by Richard Ford
But did we have “interactions”? Of course. I must have told him about things—learning to swim at the YMCA, about General MacArthur’s visit to Jackson in 1952, which he missed. About trying (unsuccessfully) to earn Cub Scout badges. And later, about wanting to go to Camp Mondamin. I have no memory of anything being a problem, of ever feeling I wasn’t getting him enough. There was a way that his not being there most of the time became a kind of privileged state for me, a distinction among the other boys. It was as if I came to like having him gone. Though it also meant that I could not—when those same boys eventually asked—paint a clear picture of my life in one sentence or even four.
I have already said that what I don’t know about my parents ought not be thought a quality of their lives. And yet, for me—different from my mother and different from him—his continual absence, much more than his intermittent presences, has become (and perhaps was all along through childhood) much of who he was. Memory has pushed him further and further away until I “see” him—in those early days—as a large, smiling man standing on the other side of a barrier made of air, looking at me, possibly looking for me, recognizing me as his son but never coming quite close enough for me to touch.
HOW WE LIVED IN JACKSON WAS SMALLY. My mother, who’d been taught by nuns, now joined the Presbyterians—a church close to our house—because my kindergarten teacher was a member there. “Accepted by profession of faith” my mother’s certificate stated. My father, who never attended, joined “by letter,” though he’d been raised a Presbyterian. A red-brick school—Jefferson Davis School—was next door, where it still sits. I was to go there. My mother was friendly—when she knew you—but did not make friends easily and was suspicious of the other children on our street, children who lived in rooming houses in upstairs apartments. Being a transient herself, she looked askance at transients. There were the old families in their big white houses up and down the block. They, in their turn, were wary of us. My mother and I ate in the boarding-houses up Congress by the capitol, two blocks south. Or sometimes we bought our meals at the steam-table at the grocery, which was not far away. We walked to town, the two of us—to the two department stores or to the movies. I rode the bus alone to kindergarten, walked the two blocks from the stop down Keener Ave, then took the bus home after lunch. Most always, he was not there—my father. Though I remember his Ford sitting at the curb on weekends, remember the sound of him in the house, in the bathroom, snoring in his bed. I remember the size of him. His leather suitcase was never unpacked. His change, wallet, pocket-knife, handkerchief, and watch were on his bed table (they did not sleep together anymore). The soapy smell of his shaving kit sweetened the bathroom. I can hear him singing—something about “the wig-a-zees and the bees in the trees,” which made them both laugh, and sometimes he sang “Danny Boy.” I hear the names repeated of the people he knew. Ole Mac. Lew Herring. Always, Mr. Hoyt up in KC. Mr. Beeham, Mr. Hoyt’s boss. Kenny somebody.
Snapshots come into play. Tiny, square, scalloped black-and-whites. My mother bought a box Brownie and was bent to capture my father and me together: a bulky man in a dark overcoat, at first holding me, then “walking” me on the sidewalk in front of our house and the school yard; leaning over me in my toy car; later, me sitting in his car, smiling out the window wearing a baseball cap as if I’d just driven up. My mother’s shadow lives in these, her perfect silhouette holding the camera at her waist, peering into it. Often lying in my bed at night, I heard the bed-springs squeeze—squeeze-squeeze, squeeze-squeeze—their low voices, encased in the old intimacy and in the anticipation of his regular departures—Monday gone, Friday returned.
What could I possibly have thought about my life? Most of it, of course, would’ve been just sensation, not thoughts, and much of that just anticipation. Of him. And once he was home again, anticipation that the week’s events—its pleasures, displeasures, minor controversies, remonstrances, the complications my mother and I experienced—these would all be suspended or ignored. Or explained away quickly. It made for an atmosphere of agreed-upon concealment, of small dissemblings, of putting a good face on, of judging this to be more important than that, even when both mattered. These may have been the first of the lessons my father hoped to impart onto me, coping skills for issues that won’t iron out yet need to be dealt with, and for which explanations must be available. If these were not the intended lessons, they were the ones I learned. My father’s job was hard. He was delicate (probably he was by then). She would not risk distressing him. I was her ally, like it or not.
The grandparents played their part—at least her family did.
They were now established in Little Rock—Bennie and Essie. They ran a big hotel—the Marion. They had more money, more time. Ben Shelley kept blooded bird dogs in the hotel basement, drove a red Buick “Super.” A four-holer. Was a sport. They came to Jackson at Christmas, or we went to them, bundled into my father’s Ford with starch samples in the back, driving up through the Delta, across the river into Arkansas—five hours plus. We stayed in their big apartment in the hotel. #604. It was festive, jovial, boozy. They all still liked one another—an unusual family. There was a sense of re-uniting and resuming from the time before I was there. Plus I was there, included now. It was the happiest life I’d known.
Bennie, Richard, and Essie, Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1954
In these joint festivities, my father was a son-in-law again—but a father, too. Older. Though now he was 5th—since I was there and much was made of me. Bennie was a boisterous, fat, rakish, pugnacious, sharp-eyed capable man everyone liked, and who cut a swath. A lesser, slightly ludicrous public personage in Little Rock, with his name frequently in the papers. Whereas my father—tall, fleshy, slightly shy, understated but willing, and with the politeness of a more modest-size man—was still a country boy who’d made it to where he’d made it but wasn’t going much further. He stood aside for my grandfather, who captivated me. My father was part of an audience and seemed not to mind.
His brother still lived in town. “Uncle Pat” was heavy, grim-faced, sullen, with a tiny wife crippled by arthritis. Aunt Nora. He booked circus acts for the state fair and had little to say. Terrible things he’d seen in the war were the ostensible reason for his silence. They had no children. On these holiday trips we saw him only in his small house on South Spring Street, and never for longer than an hour. I did not have a brother, so how they were together became the way brothers were. Not close.
On Christmas morning, we always drove to Atkins, to his mother’s, two hours west. We ate Christmas dinner with the likable cousins and his sister and her unlikable pharmacist husband. My father watched his mother stump around her house in fervid insistence that things weren’t the way they were. Dislike or distrust or just dismay with my mother underlay this. Everyone acted polite. I was pronounced to look more like an Uncle William—a deceased Irishman. My father was doted on, teased. Everyone half wished he would stay longer. But we did not. A day was all.
Following which, it was the long, wintry drive back to Jackson and to how events went on there—the leaving and the coming, my father’s appearance on the weekends; my mother and me alone in the little brick house with the sycamore in front. If I could’ve asked them, they might’ve said these were also exquisite times. They were in their forties—the clear-horizon years, when if you had a better idea you could give it a try. Have another child. Find a better job. Buy a new car. Buy the duplex on Congress—which they did. Mississippi was alien, costive, but it was just a small, ignorable part of the whole. My mother didn’t have to work. We had a maid to clean and look after me when she went to the library or to a movie or shopping. She bought a piano so I could someday take lessons. When he was home there was time for picnics at Pelahatchie Lake, for day trips to the Confederate bluffs at Vicksburg, to Stafford Springs to swim, to Allison’s Wells, to Jack’s tamale house, to the bootlegger across the river, to the airport to watch planes take off. I don’t know how other people saw them, or if
my life—loved, looked after, cloistered by my parents’ circumstances and personalities—was like other boys’ lives. Again, I don’t remember my mother complaining about anything. But for myself, I must’ve been beginning to sense that his being gone was not the exception, but the ordinary, identifying dimension of everything. People go away. Possibly I was becoming more aware of my father as someone not there, and less aware of him in the days and moments he was actually present. Permanence became something you fashioned. This may have been another lesson he imparted to me.
I DON’T REMEMBER THE TIME OF YEAR of his heart attack—the first one. Something makes me think it was in spring, because when the ambulance came to our house in the middle of the night—the men with a stretcher walking right down the hall—they took him out the front door, and I don’t remember it being cold or hot. I remember only being confused and alarmed, since nothing like this had ever happened in the comings and goings that made up our life.
Everything changed on that night, of course. Remembered time can shift and wander. But I was definitely four. I knew something about absence but I knew nothing about change. I knew nothing about my father’s heart, or about what my mother felt: her husband, aged forty-three, in the Baptist Hospital—where I’d been born—laid out under an oxygen tent, not breathing well. Both of them so young.
We went to the hospital, she and I. Possibly it was later that same morning. I saw him under his big, clear tent—as big as a pup tent. We would say today that he was stabilized, but I didn’t know what had happened—what he’d suffered, how it had felt. I heard the words—heart attack. But he was strangely smiling out at me through the plastic, as if this was just a very funny situation to find yourself in. Possibly he didn’t want me to be afraid, though I wasn’t. He was large under the sheets, but didn’t look sick. He was breathing normally, it seemed to me. His doctor, Dr. Hageman, must’ve told my mother and him many things (I of course wasn’t told anything): that Parker could be fine; though also that his life could now be shortened; that he should lose weight, work less, not smoke, take exercise, not drink, find a hobby, possibly even should put his affairs in order. People knew less about heart attacks then. But no one took it lightly. And while I could not have said so, I must have sensed, just from being present beside them, that wherever life had seemed to be going before, it might be going there differently now. Or it might be going somewhere else. Here was change. His mother did not come down from Atkins to see him, though Bennie and Essie did.
IT’S TEMPTING, AS I sit here sixty-eight years later, to focus a shadowy, melodramatic light on my father’s remaining life; to see it as the time between his heart attack and before he would suddenly die. This would be accurate, since that is what that time was. Again, Dr. Hageman would’ve told him what was wrong—the heart murmur—and about how things could go; that the time ahead was unassured. Death was a likelihood, but nothing more was ordained. He was alive now. These things he knew. And yet it is also true that this period, between 1948 and 1960, encompasses the entire time—I can say it now—that I knew my father not just as a father or the father, but was the only time and the only terms under which I fully realized I had a father. To write a memoir and to consider the importance of another human being is to try to credit what might otherwise go unremarked—partly by acknowledging that mysteries lie within us all, and by identifying within those mysteries, virtues. Once more, it’s not so different from what we find when we read a story by Chekhov, nor is it probably very different from the problem any son faces when thinking about and estimating his parents. The truest life, of course, is always the life that’s lived. But how I, his only child, can best credit and characterize my father’s life and its virtues is as he lived it in my gaze, which is to say, without the overlay of later, unhappy knowledge, life lived as if there would always be a tomorrow, right to the moment when there was not.
SO THEN, THE LAST TWELVE YEARS of my father’s earthly life. It is little easier than the early parts to make clear, since he was, again, not there with us much. What I remember of him between my ages five and sixteen, in fact, stands away from time like islands in the horizon-to-horizon sea of his absence. Things that took place when I was nine mingle uncertainly with what happened when I was twelve and fourteen. And if his absence had for a time become a kind of presence, it now became less that, as my own life crowded in with its concerns. Somehow in these years there seems to be less of him even when there was more.
HE RECOVERED—at least in a way he did. There was no surgery, then, for what he had. He was given no pills to take. There would be convalescence—some taking it easy. But from my standpoint, he was in the hospital, and then he just resumed life.
He did set aside cigarettes, though he did not take any exercise. Driving his territory was deemed stressful, and since I was not in school yet, my mother and I rode with him once again, with her now driving. When having me along—age four—became impractical, I was sent to Little Rock to live with the grandparents in the Marion. How long this went on, I don’t know. A year, possibly, with me back and forth to Arkansas; while the two of them did what they’d done before I was born. Lived on the road while he recovered and got stronger. They might’ve loved it.
My age, of course, soon changed that arrangement. Kindergarten and then school. Her helping with the driving was now confined to summer. To stay off cigarettes, he opportunistically affected a pipe, which was thought to be better. He gained weight. He developed hemorrhoids and big corns on both his feet (which he carved away at with a safety razor blade, while seated on the bedside when he was home, and as I watched). He now limped—possibly from the corns. His affect became burdened. His breath was shorter and he wheezed. He lost hair. Something inimical and sinister in the way the company Fords were made—a flaw in the design of the door-front moldings—caused him more than once to close the car door on his hand, wounding him but not breaking a bone. It was before the days of lawsuits for such things. He tried to be more careful. But overall he was weakened.
In Kansas City his bosses contemplated his situation and relaxed his duties, divided his territory into two parts and gave one to Dee Walker. My mother attended him as lavishly as possible. And yet, he very well might’ve felt trapped—trapped inside his defective body, trapped in a now-stressful job he’d always loved, trapped in his car and in all those tiny hotel rooms and coffee shops, trapped as the father of a son he saw only on weekends—when he came home exhausted, needing calm and sympathy and sleep. He might also have felt remote from his only love, whose affections and time she was now required to share with me. He also might simply have hurt and been scared.
I do not know about my father’s faith—if he had any. He might’ve said he did—after his heart attack. But he did not practice one, not as long as I knew him. I know he didn’t take pleasure in books—where he could’ve found what we all find if we don’t have faith: testimony that there is an alternate way to think about life, different from the ways we’re naturally equipped. Seeking imaginative alternatives would not have been his habit.
Like any of us he certainly possessed an ongoing, interior narrative, yet he was not notably inward. He was also not of a complaining nature. It was not natural for him to think life was inadequate or required much bettering, or of himself as singular or standing out for special notice. He lacked obvious hubris or great ambitions and fitted himself better than most into daily existence—even now when his had grown uncertain. In most ways, he was a man who took life as it randomly came, and was good at avoiding what he didn’t want to think about. Being sick. These native qualities that maybe bottled him up as an uneducated country boy may also have defended him. And as time went on he may have thought that his doctors would save him, and wished to portray himself as strong for my mother. But he would also have known that even though he could be approaching death, nothing in her love for him would change. He was in most ways not a dexterous or skillful man, but in the art of being loved he possessed a talent—which surely is
a virtue worth noting, one that confers benefits superior to most.
I MYSELF DO NOT REMEMBER thinking much about my father being ill. Only that he had been ill but was mostly all right now. Twice, I recall, he had bursitis and stayed off the road, in bed for a week. And there were the times when he shut his hand in the company-car door. But his heart was never talked about in my hearing. The signal life events of this period were not, at least in my understanding, health related.
Did he fear death and think about it? Probably both. Did he experience tension and worry because of it? I’m certain. But was he an even more partial father than when I was younger? Not that I recall. I remember being aware that my relation to him seemed different from what I observed were other boys’ relations to their fathers. I was aware of no one whose father was a traveling salesman and always gone. (There of course may have been several.) Other fathers seemed to go to banks or be pharmacists or work in the oil & gas business or own car dealerships or construction firms or pest controls. Though it would be inaccurate to say I felt loss arising from this difference. To my view, we were not a determinedly unusual family. Not poor. Not rich. Close-knit, though shying away—by instinct and mostly without choice—from full entry to the life of Jackson. I grew up understanding that the view from outside any family, mine included, and the experience of being inside would always be different.
From other photographs of him through these years, I think I “see” in my father’s soft, willing features—and photographs always bear the imprint of the viewer’s later knowledge and needs—a hesitancy, a lack of wryness, a hint of reluctance and frustration, a faint awareness of some sort of impendment. How would that not be true? And yet, we went on traveling back and forth to Arkansas—where I was again often left with my grandparents in their big hotel and was happy. Other times, with my mother along, we made holidays out of his trade shows. We drove to Kansas City, took short outings to the Coast and back, and as always to New Orleans. Sometimes in summers I rode alone in the car with him, to Louisiana or to Alabama, while my mother stayed home and rested. We slept together—we must’ve—in the same steamy hotel-room beds where they had slept, ate in the same three-dollar restaurants. I sat in the car, as she had, and waited while he called on his small-town customers. During these trips my father and I treated each other with unaccountable correctness and courtesy. Away from my mother’s oversight and occasional volatility, a new and possibly natural decorum took over. Nothing of their life-on-the-road before I came was rehearsed to me. Nothing regarding his current situation was complained about or even mentioned. My view about anything was seldom sought. If his life during this time was straitened by poor health or worry, his mantra (and of course he didn’t have a mantra) was that all was normal.