The Wide Circumference of Love Read online

  Over the years, Diane had stapled that slip of paper to a page in her diary, under lock and key, and placed it in a music box given to her by a lover on Valentine’s Day. She then put it in a safety deposit box in a bank downtown.

  Her joy at being pregnant was clouded by thoughts of all the questions she would not be able to answer for her unborn child. Questions that revealed the emptiness of the family inheritance she had to offer. There was all that she did not know. And there was what she did: in the years that had passed since her father left, he had not reached back for her, and the aunts, uncles, even the grandmother and grandfather that she was owed had been rendered nonexistent.

  The child she carried needed answers, perhaps even more than she did. Yet the knowledge that seemingly no one from her father’s side cared to know her, search for her, was a blatant injury. Invisible to whoever remained of the Garrisons, Diane strained to be seen by the world. She owed this child answers, even if the search for answers only led to more questions. Friends had told her that having children filled you with focus and direction. Her baby wasn’t even born yet, but it had already made her think that she could stand up for herself as she had stood for others.

  Nearly all those she had represented as a public defender and in her family law practice had been erased by someone. Guilty or innocent, abused or neglected, her job was to give them a voice, to remove the cataracts of prejudice and indifference from the eyes of judges and juries. No one had fought for her, so she fought for those who had been disarmed.

  And so one evening, she decided to tell Gregory all of this, slipping into a chair beside him in his office at home, where he sat making initial sketches for a home for senior citizens to be built in Rockville, Maryland. He finished a few marks, and when he looked up at Diane, what he saw on her face made him put down his pencil. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I want to try to track down my father.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be sure? All these years, I’ve allowed myself the luxury and the lie of believing it didn’t matter. That I could go on not knowing at least something about him, where he went, who he is. But with the baby coming, I feel like it’s now or never.”

  “He and his family never reached out to you. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “Gregory, how could I get more hurt than I already am?”

  “I’m afraid to answer that question.”

  “You’ve got family to give our baby. I only have my Aunt Georgia and Uncle Ray. How will I explain that?”

  “Our baby won’t need explanations, excuses, or apologies for things you couldn’t control.”

  “But I can’t be a mother to our child until I at least try.”

  The next day on her way to court, Diane stopped by her bank and retrieved the slip of paper from her safety deposit box. Later that afternoon, she returned to her office, closed her door, and made the call. Her aunt’s name was Marcia. Was her aunt still alive? Was this still her phone number? What would she do if the number had been disconnected? If no one answered, would she call back? The onslaught of questions gave her a momentary reprieve. Then Diane felt the movement of the baby in her abdomen, a slight, gentle roll, a shift that brought the child closer to her heart. She picked up the receiver and dialed the number.

  “Hello?”

  The voice was hoarse and resonant with age. She knew this was her aunt Marcia. And Diane, who had not thought of her father in a specific, concrete way, who had only imagined him as a figure fleeing her mother, her brother, and her, realized that her father would now be a man in his late fifties or sixties. He might be sick. He might be dead.

  “Hello?” the voice asked again.

  “Hello, my name is Diane. My father is Samuel Garrison, and I’d like to speak to my aunt Marcia.”

  “You Sammy’s girl?”

  “Yes. Yes, ma’am.”

  “Lord have mercy, I was hoping this day would come. My brother run away. Left town like he was the criminal. Like he was the one who done wrong. And then he did.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I know it’s been a long time but I’m trying to find him.”

  “He ain’t never tried to find you, did he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I get a call or a card from him every couple of years. If you looking for him all I can do is give you the last address and phone number.”

  “I would like that. Could we meet somewhere? I’d like to meet you, connect with you.”

  “I ain’t seen you since you was three or four years old.”

  “Where do you live? Could I come to your house?”

  “Naw, honey, you don’t wanta do that. I live in Sursum Corda.”

  Just the name conjured images of drive-by shootings and open-air drug markets. On its streets, children were regularly killed in the crossfire of bullets aimed to settle scores, to exact revenge. During her time as a public defender, Diane had several clients who had lived in the complex which sprawled over several blocks, resembling a barracks or a prison. The place had its own police station.

  Instead, she met Marcia in Chinatown. After arriving fifteen minutes early, Diane was so nervous she vomited in the restaurant bathroom. She sat sipping a tiny cup of jasmine tea when Marcia came through the door. It was a blustery day and Marcia told Diane she’d be wearing a red leather jacket. The ferocious winds that whipped along the streets propelled Marcia through the door. Diane saw her aunt, a small, shriveled woman the color of nutmeg, look around the room and finally meet her gaze.

  Her wide smile erased years from her face as she closed in on Diane, who stood and leaned forward and hugged the woman. She was tiny, her face was ruined, the only question was: Had it been crack or heroin? Addiction and ill-health had ruptured her skin, pockmarking it with scars and leaving her brown eyes overcast with a milky film so thick that Diane wondered how well she could see.

  Marcia removed her jacket and revealed a linty black turtleneck sweater, the sleeves of which she pushed up her arms. She folded her bony fingers and settled her hands on the table.

  “You turned out beautiful, just like your mama.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad you came. My mother’s sister said my father had other siblings, too.”

  “Your two uncles are twin brothers. One’s in jail, the other got an auto repair shop in Oxon Hill, Maryland,” she said matter-of-factly. “You look like you made something of yourself. In fact more than something.”

  “Well, I guess I did. I’m a lawyer. I have a family law practice.”

  “Family law, huh? I guess that makes sense, all you been through.” Marcia smiled again, momentarily lifting the mask of age and decay. “Your daddy would be proud.”

  The waitress came, and they both studied the menus, holding them before their faces as though seeking respite from each other.

  When the waitress left with their orders, Marcia asked, “How far along are you?”

  “Four months.”

  “You married?”

  Diane held up her ring finger.

  Marcia smiled, bigger this time, revealing three missing teeth. “Is he a good man?” she asked.

  “He is a good man. Tell me about my father.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything. Everything. Now that I’m pregnant, family, whatever I have left, means more to me than ever.”

  “That’s a tall order,” Marcia said, rummaging through her pocketbook and pulling out a battered cigarette that she began to twirl in her fingers. “I’m still trying to kick the habit. When I get nervous, if I can’t smoke one, it helps anyway to just hold one.”

  The waitress brought their small bowls of wonton soup and both women retreated from the moment by lifting their spoons.

  Marcia had dropped her cigarette onto the table and after her third spoonful of soup, placed the spoon on her napkin and said, “Even when he was a child, Sammy acted like he’d been born into the wrong family. We lived over in Barry Farms. Back i
n those days, in the thirties and forties, it was a nice place. People had whole families. Daddies were around. People had jobs. Wasn’t always much, but it was honest work. You could even leave your door open at night. Mama cleaned government office buildings. Back then, even the black college girls did domestic work, cleaned offices to get extra money. That was the easiest work for a black woman to get then. Sometimes the only work she could get. Our daddy was a junk dealer. I bet you don’t even know what that is.”

  Marcia laughed, no doubt pleased by the thought that she knew something Diane most likely did not. “He’d collect old stuff people had thrown out, fix it up, repair it, or polish it so it looked like new and then ride around different neighborhoods selling it off a truck. Our mother couldn’t read, and our daddy sold junk, and that shamed Sammy. Don’t look surprised. Back in those days it wasn’t so unusual to find black folk who maybe could add and subtract a little bit, but who couldn’t even read a book their second grader brought home from school. The rest of us, me, Tyrone, and Tyler, we were satisfied with the life we lived, and thought in some ways we were lucky.”

  Marcia paused and indifferently placed her spoon in the bowl of soup, stirring the liquid and gazing into the bowl as though inside she saw the story she was telling beginning to unfold. “Sammy was always reading something—the black newspapers, old books, and magazines that Daddy brought home. He’d ask Daddy why he sold junk. Ask Mama why she couldn’t read. And it was like he asked the question just so he could look at ’em with a cold look in his eyes. Daddy told him that junk put food in his belly. But Mama, something in her just shrank up whenever Sammy asked her why she couldn’t read.”

  Marcia leaned back in the booth and looked at Diane unflinchingly and said, “He thought he was smarter than everybody in the family and because he thought he was smarter he thought he was better. He left us a long time before he left us. Mama and Daddy used to say they just wanted to live long enough to see us graduate from high school. Well Sammy didn’t even tell nobody and he got hisself accepted into a small Negro college in North Carolina. He left and never really looked back.” Curling her lips in distaste, Marcia said, “He’d write now and then. We had relatives in the town where the school was but they never saw him either. He’d come home for Christmas talking about his classes. I wanted to see my brother, but it was like a professor had come home instead. In his senior year, Sammy got a girl who went to the school pregnant, told her he was gonna marry her, and then just left.”

  “So he was always an outsider?”

  “I guess that’s one way to put it. You asked me, you want me to go on?”

  Before Diane could answer, their orders came: Diane’s stir-fried vegetables and Marcia’s General Tso’s chicken.

  Diving into the food, Marcia said between mouthfuls, “He come back to Washington and worked over the post office. He had a college degree, but so did half the black men working with him. I heard some of ’em even had PhDs. That was in the days when the joke was, ‘What did you call a Negro with a PhD?’ And the answer was ‘Nigger.’ I’d run into him sometimes on the street and he would just complain about the black folks he worked with.

  “Daddy died and then Mama died right after him, I think mostly ’cause she missed him. Sammy came to visit us whenever there was an emergency, mostly so he could make the rest of us feel like we were too stupid to know what to do. I was married to my first husband when Sammy brought Ella around and showed her off. He did all the talking, but all you had to do was look at her and you could see she’d fallen hard for Sammy. I ain’t never had too much good to say ’bout my brother but I will say I’m sure he loved your mother. They’d been married about four years when it happened. Sammy called me middle of the night and said a man had broken into the apartment, tied him up, and made him watch him rape Ella and stole a bunch of their stuff.”

  With each new revelation, Diane lost more of her appetite. Now, she gave up any attempt to eat.

  “You don’t want that? Well, let me take it home,” Marcia said.

  “Sure.”

  “I went by to see them that night. The police had gone by the time I got there. If you looked at them, and looked in their eyes, it was like they had both been raped. All his life Sammy had wanted to be big, had wanted to be in control. That man busted in his apartment and he took control. Then Sammy got so he was over my house all the time. He’d sit on my sofa and just start crying. I saw a brother I’d never seen before. I wondered about your mama and told him he needed to go home and cry with his wife or at least let her cry on his shoulder and then he could cry on hers and they would be okay. He’d tell me he couldn’t go home. He felt like he couldn’t live in that apartment no more.

  “About a year after it happened, I heard he and your mama had separated. Then he was gone. It was all too much for me. I lost a brother and that poor woman had been destroyed. When I heard about her getting run over, I swear to God I didn’t know what to do. I felt too ashamed to come to the funeral. That man raped her, but then I think what Sammy did killed her long before them boys driving that car.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He comes to D.C. now and then, but he lives out in Las Vegas. Married some woman from Argentina.”

  “Does he ever ask about me?”

  “Honey, I wish I could say he did. Back when your aunt called and told me Ronald died, I let him know about that. I was sure that he’d call you then. No, honey, in all these years he ain’t never asked about you or your brother.”

  Diane left the meeting with Marcia making a promise to stay in touch, a promise that she knew she would not keep. Outside, the wind was still strong as the two women parted.

  “You didn’t ask me for his phone number and address but I wrote it down for you,” Marcia said hesitantly, offering a slip of paper. Diane looked at the paper, still reeling from the story her aunt had shared. As the wind whipped up bitter gusts and pedestrians bustled against them, the two women stood as though frozen. When Marcia had entered the restaurant two hours earlier, Diane had not imagined the power she possessed. Now, Marcia reached for Diane’s hand, pressed the slip of paper into her trembling palm, and closed Diane’s fingers around it. Then Marcia lifted the collar of her red leather jacket, turned away, and walked toward the corner.

  Diane hailed a taxi. During the ride home she settled in the backseat and instinctively rubbed her abdomen. “I did this for you,” she whispered and then wondered, But what have I done?

  Samuel Garrison came back to D.C. over the years but he had never asked about his son or daughter. She rolled down the window. The wind remained as furious as it had been all afternoon. She longed for its bruising touch on her skin, longed for it to lift what she now knew on its wings and take it unto heaven. They would have been so easy to find. She hadn’t known where he was. Told herself that she didn’t want to know.

  Gone had become a destination, an actual place with dimensions. Over the years in her imagination, Samuel Garrison lived in New York, in Canada, or Chicago, and always there was some insurmountable obstacle that kept him away from them. Now the truth sealed her off from forgiveness. If she undertook the task of forgiving, her father would have to stand in a long line.

  Gregory came home that evening and found Diane in the nursery, placing baby blankets and clothing in the four-drawer mahogany chest they had found at an estate sale in Arlington. They had compromised on the color of the room, settling on pale blue walls dotted with pink clouds on the ceiling and the wall where the crib sat, overflowing with gifts from the baby shower Paula had hosted a week ago.

  “I’m sorry I went to see her. There’s such a thing as knowing too much,” Diane said, closing the drawer.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That he always thought he was better than the rest of his family. That he walked out on a girl he got pregnant. And that in all these years, he’s come back to Washington and he never even tried to find us.”

  Diane sank into a cushioned chair be
side the crib. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Are you okay?”

  She took a slip of paper out of her jacket pocket and held it up as though offering it to Gregory. “She gave me his address and phone number.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Not after what she told me.”

  Diane crumpled the paper, and Gregory bent on his knees before her, pried open her fist, and snatched it out of her palm.

  “I won’t let you do that,” he said, rising from the floor, his voice final as he slid the paper into his pants pocket. “You wanted to talk to your aunt and you wanted her to give you a perfect father. A father you knew you didn’t have. We just buried my dad last year and I’m not going to let you cut yourself off from yours.”

  Her face was hidden behind her palms, and when her hands slid slowly down her cheeks Gregory saw the tears. “I hate him.”

  “Of course you do. And you love him.”

  “I never want to see him.”

  Gregory pulled a hassock before Diane, sat down, and clasped her fingers. “I’m disappointed in you.”

  “In me?” She sobbed, befuddled, and sniffled, her face now a glistening mask.

  “Yes, you’re bigger than that. Bigger than him. At least hear his side.”

  “He never asked about us. He never tried to find us. I wanted to give our child a grandfather, not a monster.”

  “There had to have been a reason. A reason for what he did. A reason for what he didn’t do.”

  “How can you take the side of a man you don’t know?”

  “Because I don’t know him. And neither do you. This isn’t over and for now that paper belongs to me.”

  “He’s a coward who turned his back on one family after another. Why would I want to reach out to him?”

  “You don’t get to choose your parents.”

  “Sometimes, Gregory, sometimes, maybe you do.”