Love and Fury by Richard Hoffman Read Free Book Online

if my uncle had been led to believe that the baby’s father was black. My father seemed to think that it was a shame, not that my uncle had disowned his only daughter, but that he had done so needlessly: “It was a white baby!”
    Beyond the murkiness of my cousin’s story, there are other questions that I despair of ever fully understanding. How could my parents have gone along with this? Especially my mother. Joanne’s mother had died while she was very young, and my mother was without a daughter. Was my mother so powerless to intervene? And how could my father have acquiesced? Francis was his older brother; was there some strict rule of primogeniture at work? “She just disappeared,” my father said, “poof! just like that. I think she sent Kitty a Christmas card or a note once in a while, but she was just gone.”
    When my uncle was on his deathbed in Florida, one of my cousins thought she might be able to track down Joanne by means of her most recent return address. “Do you want us to try to find Joanne?”
    â€œJoanne who?”
    â€œYour daughter!”
    â€œI have no daughter.”
    A short time after telling my father of Veronica’s pregnancy, I sent him a photograph of Veronica and Damion sitting together on our living room sofa. At the time they were living in our house, along with our son, Robert, who had returned from Miami, where he’d been struggling in college. My father called to thank me for the photograph. “But she don’t look happy,” he said.
    I dodged the invitation to candor, the first of several times I would do so. He was insistent, and right, of course. “I know my granddaughter, and she don’t look happy.” In fact neither Veronica nor Damion was happy. They were scared. They were fighting. They were on again, off again. They’d hardly known each other before the pregnancy, and now they were trying to learn how to love each other while living in our crowded house. So my father was, as always, perceptive, but I knew there was a racist element to his concern, and I wanted to be careful not to engage with it. I considered it a sleeping dog it would be best to let lie.
    The next time I visited, soon after my father’s diagnosis, I saw that he’d tacked the photograph up on the bulletin board beside his chair, which occupied the same spot, in the same room, by the same window onto the alley, as my grandfather’s. When I mentioned to my brother that it was nice to see it there, Joe laughed. “When I got home from work the day that picture came, he handed it to me and asked me what I thought. ‘Nice picture,’ I said. And then he spilled it. ‘But look at the guy. He’s black!’ I said that I thought we had established that. But he shook his head and kept saying, ‘He’s black. He’s black!’ I think he thought he’d be Derek Jeter or Obama or something. He figured he’d be brown, I guess.”
    Oh come on, you were never raised like that.
    My father didn’t know the half of it. I couldn’t begin to tell him the complex truth of the situation. It saddened me, since we had for the past fifteen years or so been able to talk honestly about our lives. It had taken us both a great deal of effort to reestablish, some years after my mother’s death, a communication beyond the sports and weather talk that had replaced, for decades, our lost intimacy. Now, once again, I had a secret I could not bring myself to share with him.
    Damion, the smiling, broad-shouldered, warm, funny young man who lived with us, was a felon, recently paroled from federal prison, where he’d served time for dealing marijuana across state lines, and for gun possession. I watched his mounting discouragement as he tried to find work; day after day, following some lead, he would go off hopeful and come home sullen and sad. It was a tight job market, and employers wouldn’t give a