I learned who I. M. Pei was.
Root Square, as my mother succeeded in having East Ogden Square renamed, hidden by maples and elms, was a small, old pocket not far from Mom’s friends. My earliest humiliations at bat took place around the corner in Nicholas Park. Everywhere you met the smiling unreality of the neo-Gothic university. Mom said Dad wanted us to live where we could safely walk to school and come home for lunch.
We never took public transportation when I was growing up. After we left home, my brother, Solomon, and I had to hurt Dad’s and Mom’s feelings to make them stop taking us to the airport and picking us up from the airport. In the end, Solomon wouldn’t give them the details of his flights, which sent Mom up the wall because her days were nothing if not schedules. She suffered, wondering what had happened to me, until she heard the trunk of the taxi. Solomon clearly believed I owed him on this one and I went along with him and wouldn’t let Dad drive me. Solomon rented a car when he landed. He and I seldom visited at the same time.
Our house always looked as though it were playing dumb. The front garden died under the steps up to the front door and after a lifetime of costly and impractical schemes for it from one of Mom’s crazies after another, Dad declared it his territory and instituted no-nonsense, low-maintenance conifers, evergreen bushes and hedges that shielded the house. It was so unassuming it could have been a movie set held up by a giant T square in the back. But the narrow limestone façade hid what a warren it was. A couple of Mom’s crazies were usually lining up their shoes compulsively on the third floor. Mom gave shelter only to women, not that some of them weren’t as scary as any man. Cello was often ensconced on the third floor, too, in the room in the front, the sacred presence, the personification, however unwilling, of racial uplift through art.
My brother and I and Cello’s siblings had the second floor, each to his or her own cell. My brother and I were never bunk-bed pals. We had our own rooms. Mom and Dad’s bedroom was also on the second floor, but maybe because there was only one bathroom per floor, they spent a lot of their time in their basement domain, in his den, her office, and the back room where Dad worked on his planes and Mom painted placards. The closets everywhere were packed with boxes of labeled rocks or the minutes of forgotten social betterment ventures or 78-rpm records. Mom had the carpet removed on what she from time to time called the parlor floor. She put her beloved piano on sheets of acoustic-boosting tiles. We’d been there as long as anyone.
The flat-roofed, three-story houses of tiny Root Square wanted to scoot over some blocks and huddle under the El to get out of the rain. Once, I saw Dad look around when he was putting Cello’s father in the car and I could tell that in his head he was urging the old-timers to hold on. Two white “yuppie” couples, as the white Sunday supplements called them, had gone around the square trying to interest people in a new homeowners’ association. Mom suspected that they were checking to see who was their sort of black person, the kind that would fit in to the gatherings they were planning.
As a child, I knew that my parents were kind of laughed at, but people respected them. Mom was built like a fire hydrant and though Dad was tall, his caboose was enormous. Dad was wild about sports, but neither he nor Mom was athletic. They walked like two bears in love. They couldn’t dance. Neither wore clothes well. Everything Dad had was dark gray and Mom stayed in dark green from season to season. They both had short hair, in order not to have to do much to it and, in Mom’s case, in order not to be accused of having “good hair.” Dad’s name was on the roster of a few black clubs, but that was because loyal friends had insisted. Once a Kappa, always a Kappa. Some remembered the Eagle in its better
Root Square, as my mother succeeded in having East Ogden Square renamed, hidden by maples and elms, was a small, old pocket not far from Mom’s friends. My earliest humiliations at bat took place around the corner in Nicholas Park. Everywhere you met the smiling unreality of the neo-Gothic university. Mom said Dad wanted us to live where we could safely walk to school and come home for lunch.
We never took public transportation when I was growing up. After we left home, my brother, Solomon, and I had to hurt Dad’s and Mom’s feelings to make them stop taking us to the airport and picking us up from the airport. In the end, Solomon wouldn’t give them the details of his flights, which sent Mom up the wall because her days were nothing if not schedules. She suffered, wondering what had happened to me, until she heard the trunk of the taxi. Solomon clearly believed I owed him on this one and I went along with him and wouldn’t let Dad drive me. Solomon rented a car when he landed. He and I seldom visited at the same time.
Our house always looked as though it were playing dumb. The front garden died under the steps up to the front door and after a lifetime of costly and impractical schemes for it from one of Mom’s crazies after another, Dad declared it his territory and instituted no-nonsense, low-maintenance conifers, evergreen bushes and hedges that shielded the house. It was so unassuming it could have been a movie set held up by a giant T square in the back. But the narrow limestone façade hid what a warren it was. A couple of Mom’s crazies were usually lining up their shoes compulsively on the third floor. Mom gave shelter only to women, not that some of them weren’t as scary as any man. Cello was often ensconced on the third floor, too, in the room in the front, the sacred presence, the personification, however unwilling, of racial uplift through art.
My brother and I and Cello’s siblings had the second floor, each to his or her own cell. My brother and I were never bunk-bed pals. We had our own rooms. Mom and Dad’s bedroom was also on the second floor, but maybe because there was only one bathroom per floor, they spent a lot of their time in their basement domain, in his den, her office, and the back room where Dad worked on his planes and Mom painted placards. The closets everywhere were packed with boxes of labeled rocks or the minutes of forgotten social betterment ventures or 78-rpm records. Mom had the carpet removed on what she from time to time called the parlor floor. She put her beloved piano on sheets of acoustic-boosting tiles. We’d been there as long as anyone.
The flat-roofed, three-story houses of tiny Root Square wanted to scoot over some blocks and huddle under the El to get out of the rain. Once, I saw Dad look around when he was putting Cello’s father in the car and I could tell that in his head he was urging the old-timers to hold on. Two white “yuppie” couples, as the white Sunday supplements called them, had gone around the square trying to interest people in a new homeowners’ association. Mom suspected that they were checking to see who was their sort of black person, the kind that would fit in to the gatherings they were planning.
As a child, I knew that my parents were kind of laughed at, but people respected them. Mom was built like a fire hydrant and though Dad was tall, his caboose was enormous. Dad was wild about sports, but neither he nor Mom was athletic. They walked like two bears in love. They couldn’t dance. Neither wore clothes well. Everything Dad had was dark gray and Mom stayed in dark green from season to season. They both had short hair, in order not to have to do much to it and, in Mom’s case, in order not to be accused of having “good hair.” Dad’s name was on the roster of a few black clubs, but that was because loyal friends had insisted. Once a Kappa, always a Kappa. Some remembered the Eagle in its better
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