back in a week. The following evening, I arrived home from work to find a message on my machine: “Hey, Steve. It’s Mike. Give me a call when you get a chance. I’ll be in the office.”

  It was past five, and I worried that Mike might have left for the day. I picked up a glass of lemonade and walked back into the living room, holding the cordless phone in the other hand. To my happy surprise, he picked up on the second ring. “So, Steve, I have some information, but I’m not sure how helpful it’s going to be. And remember, you didn’t get it from me.”

  “I gotcha, Mike.”

  “Let’s see here.” I could hear pages flipping in the background. “Your mother’s name is Marian Klakowicz. Maiden name, Murphy. There is no record of your father anywhere in your file. We lost track of your mother somewhere around 1975. The department never knew where she was after that.”

  “Wow,” I said, taking notes furiously. Every detail I jotted down made my mother seem more real, closer to me. For the first time, I heard her name: Marian. I wrote it down and underlined it twice, whispering it softly to myself. “Is there information on anyone else?” I asked.

  “There is.” Mike’s voice fell to a whisper. “Remember, you did not get it from me. I could get in big trouble—like lose-your-job trouble— if anyone ever found out.”

  I nodded my head. “Mike, I give you my word. It’s the most precious thing I have.”

  “Okay. In that case, did you know you had siblings?”

  I jumped up, nearly knocking over my glass. “Wow. Mike, I had no idea.” Through all my imaginings of what was or coul
d have been, it never occurred to me that I had brothers and sisters. I had always seen myself as a lone entity, this lost child, disconnected from everyone.

  “Well, it says here that there were four boys, including you, and a girl.”

  Questions flooded my mind. Where were they now? Were these Kenny’s children? Do we look alike? How come I don’t remember them? Did they live with my mother?

  “There’s one other thing, Steve. The only information we have on your family is the town and state where your grandparents lived in 1972. The name here in the file is J. Murphy, but I don’t know if that is your grandmother or grandfather. The last address we have is in Pucker, New Jersey.”

  I tapped my pencil on the table, so astounded I stopped taking notes. That was such a long time ago.

  “Before I let you go,” Mike said, “I have been going through your case file. It’s huge, by the way, and . . . well . . . there are just some very tough things in here about your family. It was tough for me just reading it. I know you went through the fire with the Robinsons, but things were pretty tough long before you got in their clutches. That’s all I can really say. So be careful. And be prepared.”

  CHAPTER 29

  The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven’s lieutenants.

  —LEWIS THEOBALD, DOUBLE FALSEHOOD

  Siblings, I thought, after hanging up with Mike. I shook my head again in astonishment. How do I go about finding them? I paced around the apartment. I knew my siblings existed, but I didn’t have their names. What else do you know? The town where your grandparents lived. What was the name of the town again? Pucker. Strange name for a town, but that is what he said. There is no way my grandparents could still live there. How else could I find them? Take a trip to the town and start asking around?