by Richard Ford
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.”
And that was all. All of that. Matt s
aid very little. My mother got her coat and we went home in two cars. She acted vaguely annoyed at me, and I was mad at her. We talked that night. Eventually she said she was sorry, and I told her I didn’t care if she saw Matt only that she tell me when she would be home late. And to my knowledge she never saw Matt Matthews, or any other man, again as a lover 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 years later, say she would’ve called me. But that was not, of course, what she did or how she saw it. She just looked a little disgusted and shook her head. “Oh, that,” she said. “My God. That was just silliness. You had no business coming up there. You were out of your mind. Though I just saw I couldn’t be doing things like that. I had a son to raise.” And here again she looked disgusted, and at everything, I think. All the cards the fates had dealt her—a no-good childhood, my father’s death, me, her own inability to vault over all of this to a better life. It was another proof of something bad, the likes of which she felt, I believe, she’d had plenty.
There are only these—snapshot instances of a time lived indistinctly, a time that whirled by for us but were the last times we would ever really live together as mother and son. We did not fight. We accommodated each other almost as adults would. We grew wry and humorous with each other. Cast glances, gave each other looks. Were never ironic or indirect or crafty with anger. We knew how we were supposed to act and took pleasure in acting that way.
She sold the new house my father had bought, and we moved into a high-rise. Magnolia Towers. I did better in school. She was switching jobs. I really didn’t register these changes, though based on what I know now about such things they could not have been easy.
I did not and actually do not know about the money, how it was, then. My father had a little insurance. Maybe some was saved in a bank. My grandparents stepped forward with offers. They had made money. But there was no pension from his job; it was not that kind of company. I know the government paid money for me, a dependent child. But I only mean to say I don’t know how much she needed to work; how much money needed 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 her—independence. Solitariness. All that that means.
There were memorable moments. When my Ford was stolen we went one winter day at dusk out to a car dealer in the country, where good deals were supposedly available, and looked at cars. She felt we should replace mine, and so did I. But when we were there looking at cheap station wagons, she saw a black Thunderbird and stared at it, and I knew that was what she wanted—for herself—that that would make her feel better. Getting my father’s Olds out of our lives would be a help, and there was really no one there then to tell us not to. It was a kind of new though unasked-for freedom. And so I encouraged her. She stared a long time at it, got in and tilted the steering wheel, shut the door a few times, and then we left with the promise to think about it. In a few days, though, after we’d thought, the police found my old car, and she decided to keep the Olds.
Another time, when my girlfriend and I had been experimenting in one kind of sexual pleasure and another. And quite suddenly my girlfriend—a Texas girl—sensed somehow that she was definitely pregnant and that her life and mine were ruined. Mine, I know certainly, felt ruined. And there was evidence aplenty around of kids marrying at fourteen, having babies, being divorced. This was the South, after all.
But I once again found myself in terror, and on a Sunday afternoon I just unburdened myself to my mother; told her all we’d done, all we hadn’t. Spoke specifically and methodically in terms of parts and positions, extents and degrees. All I wanted from her was to know if Louise could be pregnant, based upon what she knew about those things (how much could that really have been?). These were all matters a boy should take up with his father, of course. Though, really, whoever would? I know I wouldn’t have. Such a conversation would’ve confused and embarrassed my poor father and me. We did not know each other that well at our closest moments. And in any case, he was gone.
But my mother I knew 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 partners in my messes and hers. I sat on the couch and carefully told her what scared me, told her what I couldn’t get worked out right in my thinking, went through it all; used the words it, hers, in. And she, stifling her dread, very carefully assured me that everything was going to be fine. Nobody got pregnant doing what we were doing, and I should forget about it. It was all a young girl’s scare fantasies. Not to worry. And so I didn’t.
Of course, she was wrong. Couldn’t possibly have been wronger. My girlfriend didn’t get pregnant, but only because a kind fate intervened. Thousands of people get pregnant doing what we were doing. Thousands more get pregnant doing much less. I guess my mother just didn’t know that much, or else understood much more: that what was done was done now, and all the worry and explaining and getting-straight wouldn’t matter. I should be more careful in the future if I was to have one. And that was about it. If Louise was pregnant, what anybody thought wouldn’t matter. Best just not to worry.
And there is, of course, a lesson in that—one I like and have tried ever since and unsuccessfully to have direct me. Though I have never looked at the world through eyes like hers were then. Not yet. I have never exactly felt how little all you can do can really matter. Full understanding will come to me, and undoubtedly to us all. But my mother showed that to me first, and best, and I think I may have begun to understand it even then.
In the sixties after that I went away to college, in Michigan. It was a choice of mine and no one else’s, and my mother neither encouraged nor discouraged me. Going to college in Mississippi didn’t enter my mind. I wanted, I thought, to be a hotel manager like my grandfather, who had done well at it. And Michigan State was the place for that. I do not, in fact, remember my mother and me ever talking about college. She hadn’t been and didn’t know much about it. But the assumption was that I was simply going, and it would have to be my lookout. She was interested, but in a way that was not vital or supervisory. I don’t think she thought that I would go away for good, even when it happened that Michigan State took me and I said I was going. I don’t know what she thought exactly. She had other things on her mind then. Maybe she thought Michigan wasn’t so far from Mississippi, which is true and not true, or that I wouldn’t stay and would come home soon. Maybe she thought I would never go. Or maybe she thought nothing, or nothing that was clear; just noticed that I was doing this and that, sending and getting letters, setting dates, and decided she would cross that bridge when the time came.
And it did come.
In September 1962, she and I got on the Illinois Central in Jackson and rode it to Chicago (our first such trip together). We transferred crosstown to the old La Salle Street Station and the Grand Trunk Western, and rode up to Lansing. She wanted to go with me. I think she wanted just 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, possibly to detect how I was going to fit myself among those people, live in their buildings, eat their food, learn their lingo. Why this was where I had chosen to go. Her son. This was how she saw her duty unfolding.
And, too, the ordinary may have been just what she wanted: accompanying her son to college, a send-off; to see herself and me, for a moment in time, fitted into the pattern of what other people were up to, what people in general did. If it could happen to her, to us, that way, then maybe some normal life had reconvened, since she could not have thought of her life as normal then.
So, at the end of that week, late September 1962, when I had enrolled, invaded my room, met my roomies, and she and I had spent days tou
ring and roaming, eating motel dinners together until nothing was left to say, I stood up on a bus-stop bench beside the train tracks, at the old GTW station in Lansing, and held up my arms in the cool, snapping air for her to see me as she pulled away back toward Chicago. And I saw her, her white face recessed behind the tinted window, one palm flat to the glass for me to see. And she was crying. Good-bye, she was saying. And I waved one arm in that cool air and said, “Good-bye. I love you,” and watched the train go out of sight through the warp of that bricky old factory town. And at that moment I suppose you could say I started my own life in earnest, and whatever there was left of my childhood ended.
After that the life that would take us to the end began. A fragmented, truncated life of visits long and short. Letters. Phone calls. Telegrams. Meetings in cities away from home. Conversations in cars, in airports, train stations. Efforts to see each other. Leaving dominating everything—my growing older, and hers, observed from varying distances.
She held out alone in Mississippi for a year, moved back into the house on Congress Street. She rented out the other side, worked at the hospital, where for a time, I think, the whole new life she’d been handed worked out, came together. I am speculating, as you can believe, because I was gone. But at least she said she liked her job, liked the young interns at the hospital, liked the drama of the ER, liked working even. It may have started to seem satisfactory enough that I was away. It may have seemed to her that there was a life to lead. That under the circumstances she had done reasonably well with things; could ease up, let events happen without fearing the worst. One bad thing did finally turn into something less bad.
This, at least, is what I wanted to think. How a son feels about his widowed mother when he is far away becomes 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 fragmented life with my mother, I was aware (as I have said) that things would never be completely all right with her again. Partly it was a matter of her choosing; partly it was a matter of her own character—of just how she could see her life without my father, with him gone and so much life left to be lived in an unideal way. Always she was resigned somewhere down deep. I could never plumb her without coming to that stop point—a point where expectation simply ceased. This is not to say she was unhappy after enough time had passed. Or that she never laughed. Or that she didn’t see life as life, didn’t regain and rejoin herself. All those she did. Only, not utterly, not in a way a mother, any mother, could disguise to her only son who loved her. I always saw that. Always felt it. Always felt her—what?—discomfort at life? Her resisting it? Always wished she could relent more than she apparently could; since in most ways my own life seemed to spirit ahead, and I did not like it that hers didn’t. From almost the first I felt that my father’s death surrendered to me at least as much as it took away. It gave me my life to live by my own designs, gave me my own decisions. A boy could do worse than to lose his father—a good father, at that— just when the world begins to display itself all around him.
