Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  I visited him and found him inconsolable. I asked him if he wanted to go for a drive and get some sunshine. He shook his head no. I told him I had brought him some mangos and angel food cake. He looked away. “I hate to see you like this,” I told him. “What can I do to cheer you up?” He stared out the patio door at the begonias growing unattended and a lawn that was not as it should be or would have been if he had been well.

  It got to the point that the only way he would go to dialysis was if someone insisted upon it. He was up and ready when I arrived to take him one day. His dark pants hung like draperies from his disappearing frame, and he took slow, labored steps as if he were walking in mud. He walked toward the stairs leading up to the landing above the den where the current aide, Renee, and I were setting up the wheelchair. As he neared the stairs, the hem of his pants got caught under his shoe and he teetered forward, reaching for my arm but missing it as he stumbled in a half-second fall on the top step. We rushed toward him and grabbed him at the waist and arm to lift him to an upright sitting position on the edge of the stairs. He sat flustered and defeated, his eyes lowered and looking at the floor in disbelief at his lot.

  The dialysis center was at San Vicente and Third Street. He sat sinking into the passenger’s seat, pointing to direct me to the center, his finger wagging becoming more rapid and insistent when I took a turn he did not think right. He shook his head to show his disapproval and struggled to clear his throat to say no, make a right at this corner. His mind was sharp. He knew exactly where we were going and how best to get there.

  It was getting to be late June. “I’m getting weaker and weaker,” he told me. “As soon as I put the walker on the landing to the den, it slid beneath me. I hit the landing hard. I called the nurse. She didn’t hear me. I tried three times. I took a hammer and banged on the coffee table to get her to help me.”

  He turned his thoughts to more pleasant things, the visitors who had stopped by to see him that day. “I just know so many beautiful people,” Robert said.

  Just the other day, he had told some friends, “I would give anything for a piece of watermelon,” which he conveniently did not say he was not supposed to have.

  Sylvester Brooks, the president of the Monroe Club and a faithful admirer, came by and brought Robert the watermelon he so craved. He sat on a bar stool and told Robert what folks in the club were up to.

  Robert’s old friend from back home, Beckwith, who helped him set up his first office and even built furniture for it, stopped by to check on him. Robert was happy to see him. But it was a painful visit and did not last long.

  “As well as I know him,” Robert said, “we had so little to say. He was not completely comfortable. But that doesn’t matter. No, it doesn’t matter.”

  Then a man from back in Monroe, a man named Charles Spillers, dropped by. He had caught the bus from Slauson and Normandie in the center of South Central to see his old physician from the VA hospital.

  He had heard of Dr. Foster before he’d ever gone to see him at the VA. He remembered Ray Charles’s song about him. “Dr. Foster got medicine and money too,” the man sang to himself. “I said, that must be some doctor, that Dr. Foster.”

  Robert had been concerned about this new patient before him.

  “You losing too much weight,” Robert had told him. “You’re sick. You need help.”

  The man had been a deckhand on a dredge and done ground maintenance at the VA hospital. He had dug up old graves, the graves of people who had died of tuberculosis, and he had dug them without a mask. He had worked in fields that leaked uranium, where some of his co-workers had died within weeks of exposure.

  He was from the Old Country of Louisiana, believed in root doctors, and was suspicious after all he had seen in the South and West. He had pulled for Robert back at the VA, and he worried about what would happen to him after his trouble at the hospital.

  “I’m not sure his kidneys went out on their own,” Spillers confided to me. “You have to watch a rattlesnake if you get in the bed with him.”

  Charles Spillers felt he owed a debt to Robert as his physician even though he was too religious and superstitious to do some of what Robert told him. It was more that he felt inspired by him and appreciated Robert’s forewarnings, which Spillers promptly used as a cue to go see his root doctor.

  “If it wasn’t for him, I would have been gone,” Spillers said.

  He remembered the first time he went to see Robert in his office. “You’re just fading away right before me,” Robert had told him during the exam. “I’m going to admit you to the hospital.”

  Spillers trusted the doctor but not the hospital and did not go. “The Holy Spirit came and told me don’t go to the hospital,” he said.

  The man went to a root doctor instead, a woman from back south who was now in L.A. She plied him with root tea and Epsom salts in water. She made a fire in the house, even though it was August, and covered him with quilts until he sweated out the virus she believed to be in him. The fever broke, and he began to eat again and put weight back on.

  Robert didn’t take it personally or prejudge the man. He had grown up in the South and knew and accepted its ways. And that endeared Robert to the man all the more. He felt he had Robert to thank for alerting him to the problem and for saving his life.

  “He meant so much to so many people,” Spillers said. “I owe him so much.”

  He had ridden the bus to see his doctor, who was now sick himself. He sat with him for a while and then prepared to leave. As he headed toward the door to catch the bus back home—not knowing how long the wait would be; this was, after all, L.A.—he turned to his old doctor and friend from the VA hospital with a mixture of worry and gratitude, and the sweet folk spirit of the ancestral South.

  “Dr. Foster,” he said with heavy eyes, “I’m lighting seven candles for you.”

  By the summer of 1997, Robert Foster was finding his world constricted and fewer reasons to wake up in the morning. The things he loved to do, he could no longer do. He couldn’t make it to the racetrack. Vegas was out of the question. His mansion on Victoria had become a glorious prison. The things he loved to eat, he could no longer get. His beloved nurse was ailing herself and no longer there to sneak him a half strip of bacon or a spoonful of peach cobbler. Then there were the twice-weekly trips to dialysis, which made him dread the start of every new week.

  In late July, he went into the hospital for repair of a vein damaged by dialysis. He returned home weaker than before. Then, a few days later, on Sunday morning, August 3, he did not respond when called for breakfast. His left arm was motionless. He had suffered a massive stroke. He fell into a coma.

  Word spread rapidly through the dwindling corps of original migrants from Monroe who had come out to California all those decades before.

  Reatha Beck Smith, the widow of his old mentor Dr. Beck, who put Robert up when he first arrived in Los Angeles and who helped him get on his feet and open his office, rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard the news. She herself was in her nineties now and had her family and old friends from Louisiana with her. She saw him there lying motionless, the central and unforgettable figure of so many parallel worlds, who had saved so many lives but could not save his own.

  “We went to see him at the hospital,” she remembered. “He wouldn’t open his eyes. We called out our names, each one. And we could feel him squeezing our hand, each one.”

  He never came out of the coma. He took his last breath on Wednesday, August 6, 1997. He was seventy-eight years old.

  The memorial was the following Monday at the church where he had walked his three daughters down the aisle at their weddings but where he was rarely seen after Alice died.

  Along the front pews sat the fruits of his labors and the embodiments of whatever dreams he carried with him while driving through the desert decades before: his eldest daughter, Bunny, now an artist’s agent in Chicago, trim and regal in a black sculpted suit and with an upright bearing being con
soled by her son Woodie White; his middle daughter, Robin, now a city manager in San Jose, sitting with her husband, Alan Christianson, and son, Daniel Moss, the pride of the family, who, having turned down Harvard and Princeton, would start at Yale a few weeks from now. Robert had lived long enough to know that. Then came Robert’s youngest daughter, Joy, a radiologist, seated with her husband, Lee, a day trader, and their two small children, Lia and Adam.

  The pews were filled with people from back in Monroe, old classmates from Morehouse, the people he knew from the racetrack, the people he had worked with at the VA hospital, the people whose gallbladders and appendixes he had removed and whose babies he had delivered and the babies that he had brought into the world and who were now grown men and women with gray hair and children of their own.

  All of them showed up, their faces glazed and empty, to pay their respects. The daughters had had Robert cremated, which caused some grumbling among those who had wished to see him once more or who were grieving that they had not made it by to see him in time or who knew that it had simply not been the way southerners put away their dead.

  The service was a tightly scripted affair.

  “We gather in the faith and hope of Jesus Christ,” the minister, who had not known Robert, intoned. “We come to comfort and support each other in our common loss—Robert Joseph Parish Foster.”

  Nobody remarked on the mispronunciation of “Pershing” in his final hour. Few people in California likely knew the name anyway. He had dispensed with it on his way to California for that very reason.

  His nephew, Madison, read a scripture assigned to him from Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a time, a time to be born and a time to die …”

  Robert’s gambling buddy Romie Banks rose and addressed his friend and those assembled: “Robert, you have fought so many battles, been a champion for so many people. He was a perfectionist at everything he did except winning at the racetrack.”

  Robert’s son-in-law Lee went to the altar. “He let you know which way the wind was blowing,” the son-in-law said, “whether you liked it or not.”

  The Morehouse alumni stood when asked to make themselves known.

  Easter Butler, who had met Robert at the racetrack, declared simply, “Dr. Foster was one of the greatest men I ever knew.”

  Afterward, the people assembled back at the house on Victoria. Now, the street, unlike the last few weeks of his life when he was in his weakest, loneliest state, was crowded, overcome by cars—Mercedes, Cadillacs, sport utility vehicles, German and Japanese cars.

  The people gathered around the crushed-velvet armchairs and the orange shag rug and the Zenith television console in the den, the room where Robert had thrown so many parties and had lived out the last months of his life.

  A copy of Life magazine with Coretta Scott King in mourning sat in the bookcase, along with Roots by Alex Haley, surgery and gynecology textbooks, a book entitled Difficult Diagnosis, and, sitting alone, the brown desk plate that read, ROBERT P. FOSTER, MD.

  The mourners partook of the honeydew and cantaloupe, cheesecake, lemon cake, and ham spread out on the dining room table. The testimonials continued all afternoon.

  Della Bea Robinson, Ray Charles’s ex-wife, showed up to pay her respects because “Bob delivered my son,” she said. “My husband named our son after him.”

  The moment made Della Bea think about what a perfectionist Robert had been, which was a good thing to have in a surgeon. “We were going to a concert,” she remembered, “and Alice came down the steps and couldn’t find the right gloves. She put on a pair of gloves she found. Bob saw her when she came out. ‘Something is wrong. The gloves are off,’ he said. He noticed everything.”

  Leah Peterson, who had worked at the VA hospital with him, remembered turning to him for advice. “I used to go up and talk to him,” she said. “I told him what I wanted to do with my years. Bob started buying me books.”

  A realtor named Nick White said simply, “He delivered me.”

  Madison, his nephew, left the memorial repast early and brooded over a glass of ice water at a restaurant over in Santa Monica. He was feeling alone as the only Foster left from that era and isolated from what he saw as the bourgeois pretensions of the day’s proceedings, which, to him, did not reflect his uncle’s southern joie de vivre. “He didn’t get as good as he gave,” Madison said after the funeral, “and he gave the best.”

  Madison was the self-described country cousin and one of Robert’s biggest champions, a living reminder of the South that Robert had put behind him. Madison thought about all the things Robert had been through in the South and out west, the rejections despite the triumphs and never feeling good enough. These things made him an exacting, infuriating, insecure perfectionist who left a mark on everyone he met. The people around him knew to smooth their tie, check their hem, reach a little higher, do a little more because Robert Foster demanded it of them. He made everybody crazy and better for the sky-high expectations he had of them for even the smallest of things.

  “If you bought him a melon,” Madison said, “you couldn’t just buy a melon. You had to stop and think about that melon. That’s how he was with everything.”

  Madison thought back to how Robert had tried to get all of Monroe to come to Los Angeles. “Bob would say, ‘You want some Monroe? Plenty Monroe out here. You can have Monroe in California.’ ”

  Then Madison remembered the trips he had made to Los Angeles, his feeling tentative and unsure, being from small-town Louisiana as he was but exhilarated to be out in California with his uncle.

  “Come on, chief,” Bob would say. “Let’s go to Beverly Hills and have breakfast on the veranda. Put your chain out. Put that gold chain out. You ain’t on no college campus now. Put your chain out. That’s why I gave you that damn chain.”

  This was Robert’s Promised Land. He walked around as if he had been born to it. “You didn’t have a care in the world,” Madison remembered. “All your problems were gone. Nothing could happen to you. You were with Uncle Bob. He lightened a room. He created another world for you. The man had a certain magic to him.”

  The story of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster of Monroe, Louisiana, and Los Angeles, California, did not end with his death. Years later, people were still trying to decipher the meaning of his life. Some people were too distraught to speak of him with anyone outside their circle. Others could not stop referring to him in the present tense.

  For some of his patients, Robert was the only doctor they had ever been to. They remember him making hospital rounds at midnight, stepping in with free medical advice upon hearing that an acquaintance of somebody’s co-worker was in the least bit of trouble.

  Perhaps it could be said that gambling was his mistress, medicine his beloved. Another migrant named Malissa Briley did not fully grasp it until she had to go into surgery herself. She was in her midforties at the time, a social worker in L.A. who had gone to Spelman with Alice. She was anxious about going into the hospital.

  Robert did the surgery, and the surgery went well. But later that night, her blood pressure shot out of control. She was on the verge of having a stroke, which could have killed her or left her paralyzed. The hospital tried to get her blood pressure down but had no success. At midnight, the hospital called Robert to report the turn of events. He rushed over right away. He tried to lower her blood pressure, but he couldn’t get it down either.

  The next morning, Briley awoke to see Robert in a chair by her bed. She was stunned to see him there. It was early winter, the quiet time of the morning, so early that the hospital hadn’t brought the breakfast tray yet. He was in his street clothes and uncharacteristically wrinkled. He hadn’t shaved, had bags under his eyes.

  “What are you doing here this early?” she asked him.

  He told her she had gone through a crisis the night before and that neither he nor the hospital could get her blood pressure down.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “Well, I got to th
e point I couldn’t do nothing but pray,” he said.

  He had stayed by her hospital bed all night. He had sat upright in a chair in his street clothes. Any patient he lost, he took it personally and especially hard. He took it as a sign of his own failure. So he had fought back sleep watching over this patient and praying for her to live.

  By morning, her blood pressure had returned to a safe range. He made sure her vital signs were stable, gave instructions to the nurse to call him immediately should there be any change. Then he left to see about the rest of his patients.

  “He had stayed through the night,” she said forty years later, still almost in disbelief. “I woke up, and there he was. That I’ll never forget, as long as I live.”

  Robert Foster did not want to return to Louisiana, in life or in death. Nor did he choose to be interred with the Clements in Kentucky. He paid down on a place for himself at a cemetery in Los Angeles.

  His body was cremated and placed in an urn in a granite mausoleum with rows of bronze plaques lining the wall like identical file cabinets. His sits in a corner high on the wall with a vase of purple silk roses. IN LOVING MEMORY OF ROBERT P. FOSTER, M.D., 1918–1997, the plaque reads.

  The mausoleum is high on a hill at Inglewood Park Cemetery. The urns face a picture window with a view of the cemetery’s manicured gardens and, beyond that, Hollywood Park racetrack. It is the closest Robert could get to the track he so loved. Every so often one can see, settled along a curb of the cemetery road, a crumpled copy of the Daily Racing Form blown over from the track, and, if listening closely, hear the clomping roar of a horse race in progress over at Hollywood Park. Beloved California.

  CHICAGO, AUGUST 1997

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THE TRANSFORMATION of the South Shore section of Chicago from an all-white neighborhood to a near totally black one was complete by the time the Great Migration ended in the mid-1970s. But there was a less visible change that made life more difficult still for people like Ida Mae.