The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt Page A

pride meant you didn't take things that were offered, pride meant you suffered stupidly. She was not above admitting the many times she had swallowed her own pride, and done better for it. Jerene leaned back in her seat, wondering. She knew her father's childhood as mythology—scrubby lots to play in, not enough heat. He had no toys. The streets were full of toughs. "Just be glad you've got all this, my little honeybee," he'd say to her when she was little, pushing her in the backyard swing, and she would look around herself at the twilit green trees, the leaves on the ground, the little gazebo near the gardener's shed. None of it was hers except by refugee's luck. And then an extraordinary thing happened: Her father, pushing her on the swing, suddenly grasped the metal chains, pulled her back, held her suspended in mid-air, so that she thought she could see the world's roundness below her, and buried his head in her back to weep.
    She knew certain facts. He had been, at the age of seventeen, the first black boy chosen Boy of the Year by the Bensonhurst Brooklyn Optimists' Club. He had been the first black editor of the paper at his college, and of the Law Review at his law school; the first black lawyer at one firm, the first black partner at another. All through his twenties he stood on podiums, and his hand was shaken and his back was patted. Jerene came along, afterwards many large men smelling like gingerbread lifted her into the air. She'd stand with her mother in the ladies' room, and the wives would politely pass makeup tips to Margaret, then suddenly grow embarrassed and say, "Oh—I guess you people have your own brands, don't you?" Margaret always smiled.
    Sometimes they would find themselves alone in the car with the statuettes and prizes, driving through dark suburban streets that became increasingly unfamiliar. From the back seat Jerene would stare at the backs of her parents' necks—her father's carefully shaved and trimmed, her mother's shiny and bare in the moonlight, caressed by the clasp of a necklace, a few pearls. They would get lost. Sam would pull the car over, and his neck would be soaked with sweat. "Look, Sam, we're in Noroton Heights," Margaret would say. "I know exactly where we are. There's that mall where I went with Jerene the other day." And slowly, exactingly, she would direct him home.
    He was a Nixon delegate in 1968. Jerene was eleven and voted for Humphrey. She prayed that her Humphrey-supporting best friend, Jessica Hudson, and Jessica's Humphrey-supporting parents, wouldn't say anything.
    Still, when the convention was on television, she watched with her mother and was thrilled to see Sam's face suddenly filling up the screen. "We're talking to Mr. Samuel I. Parks," the reporter said, "an attorney from Connecticut, and one of the few black delegates here at the convention. Mr. Parks, as a Negro, how do you feel supporting Mr. Nixon in the face of your race's overwhelming support of the Democrats?"
    "I fully believe that Richard Nixon is what our country and our economy needs now," Sam said. He was sweating and looked rather uncomfortable, but his voice was sure.
    "Mom," Jerene said.
    "Hush up!" Margaret said. "How many times in your life are you gonna get to see your father on television?"
    And indeed, Jerene could not help feeling a secret pride, for he looked so handsome with the microphone in front of his mouth.
    She never talked about it with Jessica.
    She grew up, grew taller and kept growing. By the time she was in junior high school she was already five foot eleven and the star of the basketball team. That year her school won every game, and Jerene was named Most Valuable Player.
    She brought the trophy home and showed it to her mother. Margaret was cleaning the big house, which over the years had acquired an apparently insurmountable coat of dust. "Why do you have to play that game?" she asked when Jerene showed her the trophy. "It's so—unladylike." She did not approve of