Between Them Read online

  Parker, Richard, and Edna, New Orleans, V-J Day 1945

  Dedication

  Kristina

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Gone: Remembering My Father

  My Mother, In Memory

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Ford

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  In writing these two memoirs—thirty years apart—I have permitted some inconsistencies to persist between the two, and I have allowed myself the lenience to retell certain events. Both of these choices, I hope, will remind the reader that I was one person raised by two very different people, each with a separate perspective to impress upon me, each trying to act in concert with the other, and each of whose eyes I tried to see the world through. Bringing up a son who can survive to adulthood must sometimes seem to parents little more than a dogged exercise in repetition, and an often futile but loving effort at consistency. In all cases, however, entering the past is a precarious business, since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are. RF

  Gone

  Remembering My Father

  Parker Ford (date unknown)

  Somewhere deep in my childhood, my father is coming home off the road on a Friday night. He is a traveling salesman. It is 1951 or ’52. He’s carrying with him lumpy, white butcher-paper packages full of boiled shrimp or tamales or oysters-by-the-pint he’s brought up from Louisiana. The shrimp and tamales steam up hot and damp off the slick papers when he opens them out. Lights in our small duplex on Congress Street in Jackson are switched on bright. My father, Parker Ford, is a large man—soft, heavy-seeming, smiling widely as if he knew a funny joke. He is excited to be home. He sniffs with pleasure. His blue eyes sparkle. My mother is standing beside him, relieved he’s back. She is buoyant, happy. He spreads the packages out onto the metal kitchen table top for us to see before we eat. It is as festive as life can possibly be. My father is home again.

  Our—my and my mother’s—week has anticipated this arrival. “Edna, will you . . . ?” “Edna, did you . . . ?” “Son, son, son. . . .” I am in the middle of everything. Normal life—between his Monday leavings and the Friday nights when he comes back—normal life is the interstitial time. A time he doesn’t need to know about and that my mother saves him from. If something bad has happened, if she and I have had a row (always possible), if I have had trouble in school (also possible), this news will be covered over, manicured for his peace of mind. I don’t remember my mother ever saying “I’ll have to tell your father about this.” Or “Wait ’til your father comes home. . . .” Or “Your father will not like that. . . .” He confers—they confer—the administration of the week’s events, including my supervision, onto her. If he doesn’t have to hear it when he’s home—ebullient and smiling with packages—it can be assumed nothing so bad has gone on. Which is true and, to that extent, is fine with me.

  HIS LARGE MALLEABLE, FLESHY FACE was given to smiling. His first face was always the smiling one. The long Irish lip. The transparent blue eyes—my eyes. My mother must’ve noticed this when she met him—wherever she did. In Hot Springs or Little Rock, sometime before 1928. Noticed this and liked what she saw. A man who liked to be happy. She had never been exactly happy—only inexactly, with the nuns who taught her at St. Anne’s in Fort Smith, where her mother had put her to keep her out of the way.

  For being happy, however, there was a price. His mother, Minnie, an unyielding immigrant from County Cavan, a small-town widow and a Presbyterian, maintained views that my mother was a Catholic. Why else go to their school? Catholic meant “wide” instead of diffident and narrow. Parker Carrol was her youngest of three. The baby. Her husband, my father’s father—L.D. Jr.—was already a suicide. A dandified farmer with a gold-headed cane in a small Arkansas town. She’d been left with all his debts and his scandal. She meant to protect her precious last. From the Catholics, definitely. My mother would never fully own him, if his mother had a say. And she would.

  My father did not project “a strength,” even as a young man. Rather, he projected a likable, untried quality, a susceptibility to being over-looked. Deceived. Except by my mother. From my memory, I know he tended to stand back in groups, and yet to lean forward when he spoke, as though he was expecting soon to hear something he’d need to know. There was his goodly size; the warm, hesitant smile. A woman who liked him—my mother—could see this as shy, a fragility a wife could work with. He would likely not disguise things or himself: a man who wasn’t so knowing that you couldn’t take care of him. There was the terrible temper, not so much anger as eruptive and impulsive, born of frustrations with things he couldn’t do or hadn’t done well enough, or didn’t know—private dissatisfactions, possibly of the sort that had made his young father take a seat on the porch step one moonlit summer night in 1916, having lost the farm to bad investments, and poison himself to death out of dismay. My father’s temper wasn’t of that kind. His sweetness, the large forward-leaning sunniness and uncertainty worked against that, allowed an opening for a life my mother could see and enter with the sound of her name. Edna.

  Parker, Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1929

  When she met him, she was seventeen. He was possibly twenty-four—a “produce man” at the Clarence Saunders grocery in Hot Springs, where she lived with her parents. It was a small chain of stores, now gone. There is a photograph I have: my father, standing in the store with the clerks—wooden bins all around, brimming with onions, potatoes, carrots, apples. It is an old-looking place. He is wearing his white bib apron and staring, slightly smiling for the camera. His dark hair is neatly combed. He is ordinarily handsome, competent-appearing, alert, a young man on the way to somewhere better—a career, not merely employment. It is the twenties. He has come to the city from the country, equipped with farm virtues. Was he nervous in this picture? Excited? Did he fear he might fail? Why, one wonders, had he left tiny Atkins, where he was from? The world’s pickle capital. All of it is unknown to me. His brother, Elmo—called “Pat” for the Irish lineage—lived in Little Rock, but soon went to the navy. His sister was at home with a burgeoning family. Possibly, by the time of this picture, he had met my mother and fallen in love. Dates are no more clear than reasons.

  Not long after, though, he took a better job managing the Liberty Stores in Little Rock—another grocery chain. He joined the Masons. Though soon, robbers would enter one of his places of business, wave guns around, take money, hit my father in the head, and depart. After which he was let go and never told precisely why. Possibly he’d said something he shouldn’t have. I don’t know how people saw him. As a bumpkin? A hick? A mother’s boy? Not brave enough? Possibly as a character to whom the great Chekhov would ascribe a dense-if-not-necessarily-rich interior life. A young man adrift within his circumstances.

  Time then, and another job—in Hot Springs, again. He was married to my mother now. The thirties were beginning. Then another, even better job came—selling laundry starch for a company out of Kansas City. The Faultless Company. I don’t know how he gained such a job. The company still exists in KC. To this day there are pictures of my father on the walls in the offices, with other salesmen of that time. 1938. This job he kept until he died.

  With this work came a traveling territory—seven southern states—plus a company car. A plain Ford tu-dor. He would “cover” Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and a small part of Tennessee, a slice of Florida, a corner of Texas, all of Mississippi. He was to call on the wholesale grocer companies that provisioned small stores across the rural south. He arrived a
t each and wrote down orders for starch. There was only the one product. His customers occupied murky, back-street warehouses with wooden loading docks and tiny stifling offices that smelled of feed by the bushel. Piggly Wiggly and Sunflower and Schwegmann’s were the big accounts. He liked his small customers best, liked arriving to their offices with something he could make happen. A sale. Many—ones in Louisiana, across the Atchafalaya—spoke French, which made it more difficult but not impossible. No one hit him in the head.

  HE WAS NOW ON THE ROAD ALL THE TIME, and my mother simply went with him. Little Rock would be home—a small two-room apartment on Center Street. But they lived on the road. In hotels. In Memphis at the Chief Chisca and the King Cotton. In Pensacola, at the San Carlos. In Birmingham, at the Tutwiler. In Mobile, the Battle House. And in New Orleans at the Monteleone—a new city to them, very different from what they’d known in Arkansas. They loved the French Quarter—the laughing and dancing and drinking. They met some people who lived in Gentilly. Barney Rozier, who worked on oil derricks, and his wife, Marie.

  Part of the traveling job was to attend “cooking schools” in the small towns. Young girls came out of the backwoods to learn to be wives—to cook and clean and iron, to keep a house. Guard armories, high school gymnasiums, church basements, Elks Clubs were where these took place. He and my mother worked as a team, demonstrating for the girls the proper way to make starch and use it. It wasn’t hard. The Faultless emblem was a bright red star on a small white cardboard box. “You don’t have to cook it” was the company motto. There was a song with that phrase in it. My father had a tolerable tenor voice and would sing the song when he’d had a drink. It made my mother laugh. He and she—barely out of their twenties and exceedingly happy—handed out little boxed starch samples and cotton hot pads to the country girls, who were flattered to receive such gifts at a time when nobody had anything. The Depression. It was enough to get them started and to make a lasting impression when they went to the Piggly Wiggly. The car’s back seat was full of hot pads and samples.

  Imagine it. You have to, because there’s no other way: this being their whole life. On the road with no great cares. No children. Family far away. My father wore a felt hat in the winter and a straw one in summer. He smoked—they both did. His face was assuming a maturer look—again, the Irish lip, the thin mouth, and thinning hair. He had an awareness of himself. He was on his way—almost suddenly—to being who he would be. He experienced some trouble with his teeth that necessitated a bridge. A partial. He was six foot two and had begun to take on weight—above two-twenty. He owned two suits, a brown and a blue, and adored his work, which agreed with his obliging nature. About himself, he said he was “a businessman.” His boss—a Mr. Hoyt—trusted him, as did his customers in all the tiny towns. He didn’t make a lot—less than two hundred a month, with expenses. But they didn’t spend much. And he’d found a thing he could do. Sell. Be liked. Make friends. The military wouldn’t be a worry. A heart murmur had been detected, and his feet were flat. Plus, his age—too young for the first war, too old if a second one started, which eventually it did.

  The two of them began to know more people—on the road, other salesmen encountered at wholesale grocer conventions or at the cooking schools or in hotel lobbies. At the Carousel Bar at the Monteleone. By the duck pond at the Peabody in Memphis. Ed Manny. Rex Best. Dee Walker were these men’s names. They traveled for Nabisco and General Mills and P&G, or for his “competitors,” Argo and Niagara. It was collegial, more or less.

  There certainly wasn’t reading. There wasn’t television, only the car radio. There wasn’t air-conditioning for the car or the rooms. Only ceiling fans and the window if there was a screen. There were movies, which my mother liked, but he didn’t care about. They ate in supper clubs and bars and roadside joints, had breakfasts in hotel coffee shops and diners. For my father, behavior and awareness ran on a single track. There wasn’t much looking to the side of things. It made for a present he liked.

  For Faultless he was regularly the low man in gas consumption and the thriftiest in expenses charged back. He drove a steady 60 mph—the most economical way to drive. There was no hurry. He didn’t wish to lose his job when jobs were scarce. They were together everywhere, all the time. Each Sunday morning, wherever they were—in some hotel—he wrote out his expense reports in the room or at the little escritoire in the lobby, his tiny, barely decipherable ink-pen scratchings filling the forms the company provided. Then he walked to the post office and mailed off a fat envelope to Kansas City. Special delivery.

  All along they wanted children. It was the normal thing. But that simply hadn’t happened. They weren’t sure why. Though it only made them closer—walled out the past and the future both. A suicide for a father and a severe Irish mother can close off a lot. Plus, my mother had had anything but an easy life before going to the nuns. The past for them wasn’t an accommodating site. As for the future and intimacy, they would be each other’s givens. He had his job and relied on her. She could do figures, could conceptualize, think of things he couldn’t. She was lively and watchful. If they talked about dreams, what they would do or later seek, what was out of reach, what they remembered and regretted, what they feared, what delighted them—and of course they did—there were no records kept, no letters, diaries, no notes on the backs of photographs. It wasn’t thought necessary.

  SOMEWHERE BEHIND THEM, of course, there was his difficult family and hers. My mother was pretty, black-haired, small, curvy, humorous, sharp-witted, talkative—and therefore difficult to accept in Atkins, though no one precisely said so. From his mother they kept a distance, even when they visited, and even though they slept in her house, the house left by the scandalous father, up the hill from Atkins with a view down to the highway and up Crow Mountain. His mother thought of her son differently now—as if he’d acquired airs with this new, possibly Catholic wife; had embraced ambitions; had met people one didn’t meet if one were from where he was from. The country. They’d been married by a justice, not in church. All was acceptable, but nothing precisely was. His sister loved him, her many children adored him, called him—Parker Carrol—“Uncle Par’Carrol.” But all was under the mother’s ceaseless eye. She kept her counsel, waited, ruled what she could rule, but did not mean to receive the new “daughter.”

  For my mother, there were added matters to dwell upon—given her life, overseen by her own rattily Ozark parents. Her people were from the sticks—worse than the country. North Arkansas. Tontitown. Hiwasse. Gravette. Way up there. My father had not known such people growing up. My mother’s mother was only fourteen years older than her daughter, and was punitive, jealous. She’d divorced the father. He was gone. The pretty, blond-headed second husband/stepfather, Bennie Shelley, was a quick-witted gigolo—a talker, a club boxer, a railroader, a show-off—but a man with a future, whom my mother’s mother, Essie Lucille, intended to hold on to, even if it meant sending her vivacious, smiling daughter off to the convent school in Fort Smith when things with Bennie grew unwieldy. Which they did. At least until the two of them needed the pretty daughter to bring in a paycheck, at which point they took her out of school at sixteen and put her to work, too young, in the cigar stand at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, where Bennie now oversaw the catering department. Again, it was the Depression. They needed to salt money away. They were not to be held back.

  For her, though—Edna—my father’s family might’ve been a real family. Irish or not, country or not, narrow with pieties, suspicions and misfortunes—all that set easily enough to the side. Had his mother been the least bit welcoming, my mother might’ve found more than enough to fit into. She was, after all, likable—knew it about herself. The sister liked her—privately. The cousins did. My mother could make you laugh. She knew interesting things the nuns had taught her. Plus my father loved her. What could be wrong? No one was making great demands. It should’ve been better. She wasn’t a Catholic. But nothing was forthcoming.

  So it be
came with her people—my mother’s and not his—that they forged a bond. She at least knew them. And there were attractions. They drank—illegally. Bennie smoked cigars, played golf, wore spectator shoes, hunted ducks with wealthy men, told jokes, knew women, lived it up to a certain extent—though was cautious not to inch above his station. He was an Arkie. They all three were. Knowing your place—who you were above, who below—was second nature. He called Essie “Mrs. Shelley” because in the hotels where they worked—at the Huckins in Oklahoma City, at the Muehlebach in KC, the Manning in Little Rock, the Arlington—that was the protocol, even if you were married.

  They were her parents, but there was little difference in their ages—the four of them. 1895 was Essie. 1910, my mother. Bennie and my father were in the middle—1901, 1904. They all “went out” together in Hot Springs and Little Rock. Roistered. Arkansas had been a state less than a hundred years, and Little Rock was the center of things, the capital—a characterless, rowdy, self-important, minor river town. Neither south nor west, not quite middle west. More like Kansas City or Omaha than Memphis and Jackson. There were streetcars, new bridges, big department stores owned by Jews, restaurants, gambling on the sly, Main Street movies, new hotels. Booze, in spite of Prohibition. Things were going on in Little Rock. They had all four been drawn to there from their own private nowheres.

  What my father, a big, courteous stand-offish young husband, felt about Essie and Bennie, I don’t know. He may have gotten swept up a bit. The world was slightly new to him and always would be. Certainly it was odd to have your in-laws be these people: on the one hand, your contemporaries; on the other, a sensation that they were in charge. They liked him without much knowing him. She stood between him and them and buffered things. His having married Edna, taken her away and made her happy was a convenience—especially to her mother. There was a bawdy, amiable, loose-limbed ruthlessness to the parents, a rough-trade aura affiliated with ambition. They were big personalities. They had scrapped beyond life in the boondocks, while my father was a traveling salesman from sixty miles up the road.