Riverside Drive. Laura Wormer Van
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don’t know. A couple of weeks, I guess.” She looked at him. “Why?”
“Well,” Sam said, slowly putting his spoon down on the saucer, “I wish you could put it off for a little while.”
“Why?” she said again, clearly puzzled.
“Well, with summer coming—I don’t know,” he mumbled, shaking his head.
Harriet was frowning. “I don’t understand. On Sunday you were all for it. As I recall, your exact words were, ‘It’s time one of us took a risk—go for it.’”
He sighed, sitting back in his chair. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not so sure you want to leave—”
“What are you talking about, Sam? Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said to you for the last year? It’s—”
Seven-year-old Samantha chose that moment to come in and announce a crisis concerning a missing blue sock.
“I’ll help you, honey,” Harriet said, rising from her chair. “Sam,” she added on her way by him, “I want to talk about this some more tonight.”
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Sam mumbled.
Harriet stopped in her tracks and turned around. Finally, her husband looked at her. She started to say something, stopped, squinted slightly, and then said, “We do have to talk, Sam. We do.”
“I don’t know where it is!” Samantha wailed from the hall.
“Did you hear me, Sam?”
He nodded, tossing his napkin on the table.
“Honey,” Harriet said, coming back to him.
“I know, I know,” he said, lifting the jacket of his suit from the back of the chair. “We’ll talk tonight.”
As Harriet went in one direction, Althea came in from the other. She avoided her father’s eyes, intending to pass him by, but he caught hold of her arm. “Hey,” he said, pulling her back to face him.
Althea was not going to cooperate.
“Look,” he said, tilting her chin up, “Althea, in a couple of years, you’re going to be able to do whatever you want. You can run for mayor of Southampton if you want to, and I won’t care. But for right now, while you’re in school, while you’re living here with us, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to pacify your old man.”
Althea rolled her eyes.
Very slowly, very deliberately, he said, “I love you, you know. And I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I don’t see how going to Southampton is going to hurt me,” Althea sulked.
Sam slid his arm around his daughter and made her walk him to the front door. “Look, I think it’s nice that your friends invited you, but I don’t think they understand—”
“Understand what?” Althea persisted, twisting away.
“That I don’t want anyone looking at my daughter like she’s a second-class citizen and, Althea, that’s what you’ll get out there.” He shook his head. “You know, you act as though your mother and I don’t know anything about how this world works. Well, let me tell you something, we didn’t get where we are by hanging out—” He raised his hand and then dropped it, shaking his head again. “Did it ever occur to you that there was a reason why we decided to raise you kids here and not in the suburbs?”
“‘Cause you work here.”
Sam closed his eyes and then, slowly, reopened them.
“You’re so uptight, Daddy,” Althea said, turning away. “You’re so uptight about everything.”
Sam looked at his daughter’s back and sighed. And then he left for work.
Sam regretted almost every decision they had made concerning how to bring up Althea. For one, they never should have enrolled her in the Gregory School. Yes, it was true, at the time Sam had been extremely proud that Althea had been accepted at one of the best private schools in the city. And yes, he had been very proud that he and Harriet had been able to send her there at a cost of nearly five thousand dollars a year.
And, actually, the Gregory School had been fine until Althea hit her teens. Looking back, Sam and Harriet wondered at their naiveté. After putting their daughter in a nearly all-white school, how had they expected Althea to maintain many black friends? The one black boy in her class Althea didn’t even like. (“He’s a jerk!” Althea had exclaimed, when her parents asked why she wasn’t going to the dance with him instead of John Schwartz. “Just because his father plays for the Jets, he thinks he’s God’s gift.”) And when they talked about pulling her out of Gregory, Althea’s counselor had made a very good point: Althea was happy there, and her grades and popularity showed it. And so the Wyatts had tried to compensate by pushing Althea into extracurricular activities—a plan that failed as well. (“I don’t want to go out for the team at the Y—I want to swim for Gregory!”)
Althea graduated from Gregory with a 3.8 average and the Wyatts were relieved when she expressed a desire to stay in New York and attend Columbia. (“Smith!” Sam had yelled during Althea’s time of uncertainty. “Harriet! Your daughter wants to go to Smith with a friend named Poo!”) And again, Sam had been very, very proud of Althea. And of him and Harriet. How many blacks, he wondered, how many kids anywhere, were smart enough to get into an Ivy League school and had parents who could afford to send them there? (“The way I figure it,” Sam had said to Harriet as they sat down to plan out Althea’s tuition for the next four years, “we can send Althea through school, or we can buy Mexico.”)
Althea, thus far in her freshman year, had done extremely well, but Sam was still nervous about her. Of all the different students, Althea still undeniably gravitated toward those affluent whites she had grown up with at Gregory. She did have some black friends, and her last boyfriend too (thank God) had been black, but still…
It wasn’t that Althea disregarded her heritage. On the contrary, Althea made being black seem like an asset in the world. An asset because to know Althea Wyatt was to associate a young black woman with all the things all people everywhere coveted: brains, beauty and the brightest of futures. Did that bother Sam? No, not really. What gnawed at him was how self-centered Althea seemed to be. That everything Althea sought was for her own benefit, hers alone, with apparently no thought of rechanneling some of her good fortune back into the black community.
Harriet did not worry about it as much as he did. But then, Harriet was forever clouding the issue (for Sam) by claiming that Althea, as a black woman, couldn’t afford to give anything away until she reached that almost nonexistent place called power. “For you it’s a white man’s world,” Harriet would storm on occasion. “But for me, Sam, for Althea, and for our little Samantha in there, it’s a man’s world first, Sam, and then it’s a white man’s world.” And then Harriet would burst into tears and Sam would feel terrible as Harriet would say, “You make me so furious sometimes. You always say you understand and you never have. You just don’t know, Sam, you just don’t.” Sniff. “And I’ll tell you something else, Sam Wyatt, why should our daughter do a darn thing for all those groups of yours? Look at them, Sam—they’re all men. And who do you men help? Young men. You have two daughters, Sam—don’t you think you could give one scholarship to one woman? Can’t you guys even pretend that women matter?” (Sam, incidentally, no longer participated in any group that did not include women.)
But the issue of race and of sex and of Althea’s upbringing had another all-encompassing issue attached to it. It was the issue of addiction. From the day she was born, Althea had clearly been her father’s daughter. She looked like him, she talked like him, and her attitudes were just like his—in the old days, that is. Would Althea inherit it? they wondered. Had Althea been given it when she was little? What does one do when scared of the onslaught of it? It that has raged through half of your child’s heritage, it that is waiting out there, on every street corner,