One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  But there would be no more visits. My mother was drinking heavily at this time, and she suggests that my father wouldn’t want to risk his mother and sister seeing his wife drunk. And by the time my mom was sober, Edna’s health had deteriorated to the point that she couldn’t leave the nursing home anymore. But for Edna that single trip could at least silence any doubts about what her son was doing out there in Connecticut. She could tell anyone who dared to ask (and no one would, except perhaps Shirley or Frank) that Anatole had even taken her and Lorraine to his country club for dinner.

  As Shirley points out, being seen in public with her mother or Lorraine wouldn’t have caused a problem for my father; she and Frank, on the other hand, weren’t invited. But Edna wasn’t inclined to dwell on how my father was living his life, as long as she could maintain some kind of relationship with him. “She never raised a question about why you didn’t know that we existed,” Shirley tells me. “It might upset something.”

  Over the next few summers, my father kept writing and rewriting the chapter about Edna, each draft slightly different from the last, each one increasingly marked by cross-outs and additions, each mother a little less tangible than the last one. But he never managed to bring the story line to some satisfying conclusion.

  If [Nat] resembled his blueprints—a pale diagram of a father—she was like her cooking, palpable. She wasn’t going to “pass away.” She’d spill and splash, flounder and putrefy. She might even make a scene...

  In the end Edna simply devolved into vagueness until she no longer recognized her son. And it was my father who made the scene, tearing apart the refrigerator on Mother’s Day. I can still recall the surprise and hurt in his voice when he told me about visiting her at the nursing home. “She didn’t recognize me,” my father had said. “She didn’t even know her own son.” It hadn’t occurred to him that just as a son could forget his mother, so too could she forget him.

  I’m dying, too, I’m next....Have you anything to say, Paul, something you’ve forgotten to do? I hope you won’t put if off too long.

  A shadow of resentment obscures my recollections of my grandmother during our single meeting. There’d been a quality of formality to the day—my brother and I were made to dress up and sit quietly. I had trouble understanding my grandmother’s strong New Orleans accent. I think, too, I found something vaguely threatening about her presence, as if these strangers who had appeared out of the blue would take my father with them. I’d only ever known him as my dad, and in the blunt logic of my seven-year-old brain, I didn’t understand that he could be a son and brother too.

  I imagine that my mistrustfulness made me taciturn and stand-offish with my father’s mother. The few times I’d been around old people—mostly the grandparents of my friends—their frailty, medicinal smells, and incongruous turns of conversation had made me keep my distance. I wonder, did I let Edna hug me? Did I call her grandma? Did she look at me as if to drink me in?

  After his mother’s death, my father began to second-guess some of the choices he’d made, often in the Times column he had recently started writing about our life in Connecticut. He wondered if the “excessively sheltered” upbringing that he’d provided for my brother and me might prevent us from developing the necessary toughness or tolerance to survive in the larger world. Also, although he liked the Wasp lifestyle for the security and advantages it promised, he hadn’t necessarily counted on his children becoming Wasps themselves. Was he raising my brother and me to be as innocent and uniform as sheep, lacking any irony or a tragic sense of life? Was he guaranteeing that we would grow up to be dull? He questioned whether his creative energy had become stagnant in this picturesque setting, ensnared by rose vines and ivy into complacency. Perhaps he could have finished his novel if he’d been more anxious, more desperate. A view of skyscrapers, empty lots, and discarded mattresses might have been more conducive to the modern sensibility. Was this life worth everything that he’d forsaken?

  In April 1979, six months after my grandmother died, my father recounted in his column how as a young man he’d run away to Greenwich Village, “where no one had been born of a mother and father.” There he and his friends had “buried our families in the common grave of the generation gap.” But now that he was a father himself, he had begun to reconsider his relationship to his parents. “Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I could understand how much I missed them and what they meant to me.” He wondered if my brother and I would ever try to put him behind us. Or did we understand that “after all those years of running away from home, I am still trying to get back?”

  A year or so later, my father was waiting for an elevator with Evelyn Toynton in a friend’s apartment building when he mentioned, almost out of the blue, that there was a C on his birth certificate. When she asked him what it meant, he told her it stood for “colored.” Then the elevator doors opened, ending the conversation.

  After that my father would occasionally raise the subject with Evelyn, but always when they were about to arrive somewhere or walking back from lunch and there wasn’t time for much discussion. He told Evelyn about his father sitting the family down in the living room and telling them they had to be white. Another time he mentioned that he’d been beaten up by the darker-skinned kids in the neighborhood. Evelyn recalls: “He stopped walking and said, ‘You don’t know what it was like. It was horrible.’”

  Looking back now, Evelyn thinks that my father may have been probing to see how people would respond to the revelation of his background. “And it almost felt like, when he realized that people wouldn’t care—certainly people like me didn’t care—that it was weird for him,” Evelyn says. “Because if nobody would care, then why had he done it?”

  It was around this time, the early 1980s, that my father toyed with the idea of going public about his racial identity. One evening he visited Harold Brodkey and his wife, Ellen Schwamm, at their apartment in Manhattan for help with his novel. After listening to him read from various sections, they gave him the same feedback he’d been hearing for years from other friends and editors: the writing was too controlled and distant; he needed to let go to get back to the immediacy of his earlier fiction. Harold told him that it seemed like he wasn’t being honest, and if you evaded the truth, this was what you got. My father wondered out loud if he should try to write about being black.

  Harold and Ellen had heard the rumors, but they’d never discussed my father’s racial identity with him before. Ellen, who is also a novelist, thought that writing about it was a wonderful idea. She suggested that such a book would free him. But Harold said that he didn’t believe that my father had lived it. That he was really black wasn’t the truth either. If my father had felt himself to be actively passing as white, Harold surmised, there would have been more of a gulf between my dad and my brother, my mother, and me, that the act of keeping a secret would have made my father seem more different.

  Harold and Ellen asked him why he needed to be secretive about his background in the first place—almost everyone seemed to know already, and wasn’t it just one black relative somewhere in his past anyway? My dad told them that in fact both of his parents were black. He said that he had never had anything in common with his family; they didn’t understand him. When he started Brooklyn College at age sixteen, he’d felt more at home among the Jewish students. Sometimes it seemed to him that he’d been born into his family by mistake.

  When I talked to Harold and Ellen in 1994, Harold described my father wearing a “shit-eating grin” when he talked about being black. “He said how well a book like that would sell,” Harold recalled. “How he could make a lot of money.” My father’s writer’s block wasn’t only frustrating creatively; my brother and I were about to start college, and my dad needed a book advance to help pay for our tuitions. Harold also thought that my father told him because he knew that Harold would out him one day and then he would be forced to explain himself. But my father died before Brodkey got around to exposi
ng him, and then Harold was diagnosed with AIDS and busy finishing up his own life.

  My father eventually told Brodkey that he didn’t want to write about being black because he simply didn’t want to be viewed as a black writer. Also, he didn’t want Todd and me to be seen differently. Harold kept encouraging him to tell us about his background, but my father always refused, insisting that it had nothing to do with us. We were white.

  My mother had also begun pressing my father about the need to tell the children. She felt that we had a right to know, both for ourselves and for the sake of our own children. But my father would immediately grow angry whenever she brought up the subject. To end the conversation, he would agree to tell us one day, but we didn’t need to know yet.

  When was the right time, though? When we were so secure in our white identities that the revelation wouldn’t change our conception of ourselves? When the world no longer made distinctions between black and white? When we stumbled on the secret by accident? If he’d ever actually tried to imagine our reactions, he might have been scared. Perhaps he’d done such a good job raising us as white that we’d be upset or angry. Maybe the wall he’d erected between our lives and the colored world of his childhood would prove so high that we’d lose sight of him across the divide.

  Equally troubling might be the possibility that we’d embrace our father’s background. To his mind, if we started to identify as black, then all the advantages he had worked so hard to provide us—and everything he’d sacrificed along the way—could prove for naught. Through the force of his personality, my father had managed to thwart any racial stereotypes’ being “pinned” on him by people who knew about his identity, but he couldn’t be certain that we’d have the same sureness of character to deflect the distorting influence of prejudice.

  My father might have wondered how springing this news on us would be any different from what his father had done to him as a kid. He knew firsthand how confusing it could be to grow up thinking of yourself as one thing only to be told you’re another. His father had also been trying to make a better life for his family, but he’d hijacked his children’s sense of themselves in the process. My aunt Lorraine suggested to my mother that she’d never married because of the mixed messages she received as a child about her racial identity. Could my father expect us to keep his secret for him? Would forcing us into becoming his coconspirators be any better than withholding the truth?

  My father could have come up with a million excuses about why he shouldn’t tell us. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that he was afraid we’d be disappointed in him. He might have gone on postponing forever, but then he got sick and his time ran out.

  In a talk about having a critical illness that my father gave at the University of Chicago Medical School six months before his death, he mentioned the need to develop a style for finishing up one’s life. He’d always viewed a person’s style as the literal embodiment of his personality. For him style extended far beyond fashion to include how a person moved, the language he used to express himself, the angle of his observations. In his view we could deliberately cultivate these aspects of our character by paying very close attention to our instinctual likes and dislikes, our innate prejudices when responding to the world. As if we were each uniquely made instruments, our job in life was to continually tune ourselves, tightening this and loosening that until we hit upon our most natural, most authentic sound. My dad often spoke of life as a rhythmic process—“When I was happy, my rhythms, my tuning were good...and when I was unhappy, I didn’t have any rhythm at all.” Finding his unique sound allowed him to dance.

  In finishing up his life, my father adopted a style that defied and disparaged his illness. When his oncologist suggested that the most effective remedy for prostate cancer was an orchiectomy—removal of the testicles—my father told him that losing his balls might depress him, and that depression could kill him quicker than cancer. He entertained us with stories about his hospital roommate, a thug who’d broken his jaw during a bar fight. After having a catheter removed, my father couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time and peed all over the floor, and this man, who had drawn blood in anger, leaped onto his bed and began dousing the room in air freshener.

  Just as my father had counted on his style to protect him from the diminishment of self that came from being black in the 1930s, he expected it to safeguard him against the diminishment of self that accompanied having a fatal illness. Rather than wasting away, he would become a crystallized version of Anatole, more insistently himself than ever before. As cancer disfigured his body and disoriented his mind, this tactic would keep him in love with himself, which was crucial to maintaining his will to live. And it would also allow his family and his friends to continue loving him as he became more and more unrecognizable.

  If my father told my brother and me about his racial background, how could he have remained himself while also revealing that he wasn’t who he seemed to be? Even if he convinced us that his few drops of black blood didn’t mean that he was black, would we nonetheless feel alienated by the drops of secrecy and conclude that he’d become a stranger?

  In the final months of his life, my father agreed to see a family therapist with my mother. They’d been fighting a lot because my father wouldn’t go along with the macrobiotic diets and vitamin cures that my mother wanted to try now that they’d exhausted the treatments available through Western medicine. In the session, my father tried to explain to my mother that he was in too much physical pain to tolerate the taxing side effects of these alternative cures. When the therapist asked him about other moments of pain in his life that went unrecognized, my father began talking about his childhood and broke down sobbing. He described feeling caught between two worlds, and how much he blamed blacks for acting in a way that invited prejudice. He talked about being beaten up because of his white looks and black identity, and how his parents had pretended not to notice. And he railed against his father, dead now for forty years, for protecting him neither from those bullies nor from the turmoil of growing up in this racial limbo.

  In three decades of marriage, my mother had never heard her husband talk about his childhood or internal strife about his racial identity with such honesty or anguish. She was deeply saddened to learn that he’d been carrying around this burden by himself for all this time. Both she and the therapist suggested that sharing this pain with the people who loved him could ease his suffering. Telling my brother and me would not only help us to understand him better, but it might make my father feel less alone at the end of his life.

  I remember visiting my parents at their house after that therapy session. My father took up what had become his constant position in recent weeks—reclined on his side on the couch in the living room. But as he lay there, with his head propped in his hand, he held forth with such enthusiasm that I could almost view him as simply relaxing. He spoke optimistically about the efficacy of the alternative treatments and how he would give them another try. He mentioned writing projects that he was eager to finish and all the work that he could still get done. And he raved about this magician of a therapist who had accomplished in a single session what forty years of analysis had not. “I feel as if I’ve been completely recalibrated,” he said to me, without explaining what he meant. “Like a brand-new man.” In the therapist’s office, my father had glimpsed a way to reveal himself without betraying who he was or changing the way that his children saw him.

  But in Martha’s Vineyard with Todd and me a few weeks later, the right words failed to come. In my father’s dream about being on trial for an unspecified crime, he’d made a speech in his defense that was so moving that even in his sleep he could feel himself tingling with it. The style in which he’d lived his life was a conviction he felt in his bones. But even though my brother and I were made from those same bones and blood and flesh, he couldn’t be sure that we’d share his feeling about the rightness of what he’d done. As he grew more sick, the frailty of his spirit couldn’t tole
rate anything short of transcendence.

  A few months before my father died, my friend Chinita and her boyfriend Mike paid another visit to my family’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. One early evening we all headed down to some nearby tennis courts. None of the three courts were occupied, and we spread across them, volleying back and forth. My father started out hitting with us, but he was too weak to play, and after a minute he said that he’d rather watch. Mike and my brother began a game, and my dad took a seat, leaning up against the wire fencing beside them.

  Two courts away, Chinita and I had been playing for a half hour or so when the exhortations of my father caught our attention. We stopped to see what the commotion was about. Mike and Todd were both good athletes who could have been great tennis players if they’d ever put their minds to it, but Mike became a competitive rower while Todd took up running. Now Chinita and I watched Mike sprint to the net, scoop up a drop shot, and send it in a lob over Todd’s head, and Todd turn and race to the baseline, leaping to slam it back with a high backhand. The rally continued on like this, with neither of them able to make a bad shot and my dad exclaiming after each one: “Keep your eye on the ball!” and “Don’t think!” and then just calling out their names or hoots and cries of admiration.

  The light started to fade but the match went on, and still they kept making improbable shot after impossible get. Chinita and I abandoned our game and sat down to watch on the other side of the court, adding our shouts of praise to the mix. Neither Todd nor Mike had played as well before, but they didn’t seem to be trying to win, because that would mean the end of this match and the spell that had come over them, and the end of the astonishment of Anatole, without which they would never play as well again.