Freedom

Patty’s first memory of doing a team sport with her mother watching is also one of her last. She was attending ordinary-person Sports day camp at the same complex where her two sisters were doing extraordinary-person Arts day camp, and one day her mother and sisters showed up for the late i

Patty was aware that it was not her finest hour of sportsmanship. Something had come over her because her family was watching. In the family station wagon, in an even more quavering voice than usual, her mother asked her if she had to be quite so… aggressive. If it was necessary to be, well, to be so aggressive. Would it have hurt Patty to share the ball a little with her teammates? Patty replied that she hadn’t been getting ANY balls in left field. And her mother said: “I don’t mind if you play sports, but only if it’s going to teach you cooperation and communitymindedness.” And Patty said, “So send me to a REAL camp where I won’t be the only good player! I can’t cooperate with people who can’t catch the ball!” And her mother said: “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to be encouraging so much aggression and competition. I guess I’m not a sports fan, but I don’t see the fun in defeating a person just for the sake of defeating them. Wouldn’t it be much more fun to all work together to cooperatively build something?”

Patty’s mother was a professional Democrat. She is even now, at the time of this writing, a state assemblywoman, the Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children, and the Arts. Paradise for Joyce is an open space where poor children can go and do Arts at state expense. Joyce was born Joyce Markowitz in Brooklyn in 1934 but apparently disliked being Jewish from the earliest dawn of consciousness. (The autobiographer wonders if one reason why Joyce’s voice always trembles is from struggling so hard all her life to not sound like Brooklyn.) Joyce got a scholarship to study liberal Arts in the woods of Maine where she met Patty’s exceedingly Gentile dad whom she married at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In the autobiographer’s opinion, Joyce had her first baby before she was emotionally prepared for motherhood, although the autobiographer herself perhaps ought not to cast stones in this regard. When Jack Ke

Patty’s father, Ray Emerson, was a lawyer and amateur humorist whose repertory included fart jokes and mean parodies of his children’s teachers, neighbors, and friends. A torment he particularly enjoyed inflicting on Patty was mimicking the Barbadian, Eulalie, when she was just out of earshot, saying, “Stop de game now, stop de playin,” etc., in a louder and louder voice until Patty ran from the di

Most nights her dad left the house again after di

On the train ride home, Patty asked her dad whose side he was on.

“Ha, good question,” he answered. “You have to understand, my client is a liar. The victim is a liar. And the bar owner is a liar. They’re all liars. Of course, my client is entitled to a vigorous defense. But you have to try to serve justice, too. Sometimes the P.A. and the judge and I are working together as much as the P.A. is working with the victim or I’m working with the defendant. You’ve heard of our adversarial system of justice?”

“Yes.”

“Well. Sometimes the P.A. and the judge and I all have the same adversary. We try to sort out the facts and avoid a miscarriage. Although don’t, uh. Don’t put that in your paper.”

“I thought sorting out facts was what the grand jury and the jury are for.”

“That’s right. Put that in your paper. Trial by a jury of your peers. That’s important.”

“But most of your clients are i

“Not many of them deserve as bad a punishment as somebody’s trying to give them.”

“But a lot of them are completely i

“All of that is entirely true, Pattycakes. Nevertheless, uh. Your mother can be somewhat dewy-eyed.”

Patty minded his ridiculing less when her mother was the butt of it.

“I mean, you saw those people,” he said to her. “Jesus Christ. El ron me puso loco.”

An important fact about Ray’s family was that it had a lot of money. His mom and dad lived on a big ancestral estate out in the hills of northwest New Jersey, in a pretty stone Modernist house that was supposedly designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and was hung with minor works by famous French Impressionists. Every summer, the entire Emerson clan gathered by the lake at the estate for holiday picnics which Patty mostly failed to enjoy. Her granddad, August, liked to grab his oldest granddaughter around the belly and sit her down on his bouncing thigh and get God only knows what kind of little thrill from this; he was certainly not very respectful of Patty’s physical boundaries. Starting in seventh grade, she also had to play doubles with Ray and his junior partner and the partner’s wife, on the grandparental clay te