Between Them Page 7

  I don’t remember the exact chronological order of things, commencing now. 1960, ’61, ’62. Time whirled by. I was a tenth grader and on. But I did not get brought before the juvenile court again. I did live summers with my grandparents, who ran their big hotel in Little Rock. My grandfather bought me a black ’57 Ford, which fairly quickly got stolen. I got beaten up a time or two, and then got some new friends. I did what I was told, in other words. I started to grow up in a hurry.

  I think of that time—the time between my father’s death and the time I left for Michigan to go to college—as a time when I didn’t see my mother nearly as much as I once had. Though that is not exactly how it was. She was there. I was there. But I cannot discount my own adjustments to my father’s death and absence, and to my new independence. I may have been more dazed than grieved, and it is true the new friends I found took me up. My mother got a job doing something at a company that made school pictures. This required training. And it was then—again, when she was fifty—that she may have felt the first full effects of having been made to leave school in 1925. Though she finished the training, got along and did not have trouble and began coming home tired every day. But then she left that job and became a rental agent for a new, high-rise apartment house in Jackson. Sterling Towers. Later, she tried to get the job as manager but didn’t get it. Who knows why? She then took another job as night cashier in a hotel, the Robert E. Lee. This job she kept maybe a year. And after that she was hired to be an admitting clerk in the emergency room at the University of Mississippi Hospital, a job she liked very much and was good at because she was sympathetic and businesslike, and the doctors liked her.

  And there was at least one boyfriend during that time. A married man, from Tupelo, named Matt Matthews, who lived in the apartment building where she had worked as the rental agent. He was a big, bluff, good-natured man, possibly in the furniture business, who drove a Lincoln Continental with an automatic pistol strapped to the steering column. I liked him. I liked it that my mother liked him. It didn’t matter that he was married—not to me and, I guess, not to my mother. I really have no idea about what was between them, what they did alone. He took her on drives. Flew her to Memphis in his airplane. Acted respectfully toward both of us. She may have told me she was just passing time with him, getting her mind off her woes, letting someone be nice to her. We both knew that nothing she told me about him had to match the truth. I sometimes wished that she could marry him. And at other times I was content to have them be lovers, if that’s what they were. He had sons near my age. Later I would meet them and like them. But this was long after he and my mother were finished.

  What finished them was brought on by me but was not completely my doing. Matt had faded for a time. His business brought him into Jackson less, and he was often away for months. My mother had quit talking about him, and our life had returned to its almost-normal level, the level of having my father be dead. I was having my usual bitter time in school—getting an F in algebra (I’d already failed once) and having no ideas about how I could improve. My mother was cashiering nights at the Robert E. Lee and coming home by eleven.

  But then one night she didn’t come home. I had a test the next day. Algebra. And I must’ve been in an agitated state of mind. I called the hotel and heard that she had left on time. And for some reason this scared me. I got in my Ford and drove down to the street by the hotel—Griffith Street—a fringe neighborhood near a black section of town, where I thought she might not be safe. I drove around until I found her car, the gray-and-pink Oldsmobile ’88 that had been my father’s last car and his pride and joy. It was parked under some crepe myrtle, across from Sterling Towers, where Matt kept his place—something I knew about, since it was how they’d met. It was close to the hotel. And for some reason I must’ve panicked. There was no clear reason to, but I did. I’m not sure what I thought, but thinking of it now I believe I only wanted to ask Matt—if he was there—if he knew where my mother was. This may be right, though it’s possible, too, that I knew she was there and wanted to make her leave.

  I went into the building. It must’ve been near midnight. There was no security guard. I found Matt’s name on the directory and went up the elevator and down the hall to his door. And I banged on it. I hit the door very hard with my fists. Then I waited.

  Matt opened the door, and my mother was there in the room behind him. She had a drink in her hand. Lights were on low, and she was standing in the middle of the room. Nothing was out of order. It was a nice apartment. Both of them were shocked—by me. And I was already ashamed to be there. But I was, I think, terrified. Not that she was there. Or that I was alone. But just that I didn’t know what in the hell. Where was she? What else was I going to have to lose?

  I remember being out of breath. I was seventeen years old. I can’t remember much of what anybody said or did except me, briefly. “Where have you been?” I said to her, behind him—or I said words to that effect. “I didn’t know where you were. That’s all.”

  And that was all. All of that. Matt said very little. My mother immediately got her coat. “Oh, Richard, for God’s sake,” she said. “Go home.” We both went home, in two cars. In the house, she acted annoyed at me, and I was mad at her. We talked. Eventually she told me she was sorry, and I told her I didn’t care if she saw Matt, only that she should tell me when she’d be home late. She said she would. To my knowledge she never saw Matt Matthews or any other man again as a lover for as long as she lived.

  Later, years later, when she was dying, I tried to explain it all to her again—my part, what I thought, had thought—as if we could still open it and repair that night. All she needed to do was call me or, even now—years later—say she would’ve called me. But that was not how she saw it. She just looked impatient and shook her head, in her hospital bed. “Oh that,” she said. “My God. That was just silliness. You had no business coming up there. You were out of your mind. I just saw, though, that I couldn’t be doing things like that. I had a son to raise.” She looked disgusted, at everything—all the cards the fates had dealt her—a no-good childhood, my father, then his death, me, her own inability to vault over all of it to a better life. It was another proof of something bad, the likes of which I believe she felt she’d had plenty.

  Eventually she sold the suburban house my father had bought and greatly prized, and moved us into a different high-rise. Magnolia Towers. I was provided a tutor for math, and did better. She was switching jobs again. I registered these changes, but not vividly. Though based on what I know now about such things, not much was easy for her. Even though there might’ve been a part of it all that she—not exactly enjoyed but—took satisfactions from. Small accomplishments. We did not fight, as we had when I was younger. Instead, we adjusted to one another almost as adults would. We grew wry and humorous with each other. We cast glances, gave each other looks. We were rarely ironic or indirect or crafty with anger. We didn’t know these would be among the last times we would ever live together. We just somehow knew how we were supposed to act as widowed mother and only teenage son, and took self-conscious pleasure in acting that way. In retrospect, I think it was a way of living not so different from when my father was alive. Only of course he wasn’t.

  Edna and Richard, New Orleans, 1974

  I did not, and do not now, know about our money. My father had had a little insurance, but there was no pension from his job. Faultless Starch was not that kind of company. Maybe some money was saved in a bank. My grandparents came forward to help. They had made money and had lent my father money for the new house. I know the government paid money for me as a dependent child, until I was eighteen. But I mean only to say I didn’t and don’t precisely know how much my mother needed to be working; how much money was required to come through; if we had debts, creditors. It may have been we didn’t, and that she went to work just to thrust herself in the direction life seemed to be taking—toward independence. Solitariness. All that that meant.

  There w
ere memorable moments. When my Ford was stolen, my mother and I went one winter day after school, just at dusk, out to a dealership across the Pearl River in Rankin County, where bargains were supposedly waiting. She felt we should replace my car, and so did I. But when we were there looking at cheap models for me, she saw a new black Thunderbird and stood staring at it. I knew that was what she really wanted—for herself—that it would make her feel better to own it. Getting my father’s Olds out of our lives would help with our adjustments. There was no one there then to tell us not to. It was part of our new, unasked-for freedom. I told her she should buy the Thunderbird. I could do without a car in high school. She stared at it for a long time, eventually got in and tilted the steering wheel, shut the door a few times, pushed the pedals. Then we left with the promise to the salesman that she would think about it. Though in a few days, when the police had found my old car, she decided just to keep the Olds a while longer.

  Another time was when my girlfriend and I had been experimenting inexpertly with one kind of sexual pleasure and another—inside my car. We knew almost nothing about sex. But just out of the blue, my girlfriend—who was from Texas—decided that she was now definitely pregnant (though we hadn’t yet driven away from where we were parked) and that her life was now ruined. Mine, I knew the instant she said this, certainly felt ruined. There was evidence aplenty of kids in our school marrying at fourteen, having babies, being divorced. This was the south.

  I once again found myself in terror. And when I got home—it was the very same Sunday afternoon—I abandoned myself to my mother; told her all we’d been doing just one hour before, all we hadn’t. I spoke in details, methodically, horribly of anatomical parts and positions, extents and degrees. What I wanted from her was to know if my girlfriend could be pregnant, based on what she knew about these things. (How much could that really have been?) These were all matters a boy should take up with his father. Though I wouldn’t have. Such a conversation would’ve dumbfounded my poor father, then silenced him. In any case he was gone.

  My mother was the only one there. I knew her very well—at least I acted that way and she did, too. She was fifty-two. I was eighteen. She was practiced with me, knew the kind of boy I was. We were, as stated, partners in my messes and hers. I sat on the couch in our apartment and painfully, painstakingly told her what scared me, told her what I couldn’t get worked out in my thinking, went through it all more than once; used the words it, hers, inside. She, stifling her dread, calmly assured me that everything was going to be fine. Nobody got pregnant doing what we were doing. It was all a young girl’s scare fantasies. Not to worry. So I didn’t.

  Of course, she was wrong. She couldn’t possibly have been wronger. My girlfriend did not get pregnant, but only because an indifferent fate intervened. Thousands of girls get pregnant doing what we were doing. Thousands get pregnant doing less. My mother either didn’t know much, or else knew a great, great deal: knew that what was done was done, and that all the worry and explaining and getting-things-straight wouldn’t matter now. If I escaped ruin and shame, it was good luck. I should be more careful in the future if I was to have my future. And that was about it. If my girlfriend had been pregnant, what anybody thought, believed or said wouldn’t matter very much. Life would go the way it went.

  And there is of course, a lesson in that, too—one I have tried over time and not usually successfully to have guide me: the lesson that says, it’s what happens that matters, more than what people, even yourself, think about what happens before or after. It mostly only matters what we do. I had not then, and have not yet, looked at the world through eyes like hers. Possibly fuller understanding will come. It was my mother, though, who taught this to me first.

  IN 1962, I WENT AWAY TO COLLEGE at Michigan State. My mother neither encouraged nor discouraged this. It was a choice of mine and no one else’s. Going to a college in Mississippi didn’t enter my mind. I wanted distance by then, and to be a hotel manager like my grandfather, Ben Shelley, who had done well at it. Michigan State was the place to learn about hotels. I do not remember my mother and me talking about college—though we must’ve. She hadn’t been to one and didn’t know much about what went on there. She was interested, but in a way that didn’t seem vital or supervisory. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t like it and would come home soon. Maybe she thought I would never go, even when Michigan State accepted me and I said I was going. Maybe she thought Michigan wasn’t so far from Mississippi, which is both true and not true. Or maybe she thought nothing, or nothing that was clear; just noticed that I was doing this and that, sending off and receiving letters, establishing dates, and decided she would cross the bridge to college when the time came. The assumption became that I was going. Money would be found somewhere.

  In late September, then, she and I together got on the Illinois Central at the Union Station in Jackson and rode to Chicago (our first such long trip as mother and son, though we had ridden shorter distances in years past to meet my father in places where he was working). In Chicago, we transferred crosstown from the old Central Station to Dearborn Street and the Grand Trunk, and rode over to Lansing. She wanted to go with me. I think she wanted to see all that. Michigan. Illinois. Cornfields. White barns. The Middle West. Wanted to see from a train window what went on there, how that was, what it all looked like up north, possibly detect why I seemed to want it and how I would situate myself among those people, live in their buildings, eat their food, learn their lingo. Find out why this was where I had chosen to go. Her son. This was how she saw her duty and our partnership unfolding.

  And, too, some indulgence in the ordinary may have been what she wanted: to accompany her son to college, to fashion a send-off; to see herself and me, for a moment, fitted into a pattern of what others were up to, what people in general did. If that could happen to her, to us, then maybe some normal life could reconvene, since she could not have thought of her life as very normal at that time—two years away from my father’s death.

  We spent a week together in East Lansing. Late September 1962. She had never been so far from home. And when I had enrolled, been assigned my classes, invaded my dormitory room, met my roomies, and she and I had spent a couple of leisurely days touring and roaming, eating restaurant dinners across from one another until nothing was left to say—when that was over, she and I went back to the GTW station, and I stood up on a bus-stop bench beside the train tracks, and held up my arms in the cool, snapping air so she would see me as the train pulled away toward Chicago. I saw her, her white face behind the tinted window, her palm flat to the glass for me to see. And she was crying. Good-bye, she was saying. I waved my hand, a wide wave, and mouthed, Good-bye. I love you, and watched her train go out of sight through the warp of that bricky old factory town. At that moment I suppose you could say I started my life alone-in-earnest, and that whatever was left of my childhood ended.

  FOLLOWING WHICH, the life that would take us forward together as adults began. An even more fragmented, truncated life of visits long and short. Letters. Phone calls. Telegrams. Meetings in cities far from home. Conversations in cars, in airports, train stations. Efforts to see each other. Leaving dominating everything—my growing older and her growing older, both observed from varying distances.

  She held out alone in Mississippi for another year, moved back into the duplex on Congress Street, rented out the other side. She worked on at the hospital, where for a time, I think, the whole new life she’d been handed came together. I am speculating because I was gone to college and would stay gone. She said she liked her job, liked the young interns at the hospital, liked the drama of the ER, liked working. In my view, from my distance, she experienced capability for the first time, separate from her skills as a wife and my mother. It may have started to be satisfactory that I was away. It may have seemed that there was a life to lead, and that under the circumstances she had done reasonably well with her fate. She might ease up, let events happen without fearing the worst. One bad thing could fi
nally turn into something less bad.

  This, at least, is what I wanted to think. How an only son feels about his widowed mother whom he loves but is far away from, is necessarily an involved business. But it is not oversimplifying to say that he wants good to come to her. In all these years, the years of curtailed life with my mother, I was aware that things would never be completely all right with her. Partly it was a matter of her choosing; partly it was a matter of her character—of just how she could see any life without my father, with so much life left to be lived in an un-ideal way. Always somewhere down deep she seemed resigned. I could never plumb her without coming to that stop point—a point where widening expectation simply ceased. This is not to say she was always unhappy. Or that she never laughed. (I could make her laugh; others could.) Or that she didn’t see life as life, didn’t regain parts of herself. She did. Only, not utterly. Not in the way a mother could disguise from her son. I always saw it. Always felt it. Always experienced her unease with life. Her resisting it.

  From almost the first moment in the room where he had died, I felt my father’s death surrendering back to me nearly as much as it took away. His sudden departure, the great, unjust loss of his life, handed me a life to live by my own designs, freed me to my own decisions. A boy could do worse than to lose his father—even a good father—just when the world begins to array itself all around him. And because I thought this way, I wished my mother could relent more than she could. But it was not that way for her, even if I can’t exactly imagine how it was. She had talents. She was intuitive, passionate, candid, quick-witted, mirthful, occasionally fiery and dire. And decent. And yet I can say that in all her time in life after my father died, the twenty-one years that she would be without him, her life never seemed fully lived. She took trips—to Mexico, to New York, to California, to Banff, to various warm islands. She had friends who doted on her and whom she spoke highly of and enjoyed. She had an increasingly easy life as her own parents died. Eventually she had us—my wife and me—who loved her and included her in everything possible. But when I would say to her—and I did say—“Mother, are you enjoying your life? Are things all right?” she would look at me with familiar impatience and roll her eyes. “Richard, I’m never going to be ecstatic. It’s not in my nature. Concentrate on your life. Leave mine alone. I’ll take care of me.”