The Warmth of Other Suns (83 page)

By the early 1970s, integration was beginning to filter into everyday life in Monroe. So, after visiting the graves of his mother and father and his big brother Madison, Robert decided to walk into a diner that used to be only for white people. It was a place he could only have dreamed of entering as a young man. He sat down without incident, ordered and ate, and nobody commented on it one way or the other. It was nothing special and, in fact, underwhelming after all those years of being denied entrance and dreaming of being inside. How could it be that people were fighting to the death over something that was, in the end, so very ordinary? He had crossed into territory forbidden him growing up, and now the circle was complete. It was much like returning to a building
that had seemed so imposing when you were a child but was, in fact, small and forgettable when seen through the eyes of an adult.

Before leaving Monroe, he passed the big new colored high school on Renwick Street and could not help but think of his father walking to his old schoolhouse in the dark of morning to open up Monroe Colored High with its used books from the white school and secondhand desks. The new Carroll High School was something Professor Foster could only have dreamt of in those early days, and, for as long as he lived, Robert would remain convinced that it should rightly have carried his name.

Robert returned to L.A. and again tried to put Monroe behind him. He would never fully be able to. And so he worked harder at everything he did. He gave all of himself to whatever was his fancy at the moment.

Each December 23, he put aside his patients and gambling to devote himself to commemorating his marriage to Alice. He made the reservations and all the arrangements. Every year, the plan was exactly the same.

Robert and Alice would go to Scandia on Sunset Boulevard. The maître d’ would make a show of the appetizer and subsequent courses. There would be a gift immediately following the entrée—a diamond ring or a fur coat. There would be some grand gesture at the end and a toast to however many years it had been.

But things did not always go according to plan—not in any huge, irreversible way, but in the little ways that could easily rattle Robert, who was easily rattled anyway.

One anniversary, the maître d’ happened to seat them at a table in a darkened corner in the back.

“I couldn’t stand it,” Robert said.

He fumed and sulked. He could barely enjoy the anniversary he was supposed to be celebrating. When he could stand it no longer, he summoned the maître d’.

“Please move me to another table,” Robert said. “It’s too dark.”

(“
I tipped him, and that will work wonders. You have to be careful not to overdo it. Then you show your ignorance.”)

Another year, the maître d’ sat them at a booth. It was in the right place in the room. But something was wrong. The booth sank in where Robert was sitting.

“When I sat down in the booth, my wife was taller than I,” he said. “I didn’t like that.”

He told Alice to switch places with him, “so that I wouldn’t be shorter than she was.” Alice, having already settled on her side of the booth, had to collect her purse. The two got up and circled each other to take the other’s seat.

Only then could the evening commence.

“Leo, what are we going to eat tonight?”

There came the courses, and he would watch with pride and amazement as Alice negotiated whatever elaborate or towering concoction was put before her.

Then came the part Robert liked the most, the part he put the most ritual and planning into.

The morning of the dinner, he had called the florist.

“I want red roses and baby’s breath,” he had told the florist. “I want to be able to see over the table.”

The florist fretted over what that meant for the arrangement, precisely what the dimensions should be.

“Alright, get me the width and the length of the table,” Robert said. Someone called the restaurant and got the measurements for the particular table Robert had reserved for this particular anniversary, and the roses and ferns could then be cut and arranged.

“Each year I added one red rose to that bouquet,” he said.

It was their thirty-third anniversary. “We’re in the center of the dining room,” Robert remembered. The maître d’ came out with “thirty-three long-stemmed roses with white baby’s breath and fern and ribbon,” he remembered. “Each anniversary, one more ribbon.”

WITHIN FOUR YEARS
of Robert’s big party of a lifetime, Alice, who had married him to the unspoken disappointment of her upper-crust parents, had followed him to Austria and Los Angeles and Vegas, allowed herself to be his mannequin and muse, given legitimacy to his aspirations and become his ticket to high society, which he both coveted and resented, Alice with her cat-eye glasses and teacher’s solemnity, had fallen gravely ill and died.

Again, like his brother Madison, here was another family member passing away, and his medical certifications and surgical expertise could do nothing to stop it. She died of cancer, as had Robert’s mother, on December 8, 1974, at the age of fifty-four. Her passing and burial rites were both headlined in the
Chicago Defender
and the
Atlanta Daily World
, the black newspaper that had charted her every coming and going for most of her life.

The
Defender
, taking interest from half a continent away, described her as “one of Los Angeles’ most prominent civic and social figures,”
“wife of noted surgeon, Dr.
¹⁵
Robert Pershing Foster,” and “a tireless worker in numerous civic and philanthropic organizations.”

She was interred far from the tinseled veneer of Los Angeles in Louisville, Kentucky, at her father’s burial site, reclaimed in death as a Clement, not a Foster. They had been married thirty-three years, not one of them in Monroe. On that, they had both agreed.

As quiet and self-contained as she was, the house felt empty and unbearably silent after she was gone. The girls were all off on their own, two now married and living back east, the youngest away at college. Robert, along with Alice’s mother, Pearl, returned disheartened from the interment and took up their positions in their respective corners of the echoing mansion. As big as it was, it was feeling too small for two people so different from each other, who had put up an appearance of cordiality only to appease the one thing they had in common—sweet and devoted Alice. Neither had liked how the other seemed to control her, and now the reason they endured each other was gone and not coming back.

Each missed her more than they could have possibly anticipated. Even Robert—who had directed her choice of clothing, dissected her every attribute and deficit, stayed out late tending his patients and his vices, and taken for granted that she would be there whenever he needed her—felt her absence perhaps more than her presence now that he no longer had it.

With each passing day, Pearl grew angrier and more resentful. Of all the people in her life and all the people she had known and loved, here she was left with the one she least wanted to be around. How was it that the two of them had survived? It would never have occurred to her when she moved to Los Angeles, a widow from Atlanta, into the new wing Robert had built for her that her daughter would precede both of them in death and that so full a house would come down to just these two.

Now Robert was asking her to contribute a little in rent each month, which she took as an insult, given how the Clements had helped them in the early years of their marriage and how she had just now lost her only child. Robert thought it was only fair, given that he had vowed to take care of her daughter, not her, but still had done so, even building a wing for her, from the time Rufus Clement had died seven years before. He knew that Pearl had the money to share the household expenses from Clement’s pension and estate. And, besides, Robert said, “I had given
her anything she wanted.” They could come to no agreement, and matters only grew worse.

The gambler and the socialite were marooned in a house that was big, but not big enough to escape each other. They were the oddest of couples and each was all that the other had. Day after day, he went to his office, hoping to avoid her on the way out. Day after day, she was stuck in the house where every lamp and figurine reminded her of the daughter she had lost.

She had never wanted to be part of the Great Migration or come out to California. She had lived her whole life in the South and was in Los Angeles only because her daughter’s husband had been so insistent on fleeing the South and had taken Alice and the girls with him. Now, with Alice gone, she was alone in a city she had never wanted to be in. She had little to fill the hours. Robert and Pearl ground through their days in slow motion and tried to pretend the other wasn’t there.

It wasn’t long until she realized she couldn’t take it anymore. She could no longer hold in the resentment. One day, she broke the silence.

“Why did you have to be the one to live, and not my daughter?” she finally said.

She had gotten it out, and there was nothing left to say after that. The tension had likely been building up from the moment they’d met. Her time in the house couldn’t last much longer. She packed her belongings and moved back to Kentucky, where her late husband and daughter were buried. And Robert was alone in the house and with himself for the first time in his life.

IDA MAE’S SISTER IRENE
, the one who had urged Ida Mae to come north in the first place, saying, “
I just wouldn’t stay down there if I was you
,” and whom they moved in with upon arrival, was having eye surgery. She hoped Ida Mae would come up to Milwaukee to help her
while she recovered. Ida Mae wanted to go but wasn’t sure she would be able to.

There was so much going on in Ida Mae’s household with everybody either coming or going to work and trying to take care of the grandkids, who were teenagers now, and get to church on time and pay the light bill and the house note. Ida Mae couldn’t drive and didn’t have a way to get there. And it was the darkest days of winter.

George and Ida Mae were not the youthful innocents fleeing the hard soil of the South for Chicago as they had been all those years ago. They were in their sixties now—George was sixty-eight and Ida Mae was sixty-two. They had lived in Chicago for longer than they had been in Mississippi and were still working, which they had been doing in one form or the other from the time they could pick up a hoe or reach over a wash pot.