A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [42]
My mother was brave but clearly devastated and maybe a little ashamed herself. In her youth, she had been known for her fine features and sassiness. She had clear, fair skin, auburn hair, a lithe, 5-foot-2 body, and a warm smile, dressed up in bright red lipstick. She liked to flirt. Old photographs show her sitting cross-legged and fetching at a jazz club or modeling for Jet magazine’s “Beauty of the Week,” wearing the fashions of the day, some borrowed from her job as a temporary sales clerk at the Saks Fifth Avenue on North Michigan Avenue.
But after my father left, the hardships on my mother accumulated. She continued to flirt but with less conviction, sporadically dating an operative in the Young Democrats Club on the South Side. Her delay in getting a divorce doomed that would-be romance. Then her body turned on her. She developed discoid lupus, which attacks the skin, and was so irritated by it that she scratched deep, permanent scars on her face. For a young coquette who took so much pride in her beauty, these scars brought her overwhelming shame and despair. They disfigured her face, and struck at the core of her self-image and confidence. Her cherished good looks vanishing, her finances always on the brink, she started a long, slow slide into bitterness and depression.
Tensions between my parents continued on a low boil until I was twelve, when the pot finally exploded. I was right in the middle of it. Ironically, my father’s love for music, which brought so much joy to so many, led to disaster.
My father tried to nurture my interest in music from a distance, which wasn’t hard. In addition to Gram’s spontaneous hymn singing around the house, my mother had a small collection of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan albums she could play on my grandparents’ hi-fi. Soul tunes poured from the AM stations on our transistors or from the 45s of Aretha Franklin, the Jackson 5, and later Marvin Gaye, whom we listened to in the phone-booth-sized spaces at the record store. Music was all around us. But just as my mother’s urging us to write letters was as much about her needs as ours, my father’s effort to interest me in music was also about him, not me.
When I was in middle school, he sent me a brochure for drum sets. At the time, I was taking lessons from a family friend, drumming on a set of practice pads and learning to read music, but I wasn’t very diligent. The drums in the brochure, however, sure looked beautiful. I thought if I had my own and heard how real drums sounded, I would dedicate myself, practicing in the basement of our apartment building. I even circled the set that I liked. I sent my father letters and made phone calls, lobbying for my own instrument. This was, my mother quickly reminded me, a crazy idea—we barely had enough money for clothes and school supplies, and my father had studiously avoided contributing funds for our necessities. Besides, I would wake the dead, not to mention the neighbors, banging away in close quarters. The last thing we needed was a drum set.
The issue might have died, except my father made one of his rare visits to Chicago and came to take me out for the afternoon—just me and my father on an afternoon outing. I was excited. My mother knew what he was up to.
“Don’t you get him a drum set,” she warned. It was practically a dare.
We promptly went downtown to the drum store.
“Which one do you like?” my father asked.
I told him that Mom said I couldn’t have one.
“Don’t worry about your mother,” he said. “You should have one.”
I sensed this was not going to end well, but I could hardly turn my back on new drums and even picked out some premium Zildjian cymbals. The set had to be delivered, but I was permitted to take the snare drum with me, packed in a smooth black leather case with a brand-new pair of drumsticks. I rode home in silence with a mixture of excitement and dread. I kept thinking