A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [3]
Any sense I had of contented family life came to a jarring end when my father decided to leave and move to New York when I was four. I knew nothing of the tensions. My mother, who had dropped out of high school to pursue him, hoped he would return, a hope she nourished by sending him letters regularly. “We all love you very much, and are trying to understand you,” she wrote. “Try and do the same for us.” When Chubby Checker became a sensation, she wrote, “The kids have gotten so they twist on everything; every kind of beat.” She would include little notes from us in her letters. Rhonda’s penmanship was remarkably clear at age five or six. Mine was horrible.
My father sent some money once or twice a year, and the landlord was kind about waiving the rent for months at a time. But our finances went from tenuous to desperate, and we had to move. We were offered an apartment in the new Robert Taylor Homes, but my mother could not bring herself to live there, still hoping, I think, for her husband’s return.
There would be no reconciliation. My mother tried to make it on her own for a few years, mostly with the help of welfare, but feeling lonesome and needing help, she moved us into her parents’ apartment on Wabash Avenue. Since we spent so much time there anyway and I adored my Gram and Poppy, I thought this was a great idea. Little did I know that for my mother it was a sign of defeat, and that my grandmother made her feel like it was for many years.
The tenement that we lived in with my grandparents consisted of four apartments on two levels with two separate entrances. The apartments were identical, long and narrow. Ours was on the first floor. The door from the small, tiled vestibule opened on a dark, narrow hall. To the right, with a window on Wabash Avenue, was the living room with a gold upholstered sofa with clear plastic slipcovers, a dark green leatherette recliner, and a light brown stuffed chair, also covered in plastic, facing the television. That television, with its oversized cabinet and small screen, seems to have always been on and at full volume, whether for Gram’s soaps (her “stories”) during the day or the network news in the evening. It took a long time to warm up, so we had to plan ahead if there was something we didn’t want to miss. The firehouse across the street had two trucks with an uncanny ability to roar off, sirens wailing, just at the punch line of a favorite sitcom.
Next down the hall was my grandparents’ room, small and orderly, with twin beds, a matching dresser and chest in walnut veneer, and a large radiator painted white with a tin pan or kettle on top to generate a little humidity in winter. I was born in this room, in my grandmother’s bed. She and my uncle Sonny assisted. There was no doctor; labor was brief. According to family legend, after Uncle Sonny cut and tied off the umbilical cord, Grandma wrapped me in a blanket and placed me in the warm oven with the door open until the doctor arrived. Grandma told this story every Thanksgiving when she was dressing the holiday turkey in the very same roasting pan that once held me.
My mother and sister and I occupied a smaller bedroom across from the one bathroom. It was furnished with bunk beds that took up most of the space. For a time we could double up, but eventually we had to rotate so that one of us would sleep on the floor. Whoever’s turn it was for “floor night” followed a ritual: you would lay down newspapers, then a thin blanket, then a sheet, then a threadbare cover. Part of the morning ritual was to disassemble all of this and stack it neatly under the bed. The room’s one window opened onto an air shaft and the neighbors’ window fifteen feet across.
At the end of the hall was a dining room, off of which was a small, rude kitchen with one bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling on a frayed cord. At