The television’s prayers had let up and we’d come to a political history part of the broadcast. Uncle Ralston tried to raise himself from his chair, his teeth knocking. I didn’t know if he thought to welcome us into the living room or if he was going to attack the television. I was sure I saw Ralston Jr. clock exactly where his father was.
“The negrificity of these proceedings.” Uncle Ralston found his feet. “I object.”
“I know.” Ralston Jr. leaned over. “Chubby Checker and Cassius Clay are the same man. Muhammad Ali is somebody else.”
Dad put a tray of raw celery and carrots in Uncle Ralston’s shaking hands and pushed him back toward the chair. Miniature carrots jumped like Mexican beans in an old-fashioned arcade game. I couldn’t believe that that was Dad. Ralston Jr. swerved away with a grin when his father landed back in the chair with a fart.
“Excuse me,” Dad said and stuck a carrot between Uncle Ralston’s porcelain incisors.
Uncle Ralston would never retire or sell up or invest in anything new. His black suits got shiny with age. When people came to Dad with a plan they wanted him to run by Uncle Ralston, Dad had a way of getting them mired in the muck, remembering how magnificent Texas Instruments had been and how much he admired the company for getting out of oil and in with the government over the whole semiconductor thing. He knew there was no point telling Uncle Ralston anything radical, he who let a chance to get in on the Seaway National Bank go by.
Uncle Ralston did not want women at business meetings, though middle-aged and older black women comprised most of his company at its death. The Eagle had shrunk, and women ran Uncle Ralston’s subsidiary Bible and religious printing businesses. Dad said that the properties owned by Shay Holdings, Inc., including black nursing homes, a medical supply company, and soul food restaurants southeast of the defunct stockyards, didn’t exactly lose money, but they didn’t make enough to keep the newspaper going. It was over. Uncle Ralston was holding the baby carrot like a candle and blinking up at Dad.
“One day we will all get away to that better place.” Mrs. Williams was in the hall, much to my surprise. She entered the living room followed by a thickset man with processed hair. I looked around for Mom.
The thickset man was already working the room, saying, “What’s happening, brother man,” handing out his attorney business card, and telling the women that women were the healers in the black community at times like these, the conjure doctors, the root workers. It was impossible to squeeze his hand, to get the advantage over him in a handshake. I could tell he liked to be the one to let the other guy go. He wore gold rings on both hands, a gold watch on one thick wrist, a gold ID bracelet on the other. His clothes weren’t cheap, but they were inner-city threads, brands popular among blacks, like Cole Haan shoes. They were appropriately gray. His hair smelled like James Brown’s music.
The attorney settled on an arm of Uncle Ralston’s chair, took the vegetables from him, and handed the tray to one of the elderly secretaries, who, like me, was inspecting the only plausible man in the room.
Mrs. Williams came over to me, beaming. “I see you, your nose all up in the air, you sissy,” she whispered. She was smiling away, lightly touching my sleeve. “God’s judgment is upon my grandson as it will land upon you one day, for we are made Hebrew Israelites, not punks.”
“Fifty-fifty box,” Uncle Ralston began, pointing at Aunt Gloria.
“No, no, no, no,” we heard as Aunt Gloria accelerated in heels across Mom’s tricky parquet and raised her purse against Uncle Ralston. She didn’t get to him. The attorney intercepted her easily and scooped her with evident pleasure against his double-breasted wool. “Hold,” he called, as if his voice came from his massive thighs. The priest waited for Aunt Gloria to release the purse into his hands. Mrs. Williams tried to take over Aunt Gloria, but the attorney was not letting go.
“My understanding is that he was alone,” someone said in the crowd that didn’t know whether to keep looking or to act like nothing untoward was happening. “Anything could have gone on in the mayor’s office, for all we know.”
“I’m hip. One side door, one injection.”
The television coverage moved into interviews with stricken associates of the departed mayor. Bottles and flasks and plastic cups that did not belong to the house came out of raincoats and handbags as people who loved Mom and Dad but knew they didn’t know how to party got louder. Uncle Ralston craned around, looking for Aunt Gloria perhaps. She was with the attorney in an arrangement of chairs, and Dad had moved Ralston Jr. out of harm’s way by a window. He, too, wore a black suit. Mrs. Williams darted off to get in on some Johnnie Walker.
In a flash, it had become impossible to remain sober in Chicago. I felt the need for an AA sponsor and was humbled that I couldn’t recall the name of the guy who’d volunteered to act as mine when I got out of rehab thirty months before.
* * *
After I had dropped out of the University of Illinois, Cello told me that my real problem was that I did not believe myself to be good enough. Her advice was that I set my sights lower, in all things, like checking the National Achievement box, a separate category for Negroes on the National Merit exam that was judged by a lower standard and was therefore an attainable prize for black students like me, who were psychologically disadvantaged. Cello had not got over her Bicentennial Concert Disaster of the year before and she never would.
I just looked at the telephone receiver, believing, as I did then, in the poetry of my impending nervous breakdown.
To go nuts had been my plan for what to do once I had dropped out of school. But when I wasn’t hearing the voices that flocked into Ralston Jr.’s head during his breakdowns, and forgetting to eat or getting lost on the El or acting out in abandoned downtown blocks by the new library didn’t bring to my synapses the traffic of psychosis, I couldn’t think what to do other than to drink even more.
I was soon going to run out of money and in that state I stayed with successive unsuspecting someones. I was usually asked to seek shelter elsewhere once it had become clear to my helper in my crisis that I would continue to drink up everything alcoholic that came into the house. I knew I was putting off having to go home to face my parents, the son and daughter of graduates of black colleges in the traditional antiblack South.
“Remember, they have to take us now, but they don’t have to keep us,” Mom said hopefully when she and Dad left me at the brick-everywhere university in Champaign, Illinois, three years before.
My first year I spent my extra money on drinking; my second year I spent my tuition on drinking and the university notified Dad that I’d failed to register. He flew down the same day and made it to the bursar’s office. He took me out to dinner and I got drunk. He stayed in a motel and said the next morning that it was okay that I could not get over to say goodbye. I didn’t have a car.
He never scolded me for what I’d wasted. My dad said that one of the worst feelings in the world was that of not knowing what was one’s calling, one’s path. He said he knew people laughed, but he never doubted that accountancy had been right for him. He hoped I’d find mine soon. Until I did, not knowing what to do with one’s life was worse than not having a woman or a family to love.
I was surprised by his coherence and moved by his leniency, so much so that I continued to drink in town and to fall behind in my classes. I filled out the withdrawal documents in a fog of being tired and broke, unable to make up the work for the term, unable to do my laundry because I didn’t have quarters, didn’t have the energy to carry that enormous bag to the basement, and I didn’t care. My tab had been cut off at the bar downtown where I drank underage.
The disgust my parents felt at my coming home a dropout was too much for me to handle. When the nervous breakdown didn’t come and the locked liquor cabinet turned out to be unlocked and empty of everything except flat tonic, I called an old flame and met her at a black bar where an overweight white girl might expect some action. We got completely dr
unk. She paid. I could hear her laughter as her taxi lurched out of the parking lot.
I got in the car borrowed from my brother, his army-green Mercury Coupe, his beloved Tank. I thought of how my father had taught me one day at the Eagle to tip my cap to the ladies. I was such a hit. The memory brought me to tears. I started up my brother’s Tank, roared out of the parking lot, and within three minutes had careened off a post and flipped the car over beside a disused brown railroad track, the giant warehouse into which it had once run long gone.
I remember saying to myself in a British accent, “I’m all right.” The car was on its left side. I could see that the windows were either broken by the impact or scratched by the gravel the car had slid across. I was in my seat belt. The radio was going. “Aha,” I said, still in Bunbury’s voice, and pressed the window button. The left one cracked horribly and I pulled myself up quickly, away from bouncing glass pieces. But the window on the right had gone down. I unbuckled and reached up. I hoisted myself up and fell over the side, jumping back from contact with the hot underbelly of the vehicle. I got to my feet. No one was around.
I went three blocks before I saw a convenience store. I said in a heavy Bunbury-British accent to the black man behind the Plexiglas shield, “I say, I’ve had an accident.” Incredibly, I had no injuries.
I never saw the tow truck. I was gone from the scene before it arrived. The police dropped me at the hospital, perplexed by my bright British accent. Dad and Solomon picked me up. Mom waited at home with something new in her eyes. The crazies staying with us had sat up with her. Dad fixed things with a judge. The car had been hit while parked in the lot of the Sweet End Tavern, the insurance story said. I missed most of the aftermath. I slept through it. I slept for two days. Mom was worried that I might have a concussion. When at last I woke, they were standing over me. Solomon asked if I was all right.
I cried, which spoiled things. They went away, except for Mom. But here my brother had been looking as though someone had shot the dog we’d never had and the first thing out of his mouth was to ask if I was okay. When Cello went into how much he disliked me, I remembered that about him and held on to it, as they say.
After that, I pulled myself together for a while, so much so that Solomon asked me to cease my hysterically punctual payments. The debt kept us more in touch than he wanted to be. Dad stopped talking to me pretty much and Mom nattered in order to cover up her disappointment.
* * *
“The fun never sets,” Dad said as he passed by. He had never been the sort of black guy who could get people laughing by remembering neck bones and rice in the Second Ward. “There is life after Sears, Roebuck.” He was acting as though he were glad-handing his way around a crowded room, but what he was doing was revolving from the kitchen through the dining room to the living room and back, clapping the same dozen people on the back and saying anything that seemed jolly, spirit-keeping.
The need to smoke had reduced the number of mourners. The house had quieted down considerably. Aunt Gloria had been in the bathroom for some time. Ralston Jr.’s pockets were full of baby carrots. I was sure that he was counting between carrots, timing each one. The television was on still, but nobody paid attention, loud as it was. Mom was in earnest conversation with the priest. We didn’t notice that Solomon had let himself in.
“You arranged for the pilot, I presume,” Ralston Jr. said.
Uncle Ralston was up, tottering toward Solomon, as out of it as his damaged son. “Take me to North Carolina this instant.” The old dictator making demands before he’d accept exile.
But my brother had Mom hanging on to his shoulders and Dad fastened to his ribs. I was in a sports bar with Solomon when Harold Washington was first elected.
“Never gave the time of day.” Mrs. Williams must have been eighty, at least, someone who could remember big floods down South and weevils in the cotton and the day the Armistice was signed. Yet she was a display totem of mascara and lipstick and red nail polish and jangling bangles, her grandson’s, the late Clark’s, perhaps, as she stumbled from chair to chair in Uncle Ralston’s direction. For some reason, I thought of Manfred’s car.
“Solomon, you’ve been drinking,” Mom said.
“Oh, you think you can smack me?” Mrs. Williams and Uncle Ralston rocked back and forth at each other, unsteady, furious, moist-mouthed, and unable to strike.
“I had brunch with my fiancée and her parents downtown. Francesca’s parents had their car drop me off.” Solomon had to disengage himself from Dad’s look at Mom—and hers right back at him.
Mom was happier than anyone when after four years Solomon broke up with that Vietnamese chick and her Pentecostal family in San Francisco. Maybe he was still a registered Republican, but at least he didn’t accept Christ as his personal savior anymore. He didn’t share his dating life with me, but obviously this was the first Mom and Dad had heard of someone named Francesca.
Because Solomon was away on athletic camp scholarships every summer, he never put in his time at the newspaper. Yet Uncle Ralston would run stories about Solomon’s class in Fortran for gifted high school students at the Illinois Institute of Technology, his picture bigger than any he ever printed of his granddaughter Cello. Uncle Ralston would make a toast at office lunches, the rambling contents of which could touch on the idea that one day all-star Solomon would take up the chair as editor, but clearly just as a way of introducing himself to the city before he embarked on a political career.
It wasn’t just Uncle Ralston and Mom’s gun-happy mother who were in love with Solomon. He was everybody’s shining black prince. Cello’s brother, Ronald, was almost tragic in his worship. Cello certainly approved of him as a relation. He had always been welcome in her biography. But now that I felt like a stronger candidate for her index, I was determined to be different with my brother. I was going to pour down the drain behavior brewed in envy and low self-esteem.
Solomon and I never had the talk, the scene where the older brother says that he always sort of figured his pain-in-the-ass little brother was, well, that way, because of those lame comics and how scared he was of water or balls of any kind aimed at him. But the talk with Mom and Dad had gone so badly, to my lasting astonishment, I decided not to have any more talks with anyone for a while. “I heard,” Solomon said at the time, and nothing else.
Mrs. Williams was trying to keep her balance as she traced the air in front of her like someone wielding a razor. “You such a big fool, you do not believe we landed on the moon.”
Dad himself had pulled Uncle Ralston’s editorial denouncing as a hoax the Apollo 11 landing in the Sea of Tranquility. But Uncle Ralston forced him to print the thing the next week. Dad often said that that was the turning point, the summer of 1969. Anyone any good on the Eagle began to leave after that.
The priest turned off the television and announced that he was going to find some music. I was excited that Solomon drew me to him, out of Mrs. Williams’s path.
“Francesca is perfect. We both grew up in the Windy City and had to meet in the City by the Bay.”
He squeezed my right bicep and I heard myself giggle and felt my teeth show. I saw Mom and Dad put their arms around each other at the sight of their eldest showing affection for his little brother. They acted as if he were ten years older than me. Behind them, I could see the attorney and Aunt Gloria in the same pose, but their eyes were closed. Their heads touched. Uncle Ralston and Mrs. Williams paddle-wheeled at each other. They both missed. They went past each other, as in a jousting competition.
Mrs. Williams was the lucky one, falling facedown into an easy chair, while on the other side of the room people sprang out of the way and several chairs went down sideways with Uncle Ralston like bowling pins.
“Hammer time!” Ralston Jr. screamed from the windowsill. “It’s hammer time!”
I felt Solomon’s arm around my neck and thought I heard applause. “You okay? You’re being careful? Good. Listen up, you have to help us out here, Jeddo. T
he truth is, Francesca and I are married already. How do I tell Mom we pulled a no-wedding on everybody. Francesca’s father and mother weren’t there either. The last four hours have been real Sidney Poitier, blood. You don’t still do that Katharine Hepburn routine you used to do? I hope not.”
* * *
The summer of Cello’s Bicentennial Disaster, I saw Aunt Gloria get into Uncle Ralston’s Cadillac behind the Eagle. She had on a very big wig and I saw a box of Kleenex go onto the dashboard. Out of nowhere Uncle Ralston gave her the back of his hand. When he had both hands back on the wheel, she was still leaning back against the seat, her hand over her mouth and nose. I could see the sequins of her nightclub-act dress. She reached for the Kleenex and Uncle Ralston backed up his car.
I went upstairs to tell Dad and on the way to his office I told three or four people what I had seen. They knew to run.
“Loose lips are torpedoes in your own waters.” Dad told me never to make Uncle Ralston’s business my business. I pointed out to him that he had. He said the trick was to let people think you had. He gave me the manly task of changing the bottle in the watercooler.
* * *
The year Cello got married on Lake Constance, I was mugged on my circuitous way back from class, in Greektown, of all places. My bag was taken, and with it my paper on eighteenth-century monument sculpture by Rysbrack. It was not “my” paper. I’d bought it for an outrageous sum. A few weeks later I dropped out of college for the second time. Drunk, I again called Cello long-distance in Berlin. She said that she wished she knew what to tell me. She said she was going to call Mom and hung up. She didn’t call Mom.
“Mooch,” Solomon said when I had to come home again.
“Minnie the Moocher, to you,” I answered.
“And a Big Zero.”
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