Between Them Page 6

  About their courtship I know nothing except that it took place—in Hot Springs, but in Little Rock, too. This was 1927. My father was twenty-three. She was seventeen or eighteen. At the Saunders firm, he worked as a produce man—vegetables and fruit. Something had brought him down from the country where he was born, in Atkins—some restlessness. What he might’ve had in mind for himself, I don’t know. But I can easily see them as a couple. Compatibly handsome. Friendly and shy. My mother, black-haired, dark-eyed, curvaceous. My father, blue-eyed like me, big, gullible, honest, conceding. And I can sense what they each might’ve thought about the other. My mother knew things—not all of them good. She’d worked in hotels, been wrested out of boarding school. Had lived in cities. Been around a wide mix of people, was an unwieldy third party to her mother’s marriage. Whereas my father was a country boy who’d quit school in the seventh grade, was the baby of three, the sheltered son of a suicide. I can believe my mother wanted a better life than working for her slew-footed stepfather; that she believed she’d not been treated especially well and thought of her life, so far, as being somewhat rough; that she didn’t like being her grudging mother’s “sister” and was in danger of losing all expectation if something didn’t happen. I can also easily believe my father simply saw my mother and wanted her—loved her immediately. What they each thought about the other was, Here is someone good.

  They were married up in Morrilton by a justice of the peace, sometime early in 1928, and arrived at my father’s mother’s house in Atkins as newlyweds. There is no report of what anyone said. They had acted for themselves. Though from her new mother-in-law they both, without doubt, found disapproval.

  IT WAS MY MOTHER’S SMALL BOAST that my father kept a job through the Depression, and that there was always money enough. They lived in Little Rock, and for a while my father advanced in his work as a grocer. He came to manage several Liberty stores and for a time pursued that as a future. Though around 1936 he was fired. No one ever told me why. They moved back to Hot Springs. And soon he took another job, this time selling laundry starch for the Faultless Company out of Kansas City. Huey Long had worked for them two decades earlier. It was traveling work, and the two of them made their married life together riding in his company car. New Orleans. Memphis. Texarkana. They lived in hotels, spent the few off-days back in Little Rock. My father called on wholesalers, prisons, hospitals, a leper colony in Louisiana. He sold starch by the box-car full. My mother never characterized that time then—the middle-to-late thirties—except to say that he and she’d had fun together—her word. Something about it all may have seemed un-narratable—unworthy or unnecessary for telling. Years on, her fleeting references to that time made the thirties seem like a long weekend. A loose, pick-up-and-go life. Drinking. Cars. Restaurants. Dancing. People they liked on the road. A life in the south. A swirling thing that didn’t really have a place it was going. She sometimes gave the impression of possibly untidy things having gone on, some recklessness of spirit that didn’t rise to the level of evil, yet something a son would be better off not to worry with. There must’ve been an abundance of lives like theirs. It seems “a period” to me now. A specific time, toward the beginning of the Second war. Though it was just their life.

  They may also have begun to think they wouldn’t or couldn’t have a child, because they hadn’t had one. I don’t know how much this mattered to them, if there were other pregnancies that didn’t succeed, or if they were even “trying.” It was not their way to fight fate, but to see life as much as possible as being okay. So that this time—being married without children—lasted on. Fifteen years. Although, looked at from the moment of my birth, 1944, all that life lived childless, on the road, not paying much attention, may have come to seem to them—even if it was their only life—an odd time, possibly pointless in comparison to the pointedness of a life with a child.

  ALL FIRST CHILDREN, certainly all only children, date the beginning of their lives as notable events. For my parents, my arrival came as a surprise, almost simultaneous with the end of World War II—the event that finished the thirties in this country. And it came when, in essence, their young life was finishing. He was thirty-nine. She was thirty-three. You could say it was a moment when the intimacy they’d established was finally being brought forward to greater consequence—in this case to a life they may have all but abandoned any thought of because no children had come.

  By all accounts, they were happy to have me. It may have been an event that made their life feel conventional for once, that settled them and made them think about matters their friends had thought about for years. Staying put. The future. They had never owned a house or had a car, except the car my father’s job provided. They had never had to choose a “home,” a place to be permanently. Only now they did, or could.

  At the suggestion of my father’s boss, they moved from the apartment in Little Rock they rarely stayed in, down and across the river to Mississippi, to Jackson, the center of my father’s traveling territory, a place he could easily return to on weekends, since my mother wouldn’t be going with him now. There was a baby, or soon would be.

  They knew little of Mississippi, being Arkies. And they knew almost no one in Jackson—a couple of jobbers my father called on, and one salesman off the road. It could not have been an easy transition. They rented an apartment in a brick duplex beside a school. They joined a church—the Presbyterians—found a grocery, the library, a bus stop. You could walk to the main street from 736 North Congress. There were neighbors—elderly, established, unbeckoning families hanging on in big, galleried homes in what was the older part of town. Still, quickly this became their life. Once I’d arrived, my mother stayed at home—alone with me—while my father went off to work Monday mornings and came back Friday nights. Our weekend visitor. It became a routine of days, afternoons, nights, sidewalks, dressing, feeding me, the radio, looking out the window—my mother a single, precise shadow in a snapshot of myself.

  They had never exactly done anything like this—been apart, cared for a child. And between them, I don’t know what happened. Given their characters, my best belief is that nothing dramatic did. That their life changed radically, that I was there now, that the future meant something different from what it had meant, that there was apparently no talk of other children, that they saw far less of each other—all that meant little to how they felt about each other, or to how they registered how they felt. Psychology was not a science they practiced any more than history was. They were not natural inquirers, did not often ask themselves how they felt about things. They simply found, if they had not known it before, that they’d signed on for the full tour. I don’t think my mother longed for a more fulfilling career than this one or even a more active life. I don’t think my father had other women on the road. I don’t think the intrusion of me into their lives was anything they didn’t think of as normal and at least as all right. Life was going this way now and not that way anymore. They loved each other. They loved me. Nothing else much mattered. They must’ve accommodated. One of my earliest memories is of my father moving around their sunny apartment on Monday mornings, packing his suitcase to leave, whistling “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-a-Dee-ay.”

  Richard and Edna, Jackson, Mississippi, 1945

  SO THEN, BECAUSE HE—MY FATHER—was now almost always away at work, the part of life that has largely to do with my mother. The end of the war and then Korea. Truman and Eisenhower, school, television, bicycles, one big snowstorm in 1949—the time when we were on North Congress, down from the Mississippi state capitol building, and next door to the Jefferson Davis School. The time when we lived in Jackson but also when we went. With him—as I’ve told it. Little Rock, New Orleans, etc. Christmas. Summers. The time of his first heart attack. Me being with them, but mostly being with her.

  Chiefly, I remember pieces of life from then, at least to age sixteen—1960, the up-ending year for my mother and me, the year my father came awake in his bed on a Saturday morning and d
ied, with me up onto his covers with him, breathing into his mouth, trying to help him, and my mother for a while losing the run of herself. There was a life’s worth of small events. I have remembered more than I do now. I’ve written down memories, disguised salient events into novels, told stories again and again to keep them within my reach. But pieces can stand for the whole well enough. Though each must make a difference to me or I wouldn’t remember them so well.

  I remember an elderly neighbor stopping me once on the sidewalk and asking me matter-of-factly who I was. This was on Congress Street. Maybe I was nine or seven or five. It was a thing that could happen to you in Jackson. But when I said my name—Richard Ford—she said, “Oh, yes. Your mother’s the cute little black-haired woman up the street.” These were words that immediately affected me, and strongly, since they proposed my first conception of my mother as someone else, as someone whom other people saw and considered and not just as my mother. A cute woman, which she wasn’t. Black-haired, which she was. She was five feet five inches tall, but I never have known if that is tall or short. I think I must have believed, as I still do, that it was normal. I remember this, however, as a sentinel moment in life. Small but important. It alerted me to my mother’s—what?—public side. To the aspect of her that other people saw and dealt with and that was always there, alongside what I saw. I don’t believe I ever thought of her again without thinking of that, or ever addressed her except with that knowledge. That she was Edna Ford, a person who was my mother but who was also someone else.

  Edna and Parker, Jackson, Mississippi, 1953

  It is, of course, a good lesson to learn early—cute, little, black-haired, five-five—since one of the premier challenges for us all is to know our parents fully—assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing, and it is physically possible. The more we see our parents fully, after all, see them as the world does, the better our chances to see the world as it is.

  There was the flat tire we all three had, halfway across the Mississippi bridge at Greenville. High up there, over the river. I have mentioned it earlier. My mother stayed in the car with me while my father got out to fix things, and she held me so tightly to her I could barely breathe. I was four or three. Later she always said, “I smothered you when you were little. You were all we had. I’m sorry.” And then she’d tell me the bridge story again. But I wasn’t sorry—have never been. We were way up there, after all. It was terrifying. Smothering meant to me, Here is danger. Love protects you. These are words I respect. I’m not comfortable on high bridges now, but I have come to my fear from the recesses of my mother’s love.

  I also remember my mother having a hysterectomy and my grandfather—her stepfather—Bennie Shelley, joking cruelly about it to her—about what good “barbers” the nuns at St. Dominic’s Hospital had been. Barbers. Nuns—whom she so admired. For years to come, I didn’t understand what he’d meant. He reflected this lewd aspect all his days. It made her cry.

  I REMEMBER ONCE, in our front yard on Congress, something unsettling happened, something I said or did. I don’t know what. I might’ve been six and already had an urge to say disruptive things. But, in response to whatever I said, my mother just suddenly began running away from me—out across our yard and onto the school grounds next door. Just running away, her flowery cotton dress flapping in the warm breeze. Naturally it frightened me, and I shouted out, “No, no, no, no!” But she disappeared past the back corner of the school building and was gone. I’ve never known how serious she was about needing to escape. Eventually she came back. But I have always understood from this event that there might be reasons to run away. In her case—alone, with a small child, in a strange city, knowing no one. That could be enough.

  There were two fights they had that I was present for. One on St. Louis Street, in the French Quarter in New Orleans. I have mentioned this. It was in front of Antoine’s Restaurant. I think they were both drunk, though I didn’t know what drunk was. One of them wanted to go to a bar and have a drink after dinner. The other didn’t and insisted on going back to the hotel. This was in 1955. We had tickets to the Sugar Bowl—Navy versus Ole Miss. They yelled at each other, and my father yanked my mother’s arm and pressed her against a brick wall, after which they walked back separately. Later we all got in bed together in the Monteleone and no one stayed mad. In our family no one nagged or held grudges or nursed anger, though we could all get angry and often did.

  The other fight was somewhat worse. It was near the same time as the other—possibly a difficult period for them. Again, they were drinking. My father had invited friends over to our house in Jackson, but my mother hadn’t been consulted and didn’t like it. All the lights were on, as usual. They were both combustible by nature. Again, she swore and raised her voice and pointed accusingly at the front door. I remember the guests standing outside the screen, gaping in—confused. I remember their white faces and my mother shouting at them to get the hell out, though they were not even in. Presently these people left, and my father again held my mother’s shoulders up against a wall by our bathroom and yelled at her while she struggled to get free. I remember the volume of what they angrily said, but not the words. I remember how hot it was—the porch light dimly on. No one got hit. No one ever did, except me when I was spanked or whipped. They just yelled and struggled for a while. Fought that way. Then later, when we were all in bed, with me in the middle between them, my father began to cry. “Boo-hoo-hoo. Boo-hoo-hoo.” Those were the sounds he made, as if he’d learned how to cry from reading it in a book.

  And there was one more thing. My mother, who had taught young girls to be young wives, did not excel at those skills herself. She disliked cleaning and ironing and cooking—from all their years on the road—and didn’t do any of it well or any more than she had to. Consequently, often on hot summer days we would leave the house at noon, and walk up the block and across North State, and down to the Jitney Jungle grocery. (I never knew why it was called that.) There, it was air-conditioned, and you could get in line and buy a hot lunch from the steam-table, standing, the two of us, beside the neighbors we didn’t know, all of us holding paper tickets with a number, waiting our turn to order—baked eggplant, creamed corn, lima beans, collards, a pork chop, with banana pudding for dessert—the usual southern repast. One day as we were waiting among the others, my mother said to me, “Richard, do you see that woman standing over there?” I looked and saw a woman, someone I didn’t know—tall and smiling, chatting with people, laughing. My mother looked at the woman again with a private expression I think now was estimating. I said yes. And my mother said, “That’s Eurdora Welty. She’s a writer.” Which was information that meant nothing to me, except that it meant something to my mother, who sometimes read bestsellers in bed at night. I don’t know if she had ever read something Eudora Welty wrote. I don’t know if the woman was Eudora Welty, or was someone else. My mother may have wanted it to be Eudora Welty for reasons of her own. Possibly this event could seem significant now, in view of my life to come. But it didn’t, then. I was only eight or nine. To me, it was just another piece in a life of pieces.

  WHEN MY FATHER DIED, of course, everything changed—many things, it’s odd to say, for the better where I was concerned. But not for the better where my mother was concerned. Nothing for her would be quite good again after February 20th, 1960. They’d had me and loved me. But to her my father had been everything. So that when he suddenly died, all that had been naturally implicit in her life either vanished or became different and explicit and not very good. And she, who was not truly skilled at life without him—having never had a good life without him—became not very interested in life itself. And in a way that I see now and saw almost as clearly then, she gave up on the part of herself that loved him.

  Not long after my father’s funeral, when I was back in school and the neighbors had stopped calling and visiting and bringing over dishes of food—when grief and mourning had become indistinguishable—my mother sat me down and be
came specific about the formal features of her life now. She was fifty, she said. Her husband was dead. She had a son (me) who seemed mostly all right, but was veering into law scrapes, and so she needed to pay attention. We were now going to have to be more independent. Of him, certainly, because he was gone. But of each other, too. She was going to have to get a job. I was only sixteen, but she would not be able to look after me as she had. We agreed that I had a future, and that we would try to look after each other. But I would have to look after me now. We would be partners is what I remember thinking. My father, as I’ve told, had never been around much because of his work, and this new absence—death—was, for me, not so strongly felt as even I imagined it would be. I already, in fact, felt more in charge of myself. So a partnership with my mother, one in which she would not notice me so closely, seemed like a good arrangement. I was to stay out of jail because she didn’t want to have to get me out. Couldn’t get me out, she said. I was to find friends I could rely on. I could have a car of my own. I could go away in the summers to find a job in Little Rock with my grandparents and return to school in Jackson in the fall. I was freer but would have to be more responsible. She was trying not to state too much. She didn’t want everything to have to be explicit, since so much was. Whereas when my father was alive so little had needed to be. Not being too explicit would give her a chance and time to adjust. To think about things. To become whatever she could—or would have to become—in order to get along from there on out.