The more Grandfather threatened to descend on me with
meals, the greater my paralysis became, but when he picked up the telephone in a different mood, asking me to reserve a room for him at the Hotel Olga, long defunct, as it turned out, or offering to send a consignment of Spam, the more insultingly transparent were my excuses. But I had to be careful. A phone call from Grandfather was sometimes followed by an interrogation from my parents, upset that my rudeness had brought them a fierce dressing-down on the subject of what I had not been taught about how to speak to my elders.
Sometimes Grandfather was in town, but mostly he was not. The complications of his own life had almost simplified mine. His scandalous separation from the beige stepgrandmother—“I’m going to ride until I can’t hear them call her name”—limited his invasions, his surprise visits to the dean that he called keeping an eye on me and which I thought of as spiritual scavenging. As long as the stepgrandmother and her equally hateful sister were in their matching pigeon coops for senior citizens on upper, upper Third Avenue that Grandfather had had “no head chief’s say” in the purchase of, he kept away.
Perhaps his snobbery made him unable to consider anything less than the sacred groves of the Talented Tenth—massive apartment buildings on Sugar Hill, like the Dunbar Court. Having crusaded throughout his ministry against the wasteland of low-income housing, the projects were to be his destiny. He described the pigeon coop as being near Harlem, above Harlem, on the edge of Harlem, or “sleeping against Harlem’s backside,” anything not to admit that it was in what could be spoken of as Harlem. He had seen Harlem in its glory, but back then he had just been passing through.
Not to be outdone, Grandfather had established himself, as he liked to say, unmindful of his reduced, improvised circumstances, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, within pestering distance of family. “There the wicked will cease from troubling; and the weary
will be at rest.” He maintained parity of forces with the stepgrandmother: if she had her sister, he had his brother, Uncle Ulysses, though he had little contact with him, except when he needed something.
He was strangely, suddenly inhibited toward the rest of us, as if some embarrassment had caught up with him. In his time he had had an exalted social vision, which rested on what could be done for the next generation, a cabalistic idea of one soul born again and again on the tormented journey toward final purity. “I remember Cassius Clay as a boy,” he once said. “The Golden Gloves. Some joker pinched his brother’s bicycle and he wanted to win the money to buy him a new one.” Grandfather, my father and aunts and uncle said without rancor, believed in doing everything for the children—except his own.
I’d never conceived of my dealings with my grandfather as a relationship: the term implied choice. His having come with the territory precluded thinking about him that way. Family didn’t require the considerations that went with voluntary association. Then Grandfather one-upped me and gave me what I thought I wanted: he stopped calling, boycotted me altogether.
For a while I stewed that the possessive old darky who had nearly made a colony of my mind was trying to manipulate me into feeling that I had somehow let him down. Like those people who you think reciprocate your feelings, not understanding that what truly interests them about you is your interest in them, I had come to depend on his pursuit. No one had ever given me the power to reject. Once given, this power is almost impossible to take back. Grandfather had retrieved the advantage, and as much as I told myself that I was well rid of him, I was uncomfortable and not unmoved.
I heard that Grandfather sent cheerful, solicitous notes to my sisters. I admitted that I sort of needed him, like people who look outside but don’t trust their sense of the weather until they
see what other people are wearing. Then I heard that he blamed me for the interregnum of coolness and I was back in the driver’s seat of negatives.
He wanted to see me, I was told, but was too proud to beg. It wasn’t like him to take a position and not hold to it. I was sure he would begin to tie up the campus phone again and complained to myself about family obligations. I made plans, but was told that Grandfather didn’t want to see me after all. He’d got me, as when a machine that has been silent long enough for you to forget it suddenly starts up again and fills every cavity in your head.
I went to him anyway, telling myself that at his age I had to pay the price of just showing up at his door, of sitting for hours noting the feline sounds a fly could make on a wall, of patiently watching as Grandfather rocked gently, kept time with his slippers as an old, abused song crept into him and carried him, nearly asleep, head bowed, in a terry-cloth-covered chair, from his borrowed, musty living room in Cambridge, back to the wide, hot fields where men and women cut and pulled their way through the furrows.
The sound of a car horn called Grandfather from his reverie. Surprise wrinkled his face, angular and sharp, like a tribal mask. He remembered that he was in retirement in a brown wood frame house on Dana Street, not squinting at the sun that baked the red clay. The passage Grandfather had made through life from Dublin, Georgia, was something—of that he was certain. But he wanted to know more about what he had come to. Where from, that he knew.
Grandfather was no longer so tall, but he was still ascetically thin. The cap of granite-colored hair had liberated itself into crumpled stalks that shot out over his ears in an alfalfa-like way. He moved in quick, small steps, stopping to support himself
against the unsteady gateleg table, pausing to ask for strength to get to the stained stove or the almost empty bookcase. There was something valiant in the way he stumbled about, kept moving and fending for himself, pushing through his daily routine, as if his body were not betraying his will hour by hour.
Students lived above Grandfather, and also next door, in the left half of the splintered wood house. I was jealous of his interest in them, of his love for Harvard students in particular. In his mind Grandfather followed them down Boylston Street and into Widener Library. It was impossible to know how many lived there at any given time. Grandfather was disappointed that they remained strangers, that the faces of the occupants changed so frequently, that he had not formed a kind of pedagogical rapport with them.
He longed to advise the students who shared his back yard how to tend their tomatoes and peppers. Once, catching them at work, he stunned them with lyrical remembrances of the plush, full vegetables that grew down home. They stopped their doglike digging and looked up at him, an old black man leaning with his cane against the puckered screen door as he traced images of cabbages on the clouds.
Grandfather retreated, a little confused and embarrassed. He latched the door and mumbled something about what Paul had written to the Philippians about good works. The students watched him shrink into the dark house, pulled at the red bandannas over their heads, rubbed their hands on faded dungarees, and exchanged smiles. But one of them, the one who had just returned from a hitchhiking tour of the country, defended my grandfather, asserting that every “Pops” he had met was very heavy, close to the earth, wise in the way of herbs. Grandfather had yet to identify the marijuana plants they were trying to grow near the fence.
His fondness for the ebb and flow around him came from the
perplexing contradiction of his somewhat worldly Old Country tolerance. He liked students, partly because he believed that, unlike children or the middle-aged, they were not impatient with old-timers. He carried their remarks away, and examined them, like a shoplifter who doesn’t dare to pull out the booty until well away from the detectives and alarms. Though he was a good man, incorruptible, in his way, he loved sinners and had never experienced a dearth of supply.
Grandfather really enjoyed his part-time helper, Red, a reliable old sinner who lost vast sums, as he told it, playing the numbers and sending healing dollars in to radio preachers. Red lied about his age, claiming any year between fifty and sixty. Red had told so many whoppers he believed most of them.
Among Red’s other businesses was a car service. I doubted he had a license, but he taped a livery sign on the windshield when he took Grandfather for a thrilling ride. Usually, a thin green bottle of wine slid around under the seat. Red talked about how quickly a fistful of Jacksons could unstable you, while Grandfather tipped through the revolving doors to pay his bills on time.
Grandfather didn’t trust Red unsupervised around the house. He complained that Red’s irresponsibility upset his own schedule. Red was sometimes detained elsewhere by the consequences of “flea-collar” crime. He banged around trash cans to announce his arrival and went to the back door, massaging his shoulder, explaining how he’d had to start another job at six that morning and hadn’t finished sanding the floors until noon.
Red had a long list of projects to see to around Grandfather’s retreat, including putting up storm windows, but there wasn’t much to do really, and mostly they argued back and forth about “the race thing,” the screen door between them like a net. “Let me culminate what you’re saying, Reverend.”
Content with his solitary chores, Grandfather watered the lemon plant that was placed like an altarpiece on the bright blue
TV tray. The one pale yellow lemon was the size of a grapefruit and the whole thing threatened to topple over under its weight. I was made to pay homage to it. Grandfather was a little superstitious about his lemon plant: if it remained healthy, so would he, more or less. I saw him wink at it from the kitchen. It did not, like the beige stepgrandmother, talk back. He wet his cracked lips and whistled melodiously “O How Glorious, Full of Wonder” as the kettle hissed, calling the world to reveille.
His presentation of himself—setting himself apart from Dorchester, from Roxbury, from the unhappiness of the Rutherford Street projects—still mattered to him. Always the limp dress shirt, somewhat baked around the collar, the cuffed trousers smooth with age, whether he was bouncing to the market, list and pencil in his breast pocket, or clawing his way across the Charles River to try the patience of a teller at his savings bank. He lived in terror of anyone mistaking him for a welfare client and got around the shame of a Medicare card by treating it as a charge plate.
“Come to the speaking blood,” a lanky boy brayed in the street, his long hair pulled in a ponytail held together with a strand of beads. “Today is the day of your salvation. One drop will melt the mountain of your sins. Would you like to make a contribution to Jesus?”
“I certainly will. If He shows.”
“You’re going to be holy one day for sure.”
“Lord, if you love anybody, love me.”
His cane a divining rod, Grandfather extended himself down Massachusetts Avenue past the “Soul-Saving Station” toward the Red Line. He was dressed in his brushed brown Borsalino and olive-green overcoat slick from so many seasons of cold rain. He enjoyed the atmosphere of Harvard Square, the youthful
chatter in front of the Brattle, the aroma of cider drifting from the doors of the Pewter Pot so early in the autumn term.
His errands: the bank, the grocer, the cleaner, the newsstand, Keezer’s Men’s Store, a peek at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, and then happily to Goodspeed’s to inhale the sweetness of pipe tobacco and to spend his ration of conversation, if anyone was willing to accept it. “Good books are a man’s best friend,” Grandfather had written inside Giovanni Papini’s
Life of Christ
in 1925, a present to his first wife, my grandmother. “They are companions silent, consoling, understanding. For silence read them and they will give you rest. Will fill you with heavenly peace.” It was one of the few volumes of his library that he had not sold in a much-regretted punitive fit.
Grandfather’s excursions ended in daydreams in Boston Common, where spots of earth showed through the hard grass like skin. He began each visit with a silent prayer before Martin Milmore’s monument to the men of Boston who died in the Civil War for slavery and the Constitution, “that their example may speak to coming generations.” Crispus Attucks continued his solitary vigil. Grandfather had seen so many statues in his time that history itself seemed to have taken on the greenish color of weathered bronze.
He did his part on these walks, devoting a few minutes to picking up, with more than a little effort, the litter of cigarette butts, cans, plastic. Around the elms and rodents he went, tapping through the mash of leaves. He sat alone, far from the couples and the old men waiting with folded newspapers in their laps, another broken Brahmin brooding in the oil of the pensioned life.
Under the brag scat and hum of the venerable city the tennis court was silent, the baseball diamond abandoned. He surveyed the new buildings that got lost in the Milk of Magnesia fog. A
hunchbacked woman complained to herself in Polish. Rooted in mismatched shoes, she searched the garbage with the skill of habit. The smell of urine blew our way. Grandfather pulled himself up, a little saddened. Predictably, someone had sprayed WAR IS HELL over KOSCIUSZKO.
You cannot grow up with a city; it grows away from you, a speeding landscape that veers off to present itself to someone new. Grandfather had no feeling for his first home on Mill Street somewhere deep in Boston. He had no urge to see it, as if it belonged to a history as remote as the days of “Nigger Hill” when Irish gangs lay in wait to attack free blacks out walking with their wives. He found being himself a protection of sorts, but he was not a man to rummage as if the optimism of the 1920s were like a memento at the bottom of a forgotten suitcase behind the door.