I jacked myself out of bed, threw on a robe, and sat again with a phone in my hands. I tried to pass the receiver to him, but he refused. He wasn’t the one she’d called. I dialed the number, methodical as scales. Again, the jangle of an American ring, followed by its transatlantic echo. Between each ring, I rejected a thousand opening words. Rootie. Root. Ms. Strom. Mrs. Rider. Laughing, grieving, begging her forgiveness. Nothing felt real. Ruth. It’s Joseph. Your brother.
Then the click of the receiver lifting on that other continent, the sound of a voice that killed all preparation. Instead of my sister, an old man. “Hello?” he challenged. A man who sounded a hundred years old. I froze in his voice, worse than stage fright. “Hello? Who’s there? Who is this?” On the line, in the room behind him, younger voices asked if there was something wrong.
Paths collapsed upon themselves. “Dr. Daley?” I asked. When he grunted, I said, “This is your grandson.”
The Visitation
During the call to Philadelphia, Jonah hovered at my elbow. But he wouldn’t take the phone when I handed it to him. Speech without pitches terrified him. He wanted me between him and where we came from. My grandfather put Ruth on the line. She tried to tell me what had happened to Robert, but she couldn’t begin. Her voice was past anger, past warmth, past memory. Past everything but shock. The month since her husband’s death had done nothing to help her back. Nor would years.
She got out two numb sentences. Then she gave me back to our grandfather. William Daley couldn’t quite grasp which of Ruth’s brothers I was. I said I’d very much like to meet him. “Young man, I turned ninety six weeks ago. If you want to meet me, you’d best catch the next flight out.”
I told Jonah I wanted to go. The idea of returning twisted Jonah’s face, half temptation, half disgust. “You can’t fix anything, Joey. You know that? You can’t fix what’s already happened.” But he pushed me away with his free hand while he pulled with the other. “No, of course. Go. One of us has to. It’s Ruth. She’s back.” He seemed to think I might at least fix the things that hadn’t happened yet.
I bought an open ticket. Ruth was back. But she’d never really left. We were the ones who’d gone away.
My uncle Michael met me at Philadelphia International. He wasn’t hard to pick out of the crowd. All I had to do was look. He picked me out, too, as soon as I came through the passenger chute. What could be easier? Bewildered, middle-aged, mixed-race boy gazing all over the place in excitement and shame. I moved toward him, holding my two carry-ons in front of me as if they were delinquent children. My uncle came up to me, as shaky as I was, but empty-handed. After a second’s hesitation, he took my shoulders with the strangest, most wonderful grace. Don’t know you. Don’t know why. But I will.
It amused him, how awkward two total strangers could be. We were total foreigners, connected by blood in another life. “You remember me?” Dazed, I did. I’d last seen him for all of four minutes, when I was thirteen, a third of a century ago, at my mother’s funeral. Even more remarkable: He remembered me. “You’ve changed. You’ve gotten…” He snapped his fingers, jogging his memory.
“Older?” I suggested. He clapped his hands and pointed at me: Bingo.
He took one of the bags and we walked the long concourse to the parking lot. He asked about the flight, Europe, and my brother. I asked about Ruth — alive; Dr. Daley — also, remarkably. Michael told me of his wife and children, his lot in life. He was a personnel officer at Penn. “Only do this chauffeur job in my after hours, when vanished relations come back from the dead.” He looked me up and down, in the wonder of genetic recognition. We looked more like each other than either of us could accept. He seemed to be deciding whether his own nephew could really be white.
His car was the Hindenburg. Years in a small foreign country will do that to a person’s sense of scale. Michael started the engine, and a burst of exuberance blared out of the dashboard. It was only two beats, but at a volume I’d forgotten, from a rhythm section wider than oppression is long. It had been forever since I’d heard anything like it. In something short of embarrassment, Michael leaned forward and snapped off the stream.
“Please. Don’t shut it off for me.”
“Just old R & B. My feel-good. My church. What I listen to when I’m alone.”
“It sounded like a dream.”
“You’d think a man well into his fifties would have outgrown that.”
“Not until we die.”
“Amen. And not even then.”
“I used to play that stuff.” He looked at me in disbelief. “In Atlantic City. Only, you know, solo piano. Tip glass on the music rack. Liberace Covers Motown. The old Eastern European émigrés who came down for holidays couldn’t get enough.”
Michael coughed so hard, I thought I’d have to take the wheel.
“People are strange.”
He whistled. “You got that. Stranger than anyone.” He flipped the radio back on, although he doused the volume. We listened together, each according to his needs. By the time we hit the heart of town, we were harmonizing. Michael did this outrageous full-pipe falsetto, and I hit the changes in the bass. He smiled at my passing tones. Theory can help get you through a shortfall of soul — at least in the easy keys.
We turned off the highway onto local streets. The size of the most modest apartment block amazed me after years in hunchbacked Ghent. We neared his boyhood house. Michael grew morose. “Rough times. Trickle down shakes the last few golden drops on inner Philly. Every cheap scrap of manufacture has headed offshore. Then it’s our fault for doing crack.”
I was at sea. I couldn’t even ask for definitions.
Michael looked out the window, seeing his old neighborhood through my eyes. His face was racked with betrayal. “You would have loved this street. So fine once. No way you can even recognize it now. We’ve been trying to get the doctor out of here for the last five years. He’s not moving. Insists on dying inside that monstrosity. Riding out the decline and fall until the house collapses around him or his body gives up, whichever comes first. ‘What would happen to Mama if we sold the house to strangers?’”
“Mama?” My grandmother. Nettie Ellen Daley. “Isn’t she…”
“Oh, yeah. Completely. Two years ago. The doctor hasn’t quite come into possession of the fact yet. A real ass-buster, I have to tell you. My sisters and me, coming all the way in here, five times a week. We go through caretakers like chocolate through a dog.”
His street indeed reeled from the present. Even the most stately old houses had died intestate. We slowed and turned into the driveway of an ample house bucking the tide around it. Michael flipped off the radio as we hit the driveway mouth. He caught me smiling at the gesture. “Old habit.”
“Not his music of choice?”
“Don’t get him started on it.”
We were still yards from the house. “His hearing’s really that good?”
“My Jesus, yes. You got it from somewhere, didn’t you?”
The shock of that thought was still banging around in me when a figure drifted out onto the lawn to meet us. A full, fluid, statuesque woman, one shade paler than I remembered her. I was out of the car without feeling myself leave. Michael stayed behind the wheel, giving us our minute. She had her head down as I closed the distance. She wouldn’t look at me. Then I put my arms around my sister.
Ruth wouldn’t hold still for the embrace. But she gave me more than I’d hoped, and I held her longer than I had all my life. Three full seconds: It was enough. She pulled free to look at me. She wore red robes and a green-and-black headdress that even I knew was supposed to invoke Africa. “Ruth. Let me look at you. Where’ve you been?”