Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  As quiet and self-contained as she was, the house felt empty and unbearably silent after she was gone. The girls were all off on their own, two now married and living back east, the youngest away at college. Robert, along with Alice’s mother, Pearl, returned disheartened from the interment and took up their positions in their respective corners of the echoing mansion. As big as it was, it was feeling too small for two people so different from each other, who had put up an appearance of cordiality only to appease the one thing they had in common—sweet and devoted Alice. Neither had liked how the other seemed to control her, and now the reason they endured each other was gone and not coming back.

  Each missed her more than they could have possibly anticipated. Even Robert—who had directed her choice of clothing, dissected her every attribute and deficit, stayed out late tending his patients and his vices, and taken for granted that she would be there whenever he needed her—felt her absence perhaps more than her presence now that he no longer had it.

  With each passing day, Pearl grew angrier and more resentful. Of all the people in her life and all the people she had known and loved, here she was left with the one she least wanted to be around. How was it that the two of them had survived? It would never have occurred to her when she moved to Los Angeles, a widow from Atlanta, into the new wing Robert had built for her that her daughter would precede both of them in death and that so full a house would come down to just these two.

  Now Robert was asking her to contribute a little in rent each month, which she took as an insult, given how the Clements had helped them in the early years of their marriage and how she had just now lost her only child. Robert thought it was only fair, given that he had vowed to take care of her daughter, not her, but still had done so, even building a wing for her, from the time Rufus Clement had died seven years before. He knew that Pearl had the money to share the household expenses from Clement’s pension and estate. And, besides, Robert said, “I had given her anything she wanted.” They could come to no agreement, and matters only grew worse.

  The gambler and the socialite were marooned in a house that was big, but not big enough to escape each other. They were the oddest of couples and each was all that the other had. Day after day, he went to his office, hoping to avoid her on the way out. Day after day, she was stuck in the house where every lamp and figurine reminded her of the daughter she had lost.

  She had never wanted to be part of the Great Migration or come out to California. She had lived her whole life in the South and was in Los Angeles only because her daughter’s husband had been so insistent on fleeing the South and had taken Alice and the girls with him. Now, with Alice gone, she was alone in a city she had never wanted to be in. She had little to fill the hours. Robert and Pearl ground through their days in slow motion and tried to pretend the other wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t long until she realized she couldn’t take it anymore. She could no longer hold in the resentment. One day, she broke the silence.

  “Why did you have to be the one to live, and not my daughter?” she finally said.

  She had gotten it out, and there was nothing left to say after that. The tension had likely been building up from the moment they’d met. Her time in the house couldn’t last much longer. She packed her belongings and moved back to Kentucky, where her late husband and daughter were buried. And Robert was alone in the house and with himself for the first time in his life.

  CHICAGO, FEBRUARY 1975

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IDA MAE’S SISTER IRENE, the one who had urged Ida Mae to come north in the first place, saying, “I just wouldn’t stay down there if I was you,” and whom they moved in with upon arrival, was having eye surgery. She hoped Ida Mae would come up to Milwaukee to help her while she recovered. Ida Mae wanted to go but wasn’t sure she would be able to.

  There was so much going on in Ida Mae’s household with everybody either coming or going to work and trying to take care of the grandkids, who were teenagers now, and get to church on time and pay the light bill and the house note. Ida Mae couldn’t drive and didn’t have a way to get there. And it was the darkest days of winter.

  George and Ida Mae were not the youthful innocents fleeing the hard soil of the South for Chicago as they had been all those years ago. They were in their sixties now—George was sixty-eight and Ida Mae was sixty-two. They had lived in Chicago for longer than they had been in Mississippi and were still working, which they had been doing in one form or the other from the time they could pick up a hoe or reach over a wash pot.

  They had reached the point in life where everyone around them seemed to be succumbing to something—high blood pressure, diabetes, which they called sugar, cancer, stroke, hysterectomies, heart attacks, or some combination of them all.

  Ida Mae had had to go back to Mississippi some years before to see about her ailing mother. Miss Theenie had collapsed from a stroke and, isolated in the country as she was, had lain out in her yard, unable to move, for more than a day until someone happened to pass by on that lonely gravel road and see her. Miss Theenie did not live too much longer after that. Ida Mae went down to the funeral in the spring of 1959 and grieved mightily over it, but she had a family of her own to tend to.

  Ida Mae herself had finally gotten over her fear of hospitals and had the hysterectomy her doctor said she needed. George had an enlarged heart and had already suffered two heart attacks. Each time, the family managed to get him to go to the hospital. But, stubborn as he was and disbelieving and suspicious of northern medicine, he wouldn’t submit to any surgery or medication upon release—the nitroglycerin or beta-blockers that would have been standard at the time. To him that was just some kind of northern trickery and against his faith in God.

  “He didn’t have no medicine ’cause if he had it, he wouldn’t take it,” Ida Mae said. “He would never believe nothin’ was wrong with him. He didn’t believe in no doctors.”

  Whatever he was feeling, he just said it was indigestion. Once when he went to the hospital, the triage nurse was asking him about his symptoms.

  “Don’t ask so many questions,” he told her. “Just do something for me and ask questions later.”

  Now her beloved big sister Irene was needing her, and Ida Mae was trying to figure out how to get to her. George told her she should stay home, tend to the family, and go to church. But it turned out that a friend named Evelyn happened to be heading to Milwaukee at around the same time, and Ida Mae’s daughter Eleanor told her she should make up her own mind and go see about her sister. Eleanor agreed to go with her.

  They helped Irene as best they could. When they arrived back in Chicago and pulled up to the house, they knew something was wrong. It was a Sunday, midday, and George’s Chevrolet was still parked out front when he should have been at church.

  Ida Mae and Eleanor walked into the vestibule. James came right out. He told them George had had another heart attack while Ida Mae was away. It was the third one her husband had had. It struck him that morning. This time he didn’t come back from the hospital.

  James broke the news to Ida Mae and Eleanor that George had passed away. “They had to pick both of us up off the floor of the vestibule,” Ida Mae said.

  She thought back to the start of the weekend. How she had chosen to see about her sister instead of staying home. How, the night before she left, the cat had slapped her in the face.

  “I should have known then,” Ida Mae said.

  She remembered George’s warning her over and over, “Now you work and make your own money,” he used to say, “ ’cause one day I ain’t gon’ be here.”

  She thought about his last heart attack. “The doctor said he’d never pull out of another one,” she remembered.

  Even Irene said she knew something was about to happen, although it wasn’t clear exactly how. “Ida Mae, I started to tell you to go back home,” Irene said after she learned that George had died.

  James said he had found him.

  “His arm
was as hard as this seat.”

  “No, I found him,” his wife, Mary Ann, said.

  “No, you didn’t,” James said. “You fell out in the hallway.”

  “I should have been there,” Ida Mae said in one of her rare displays of regret. For forty-five years, she had been the dutiful wife of a hard-working and stoic man, cooking and cleaning after him and obeying him—most of the time—like the pastor had said to do. And here, when he needed her, in his last moments on this earth, she wasn’t there.

  She tried to remind herself why she had gone. “Eleanor said I was always doing what he said to do,” she remembered. “She said I should go on up and see about my sister. I ain’t saying he’d a lived. George went to a funeral that Saturday. Something told me, ‘Ida Mae, you better stay here.’ … You think about these things.”

  She mulled this over in the days after his death. Then Ida Mae dried her tears and consoled herself with something her husband used to say.

  “He always said the Lord wasn’t gon’ let him suffer,” Ida Mae said. He had suffered enough in his life. He had been a good provider, and he had kept his faith that God, who had delivered them from Mississippi, would look after him in the end.

  He was right. He was the one who used to open up the church. He had set out his suit, shirt, shoes, and tie well in advance so he would be ready that Sunday. “He died in his sleep,” Eleanor said, “with his hand over his heart like somebody had placed it there.”

  NEW YORK, 1978

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  ALL THE SORROWS caught up with Inez. There would be scientific and medical explanations for what befell her. But those who knew her could see the storm whirling inside her, which she had tried to suppress, a thousand little heartaches since coming into the world just as her mother left it and being hooked now into a marriage born of adolescent love but mostly of spite.

  Her churlishness had managed to alienate so many people, perhaps without intending to, but people didn’t tend to stay around long enough to figure out the motivation. The one thing she categorically loved most in this life, her firstborn, Gerard, had broken her heart with his addictions. The drugs had turned him into a stranger and stolen her son from her.

  She would never fully get over it. And as Gerard sank further and, by some miracle, came out of it, only to sink back again, she and George moved further apart. George practically had a second family, distant though he was, now that he had a son by another woman. But he stayed in the marriage out of a distorted sense of honor and duty rather than truly wanting to be there, and Inez had to live with that, too. The New World had been a land of milk and honey, of a hard-won measure of freedom and working-class achievements—the Harlem brownstone, the insurance policies and certificates of deposit, the upstairs tenants who brought in extra income, the furniture, cars, and appliances, the steady if monotonous jobs that impressed the folks back home—but they had come at a steep price.

  Inez suffered under the weight of her disappointments and the mirage of what, from Florida, looked like a well-lived life in the North. By early 1978, the heartaches caught up with her. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and succumbed later that year.

  Even as her body failed her and she had little time left on this earth, she and George circled each other, could not break through the hurts and recriminations that had built up over the decades since he had grabbed her by the hand and ushered her into the magistrate’s office back in Florida to get back at his father. Her passing lent a finality to that error in judgment. They had lived with it but had not been happy, and the marriage ended more sorrowfully than either of them could have ever imagined that spring day back in Florida in 1939.

  LOS ANGELES, 1978

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  WHEN ALICE DIED, so did the highbrow social theater she and Robert had shared in Los Angeles. Robert would no longer keep open the private salons of the finest department stores to find some heavily beaded gown for Alice. The invitations to this or that black-tie function evaporated. The phone didn’t ring as much. With Pearl gone back to Kentucky, he had the whole house to himself.

  Even the office didn’t feel the same. What was he raking in all this money for if he couldn’t spend it on someone he could show off and brag about? He was going on sixty now, and it was time he started thinking about letting his private practice go and taking a more predictable position at a hospital somewhere. He wouldn’t have to worry about managing an office or patients needing him in the middle of the night. He could spend more time out in Vegas or at the track, doing what he wanted to do, what he came out to California for in the first place.

  He decided to take a staff position at the Veterans Hospital in Brentwood. It would allow him to focus on medicine and his patients, not on rent, utilities, and payroll. It seemed a perfect fit. He was a veteran after all.

  His life would now revolve around carpools to the hospital, treating the same kind of people he treated when he was in the army in Austria—rather like going back in time. And then there were the trips to Vegas whenever he could get away.

  It was nothing for him to catch a plane to Vegas after work, gamble all night, fly back the next morning, and make it to his office just in time for his first patient.

  “It was a sickness,” said Limuary Jordan, who knew him in Monroe and in Los Angeles and had little patience for him. “I know for a fact that here’s a man who could make five hundred or six hundred dollars a day in his office back in the seventies and still had to go and gamble in Vegas, go play his blackjack.”

  He would arrive at the Las Vegas Hilton and, unlike his first trip back in the fifties, would be ushered to one of the best rooms in the house. “The room was comp,” Robert said.

  “The meals were comp.” He was betting so much money, the casino at the Hilton could be assured it would get the cost of them back, and more.

  Robert would head to the casino and start playing blackjack or the roulette wheel. Mostly blackjack. Of course, there were no clocks or windows. None of the gamblers knew whether it was day or night. It didn’t matter to Robert because he could play for almost twenty-four hours straight anyway.

  “I don’t know when to get up,” Robert said.

  There were times, lots of times, when he lost, in a matter of minutes, more than some people made in three or four years on a fairly decent job. And when he lost, he just kept playing, feeling it in his bones that the next hand, the next game, would be the one to turn things around. He could rise out of the hole and get back in it for hours or days. He could get away with losing great sums of money because the casino knew he was good for it.

  During one particularly rough stretch, he had a run of good luck and then sudden, heart-stoppingly bad luck. He was betting heavy and winning at first. He got cocky enough to tell the man in the casino cage that he was going to give him ten percent of whatever he won. He got to ten thousand, eleven thousand, twelve thousand, thirteen thousand dollars, and started attracting the attention of other gamblers around him.

  Then nothing seemed to go his way.

  He usually took someone with him—a nurse, a patient, another gambling buddy—to keep track of his winnings so he could concentrate on his game. When he hit it big, whoever was with him could count on getting a few thousand dollars from him to take back to Los Angeles. When he was losing, they sat helpless and watching. His nurse from the office was with him this time. As Robert’s fortunes rose and fell by the hundreds with each bet, she started to notice something and tried to bring it to his attention.

  “You know,” the nurse began, “seems like every time you get to thirteen thousand dollars, you start losing.”

  That would not have been enough to stop him. It was not one of his better trips. But it was Vegas, and there was always another day. He was always playing to the crowd, knew all the casino workers, and loved it. Whatever he lost, he figured he would make it up tomorrow.

  One time, Jimmy Gay, the man who had introduced Robert to Vegas and had
been a boyhood friend of Limuary’s in the small world of southerners in the L.A.-Vegas circuit, ran into Robert after a big win.

  Robert had forty or fifty thousand dollars in front of him, and Jimmy wanted to intercede to keep him from losing it.

  “Bob, let me go put it up for you,” Jimmy said.

  “No, I can handle my money,” Robert shot back. “I’m a grown man. I don’t need nobody to handle my money.”

  A couple hours later, Robert came back, wanting to borrow two thousand dollars.

  “He done lost that fifty thousand and wanted two thousand to get it back,” Limuary remembered. “Bob squandered a fortune.”

  But he seemed only to remember the times when he hit it big. It was what he lived for. Like the time when a friend who went with him had to keep up with the kind of money you only heard of in bank robberies. “We brought back fifty-three thousand dollars,” Robert said of one trip in the 1970s.

  “He came back with a paper sack full of money,” Limuary remembered, “and everybody knew his business on the job, and he’d pay all the people he owed.”

  But it was never really about the money for Robert. He had plenty coming in to begin with. It was hard really to know what it was about, except that he was weak for it and that deep inside him was a southerner with still a lot to prove. Gambling drew him, and he couldn’t stay away. When he couldn’t make it to Vegas, he bet on the horses at Santa Anita or played blackjack in a bare gymnasium of a space over by the Hollywood Park racetrack, anywhere he could escape into the nerve-jangling uncertainty and the rare seconds of elation that lasted only long enough to reel him back in.

  He was handling sums of money that people back in Monroe could not fathom. “He won and lost several fortunes of a lifetime,” Jimmy Marshall, his fellow migrant and friend, said.