Vintage Ford (21 page)

Between them, I don't know what happened. But given their characters, my best belief is that nothing did. That their life changed radically, that I was there, that the future meant something different, that there was apparently no talk of other children, that they saw far less of each other now—all meant almost nothing to how they felt about each other, or how they registered how they felt. Neither of them was an inquirer. They did not take their pulse much. Psychology was not a science they practiced. They found, if they had not known it before, that they'd signed on for the full trip. They saw life going this way now and not that way. They loved each other. They loved me. Nothing much else mattered.

I don't think my mother longed for a fulfilling career or a more active public 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 all right. I know from practice that it is my habit to seek the normal in life, to look for reasons to believe this or that is fine. In part, that is because my parents raised me that way and lived lives that portrayed a world, a private existence, that
could
be that way. I do not think even now, in the midst of my own life's concerns, that it is a bad way to see things.

So then, the part of my life that has to do with my mother.

The first eleven years—the Korean War years, Truman and Eisenhower, television, bicycles, one big snowstorm in 1949—we lived on North Congress Street, down a hill from the state capitol and across from the house where Eudora Welty had been a young girl thirty-five years before. Next door to Jefferson Davis School. I remember a neighbor stopping me on the sidewalk and asking me who I was; this was a thing that could happen to you. Maybe I was nine or seven then. But when I said my name—Richard Ford—she said, “Oh, yes. Your mother is the cute little black-headed woman up the street.” And that affected me and still does. I think this was my first conception of my mother as someone else, as someone whom other people saw and considered: a cute woman, which she was not. Black-haired, which she was. She was, I know, five feet five inches tall. But I never have known if that is tall or short. I think I must have always believed it was normal. I remember this, though, as a signal moment in my life. Small but important. It alerted me to my mother's—what?—public side. To the side that other people saw and dealt with and that was there. I do not think I ever thought of her in any other way after that. As Edna Ford, a person who was my mother and also who was someone else. I do not think I ever addressed her after that except with such a knowledge—the way I would anyone I knew.

It is a good lesson to learn. And we risk never knowing our parents if we ignore it. Cute, black-headed, five-five. Some part of her was that, and it didn't harm me to know it. It may have helped, since one of the premier challenges for us all is to know our parents, assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing, and it is physically possible. This is a part of normal life. And the more we see them fully, as the world sees them, the better all our chances are.

About my mother I do not remember more than pieces up until the time I was sixteen: 1960, a galvanizing year for us both— the year my father woke up gasping on a Saturday morning and died before he could get out of bed; me up on the bed with him, busy trying to find something to help. Shake him. Yell in his sleeping face. Breathe in his soft mouth. Turn him over onto his belly, for some reason. Feeling terror and chill. All this while she stood in the doorway to his bedroom in our new house in the suburbs of Jackson, pushing her knuckles into her temples, becoming hysterical. Eventually she just lost her control for a while.

But before that. Those pieces. They must make a difference or I wouldn't remember them so clearly. A flat tire we all three had, halfway across the Mississippi bridge at Greenville. High, up there, over the river. We stayed in the car while my father fixed it, and my mother held me so tightly to her I could barely breathe. I was six. She always said, “I smothered you when you were little. You were all we had. I'm sorry.” And then she'd tell me this story. But I wasn't sorry. It seemed fine then, since we were up there. “Smothering” meant “Here is danger,” “Love protects you.” They are still lessons I respect. I am not comfortable on bridges now, but my guess is I never would've been.

I remember my mother having a hysterectomy and my grandfather, Ben Shelley, joking about it—to her—about what good “barbers” the nuns at St. Dominic's had been. That made her cry.

I remember once in the front yard on Congress Street something happened, something I said or did—I don't know what— but my mother began running out across the schoolyard next door. Just running away. I remember that scared me and I yelled at her, “No,” and halfway across she stopped and came back. I've never known how serious she was about that, but I have understood from it that there might be reasons to run off. Alone, with a small child, knowing no one. That's enough.

There were two fights they had that I was present for. One on St. Louis Street, in the French Quarter in New Orleans. It was in front of Antoine's Restaurant, and I now think they were both drunk, though I didn't know it, or even know what drunk was. One wanted to go in the restaurant and eat. The other didn't and wanted to go back to the hotel around the corner. This was in 1955. I think we had tickets to the Sugar Bowl—Navy vs. Ole Miss. They yelled at each other, and I think my father yanked her arm, and they walked back separately. Later we all got in bed together in the Monteleone Hotel and no one stayed mad. In our family no one ever nagged or held grudges or stayed mad, though we could all get mad.

The other fight was worse. I believe it was the same year. They were drinking. My father invited friends over and my mother didn't like it. All the lights were on in the house. She swore. I remember the guests standing in the doorway outside the screen, still on the porch looking in. I remember their white faces and my mother shouting at them to get the hell out, which they did. And then my father held my mother's shoulders up against the wall by the bathroom and yelled at her while she struggled to get free. I remember how harsh the lights were. No one got hit. No one ever did except me when I was whipped. They just yelled and struggled. Fought that way. And then after a while, I remember, we were all in bed again, with me in the middle, and my father cried. “Boo hoo hoo. Boo hoo hoo.” Those were the sounds he made, as if he'd read somewhere how to cry.

A long time has passed since then, and I have remembered more than I do now. I have tried to put things into novels. I have written things down and forgotten them. I have told stories. And there was more, a life's more. My mother and I rode with my father summers and sat in his hot cars in the states of Louisiana and Arkansas and Texas and waited while he worked, made his calls. We went to the coast—to Biloxi and Pensacola. To Memphis. To Little Rock almost every holiday. We
went.
That was the motif of things. We lived in Jackson, but he traveled. And every time we could we went with him. Just to be going, or when he became not so well with heart trouble we went to help him. The staying part was never stabilized. Only being with them, and mostly being with her. My mother.

And then my father died, which changed everything—many things, it's odd to say, for the better where I was concerned. But not for my mother. Where she was concerned, nothing after that would ever be quite good again. A major part of life ended for her February 20, 1960. He had been everything to her, and all that was naturally implicit became suddenly explicit in her life, and she was neither good at that nor interested in it. And in a way I see now and saw almost as clearly then, she gave up.

Not that she gave up where I was concerned. I was sixteen and had lately been in some law scrapes, and she became, I'd say, very aware of the formal features of her life. She was a widow. She was fifty. She had a son who seemed all right, but who could veer off into trouble if she didn't pay attention. And so, in her way, she paid attention.

Not long after the funeral, when I was back in school and the neighbors had stopped calling and bringing over dishes of food— when both grief and real mourning had set in, in other words— she sat me down and told me we were now going to have to be more independent. She would not be able to look after me as she had done. We agreed that I had a future, but I would have to look after me. And as we could, we would do well to look after each other. We were partners now, is what I remember thinking. My father had really never been around that much, and so his actual absence was, for me (though not for her), not felt so strongly. And a partnership seemed like a good arrangement. I was to stay out of jail because she didn't want to get me out.
Wouldn't get me out.
I was to find friends I could rely on instead. 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. This, it was understood but never exactly stated (we were trying not to state too much then; we didn't want
everything
to have to be explicit, since so much was now and so little ever had been),
this
would give her time to adjust. To think about things. To become whatever she would have to become to get along from there on out.

I don't exactly remember the time scheme to things. This was 1960, '61, '62. I was a tenth-grader and on. But I did not get put in jail. I did live summers with my grandparents, who by now ran a large hotel in Little Rock. I got a black '57 Ford, which got stolen. I got beaten up and then got 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 much. Though that is not precisely how it was. She was there. I was there. But I cannot discount my own adjustments to my father's death and absence, to my independence. I think I may have been more dazed than grieved, and it is true my new friends took me up. My mother went to work. She got a job doing something at a company that made school pictures. It required training and she did it. And it was only then, late in 1960, when she was fifty, that she first felt the effects of having quit school in 1924. But she got along, came home tired. I do not think she had trouble. And then she left that. She became a rental agent for a new apartment house, tried afterward to get the job as manager but didn't get it—who knows why? She 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 the admitting clerk in the emergency room at the University of Mississippi Hospital, a job she liked very much.

And there was at least one boyfriend in all that time. A married man, from Tupelo, named Matt, who lived in the apartment building she worked at. He was a big, bluff man, in the furniture business, who drove a Lincoln and carried a gun strapped to the steering column. I liked him. And 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. And I don't care about that, either. He took her on drives. Flew her to Memphis in his airplane. Acted respectfully to both of us. She may have told me she was just passing time, getting her mind off her worries, letting someone be nice to her. But I didn't care. And we both knew that nothing she told me about him either did or didn't have to match the truth. I would sometimes think I wished she would marry Matt. And at other times I would be content to have them be lovers, if that's what they were. He had boys near my age, and later I would even meet them and like them. But this was after he and my mother were finished.

What finished them was brought on by me but was not really my doing, I think now. Matt had faded for a time. His business brought him in to Jackson, then out for months. She had quit talking about him, and life had receded to almost a normal level. I was having a hard time in school—getting a D in algebra (I'd already failed once) and having no ideas for how I could improve. My mother was cashiering nights at the Robert E. Lee and coming home by eleven.

But one night for some reason she simply 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 to hear she had left on time. And for some reason this scared me. I got in my car and drove down to the neighborhood by the hotel, a fringe neighborhood near a black section of town. I rode the streets and found her car, a gray and pink '58 Oldsmobile that had been my father's pride and joy. It was parked under some sycamore trees, across from the apartments where she had worked as a rental agent and where Matt lived. And for some reason I think I panicked. It was not a time to panic but I did anyway. I'm not sure what I thought, but thinking of it now I seem to believe I wanted to ask Matt—if he was there— if he knew where my mother was. This may be right, though it's possible, too, I knew she was there and just wanted to make her leave.

I went in the building—it must've been midnight—and up the elevator and down the hall to his door. I banged on it. Hit it hard with my fists. And then I waited.

Matt himself opened the door, but my mother was there in the room behind him. She had a drink in her hand. The lights were on, and she was standing in the middle of the room behind him. It was a nice apartment, and both of them were shocked by me. I don't blame them. I didn't blame them then and was 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. And I really can't remember what anybody said or did except me, briefly. “Where have you been?” I said to her. “I didn't know where you were. That's all.”