Love and Fury (10 page)

But Palance's dead visage: even viewing it as an adult, even knowing it was an actor playing a part, did not dispel the stark horror of that death's head.

What does a child know of special effects? Those are corpses, not sprawled actors covered in syrup. A child has no disbelief to suspend, willingly or not. Besides, every detail in a film is meant to override the suspension of disbelief, every moment, every word, gesture, costume, and shadow is meant to convince.

I was convinced. My whole body was convinced.

Before that day I lived in the dream world of childhood: I spoke to worms and bumblebees, birds landed on the backyard fence and cocked their heads so quizzically I understood their queries. My brother Bobby and I ate rose petals and onion grass, and we lay on our bellies on the concrete walk in the sun because it was warm and felt so good. We were creatures, and although there was certainly a difference between sleeping and waking, it is also true that in another sense we lived in a more or less continuous dream. Even our father's rages, when he cursed and broke things and drew his belt from his pants and doubled it and forced us to submit to a “lickin',” were experienced as nightmarish disturbances within that dream. I don't mean to speak for Bobby, dead now forty years, and yet that was how it was with us then: born a year apart, we were not merely inseparable, we were hardly separate people at all.

It could be that we are all born into this dream, and that it is continuous and unending, even though soon, whether gradually or suddenly, we're separated from an awareness of it.

We were having a party in the backyard for D's first birthday. Veronica had done up the patio with a brightly colored tablecloth and about a hundred balloons she filled from a helium canister she'd purchased. Most of the guests were my grandson's family who live close by. Damion was in the county lockup awaiting trial on gun and drug charges. Veronica had been cooking all night and into the morning: curried chicken, shrimp, beans and rice, pasta with meatballs and sausages, salad, potato salad; and as if he knew something was going on, D had hardly slept.

By three in the afternoon the yard was filled with uncles, aunties, and cousins, a few neighbors and friends of ours, and a dozen kids racing around. One of the uncles had brought a bubble machine that sent thousands of bubbles the size of Ping-Pong balls wafting across the patio to the great delight of the littlest ones who chased and whirled and laughed. They couldn't get enough of it, and the machine had to be replenished with “bubble juice” several times.

Kathi, whom all our guests that afternoon, no matter their age, called Grandma, had D on her hip, and although he'd been cranky, he was laughing as he swatted at bubbles, his grandma exclaiming whenever he popped one.

I was standing on the deck where a buffet, including birthday cake, waited under plastic wrap and aluminum foil. I was watching Kathi, marveling at her ability to so thoroughly give herself to her grandson and enjoy the other kids who were drawn to her enthusiasm—“Look at me! Watch this!”—jumping up and down around her. Only three days earlier, she had been diagnosed with “ductile carcinoma in situ,” or DCIS—breast cancer.

I try to remember the moment she told me. It must have been in the kitchen. Yes, I seem to recall hearing the news there. But this moment, her dancing around with the baby amid balloons and bubbles and leaping children, is the moment that stays with me. I've referred to my journal to refresh my memory of hearing the news, but there is no mention of that conversation per se; there is only fear and self-pity. I wrote as if I were being given the news my father received when my mother was diagnosed. I suppose I was primed to feel this way, and my fear of losing Kathi was terror commensurate with my love for her but, goddamn it, all I find written there is about me. I kept thinking I'm going to lose her; I'm going to lose her. Not once in those pages did I reflect on her feelings, on what her course of treatment would exact from her, or even on how I might make myself useful to her.

So the reason I keep returning to this memory of standing on the deck watching her is that it is kinder to me than recalling my selfish fear. But it is also true that the beauty of that moment pierced my numbing anxiety with a sudden, refreshed appreciation of her bravery. I have been witness to, and often beneficiary of, this courage for thirty years. I am not entirely joking when I quip to friends that by contrast I am a big baby, “You know me, if I get a haircut, I need to take a day off.” And even though, later, she will say that she always knew there was no need to worry, I can't help but know how terrified and self-centered I would have been in her situation.

Veronica came out of the house with paper napkins, plastic knives and forks and cups. “It feels like rain. We'd better eat soon. Dad? Hey, are you okay?”

“Me? Yeah. Fine.”

“Don't worry. You don't need to worry.”

“I'm not. I know. I'm not worried.”

Evidently, I wasn't very convincing. She made a face at me. Then she pointed into the crowd of kids where Kathi was pointing at me, talking to D, “Wave to Grandpa! Say, ‘Hi, Grandpa!'”

“Maybe we should take the food inside,” Veronica said. The wind was coming up, flapping the corners of the tablecloths. Somehow one of the balloons came loose and, after catching a moment in the leaves of a maple, soared higher and higher with the kids running up on the porch to see better as it gradually became a mere speck in the sky. Clouds were rolling in and it looked like rain.

“I want to do it!” yelled one of the boys, and he began tearing a balloon from a bouquet tied to the porch rail.

“Me too! I want to do it!” another boy called out. The younger kids had gone back to chasing bubbles.

The boys especially were riled up. Everywhere the balloons were fastened—to the deck, to the tables and chairs— the boys were tearing at the ribbons to free them.

“Hold on,” I said. “Hold on! Wait! Wait!” Pouts on their faces, some anger on the faces of a couple of the older boys;
of course,
they seemed to think,
of course some adult would put a stop to this much fun.
But I only wanted to slow things down. I knew this kind of energy; it threatened to sack the whole party and destroy the whole afternoon, especially for the youngest kids. “All right. Okay, listen up. You can each have one. One.”

Kathi was giving me a look that asked if I had utterly forsaken being a responsible adult. I could see in my mind's eye the very Sierra Club photograph she was silently referencing with her loud frown—that pathetic Canada goose, starved, its beak clamped shut by a piece of a red rubber balloon. One of the girls pointed to the sky where the first balloon had all but disappeared. “It's going all the way up to heaven!” she shouted, jumping up and down and clapping. She gave me an idea.

Earlier that afternoon, a couple of hours before the party, Damion's father, Smithy, had arrived with a young woman about Veronica's age whom he introduced as his girlfriend. “We are the grandfathers!” he shouted as if making a pronouncement. He hugged me, clapped my back. It was easy to fall into a boisterous familiarity with him; easy for me, anyway. Kathi came into the hall and extended her hand in a way that was gracious but discouraged his loud assumption of his place in our lives. She was mindful of things that we knew about Smithy, things the volume of his presence had momentarily driven from my mind. Damion's mother was fourteen when he was born in Jamaica. Smithy was somewhere about thirty. Now here he was with this young woman who had yet to say a word or even make eye contact. At least she seemed to be of legal age.

Not long after Damion's birth, his mother's family sent her from Jamaica to the United States to continue her education. Damion was left with Smithy. I have since learned from Damion that he was beaten by his father, locked in his room in the evenings while his father went out, and made to carry his father's gun in his backpack and stay within easy reach. When Damion was seven, he asked if he could please live with his great-grandmother. According to Damion, Smithy was happy to be rid of him.

Although I did not think the occasion granted him a plenary indulgence, as Smithy apparently did, I felt it was a special moment, an instance out of the ordinary, and I wanted to be welcoming. Besides, the rest of Damion's family had not yet arrived, and I thought I should take my cues from them.

I needn't have wondered about that. Not one of the women—not Damion's mother nor his aunts nor members of his mother's church—would be in the same room with Smithy. If he walked in, they would simply turn their backs, excuse themselves, and leave the room. But it would be a long time until any of them arrived. We moved into the kitchen.

“I have brought to you the famous kukoomba juice! I make the juice for all Jamaica!” He held up a plastic gallon jug of green liquid. “The juice of the kukoomba make you strong! Down there! Strong! I don't need no Viagra. No!” He turned to the young woman who was standing just inside the doorway, looking at the floor. “Tell him!” She seemed to curl into herself and shrink. “Tell him, I say!”

“Excuse me,” Kathi said, moving to the young woman and taking her by the arm. “Come. Come into the living room where we can sit down and talk.” She asked the woman her name.

“Anything that is wrong for you, the kukoomba juice will cure it. Even good for the cancer. You try it. This I made special for you the grandfather. Try it!”

I went to the pantry for a glass. The juice was tasty, a clean fruity taste, sweetened with honey. “The drug companies, they want to shut me down. I make the juice for free, give it for anyone who is sick. I don't take no money, so they want to shut me down.”

“Delicious,” I said. It was. I poured myself a full glass this time.

“Ah, because you are the grandfather. I will give you how to make it. I will teach you.”

Robert had come downstairs and was standing in the doorway. I poured him half a glass. “Here. This is my son, Robert. This is very tasty. You'll like it.”

“No. No, thanks. I'm good.”

“Robert. Smithy. Damion's father.” They shook hands.

Then, as if I had just reminded him that he is Damion's father, Smithy said, “I brought him up to be a good man. I have told him, ‘You have disappointed me. I taught you to do the good, not to do the bad. Why must you do the bad?'” In a transparent play for fatherly solidarity, he leaned toward me and said, “The young men, they don't listen. You try to teach them, but they do not listen to their fathers.”

Robert was hanging in the doorway, and the look on his face asked, “Is this guy for real?” I was thinking of a five-year-old boy, walking next to his father, alert to his displeasure, staying close, with a pistol in his Flintstones backpack.

“First you need the good water. Spring water. In Jamaica the water is purest of anywhere, of any place. And then you must have the good kukoomba.”

“Where can I get that?”

“All the markets, they have the kukoomba. The best kukoomba from anywhere in the whole world is in Jamaica.”

“And you must make one gallon of water to five large kukoomba. This you must do right. And you mash the kukoomba with five tablespoons honey. Good honey . . .”

“I won't remember this. Here,” I said and handed him a pad and pen we keep by the telephone. “Write down the ingredients for me.”

“Yes, yes. For you, grandfather.”

I watched him write it:

C-U-C-U-M-B-E-R

“I have a good idea!” I said to the kids. They gathered around, holding tight to their balloons. “Before we send our balloons up to heaven, why don't we each make a wish?”

“Yeah! A wish! A wish!”

“Will it come true?” one boy asked very earnestly.

“If you tell me your wish, I'll write it on a piece of paper and maybe when it gets up to heaven an angel will see it and read it.” I was far out on a limb now. I had only meant to slow things down while keeping them interested. “Like, my wish is for D on his birthday. I want him to grow up big and strong and have a good life.” I wrote “A Good Life for D” on a small piece of paper, rolled it up, tied it in the ribbon of the balloon, and let it go. We watched it rise. The adults stopped their conversations and watched, too. “Now me!” said a girl of five or six. “I want a girl baby cousin!” I wrote it and we launched it.

“Me! Me! I want a Xbox!” a boy said, bringing me his balloon. I asked him if he wanted to make a different wish, for something that would make life better. “A Xbox! A Xbox!” he insisted. I wrote it as the first drops fell from the sky and we sent his balloon up into the rain. Soon it was coming down hard, the adults scrambling from their chairs to herd the kids indoors.

“No, Mommy! No!” the boy cried. He sat down. His mother dragged him up by the arm as he twisted and yelled, “No, Mommy!” looking at the sky. “My Xbox! My Xbox!”

“Child, what are you talking about? Hush up that nonsense right now and get in that house.”