“The crack” and I had not met. The speedball had been warning enough to me about seeking the big bang. It was altitude I looked for, sustained flight. But every drug I’d ever tried I had done so without thought, in an instant, so I wasn’t going to let myself think I could not fall that way, too. This law offended me, as did Dad’s approval of it. I would escape. Because my future was in Berlin, my future had not in my mind been criminalized.
Social policy made for unpredictable temperatures between Mom and Dad. The movement of history influenced their union, the way the stars unsettled the fates of others. Dad held that the law helped Chicago’s first black mayor by taking the responsibility for the War on Crimes from his shoulders. The mayor and his police force were obliged to enforce federal law. But Mom interpreted policy according to how it affected people she knew or could see. A lot of her crazies were plain gone, among the disappeared, methadone survivors who’d bent over and eaten the ground somewhere.
The threat of “the crack” was a ways off, in the boarded-up streets of Woodlawn and Englewood, streets where dead branches speared through burned-out box springs that had not yet been collected by the Department of Sanitation. But it was still Mayor Daley’s police force, not Harold Washington’s. Mom refused to wear the blue ribbons of the War Against Crime Week sponsored by the police department; she wouldn’t keep the porch light burning, in spite of what radio and TV said the black community was doing.
It wasn’t like Mom not to have any sympathy for the cop they’d found burned up in the trunk of a car a while back, and just because that man they chased from Cabrini-Green to the railroad tracks out on Western Avenue had a record didn’t mean that the cops were justified in shooting him. Dad countered that he had stolen a car and kidnapped a girl and brandished a gun at the squad car in pursuit so what else were the police going to do other than what the police tended to do in the first place. Mom said that was her point.
I said that Uncle Ralston would call a meeting in order to draft a statement of support for the police department’s Office of Professional Standards. Mom said Uncle Ralston would call a meeting about the need to establish a commission to investigate why petrified dog shit, those white turds, were no longer to be seen on our city’s streets. Uncle Ralston came to his office at the Eagle every day, but he didn’t say much, Dad said.
The Eagle had always been on the side of the Chicago police, even during the infamous Democratic Convention, when Dad physically restrained Mom, tackled her in order to keep her from reaching the front door. Solomon had jumped on Dad’s back, screaming that he was hurting Mom. That was when Mom gave up and stayed home. We’d never seen Dad like that. Rhonda came out of her hiding place and sat with him. Ronald found excuses to be around Solomon. Mom hugged Cello and me and cried at the reports of teargassed demonstrators. She might have had friends among them. Dad said again that her place was with her children, in one piece.
The Eagle had also been on the side of the cops when the gangs took over everything soon after the riots. Dad got some friends from the university police to escort Mom around town when there was a possibility that a grand jury might call her to testify in the case of a gang leader who’d stolen the money nobody could believe the federal government had granted him for youth training programs. But the Eagle got nothing back from the police, or even from the mayor’s office of the time. Nothing happened when the Eagle championed the elderly; nothing happened when the Eagle criticized black youth.
“There’s nothing morally wrong with sulking,” I heard Dad tell Mom. She hit him, lightly, and the debate was over. He was her comfort. Her shelters for battered women had closed; so much had been rolled back, defunded. Mom’s crazies weren’t family, but they were her philosophy.
Dad was happiest when taking care of Mom, she who took care of the known world. She let him remove her calendars, her schedules, from the refrigerator and from inside the front hall closet. I didn’t go down to the basement to look at the calendars over her desk. The house was devoid of activity. Usually Mom would be on the phone, arranging a ride for an elderly person, looking around for a juvenile defender, advising a fledgling women’s group on how to apply for grants, willing to sit on hold with Cook County agencies. At the same time, there’d be someone trying to work off a loan by repairing the furnace he knew nothing about or someone repaying a favor by washing windows he was too worn out to do properly.
Her fellow committeewomen came and went throughout the day, soldiers for the Coleman Report. Around teatime, chubby white clergymen of a certain age or scrawny movement types would drop in. Now, as if overnight, there was none of that. Dad would come in early and sit with Mom. They liked to say that they first saw each other as small children at the 1933 World’s Fair and they never forgot. She’d get up and make dinner for us. I noticed that I talked more as the weeks went by. I stressed the importance of Rosen-Montag’s ideas to urban policy around the globe. Mom listened, but she didn’t know what to say. I’d given a made-up full description of what my life at Cello’s had been like. Mom listened, but didn’t answer.
Mom used to shed tears of pride over André Watts. She was confused when Cello turned seventeen and confessed that Watts didn’t send her the way he did Mom. They’d always been as one on such matters. Mom slowly went back to playing after Cello was gone. It had been years. She wasn’t ashamed of being rusty, she said. She did a little at a time. Dad said he could have exploded with pride the first time he came home and realized that it was Mom at the piano. Now he would go so far as to suggest a piece she might want to play for him, but she would hug her shoulders and look away. They were together a lot in their basement.
I knew that if Solomon had seen Mom taking pills, he would have asked questions. Instead, I let her sit with Dad and his games, leaning against him on the sofa, not reading. It really frightened me when I saw her race out to the front steps one frigid evening in order to cool her body down. Dad was up and after her. He caught her and fanned her with his U.S. News & World Report until she stopped wrestling and his magazine fell apart. Only other people seemed to find that kind of love.
* * *
I couldn’t believe that Mrs. Williams was alive. She’d been flunky to Cello’s grandmother since Cello’s grandmother got married. Mrs. Williams cooked for her, ironed for her, and at the end watched episode after episode of The Love Boat with her. Cello’s grandmother had not left her a penny, but Uncle Ralston — Dad, really, signing Uncle Ralston’s checks — looked after her. If Uncle Ralston had mistresses, then Cello’s grandmother had Mrs. Williams.
“Loretta Shay wanted to be Miss Anne so badly,” Mom said. She didn’t like to explain “black” things to her white friends. They would just have to catch on somehow that black women called white women Miss Anne, the way black men called white men Mr. Charlie. “Bossing that Williams woman made her feel like Miss Anne. Beulah, peel me a grape.”
Nobody had cozy stories about Mrs. Williams. She didn’t bake. She didn’t care about the rest of the family. She didn’t even look after Ralston Jr. She sided with the neglectful Loretta Shay. They both ignored him. Who knew that “Mrs.” Williams had a son of her own, brought up by her parents in Alabama, and maybe he was an illegitimate cousin — or half brother — to Ralston Jr. Now here was that son’s son, in our living room, clearly suffering from AIDS, brought over by Mrs. Williams to play for Mom.