by Africa Fine
I couldn’t suppress a smile. “You’ve never cooked anything besides spaghetti in your life.”
“How would you know? You rejected me before I had a chance to invite you over for one of my gourmet dinners.”
I stopped smiling. “Rejected you? What?” The way I remembered it, he had shown no interest after the first date. What I thought of as our second date—the night at Dean Goldman’s house—probably wasn’t even a real date.
He thought for a moment, and then waved his hand as if to dismiss his own words. “Never mind. We’ll talk about it another time—”
I held up my hand to stop him. I thought I heard something coming from my aunt’s room. “What’s that sound?”
Jack listened for a moment, his head cocked toward Aunt Gillian’s bedroom.
“Singing?”
I stood up and walked down the hall, keeping my steps soft. I put my ear to Aunt Gillian’s door. Her voice was a high and clear soprano. I’d never heard my aunt sing before, not once. She had a beautiful voice, and it made me sad that it had taken all these years for me to hear it. I was about to knock, and I realized the song she was singing was one made famous by the woman Aunt Gillian’s father had hated all those years ago. My aunt’s version of “Strange Fruit” was nothing like Billie Holiday’s. Aunt Gillian didn’t imbue the words with a lifetime of weariness tinged with hope. You couldn’t hear the smoke of a thousand clubs in my aunt’s lungs. But from her lips the song sounded just as lovely.
She finished and started another song, a hymn this time. It was an unfamiliar one with melancholy lyrics.
“I’m but a stranger here, heaven is my home
Whatever my earthly lot, heaven is my home;
And I shall surely stand there at my Lord’s right hand.
Heaven is my fatherland, heaven is my home.”
* * *
Aunt Gillian wanted to come with me to Cleveland.
“It’s my house. I want to go. I have a right to go.”
She was standing in the living room, her hands on her hips. This was the most animated she had been in weeks, and it was nice to see the old Aunt Gillian surface, even if she was arguing.
I didn’t want to travel with her for a few reasons, most of which were selfish. I wanted to see the condition of the house and deal with the police without the emotion I knew she would attach to the process. Also, I knew that selling the house was a necessity, and I didn’t think convincing her would be easy. I wanted to put off that conversation until I’d had time to strategize.
The reason I was most ashamed of was also the simplest. I wanted some time away from her, from the medical tests, from everything. I’d spent the past two months focused on my aunt, and I hadn’t stopped to realize how tired I was. Sitting there listening to my aunt fume, I felt the exhaustion settle into my neck and shoulders. I looked over at Jack, hoping he could rescue me. He was so good at being my rescuer, and I knew it wasn’t fair, but I needed him to do it again.
He caught my look and understood. He stood up and led Aunt Gillian to the rocking chair she liked. Her back stayed rigid even as she allowed him to seat her.
“Gill, you’re right in the middle of your appointments with Dr. Ortiz. Let’s call him and ask him what he thinks.”
Before my aunt could formulate a reply, Jack picked up the phone and dialed. He then proceeded to have a conversation that was entirely made up.
He hung up after a few minutes and looked at Aunt Gillian.
“He says it’s best that you do all your tests at once to make sure the readings are accurate.”
I thought she would never buy this vague explanation that didn’t explain anything. What “readings?” But my aunt looked at him for a long moment and then nodded.
“Well, Dr. Ortiz would know best, I suppose.” She turned to me and frowned. “Can you take care of things back home?”
I offered my sweetest smile. “I’ll be back in a few days, and Jack’s going to stay with you while I’m gone.”
She nodded again. “I trust Jack.” They smiled at each other, and I went into my room to pack. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that she had given in again, or annoyed that the only person my aunt didn’t seem to trust was me.
I loaded up my smallest suitcase with just enough clothing for four days. I hoped I wouldn’t be in Cleveland any longer than that. Just before I zipped the case, I decided to put the birth certificate into an interior pocket. As I did it, I had to admit that looking for answers about the past, about my parents, about Lily were the real reasons I didn’t want my aunt to come with me to Cleveland.
Chapter 17
“The most important things”
Here’s what I knew about my parents. They married young, when my mother was eighteen and my father was twenty. They eloped. It was 1968, three years before I was born, a little over two years before they died. Aunt Gillian was much older than my mother, her sister. She was already sixteen years old when my mother was born, making her thirty-four years old when my parents eloped. My parents were Ernest McElroy and Brenda Jones-McElroy. I was named after my father. My aunt said they died in an accident when I was six months old.
I always wondered what my life would have been like if I could have remained Tina McElroy, daughter of Ernest and Brenda, instead of Tina Jones, niece and legal ward of Gillian Jones.
When I was a kid, I used my parents as fodder for my imagination, inventing personalities and scenarios to take the place of the real lives that were cut short. I never wrote down my ideas, preferring to lull myself to sleep at night by replaying the vivid memories I’d created in my head.
My parents were conscientious students like myself, who had planned to attend Case Western right there in Cleveland until they found out I was on the way. They were happy about this development, of course, and planned to bring me along to their classes in a baby carriage. Or they were lovers at first sight who met each other at a community dance and never looked back. Or they were forced to elope because Aunt Gillian, who was like a mother to mine, disapproved.
Maybe none of these things was true. Or maybe they all were. My aunt was reluctant to talk much about my parents. Her reticence seemed to me cruel and spiteful. All I wanted was to know who I was, where I came from, and she denied me even that small gift.
“Living in the past will get you nowhere,” Aunt Gillian told me whenever I asked about my parents. “We can’t change what’s already happened, so we have to look forward to the future.”
I always resented the use of ‘we,’ because it seemed to me that it was I who suffered, not we. I was an adult before I considered that I wasn’t the only person who had lost something, someone, when my parents died in June 1971.
To be fair, my aunt did provide some information after I begged and harassed her. She claimed not to know how my parents met, or why they eloped. When I was thirteen years old, she told me that she and Brenda were apart for a long time. She had known her sister as a baby, and then as a young woman. Their own mother was not around for most of Brenda’s childhood, having been committed to a mental hospital in their hometown of Baltimore soon after her second daughter was born. She died there, my grandmother, not long after she was committed. My aunt claimed not to know why her mother was committed, or how she died, but I knew she was lying.
She went on to say that my mother was spoiled and difficult, which sparked an argument between us. I accused her of being cruel and unfeeling; she accused me of asking for the truth but being afraid to hear it. We were both right.
When I was sixteen years old, she told me that my father was a poet and worked in a restaurant. Just before I left for college, Aunt Gillian told me that my father was a wonderful, sweet man whose love was easy and complete. This seemed like an intimate thing to say about one’s brother-in-law, but I was so happy to hear any details about my parents that I soaked it up without question.
I had two photos of my parents. One must have been taken the day they got married at Baltimore City H
all. She wore a pink suit in imitation of Jackie Kennedy, complete with a small pillbox hat and white gloves. She was pale, like my aunt, and her curly hair tumbled to her shoulders. Her smile was bright and genuine. She looked like a kid trying to be an adult.
My father’s eyes bore straight into the camera without smiling. He looked serious and a little scared. He, too, was dressed up for the occasion, wearing a dark suit and a crisp white shirt with a maroon striped tie. His dark skin had an eggplant sheen, and his hair was close-cropped instead of the afro style of the time. They both looked more like civil rights volunteers from the 1950s and 1960s than members of the Black Power generation of the late sixties and early seventies.
Here’s what I didn’t know about my parents: The sounds of their voices. Her favorite breakfast cereal. His dream car. The looks on their faces when they were happy, sad, angry, bored. Their smells. Their laughs.
The most important things.
* * *
I took the Tuesday morning flight from West Palm Beach to Cleveland and I rented a car at Hopkins International Airport. I hadn’t made hotel reservations before leaving Florida, and when I called around, most hotels were booked. It was early August, a time when people came north to visit family, catch an Indians game and visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before the start of the school year. My flight had been full of families coming from Florida to enjoy the cooler Cleveland weather. They reminded me that my own classes would soon begin. This trip was to be the last break I would have until Thanksgiving.
When I couldn’t get a room at the more moderate-priced hotels, I was faced with a choice: stay at my aunt’s house while I sorted things out, or take another look at my budget to see just how much I could afford to spend on a hotel.
Two hours after my plane landed, I was soaking in a bathtub the size of a small swimming pool at the Ritz-Carlton on Third Street. The only suites available cost more than I’d ever paid for a hotel in my life. But taking a long bath at ten o’clock in the morning while I waited for room service to deliver eggs Benedict, I decided it was all worth it. I had never treated myself like this. I’d always dreamed of this kind of luxury, but when I was fat, it somehow seemed like a waste.
Soaking in the bathtub, I couldn’t quite let go of the feeling that I was impersonating someone else, that the body my fingers touched wasn’t mine. When I lost weight the first time, there had been none of this uncertainty. I didn’t stop to think about how different I felt on the inside because of the changes on the outside. Maybe, I thought, as I poured Perrier into a wineglass, that was part of the reason I’d gained the weight back.
After a lazy morning, I decided to go to Aunt Gillian’s house and get the worst part of my journey over with. The police officer I’d spoken to said I just needed to itemize what was missing and file a report. I drove to East Cleveland, dreading what I might find at my aunt’s old colonial. My dread wasn’t a result of sentimentality, since I’d never felt at home there. I just wanted to sell the house and move on, although I suspected that things wouldn’t be as simple as I hoped.
For one thing, there was the problem of ownership. Aunt Gillian and I had never talked about power of attorney, and even if she was able to make this kind of decision on her own, I wasn’t at all certain that she wanted to sell her home. She’d lived there for more than half her life, and she still referred to the house, and Cleveland, as home.
When I got to the house, I saw the boarded-up window where the vandals broke in. On the first floor, I found broken lamps and the books strewn around the rooms. Unintelligible writing was spray-painted on the dining room wall, and framed prints lay broken on the floor. Upstairs, all the bureau drawers in my aunt’s room were opened and the medicine cabinet was torn off. But that was the extent of the damage. I figured the police were right, that this was the work of locals looking for cash. Apparently, they gave up when they found nothing. My room and the upstairs guest room were untouched. Standing there, I shivered and said silent thanks that my aunt was safely in Florida.
I called a cleaning service to come put the house back into shape. They agreed to come right away, so I decided to look around a bit while I waited. When we moved Aunt Gillian in May, we packed the essentials but left most everything else, figuring we would be back one way or another. I stepped into the guest room, which we left intact during my aunt’s move. There were boxes labeled photo albums in the closet. I thought this was strange, since Aunt Gillian had taken many photo albums to Florida. The ones she had insisted could not be left behind contained photos of her parents and a few of me, and they included my high school and college graduation ceremonies. These photos, she had told me, were the records of her entire life, everything that was important to her. I had to wonder what the photo albums she left behind contained. I dragged out the nearest box and sat on the floor to look inside.
I found photos of my aunt when she was a young woman, just out of her teens. Many showed her standing next to a building or in a field, smiling and shading her eyes with one hand. Other showed her posing with her hip jutted out as she looked directly into the camera, confident and proud. I was starting to wonder why Aunt Gillian had so many pictures where she was the only one in the frame. Then, near the end of the album, I saw the first photo of a young man.
His hair was combed into silky waves. His skin was smooth and pale and he wore a thin mustache and a graduation gown flapping open, under which a suit and tie was visible. He looked straight into the camera, and although the photo was in black and white, I could see how light his eyes were. Hazel, or maybe ocean blue. This, I concluded, must be Jeremiah Jackson, my aunt’s ex-husband. When I was a child, before I’d learned that getting information from my aunt was impossible, I used to ask if she had ever been married, and if so, what happened?
Her answer was the same every time. Her face contorted into a polite grimace, and she hissed his name through clenched teeth, adding, “It’s always best, if one has nothing nice to say, to say nothing at all.”
It was an unsatisfying answer, but it was all that I’d ever gotten. I took the photo from the album and turned it over. On the back, written in my aunt’s handwriting, was a notation: Jeremiah 1952.
That was the year my aunt had graduated from Howard, gotten married and moved to Cleveland, Jeremiah’s hometown. I tried to imagine Aunt Gillian as a twenty-two-year-old woman, fresh and hopeful, but I couldn’t reconcile this version of my aunt with the one I’d grown up with. I wondered about Jeremiah. They’d gotten married in 1952, but by the time I was born, he was out of the picture.
I stood up and stretched, still holding the photo of Jeremiah. My uncle. I took it downstairs while I dug in my bag for Lily’s birth certificate. I set them side by side on the now-ruined dining room table and I studied the dates. Lily was born in 1971, the same year as my birthday. Was Jeremiah still around then? I pulled out my cell phone, and without thinking about the ramifications, I called information and asked for listings of Jeremiah Jackson. While I waited, I figured there might be too many to sort through. There must be tons of listings for J. Jones, I figured, so I decided not to bother with those. Not yet, anyway. I was on hold for so long I started to lose hope and was just about to hang up when I heard the operator’s voice.
“We have one Jeremiah Jackson listed. Please hold for the number.”
Before going to the police station to fill out paperwork on the burglary, I headed over to the downtown library on Superior. I wanted to check past editions of The Cleveland Plain Dealer to see if I could find out anything about my parents. For whatever reason, this had never occurred to me. Perhaps out of fear, I had always simply accepted the nuggets of information my aunt chose to provide.
But I was thirty-four years old, and it was time to find out more about my family. I ignored the fluttering in my stomach as I sat down to the computer and clicked on The Cleveland Plain Dealer icon. I already learned from the reference librarian that the newspaper had computerized its archives back to 1965.
&nb
sp; When I typed in my mother’s name, just one item came up. I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath before clicking on the link. It was an obituary for my mother. Gillian Jones was listed as the surviving relative. It noted the date of her death, June 1, 1971, and her age, nineteen. But no cause of death was provided. There was no mention of the accident my aunt always referred to when she spoke of my parents’ deaths. I had always assumed it was a car accident, but now I realized that Aunt Gillian had never described the accident. I wondered why I had never dared to ask. What kind of person was I that I never asked?
I didn’t bother looking up my father’s obituary, assuming it would be much the same. I tried a few more searches, using my father’s name and then my aunt’s, but there was nothing more. I entered Lily’s name. Again, nothing.
I sat at the computer for a long while, thinking. What I had found didn’t answer many questions. I already knew my parents had died when I was less than one year old. The provided information created more questions. How did they die? Why wasn’t I with them? And why didn’t the obituaries mention me?
I printed the obituaries and put them in the envelope with Lily’s birth certificate. Discouraged, I headed out to the police station. It was getting late and I was tired. All I wanted was to eat nice meal, lie down, and forget about the past, at least for one night.
The next morning, I got an early start and was headed toward the Shaker Heights address listed for my uncle. I considered calling first, but I wasn’t sure he would want to see me. I didn’t know what to expect, but I imagined that seeing me might trigger unpleasant memories of my aunt. I knew almost nothing about him, and I had to assume he knew nothing about me. We were strangers. We were family.
I turned into a quiet neighborhood filled with stately brick homes. The expansive lawns were precise and neat, and every house featured bursts of colorful flowers around the front entries. Although it was a Tuesday afternoon, there were Mercedes sedans and BMW sport-utility vehicles in several driveways, making me think this was a neighborhood populated by either stay-at-home moms or retirees of some means.
