The Bold World Page 10

  And luckily, Georgia proved never to be a dainty girl—she was born heavy and dominant, and I was determined to push those traits to the forefront. As she got older, she was athletic—always swinging on the scaffolding around New York City, doing flips and cartwheels from corner to corner. I never put her in Mary Janes or ballet flats—I wanted her to stomp around and feel the weight of her feet. I tried my best to move things out of her way so she could take up as much space as she desired and take it with her wherever she went.

  I brought her with me everywhere: to big brunches with my best girlfriends, her “aunties,” to intimate dinners at her father’s restaurants. In any setting, she could tap into the subtext of our conversations. Nothing slipped past her. During gatherings with my female friends, I’d watch Georgia watching us. Even without knowing what we were saying, she was vibing off how we were saying it. At not even half my size, this little girl held all the possibility in the world. I saw in her a mighty force that would not, should not be stopped.

  On her first day of preschool, I dressed her in her favorite pink tutu and scuffed high-top sneakers, and we strolled down Broadway heading toward school, just a few blocks away.

  “Do you think we should go back home and get under the covers, Mama?”

  I looked over at Georgia as we walked, seeing a flash of apprehension across her golden face.

  “Ladybug, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll march with our head up to the sky, like this.” I demonstrated, stretching my neck. “And with our chest poked out, like this!” I thrust my torso forward, like Mighty Mouse.

  “Why, Mama?”

  “Because this is the walk of self-determination,” I said, smiling reassuringly.

  “What’s self-demer-min-ation?”

  “Determination is when you know what needs to be done, and you do it.”

  Georgia looked up at me—a new look of resolve on her face, as though she understood, deeply, what I was trying to tell her. Without missing a beat, she picked up the pace, strutting up Broadway from Spring Street all the way to Bleecker, singing, “This is the walk of self-de-ter-mi-na-tion!” Chin to the sky, arms swinging wildly, and heart leading the way.

  I called Georgia my Wise Soul—my free-spirited soul, my fierce soul. Watching her gave me faith in my own strength—not the borrowed kind, but the good stuff, the kind that comes from within.

  She was something special—a totally uninhibited me. Me, unrestrained, unrestricted. A better version of me. She.

  FIVE

  Santa Claus Is a Black Man

  A YEAR OR SO AFTER GEORGIA’S BIRTH, I found myself at my father’s bedside in a small town in Germany, attempting to massage the life back into his dying body. Prostate cancer had taken over his bones and his blood, invaded his organs, and snatched his breath and speech when the pain was at its worst. That part—the speech—came easy only after the morphine settled in to do its work.

  Our days were spent developing a new and visceral language, navigated by touch and sight and things better left unsaid. Each day, I tried to decipher where it hurt and adjusted his body into more comfortable positions, working to avoid erupting his bedsores. We moved silently together, me rubbing his hands and feet, rolling him onto one side or the other, while he guided me with soft grunts, or a sharp intake of breath—maybe a few coded words. I understood eventually that “three o’clock” meant the pain was on the left side, midpart of his body. That when his breathing sounded like air being slowly let out of a balloon, he was being suffocated by the fluid that constantly filled his lungs. I communicated his discomforts to the doctors and watched Daddy look in my direction, wearily winking his approval.

  Over the past few years I’d received handwritten notes, about every six months or so, from the “spa” where my father was getting a “tune-up”: “Miss you, Sunshine!” he’d write. “See you when I’m back in the States.” I assumed he was living out his retirement years extravagantly, traveling to remote places for a little R&R. But this “spa” was actually a progressive cancer treatment center in Bad Aibling, Germany. He’d been quietly receiving care there on and off for years. Apparently, Daddy intended to fight the sickness his way, in the most radical form he could find. He’d told no one—not me or Ramona, or our two older sisters from his first marriage. No one except his girlfriend, Dorrett, who traveled with him everywhere. I was sure he had kept the cancer to himself for all this time so he could manage it as he pleased: without pity or tears. With only his grit and determination to get him through.

  When I first arrived at the center, Daddy made clear that his cancer was yet another thing he would wrestle into submission; Dorrett and I were there to help execute his plan. “You didn’t come here to sightsee!” he growled at me from beneath bright white blankets when I made the mistake of taking a couple hours away from the clinic to grab dinner the night I flew in. “Come on now—we need to get organized!” He demanded that we make up visitation and medication schedules, create spreadsheets to monitor the room’s temperature, and catalog his sleep patterns, his pains, and his improvements.

  Death had already begun to assert itself, staking its claim on what was left of my father. He couldn’t walk, he could barely breathe, and his organs were failing—one by one by one. And so it became my mission to revive him. Daddy appointed me to uphold order and manage his recovery, for there would of course be one. Every moment of the day we would find ways to grab at his life—begging it to come back to us.

  * * *

  —

  Daddy’s room was on the second floor of the clinic, looking out onto the gardens. His bed took up most of the narrow space, and it faced the room’s only window. When we were not adjusting his position, trying to give him some relief, I sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair by the bed while he stared outside at a single tree, moving only his eyes. From our height, it looked as if we were floating inside a canopy of clover-shaped leaves. When the wind blew, they danced and danced, making shimmery sounds. The leaves were varying shades of lime and emerald green—brilliant, vibrant, explosive colors that looked unreal. Lack of sleep, I think, will do that to you. Without sleep, the lighting changes; the dark gets darker and the light becomes blinding. Your adrenaline fog—the only thing keeping you standing—distorts reality and tweaks all your senses. A soft shuffle sounds like a stampede, a whisper grates like nails on a chalkboard.

  Georgia had come with me to Germany. At a little over one year old, she was the one well of happiness that we frequently drew from; her joy swept over us all. Often too tired to rove the room with his eyes, Daddy searched for her with his ears whenever she fussed around the room. “Where is she?” he’d say weakly from his bed. Hearing his voice, Georgia would move toward him proudly, confidently, as kids that age often do—climbing on chairs and then on me to get a better look at her grandfather. She’d grin when she’d catch his eyes finally watching her, and he’d smile in return, despite the pain. “Jodie, take a picture,” he’d direct me, raising his chin a bit as Georgia moved closer to him. Together, they posed for what would be the very last set of pictures I would take of Daddy with his golden girl.

  Georgia affected my dad as though she owned his happiness. I watched him being lifted out of his misery every time he watched her, every time she toddled into the room, babbling, smiling, and laughing at the birds outside. This little girl just being happy, young, and agile brought my father life—maybe only minutes more life, but it was more. So I brought Georgia to him throughout our days, and even some nights, bundling her in blankets on a narrow cot next to his bed so that when he woke up, he could see Georgia sleeping nearby.

  Georgia was the sun for me, Daddy, and everyone she met.

  But the pain always, eventually, took over, and it was then that Daddy started to moan, and the doctors began filing in. Whenever I heard those sounds, I took Georgia out of the room as quickly as possible—away from Dadd
y, away from the clinic and all the sickness, to a small patch of garden outside where the children of other dying patients liked to play in the grass.

  Each minute, each hour of any given day was filled with the kinds of unhappy surprises that racked my insides like a seizure. Daddy teetered closer and closer to the edge, and his team of lifesavers—the doctors, me, and Dorrett—tried different methods to reel him back in.

  Our second week in Bad Aibling, I called my sisters. “The doctors don’t know when,” I told them, “but they do know that eventually he’ll drown in his own fluids.” When I relayed this, I imagined a bobbing waterline slowly creeping up his neck, his chin, his nose and eyes, ultimately taking him under.

  * * *

  —

  I was the most awake at two or three in the morning. After I put Georgia to bed and Daddy settled into quiet, semilucid moans, I sat on the floor outside his room with my knees against my chest, watching the empty hallway. The clinic was not a machine-driven place; the typical beeps and buzzes of heart monitors and intercom systems were replaced with hush, with muffled conversations, or the creak of a bed as someone shifted around in their slumber—sounds often heard through closed doors but rarely experienced in full view. There, each room was a private universe, everyone fighting in their own way against death.

  It was during those early-morning hours that the nurses removed the bodies of the people who passed that day. I saw it once—two nurses walked past me down the hallway to a door I hadn’t seen anyone come in or out of in quite a while. They walked inside the room, then moments later wheeled out a body on a gurney, covered with a sheet. I watched them roll the gurney down to the end of the hall, then disappear around the corner; the whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than four or five minutes. They were there, then they were gone. The next day at lunchtime in the cafeteria, people passed around the news that so-and-so had died.

  I imagined that it was done this way so as not to disturb people—the trick with these kinds of places was to forget the death part, or at least be reminded of it as little as possible. People were sick, yes, but there, we all desperately needed to believe the sick do get better—that the remedies do work. And the sick needed to feel hopeful, that maybe it wasn’t as bad as it appeared.

  Every day I watched pieces of Daddy drift into some other dimension, come back, and then drift out again, a little further than before. His hazel eyes started to change color, turning a light, frosty blue; his pupils became less and less focused. And the whites of his eyes started to film. The commands he’d been delivering to doctors, nurses—anyone around him who would listen—started losing their oomph. Usually the words shook with authority—“Keep it together!” “Make a plan!” They were up and forward in their feeling. But as he drifted further inside his morphine haze, deeper inside the pain, his words began to sag, saturated with fatigue.

  From my post in the wooden chair next to his bed, I listened as a steady stream of aphorisms I’d heard all my life tumbled out of his mouth in an endless loop: “You got this, J.P.”; “Eye on the ball”; “Toughen up”; “Lean in”; “Don’t let people confuse you.” Day and night he repeated them. But in that new context, the phrases sounded strange.

  I’d grown up hearing those mantras all the time on the tennis court—Daddy was my first and most persistent coach. He loved to throw me into uncomfortable moments and force me to deal. Once when I was about ten, he surprised me as we walked onto the tennis courts at our country club in Queens with the news that he and I would be competing in a doubles match against two of his fiftysomething friends. “I thought you said we were just having fun today, Daddy!” I said, looking around anxiously at the two adults walking toward us on the court. “Why didn’t you tell me it was a match—with your friends?”

  “One game, baby girl. Just one game of doubles.” He nudged me into position next to him. “Then you and I’ll hit balls back and forth, promise. We got this, Jodatha!”

  We were already on the court. The adults were all staring at me. There was nothing to do other than to get my head in the game. Backing out was not an option—and losing wasn’t an option, either. I looked at Daddy, nodded in acceptance, and started twirling my racket in my right hand. He smiled—that was all he needed to know that I was ready.

  “That’s right, Jodie. Okay, eye on the ball—stay low, knees bent, and follow through. Your backhand is your winning shot. I’ll get them with my cross-court—then you attack with that volley. Lean in!”

  With my father, tennis wasn’t just a sport, it was the blueprint for life. Life, like tennis, was made up of serves and volleys, unexpected moves, and opponents to conquer. Stay flexible, focused and open, and you can master anything. Don’t, and you will buckle under the pressure of the game.

  As Daddy spoke to me that day on the court, I could see the match playing out. Every shot he described, I could feel myself executing—my muscles pushing through each stroke, anticipating every move. We hadn’t even served the first ball, but the whole match was unfolding in my mind in real time.

  It wasn’t an easy game—my serve was the weakest of the bunch, and my confidence was not quite turned up all the way—but we won. Daddy talked me through every move, pushing me to run ahead and volley, or shuffle faster across the court to slam the ball as best I could down our opponents’ throats. Every time I’d make a mistake and they’d score, Daddy would laugh so loud that they’d get distracted and think this was all for fun, laughing right along with him. And then we’d sneak up on them and score the next point, and then the next. By the end, I was exhausted from the pressure of keeping up, but we came out on top, and Daddy was proud of us.

  Growing up, I was always receiving little jolts of John Patterson wisdom, often disguised in sports analogies, that I didn’t fully understand until years later. Shortly after Daddy moved to Boca Raton, Florida, following the divorce from Mama, I went to visit him for the weekend. He took me to lunch at the posh country club he belonged to, a place as white as the tablecloths in the club’s dining room. The only other people of color there were the waiters quietly passing by with their eyes trained on the floor. In the midst of all this, I remember feeling very Black, and uncomfortably small. I leaned over to him and started cracking jokes about this one’s lopsided toupee, and that one’s caked-on makeup, hoping for a bit of outsider camaraderie. Being a cocky guy from Harlem, I assumed Daddy would want to take a couple of jabs, too.

  Instead, without looking at me or altering his expression, he continued to face the crowd. “You’re so busy, Jodie, looking at what those people have on that you’re missing the point. Look around,” he said, scanning. “These are some of the wealthiest men you’ll ever meet. Their companies run the world, and I’m going to learn everything they know. Don’t let small differences confuse you. Focus on the big picture.”

  He then stood up from our table and walked directly into the crowd, weaving between people, working the entire room. He shook men’s hands, kissed their wives on the cheek, and disarmed everyone with his laughter. I watched people’s faces as they listened to him, rapt by whatever story he was telling. And I watched his face, too—he was engaged, attentive; just enough of that brilliant smile, that body language. He was absolutely confident.

  Looking back, I don’t think my father particularly enjoyed that country club—it was an obnoxious bastion of white privilege. But it wasn’t about that, it was about boldly telling this world how he wanted to be seen from the very moment he stepped into a room. It was about dialing in on the thing you wanted and not getting distracted by the noise.

  In his prime, Daddy was electric. He was six feet tall, but his lanky arms and legs easily made him look two inches taller. Just as much as I watched my mom in her gorgeous womanhood, absorbing everything she so easily shared with me, I watched my father, too. A big song in our household when I was a kid was “Santa Claus Is a Black Man.” We played it all the time, vir
tually every day, regardless of the season. More a Black pride song than a Christmas carol, in it the Black man is the Dream. He’s handsome, he’s the provider, he’s strong, capable, and loving—he’s what we all want. He was Daddy. The writer of the song was a close friend of my parents’ and he had written it for families just like ours, who needed to believe in their men. The song became our family’s anthem, and Ramona and I loved singing along.

  Daddy could light up any room.

  But we saw our dad through a kind of double consciousness: as he wanted to be seen, and also in a way he couldn’t see himself. We knew he was amazing. But he put barriers around his greatness. Where my mom’s beauty was for all of us to enjoy, and even to become, my father’s power was only for him. We could be strong, but we were never meant to be stronger than he was. I envied his toughness but feared his power, and I stood back in wonder every time he asserted himself.

  But at seventy-two years old, the indomitable man of my childhood, my adolescence, and my adulthood was now bedridden in Germany, too weak to hold up his own head. Stripped of his vitality, of his health, of his control, the only pieces left in his arsenal were the steady stream of mantras he summoned to battle through another day.

  * * *

  —

  It got harder and harder to look at him toward the end. Looking meant truly coming to terms with what was obvious: that our efforts were failing. His body continued to swell and break and corrode. He woke from a nap once and found me sobbing in my wooden chair, hands clasped over my mouth. “What? Is there something I’m missing?” he asked, impatient with my display of emotion. I told him, point-blank, “It’s bad.” Did he not see that? He chuckled and looked past me and out the window, as if he knew something I didn’t. It’s not over until I say it is, his expression told me. In his truth, the cancer didn’t exist. He was certain that he could change the facts with his words, and with his thoughts.