This article on the late labor leader Harry Bridges' daughter,Julie,was originally scheduled to run as a cover story on July 6,1990 in the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday supplement section. Shortly before publication the article was killed.
Julie Bridges died of cancer two weeks ago at Ralph K. Davies Medical Center. She was 48.
"I was born out of wedlock," she says evenly in response to
a question about whether or not her parents had been secretly married in
1942 when Harry was still married to his first wife, Agnes. Agnes contended
in their 1945 divorce proceedings that Bridges, under the name of Alfred
Fenton, a "California leather salesman," had fathered a child
in May of 1943 by New York dancer Nancy Beredico, the wife of a Bolivian-born
artist. Moreover, Agnes's attorney, in an off-the-record interview with
a reporter, maintained that Harry had married Beredico before she left for
New York in January of that year. "I can't imagine that they would
have even thought about getting married at that point," Julie says.
"It would have been too dangerous. As it was, it was difficult enough
to even get my dad to change the birth certificate later on. My mom used
to yell at him all the time about it." She pauses and then, with a
wry grin, adds: "After he finally got around to it, he would sit back
and proudly say, 'It's all in the record!'--one of his favorite phrases."
The park is busy with the rituals of sunshine but uncrowded, and she appears
relaxed and relieved to be out of anyone's earshot. We speculate on what
might have happened if Nancy and her father had in fact been secretly married.
She laughs at the thought that, after all the endless trials and the hounding
her father had undergone, he could have been deported for something like
bigamy.
Unlike her half sister Jackie, whose schoolmates had taunted her because
Agnes and Harry had married only a few months before her birth, Julie's
illegitimacy never came up as an issue outside the house. "The other
kids never mentioned it," she says. "And in fact, those years
between 1943 and 1955 were wonderful for me. Almost idyllic."
"I grew up like a normal kid; somewhat sheltered, actually. I was aware
of what was going on to some extent, but my mom never made a big deal about
who my dad was. Oh, there were always worries. There was a gang of neighborhood
kids on Willard Street who I was afraid of. They hung a hangman's noose
over the door one day, and we had reason to believe they vandalized the
house another time while we were away. I know my mom slept with a hand-siren
under her pillow because she was deathly afraid of a kidnapping attempt.
My dad didn't believe in bodyguards, although he did see to it that I was
picked up from school every day. And we just always assumed the phone was
tapped. We were very careful about that kind of thing, and my brother and
I were always instructed to answer 'I don't know, I don't know' if the FBI
ever came to the door.
"Other than that, and the time my dad went to jail for three weeks
in 1950--I remember being worried that they wouldn't feed him--I recall
only the good things from that time. Going over to Kentfield to visit with
the Hallinans. All those people around, always this incredible din.
There were a lot of other families around as well. Lou Goldblatt and a couple
of the other union officials lived near us. I don't remember those days
as being anything but warm and friendly. And, no, even at school the kids
never paired off into any kind of 'class' groupings. I was accepted by everyone.
'Better off trusting people,' my dad used to tell me. And he was right."
She looks at me for a few seconds after saying that and continues. "I
guess what I remember most about that period are the times my dad came up
to school with his cartoon shows ." She smiles widely and then breaks
into a short laugh and says, "One year he won the prize for the best
spaghetti sauce. God, he talked about it to his dying day."
We move off the bench to the ridge at the top of the park. Over the tuft
of rooftops, the container cranes on the southern part of the waterfront
are visible in the distance. "I never knew there was trouble in their
marriage," she begins. "Never even saw them fighting. And then
suddenly it was over."
She talks about her mother's reaction to hearing that Harry was having an
affair, her accusation that he was married to his job and had "become
a ghost in the house." Her mother, Julie concedes, had entered into
an affair around the same time with the man who would become her next husband,
"but knowing her, I don't think she would have done it if she hadn't
felt my dad had stepped out on her first," she says flatly. "She
had heard things; enough to make her decide to leave him. Still, the general
perception was that she had been the homebreaker, and eventually she blamed
herself, bought the guilt trip."
Harry hadn't wanted the divorce, and a bitter custody battle began after
her mother took her and her brother back East, ending up in the New York
Supreme Court in 1956 with a decision in Nancy's favor. Later that year
her mother fought to include Julie in the child support payments her father
was making for her brother Robert, and won a decision in Superior Court
here. The relative sense of shelter Julie had hitherto known was crumbling,
yet she remained shielded from the worst of the publicly-paraded acrimony.
"All I can remember is that my mother was constantly complaining about
lawyers," she says.
She and Robbie shuttled cross-country for the next three years, spending
summers with their father. And though she felt her primary allegiance should
be to her mother, she looked forward to her visits with Harry. The emotional
juggling act she later endured was still a few years away, and with the
residue of self-securedness she still enjoyed during those years, she was
able to talk openly with her father about what had happened. The young girl
who had once kept her small blue trunk packed in hopes her father would
take her with him on his frequent business trips, retained enough adolescent
equanimity at that point to be able to say to him of the divorce, "Dad,
I'm really glad you didn't take us away." Their relationship remained
intact, and Harry continued a regimen of long-distance supervision, enrolling
her in the exclusive New Lincoln School in New York.
"He was really impressed with the place, thought it would be good for
me. And he came to my graduation."
"Things began to change the following year," she says, the tone
of her voice shifting noticeably. She had come out to Berkeley to attend
college, and for the next three years she saw her relationship with her
father begin to alter drastically. This period also marked the onset of
what would be a drawn-out and stormy relationship with Harry's third wife,
Nikki, and a solid sisterly relationship with the couple's infant daughter,
Kathy, which developed into full-blown sibling rivalry a quarter-century
later. She would grow increasingly resentful of Kathy's proximate relation
to her father, of the accusations about herself that she heard Kathy carried
to him, and of the subsequent "double standard" she felt her father
applied toward the two of them. Of Nikki she says: "It was the classic
thing of her being the usurper of my mom, the 'other woman.'"
"I always felt approved and loved by my father until I went to college,"
she says. "But then he began to be critical. Grades never good enough,
a lot of other little things. When I'd go over to San Francisco on the weekends,
I would also overhear Nikki talking to him about me, and he to her. I'd
always thought he was in my corner, and this was completely alien to me."
She was back in New York by 1964, finishing up at Hunter College with
a degree in history. "He didn't attend the ceremonies and didn't really
believe I had graduated," she says. She shakes her head, and there
is more than a trace of dismayed irritation in her voice. "Didn't believe
it until he had the transcripts sent to him years later."
After graduation she embarked on what would be an ongoing series of low-level
clerical and secretarial jobs, and worked for a time as a waitress in a
Manhattan after-hours club until a shooting occurred there. A co-worker
pulled her aside afterward and told her she had no business being in that
type of environment. "It was true," she says with amused incredulity.
"I mean, a part of me enjoyed the idea that I could move within the
circles of 'fringe'-type people, but that really wasn't me." Prophetically
enough, the concern the man showed for her proved to be an example of the
way people appeared in her life and helped her at crucial moments in later
years.
"I came back out here again in 1968. The 1960s? Well, I did the same
sorts of things everyone was doing. I drank. And I must say I drank a great
deal. And used drugs. Actually, I liked them, but found I couldn't tolerate
them or liquor very well... As for politics, I was concerned generally about
what was going on, wasn't unaware. In 1965 the FBI was worried enough to
ask the company next door to where I was working about me. But for Harry
Bridges' daughter, I wasn't very active."
The accelerating post-divorce drinking problem her mother had acquired
peaked in that year, and Nancy went to AA for counseling. ( Julie herself
entered AA in the 1980s.) "It worked," Julie says. "She rarely
drank after that, but the years of drinking had taken their toll. She had
chronic lung problems, emphysema, bleeding ulcers. She was not well, and
the following year came out here and found a place near my brother."
Julie's life remained on much the same plane she had become accustomed to
in New York: catch-as-catch-can work, ever-present financial problems, the
growing burden of requisite expectations that went with having to live in
the shadow of a father who had assumed deservedly mythic stature. "He
began to criticize me by comparing me to my brother. 'I wish you could do
as well as Robert,' he would say."
She talks drily and generally about that period, is quiet momentarily, and
then says almost unaccountably and with a sudden burst of pensive girlishness,
"I've always had these very romantic notions about life." She
gazes down at the children in the playground below us and then out toward
the docks which have constituted such an incalculable part of her history.
"Old movies, music, dance. You know, my mother was well on her way
with the Martha Graham troupe before she married her first husband."
Only a couple of times during the day will she make reference to her own
romantic involvements prior to her marriage, and, in this instance, she
touches on them in the same straightforward but cursory way, averring also
that she has indeed been attracted to men like her father. Listening to
her, it's apparent that her prominent origins colored her dealings with
potential suitors through the two decades she was single. "I would
never tell men who I was when I first met them," she says. "And
I wouldn't tell them until I had gotten to know them better." I'm not
surprised to hear her say this, and as she talks about her life in her twenties
it seems to me that there is a larger import to the subject eddying detectably
just below the surface: the conflict between the pressure she felt about
having to make some kind of mark upon the world consistent with her lineage,
and her need to be accepted as her own person, with her own realistically-set
objectives. Later on in the day I will get a better sense of that disparity
when she allows that in some ways her father had been something of a feminist
in his relations toward her. "He never asked me about about marriage
and children," she will say. "It was always, 'What do you want
to be?'"
She alludes now, in passing, to a major "personal problem" she
had at one point during the 1960s, and her eyes cloud over somberly. I sense
that it has nothing directly to do with her father or anything relating
to their clashes, and decide not to pursue it. Whatever it was, its dimensions
are clearly a portent of what will follow.
She made a decision in 1969, she says, to move to Los Angeles and attempt
to become an actress--a decision that Harry, in his conversations with his
closest union colleagues, remarked upon with immense pride. The result for
Julie was the commonplace complaint of the star-struck, the closed doors
and disappointments in her case adding a ponderous weight to what soon became
the worst phase of her life.
"My mom's physical condition was worsening, and I was in denial about
it. I would call up and listen to her, and I knew I wanted to have her with
me. I couldn't see abandoning her." She talks now with the weary precision
of someone who has been back and forth over a distasteful subject too many
times. "She came down in 1974 and stayed a month before returning to
San Francisco. It was really rough. I was working as a waitress in a deli
and was living in a one-room apartment. While we were there was the first
time my father came down to visit. He was appalled by the place and the
way we were living. He still had this idea that my mother was somehow immoral.
'She's sick,' I would scream at him,'not immoral !'"
Somehow, amidst the worst of what would eventually ensue, Julie was able
to keep afloat. The influence upon her of a Pentecostal minister who worked
as an attendant in the parking lot across the street, the understanding
provided by a childhood friend of her mother's who had moved to L.A. and
looked them up, and the concern of an assortment of other people who came
to befriend her enabled her to get through it.
Her mother came back to live with her in 1975. The cancer Nancy had developed
was quietly progressing, and in late 1976, when she was diagnosed as terminal,
Julie surreptitiously began purchasing laetrile for her. "I had moved
to a larger apartment and was working full-time and we were relatively comfortable.
But the medication was very expensive."
It was almost two years after his first visit before her father visited
them again, she says, and this time it was a fleeting stopover one afternoon
while Julie was at work. Julie's feelings about Harry's attitude had already
crystallized by that point, and she says curtly: "I felt that he shouldn't
have abandoned her."
Her furtive laetrile purchases continued another couple of months, and when
the strain became too much for her she wrote to him. "I told him, 'You
come down here and give me some support or I'm through with you as a dad.'
I'd never said anything like that in my life."
"I wasn't asking him for money," she says. "That was later.
I wanted, needed, some emotional support from him." They met shortly
after that at the L.A. airport between flights on one of his business trips,
and she did not press him again on the matter until a month later, when
she was forced to ask him to help out with the medical expenses incurred
from placing her mother in a Mexican hospital. "Yes," she says
with a very faint but nonetheless detectable hint of disgust, "he came
up with it. Said he was very happy to do it, but said he didn't think much
of that type of treatment. He gave me a lump sum. Several hundred dollars."
Her mother's confinement in the hospital marked the final month of her life,
and with the bills mounting Julie drove up to San Francisco twice in that
month. On the second trip she confronted Harry: "I told him straight-out,
'If you don't help me out I swear I'm going to go out and work the streets.'"
I glance over expecting to see her looking amused, but she isn't. Her head
is lowered and her face is set in a tight smile, determined and without
a bit of mirthfulness to it.
"I didn't know how to take the space to talk to him," she says
then, more chagrin than anger in her voice. "I mean, I only learned
that in these past four years." She pauses and then says softly: "I
tried to love my dad, but it became more and more difficult for me."
She says she is getting hungry, and we decide to head back to the cafe.
She talks as we go, speaking deliberately, and in the exactness of her words
I begin to sense the inventory-taking and making of amends associated with
the 12-Step process of AA. The remarks she had made at the commemoration
ceremony the month before, when she shouldered the blame for the conflict
with Harry, now assume a context. "I came back up here right after
my mother died in 1977 and moved in with my dad and Nikki for three months.
I had no money, nowhere else to go, nothing.
"I was expecting the worst, but in some ways it was the best, most
harmonious time I had ever had with them. Prior to the time my mom died,
Nikki had taken an EST course up here, and a few months later at her suggestion
I took the course in L.A. My father wasn't much for that type of thing,
but he had gone, too, and it gave us some basis upon which to be able to
converse when I returned.
"They were very helpful to me," she says of that stay. "Paid
for dental work I needed, and my dad helped me find work. But by the time
I moved out, a tension had developed between us. It was time to leave."
We pass a building she had pointed out to me earlier. She once lived there.
She doesn't look up. "I began to feel independent again for the first
time in a long while," she says. "I started going out dancing,
to clubs, with Robbie and his friends. And before long I met Michael, the
man who would become my husband."
They married in 1980, and Kevin was born a year later. Mike had first gone
to Harry and told him of his intentions. Harry and Nikki disliked him intensely,
Julie says of that initial meeting, and never really accepted him. One of
five children of a family from New York's Hell's Kitchen and one of the
founders of the Scared Straight program for juvenile offenders, Mike had
shot and killed a man in an altercation having to do with Mike's then-wife,
and had spent time in prison. It was a checkered past that would continue
to bother Harry, and the nonpareil democrat who could never abide outside
criticism of the foibles and peculiarities--political or otherwise--of the
loyal men he led, remained unable to overlook it in appraising his son-in-law.
As Julie tells the story, the intensity fades from her face, and she breaks
into a giggle when she says, "But of course I heard my dad fume any
number of times about how he'd like to kill Julian Hicks, the man my mother
later married!"
"I owe a lot to my husband," she goes on. "Whatever I've
been able to eventually accomplish with my dad I couldn't have done without
Michael. In spite of my dad's feelings about him, Michael understood my
father's spirit. They're alike, the same street-sense, the same compassion,
whether it's workers or prisoners. Over the past few years he pushed me
to make it right with my dad. 'Julie, you've got to do this,' he kept saying."
I discover we've gone three blocks out of our way. I'm suddenly conscious
that she is in heels and offer to slow down. But she keeps up the pace,
matching me stride for stride, her legs obviously inherited from her mother.
She clicks along with the easy bearing and carriage of the dancer she too
might have been had the liaison of chance and circumstance been different,
her conversation modulated and in pitch with her stride. "It hasn't
been easy for Michael and me though. We've been on-and-off for the past
ten years. And that stuff certainly didn't help my relationship with my
father. He thought I was blowing it, blowing it again , and when I finally
got up the nerve and told him that I was sick of trying to get his approval
it made it worse. There was never anything my dad could hold onto, grab
onto about me, and he couldn't stand that."
The young Swedish woman behind the counter has difficulty understanding
our order. She returns four times before she gets it right.
"Growing up the way I did helps when it comes to being patient,"
Julie is saying as we wait. "Respecting working people was drilled
into me constantly. I almost bow and scrape in front of the driver when
I get on the Muni."
She alternately eats and talks. Talks about herself and Michael, Kevin,
Harry and Nikki, Nancy, a disparate group of other people. The Pentecostal
minister in L.A. who was there for her when her mother was dying. A woman
-- the parent of one of Kevin's schoolmates -- she knew in a New York. An
acupuncturist in Santa Rosa. All the other people who had unexpectedly appeared
in her life with advice and aid at key moments. "
I grew up an agnostic," she says, pushing the rest of her sandwich
away. "My dad was an atheist, and although my mother had a pantheistic
sense about life, religion just wasn't discussed at home. But I realized
I'd always been searching for something, and too much of what I'd experienced
made me think there must be something more.
"During the troubles Michael and I were having, I had reached a point
of isolation that brought me to my knees. I was, literally, brought to my
knees by my own situation. Here I was, a woman living alone in Oakland with
an infant, and I knew I had to find some comfort from the pain. I started
wandering into Catholic churches. I'd had Buddhist and Jewish and evangelical
friends and I had learned from all of them, but Catholicism felt right,
fit with me. I had a need to have it in my life. Gradually, I found myself
learning the prayers. Mike and I reconciled, and I had him ask a priest
to bless the house. In 1984 we had Kevin baptized.
"As it turned out, Mike and I split up shortly after that and I was
out on my own again. In 1985 I took Kevin with me to New York. I stayed
with my cousins. They were wonderful, spiritual people. I should have gone
there after my mother's death, not to my father's house."
The room, thinned out considerably by the time we had returned, has now
refilled. She doesn't seem to be bothered by the encroaching noise around
us and continues volubly. "I went to work for the Maryknoll Fathers
as a secretary. Oddly enough, they were an order my dad admired. He liked
the work they did."
Over the years Harry wrote to her fairly regularly, she says, and he did
so while she was in New York, their correspondence full of the same old
contentiousness. "Around that time, something happened to me,"
she says. She stares past me, though her eyes are cast inward. "The
only way I can describe it is as a 'vision.' Literally, a flash, a picture.
I could hear my dad relating to me in a way a father and daughter should.
I began to write letters to him from a ' whole other place.' For a year-and-a-half
I called and write to him. Laying a foundation that was workable. I talked
about the future, Kevin growing up, that sort of thing. Nothing that he
used to call 'stratosphere' stuff."
In July of 1986 she wrote to tell him of her plans to visit San Francisco
at Thanksgiving. "His next letter was a beaut," she recalls.
"Nasty. He had assumed I needed money again and answered, 'Will send
you some money under these conditions: Don't plan on staying here. And don't
think about returning here and interfering with our lives. Forget about
a car. You better get a bicycle.' He signed it, 'With Some Regrets.'"
As it happened, the Thanksgiving visit was something of a turning point
between them, she says. Once again, he told her not to get any "notions
about moving back" to San Francisco, but the admonitions she got prior
to her trip from a friend, the mother of Kevin's soccer teammate in New
York, seemed to have had a salutary effect. "Tell him you have absolutely
no intention of staying with him, no intention of interfering in his life,"
she had told Julie. "But tell him you're going to come back if you
think it's in your best interests."
"I wrote to him and said exactly that," she says. She lowers her
voice and leans forward and says: "I made that trip knowing he wasn't
well. I didn't know if I'd ever see him again. It was now or never. I thought
about what the therapists I'd been seeing had told me, what Mike had constantly
said to me: 'Tell him, tell him.' And I did. 'Dad,' I said, 'I love you.
I know I've angered you, hurt you. I know I wasn't the daughter you wanted
me to be."
She looks away, and then in a voice I almost have to strain to hear, says:
"And it was then that he said to me, 'You were better than most. You
were better than most.'"
We move back out onto the empty patio and she says: "I came back
permanently again in 1987 and got my own place, but it was still a very
tense situation. I continued to get professional counseling, but any thoughts
I had about the one-on-one dealings I wanted with my dad still had to go
around Nikki. He couldn't accept the fact that I didn't feel like a member
of 'the family,' that I could have individual needs. 'Nikki loves you just
like you were her own daughter,' he would say. 'Don't be quarreling with
her. She leaves every time you come over. Be the bigger person.'"
She confronted Nikki, she says, so her father "would know" that
she was willing to try and work out their differences. "I told her
that I didn't want to interfere in their lives, that I was very appreciative
of the help they had given me, and that I would be more than willing to
start paying back the money they had sent me over the years.
"The acupuncturist in Santa Rosa I mentioned? I met her after I returned
in1987, and she had been adamant in saying, 'Don't let anyone interfere
with what you have to do.' I knew she was right, but I began to realize
I was going about it all wrong. I admitted as much to Nikki, and apologized
to her. I didn't know how to tell her that I needed some special, private
time with my dad. It always came out all wrong."
Despite the fact that, as far as Julie knows, Nikki "never passed on"
the details of their conversation to her father--"and I don't know
why"--Julie had reached another turning point with him. " We began
talking at length about things," she says, "covering the old ground
and getting it out of the way. I'd told him a few years before that I'd
never gotten the feeling that he would stick up for me, and I mentioned
it again. 'I stopped trusting you at some point,' he said. I asked him why,
and when that was, and he said, 'Aw, I don't remember !'" Her
voice, rising steadily as she recounts the moment, softens again, and there
is a sudden serenity to her eyes as she says, "All he had really was
the memory of an attitude." She touches the necklace Harry bought for
her in 1971 on his only return visit to Australia and then says: "You
know, what made him a great negotiator was that he recognized limits, knew
how far he could push someone. I only remember him really praising me three
times in the past thirty years, and each of those times was when I needed
it most. He knew how to push all my buttons, but when we made up he also
knew how to do that. 'That was yesterday,' he'd say. 'Let's start over from
today.'"
"In his last six months he was bedridden, "she says, drawing
her coat around her. Shadows cover half the patio, and the wind snaps sharply
against us. "I would go over and talk with him in the evenings. 'I
want to ask you a few things,' I would say. I wanted to pick his brain,
wanted to know about his life. All the things I'd never thought to look
into when I was growing up, or even in college. Politics, history, things
about him and my mom together.
"All of a sudden he began to ask if I would sleep over. 'Can you stay
here tonight?' he would ask. We started to talk a lot about religion. I
would say, 'I know you don't believe, but you've always been in my prayers
the last four years.' Mainly, we talked about Christianity and socialism,
and how they could be connected. I know that deep-down he was a spiritual
man. He always felt comfortable around priests, for example, and had become
friendly with a couple of them during his life. The Sermon on the Mount
was something he believed in very strongly, and we agreed on a few other
things. But, then, something like Christ going before Pilate he could think
of only in terms of the Fifth Amendment."
She chortles at the telling of this and, amusedly, goes on: "Toward
the end I continued to bring Kevin over with me sometimes. From the start
they had gotten on tremendously together, and now that he knew grandpa wasn't
going anywhere Kevin would read to him, would insist upon it. If my dad
was tired, he would try a 'Not today'; but often that didn't work very well,
and the only way my dad could really stop him was to demand, 'Hey, c'mon
, what's for dinner!?'"
She smiles, and with a tinge of gravity to her voice now, says, "I
had started telling Kevin about my dad a few years ago. And in showing him
the history, it had helped open it all up again for me. He was fascinated
by my father, and wanted to stay with him right to the last. As it turned
out, my dad seemed to understand that. The day before he died he lost his
voice, and that night he moved his arm and pointed toward Kev as if to say,
'Should he be here?' 'Dad, he wants to,' I said, and he put his arm back
on his chest."
She pulls her coat closer around her throat, shifts in her seat, and hesitantly
begins to talk about her mother again. Her mother with her father--the couple
they had been. She pauses then, and as she does I find myself thinking of
something she said when I first asked about the way Kevin and Harry had
gotten along. She had described an uncharacteristic occurrence in their
relationship, an incident where Kevin asked her father what Grandma Nancy
had been like, and Harry answered, "She was a pretty woman, and she
left me for another man." Sitting there, I think about the enmity her
father had felt toward Julian Hicks, and about Julie hearing her mother
calling out her father's name in the boozy years following their divorce.
I think of the Harry and Nancy of the pernicious McCarthy era, and of a
time when the respective challenges of history and the heart could somehow
still be arbitrated, imagining him and her as they were on a night in some
fog-interred year in the early 1950s when they won the rumba contest at
the old La Fiesta on Bay Street.
"I had all the photos of my parents, all the ones of them together,"
Julie resumes in a measured monotone. "My father had told me years
before that he had made peace with my mother during that second visit to
L.A., had told me how guilty he felt about her whenever her name came up,
and denied ever having an affair while they were married. I reread all the
letters he'd sent to me. Went through the newspapers he'd saved for me.
Read around in my mom's unpublished manuscript... And I cried. I realized
as he was going that I had reached a place, a juncture, where I could bring
them forward together, with a total sense of me as their love-child, and
with them at their very best."
She is visibly tired, has been talking for almost five hours. The momentary
lull that follows seems interminable, and the pages of the notepad I've
been unable to pick up for the last 20 minutes lift and fall forlornly in
the wind. She leans forward then, looks down, and then up and past me and
says, almost shyly, "I was with him his last night, of course. I didn't
say much. Simply told him that it was only his body that was going, but
that his spirit would always be here and with us. And then when he went,
I had this tremendous feeling of peace come over me... It was complete.
I had finally become my father's daughter."
I offer to drop her off on my way home. The cab coasts smoothly toward
the Western Addition apartment she and Kevin have recently moved into. She
speaks confidently of the prospect of her and Mike getting back together
again, and then begins to talk about the way the city has changed over the
half a century she has known it. The tremendous growth, the erosion of its
industrial base, the high prices. She wouldn't mind moving somewhere up
north, she says. "I'd like to go back to school, get a certificate
or post-grad degree and work with disabled children."
"I have a strong sense of myself now," she is saying as we turn
into her street. "I have his spirit. I speak up, I'm becoming more
confident, and I like it."
She turns toward me and smiles, clasps my hand and whispers, "Thank
you." A shaft of fading sunlight scours the building, as much a herald
of this long day's close as-- perhaps-- the end of an era. I watch her half-skip,
half-stride across the sidewalk and up the steps, her motions equally those
of the dutiful young daughter thinking of the small blue trunk she has kept
packed, and the wife and mother in the afternoon of her years who came to
mediate the toughest of the many valiant battles the first man in her life
ever fought.