The Warmth of Other Suns (81 page)

He was from the Old Country of Louisiana, believed in root doctors, and was suspicious after all he had seen in the South and West. He had pulled for Robert back at the VA, and he worried about what would happen to him after his trouble at the hospital.

“I’m not sure his kidneys went out on their own,” Spillers confided to me. “You have to watch a rattlesnake if you get in the bed with him.”

Charles Spillers felt he owed a debt to Robert as his physician even though he was too religious and superstitious to do some of what Robert told him. It was more that he felt inspired by him and appreciated Robert’s forewarnings, which Spillers promptly used as a cue to go see his root doctor.

“If it wasn’t for him, I would have been gone,” Spillers said.

He remembered the first time he went to see Robert in his office. “You’re just fading away right before me,” Robert had told him during the exam. “I’m going to admit you to the hospital.”

Spillers trusted the doctor but not the hospital and did not go. “The Holy Spirit came and told me don’t go to the hospital,” he said.

The man went to a root doctor instead, a woman from back south who was now in L.A. She plied him with root tea and Epsom salts in water. She made a fire in the house, even though it was August, and covered him with quilts until he sweated out the virus she believed to be in him. The fever broke, and he began to eat again and put weight back on.

Robert didn’t take it personally or prejudge the man. He had grown up in the South and knew and accepted its ways. And that endeared Robert to the man all the more. He felt he had Robert to thank for alerting him to the problem and for saving his life.

“He meant so much to so many people,” Spillers said. “I owe him so much.”

He had ridden the bus to see his doctor, who was now sick himself. He sat with him for a while and then prepared to leave. As he headed toward the door to catch the bus back home—not knowing how long the wait would be; this was, after all, L.A.—he turned to his old doctor and friend from the VA hospital with a mixture of worry and gratitude, and the sweet folk spirit of the ancestral South.

“
Dr. Foster
,” he said with heavy eyes, “
I’m lighting seven candles for you.
”

By the summer of 1997, Robert Foster was finding his world constricted and fewer reasons to wake up in the morning. The things he loved to do, he could no longer do. He couldn’t make it to the racetrack. Vegas was out of the question. His mansion on Victoria had become a glorious prison. The things he loved to eat, he could no longer get. His beloved nurse was ailing herself and no longer there to sneak him a half strip of bacon or a spoonful of peach cobbler. Then there were the twice-weekly trips to dialysis, which made him dread the start of every new week.

In late July, he went into the hospital for repair of a vein damaged by dialysis. He returned home weaker than before. Then, a few days later, on Sunday morning, August 3, he did not respond when called for breakfast. His left arm was motionless. He had suffered a massive stroke. He fell into a coma.

Word spread rapidly through the dwindling corps of original migrants from Monroe who had come out to California all those decades before.

Reatha Beck Smith, the widow of his old mentor Dr. Beck, who put Robert up when he first arrived in Los Angeles and who helped him get on his feet and open his office, rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard the news. She herself was in her nineties now and had her family and old friends from Louisiana with her. She saw him there lying motionless, the central and unforgettable figure of so many parallel worlds, who had saved so many lives but could not save his own.

“
We went to see him at the hospital
,” she remembered. “
He wouldn’t open his eyes. We called out our names, each one. And we could feel him squeezing our hand, each one.
”

He never came out of the coma. He took his last breath on Wednesday, August 6, 1997. He was seventy-eight years old.

The memorial was the following Monday at the church where he had walked his three daughters down the aisle at their weddings but where he was rarely seen after Alice died.

Along the front pews sat the fruits of his labors and the embodiments of whatever dreams he carried with him while driving through the desert decades before: his eldest daughter, Bunny, now an artist’s agent in Chicago, trim and regal in a black sculpted suit and with an upright bearing being consoled by her son Woodie White; his middle daughter, Robin, now a city manager in San Jose, sitting with her husband, Alan Christianson, and son, Daniel Moss, the pride of the family, who, having turned down Harvard and Princeton, would start at Yale a few weeks from now. Robert had lived long enough to know that. Then came Robert’s youngest daughter, Joy, a radiologist, seated with her husband, Lee, a day trader, and their two small children, Lia and Adam.

The pews were filled with people from back in Monroe, old classmates from Morehouse, the people he knew from the racetrack, the people he had worked with at the VA hospital, the people whose gallbladders and appendixes he had removed and whose babies he had delivered and the babies that he had brought into the world and who were now grown men and women with gray hair and children of their own.

All of them showed up, their faces glazed and empty, to pay their respects. The daughters had had Robert cremated, which caused some grumbling among those who had wished to see him once more or who were grieving that they had not made it by to see him in time or who knew that it had simply not been the way southerners put away their dead.

The service was a tightly scripted affair.

“We gather in the faith and hope of Jesus Christ,” the minister, who had not known Robert, intoned. “We come to comfort and support each other in our common loss—Robert Joseph Parish Foster.”

Nobody remarked on the mispronunciation of “Pershing” in his final hour. Few people in California likely knew the name anyway. He had dispensed with it on his way to California for that very reason.

His nephew, Madison, read a scripture assigned to him from Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a time, a time to be born and a time to die …”

Robert’s gambling buddy Romie Banks rose and addressed his friend and those assembled: “Robert, you have fought so many battles, been a champion for so many people. He was a perfectionist at everything he did except winning at the racetrack.”

Robert’s son-in-law Lee went to the altar. “He let you know which way the wind was blowing,” the son-in-law said, “whether you liked it or not.”

The Morehouse alumni stood when asked to make themselves known.

Easter Butler, who had met Robert at the racetrack, declared simply, “Dr. Foster was one of the greatest men I ever knew.”

Afterward, the people assembled back at the house on Victoria. Now, the street, unlike the last few weeks of his life when he was in his weakest, loneliest state, was crowded, overcome by cars—Mercedes, Cadillacs, sport utility vehicles, German and Japanese cars.

The people gathered around the crushed-velvet armchairs and the orange shag rug and the Zenith television console in the den, the room where Robert had thrown so many parties and had lived out the last months of his life.

A copy of
Life
magazine with Coretta Scott King in mourning sat in the bookcase, along with
Roots
by Alex Haley, surgery and gynecology textbooks, a book entitled
Difficult Diagnosis
, and, sitting alone, the brown desk plate that read,
ROBERT P. FOSTER, MD
.

The mourners partook of the honeydew and cantaloupe, cheesecake, lemon cake, and ham spread out on the dining room table. The testimonials continued all afternoon.

Della Bea Robinson, Ray Charles’s ex-wife, showed up to pay her respects because “Bob delivered my son,” she said. “My husband named our son after him.”

The moment made Della Bea think about what a perfectionist Robert had been, which was a good thing to have in a surgeon. “We were going to a concert,” she remembered, “and Alice came down the steps and couldn’t find the right gloves. She put on a pair of gloves she found. Bob saw her when she came out. ‘Something is wrong. The gloves are off,’ he said. He noticed everything.”

Leah Peterson, who had worked at the VA hospital with him, remembered turning to him for advice. “I used to go up and talk to him,” she said. “I told him what I wanted to do with my years. Bob started buying me books.”

A realtor named Nick White said simply, “He delivered me.”

Madison, his nephew, left the memorial repast early and brooded over a glass of ice water at a restaurant over in Santa Monica. He was feeling alone as the only Foster left from that era and isolated from what he saw as the bourgeois pretensions of the day’s proceedings, which, to him, did not reflect his uncle’s southern joie de vivre. “He didn’t get as good as he gave,” Madison said after the funeral, “and he gave the best.”

Madison was the self-described country cousin and one of Robert’s biggest champions, a living reminder of the South that Robert had put behind him. Madison thought about all the things Robert had been through in the South and out west, the rejections despite the triumphs and never feeling good enough. These things made him an exacting, infuriating, insecure perfectionist who left a mark on everyone he met. The people around him knew to smooth their tie, check their hem, reach a little higher, do a little more because Robert Foster demanded it of them. He made everybody crazy and better for the sky-high expectations he had of them for even the smallest of things.

“If you bought him a melon,” Madison said, “you couldn’t just buy a melon. You had to stop and think about that melon. That’s how he was with everything.”

Madison thought back to how Robert had tried to get all of Monroe to come to Los Angeles. “Bob would say, ‘You want some Monroe? Plenty Monroe out here. You can have Monroe in California.’ ”

Then Madison remembered the trips he had made to Los Angeles, his feeling tentative and unsure, being from small-town Louisiana as he was but exhilarated to be out in California with his uncle.

“Come on, chief,” Bob would say. “Let’s go to Beverly Hills and have breakfast on the veranda. Put your chain out. Put that gold chain out. You ain’t on no college campus now. Put your chain out. That’s why I gave you that damn chain.”