by Richard Ford
When I came to the telephone and my father’s call—my mother had answered, and they had spoken some terse words—my father began right away to talk. “Well, let’s see, is it Van Cliburn, or Mickey Mantle?” These were two heroes of the time whom I had gone on and on about and alternately wanted to be when my father was still in our lives. I had already forgotten them.
“Neither one,” I said. I was in the big front hall, where the telephone alcove was. I could see outside through the glass door to where William Dubinion was on his knees in the monkey grass that bordered my mother’s camellias. It was a fine situation, I thought—staring at my mother’s colored boyfriend while talking to my father in his far-off city, living as he did. “Oh, of course,” my father said. “Those were our last year’s fascinations.”
“It was longer ago,” I said. My mother made a noise in the next room. I breathed her cigarette smoke, heard the newspaper crackle. She was listening to everything, and I didn’t want to seem friendly to my father, which I did not in any case feel. I felt he was a bastard.
“Well now, see here, ole Buck Rogers,” my father continued. “I’m calling up about an important matter to the future of mankind. I’d like to know if you’d care to go duck hunting in the fabled Grand Lake marsh. With me, that is. I have to come to town in two days to settle some legal business. My ancient father had a trusted family retainer named Renard Theriot, a disreputable old yat. But Renard could unquestionably blow a duck call. So, I’ve arranged for his son, Mr. Renard, Jr., to put us both in a blind and call in several thousand ducks for our pleasure.” My father cleared his throat in the stagy way he always did when he talked like this—high-falutin’. “I mean if you’re not over-booked, of course,” he said, and cleared his throat again.
“I might be,” I said, and felt strange even to be talking to him. He occasionally called me at military school, where I had to converse with him in the orderly room. Naturally, he paid all my school bills, sent an allowance, and saw to my mother’s expenses. He no doubt paid for William Dubinion’s services, too, and wouldn’t have cared what their true nature was. He had also conceded us the big white Greek Revival raised cottage on McKendall Street in uptown. (McKendall is our family name— my name. It is such a family as that.) But still it was very odd to think that your father was living with another man in a distant city, and was calling up to ask you to go duck hunting. And then to have my mother listening, sitting and smoking and reading the States Item, in the very next room and thinking whatever she must’ve been thinking. It was nearly too much for me.
And yet, I wanted to go duck hunting, to go by boat out into the marsh that makes up the vast, brackish tidal land south and east of our city. I had always imagined I’d go with my father when I was old enough. And I was old enough now, and had been taught to fire a rifle—though not a shotgun—in my school. Also, when we spoke that day, he didn’t sound to me like some man who was living with another man in St. Louis. He sounded much as he always had in our normal life when I had gone to Jesuit and he had practiced law in the Hibernia Bank building, and we were a family. Something I think about my father—whose name was Boatwright McKendall and who was only forty-one years old at the time—something about him must’ve wanted things to be as they had been before he met his great love, Dr. Carter. Though you could also say that my father just wanted not to have it be that he couldn’t do whatever he wanted; wouldn’t credit that anything he did might be deemed wrong, or be the cause of hard feeling or divorce or terrible scandal such as what sees you expelled from the law firm your family started a hundred years ago and that bears your name; or that you conceivably caused the early death of your own mother from sheer disappointment. And in fact if anything he did had caused someone difficulty, or ruined a life, or set someone on a downward course—well, then he just largely ignored it, or agreed to pay money about it, and afterward tried his level best to go on as if the world was a smashingly great place for everyone and we could all be wonderful friends. It was the absence I mentioned before, the skill he had to not be where he exactly was, but yet to seem to be present to any but the most practiced observer. A son, for instance.
“Well, now look-it here, Mr. Buck-a-roo,” my father said over the telephone from—I guessed—St. Louis. Buck is what I was called and still am, to distinguish me from him (our name is the same). And I remember becoming nervous, as if by agreeing to go with him, and to see him for the first time since he’d left from a New Year’s party at the Boston Club and gone away with Dr. Carter—as if by doing these altogether natural things (going hunting) I was crossing a line, putting myself at risk. And not the risk you might think, based on low instinct, but some risk you don’t know exists until you feel it in your belly, the way you’d feel running down a steep hill and at the bottom there’s a deep river or a canyon, and you realize you can’t stop. Disappointment was what I risked, I know now. But I wanted what I wanted and would not let such a feeling stop me.
“I want you to know,” my father said, “that I’ve cleared all this with your mother. She thinks it’s a wonderful idea.”
I pictured his yellow hair, his handsome, youthful, unlined face talking animatedly into the receiver in some elegant, sunny, high-ceilinged room, beside an expensive French table with some fancy art objects on top, which he would be picking up and inspecting as he talked. In my picture he was wearing a purple smoking jacket and was happy to be doing what he was doing. “Is somebody else going?” I said.
“Oh, God no,” my father said and laughed. “Like who? Francis is too refined to go duck hunting. He’d be afraid of getting his beautiful blue eyes put out. Wouldn’t you, Francis?”
It shocked me to think Dr. Carter was right there in the room with him, listening. My mother, of course, was still listening to me.
“It’ll just be you and me and Renard Junior,” my father said, his voice going away from the receiver. I heard a second voice then, a soft, cultured voice, say something there where my father was, some possibly ironic comment about our plans. “Oh Christ,” my father said in an irritated voice, a voice I didn’t know any better than I knew Dr. Carter’s. “Just don’t say that. This is not that kind of conversation. This is Buck here.” The voice said something else, and in my mind I suddenly saw Dr. Carter in a very unkind light, one I will not even describe. “Now you raise your bones at four a.m. on Thursday, Commander Rogers,” my father said in his high-falutin’ style. “Ducks are early risers. I’ll collect you at your house. Wear your boots and your Dr. Dentons and nothing bright-colored. I’ll supply our artillery.”
It seemed odd to think that my father thought of the great house where we had all lived, and that his own father and grandfather had lived in since after the Civil War, as my house. It was not my house, I felt. The most it was was my mother’s house, because she had married him in it and then taken it in their hasty divorce.
“How’s school, by the way,” my father said distractedly.
“How’s what?” I was so surprised to be asked that. My father sounded confused, as if he’d been reading something and lost his place on a page.
“School. You know? Grades? Did you get all A’s? You should. You’re smart. At least you have a smart mouth.”
“I hate school,” I said. I had liked Jesuit where I’d had friends. But my mother had made me go away to Sandhearst because of all the upset with my father’s leaving. There I wore a khaki uniform with a blue stripe down the side of my pants leg, and a stiff blue doorman’s hat. I felt a fool at all times.
“Oh well, who cares,” my father said. “You’ll get into Harvard the same way I did.”
“What way,” I asked, because even at fifteen I wanted to go to Harvard.
“On looks,” my father said. “That’s how southerners get along. That’s the great intelligence. Once you know that, the rest is pretty simple. The world wants to operate on looks. It only uses brains if looks aren’t available. Ask your mother. It’s why she married me when she shouldn’t have. She’l
l admit it now.”
“I think she’s sorry about it,” I said. I thought about my mother listening to half our conversation.
“Oh yes. I’m sure she is, Buck. We’re all a little sorry now. I’ll testify to that.” The other voice in the room where he was spoke something then, again in an ironic tone. “Oh you shut up,” my father said. “You just shut up that talk and stay out of this. I’ll see you Thursday morning, son,” my father said, and hung up before I could answer.
This conversation with my father occurred on Monday, the eighteenth of December, three days before we were supposed to go duck hunting. And for the days in between then and Thursday, my mother more or less avoided me, staying in her room upstairs with the door closed, often with William Dubinion, or going away in the car to her singing lessons with him driving and acting as her chauffeur (though she rode in the front seat). It was still the race times then, and colored people were being lynched and trampled on and burnt out all over the southern states. And yet it was just as likely to cause no uproar if a proper white woman appeared in public with a Negro man in our city. There was no rule or logic to any of it. It was New Orleans, and if you could carry it off you did. Plus Dubinion didn’t mind working in the camellia beds in front of our house, just for the record. In truth, I don’t think he minded anything very much. He had grown up in the cotton patch in Pointe Coupee Parish, between the rivers, had somehow made it to music school at Wilberforce in Ohio, been to Korea, and had played in the Army band. Later he barged around playing the clubs and juke joints in the city for a decade before he somehow met my mother at a society party where he was the paid entertainment, and she was putting herself into the public eye to make the case that when your husband abandons you for a rich queer, life will go on.
Mr. Dubinion never addressed a great deal to me. He had arrived in my mother’s life after I had gone away to military school, and was simply a fait accompli when I came home for Thanksgiving. He was a tall, skinny, solemnly long yellow-faced Negro with sallow, moist eyes, a soft lisp and enormous, bony, pink-nailed hands he could stretch up and down a piano keyboard. I don’t think my mother could have thought he was handsome, but possibly that didn’t matter. He often parked himself in our living room, drinking scotch whiskey, smoking cigarettes and playing tunes he made up right on my grandfather’s Steinway concert grand. He would hum under his breath and grunt and sway up and back like the jazzman Erroll Garner. He usually looked at me only out of the corner of his yellow Oriental-looking eye, as if neither of us really belonged in such a dignified place as my family’s house. He knew, I suppose, he wouldn’t be there forever and was happy for a reprieve from his usual life, and to have my mother as his temporary girlfriend. He also seemed to think I would not be there much longer either, and that we had this in common.
The one thing I remember him saying to me was during the days before I went with my father to the marsh that Christmas— Dubinion’s only Christmas with us, as it turned out. I came into the great shadowy living room where the piano sat beside the front window and where my mother had established a large Christmas tree with blinking lights and a gold star on top. I had a copy of The Inferno, which I’d decided I would read over the holidays because the next year I hoped to leave Sandhearst and be admitted to Lawrenceville, where my father had gone before Harvard. William Dubinion was again in his place at the piano, smoking and drinking. My mother had been singing “You’ve Changed” in her thin, pretty soprano and had left to take a rest because singing made her fatigued. When he saw the red jacket on my book he frowned and turned sideways on the bench and crossed one long thin leg over the other so his pale hairless skin showed above his black patent leather shoes. He was wearing black trousers with a white shirt, but no socks, which was his normal dress around the house.
“That’s a pretty good book,” he said in his soft lisping voice, and stared right at me in a way that felt accusatory.
“It’s written in Italian,” I said. “It’s a poem about going to hell.”
“So is that where you expect to go?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“‘Per me si va nella citta dolente. Per me si va nell’eterno dolore.’ That’s all I remember,” he said, and he played a chord in the bass clef, a spooky, rumbling chord like the scary part in a movie.
I assumed he was making this up, though of course he wasn’t. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
“Same ole,” he said, his cigarette still dangling in his mouth. “Watch your step when you take a guided tour of hell. Nothing new.”
“When did you read this book?” I said, standing between the two partly closed pocket doors. This man was my mother’s boyfriend, her Svengali, her impresario, her seducer and corrupter (as it turned out). He was a strange, powerful man who had seen life I would never see. And I’m sure I was both afraid of him and equally afraid he would detect it, which probably made me appear superior and insolent and made him dislike me.
Dubinion looked above the keyboard at an arrangement of red pyracanthas my mother had placed there. “Well, I could say something nasty. But I won’t.” He took a breath and let it out heavily. “You just go ahead on with your readin’. I’ll go on with my playin’.” He nodded but did not look at me again. We didn’t have too many more conversations after that. My mother sent him away in the winter. Once or twice he returned but, at some point, he disappeared. Though by then her life had changed in the bad way it probably had been bound to change.
The only time I remember my mother speaking directly to me during these three days, other than to inform me dinner was ready or that she was leaving at night to go out to some booking Dubinion had arranged, which I’m sure she paid him to arrange (and paid for the chance to sing as well), was on Wednesday afternoon, when I was sitting on the back porch poring over the entrance requirement information I’d had sent from Lawrenceville. I had never seen Lawrenceville, or been to New Jersey, never been farther away from New Orleans than to Yankeetown, Florida, where my military school was located in the buildings of a former Catholic hospital for sick and crazy priests. But I thought that Lawrenceville—just the word itself—could save me from the impossible situation I deemed myself to be in. To go to Lawrenceville, to travel the many train miles, and to enter whatever strange, complex place New Jersey was—all that coupled to the fact that my father had gone there and my name and background meant something—all that seemed to offer escape and relief and a future better than the one I had at home in New Orleans.
My mother had come out onto the back porch, which was glassed in and gave a prospect down onto the backyard grass. On the manicured lawn was an arrangement of four wooden Adirondack chairs and a wooden picnic table, all painted pink. The yard was completely walled in and no one but our neighbors could see—if they chose to—that William Dubinion was lying on top of the pink picnic table with his shirt off, smoking a cigarette and staring sternly up at the warm blue sky.
My mother stood for a while watching him. She was wearing a pair of men’s white silk pajamas, and her voice was husky. I’m sure she was already taking the drugs that would eventually disrupt her reasoning. She was holding a glass of milk, which was probably not just milk but milk with gin or scotch or something in it to ease whatever she felt terrible about.
“What a splendid idea to go hunting with your father,” she said sarcastically, as if we were continuing a conversation we’d been having earlier, though in fact we had said nothing about it, despite my wanting to talk about it, and despite thinking I ought to not go and hoping she wouldn’t permit it. “Do you even own a gun?” she asked, though she knew I didn’t. She knew what I did and didn’t own. I was fifteen.
“He’s going to give me one,” I said.
She glanced at me where I was sitting, but her expression didn’t change. “I just wonder what it’s like to take up with another man of your social standing,” my mother said as she ran her hand through her hair, which was newly colored ash-blond and done
in a very neat bob, which had been Dubinion’s idea. My mother’s father had been a pharmacist on Prytania Street and had done well catering to the needs of rich families like the McKendalls. She had gone to Newcombe, married up and come to be at ease with the society my father introduced her into (though I have never thought she really cared about New Orleans society one way or the other—unlike my father, who cared about it enough to spit in its face).
