The Warmth of Other Suns (84 page)

They had reached the point in life where everyone around them seemed to be succumbing to something—high blood pressure, diabetes, which they called sugar, cancer, stroke, hysterectomies, heart attacks, or some combination of them all.

Ida Mae had had to go back to Mississippi some years before to see about her ailing mother. Miss Theenie had collapsed from a stroke and, isolated in the country as she was, had lain out in her yard, unable to move, for more than a day until someone happened to pass by on that lonely gravel road and see her. Miss Theenie did not live too much longer after that. Ida Mae went down to the funeral in the spring of 1959 and grieved mightily over it, but she had a family of her own to tend to.

Ida Mae herself had finally gotten over her fear of hospitals and had the hysterectomy her doctor said she needed. George had an enlarged heart and had already suffered two heart attacks. Each time, the family managed to get him to go to the hospital. But, stubborn as he was and disbelieving and suspicious of northern medicine, he wouldn’t submit to any surgery or medication upon release—the nitroglycerin or beta-blockers that would have been standard at the time. To him that was just some kind of northern trickery and against his faith in God.

“He didn’t have no medicine ’cause if he had it, he wouldn’t take it,” Ida Mae said. “He would never believe nothin’ was wrong with him. He didn’t believe in no doctors.”

Whatever he was feeling, he just said it was indigestion. Once when he went to the hospital, the triage nurse was asking him about his symptoms.

“Don’t ask so many questions,” he told her. “Just do something for me and ask questions later.”

Now her beloved big sister Irene was needing her, and Ida Mae was trying to figure out how to get to her. George told her she should stay home, tend to the family, and go to church. But it turned out that a friend named Evelyn happened to be heading to Milwaukee at around the same time, and Ida Mae’s daughter Eleanor told her she should make up her own mind and go see about her sister. Eleanor agreed to go with her.

They helped Irene as best they could. When they arrived back in Chicago and pulled up to the house, they knew something was wrong. It was a Sunday, midday, and George’s Chevrolet was still parked out front when he should have been at church.

Ida Mae and Eleanor walked into the vestibule. James came right out. He told them George had had another heart attack while Ida Mae was away. It was the third one her husband had had. It struck him that morning. This time he didn’t come back from the hospital.

James broke the news to Ida Mae and Eleanor that George had passed away. “They had to pick both of us up off the floor of the vestibule,” Ida Mae said.

She thought back to the start of the weekend. How she had chosen to see about her sister instead of staying home. How, the night before she left, the cat had slapped her in the face.

“I should have known then,” Ida Mae said.

She remembered George’s warning her over and over, “Now you work and make your own money,” he used to say, “ ’cause one day I ain’t gon’ be here.”

She thought about his last heart attack. “The doctor said he’d never pull out of another one,” she remembered.

Even Irene said she knew something was about to happen, although it wasn’t clear exactly how. “Ida Mae, I started to tell you to go back home,” Irene said after she learned that George had died.

James said he had found him.

“His arm was as hard as this seat.”

“No, I found him,” his wife, Mary Ann, said.

“No, you didn’t,” James said. “You fell out in the hallway.”

“I should have been there,” Ida Mae said in one of her rare displays of regret. For forty-five years, she had been the dutiful wife of a hard-working
and stoic man, cooking and cleaning after him and obeying him—most of the time—like the pastor had said to do. And here, when he needed her, in his last moments on this earth, she wasn’t there.

She tried to remind herself why she had gone. “Eleanor said I was always doing what he said to do,” she remembered. “She said I should go on up and see about my sister. I ain’t saying he’d a lived. George went to a funeral that Saturday. Something told me, ‘Ida Mae, you better stay here.’ … You think about these things.”

She mulled this over in the days after his death. Then Ida Mae dried her tears and consoled herself with something her husband used to say.

“He always said the Lord wasn’t gon’ let him suffer,” Ida Mae said. He had suffered enough in his life. He had been a good provider, and he had kept his faith that God, who had delivered them from Mississippi, would look after him in the end.

He was right. He was the one who used to open up the church. He had set out his suit, shirt, shoes, and tie well in advance so he would be ready that Sunday. “He died in his sleep,” Eleanor said, “with his hand over his heart like somebody had placed it there.”

ALL THE SORROWS
caught up with Inez. There would be scientific and medical explanations for what befell her. But those who knew her could see the storm whirling inside her, which she had tried to suppress, a thousand little heartaches since coming into the world just as her mother left it and being hooked now into a marriage born of adolescent love but mostly of spite.

Her churlishness had managed to alienate so many people, perhaps without intending to, but people didn’t tend to stay around long enough to figure out the motivation. The one thing she categorically loved most in this life, her firstborn, Gerard, had broken her heart with his addictions. The drugs had turned him into a stranger and stolen her son from her.

She would never fully get over it. And as Gerard sank further and, by some miracle, came out of it, only to sink back again, she and George moved further apart. George practically had a second family, distant though he was, now that he had a son by another woman. But he stayed in the marriage out of a distorted sense of honor and duty rather than truly wanting to be there, and Inez had to live with that, too. The New World had been a land of milk and honey, of a hard-won measure of freedom and working-class achievements—the Harlem brownstone, the insurance policies and certificates of deposit, the upstairs tenants who brought in extra income, the furniture, cars, and appliances, the steady if monotonous jobs that impressed the folks back home—but they had come at a steep price.

Inez suffered under the weight of her disappointments and the mirage of what, from Florida, looked like a well-lived life in the North. By early 1978, the heartaches caught up with her. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and succumbed later that year.

Even as her body failed her and she had little time left on this earth, she and George circled each other, could not break through the hurts and recriminations that had built up over the decades since he had grabbed her by the hand and ushered her into the magistrate’s office back in Florida to get back at his father. Her passing lent a finality to that error in judgment. They had lived with it but had not been happy, and the marriage ended more sorrowfully than either of them could have ever imagined that spring day back in Florida in 1939.

WHEN ALICE DIED
, so did the highbrow social theater she and Robert had shared in Los Angeles. Robert would no longer keep open the private salons of the finest department stores to find some heavily beaded gown for Alice. The invitations to this or that black-tie function evaporated. The phone didn’t ring as much. With Pearl gone back to Kentucky, he had the whole house to himself.

Even the office didn’t feel the same. What was he raking in all this money for if he couldn’t spend it on someone he could show off and brag about? He was going on sixty now, and it was time he started thinking about letting his private practice go and taking a more predictable position at a hospital somewhere. He wouldn’t have to worry about managing an office or patients needing him in the middle of the night. He could spend more time out in Vegas or at the track, doing what he wanted to do, what he came out to California for in the first place.

He decided to take a staff position at the Veterans Hospital in Brentwood. It would allow him to focus on medicine and his patients, not on rent, utilities, and payroll. It seemed a perfect fit. He was a veteran after all.

His life would now revolve around carpools to the hospital, treating the same kind of people he treated when he was in the army in Austria—rather like going back in time. And then there were the trips to Vegas whenever he could get away.

It was nothing for him to catch a plane to Vegas after work, gamble all night, fly back the next morning, and make it to his office just in time for his first patient.

“It was a sickness,” said Limuary Jordan, who knew him in Monroe and in Los Angeles and had little patience for him. “I know for a fact that here’s a man who could make five hundred or six hundred dollars a day in his office back in the seventies and still had to go and gamble in Vegas, go play his blackjack.”

He would arrive at the Las Vegas Hilton and, unlike his first trip back in the fifties, would be ushered to one of the best rooms in the house. “The room was comp,” Robert said.

“The meals were comp.” He was betting so much money, the casino at the Hilton could be assured it would get the cost of them back, and more.

Robert would head to the casino and start playing blackjack or the roulette wheel. Mostly blackjack. Of course, there were no clocks or windows. None of the gamblers knew whether it was day or night. It didn’t matter to Robert because he could play for almost twenty-four hours straight anyway.

“I don’t know when to get up,” Robert said.

There were times, lots of times, when he lost, in a matter of minutes, more than some people made in three or four years on a fairly decent job. And when he lost, he just kept playing, feeling it in his bones that the next hand, the next game, would be the one to turn things around.
He could rise out of the hole and get back in it for hours or days. He could get away with losing great sums of money because the casino knew he was good for it.

During one particularly rough stretch, he had a run of good luck and then sudden, heart-stoppingly bad luck. He was betting heavy and winning at first. He got cocky enough to tell the man in the casino cage that he was going to give him ten percent of whatever he won. He got to ten thousand, eleven thousand, twelve thousand, thirteen thousand dollars, and started attracting the attention of other gamblers around him.

Then nothing seemed to go his way.

He usually took someone with him—a nurse, a patient, another gambling buddy—to keep track of his winnings so he could concentrate on his game. When he hit it big, whoever was with him could count on getting a few thousand dollars from him to take back to Los Angeles. When he was losing, they sat helpless and watching. His nurse from the office was with him this time. As Robert’s fortunes rose and fell by the hundreds with each bet, she started to notice something and tried to bring it to his attention.