The Warmth of Other Suns (80 page)

There is a long list of things he is not supposed to have anymore—fatback and ham hocks, watermelon and barbecue sauce, biscuits, corn bread, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes—just torture to a southerner. But Barbara and his friends manage to slip him some corn bread with the collards anyway because it makes him so happy, and what is the point of living if you can’t have a bit of joy in your life?

Every morning she gets up at eight, opens the drapes, and turns on the sprinklers. She invariably finds him at the side of his bed on the telephone. He comes into the kitchen. She gives him grits, which are on the approved list, but with a little salt, which is not. No matter what the list says, he refuses to give up his bacon.

He loves fried catfish, which is not approved, and he could eat that every day. “I know it’s not on the list,” he says. “But I don’t care. Let’s cook it.”

She puts a chopping board onto the Formica-top island by the Thermador oven near the avocado green Frigidaire. She positions a chair so that he can watch her dust the fish in cornmeal and fry it.

When it is time to get dressed, she pulls some things from the closet for him to wear even if he is not expecting to see anyone that day.

“Yeah, that’s fine, but run the iron over those pants,” he’ll say.

He has nothing but time on his hands, and he frets over the garden with its camellias and hollyhocks that he can no longer manage to his liking. He gets Barbara out there planting the annuals and worries over the placement and composition. They’ll be watching the news and he’ll be thinking about where he is going to put the begonias. They’ll be having their grits and bacon at breakfast, and all of a sudden Robert will blurt out an idea.

“How do you think the geraniums would look over there in that corner?” he asks her. “I’m going to need some impatiens.” And the two of them tramp out to the backyard to position them just so.

Robert has just gotten out of the hospital again, and the phone is ringing like mad. One time, Barbara picked up the phone and heard a gravel voice that sounded familiar.

“This is Ray Charles,” the man said. “Let’s speak to the old man. I’m calling to see if he wants some steaks.”

Barbara was holding the receiver to her ear and the cradle to her hip. She whispered to Robert, “Ray Charles is on the phone!”

Robert took the receiver, and Ray got straight to the point.

“You gon’ be at home?” Ray asked him. “You want these steaks? I’ll be over there with them.”

Barbara was in a panic. Ray Charles was on his way. She had just cleaned the living room, but she hadn’t gotten to the kitchen or vacuumed the orange carpet in the den where Robert spent most of his day, when it occurred to her, what was the point of rushing?

He can’t see anyway
, she said to herself.
He won’t know what room he’s in
.

She calmed herself down. When the doorbell rang and Ray Charles arrived, she sent him through the kitchen. “You just say step up or step down,” she later recounted. “Why should I let him trample through the living room I just finished vacuuming? He wasn’t dressed up, and he don’t know the difference.”

Ray Charles came bearing ten or twelve steaks that Robert was not supposed to have but that no one in the world could stop Ray Charles from giving him—all New York cut and porterhouse, no T-bone, just as Robert liked it.

Ray chided Robert for not letting him know what hospital he had been in.

“Now, I had to call all over town, every hospital, looking for you,” Ray said. “Where in the hell did you go? Why did you go way out there? I’m a shoot you if you go off again and don’t let me know where you are.”

The cancer diagnosis came in a form letter. He turned to Barbara and said, “Look at this.” He would never have allowed a patient of his to discover such news this way.

“All he would do is look at it,” Barbara remembered.

Now that he needed her more than ever, she would not be with him much longer. She already had high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. Now a blood clot had formed in her chest. It broke apart and traveled to her leg. “My leg felt like jelly,” she said. “It felt like it wasn’t there.”

Barbara would no longer be able to work for Robert. By the late spring, a succession of nursing aides would come and go, but nothing would be the same after Barbara left.

Without her to keep him company and indulge his whims as his body grew weaker, he was finding fewer reasons to keep going.

Earlier in the year, he had received the most wonderful news about one of his grandchildren. Robin’s son, Daniel Moss, a brilliant boy who took after all of his ambitious forebears, had been in the enviable position of having turned down early admission to Harvard and an offer from Princeton. He had chosen Yale, where he would be a goalie on the soccer team. He had been spared the pain of Jim Crow and the second-class schooling in the South because his mother had been spared it when Robert had moved the family to California.

Robert was too ill to fully enjoy the news about his grandson but could not help but contemplate how over the moon his mother, Ottie, would be if she were alive. All those years of scraping to send her four children to segregated colleges and never seeing her youngest son become the surgeon she so dreamed of. The idea of her great-grandson turning down Harvard and Princeton would have been beyond her comprehension.

His daughters were preparing a trip back east for Daniel’s high school graduation. It was around the time of Father’s Day. Robert had hoped to go but was not well enough to make the trip. And that made him all the sadder. While everyone else was at Daniel’s graduation, a triumphant moment for the family and for Robert as the patriarch, he felt more alone than perhaps ever before. He started refusing to go to dialysis, knowing full well the consequences.

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.