A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [44]
Apart from that episode, my years at Milton had begun to mature me. I was beginning to feel like an adult and was ready to communicate with the adults around me on a different level. One day, during the summer after graduation, my mother and I decided to take a walk. We started at the beach on Lake Shore Drive, around 57th Street near the Museum of Science and Industry, and headed north toward downtown along Lake Michigan. It was a clear, unhurried summer day, and I started asking her about the things Gram had told me the summer before, about the breakup of her marriage, about the poverty she tried to hide from us. She did not stop me or try to shut off the conversation, which was her usual way with delicate matters. Instead, with calm candor, she described her disappointment with my father, the humiliation she felt at having to move in with her parents, the conflicts she had with her own mother, the indignity of poverty, the embarrassment about her scarred face. It poured out of her in measured, mature conversation unlike any I had ever had before with my mother. I think we were both surprised. I’m sure she had long thought that I was incapable of understanding her life and struggles. And I expected my curiosity to be met with her customary distance and emotional barricades. But we kept talking, each of us finally appreciating the other. She did not want pity, just understanding. We kept talking and walking—all the way downtown and back. We covered a lot of miles … and a lot of ground.
The terrain with my father proved more difficult.
The summer after my freshman year at Harvard, I was hired by a management training program at Chemical Bank on Wall Street. I initially stayed with a friend from Milton whose family lived in one of those opulent buildings on Fifth Avenue in which the elevator opens directly into the apartment. I had never seen that before. I had arranged for my own place with some other guys, but it fell through, so I had to ask my father for help. He was living in Queens with a black dancer named Marianne, to whom he was either married or about to be married. He told me I could sleep there until I figured out other housing arrangements. I ended up staying for the whole summer.
They lived in a one-bedroom flat in an apartment complex off Hillside Avenue, just blocks, as it turned out, from where Diane grew up. I slept on a pull-out sofa in the living room, between their bedroom and the bathroom. We could not avoid one another, nor could we connect. My father disdained Harvard as much as he had Milton, and he continued to openly disapprove of the man I was becoming. It did not help that every day, to his amusement or disbelief, I dressed in a business suit, a tie, and “big boy shoes.” I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on the E train to Lower Manhattan, smack in the heart of the global financial district, and I walked confidently through the hushed corridors of the Chemical Bank headquarters.
The training program itself was mostly for minority students, and I became friends with other students from Princeton and Barnard. We were well paid for a summer job. We dined at nice restaurants, ordered drinks at the finest bars, and attended Broadway plays and the ballet. We were pretending to be part of the establishment—trying it on, so to speak, and having fun—but it was all just too much for my father. Our lifestyle was the final surrender