Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  I am sure that part of my reason for giving up on psychiatry was simply that I didn’t feel it necessary anymore. Was this attitude a “macho thing”? Maybe, although I have always had little time for macho posturing. A desire for self-sufficiency? Well, perhaps self-sufficiency is also a “macho thing.” I suspect that if I had still been a bachelor, I would have relied far more on Dr. Aaron. As it was, I had Jeanne at my side, and on my side, and who could ask for more?

  Marrying Jeanne-Marie Moutoussamy turned out to be a far wiser and more self-interested act than I had ever thought it might be. I had met her one day in New York City, at a benefit for the United Negro College Fund at the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden in New York City. A graphic artist at NBC-TV in New York City, and a professional photographer, Jeanne was at the benefit on a press pass, to take photographs. She took several pictures of me that day. I took a mental picture of her as maybe, just maybe, what my heart desired. I said hello to her, and we chatted. That was on October 16, 1976. On February 20, 1977, we were married.

  The night before, we visited Andrew Young and his wife, Jean, in their suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where they lived. Andrew was then United States Ambassador to the United Nations. He was also an ordained minister, and he was going to marry us. He and Jean had asked us to come by so they could talk to us about marriage as a sacrament.

  That night, Andrew told us about the six people who were to be married by him the next day.

  “Six people?” I asked, a little puzzled. “You are marrying six people tomorrow?”

  “Yes, and no,” Andy replied. “You see, when you and Jeanne get married tomorrow, six people will be involved. With each of you, there are really three persons. First, there is the person you are. Next, there is the person you think you are. Then there is the person others think you are. This is true of all marriages, not just yours. And in every marriage, all of these six people have to get along with one another if the contract is to work.”

  Jeanne and I were married with me standing on crutches, a symbol of physical frailty and vulnerability, recovering from an operation ten days before to remove bone chips from my left heel. Little did Jeanne or I realize that those crutches were a portent of other maladies to come. She and I would be united in holy matrimony, but we would also be bound by a shared ordeal involving doctors and medicine, pain and suffering, and the threat of death at any time. And while we would both suffer, I would depend on Jeanne physically and emotionally far more than she would depend on me.

  More irony: When we were married in 1977, it was Jeanne, not me, who seemed to be in greater physical danger. She knew at the time that heart disease was chronic in her family, most of whom lived in Chicago. It was a close knit family, headed by her father, John Warren Moutoussamy, a quiet, strong man. In 1974, he had suffered a major heart attack. He survived the attack, but tests showed that the family shared a common predisposition to abnormally high cholesterol levels and clogged arteries. This was true of her father’s sister and even more seriously true of Jeanne’s brother John Warren Moutoussamy, Jr. John Jr.’s cholesterol level was ridiculously high—above 400—and you could literally see on his elbows and knees the buildup of calcium deposits that one day would affect the flow of blood to his heart and brain. He knew, and we knew, that he was living on borrowed time.

  In the wake of John Moutoussamy’s illness and the subsequent tests, Jeanne and her family lived on a sort of twenty-four-hour alert concerning heart attacks.

  In 1978, the year after we married, her father’s sister underwent an open-heart bypass operation. Her operation was successful, at least for a few years.

  In July 1979, in Kitzbühel, Austria, a telephone call in the middle of the night from my stepsister Loretta Harris in Virginia brought the news that my father had just suffered a serious angina attack. Daddy was doing well and on the way to recovery, but I was put on notice. So, it should not have been a complete surprise when, days later, on July 31, back in New York, I had my own heart attack, and the following December I had a quadruple-bypass operation.

  Six months or so after my quadruple-bypass operation, I watched Jeanne sink slowly, and against her will, into a tremendous letdown, a depression. It was sad to see her spirits droop, especially since she continued to do all the things that I needed to have done to help me. Then we discovered, to our relief, that it is common for someone to become depressed in the aftermath of a spouse’s serious illness—and that this usually occurred almost exactly six months after the illness. We both felt better when we discovered that it was normal.

  With those events, I discovered that my own family, like Jeanne’s, had a history of heart disease. I had known only that my mother had died of complications after surgery. Now, when I examined her death certificate, I saw that while it specified toxemic pregnancy as the cause of death, it also established hypertension and cardiovascular disease as the main contributing factors. She had been only twenty-seven years old when she died.

  The single most devastating blow came on Friday, December 18, 1982. Jeanne and I were in Chicago on a weekend visit to her family. Her father received a telephone call while Jeanne’s brother John, a lawyer in the district attorney’s office in Chicago, was at a public function of some sort. John had collapsed at the dinner and was on his way to the hospital. Jeanne, her parents, and John’s wife, Penelope, rushed to the hospital. I remained at home with John and Penny’s two young boys, David and Jay. At the right hour, I made sure that they went to bed.

  Eventually the telephone rang. It was Jeanne, and she was in tears, hurting pretty badly.

  “Arthur,” I remember her saying, “Johnny didn’t make it.” She didn’t say anything else about his dying. Johnny Moutoussamy was thirty-nine years old.

  At the hospital, her father had said only one thing when he heard that his first-born was dead: “Damn it!” So much grief and pain concealed behind one mild expletive.

  On the phone, we decided that it would be best to let the boys sleep rather than wake them with the terrible news. Penny and Jeanne came back to the house at about two-thirty in the morning. Penny was almost overcome with shock and grief. Jeanne, too, was distraught, but striving hard to remain alert and controlled.

  The next morning, I woke David, who is a deep sleeper, and told him that his father had suffered a heart attack and was dead. He took the news stoically. Not so with Jay, who had crept into his parents’ bedroom, as many young children like to do. He had asked about his father. The news hit him like a blow. He rolled onto his back and kept up a piteous refrain: “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” Looking at him, I was reminded of my father’s tearful reaction to my mother’s death in 1950.

  Jeanne and I took the kids down to the glittering Water Tower shopping center to buy them new dress shirts and ties for their father’s funeral. And I watched from a distance as the Moutoussamy family coped with this tragedy as only the immediate family must cope with a tragedy of such dimensions.

  By the following year, 1983, when I had my second heart operation, a double-bypass, Jeanne was a seasoned veteran of these skirmishes between life and death. In 1988, when I had my brain operation and discovered that I had AIDS, she was a rock of stability.

  So, too, when my father died of a stroke on March 19, 1989. Jeanne and I were at our Florida home, on the Gold golf course at the Doral Resort and Country Club. I was sitting on a couch in our living room, with Camera on my lap, when the phone rang. I answered it. My stepsister, Loretta, wanted to talk to Jeanne. Afterward, Jeanne hung up the telephone, then turned to me.

  “Arthur, your father just died.” Daddy had collapsed while at Loretta’s home in the suburb of Glen Allen, outside Richmond. He had gone there for a Palm Sunday dinner. Loretta was afraid the news might affect my own heart. My heart withstood the shock but I cried and cried when I heard the news. Dominating, stern, protective, my father had loved me and taken care of me when I needed him the most.

  And Jeanne was strong again when I had another heart
attack late in the summer of 1992. This one came just after I had taken part in a demonstration in Washington, D.C., to protest what I considered the inhumane treatment of Haitian refugees by the federal government under President Bush. The police had arrested and handcuffed me and others, according to our plan. Maybe I had put too much strain on my heart. I had felt the attack coming on and I had even taken some of the nitroglycerin pills I carry around with me for just such an emergency. Unfortunately, I had held on to this batch of pills too long—they were useless.

  As we cope with my AIDS, Jeanne has been even more remarkable in her steadfastness. In the face of impending disaster, she has been unflappable. Or almost so. One fact I can depend on: Whatever happens, Jeanne is not going to panic. She will know what to do.

  If medical problems have dominated our marriage, the illnesses have bonded us in a way that good fortune could not have. But binding or not, they have also created their own tensions. In the various episodes of my illnesses, many people called to ask how I was doing. A few people, not many, asked Jeanne, “How are you doing? I can read in the newspapers how Arthur is doing, but what about you?” She is grateful for all the calls, but she remembers those few people with a special gratitude. And I do, too.

  Our marriage, I think, has been a very good one—very good for me, and I think very good for Jeanne. Of course, we had some difficulty in the beginning adjusting to one another, as all couples do, even couples in an old-fashioned marriage in which the husband dominates. In the beginning, Jeanne was bothered by people who saw her as an appendage to a famous man. She detested being called Mrs. Arthur Ashe, as if she had no identity of her own and had brought nothing to our marriage. But I never intended to marry a nobody, and Jeanne was not that. She is bright, independent, a graduate of probably the finest and most competitive art school in New York, and from a good family, in addition to being beautiful.

  Some of my older friends told me that she would care less and less, as time passed, about whether people called her Mrs. Arthur Ashe, and the implications of such a title, and that is exactly how it worked out. It doesn’t bother her much any longer, if it bothers her at all. Her passport still identifies her as Jeanne-Marie Moutoussamy. After she published two books, Daufuskie: A Photographic Essay, about the inhabitants of one of the Sea Islands off South Carolina, and Viewfinders: A History of Black Women Photographers, she became more confident, more able to shrug off the slights of those who could not appreciate her for what she was.

  In any marriage, there are smooth phases and troubled phases. Committed couples reach an understanding, a rapprochement. Successful ones develop a formula for success and stick by it. Not all the formulas are for me, or us. We have found ourselves in situations with other couples where we have said, “Oh my goodness, I could never do that! That’s embarrassing!” But every couple has to find what it takes to keep them going. And I do think, as Andrew and Jean Young tried to tell us, that marriage is sacred. You treat it casually at your peril.

  My love for Jeanne has grown deeper with every passing year. It has become deeper with every medical crisis. My emotional attachment to her has become tighter. So, too—at least in some cases—has my emotional dependence. I started to lean on her, to let myself depend on her. It took me a while to realize this fact, because I had taken pride for so long in being self-sufficient. But too much happened, and no sense of self-sufficiency could prevent me from realizing that, in many ways, life would be difficult without her. I think about certain situations in the past, then try to take Jeanne out of the equation, so to speak, and I wonder how I would have survived without her.

  The disappointments we shared could have driven us apart. Instead, they have brought us closer together. We will be together till death do us part.

  THE FACT THAT Jeanne and I had a history of heart disease in both of our families naturally made us tense and intimidated when we thought about having children. How could we justify bringing a child into the world knowing that he or she most likely would be born with a predisposition to death at an early age?

  For a while, we assumed that we would not have any. That seemed the best way to proceed, no matter how much we regretted not experiencing the joys of parenthood. Around 1984, however, we decided that we wanted and needed a child. Steadily the thought became more and more important to us.

  On December 21, 1986, Camera came into our lives. We pulled out a bureau drawer in a walk-in closet and that’s where she slept her first night home. Like many first-time parents, we were obsessed by the possibility of sudden infant death (also called crib death) or another mysterious ailment that would take away from us the fragile little body that represented our hopes and dreams of the past few years. We kept popping up in bed and going over to the bureau drawer to make sure she was well—to make sure, I think, that she was still there.

  Of course, the next morning she was alive and well. And she has been well ever since. I think if Jeanne and I prayed for anything in connection with our new baby, it was only that he or she be healthy. Whether it was a boy or a girl didn’t matter. And we have been blessed with a child as robust as any parents could ever hope for. Typically, whenever the pediatrician examines Camera, he throws up his hands in mock exasperation and exclaims, “This is one healthy child!” For which we thank God.

  From the first day, she altered the patterns of our lives. We knew that her coming would do so, but the extent to which she changed things was nevertheless something of a shock. In fact, our lives revolve around Camera.

  We were then living in Mount Kisco. The previous year, Jeanne and I had moved there from our duplex apartment in a building on East Seventy-second Street in Manhattan. To tell the truth, Jeanne had been less interested than I in moving out of the city; in fact, she loves New York City. However, I had become tired of its pressures. I guess I began to feel my age. The sheer volume of singles’ bars and trendy restaurants in my neighborhood on the Upper East Side, where I had been living for fifteen years, began to get to me.

  In 1990, however, we returned to the city. In fact, we came back to an apartment only four blocks away from our old place, so I guess we liked the old neighborhood. We came back in part because of Jeanne’s preferences, but perhaps the overriding reason was my health. Northern Westchester Hospital Center is an excellent facility, and being on the board certainly assured that I would get extra-special treatment; but with the twin conditions of heart disease and AIDS, I felt more comfortable at New York Hospital.

  I have watched and am watching Camera grow. With all my own physical problems, her positive robustness has been a godsend to me, a daily reaffirmation of the power of life. Like all children, she has her naughty side. For example, I am amazed to see how easily a lovely, sweet child can turn unashamedly vindictive. But that is life. I marvel at the way she has no interest in being the center of attention but still enjoys being with other people.

  I had no idea that I would love fatherhood as much as I do. I have an acute sense of responsibility for her—to help her, teach her, protect her, and (most of all) to love her.

  In matters of discipline, I know I can’t go the way of my father. He was of the old school; his word was law, and he enforced the law with his thick police belt. You disobeyed at your peril. He was never in any way brutal to us, but I don’t think I can be the same kind of father. Times have changed. I am not like my father, and Jeanne is even less so. I also watched my brother, Johnnie, and his wife, Sandra, bring up their daughter, Luchia, and I have tried to learn from them. I have also learned from my stepsister, Loretta, and her husband, David Harris, whose children, LaChandra and David, Jr., are outstanding young people.

  Among the youngsters in our family, Luchia is probably the star. She will graduate with excellent grades from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, which is a highly competitive institution. I saw how Johnnie and Sandra tried to expose her to enriching experiences, so that Luchia was able to pursue her love of dance and also to take part, when she wanted to,
in beauty and talent competitions. I also watched carefully to see how Johnnie exerted discipline over her—very carefully. Johnnie was a career Marine officer, but when it comes to a father and his daughter, the Marine tradition often goes right out the window, apparently. Love and compassion take over. If Camera can be like Luchia, we would be very pleased. But she doesn’t have to be. We are simply not going to put undue pressure on her to succeed. She loves her mommy and daddy, and we are ecstatic about her.

  I do not take her or her health for granted. Children seem immortal. But I know how quickly they can be taken away. Like many well-known athletes, I have been to my share of children’s hospitals, trying to cheer up the sick. Often you meet kids who are going to be well, but just as often you meet kids who you know are going to die soon. It is heartbreaking.

  I have experienced some sad days in my life, but few as harrowing as the day in Westport, Connecticut, only a few years ago when I was a pallbearer at the funeral of Alex Deford, the daughter of my good friend Frank Deford. Alex died of cystic fibrosis, at the age of eight.

  So I take nothing about Camera for granted. I guess by now I take nothing about anything for granted. Few things have worked out exactly as I thought they would, and my life has taken curious turns.

  This is my middle passage, but because of my illnesses I have to face the fact that it is both a middle passage and probably a terminus. I can’t avoid the fact that AIDS is a terminal disease. No doubt science will one day come up with a vaccine, or even a way to reverse the effects of AIDS itself in the human body. But that will be a cure for other people, too late for me.

  Meanwhile, I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full.