Between Them

by Richard Ford

  During the regular weeks when he was gone, my mother and I simply carried on. And on the weekends, his convenience (serenity, meals-on-time, extra sleeping, taking drives into the countryside) commanded almost all discretion and activity. Together, the two of them must now have lived in an even more intense present, made intenser by my being there, by their being so close to one another, by their being unaffiliated in Jackson, and by my father’s un-discussed condition. This undoubtedly is how all families operate, or would. But, if I say that when I was growing up my father’s life was headed in one direction and mine in another, I can also say that I was never aware of it, never thought of myself as being disadvantaged or kept in the dark. I was their son. I trusted them.

  Which is not to say there was never tension or disruption at ground level. My father’s temper now became a feature I learned about firsthand. A man can be courteous, affable, and shy but still have furies. And my father’s furies doubtless flamed from the silent dysfunctions of his heart and a maddening sense of frailty. Possibly, too, he was depressed—but wouldn’t have known that word. He practiced no hobbies or sports, entertained no committed interests or enthusiasms apart from work and us. He was impulsive and not adept at most endeavors requiring patience, and would quickly lose his temper. He could not make a TV work when he wanted it to, which suddenly would infuriate him. He could not reliably start a power lawn mower, which also infuriated him. He could not properly hang a punching bag in the utility room of the suburban house we eventually moved into. (It fell at the first blow.) He tried to paint by numbers as a form of relaxation, but did not finish his portrait of a golden palomino. He could not erect a basketball backboard so that when I got older I could gain a place on the school team. He could not operate a rotary barbecue or string up a hammock. When he half-reluctantly took me to dingy pay-to-fish lakes in the Delta—Bee Lake—or onto crowded, sweltering “deep-sea” excursions into the Gulf, neither of us caught anything, and both grew sullen, and in his case ill-tempered. He’d rather have been home with my mother.

  Once we went to the Natchez Trace to cut a Christmas tree—illegally. He wanted a small tree; I wanted a large one, and prevailed. But when we brought the tree inside the house and could not fit it into our low-ceilinged living room, my own temper went off. I dragged the tree outside to shorten its trunk with a handsaw. My father came behind me in a fit of anger all his own. He took the saw away, snatched up the Christmas tree and cut it off at the top—thereby, in my view, maiming it. I then grabbed the mangled tree back and, as well as I could, threw it at him. Whereupon he gave me a whipping I do not now want to think too much about because of its sudden-ness and ferocity. There weren’t many such events, but this was not the only one.

  I cannot remember, over the years, my father ever explicitly teaching me much—except to ride a bicycle, and how the column shifter worked on his 3-speed Ford coupé. He did not teach me to read and did not, that I remember, ever read to me. He did not teach me to tie knots or to hunt or to shoot a gun or how to start a campfire or how to change a spark plug or a tire. He may have tried to teach me how to bait a hook, but it may have been not the correct way, since it never worked out that a fish was caught. He did not take me to movies or to the swimming pool. He didn’t talk to me about sex or girls, about religion, about his own worries, about current events or politics—other than that he and my mother had liked Roosevelt, though he never said why. I don’t know what he thought about racial matters or about what I should grow up to be someday (when of course he wouldn’t be there). I do not recall ever having an actual discussion with him; I don’t remember him asking me what was going on in my mind. When we walked down a street side-by-side—to the post office to mail off his expense reports on Sunday mornings, or when we were in the car, driving his sales route—I cannot imagine what we said. School for me was far from easy, but he never—to my memory—asked me about my grades or what subjects I liked. These were my mother’s concerns, he must’ve thought. In all of these goings and comings performed together, of course things were said, passing life was observed, feelings voiced, views and amusements shared. Necessarily they would. But these are lost to time now and to superceding events. I wish I could remember them, if only because not remembering them portrays our life in a way it wasn’t, makes him and me together seem to be lonely and remote from each other in a way I honestly believe we weren’t. When I think about my father through the haze of all these poorly recollected details, my truest and most affectionate assessment of him was that he was not a modern father. Indeed, even then, when I knew him best, he seemed to be from another place and another time far away.

  Still. He accompanied me and my mother to the Baptist Hospital when I was eight and had my tonsils and adenoids out on the same day. Once he patiently doctored me with a menthol inhaler when I had asthma—though the inhaler suddenly malfunctioned and sprayed hot water in my face. Which made him cry. He bought me more than one dog and at least three cats, one of which my mother backed over in the driveway. There were several Easter chicks, two ducks and two rabbits, all of which subsequently vanished. He, once in a while, took me to a high school football game—though we knew no one playing and always left early. He bought me a baseball glove (a cheap one), and now and then would play catch in the back yard—though he was not good at that and never did it for long or seemed to enjoy it. Once, when I played especially poorly on my Babe Ruth League team, it happened to be on a rare night when he came. In the dark car on the way home, he seemed disappointed and told me I needed to play better but then said it was all right. Later, when I was in junior high, he would regularly drive me to school on his way out of town on Mondays, but was never there on other days.

  Parker, Edna, and Richard, Biloxi, Mississippi, 1957

  As I record these events, I realize that like many renditions of childhood, mine—under time’s ruthlessness—might seem incomplete or lacking. I do not believe, however, that I was ever ignored or given a short straw, or that my father was anything but a good father—as good as he could be. I could not have said it at the time, but an unspoken part of my awareness must’ve been that I was the only son of a man who was trying to conduct life against odds. I can only intuit what was his effect on me. But if I had to I would say that because I was his son, I can recognize now that life is short and has inadequacies, that once again it requires crucial avoidances as well as fillings-in to be acceptable. Most everything but love goes away.

  So then, at a time when I might’ve been expected to notice and remember more, my father’s absence from home became increasingly an unremarked given, something I could work with, dream up a private life around and make the most of.

  Officially—in my mother’s view—I needed now to be more under my father’s influence. I was disruptive and undisciplined in school. I read poorly. I continued to talk too much. I didn’t study, came home with poor grades, and was secretive, willful and unpredictable by age ten—all qualities that could be typical of a boy with undiagnosed learning difficulties and a largely absent father. A firmer hand might’ve been useful.

  And yet, although I was nominally expected to operate more and more in his field of notice, he was still almost always gone, so that I had little awareness of how he or I fitted into this new, more urgently formative stage of my life. We were both growing older, but for me there was no sensation of our becoming anything together. In spite of what was expected, he remained a weight—like gravity—that I felt from off to the side of things. A force largely unseen.

  When he came home weekends, life was neither worse nor better. Our house was simply less large with him in it. His and my associations were frequent but fitful, his weight upon me not persistent. Things surfaced, then went under again. He was not a stranger, but he was like a stranger, and while it was foregone that he loved me, it’s possible he looked upon me the way I looked upon him. I have sometimes thought over these years that I had my father at a time in a boy’s life when having a father did not mean so
much. But that is the opposite of true, and would only seem true to a boy whose father was mostly not there.

  But how he felt and how he experienced life is what matters here, and mattered to my mother and me. The twelve years between his first heart attack and his dying, the time of my late childhood and mid-adolescence, was his only life, all he had left, the time when he was as much himself as he would ever be again. I should step back from events as much as I can.

  I don’t remember him being unhappy. As I said, he was never an unhappy man. Though our particular version of father and son was not leisurely or capacious, and he seemed fidgety when he was home, as if seeking comfort but not quite finding it. He grew to have a belly and lost even more hair, but he stayed mannishly handsome, and the two of them—my parents—remained an attractive couple. When I see his face in pictures from this time—the mid-fifties now—he looks mildly impatient, as if trying to feel relaxed. He limped and did not stand up especially straight. Though there were no new heart crises, no worsening of whatever his condition was—nothing I was told about. I had all but forgotten his heart attack.

  What pleasure he took in me, in having a son, I cannot say—only that he did not seem to take none. His temper tended to flare, often with me as its natural focal point, given my behavior. There was the matter of the Christmas tree. I subsequently cut down some other trees on a neighbor’s property. I was building “a fort.” We were in the suburbs by then. This infraction ignited him, and he whipped me hard. He and my mother experienced their own upsets—sometimes with me present. Occasionally they shouted. Drinking was usually involved. One night on St. Louis Street in New Orleans he held her against a brick building wall late at night, after we’d eaten at Antoine’s. They were shouting. No disputes, however, carried over even to the next day. It wasn’t that they didn’t get along. This was just the way they got along. And all was over fast because they did.

  But I became watchful—of him, as if he was more unpredictable than he was. I kept him at more of a distance from things I did and said. Possibly it’s what any teenage boy does with his father. I did not confide in him, which—because I was secretive—wasn’t my habit in general. I did not ask him for much—pocket change, use of the car when I passed fifteen, permission to buy a motorcycle, permission to take a paper route—all granted. As I’ve said, I did not do well in school, but he didn’t seem to take an active interest or express concerns. Conceivably he had not been good at school and knew there were paths in life that didn’t involve school or great accomplishment. Selling starch. Following in his footsteps. This, we never discussed.

  Who clearly was the center of his life was my mother. To her, I might’ve been becoming more a center—with a damaged husband who might not live long. But to him it was her. Even at the time, I knew I was third. Which was ideal, since I could watch them, overhear them through doors, listen to the bed-springs at night when he came from his room to visit hers—all without attracting much notice to myself. Their being so much a “unit” freed me and became another luxury, born of how life was being constructed.

  When he came home on Friday nights, bringing his packages from wherever he’d been, it was to find her. When he laughed (and he often did), it was because of something she’d said. When he didn’t understand something (which was frequent, too), she would make it clear. When the in-laws came at Christmas, or we went to them in Little Rock, he watched her. When we went to his mother’s in Atkins, he sat or stood near to my mother. He was her protector, but she was his. If it meant that I was further from the middle of things, I have lived my entire life thinking this is the proper way to be a family.

  AT SOME POINT, near the time I was ten, in 1954, I became aware that my father had begun to crave the suburbs, and simultaneously to crave a new car—something better than the company Ford—two new things that would be his and his alone. Some rich aspect of life must’ve suddenly seemed within his reach, or urgently just outside it. He wanted these desires met, as if he was in a hurry.

  New cars began appearing in our driveway on Congress Street. These were demonstrators—a term of sales art now lost. Spanking new two-tone Dodges arrived with fins and big mirrored bumpers and whipping antennas. Shiny Bel Airs. Much nicer Fords. A chromed-up Pontiac Star Chief worth twenty-six hundred. Young, skinny, crew-cut salesmen delivered these to us for weekend try-outs, most of which time the cars sat out front for the neighbors to see—briefly presumed to be ours. My father would stand on our tiny lawn, smoking his pipe, considering the cars carefully, or he would muse at them out the bedroom window, presumably making up his mind. Then on Monday they’d go back. He and my mother had decided, though no one had told me how.

  But on Saturday afternoons and after church on Sunday, we would all three pile in the new car (not to be ours) and take a test drive north of the city, into the new, spreading, suburban outskirts where my father dreamed we would soon be moving. Meadowbrook, Northside, Hanging Moss, Sherwood Forest, Watkins Drive. Cul-de-sacs. Haphazardly lined-out developers’ tracts. Many of these subdivisions-to-be were only farmers’ fields or pine scrubbage dropping off into the Pearl River swamp, where deer and bobcats and turkeys abided, but where soon would be streets and houses and schools. Buyers could choose a lot or a half-built spec house or a finished model home with furniture already inside. Close-by, the Interstate was creeping north. Land would soon be filled in clear to Chicago.

  Specifically what was the character of my father’s longing—as we motored slowly in those fancy demos, down one curving, unfinished street and up another, weekend upon weekend, time when I might’ve been doing something else but was required to be with them, as my father trained his gaze hungrily out at the passing houses, as if glimpsing a bright fantasy in the clouds—I don’t know.

  Once, late on a shady Sunday, we found our way down such a gravel trace, an old lovers’ lane where a hand-lettered sign said LOTS. At the end we came upon police cars. Some boy had killed his girlfriend in the woods there, then killed himself. A uniformed patrolman walked up to our borrowed car, leaned into the window, shaking his head, his hat off. “Oh, folks, you don’t want to see what’s down there,” he said, “I promise you that.” We backed around and drove slowly home, as though our search had reached the place where civilization ended.

  It’s likely, of course, that nothing was unusual about this new yearning my father had fallen under. Almost certainly he felt his days were fewer than they had been, and might’ve fastened down on the thought of a new house and a fancy car with the zeal of just such a man—re-investing in the world, as if a promise of more life for the three of us came with that bargain. It’s also just as possible to think of him—for once—as a man of his time. If the suburbs were not his glimpsed dream in the clouds, they were nonetheless there and new, and he could go toward them—a country boy with no wish to return to the country, who’d exceeded his station and found himself free to think of things many other people thought of.

  I, of course, had come to like where we lived on Congress. I had friends—a few. I had adapted to the inevitability of school. I lacked my father’s sense of impendment, so that my world worked on relatively simple principles. You lived where you lived, knew who you knew. When my parents discussed moving, when they spent evenings at the dining room table totaling and re-totaling their finances, working out a strategy for enrolling me in a newer, “better” school, of moving us away from neighbors they knew toward neighbors they didn’t, it was never discussed with me. There were the Sunday drives, the houses. But I didn’t take any of that too seriously. They didn’t seem to be people who would change life drastically once it had found its place—as it had. Even now they do not seem that way. And so once again I approach their otherness and they elude me, as our parents do.

  There were a few close calls, inching my father nearer the purchase of a house. An offer was hesitantly extended to a Mr. Culley, but was declined and some ill will generated in my father. Another time he acquired some basic blueprints you coul
d send off for from Town and Country magazine. Numerous conversations were conducted with builders—large men in khakis and white shirts—my father standing beside them in the middle of some half-finished street, holding his rolled-up plans and pointing toward a parcel where a home could go up. There was one finished house he liked enormously but failed to qualify for at the bank. He became more intent and impatient, but was too courteous, too stand-offish, too lacking in knowingness—even with my mother’s aid—to drive home a bargain.

  Time passed. Possibly he dreamed at night with greater vividness of me mowing a lawn while he watched. Of winding curb-less streets without transients for neighbors, of a yellow school bus stopping and picking me up, of coming home on weekends to a new house, of being viewed by new congenial neighbors, of the way my mother would look when she stood in the doorway each time he arrived on Friday. Smiling.