He sees her then, a middle-aged woman, well preserved, well dressed. A tall man beside her, obviously the husband, two tall sons who are almost men.
‘She done well for herself. Married a solicitor, she did. That’s him. Kids go to college and all. Are you married yourself Frankie?
‘No.’
‘Kids?’
‘No.’
‘Not that you know of inanyway – wha?’ the man nudges the air and gives a little laugh.
‘No.’ Frank says, ‘I’ve none.’
The man lights another cigarette then takes a step closer to Frank. There’s something needy in the gesture like he’s desperate to hold onto his company. Frank looks away. He sees Ma now. He sees her standing close to the hearse surrounded by aunties who are buckled with age. Miriam’s husband is holding an umbrella high over her head. Her face. Her face, when he sees it. Not as old as he’d expected but just as hard. A man comes up to pay his respects, she rests a hand on his arm. Her slapping hand. He can’t look at her face anymore, only the hand. He thinks of it now, as a separate entity, cleaning and polishing windows, doors, brasses, removing stains only she can see. He thinks of the sound of it slapping a leg, a face, folding into a fist to punch the back of a head. Or half drunk and slightly off kilter, flipping rashers onto the pan and later all floppy on the edge of the sofa, trying to smoke a cigarette. He thinks of it turning the key in the lock of the boxroom door.
‘Susan wasn’t wild,’ Frank says.
‘No?’
‘She was different.’
‘Oh yeah, well I didn’t mean like –’
Frank listens to the man beside him sucking on his cigarette, hawing it out in sharp short breaths. After a minute he turns back to him, ‘were you thinking of going up to the graveyard yourself?’
‘Ah you know me Frankie, I wouldn’t like to intrude and that. I’ll probably just go to the fuckin’ pub after. Pay me respects then, you know?’
Frank looks at his thin face, cold sores around his lips, skin on his hand, mauvish and blotched, his lip struggling with the tip of the cigarette. ‘Look, could I ask you to do me a favour?’ he says.
‘Sure man, of course you can. Just name it.’
Frank reaches into his pocket and pulls out a fifty euro note. He holds it towards the man. ‘Could you keep it to yourself that, well, you know, that you saw me here.’
‘Ah, you don’t have to give me that, Frank, honest you don’t.’
He can see the man’s hand is trembling to take the note. Frank presses it into his fingers. ‘No, go on, really. Take it. Have a drink on me, I want you to. Just don’t say anything about seeing me.’
‘Sure Frankie, if that’s what you really want?’
‘It’s just. I mean, I just –.’
‘All right Frankie, yeah, I know. I know. All right.’
The man scratches his face, then his hair. ‘You haven’t a fuckin’ clue who I am, do you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Frank says.
He shrugs and lifts his hand as if to shake Frank’s then seems to change his mind and settles on a half-salute. Frank watches him go, head down, shoulders hunched, scuttling close to the churchyard wall.
He looks over the geometry of the churchyard, the arrangement of angles and shapes: each in his own little section. The funeral attendants, who look like FBI agents again, are sending out silent instructions. Everything shifts, everyone moves. There’s a sound of car doors slamming, the spark-up of individual engines. A black-haired girl in a green coat hurries across the churchyard, dashes the butt of a cigarette to the ground and hops into the back of a car. The green coat he saw from the corner of his eye in the church. Not really like Susan, after all. Nothing like her, in fact.
The hearse budging towards the gate now, the coffin inside it snug between glass and chrome – a perfect fit. The long Mercedes, filled with shadows, following behind. They pass out onto the road, skim the far side of the railings, then disappear.
He imagines the hearse, the cortège behind it, skirting the roundabout, gliding past the school, the shops, the pub on the corner before taking the turn into the road where Da lived all the days of his married life.
He can picture the hearse nosing along the slow endless curve past the squeeze of houses he’d counted every day on his way home from school and the railings he’d sat on and the gates he’d swung out of and all the kerbs he’d battered with footballs, and later then, much later, the hundreds of windows behind their veils of net that had followed him like eyes behind burkhas, during the black weeks and days, after Susan.
Frank takes the taximan’s card out of his pocket. He waits a few minutes for the churchyard to drain – of people, cars, sound.
Leaving for Kenosha
Richard Ford
IT WAS THE ANNIVERSARY. WALTER HOBBES WAS DRIVING uptown to pick up Louise at Trinity. She had the dentist at four – a cleaning, and her night guard adjusted – then the two of them were slipping off for a ridiculously early dinner at the place she liked. Cyril’s, out the Chef Highway, a higgle-dee-piggle roadhouse on stilts that the hurricane had comically missed. Later on they’d go back to his condo for Louise’s homework and a Bill Murray movie. This was New Orleans.
It was his day for Louise. Betsy, Louise’s mother, was driving out to appraise subdivision plats in Mississippi, then was sleeping over at Mitch Daigle’s across the lake. Which meant Ultimate Mojitos and maybe a joint and some boiled shrimp. Hobbes had been divorced a year. Betsy’d ‘fallen in love’ with Mitch while showing him a house – an anniversary present he planned for his wife. An anniversary that hadn’t quite come off. Now and then Walter saw Mitch’s ex-wife Hasty, at the Whole Food. Once a great, auburn-haired, husky-voiced Alabama stunner, a former Miss Something at UAB, she’d grown now sturdy in her young middle age. In the Whole Food she’d looked at Walter resentfully, as if he’d sent his wife to commit espionage on her less-than-perfect marriage. Once, he’d turned unexpectedly, and there she was in front of the lettuce, artichoke and celery bins. He’d instantly smiled while a silly, dauntless smile had begun on her face, too. But then her shoulders sagged. She pursed her lips, shook her head in frustration, her chin turned down. She put a ringless palm out in front of her like a traffic cop – keep away – then she pushed her green basket along, leaving him where he stood, as the sprinklers all came on at once.
‘We observed a moment of relative silence today for the poor flood victims,’ Louise said. They were driving up famous Prytania Street, past the French Consul’s gated residence, with the drooping tricolor out front and the big black Citroen in the circular drive. Outside the air was ninety-eight, but with the a/c going it was pleasant enough. Kids with their uniform shirt-tails pulled out were pranking along the steamy sidewalk, gesticulating and laughing raucously. The privileged from another private school nearby. The dentist was close.
‘Did any of your classmates lose someone?’ her father asked.
‘I suppose so,’ Louise said. Louise was in the sixth and knew everything about everything. ‘Ginny Baxter – who’s black. She and I both opened our eyes at the same time and almost laughed. It was like everybody was praying, but they weren’t of course. It was weird.’
‘Did you remember your device?’ Louise’s ‘device’ was her night guard, which she was having adjusted by Dr Finerty. She’d begun grinding at night and in the daytime, too – when night guards weren’t socially plausible. Finerty believed this to be a result of her parents suddenly divorcing when Louise was exactly ten years and two months old. Louise had shared her belief it was a result of the hurricane. Though any child grinding her teeth seemed a small, unrecoverable tragedy.
Louise sighed a profound sigh, placing her two small hands in her lap and twiddling all her fingers like a librarian. She ignored her father’s question about her device as if it was a subject too delicate to discuss. ‘I have two requests,’ she said, riding along.
‘The court will entertain two requests.’ Hobbes was a lawy
er, of course. ‘As long as one of them isn’t skipping the dentist.’
Louise liked the dentist, who was a jowly round-belly Irish jokemeister who went on Catholic retreats in the woods where he read Kierkegaard and Yeats, sat alone, and thought long about Thomas Merton. Louise thought this was bizarre but interesting. Finerty was divorced, too, from a pleasantly round Presbyterian woman who’d years ago returned to County Down without directly explaining herself. He always complimented Louise on her beautiful white teeth, which she enjoyed hearing.
‘Ginny’s family is taking her out of school after today. They’re moving away. I want to take her a sympathy card or whatever, and say goodbye. She’ll be gone tomorrow.’
‘That’s very considerate of you,’ Walter said. School had been going less than a week, and already this was happening. Louise allowed nothing about his commenting that her consideration was a nice feature. She had her hands deep in her knapsack now, digging out the green plastic case that held her night guard. They were on the dentist’s street. Amelia, off St Charles. A big apartment block. A Chinese take-out. A Circle-K. ‘Why’re they leaving now?’ He was angling the big Rover in at the curb. He intended to sit in the waiting room, read Time magazine, then chat up Finerty about red-fish fishing off Pointe La Hache (which they never did together), discuss the euro and the Catholic Church – all, once Louise was finished.
Louise had her green case clutched in both hands. ‘Her father works for UPS’ – she said it like a word: ‘ups’, versus ‘downs’. ‘He got this transfer. To Kenosha. Where’s that?’
‘Kenosha’s in Wisconsin. If it’s the same one.’
‘Ginny said that. It is.’
‘It’s up on Lake Michigan.’ He’d gone there once with some fellow students when he was in law school in Chicago. A million years ago, though only fifteen. ‘It gets cold up there.’
‘Do you think there’re a lot of black people who live there?’
‘There’re a lot of black people who live everywhere. Up there, too.’
She was silent. This was enough to know from him.
Louise was getting out of the car, or starting to. She said, ‘Would you go buy a nice card for me? Please? While I’m in here suffering? Then can we go out to her house and I can give it to her?’
‘Where would Ginny live?’ Their afternoon routine was being diverted – which could spell trouble. Kids liked routines and said they hated them.
‘I have the address. It was on her knapsack just like mine is.’ Louise said the name of the street, which was way east out St Claude, almost to the parish line, in the part where most houses had been destroyed two years ago today. A wasteland was out there. ‘They’re leaving tomorrow,’ Louise said. His daughter had long straight honey-brown but rather mousy hair and wore brown tortoise glasses that made her look business-like, older than twelve. Older than twenty. She was wearing her blue plaid school kilt and her standard wrinkled white blouse and white knee socks. She looked perfect. Was perfect.
‘We can certainly do that,’ Hobbes said.
‘They have gobs of cards at Wal-Mart,’ Louise said. ‘I bought one for you there this year.’ Her mother took her to Wal-Mart for durable play wear. Or used to.
‘What would you like any card to say?’
Louise looked in at him gravely from outside the door. She’d been thinking about this all day. ‘“Have fun in Kenosha”,’ she said. ‘“We’d love to have you come back. Love, Louise Hobbes.”’
‘I doubt if I’ll find one that says exactly that,’ Hobbes said. ‘You’ll have to write in a message. I’ll get you a plain one.’
‘But get a very pretty one. No flowers. No birds.’ Gasping late-afternoon heat swarmed the cavity of the car. Louise was outside the door, holding it open, looking in at her father as if he needed better instructions. ‘Maybe get one with a New Orleans theme. So she’ll remember everything and be miserable and miss me.’ Her green night-guard container bulked in her small hand. Her nails were painted a similar green and were chipping. Green was her color for now. Nothing frightened her or seemed impossible yet.
*
Often at night that summer Walter lay awake in his metal and glass bachelor apartment high above the swank, curved sweep of the Mississippi – container ships and tanker ships hung at anchor, white running lights smudging the dense airless darkness – and wondered what had caused Betsy suddenly to need to divorce. It hadn’t seemed at all necessary. Mitch Daigle wasn’t a bad fellow, but not someone to leave life over. He’d known Mitch on the Young Barristers Round Table, been friendly doubles opponents for at least one summer at the River Bend. Mitch came from Mamou, a suavely handsome, nervous-eyed coon-ass boy, who’d come into the city from across the Atchafalaya the way Walter had come down from Mississippi – for a big lick in the oil and gas fascination, now long gone. Life left bestilled. There’d been a slew of them: young men – boys, really – who’d arrived out of law school ready to make their stand and get well. There hadn’t been a need for long establishment. New Orleans didn’t require that. You needed seed money and nerve, and everybody had that for a while. He and Mitch had each gone into an old, good white-shoe firm, then drifted away to smaller outfits with the money tide. Betsy had helped him find a suitable Greek Revival house on Palmer Street and on the ‘come-back’ showing, fucked him on the client’s teaster bed. It all went south then. Betsy ‘explained’ she’d read a book in college in South Carolina, something about lost children caught in a cyclone on a South Sea island. All the animals on the island – bird, lizards, fuzzy creatures – went crazy out ahead of the storm. It had become fashionable to blame as many bad things as possible on the hurricane – things that would’ve happened anyway, shortfalls in character the hurricane could never have begotten. As if life weren’t its own personalized storm. He knew you needn’t think about why things happened. Lawyers made up those reasons. It was widely known to be nearly impossible to admit that things, in fact, did happen.
Still. Life was lived in your head – even for Louise. You tracked back toward the cause of things out of habit, but got little for it. Betsy had ‘thrown herself’ into her work, was living alone in a condo like he was, being a part-time mom, and was spending this evening on a hot screened porch, drinking rum and staring out toward the distant lights of the city, becoming bored with life all over again, just in some entirely new way. A shame you couldn’t go back the other way. Re-leash the storm.
*
The Wal-Mart lot felt hotter than any place he’d been so far that day, the mostly empty, paper-strewn parking expanse buttery with petroleum fumes from the river. It of course had been damaged then looted, then looted again for good measure and not been reopened long. Ants on the cupcake. A few souls – a large Negro women in skin-tight, fuchsia shorts trailing her tiny kids and a muscular young man in a Saints jersey and baggy jeans – were strolling out the entrance-exit, navigating full shopping carts.
Inside was instant relief from the cooking heat. Walter was dressed for the office – a suit and tie no one else in Wal-Mart was wearing. No one looked at all like him, which made him prompt to get his business over with. The general human feeling in the vast, merchandise-clotted space, dimensionlessly farther than you could see under severe fluorescence, was of people – families, shoppers, grannies in wheelchairs, abandoned kids, slack-jawed young-marrieds in from the country – all making a late afternoon of it, taking their spoiled leisure, letting Wal-Mart be what their day offered. Only the size of the biosphere made it feel strangely empty within.
He asked of the friendly/elderly merchandise checker where greeting cards might be found and went straight there – a long, tiered and racked section between school supplies and the discount wines – and where no one was there to help. The chlorinated air was freezing, and he’d sweated his hairline and his shirt collar. There was no reason, though, to make a complex assignment of this. What he’d choose wouldn’t please Louise anyway. Left to herself, hours would be expended determining the
perfect card, which would then have been repudiated later.
Most of the tired offerings were for conventional observances – graduation, birthday, anniversary, confirmation, birth, sympathy over a mother’s death, illness, events requiring good humor. There were a lot of these. But no message-less cards, except two with sex themes – one, some wit had already written on and drawn in a picture of a large smiling penis with a moustache. ‘Hey-o!’ Not so easy to fit your private need for expression into a category some soul in Kansas City has already found words for. You ended up finally buying one, signing it, sealing it up and sending it off, then letting thoughts voyage elsewhere. Compromise was all.
Lots of cards depicted black people, although they were mostly tan, clean-cut black people wearing chinos and oxford shirts and women smiling out at fields of colorful cornflowers, wearing gold wedding bands, with children who looked like they’d done well on their science projects and were ready for Harvard. They weren’t much like the people in Wal-Mart. Ginny Baxter might also not appreciate a card semi-personalized to her race. It was because of her race that she’d soon be moving. It was tempting to seek out one of the red-smocked sales associates who was a person of color and ask if she or he might be offended if a well-meaning white child gave their black child a friendship card in which the human beings depicted were more or less ‘black’. Or would it be insensitive? Possibly a hoot? Or just one more thing white people didn’t get – of which there was a growing cavalcade. Such feelings were enervating.
Here was one that said, ‘Have a Wonderful Trip!’ A bright red mini-van full of waving, smiling tan children was portrayed pulling out the wide driveway of a big blue suburban home with a great leafy oak tree in the healthy, grassy green yard. Lots of festive colored balloons rose into a clean blue sky, which must’ve been California. A message pledged, ‘We won’t be happy ’til you’re back!’ Louise would loathe the Negro characters and think it was all queer and ‘inappropriate’. She’d hate the minivan and the house and the tree and the smiles and the balloons. These black people were also obviously headed to Orlando, not Kenosha. There was nothing he could do right, here. A task past his capabilities. Louise could’ve made a perfect card out of red construction paper and affixed her own clever, tender wording. Only she’d have been embarrassed, unsure, mortified. Too painful. A father’s job, this was. Louise never really asked for much.
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