A Reason to Believe (14 page)

I really had no choice but to sit there and take it. He spoke for nearly two hours, raising his voice to overcome the roar of traffic passing by the open windows and to convey his pent-up emotion. Years of fury and regret gushed out of him. When he was finally spent, I surprised both him and myself by being calm. I told him quietly that I certainly missed having him in my life as a young boy but did not blame him for not being there, and that my mother’s urging of him to see Rhonda and me was the only reason he knew us at all. If we were going to have a relationship, I said, it would have to be about the future, not the past.

“I haven’t made any judgments against you,” I said. “I don’t even know you. The fact that I’m making other choices is not about you.” So let’s move on.

He was stunned that I did not fight back on his terms, yet stood my ground. We drove back to his apartment in silence. Nothing had been settled, but it was the beginning of a process in which I would try to forgive him for the hurt his long absence had caused us, and he would try to accept me for the man I was becoming. I would save a place.

After our long walk that summer day, my mother and I became much closer. We began to accept each other as adults, as friends. During the year I spent in Africa after graduating from Harvard, she even came to visit. It was an adventure all its own.

The villages where I lived in Sudan had no postal or phone service, so my mail was held for me at the main post office in the capital. Returning there from Darfur was the end of a long, lonely spell without contact from home. What a treat awaited in December when I visited the dusty, colonial post office in Khartoum to find piles of unopened mail. I needed a large bag to haul them away. I put the letters in chronological order and worked my way through them over several days. My friends’ sprawling lives, their milestones and their crises, were neatly compressed and resolved in one or two readings.

When I eventually reached one of the letters from my mother, dated sometime in early November, she wrote that she had saved her money so she could come see me, and I should meet her in Nairobi, Kenya, for Christmas. Since
I had been anticipating the strangeness of my first Christmas away from home alone in a foreign environment, I felt a surge of excitement. I was touched by the gesture, too, since Mom had never traveled overseas before.

I quickly realized, however, that the date she had set for our rendezvous was only two days away. Her letter was weeks old by then, and she had, of course, received no reply from me that I would meet her. Communicating with her quickly was impossible. In those days, phone service in Khartoum was spotty at best. Even when it worked, an international call was expensive, required making a reservation at the phone company headquarters downtown, and was likely to be interrupted anyway. Sending a fax was impossible for ordinary people. There was no such thing as e-mail, cell phones, or text messaging. According to her letter, my mother would be flying into Nairobi, but she made no mention of airline, flight number, or where she would be staying. Just “meet me in Nairobi.”

I hustled down there by effectively hitching a midnight ride on a British Airways flight out of Khartoum. Luckily, my friend Kamal, with whom I had worked those many months out in Darfur, had a friend who worked for the airline. The friend sold me a deeply discounted ticket and got me on the already full flight when it stopped in Khartoum at midnight en route to Addis Ababa and Nairobi. I’m not sure how he did it. All I know is that a groggy and bewildered European businessman was escorted off the plane onto the empty tarmac just before I was told to grab
my big backpack and hustle aboard to a seat in the back. The ways of Africa are sometimes mysterious!

I landed in Nairobi amid uncertainty and confusion. The city is on the equator and is warm and tropical even in December. The airport terminal itself was a big open shed with no walls and a tile floor, with colorful birds gliding in and out, taxis milling along the curb on one side and an opaque glass barrier on the other, with sliding doors to admit arriving passengers. I found airline personnel and explained my dilemma. They were incredulous. There were no direct flights from Chicago, and I had no idea how she was connecting to Nairobi. The airlines, meanwhile, refused to give out any information about their flight manifests. So I simply met every international arrival—for a day and a half. Each time the door of the arrival lounge opened to disgorge passengers and closed again, I rode a cycle of anticipation and disappointment. I kept watching other people’s reunions, a great cross section of the continent—white, black, Asian, businesspeople, farmers, families, and friends. But not my mother. It was warm during the day and cool at night, and I slept fitfully between flight arrivals on an uncomfortable plastic bench.

Then, improbably, there she was. She looked tired but cheerful, smaller than I remembered, wearing a flowery shirt and floppy white canvas hat. “I wasn’t sure I would even see you here,” she said, laughing. My exhaustion and frustration gave way to tears of relief. She wept as well.

I asked what she would have done had I not been
there. She said she had met a lovely Kenyan family on the plane, and they would have given her a place to stay. I had to admire her moxie—picking up from a tenement on the South Side of Chicago, flying to Nairobi, and thinking, I’ll figure it out along the way.

We stayed for a few days in a small colonial guesthouse set in a garden, which served cold toast and tea for breakfast. The Kenyan staff would greet my mother warmly each morning with
“Jambo, Mamma,”
which means “Hello, madam” in Swahili. But my mom would reply with “Jumbo,” which usually elicited peals of laughter. She couldn’t quite get the hang of it. However, we were always treated well. Respect for elders is very important in Africa, and my traveling with my mother was quite endearing to the Kenyans. We organized a couple of safaris, though she could have lived without the lizards that invariably scuttled across the ceilings at night wherever we stayed, and when some critter came too close to our van in the game parks, she shrieked. We stayed in tented camps, dined on multicourse feasts of fresh soups and roast lamb or stewed Kudu at night, slept under the brightest stars, and listened to the sounds of elephants crashing through the bush or hyenas yelping just beyond the camp. We walked up Mount Kenya, not quite to the summit but to about 14,000 feet; my mother was a longtime smoker, so it was a struggle for her, but she persevered. We took an elegant overnight train to Mombasa, down by the sea, where the blend of African and Arabic influences made a spicy mix.

It was a wonderful visit. After many months on my own in Egypt and Sudan, I was accustomed by then to the rhythms of Africa and was at ease making my way, bargaining in the markets, eating the local foods, and sensing which chances to take and which to avoid. Like any first-time visitor to so foreign a place, my mom was always checking her passport and her travelers’ checks to make sure all was in order. She had to rely on me more than either of us was used to. It was a new chapter in our relationship, and we both took to it.

She stayed for almost two weeks, and when she left, I felt a deep void. I couldn’t believe she had traveled so far to see me. She had never been very good about showing affection or saying she loved me, but her unlikely trip spoke more eloquently than any word or gesture.

In the years immediately following the blowout with my father, our relationship slowly began to mend, and my time in Africa played a central role. He was always citing the Motherland and his ancient Egyptian roots and reminding me how much more advanced African civilizations were than those of Europe. He had traveled to Egypt, Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa, and that continent’s proud history stood in dramatic contrast, he believed, to the history of humiliation that blacks had suffered in America.

I wrote to him from Africa and described how rich and inspiring my experiences were, and this embossed my credentials with him. He stopped questioning whether I was
black enough. It helped that my familiarity with African culture and history, given my time on the continent and my reading of African literature while there, was growing deeper than his. When I returned home for law school the following year, we checked in with each other more often, though I still didn’t see very much of him, except on one memorable occasion.

The summer before my third year of law school, I worked at a law firm in Washington, D.C. I turned twenty-five that July, and on my birthday, my father happened to be playing in a local jazz club called Pigfoot and invited me to join him. I hadn’t spent a birthday with him since I was three, but I agreed.

I arrived near the end of the first set, just before the break, and my father was playing the saxophone, jamming with a skilled quartet. I took my seat at a little table, and he nodded when he saw me come in. When they finished the number, he took the microphone and said to the crowd, “It’s my son’s birthday, and I want to play this next tune for him.”

There was warm applause and an approving glance or two my way from other patrons. Then the place got quiet, and he played an old standard, “I Can’t Get Started.” There was no vocalist, but by then I had developed my own love for jazz, and I knew the words.

He looked me straight in the eye while he played, long and soulfully, full of regret and longing all at once. I gazed right back at him, knowing what he was trying to say: Life is too short to go on like this; let’s find a way to come together. No words were spoken, but the music gave us our own language. We communicated more in those few moments than we ever had before, and it was clear how much we both wanted simple understanding. We weren’t quite there—when I graduated from law school, he did not attend the commencement—but we were moving closer, and it seemed my father never felt threatened by my choices again. I had saved a place, and so had he.

After law school, while I clerked for Judge Reinhardt in Los Angeles, Rhonda was living not far away in San Diego with her husband, Bernie, and their infant daughter. Grandpa Pat and various cousins on my dad’s side lived nearby in Orange County, so family gatherings included my father. They were infrequent, but relaxed and pleasant. He was eager to be in California as much as possible, as if to make up for lost time with Rhonda and me. It worked because we were building a relationship on tomorrow rather than yesterday.

Diane, too, was instrumental in the efforts between my father and me. I had always been open with her about my disappointments in my father, his abandonment of his family, his failure to contribute to our upbringing, his breaking of my mother’s heart. But, even before she met him, Diane also sensed my respect for his intelligence and his musical gifts and my longing to be closer.

Soon after Diane and I had settled into our home in Brooklyn, I noticed an ad in the
New York Times
saying my father would be playing with a small ensemble at a jazz club on the Upper West Side. I suggested we go. Diane was reluctant because she didn’t want me to reach too close and be hurt again, but I insisted.

When we entered the small bar, with its smoky red walls and dim light, the trio was in the middle of a number. My father looked up immediately, stopped playing mid-note, and left the bandstand to come over and throw his arms around me. I returned the embrace, and soon we both had tears in our eyes. When I introduced him to Diane, he could not have been more gracious and charming. They became instant friends.

He became a frequent guest at our house, and Diane had an ease about his presence that allowed us to move forward. He adored her, and she always welcomed him into our home, invited him for dinner, and enjoyed his company. She gave us both space to move at a deliberate but comfortable speed. We talked about old times, but without
the bitterness. He told me how his slapping me on the day he left was something he had regretted ever since. I said he could now let that go.

When Diane and I got married, my father organized his friends to play at our wedding. This ensured that we had not just good music but
any
music, as we lacked the funds for a band. My dad had a rousing good time playing background for Diane’s father’s singing. He even secretly taped our wedding and gave it to us as a special gift. Before the wedding, I worried about how my parents would behave with each other. They had not been together since that fateful encounter at my graduation from Milton. But they treated each other like old friends. Reconciliation seemed to be in everyone’s heart.

My father took to staying with us in Brooklyn for long periods when he was between concert tours or on the outs with his girlfriend. Even when he wasn’t living with us, he was part of our lives, and he was eager to play his part as father-in-law.

After we told him that Diane was pregnant and as the date approached, my father called every day to ask for any news. I kept assuring him I would call when there was something to report, but he kept checking in anyway. On the one day he missed his check-in, Sarah was born after a long and trying labor. I called and called for a couple of days thereafter but could never reach him. Then, the first day that Diane was feeling herself again, I went by her favorite Italian restaurant to pick up a special dinner to take
to the hospital. Laden with the food and flowers and little gifts for her and the baby, I stood on a midtown corner trying to hail a cab. My father was then driving part-time a business tycoon’s gray, stretch limousine, and he miraculously spotted me. He pulled up, told me to hop in the back, and asked me where I needed to go. There, from the backseat of a stranger’s limousine in rush-hour traffic, I told him to take me to Lenox Hill Hospital, where I was going to have dinner with his new granddaughter.

The generational bonds were now secure. My dad continued to visit intermittently between concert tours overseas. By the time Katherine had grown into a sassy toddler, he would come to our house in Milton and dote on two precious little girls. He gave them fifes and little flutes and played the sax for them while they danced around our front hall, and he showed them the gentleness, attention, and love that I so craved in my own youth. Sarah and Katherine loved him in return, and my father reveled in it. How fitting that the finest gig of his life was that of grandfather.