Between Them Read online

  And it was all much more than I’m saying. You can be sure. What I don’t know can’t rightly be called a feature of who he was. My father. Incomplete understanding of our parents’ lives is not a condition of their lives. Only ours. If anything, to realize you know less than all is respectful, since children narrow the frame of everything they’re a part of. Whereas being ignorant or only able to speculate about another’s life frees that life to be more what it truly was.

  My father was almost, but not completely, a kind of man by then. Not a boy. Yet not a full-scale adult. A husband, a wage-earner certainly, a son, a brother, an uncle. But among the four of them, as a son-in-law, he was 4th. He didn’t recede as much as settle into a role within their small hierarchy. He may have realized it. His large size and politeness, which made people like him—these may also have bottled him up. As if mannerliness was a measure of not being prepared for life. It would be the pattern around the three of them—his being 4th. Though it could also have been that for all he was—reticent, not quite gainly, smiling, forward-leaning, newly married, loved and in love—it might’ve been the most exquisite time of his life.

  BEING BOTH A LATE CHILD and an only child is a luxury, no matter what else it might be, since both invite you to speculate alone about all the time that went before—the parents’ long life you had no part in. It fascinates me to think of the route their life could’ve followed that would’ve precluded me: divorce, even earlier death, estrangement. But also greater closeness, intimacy, being together in a way that defies category. They more than certainly had that in them. They wanted me; but they did not need me. Together—though perhaps only together—they were fully formed.

  They stayed on the road. Life went on as it had, from the thirties straight into the forties. They owned little—a bit of furniture, their clothes, no car. My father grew larger, lost more hair, smoked too much, remained a star in his selling work. They traveled to Kansas City for sales meetings. They came to New Orleans often and thought it could be a place to live. It had an open feel. He didn’t long for Atkins, though he managed a visit to his mother when he was nearby. He went hunting with the cousins, doted on his nieces and nephews. He gained stature at home. They all, except the mother, learned to like Edna—if not entirely, at least in the ways they liked certain surprising sides of themselves. She was too pretty and lively and irreverent not to be semi-accepted. One merely avoided certain subjects. It wasn’t hard. And he loved her, which was what mattered.

  The war began. His brother went and so did two nephews. He had the heart murmur and did not go. It must’ve been odd for life to carry on in a normal way while the terrible fighting took place overseas. It might’ve been a thing he regretted—missing the chance to come back changed. Some abstract, un-uttered thought—something he may not have noticed—could’ve coursed through his mind, made him think of himself differently. As being less competent. Or just lucky. Or both.

  What were their frustrations, my mother’s unspoken wishes? What did they say to each other in the car during all those traveling miles alone? He had become thirty-six, she was thirty-one. He must’ve become fully a “kind” of man now. An adult. A salesman with a wife. He affected few people beyond her and his customers; though affecting people would not be a part of what life meant to them. Did he “develop”? Feel more confident? Did this way of floating begin to seem old? Was there an extra dimension to their life where before there hadn’t been? Is it bad if there wasn’t?

  It’s revealing—though perhaps only of oneself—to think of people in terms of what might’ve been better for them. The writer who might better have been a lawyer; the lawyer who might better have been a teacher; the soldier who might better have been a priest; the priest who might better have been most anything. My father could’ve sold something else. Cars. He could’ve worked in a hardware. Possibly he could have farmed with his father, if he’d had one. But he wouldn’t likely—in my view—have done much better than he did at Faultless. He had no notable skills besides his good personality. Selling was perfect. His job—fitting into it and liking it—was part and parcel to understanding him. Greater challenges might only have frustrated him and rendered him unhappy. If he had dreams of something else, I never heard of them later. He seemed to be where he belonged and thought so. If he had a self-image, his own outlook, it was that. Habit became his guide—along with my mother. It does no injustice to him to say that.

  BUT THEN, TO EVERYONE’S SURPRISE, my mother was pregnant in the summer of 1943. And the course of everything changed.

  Seeing one’s advent as a mixed blessing is not necessarily bad. They had almost certainly concluded—after fifteen years—that there would be no children. My parents may have harbored complex and possibly unexpressed feelings about that: of life now staying the same—and being good. Of settling somewhere—just the two of them. New Orleans. The time together was precious. It was what they knew. Did he feel he had something to impart that, without a child, would never be imparted? Did each or both of them think my father would not live long due to his heart so that a child was a needless difficulty? All are possible.

  As I said, they officially wanted children. Though that they were now going to have a baby could only have been unsettling. He’d become thirty-eight and was not robust. She was thirty-three. His boss in Kansas City—Mr. Hoyt again, who had children of his own—said, “Parker, you have to choose a place to live now. Not just the road. Find the middle of your territory. You can be home more.” This seeking may have been what was happening anyway.

  Yet if there was ever going to be a job change—to a hardware in Little Rock, or back to stocking lettuce, or a return to Atkins—this would’ve been a moment. The Depression was behind them. The war was on, but would be over. Better times were possible. But there was no thought of changing that I ever heard about. The selling job was too good. And he was too good at it. Instead, they would choose a place—in the middle, as he’d been told—and live there. Being on the road together for those years was over.

  It must be said they were not people to pore over decisions. Having discretion over a great deal meant less to them, having never had much of it. A place on the earth to live was not a spiritual matter, but a practical one. His family were immigrants. He traveled for a living. Her family were backwoods itinerants. The two of them had kept the apartment on Center Street but rarely slept there. They had no great experience of residence. It might’ve been a small matter where they decided to go to have their baby. Me.

  They thought first of New Orleans, where they liked it. It was not central, but life seemed possible there. Barney Rozier and Marie were in Gentilly—the suburbs—in a four-room, flat-roof, aqua-tinted stucco house with a tiny lawn. They had seen what that was, but chose against it. Jackson, Mississippi, was just up the road. They knew two people there, though not well. It must’ve seemed less exotic, more normal—which it was. It was the middle of where he drove to—Alabama, north Louisiana, south Arkansas. Plus, Jackson was nearer to Little Rock, and in a way like it. A small, southern capital. To be able to choose might’ve felt good. Grown-up—finally. They would be far enough away from everybody—his family and hers. Neither he nor she needed many people. Feeling unassimilated was no more unfamiliar than feeling assimilated.

  In Jackson, then, they rented half a duplex, four small rooms including a bath, in the older central part of town. North Congress Street, down the hill from the capitol building. The flat came with an option to buy. There were old mansions up the street where legislators and hillbilly musicians took rooms, and where you could buy lunch or dinner. My mother was not a good cook, and they were used to eating out. There was a small yard front and back, a garage, neighbors, some older established houses where elderly widows peered out at you through the screens. These were already being converted to apartments. It was transitional. It was where you started if you came from someplace else.

  I was born in the warm winter of 1944, in February, at the Baptist Hospital, at two
A.M. I don’t know if they cared that I would be a boy or a girl. But they were overjoyed—so they said—by me and by having made the commitment to live in Jackson and for their life to be altered in these ways. I don’t know if my father was present for my birth. It was a Wednesday. He would normally have been on the road. Witnessing a birth wasn’t so much a thing people did then. My mother’s mother came down from Little Rock. None of his family chose to.

  Edna, Richard, and Parker, Jackson, Mississippi, 1946

  How would they work it all out—from an indistinct, undemanding future, to having a child, which is a very distinct future? She would now be what she had never been—a housewife-at-home alone, with a child. A mother. She must’ve believed she was cut out for it. It was the more usual life. Things had been good up to now, and this might have seemed good, too—with the exception of my father’s new absences.

  For him, it would’ve been different, too. There was no single way to perform fatherhood—though he wouldn’t have had those words. It wouldn’t be good to be without her, having always had her—in the car with him, listening to her talk, enjoying her, eating with her, sleeping with her, letting himself be guided by what she thought and liked and wanted. Just seeing her. This was life he would miss. She was wide. He was less so. It had been all but perfect. Did he feel they were giving up something important? Was he ready for all of it? Probably he was, but no one asked the question in 1944. He would be gone now from Monday to Friday, even longer at the remoter reaches of his territory—Jackson, Tennessee. Far north Arkansas. Would he be lonely? Absolutely. Would she worry about other women, and he about other men slipping around? There had likely never been others for them. These thoughts might not have entered their minds.

  But would it be permanent? It, meaning Jackson. The deep south. Mississippi, not Arkansas. No one knew.

  And there was now me. Possibly I would not be the only baby. Did they think that? Did he or they wonder if I would grow up different without him there each and every day? If so, how? Would it be all right that “the father” was not a constant presence? How would he teach me things? Could a presence still be achieved? He himself had lacked a father, had grown up not being taught much. Did other boys have absent fathers? Could she compensate for him? Clearly, waiting for me to be born, they had just accepted how things would be. They loved each other and would love me. Love would be presence enough. We would be happy. And in that way—a way I think of as good, up to the very moment I write this—in that way my life began, and its lasting patterns became set.

  STILL, THEY DID THEIR BEST to keep up the old ways—at least at the beginning. They took me. The three of us in the hot car—in south Louisiana. Florence, Alabama. The Mississippi Delta. Bastrop, Shreveport. El Dorado and Camden, Arkansas. He now smoked El Productos, gained more weight—two-forty—wore better hats, went inside the wholesale grocer houses to call on his accounts, leaving us outside in the front seat by the loading docks, in the heat or the cold. In New Orleans, my mother and I rode the Algiers Ferry back and forth while he worked as far as Houma and Lafayette. I crawled on the seawall at the lake, the wind whipping, the waves tufted. We went to City Park and Bayou St. John and Shell Beach, went to the zoo. We sometimes took the train—the “Miss Lou”—down from Jackson to Hammond just to meet him for a day. Once there was a car breakdown in Ville Platte, which took two weeks to fix. We waited there in a hot hotel room. Once there was a car breakdown on the high span of the river bridge at Greenville. My father was quick out into the feverish heat and damp wind, sweating in his shirtsleeves, changing the tire on the company Ford, high above the brown, sliding river, while inside my mother held me as tight as she could, as if I—the only child—might fly away.

  I was not a bad baby, so it was almost thinkable to live this way—traveling with me across the south. But it couldn’t last. Problems mounted. Hotel rooms, the places they’d always eaten, car problems. Predictable baby troubles. Finally, the decision they’d made before I was born, about the days he’d be away, the days we’d be at home—these would have to be honored.

  And how was it for him? Driving, driving alone? Sitting in those hotel rooms, in lobbies, reading a strange newspaper in the poor lamplight; taking a walk down a street in the evening, smoking? Eating supper with some man he knew off the road? Listening to the radio in the sweep and hum of an oscillating fan. Then turning in early to the noise of katydids and switch-yards, car doors closing and voices on the street laughing into another night. How was it being a father this way—having a wife, renting a house in a town where they knew almost no one and had no friends, coming home only weekends, as if this were home?

  Richard, Jackson, Mississippi, 1947

  It could only have been strange. Though possibly he might also have felt competent for the first time. Independent. Finally prepared for life. Approaching forty. A parent. He was not the kind of man to regret much or to take his temperature, or to look over his shoulder at what had once been different. Instead, he was the kind of man to know how he’d worked things out up to then, and to let that be. He knew he was mostly absent. He knew she was looking after their life and me, and that it was complex for her. He was a presence, if not a father precisely. And he was her husband, the man she loved and waited for. It was acceptable. And it was how their life would now go on—at least until his heart attack in 1948, the one he wouldn’t die from, but the point at which everything changed again, when death and the fear of it became his familiars, and my mother’s, too.

  AN ONLY CHILD ABSORBS A GREAT DEAL—possibly more if his parents are older. An only child’s imagination is strummed melodically by the things they say and don’t say. I have always said and still believe my childhood was a blissful one. But that is not quite to say that life was normal. Their age wasn’t normal for having a first child. Even in their view it wasn’t. There was, unspoken, the sense that they should’ve been younger, or I should’ve been born fifteen years before, when they were new. I grew up feeling I should be older, or was older. There had already been so much important life before me—of which I knew little, and that to them did not bear talking about since it did not include me. I have no memory of either of them saying—as I grew older—“Richard, do you remember?” Or, “Richard, once, your father and I. . . .” What they talked about and what was in the air was only the present, interrupted by the long times between Monday and Friday. These absences made their closeness to each other even more paramount, since together was where they’d always, only been. I was where things had deviated and always sensed that. For all this to be a blissful life, love is certainly required, and a willingness—on my part—to fill some things in and deflect others.

  His being gone must’ve created strains. My mother never complained in my hearing, though she was volatile—even in her loving. A shouter, a smacker, a frowner and a glowerer. Suddenly she’d had a baby. Suddenly she was too much alone in a strange city where old ties mattered and newcomers were foreigners. Possibly something about me—about my nature—also made things straitened. When I began to talk, I talked a great, great deal and wasn’t naturally passive or compliant. When he was gone, life with her was never completely calm. Though when he was back, calm was instantly, rigorously enforced. Which created its own strains.

  As time went on, did I ever sense that something was wrong between them? No. It was my child’s outlook to think most things were right. And yet if life’s eternal drama is of events seeking a more perfect state, their life and mine was not that. My recalled feelings over that time—my little-boy life, in Jackson, on Congress, in my first years, in the forties and beginning fifties—are of a hectic, changing, provisional existence. They loved me, protected me. But the experience of life was of events, of things and people in motion, and of being often alone and to the side of things. Which did not make me sorry and does not now. But life wasn’t calm.

  What did my father actually think about his situation, if he thought anything? Undoubtedly he thought, without much specificity, th
at there would be something more that would happen later. If he wondered whether he was good at fatherhood, he probably thought he was. He would’ve believed he was a good and pleasing pressure in the air of rooms he and we occupied; a continually welcome arrival into my mother’s life and mine. He might’ve actually thought he was not absent at all, but present—only not in body: just not there for doctor visits, for the dentist, to take me to kindergarten at Mrs. Nelson’s, to Sunday school; later on, for parent-teacher meetings, Cub Scouts, the swimming pool, the library, school pageants, and later yet for baseball try-outs and junior high graduation. This not-being-precisely-there is what was required to have his good job. And wasn’t I always brought along—to visit their few friends, to be put into bedrooms to sleep while beyond the wall they were drinking and talking and laughing? And there was New Orleans again, the Gulf Coast, Pensacola, occasionally Atkins and Little Rock—the places they went. There would be time—the later that was to come—to teach me things, to impart onto me a way to be. He called me “son.” I called him “Daddy.” People said I looked like him. He would not have thought that seventy years later I cannot remember the sound of his voice, but long to.

  And for me, how was it?

  I could not have formulated the thought that when I was a young child growing up, he was then a younger husband undergoing the transformation to being an oldish father; or that what my mother was experiencing in herself and with me, he was experiencing the other side of. He was my father. I knew that was important. I knew his physical dimensions. There was his leaning-forward sweetness, his humor. His uncertainty-seeking-certainty. His bodily softness and rich smell. I knew the words for what he did to make a living. I knew the words for where he went—things I’d have known from infancy.