by Kia Corthron
In thinking of this, I can’t help but gaze upon my roommate here in the hospital. Asleep, as he often is, breathing uneasily. A very old white man in such bad shape that I don’t know how I could illustrate him in any way that would be both pleasing and honest. Too weak to walk to the bathroom, the nurses having to change his bedpans. He pushes the button often for this service, and the responses aren’t always prompt. His liver spots are multitudinous, only two or three white hairs left on his pink scalp. What teeth he still has are mostly rotten, and he is blind from age. A couple of times he’s cried out for relief, and once when the nurse came with “Feelin some pain now?” he replied, “I feel pain constant, jus now it’s unbearable.” Moreover he seems to be prone to elder confusion. Two days ago when my friends from the senior swim stopped by, we all laughed so heartily once that we startled him awake. I apologized. He had barely uttered a word to me before and I assumed he would be irritable, but he surprised me by saying, “No, go ahead. Yaw seem to be havin a good ole time.” He has a down-home quality to his voice that I like, much like my own before the decades with my educated and well-traveled spouse prompted the colorful character of my dialect to recede. I mention all this to say that, after seventeen years as a professional junkie, when I look at him I feel I’ve narrowly escaped looking in the mirror. I wasted my youth as an old man, and as an oldster I am finally young.
At three on the nose, I hear Lem greeting the staff at the nurses’ station. Regular visiting hours are 3 to 5 and 7 to 9, and my husband (if not yet recognized by law then by all else) doesn’t miss a minute. But I’m surprised to see Dawit walk in with him! “Hi, Dad.” Kissing me on the cheek.
“How’d you get off work so early?” He’s had a 9-to-5 in the East 60s on and off since earning his B.A. a year and a half ago, a state college three hours’ north. His major was French with independent study in Swahili, Somali, and of course Ethiopian Amharic, his sights set on extensive visits to his birth continent.
“I took off.” It’s good to see them both beaming, my first day fully “back.” I remember their shining frightened eyes the night before the procedure, but wanting to keep up my spirits. And I tried to convey to them, My spirits are up! Whatever happens tomorrow, the two of you have made the last quarter-century heaven on earth for me!
“But you already took off the day of my surgery.”
“Dad, it’s a temp job. I’m not risking my dream career here.”
“How’re ya feeling?” asks Lem, kissing me on the lips, and in reply I smile and nod. Sometimes I ponder whether this would bother my neighbor if he could see us. On the other hand, when Lem and I have been alone it would be clear by our intimate talk what the score is, and I’ve sensed no distaste from the bed near the window.
“So. Ready for your homecoming dinner tonight?”
“Yes,” I tell my partner, “a quiet evening at home.”
He grins. “Maybe not so quiet,” and in walks my nephew, holding the hand of a little girl.
“Rett!”
“Hey, Uncle Dwight.” Another kiss on my cheek.
“What are you doing back already? You already visited this summer!” I’m grinning ear to ear.
“What, I’m not welcome?”
“You know you’re always welcome.”
The nephew I held in my arms as an infant will be fifty next year. I know this well because he mentions it every time he calls. We grew close after that summer of ’83, him visiting a week every summer thereafter while I was in San Francisco, and twice a year since I moved to New York both because he loves the city and because he has always treated my son like the kid brother he never had, with little Dawit equally crazy about his cousin Rett. Soon after receiving his B.A. my nephew landed some administrative government job in Indianapolis and has been there since, bored and lonely.
He met Imani there. They’d known each other only a year before making their vows, which worried me but given my hasty courtship with Lem and ludicrously ever-after happiness, my nephew could not take my warnings seriously. Too soon after the ceremony the only conversations he and his wife were having were conducted at the top of their lungs, and their second anniversary had just passed when they found themselves in the disastrous position of her being pregnant and wanting to keep the baby while simultaneously filing for divorce. The decree, with the stipulation that he would have their future child on weekends, went through the same day she went into labor. Months after the dissolution of his marriage, Rett suffered another aching loss with the death of the kitten he had adopted from Humble, which he had indeed dubbed “Parker” and spoiled rotten, perhaps contributing to the animal’s incredible longevity (twenty-two years).
My nephew adores his daughter and worries that she will one day resent that he was not a daily presence in her life. He worries that Imani was his only chance for happiness. He worries that, with no such role model, how could he possibly be a good father? I tell him he worries too much. That he has happiness with his child. That his romantic life need not be over and even if it is, he needn’t be unhappy. Remember his parents’ old friend Didi? She’d never married nor had children but did have many, many good friends, and that doesn’t count her enormous fan base from her novel writing, so numerous most had to stand on the street, not fitting into the large church for her funeral back in ’06. She was seventy-two. From my perspective now that seems so young, struck in her prime. When I would speak of these things my nephew would become quiet and nod, unsmiling. He’d met Didi a few times and like everyone else was always charmed by her infectious joie de vivre, but was skeptical that such bliss could ever be a part of his own existence.
And what happens to an eight-year-old boy who accidentally comes across the newspaper photograph of his father, the gruesome mass that was discovered by those teenagers—beaten, blinded, burned, bloated by days in the river? Rett knew of Eliot’s work, but as of yet hadn’t asked how he died. Andi had planned to tell him the truth when she deemed him old enough. What her son had been looking for when he stood on that chair, going through things at the top of her closet, no one ever found out. And there, in the hatbox. Clippings from the local papers of Humble, Prayer Ridge, and Indianapolis: the half-smiling photo of Eliot next to the monster into which those monsters had transformed him. Little Rett began screaming, and petrified Andi came running, and when she saw what he held in his hands she began sobbing. It seemed, she told me, that her son cried incessantly for months, had nightmares for years.
I imagine he occasionally has them still, as do I. The terror had begun the day after—our terror, as Eliot had been through his own a thousand times over the night before—when the Coatses’ phone service had been restored, and Martha called Rosie to ask if Eliot had gotten on his way back to Indianapolis alright that morning, and Rosie had nearly dropped the receiver. Beau had instantly gotten into his car, driven the road between Nathan and Prayer Ridge and found the upturned station wagon. He notified the local police and phoned Andi at the office, who immediately phoned my father. Until that moment we didn’t even know Eliot was in Alabama. When Dad called me he sounded delirious, this so soon after my mother’s death, and from what he reported I prayed he was delirious, some symptom of widower’s grief. I spoke to him in a calm voice, telling him that he must have misunderstood, that everything will be fine, there’s an explanation, and I hung up to call Andi at Winston Douglas and Associates, my fingers trembling in the rotary. Every day of the next nine was increasingly terrifying, as each of our desperate logical rationalizations, even after the discovery of the teeth, fell by the wayside with no word from Eliot, and I happened to be with my father on that fateful tenth day when the call from the Prayer Ridge police came through. He was bawling, hysterical, I had no idea what they were telling him and yet I knew exactly what they were telling him, and I fell silent, staring into space. He got off the phone, still sobbing, saying nothing, and me saying nothing, an hour or more passing before his te
ars had subsided and he finally spoke: “Well. Guess we have to make arrangements,” and then I was the one hysterical, and my father came to me and we held each other, shaking and crying. And we hadn’t yet even seen the dreaded photo, nor read the coroner’s report with the grisly details. The dental identification rendered our positive ID unnecessary, and still we went: We needed to bring him home. Parked outside the Prayer Ridge Morgue we wept for an hour, then gathered our strength to see Eliot. When we were at last looking down at him our horror strangely seemed to fade, and we were overcome with our relief to finally be with him, my father holding his left hand and I holding what was left of his right.
And now, in my hospital room, as I’m speaking to my nephew I cannot take my eyes off the child with him. Eliot’s granddaughter. Two plaits, curved like parentheses around her head, in red plastic barrettes. A red jumper, high-top sneakers. Her complexion very dark, her eyes a medium brown with gold specks. She and I have met only once before. Her mother’s fundamentalist Christian family is homophobic, and Imani had refused permission for Rett to bring their daughter with him to see me. (That Lem and I frequently attend a diverse, gay-friendly church was not even worth mentioning.) And then we came to Indianapolis: Andi’s funeral.
Eliot’s dear friend and lover had lived to ninety-two, active till the end, dying peacefully in her sleep. She’d had two husbands but with Eliot, her son’s father, she considered herself widowed thrice. She didn’t remarry until Rett was twenty-five, living on his own, and she was sixty-seven. Hal Frome, a recently retired college history professor, proved to be a wonderful partner to Andi and confidant to Rett for the next fourteen years until 1999, his own quiet death at home.
The little girl, who had adored her paternal grandmother, had heard the words, passed on, left us, died, but Eloise was too young to comprehend that Granmama would not be coming back in a few days, that death is forever. When a week later she was told she couldn’t visit her grandmother, she had apparently thrown an irrepressible tantrum. She wasn’t at the funeral but I glimpsed her at the dinner. Rett introduced Lem and me to Imani, who was cool but polite. Still, we must not have made a bad impression, or else the loss of Andi in the lives of her daughter and ex-husband had softened her, or both. When Rett visited in June, he said he thought Imani was on the verge of relaxing the New York travel ban on the child.
“Remember Great-uncle Dwight? From Granmama’s funeral?” The girl shyly holds onto her father’s leg, half turning her face away while keeping her watchful pupils on me.
“Hey Mr. Campbell.” We look up. Dawit’s latest girlfriend entering, the one who came to dinner the other night. Perhaps she stopped off to go to the bathroom.
“Oh hello there uh—”
“Safiya,” they both say. Dark hair, eyes. My son is a good-looking boy and well aware of it. He has had all varieties, and races, of girls. But if this one’s white it will be, to my knowledge, a first.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Feeling pretty good for eighty-one.”
“Eighty-one?” Her mouth hangs open, revealing a wad of gum she’d previously concealed.
“Dawit’s geriatric daddy,” I say and smile.
“I thought you were in your fifties,” and I know she’s not lying because the hospital personnel have said the same. I can’t help but wonder what they would have thought had they seen the skeleton of me thirty years ago, for nourishment begging for a needle before a noodle.
“I brought you a welcome home present, Uncle Dwight.” All these years it seems Rett has kept the same dark spectacles frames. He hands me the offering and I unwrap it.
“How old is she?” asks Safiya.
“Be five November,” says Rett. “Kindergarten next year.”
The gift is a pile of about ten old magazines.
“Some stuff I found going through Mom’s old things. It was the world the year my father died. I thought you might be interested.”
This is Rett, his mind. The quirkiest gift, no one else would think of such a thing. “I love it,” I say, and mean it.
“Can I see?” says Dawit, already coming over.
“Careful,” admonishes Rett, big-brothering Dawit as always.
“You know who you’re named after?” I ask my great-niece. She stares at me.
“You know,” says Rett. Her eyes flash at her father, as if his pressuring her to speak were a betrayal.
“Life. Time. Look. Look?” Dawit stares at the logo.
“I remember Look,” Lem tells our son. “Long time ago.”
“The Saturday Evening Post!” Safiya peering over Dawit’s shoulder. “That a Rockwell?”
“Eliot!” The baby, aware of having lost a captive audience, now pipes up.
“That’s right!” I smile. “Your grandfather Eliot.” Eloise grins, and in her dimples I see a little of him.
Rett gingerly blows dust from an ancient Newsweek as his cousin picks up the next item on the pile. “Oh this is all about the Greensboro Woolworth’s sit-in!” And Dawit instantly sets down the journal and reaches for an Ebony, his smile of anticipation having transformed into his signature smirk. “I think this might get a little closer to the truth,” as he begins perusing the pages. I am reminded of a summer when his fervent ambition was to become a rap star after high school graduation, and though Lem’s and my fervent ambitions for him involved college, we had to admit he was pretty good: cleverly rhyming Ebony and “seventy” as part of some astute meditation on being young and black in the new millennium. My husband and I did not want to be colonialists—taking a child from a developing nation and erasing his background—and thus we taught him as much as we could about Ethiopia, it being among the first words he could speak, and still: the boy is all African American, with emphasis on the noun.
Eloise and Rett are whispering. Eloise doesn’t look happy.
“What’s going on there?”
Rett shakes his head. “I always promised her one day I’d take her to New York and we’d see the Statue of Liberty. But I just told her next time.”
“Why next time?”
“When you’re well enough to come with us.”
“You can take her tomorrow, I can spare you a few minutes.”
“A few minutes?” Dawit looking up. “You know lines’ll be a mile long.”
“Take the Staten Island Ferry,” Safiya suggests. “You get a close look, and it’s free.”
“Or,” inserts Lem, “the Central Park Zoo.”
“Zoo!” Eloise jumps up, clapping her hands.
But Rett frowns. “Are the animals treated well?”
“The zoo, the zoo!” I’m glancing at my roommate to make sure our chatter isn’t bothering him, but his unseeing eyes are directed toward Wheel of Fortune, a vague smile on his contented lips.
“Yeah, it’s progressive,” Dawit states, though he wears that expression he gets when he’s not quite sure what he’s talking about. “I mean, the Bronx has big space for the animals, and it’s all part of the same system. Right?”
“And Central Park has the petting zoo,” Safiya adds.
“Petting zoo!”
“Okay, I guess that’s exploitative.” Dawit catching Rett’s eye. “But I read where they have to do that entertainment crap, to get funding. Then they can do the stuff they need to do: protect endangered species. Which they have.”
“My mom and dad used to take me,” says Safiya.
“My dads used to take me,” Dawit smiles at us. “Long time ago.”
“Not so long,” I say, gazing at my son, remembering like yesterday his five-year-old curiosity, petting the llama.
“I don’t know. I saw this documentary recently,” Rett begins, and perhaps because the word is immediately repeated on the television we are all drawn to it. My channel-surfing roommate had just settled on a local news report about a Muslim immigrant
taxi driver stabbed by a white male passenger, a student documentary filmmaker. The victim survived. For a moment we’re quiet, watching. Lem shakes his head. “Some world.”
“Nutcases,” Dawit mutters.
“What about all the fuss over the Islamic Cultural Center?” Safiya asks her boyfriend.
“They’re building it near Ground Zero,” Dawit informs his cousin.
“I heard,” Rett murmurs.
“Muslims were in the Towers too!” cries Safiya.
“Muslims were among the rescuing firemen,” Dawit remarks.
“But the picketers don’t wanna hear that,” says Safiya.
“Les crétins,” Dawit says.
“Remember that Sikh man in Arizona shot to death after 9/11? Whoops, they mistook him for Muslim, God, why don’t they just lynch us all!”
The room goes suddenly silent, with only the low-volume TV noise, and now I remember: our dinner table last week, Safiya and Dawit in a discussion over something and the mention that she and her family are Palestinian. Her face snaps to me now, the tears of a mortifying faux pas in her eyes, and I know Dawit has told her. “Sorry!”
A few moments pass, and then I say quietly, “I think you chose the right word there, Safiya.”
A nurse enters, walking to my roommate. “Feeling a little discomfort?” She holds a needle.
“Daddy, we going to the zoo tomorrow?”
“Well.” Noncommittal Rett looks down smiling, stroking his daughter’s hair.
“Penguins at the zoo,” Lem tells her.
“Elephants at the zoo!” she proclaims.
“No,” says Dawit. “The Central Park is a mini-zoo. You gotta go to the Bronx for the elephants.”
