by Richard Ford
Walter’s death, I suppose you could say, has had the effect on me that death means to have; of reminding me of my responsibility to a somewhat larger world. Though it came at a time when I didn’t much want to think about that, and I still don’t find it easy to accommodate and am not completely sure what I can do differently.
Walter’s story about a daughter born out of wedlock and grown up now in Florida was, it turns out, not true, but simply a gentle joke. He knew, I think, that I would never run the risk of letting him down, and he was right. I flew to Sarasota, did a good bit of sleuthing, including some calls about birth records in Coshocton, I called Joyce Ellen, even hired a detective who cost me a good bit of money but turned up nothing and no one. And I’ve decided that the whole goose chase was just his one last attempt at withholding full disclosure. A novelistic red herring. And I admire Walter for it, since for me such a gesture has the feel of secrecies, a quality Walter’s own life lacked, though he tried for it. I think that Walter might’ve even figured out something important before he turned the television on for the last time, though I wouldn’t want to try to speak for him. But you can easily believe that some private questions get answered—just in the nature of things—as you anticipate the hammer falling.
Coming to Florida has had a good effect on me, and I have stayed on these few months—it is now September—though I don’t think I will stay forever. Coming to the bottom of the country provokes a nice sensation, a tropical certainty that something will happen to you here. The whole place seems alive with modest hopes. People in Florida, I’ve discovered, are here to get away from things, to seek no end of life, and there is a crispness and a Tightness to most everyone I meet that I find likable. No one is trying to rook anybody else, as my mother used to say, and contrary to all reports. Many people are here from Michigan, the blue plates on their cars and pickups much in evidence. It is not like New Jersey, but it is not bad.
The time since last April has gone by fast, in an almost technicolor-telescopic way—much faster than I’m used to having it go—which may be Florida’s great virtue, instead of the warm weather: time goes by fast in a perfectly timeless way. Not a bit like Gotham, where you seem to feel every second you are alive, but somehow miss everything else.
With my bank savings, I have leased a sporty, sea-green Datsun on a closed-end basis and left my car and my house in Bosobolo’s care. This has allowed him—as he explained in a letter—to bring his wife over from Gabon and to live a real married life in America. I don’t know the fate of the dumpy white girl. Possibly he has put her aside, though possibly not. And neither do I know what my neighbors think of this new arrangement—seeing Bosobolo out in the yard, surveying the spirea and the hemlocks, stretching his long arms and yawning like a lord.
I have a furnished adults-only condo out on a pleasant enough beachy place called Longboat Key, and have taken a leave of indefinite absence from the magazine. And for these few months I’ve lived a life of agreeable miscellany. At night someone will often put on some Big Band or reggae records, and men and women will gather around the pool and mix up some drinks and dance and chitter-chat. There are, naturally, plenty of girls in bathing suits and sundresses, and once in a while one of them consents to spend a night with me, then drifts away the next day back to whatever interested her before: a job, another man, travel. A few agreeable homosexuals live here, as well as an abundance of retired Navy men—midwestern guys in most cases, some of them my age—with a lot of time and energy on their hands and not enough to do. The Navy men have stories about Vietnam and Korea that all together would make a good book. And one or two have asked me about writing their life stories once they learned I write for a living. Though when all that begins to bore me, or when I don’t feel up to it, I take a walk out to the water which is just beyond the retaining wall and hike a while in the late daylight, when the sky is truly high and white, and watch the horizon go dark toward Cuba, and the last tourist plane of the day angle up toward who knows where. I like the flat plexus of the Gulf, and the sensation that there is a vast, troubling landscape underwater all lost, with only the definite land remaining, a sad and flat and melancholy prairie that can be lonely but in an appealing way, I’ve even driven up to the Sunshine Skyway, where I have thought of Ida Simms, and of the night Walter and I talked about her and of how much she meant to him. I have wondered if she ever woke up there or in the Seychelles or some such place and went home to her family. Probably not.
I realize I have told all this because unbeknownst to me, on that Thursday those months ago, I awoke with a feeling, a stirring, that any number of things were going to change and be settled and come to an end soon, and I might have something to tell that would be important and even interesting. And now I am at the point of not knowing the outcome of things once again, a frame of mind that pleases me. I sense that I have faced up to a great empty moment in life but without suffering the usual terrible regret—which is, after all, the way I began to describe this.
Some days I drive over in my Datsun and roam around the Grapefruit League parks, where not a lot is going on now. The Tigers have clinched at least a magic number, and seem to me unstoppable. Around the player complex there is a strange, anxious merriment. A few prospects are beginning in the fall instructional leagues, Latin boys plus a few older players on their way down the ladder, some of whom I even know from years ago. Hanging around on their own, they’re hoping to motivate some kid to hit or shake a bad attitude and to impress someone as being a good coach or a scout, maybe with a farm club out in Iowa, and in that way live a life of their choosing. It is a poignant life here, and play is haphazard at best, listless in its pleasures, and everyone waits for victory. A good human-interest article could be worked up from this small world. An old catcher actually came up to me and confessed he had diabetes and was going blind, and thought it might make a good story for younger readers. But I’ll never write it, just as I never properly wrote about Herb Wallagher and had to accept defeat there. Some life is only life, and unconjugatable, just as to some questions there are no answers. Just nothing to say. I have passed the catcher’s story and my thoughts on to Catherine Flaherty, in the event her current plans do not work out.
Things occur to me differently now, just as they might to a character at the end of a good short story. I have different words for what I see and anticipate, even different sorts of thoughts and reactions; more mature ones, ones that seem to really count. If I could write a short story, I would. But I don’t believe I could, and do not plan to try, which doesn’t worry me. It seems enough to go out to the park like a good Michigander, get the sun on my face while somewhere nearby I hear the hiss and pop of ball on glove leather. That may be a sport writer’s dreamlife. Sometimes I even feel like the man Wade told me about whose life disappeared in the landslide.
Though it’s not true that my old life has been swept away entirely. Since coming here the surprise is that I have had the chance to touch base with honest-to-goodness relatives, some cousins of my father’s who wrote me in Gotham through Irv Ornstein (my mother’s stepson) to say that a Great-Uncle Eulice had died in California, and that they would like to see me if I was ever in Florida. Of course, I didn’t know them and doubt I had ever heard their names. But I’m glad that I have now, as they are genuine salt of the earth, and I am better that they wrote, and that I have taken the time to get to know them.
Buster Bascombe is a retired railroad brakeman with a serious heart problem that could take him any hour of the day or night. And Empress, his wife, is a pixyish little right-winger who reads books like Masters of Deceit and believes we need to re-establish the gold standard, quit paying our taxes, abandon Yalta and the UN, and who smokes Camels a mile a minute and sells a little real estate on the side (though she is not as bad as those people often seem). Both of them are ex-alcoholics, and still manage to believe in most of the principles I do. Their house is a big yellow stucco bungalow outside Nokomis, on the Tamiami Trail, and
I’ve driven down at least four times and had steak dinners with them and their grown children—Eddie, Claire Boothe, and (to my surprise) Ralph.
These Florida Bascombes are, to my mind, a grand family of a modern sort who trust that the world has some important things still in it, and who believe life has given them more than they ever expected or deserved of it, not excepting that young Eddie at the present time is out of work. I’m proud to be the novelty member of their family.
Buster is a big humid-eyed, pale-skinned jolly man who sees a palmist about his heart trouble and enjoys taking strangers like me into his confidence. “Your daddy was a clever man, now don’t you think he wasn’t,” he has told me on his screened back porch after dinner, in the sweet aroma of grapefruit groves and azaleas. I hardly remember my father, and so it is all news to me, news even that anyone knew him. “He had a way of seeing the future like no one else,” Buster says and grins. He’d never met my mother. And my admission that I hardly remember anyone from back then doesn’t faze him. It is merely a regrettable mistake of fate he is willing to try to correct for me, even though I have no interesting confidences to return. And truthfully, when I drive back up Highway 24 just as the light is falling beyond my condo, behind its wide avenue of date palms and lampposts, I am usually (if only momentarily) glad to have a past, even an imputed and remote one. There is something to that. It is not a burden, though I’ve always thought of it as one. I cannot say that we all need a past in full literary fashion, or that one is much useful in the end. But a small one doesn’t hurt, especially if you’re already in a life of your own choosing. “You choose your friends,” Empress said to me when I first arrived, “but where your family is concerned you don’t choose.”
Finally, what is left to say? It is not a very complicated business, I don’t think.
My heart still beats, though not, in truth, exactly as it did before.
My voice is as strong and plausible as I can ever remember it, and has not gone soft on me since that Easter day in Barnegat Pines.
I have stayed in close touch with Catherine Flaherty, and after the two days we spent together in her untidy little flat on East 5th Street, we saw a good deal of one another until I picked up and came down here. She is a wonderful, curious-minded, tendentious girl, ironie in the precise ways I half-suspected, and serious things continue to be, mentioned between us. She has started med school at Dartmouth, and plans to fly here for Thanksgiving if I’m still here, though there’s no reason to think I will be. It turns out there is no Dartmouth Dan, which should be a lesson to all of us: the best girls oftentimes go unchosen, probably precisely because they are the best. It is enough for me to realize this, and for us to act like two college kids, talking on the phone until late at night, planning holiday visits, secretly hoping never to see each other again. I doubt ours is a true romance. I am too old for her; she is too smart for me. (I would never have the nerve to meet her father, whose name is “Punch” Flaherty, and who is planning a run for Congress.) Though as a postscript, I’ll admit I have been wrong altogether about her attitudes toward love and lovemaking, and have also been pleased to find out she is a modern enough girl not to think that I can make things better for her one way or another, even though I wish I could.
From Vicki Arcenault I have not heard so much as a word, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she has moved to Alaska and reconciled with her first husband and new love, skin-head Everett, and that they have become New-Agers together, sitting in hot tubs discussing their goals and diets, taking on a cold world with Consumer Reports, assured of who they are and what they want. The world will be hers, not mine. I could’ve postponed her development, but only for a while, and we’d surely have ended in bitter divorce. My guess is, and it’s not a happy one, that she will one day discover she doesn’t like men and never did (just as she said), her father included, and will carry a banner in public with those very words written on it. That is the way with things: expectations reversed in matters of the heart; love, a victim of chance and fate; the thing we say we’ll never do is the very thing, after all, we want to do most.
I believe now she told me a lie about Fincher Barksdale and my former wife, though it was finally not a hurtful lie. Maybe she’s embarrassed about it all. But she had purposes of her own to serve, and if I was not going to confide in her (and I wasn’t) there was no reason for her to confide in me. I wasn’t harmed more than a sore jaw can harm you, and I hold no bad feelings. Sailor-Vee, as she herself often said.
I have finally resigned from the Divorced Men’s Club. Though after Walter’s death it really seemed to me there was not much enthusiasm left. It did not seem to serve its purpose very well, and the other men, I think, will eventually just go back to being friends in the old-fashioned ways.
Regarding my children, they are planning a visit, though they have planned to come all summer long, and it could be their mother suspects I’m leading an unsavory bachelor’s life here and will not send them. Somehow something always seems to come up. They were disappointed not to take our trip around Lake Erie, but there will be other times while they are still young.
X’s mother, Irma, has moved back to Michigan with Henry. Together again after twenty years. They are afraid, I’m sure, of dying alone. Unlike me, they can feel time flying. In her last letter Irma said, “I read in the Free Press, Franky, many prominent people—except for one woman broadcaster—read the sports sometime early each day. I think that’s encouraging. Don’t you?” (I do.) “I think you should pay closer attention.”
Regarding X herself, I can only say, who knows? She does not think I’m a terrible man, which is more than most marriages have to go on into the future. She has lately begun competing on the mideast club pro tour, challenging other groups of women in Pennsylvania and Delaware. She told me on the phone that lately she’s played the best golf of her life, putts with supreme confidence, and has a deft command over her long irons—skills she isn’t even sure she would have if she’d played competitively all these years. She also said there are parts of her life she would take back, though she wasn’t specific about which ones. I am afraid she has become more introspective now, which is not always a hopeful sign. She talked about moving, but did not say where. She said she would not get married. She said she might take flying lessons. Nothing would surprise me. Just before she hung up the last time she asked me why I hadn’t consoled her on the night our house was broken into, those years ago, and I told her that it all seemed at once so idiotic and yet so inexplicable that I simply had not known what I could say, but that I was sorry, and that it was a failure on my part. (I didn’t have a heart to say I’d spoken, but she hadn’t heard me.)
As I’ve said, life has only one certain closure. It is possible to love someone, and no one else, and still not live with that one person or even see her. Anything or anyone who says different is a liar or a sentimentalist or worse. It is possible to be married, to divorce, then to come back together with a whole new set of understandings that you’d never have liked or even understood before in your earlier life, but that to your surprise now seems absolutely perfect. The only truth that can never be a lie, let me tell you, is life itself—the thing that happens.
Will I ever live in Haddam, New Jersey, again? I haven’t the slightest idea.
Will I be a sportswriter again and do those things I did and loved doing when I did them? Ditto.
I read in the St. Petersburg Times a week ago that a boy had died in De Tocqueville Academy, the son of a famous astronaut, which is why it made the news, though he died quietly. Of course it made me think of Ralph, my son, who did not die quietly at all, but howling mad, with a voice all his own, full of crazy curses and outrage and even jokes. And I realized that my own mourning for him is finally over—even as the astronaut’s is just beginning. Grief, real grief, is relatively short, though mourning can be long.
I walked out of the condos onto the flat lithesome beach this morning, and took a walk in my
swimming trunks and no shirt on. And I thought that one natural effect of life is to cover you in a thin layer of … what? A film? A residue or skin of all the things you’ve done and been and said and erred at? I’m not sure. But you are under it, and for a long time, and only rarely do you know it, except that for some unexpected reason or opportunity you come out—for an hour or even for a moment—and you suddenly feel pretty good. And in that magical instant you realize how long it’s been since you felt just that way. Have you been ill, you ask. Is life itself an illness or a syndrome? Who knows? We’ve all felt that way, I’m confident, since there’s no way that I could feel what hundreds of millions of other citizens haven’t.
Only suddenly, then, you are out of it—that film, that skin of life—as when you were a kid. And you think: this must’ve been the way it was once in my life, though you didn’t know it then, and don’t really even remember it—a feeling of wind on your cheeks and your arms, of being released, let loose, of being the light-floater. And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.
RICHARD FORD
The author of six novels and two collections of stories, Richard Ford has received the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. He lives in Maine and New Orleans.
