The Warmth of Other Suns (70 page)

After all this time, he still couldn’t shake these things. Rufus Clement had been dead for years. The run-in with the motel clerks in Phoenix—that was seventeen years ago. The colonel farther back than that. All the good and extraordinary things that had happened to him seemed never to make up for the rejection he had endured, and he set out to prove that he was better than what they took him for, even though the people who haunted him would never see it, no matter what he did.

Because of the fifty-one previous years of his life, he had a number of complexes. He had a Napoleon complex, a southern complex, a baby-of-the-family complex. He had both a superiority complex and an inferiority complex, and, because he was born on Christmas Day, a Christmas baby complex.

He had never had much of a birthday party, a fate known to just about anyone who enters the world on Christmas. His mother had tried to give him a birthday party once when he was a young boy in Monroe. She invited all the children in New Town. Only four came.

That would not happen this time. He finally had all the pieces in place to celebrate his having arrived. In a few hours, he would give a gala in honor of himself. It would make up for all the parties he’d never had, all the slights he had ever suffered. It would prove to everyone that he had put Monroe and the South behind him and made it in L.A. He had worked it all out in his head.

He would have guests from back east and up the coast and from all over the country. Monroe, too, of course. The best hams and the finest heavy bond paper for the invitations. Anything that anyone had ever thought of for a party, he would have. It would cost in the thousands, like the major motion picture wrap parties over in Beverly Hills, and he wanted the guests to see every dime of it. He had rehearsed the whole thing in his mind.

That morning he woke up early, just like when he was a teenager back in Monroe racing to lose himself in the celluloid illusion of California sophisticates from the colored balcony of the Paramount. Now he was in California, finally a sophisticate himself, and the urine-scented steps of the Paramount were from another lifetime.

But as he rewound a tape that had yet to be recorded, a thunderstorm gathered in his stomach. He could hear the sounds of a party forming on the first floor. Footsteps on linoleum, the help skittering between the refrigerator and the sink and around the avocado green Formica island back to the refrigerator again. The low screech of high chairs being positioned at the bar, the setting down of serving pieces and highball glasses, the opening and closing of the heavy front door with the arrival of roses and ice. He had done all he could, and now it was up to the workers, who, sweet though they might be, could not possibly understand how crucial it was that there be only cashews and almonds and, for God’s sake, no peanuts in the nut bowls.

The sound of urgent disorder rose up the staircase and into his room. Rather than being pleased that all was going more or less according to plan, he was sickened at the prospect that, for all his preparation, things might be less than perfect.

He could hear the assembling of a party. The storm grew worse in his stomach.

For most of 1970, Robert had devoted himself to the second job of planning his own arrival party. He had told his wife, Alice, and daughter Joy and his mother-in-law, Pearl, as soon as the thought had occurred to him. He told Bunny and Robin in Chicago to be in Los Angeles that Christmas and sent them checks for their gowns with instructions to start shopping immediately. He told his nephew, Madison, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, that he expected him in from Ann Arbor. He told Madison’s mother, Harriet, that he wanted her in from Monroe.

He alerted the members of his wedding party, the former groomsmen in black tails and white kid gloves and the bridesmaids with tiaras planted over their Bette Davis curls, so they could mark Friday, December 25, 1970, on their calendars. Leo, the maître d’ at L’Escoffier, a French restaurant at the Beverly Hilton, would oversee the whole affair. The date fell within weeks of Alice’s fiftieth birthday, as well as Bunny’s and Gold’s birthdays. But the party would be essentially for him.

Robert began devising the guest list as if it were a state dinner. He began thinking menu and decor. A tent over the patio. Belgian lace for the tablecloths. Open bar with unpronounceable top-shelf spirits. He slept with the thought of it. He carried it in his head to work. During breaks in the day, he would think aloud to a nurse about this or that entrée or particular band, not necessarily because he wanted a second opinion—he would not have turned to them for that—but because he assumed everyone was as captivated as he was.

In fact, some were. At the office one day, a patient overheard him buzzing about the party. The patient joined in and offered to help. He said he did a little printing work and could make Doc Foster some nice invitations for the party. Robert was horrified at the notion and thought it should be obvious that no ordinary printer would do for a party of this caliber.

“Thank you very much,” Robert said, “but they’re already taken care of.”

In truth, he had not begun looking. But he was grateful for the reminder and would track down an engraver immediately. “It had to be the best person in the city,” he would say years later. “And I knew the best couldn’t be a patient of mine.”

He dispatched his mother-in-law to get on it right away. Her southern socialite airs would come in handy about now. It would give her something to occupy her mind and less time to scrutinize him. She spent an entire month choosing between white and ecru and the proper weight for the card stock. They found the invitations at the old Bullock’s Wilshire in Beverly Hills, off Rodeo Drive. They had them engraved on Crane’s paper, white with red lettering and a red border along the edge. “Etiquettely,” he said, “it was perfect.”

The invitations read:

Doctor and Mrs. Robert P. Foster
At Home
Friday, the twenty-fifth of December
At nine o’clock in the evening
1680 Victoria Avenue
Regrets Only      Cocktails—Dancing

Two hundred invitations went out, and as Robert was at the peak of his practice and popularity, 194 accepted. “We counted all but six R.S.V.P.’s,” he said, “and the six that declined were all out of town.”

That raised the stakes for everything else, beginning with the costumes for the principals. He was the star and would have to look it. He went to the Beverly Hills couturiers, the tailors to Sammy Davis, Jr., who, from across a blackjack table some people said he favored, and found a suit to his liking. Crushed velvet had just hit the scene, very Fifth Dimension, Age of Aquarius, and all that. So that’s what he would wear. Black crushed velvet suit. Black crushed velvet bow tie. Black velvet Bally slippers with a gold medallion above the instep. The suit had a red lining to match the red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, and the shirt cuff fell precisely one inch below the jacket sleeve, just as it should.

Finding something for Alice would take more time. He was the show-off, just waiting for somebody to say,
Bob Foster, you too much
. They went all over Beverly Hills, to the back rooms of the designer floors of the finest department stores, Robert watching, advising, critiquing, and, for one reason or another, dismissing and rejecting as Alice tried on hanger after hanger of dresses.

One night after work, rather than heading straight home or to the track, Robert drove north and west from his medical office toward Beverly Hills. He went directly to the French Room at Bullock’s Wilshire, which he had been known to keep open in search of the right attire. They had been there already, but he wanted to check again.

This time, he saw an organza gown loaded with beadwork. It was gaudy like New Orleans, and the skirt looked as if somebody had thrown rubies on the sidewalk. Robert told the salesclerk to wrap it up immediately. He carried it home and ran up the steps to show Alice. It was late, and he woke her up.

“Try it on, baby,” he said.

She got up, and he positioned himself three feet to the right and rear in a corner of the yellow-trimmed bedroom to watch her move in it.

Walk
.

Turn
.

Come to me
.

“It became alive when she walked,” he said.

In Ann Arbor, his nephew, Madison, awaited word on the big party between sociology colloquia and trying to take over the administration building at the University of Michigan. He was a three-piece-suited militant who knew how to use a fish fork. Robert had given him a year’s notice about the party. All year long, if the phone rang and it was Robert, he knew what it was about.
I’m having Mrs. Williams roast the nuts for the party. Hampton Hawes has agreed to do the jazz set. I’m flying the Smithfield hams in from Virginia
.

From the moment they accepted, he and the 194 other people on the guest list (and the guests they were bringing with them) were on a low-grade state of alert whether they liked it or not. Anyone deemed close enough to be invited also knew that Robert would expect them to look and act the part he assigned them. He wanted them to have a good time, of course, but he would also be sure to make note of the cut of their jackets and where a dress hem fell in relation to the ankle or knee. He would be judging them all. It was just how he was, and he couldn’t help it.

Madison felt the heat as much as anyone. He was the only child of Robert’s deceased oldest brother. Theirs was the closest that either had to a father-son relationship. They were the only Foster men left after all the deaths in the family. Big Madison, when he was alive, had made a point of not leaving the South, not running away and chasing a dream as Robert and millions of others had done, but staying and making the most of the angst and subtle shifts in sentiment of southern whites watching their meal ticket disappear on north- and westbound trains. Little Madison had thus been raised in the South, with the pride and insecurities that came with it, and, despite his father’s decision to stay, looked up to his Uncle Robert, who had made good out west.

A visit from Robert was a cause of great anxiety. Robert once visited Michigan in the midsixties. Madison did his best to impress him. He took him to the fanciest place he could afford. It took some time for the guests to figure out what they wanted from the menu. But they ordered and had a fine time. On the ride back, Robert gave his assessment of the evening.

“That was B+,” he said.

Madison sank into his seat and waited to hear what he had missed.

“You shouldn’t have let your guests struggle with the menu,” Robert told him.

Madison never really got over it. Almost forty years later, and he was still second-guessing the evening. “I didn’t preorder the food,” he would say long afterward. “It was a painful lesson. I learned it.”

He was southern and did everything he could to prove himself. He tried to pull Robert’s daughters back to their Louisiana roots, but they looked upon him as their country cousin from back in Monroe, a place they cared little about, growing up as they did in California.

Madison was a graduate student when Robert’s oldest daughter, Bunny, got her master’s at the University of Iowa. He didn’t have the money for a new suit. He flew in anyway. At the commencement, Robert pulled him aside.

“Your suit pants are shiny,” Robert said. “You shouldn’t go out like that.”

Madison would not let that happen again.

He had a year’s notice on the party and made use of it. He went to a tailor and had two suits cut for the occasion, hoping that one of them might meet Robert’s exacting standards.