My heart started beating rapidly a minute or two after the third time I’d read the letter. I could have sat there and guessed for a hundred years and never come up with what Seth had to say. I had a child in the world and hadn’t known it. I was a father with none of the responsibilities, fears, or joys of parenthood.
I went out to the liquor store and bought two quarts of Jack Daniels and three packs of filterless Camels.
For a day and a half all I did was drink and smoke. I had given up both habits when I was twenty-three years old. I realized one day that I was trying to kill myself with the legal drugs of my culture.
And every day for seventeen years I had wanted to end my smokeless sobriety.
I crashed around the house, cursing my brother, mother, and sister — all of whom seemed to have known but never told me the truth. At one point, near the end of my private orgy, I raised a hickory chair up above my head and smashed it on the hardwood floor. Then, melodramatically, I crumpled to my knees and cried over the broken furniture.
Maybe five minutes after my outburst, a rapping came at the door. A few seconds later I heard another, bolder knock.
I climbed to my feet, suppressed a gag reflex, and stumbled to the door.
Standing there on our common porch was Rose Henley; she was as short as ever, but her hair had not yet turned completely white.
“Are you all right, Mr. Vaness?”
“No, ma’am, I am not.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing I can point at but everything else.”
“I don’t understand. I heard a crash and I wanted to make sure you weren’t hurt.”
“You’re a brave woman,” I said, barely aware of the words I mouthed. “Somebody could have been killing me over here.”
“Does it have to do with that man who came here a few days ago? The tall one in the nice suit?”
“Yes. But he was only the bearer of the bad news. The messenger.”
“Why don’t you come over to my house and have a cup of coffee?” she suggested. “Sober up a little bit.”
Rose Henley’s home was everything that my apartment was not. The floor was carpeted, and not a hair was out of place. A painting on the living room wall was of a reclining nude woman who looked somewhat like a younger version of my neighbor.
She had me sit on a tan sofa and served me a weak cup of percolated coffee.
“Now,” she said, when we were both settled. “What’s the problem?”
Her face was broad, but her black eyes were set close together. The concern in that face was something I didn’t remember ever having been shown me before.
I told her everything, all about how Seth tortured me and how my sister probably knew about the child I’d fathered, about my mother and father and stepfather, and about my failure to surpass the image that everyone seemed to hold of me.
“I don’t even know why I dropped out of college,” I said at one point. “I don’t know when I gave up on myself.”
“You haven’t been to work this week, have you?” she asked.
“I’m sure they fired me. The temp agency called, but I didn’t answer.”
“You need to take a cold shower, get a good night’s sleep, and then go to see your daughter,” Rose said.
“I have to get a job first,” I replied. “You know Mr. Poplar wants his rent.”
“Poplar works for the landlord,” she said. “I don’t think the owner would kick you out under these circumstances.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Because I own this house, Mr. Vaness. And I like you.”
The address for Sojourner “Sovie” Alexander was on Cushdon, just south of a Pico Boulevard. It was the smallest house on the block and in need of a paint job. But the lawn was green and manicured, and there were healthy rose bushes under the front windows of the home.
The door was open, and the screen closed. I saw a doorbell but knocked anyway. After a few moments, a tallish, honey-colored girl in her early twenties appeared.
“Miss Alexander?” I said. I’d practiced calling her “Miss.”
“No,” she replied, pursing her lips, as if she were going to whistle or maybe kiss someone. “Who are you?”
“I’m here to see Miss Alexander,” I said. “Is she home?”
Staring quizzically at me, the honey-colored young woman shouted, “Sovie! It’s for you!”
The young woman went away, and before I could count to ten, a young white girl, more or less the same age as her roommate, walked up. She had light blond hair and looked at me with a furrowed brow. All at once she realized something and took in a sharp breath.
“Roger Vaness?” she said.
“Um, yes.”
“You look a lot like Uncle Seth. Three days ago I got a letter from him,” she said. “This tall bald guy brought it. The man told me that Uncle Seth had died. He gave me the letter that said, Uncle Seth said, in the letter, that my real father was... was you.”
“I got a letter from Seth too. I never knew. Nobody... not your mother or Seth or anybody ever told me that I had a little girl.”
We stared at each other through the gray haze of the screen, both of us unsure of what to do.
“Can I take you out for coffee?” I asked.
“I’ll get my sweater.”
We commandeered a small round table at the window of a coffeehouse on Westwood near Pico. There we talked for hours.
Timmy had told her daughter that she didn’t know who her father was, that she had been wild as a child but had sobered up when Sovie came. Seth was an old friend who dropped by regularly. Sovie had often wished that Seth was her father or at least her real uncle.
“I guess he was my uncle,” she said at one point, realizing for the first time the blood relation.
“But Timmy never told you that I, I mean that your blood father was black?” I asked.
“Never.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It bothers me that she lied about you.”
“I mean, it doesn’t bother you that you’re black?”
“Oh,” she said, looking very much like me and not. “I didn’t even think about that. Wow.”
“I don’t know what to say to you, Sojourner. I’m sittin’ here with a stranger, but I feel so much love that has been lost.”
“Me too. When I read Seth’s letter I, I felt like... I don’t know... I felt like an old-time explorer on the verge of discovering a new continent.”
“Did he give you my address?”
“Yes,” she said meekly. “I drove by, but I couldn’t make myself stop. I was just so nervous.”
“That’s OK. It’s better that I came to you. A father should be there for his daughter.”
I could see in Sojourner’s eyes that she had been waiting an entire lifetime to call a man Father. I put my big brown hand on her clenched white fists. She relaxed, and I thought that this was how I would have wanted it to be with my own father.
I called Absolute Temps and talked to the receptionist, Tanya Reed. I explained to Tanya exactly what had happened, and she hooked me up with a six-week gig at Leonine Records on Sunset. It was only $16.75 an hour, but that covered the rent and gas.
For the next month Sovie and I saw or talked to each other every day.
She’s a history major, like I was, and has a boyfriend, Chad, whom I met and liked very much. I gave her my blood father’s stack of Fantastic Four comics, saying that it was the only thing of value I owned. She didn’t like comic books but took them anyway. I don’t know why, but giving her those magazines felt like taking a two-ton weight off my skull.
A month later, on a Saturday, I was cleaning my apartment to prepare for her and her roommate, Ashanti Bowles, to come over for dinner the next day.