by Richard Ford
‘He’s doing fine,’ I said.
‘Joe just talked to him on the telephone,’ my mother said loudly.
‘Did he say it was a tragedy out there? That’s what they usually say. Everything’s a tragedy when they can’t put it out.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say it was.’
‘Did he say he was coming home soon?’ Warren Miller said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mention that.’ On the table beside me was a cold cigar butt in an ashtray, and under it the book my mother had lent to him.
‘Women are fighting this fire,’ my mother said. ‘I read that in the paper.’ She was standing, holding a framed photograph of a smiling woman with a dark upper lip. She had picked it up off the piano.
‘Women are better at it than men,’ Warren Miller said. He appeared limping out of the kitchen door, holding three stacked plates with silverware on top of them. He still had the towel stuffed in his pants. ‘They know what you’re supposed to run from.’
‘You can’t run away from everything,’ my mother said, and she turned the frame so Warren could see it as he put the plates down on the dining table, which had an expensive-looking white tablecloth over it and was on one side of the living room. ‘Who’s this pictured?’ my mother said.
‘That’s my wife,’ Warren said. ‘Formerly. She knew when to run.’
‘I’m sure she regrets it, too.’ My mother put the picture back down where it had been, and took a drink of her drink.
‘She hasn’t decided to call up to say so yet. But maybe she will. I’m not dead yet,’ Warren said. He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps, as if something wasn’t funny.
‘Life, life, life, life,’ my mother said. ‘Life’s long.’ She suddenly walked across to where Warren Miller was standing beside the dining room table, put her hands on his cheeks, still holding her glass, and kissed him right on the mouth. ‘You poor old thing,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s nice enough to you.’ She took another big drink of her gin, then looked at me on the couch. ‘You don’t mind it if I give Mr Miller an innocent kiss, do you, Joe?’ she said. She was drunk and she wasn’t acting the way she ordinarily would. She looked at Warren Miller again. He had a red smear of her lipstick on his mouth. ‘Is something waiting to begin or has it already happened?’ she said, because neither of us had said anything. We hadn’t moved.
‘Everything’s in front of us,’ Warren Miller said. He looked at me and grinned. ‘I’ve got a big dago dinner cooked up in there,’ he said, starting to limp toward the kitchen. ‘We have to get this boy fed, Jeanette, or he won’t be happy.’
‘Not that he’s happy now,’ my mother said, holding her empty glass. She looked at me again and touched both corners of her mouth with her tongue, then walked straight to the front window of the house where you could see out toward town, and toward our house, empty back on Eighth Street. I don’t know what she thought I was thinking. Dislike or surprise or shock at her, I would guess–for bringing me here or for being here herself, or for kissing Warren Miller in front of me, or for being drunk. But I was only aware at that moment that things felt out of control and I did not know how to bring them back, sitting in Warren Miller’s living room. We would need to go home to do that. And I guessed she was looking out at the dark toward our house because she wanted to be there. I was relieved, though, that my father didn’t know about all this because he wouldn’t have understood it even as well as I did. And I told myself, sitting there, that if I ever had the opportunity to tell him about all this, I wouldn’t do it. I would never do it as long as I lived, because I loved them.
In a little while Warren Miller brought out a big red bowl of what he called chicken cacciatore and a jug of wine in a basket, and we all three sat down at the table with the white tablecloth and ate. My mother was in an odd mood at first, but she became better, and as she ate she began to find her good spirits again. Warren Miller ate with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar, and my mother said that was the old-fashioned way to eat, and he must’ve learned it in the old West, but that she didn’t want to see me eating that way. Though after a while we all put our napkins in our collars and laughed about it. Nobody talked about the fire. Once Warren Miller looked across the table at me and told me he thought my father had a strong character, and that he fought the circumstances, and that he was a man somebody would be lucky to have working for him, and that when my father came back from the fire he–Warren–would find a job for him, one that had a bright future to it. He said a smart man could make money in the car business, and he and my father would discuss that when the time came.
My mother didn’t talk much, though she was having a good time, I thought. She was affected by Warren Miller, by something in him she liked, and she did not mind me seeing it. She smiled and leaned on the table and talked some about Boise, Idaho, where there was a hotel she liked with a good restaurant in it, and about Grand Coulee where she had been fishing with her father when she was a little girl, and where Warren Miller had been. She talked about once seeing the Great Salt Lake from the air, and what that was like, and about Lewiston. She said it was never cold there because of the special climate, and that she wasn’t looking forward to the winter coming in Great Falls, because the wind blew for weeks at a time and that after a while, she knew, constant wind would make you crazy. She did not mention the Helen Apartments or about teaching at the air base, or even about working at the grain elevator. All that seemed to have gone away, as if it was a dream she’d had, and the only real worlds were back in Idaho where she’d been happy, and in Warren Miller’s house where she was happy to be at that moment.
She asked Warren Miller how he had made his money, and whether he had gone to college to start, because she wanted me to go to college. And Warren, who had lit a big black cigar by then and taken his napkin out of his collar, sat back in his chair and said he had gone to Dartmouth College in the East, and had majored in history because his father had been a college professor of that in Bozeman and insisted, but that Montana was not a place where an education made any difference to anything. He’d learned everything that meant anything, he said, in the Army, in Burma in World War II, where he had been a major in the Signal Corps and where nobody knew how to do anything right.
‘Other people’s incompetency is what makes you rich,’ he said, and tapped the ash off his cigar into an ashtray. ‘Money begets money based on no other principle. It almost doesn’t matter what you do. I came back from Korea and I was a farmer, and then I got into the oil leasing business and went to Morocco with that, and then I came back here and bought those elevators and the car agency and the crop insurance business. I’m not very smart. Plenty of people are smarter than I am. I’m just progressive.’ Warren pushed his big hands back through his glistening hair and smiled across the table at my mother. ‘I’m fifty-five years young, but I’m that smart.’
‘You’re young for your age, though,’ my mother said, and smiled back at him. ‘You should probably write your personal memoirs someday.’ Warren Miller and my mother looked at each other from across the table and I thought they knew something I didn’t know.
‘Why don’t we listen to some music,’ Warren Miller said suddenly. ‘I bought a record today.’
My mother looked around then at the brightly lit room behind her. ‘I’d like to know where the restroom is.’ She smiled at me. ‘Do you know where it is, Joe?’
‘Go through the bedroom, Jenny,’ Warren Miller said. ‘All the lights are turned on.’
I had never heard anyone call her that before, and I must’ve looked at my mother in a way to let her know I thought there was something surprising about it.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Joe, accuse me of something that matters,’ she said. She got up, and I could tell she had drunk too much because she kept her hand on the back rail of the chair and looked from me to Warren and back again, still standing, her eyes shining in the light. ‘Put some music
on now,’ she said. ‘Some people might care to dance after while.’
‘We will,’ Warren Miller said. ‘That’s a good idea. When you come back we will.’ But he sat still in his chair, holding his cigar over the ashtray. My mother looked at both of us again as if she couldn’t see us clearly, then walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.
Warren Miller took a long puff on his cigar and blew the smoke up into the room, then held his cigar half onto the ashtray again. The big gold ring he had on his finger, the one I’d felt yesterday, had a square red stone on the top of it and a white diamond stone in the middle of that. It looked like a thing you would never forget you had on.
‘I own an airplane,’ Warren Miller said to me. ‘Have you ever been up in one of those?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t.’
‘You get a different perspective when you’re up there like that,’ he said. ‘The whole world’s different. Your town becomes just a little bitty town. I’ll take you up with me, and let you handle the controls. Would you like to do that?’
‘I’d like to go sometime,’ I said.
‘You can fly to Spokane and eat lunch and come back. We can take your mother. Would you like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. But I thought she would like it.
‘And are you going to go to college like she says,’ Warren Miller asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I hope so.’
‘Where?’ he said. ‘Which one are you aiming at?’
‘Harvard,’ I said. And I wished I knew where Harvard was, and that I had a reason for saying I wanted to go there.
‘It’s a good one,’ Warren Miller said. He reached up and took the jug of red wine in one hand and poured some into his glass. ‘Once,’ he said, and he put the jug down, and he sat a second without saying anything. His hair was gleaming in the light, and he blinked his eyes several times behind his glasses. ‘Once, when I was flying, it was in the fall, like it is now. Only colder, and it wasn’t this dry. I was flying up to look at some poor man’s hailed-on wheat crop where I held a policy. And I could see all these geese flying down from Canada. They were all in their formations, you know. Big V’s.’ He drank half his glass of wine in one gulp and licked his lips. ‘I was up there among them. And do you know what I did?’ He looked at me and put his cigar back in his mouth and crossed his legs so I could see his brown cowboy boots, which were shiny and without any fancy design on them like other boots I’d seen men wear in Montana.
‘No,’ I said, though I thought it would be something I wouldn’t believe, or something impossible, or that no one would do. He was drunk, too, I thought.
‘I opened back my window,’ he said, ‘and I turned off the engine.’ Warren Miller stared at me. ‘Four thousand feet up. And I just listened. They were all right up there around me. And they were honking and honking, way up in the sky where no one ever heard them before except God himself. And I thought to myself, this is like seeing an angel. It’s a great privilege. It was the most wonderful thing I ever did in my life. Ever will do.’
‘Were you afraid?’ I said, because all I could think of was what I would’ve felt and what an airplane would do if its engine was turned off, and how long you could stay up in the air without crashing.
‘I was,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I was afraid. I certainly was. Because I didn’t think about anything. I was just up there. I could’ve been one of those geese, just for that minute. I’d lost all humanity, and I had all these people trusting me on the ground. I had my wife and my mother and four businesses. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them. I just didn’t even think about them. And then when I did, that’s when it scared me. Do you understand what I’m talking about, Joe?’
‘Yes,’ I said, though I didn’t. I only understood that it meant a great deal to Warren Miller and was supposed to mean something to me.
He sat back in his chair. He had leaned forward when he was telling me about hearing the geese. He picked up his wine glass and drank the rest of what was in it. Far away, behind walls, I could hear water running in pipes. ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Warren Miller said.
‘Okay,’ I said.
He poured some wine for me and more for himself. ‘Here’s to the angels,’ he said, ‘and to your old man not getting burned up like a piece of bacon.’
‘Thank you,’ I said for some reason.
He pushed his wine glass toward mine, but they never actually touched before he pulled back and drank half of his again. I took a small drink of mine and I hated the taste, which seemed both sweet and vinegary at the same time, and I put my glass back down. And I felt, just for a moment, with the lights all on and Warren Miller in front of me, breathing a heavy breath that I could smell and that was like the wine and whatever Warren Miller himself smelled like, that I was in a dream, one that would go on and on, and maybe I would never wake up out of it. My life had suddenly become this, which wasn’t awful but wasn’t the way it had been. My mother was out of sight, I was alone, and in that brief instant I missed my father more than I ever missed him again or had before. I know I almost broke down and cried for all the things I didn’t have then and was afraid I wouldn’t have again.
‘Your mother has a nice frame,’ Warren Miller said. He held his glass in one hand and he touched his cold cigar with the other. He seemed very big to me. ‘I admire her very much. She puts herself forward nicely in the world.’
‘I think so, too,’ I said.
‘That’s what you should do.’ Warren Miller made a fist with his right hand and held it up so that his big gold ring with the red-ruby stone faced out at me. ‘What do you think this is?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
He pushed the fist closer to me then. ‘It’s the Scottish Rite,’ he said. ‘I’m a Thirty-third Degree Mason.’ His fist was wide and thick and packed-looking. It looked like a fist that had not ever hit anything, because everything would get out of its way if it could. ‘You can touch it,’ he said.
I put my finger on the ring, onto the smoothed red stone and then on the diamond that was embedded in it. On the gold were tiny carvings I couldn’t make out.
‘It’s the all-seeing eye,’ Warren Miller said, and kept his fist out as if he had detached it from his body. ‘Is your father a Mason?’
‘No,’ I said, though I didn’t know if he was or not. I didn’t know what Warren Miller was talking about, but I thought it was because he was drunk.
‘You aren’t Catholic, are you?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t go to a church.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, peering at me from behind his glasses. ‘You should be in touch with a group of boys your own age. Would you like to do that? I’d be happy to arrange it.’
‘That would be fine.’ I heard a door open and close, heard more water running in the pipes.
‘Boys need a start into life,’ Warren Miller said. ‘It’s not always easy. Luck plays a part in it.’
‘Do you have any children,’ I asked.
He looked at me strangely. He must’ve believed I was thinking about what he’d been saying, but I wasn’t.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I never did. I don’t much like them.’
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘I never knew any, I guess,’ he said.
‘Where is your wife now,’ I asked. But he didn’t answer me because my mother opened the bedroom door, and he looked up at her and smiled as if she was the most important person in the world.
‘The pretty lady’s back,’ Warren Miller said. And he got up and went limping across the room away from me and toward the hi-fi set sitting on top of a big chest of drawers against the wall. I had not even noticed it, but it stood out from everything else once you saw it. ‘I forgot all about the music,’ he said. He opened one of the drawers and took out a record, still in its sleeve-case. ‘We’ll play something good,’ he said.
‘You keep everything very neat in here,�
� my mother said. ‘You don’t need another wife. You’re enough of one yourself.’ She put both her palms to her face then and patted her cheeks as if she had washed her face in the bathroom and it was still damp. I had seen her do that before. She was looking around as if the room looked different to her now. Her voice sounded different. It sounded deeper, as if she was catching a cold or had just waked up. ‘It’s such a pretty little house, too,’ my mother said. She looked at me and smiled and hugged her arms.
‘I’ll die in it one of these days,’ Warren Miller said as he was bent over reading the record label.
‘That’s a happy thought,’ my mother said, and shook her head. ‘Maybe we should dance before that happens. If you’re already thinking that way.’
Warren Miller looked at my mother, and his glasses caught the reflection of the ceiling light. ‘We’ll dance,’ he said.
‘Is Warren going to get you into Dartmouth or whatever it is?’ my mother said to me. She was standing in the middle of the room, her lips pushed out some as if she was trying to decide something.
‘We haven’t discussed that subject,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I was getting him interested in the DeMolay.’
‘Oh, that,’ my mother said. ‘That’s just a lot of hooey, Joe. My father was in that. Warren needs to get you into Dartmouth. That’s better than Harvard, I’ve heard. Anybody can get in DeMolay. It’s like the Elks.’
‘It’s better,’ Warren said. ‘Catholics and Jews aren’t in. Not that I care about them.’
‘Are you a Democrat?’ my mother said.
‘When they run anybody good,’ Warren Miller said, ‘which is not the case now.’ He put the record down onto the hi-fi table.
‘My family favors the working man,’ my mother said. She picked up my glass of wine and took a drink of it.
‘Well, you should think that over again,’ Warren said, and then he set the needle arm down onto the record, and there was a lot of music all at once in the little living room.
