An American Marriage(32)

Everyone in Southwest Atlanta knows my parents’ house. It’s a landmark of a sort, although no plaque marks the spot. Situated at the junction of Lynhurst Drive and Cascade Road, right before Childress Street, the grand Victorian stood abandoned for almost a half century before my father rescued it from the squirrels and chipmunks. Set back from the street, partially hidden by a green wall of unkempt shrubbery, it stood like a turn-of-the-century cautionary tale in this community of tidy brick houses. When I was little, we passed it on our way to Greenbriar Mall, and Daddy used to say, “We’re going to live right there. That monster was built after the war, a consolation prize for losing Tara.” When I was very small, I took him seriously and pleaded against it: “But it’s haunted!” “Yes little lady,” he said. “Haunted by the ghost of history!” At this point my mother would intervene. “Your father is being rhetorical.” Then Daddy might say, “No. I’m being prescient.” And Gloria would say, “Prescient? Try delusional? Or maybe optimistic. But stop it. You’re scaring Celestial.”

And Daddy did stop it, until his money came in. After that, he rekindled his fascination with the crumbling mansion on the hill with its cupolas and stained glass. Uncle Banks discovered that the property was in the hands of the old-money family who had owned it since Reconstruction. They couldn’t bear to live in it since Southwest Atlanta had become all black, but they couldn’t bear to sell it either. Or at least they couldn’t until Franklin Delano Davenport showed up three generations later with a briefcase full of cash money handcuffed to his arm. Daddy says that he knew that a cashier’s check would do, but sometimes it was all worth it for the gesture.

Gloria didn’t think that the white folks would relent, but she knew better than anyone that her husband was capable of hitting a long shot. Who would have thought that he, a high school chemistry teacher, would land upon a discovery that would make them comfortable, as she likes to put it. When he returned sans briefcase, she discarded the brochures for modern stucco manses just outside the perimeter and started researching contractors that specialized in historic renovations. She says she is happier here, anyway, on the fringe of the old neighborhood, a community of schoolteachers, family doctors, and other salary-and-benefits jobs that were put into play by the civil rights movement. In one of the swanky subdivisions farther west, her neighbors were likely to have been rappers, plastic surgeons, or marketing executives. For his part, Daddy says he’s glad not to be under the thumb of some homeowners’ association that would try to tell him what he could and couldn’t do with his own damn house.

Daddy is headstrong and persistent; these qualities are the key to his unlikely success. For twenty years he retreated to his basement laboratory tinkering with compounds after long days of teaching high school. Most of my childhood memories of him involve him wearing a lab coat ornamented with a mishmash of vintage slogan buttons. “free angela!” “silence is consent!” “i AM a man!” Daddy let his afro thrive, wild and uncontrolled, even after “black is beautiful” mellowed into “black is just fine.” Few women would have hung in with this sort of unkempt, dreamer husband, and never mind the peculiar odors that floated up from downstairs, but Gloria encouraged Daddy’s experiments. She, too, worked all day, but she found time to fill out his patent applications and mail them in. When he is asked how he went from being a barefoot boy from Sunflower, Alabama, to the mad-scientist millionaire he is today, he explains that he was too ornery to fail.

I never imagined that he would ever turn his inflexible nature against me and Dre. After all, Dre had been my father’s first choice. Roy, with his aspirations raw and pink like the skin underneath a scab, made my father like him as a person but not as a husband for me. “I bet he showers in a coat and tie,” my father said. “I respect his ambition; I had mine. But you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with a man who has something to prove.” For Dre, on the other hand, Daddy had nothing but fondness. “Give ole Andre a chance,” he said every so often, all the way up until the morning of my engagement party. When I insisted that we were like brother and sister, Daddy said, “Ain’t nobody your sister but your sister.” When he was on the wrong side of a fifth of Jack Black, he said, “Me and your mama, we came at our marriage the hard way. But you don’t have to be smacked around by circumstance in order to live your life. Consider Andre. You know what he’s about. He’s already part of the family. Take the easy way for once.”

But now it was all he could do to greet Dre with a curt nod hello.

Thanksgiving morning, Andre and I arrived at my parents’ home light-handed, bearing little more than the news of our new commitment and Roy’s upcoming release. I had promised two desserts—German chocolate cake for my father and chess pie for my mother, but I was too shaken to bake. Sweets are curious, temperamental, and moody. Any cake mixed by hand on this day would slump in the oven, refusing to rise.

We found my father out front struggling with his Christmas decorations. With so much acreage, he had space enough to properly express the full scope of his holiday spirit. His T-shirt was on backward, so only in atlanta ran across his narrow back as he squatted in the middle of the vast green yard, using a straight razor to open three cardboard boxes of wise men.

“Remember those shirts?” Dre said as we inched up the steep driveway.