by Richard Ford
And there is your mother and her loss to fill—at least to step into—while you manage those very sensations. Fear. And others. Opportunity. And always there is the fact of your father, whom you love or loved, and whose life has quickly become only about its end—much of the rest quickly fading. So. You are alone in a way that is so many-sided there is not a word for it. Attempts to find the word leave you confused—since that confusion is not altogether unwanted or unliked.
Try to find the word.
IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO TALK MUCH ABOUT MY PARENTS. MY FATHER was a country boy from near Galena, Kansas. Large and handsome and good-natured. My mother was a skeptical, ambitious town girl from Kankakee. They’d met in the club car of a Rock Island passenger train between St. Louis and Kansas City, where my father was headed to take a job. It was 1943. Neither of them could’ve said if they had a care in the world, or anything they weren’t willing to lose. That they were far from perfect for each other and would never have married if my mother hadn’t gotten pregnant—I don’t blame them for that. But if he had merely lived longer, she could’ve divorced him. I could’ve gone to military school—which was my wish. Things would’ve turned out other than they did. No matter how patented life’s course seems when you are leading it day to day, everything could always have been much different.
ACROSS THE STREET FROM OUR HOUSE IN JACKSON—WE HAD NOT yet moved into the duplex which lack of money would soon make necessary—an older residence had been converted into a rooming house, in front of which was a wooden sign with a phone number. DIAL 33377. Nothing more. My mother—in her strange, incomplete grief—disapproved of this house, disapproved of even the sign. “The DIAL house,” she called it with a kind of disgust. People who lived there were transients, she said. “Transient” was a designation that meant undesirable to her. It meant weakness, a failing that could corrupt you. And corruption was the force in nature she now feared. My father had protected her from that—even feeling about him as she did. But being alone now in this small southern capital—a place where he’d brought us and where we knew no one yet couldn’t for the moment find a way to leave—subjected us, she felt, to every sort of pitfall and danger that could ruin us and make our chances at restoring life vanish before they could be grasped.
As I said, after my father died, the students in my school had begun to subject me to strange ambivalence, which on some days made me feel that his dying had transformed me into a “special person,” deserving sympathy and respect and even affection-like admiration. As if loss was an improvement granted to few but desired by all. Yet at the same time, these same people—boys and girls alike—seemed to look on me with the profoundest reluctance, as they would on a person from an alien race whom they were working out a reason not to like. I, of course, did not understand this. But the effect was that I became submissive to all of it, believing in it when it was fortifying and believing in it when it left me feeling abandoned, without a thought for my future except a bad one.
In the DIAL house there was always activity. I took an interest because whether I was being revered or disliked in school, my presence as a stranger guaranteed me no friends once my school day ended and time would be on my hands. It was also true, then, that my mother came to believe she needed to take a job. My father’s position had provided only for his burial—money that was now used up. My mother’s job, which she did not keep long—only until she met her first boyfriend—was as night cashier at a local hotel. Which meant she left for work when I was getting home, and came back after I was asleep, or should’ve been.
It was an older neighborhood there—large, once-stately homes inhabited by elderly widows of long residence who rarely ventured out, and who offered nothing to a sixteen-year-old. The DIAL house, which had once been one of these grand houses, was a blight to the eyes of these elderly people, since unexplained behaviors were often going on there, sometimes noisily late into the night, which was not the sort of life people were accustomed to on Grand View Avenue. I, however, understood that though my mother and I didn’t use the word about ourselves, her and my existence bore a resemblance to the life in the DIAL house, much more than to life in the shuttered, shrubberied mansions along Grand View. We were transients. We were sheltered and stubborn in our view of life. But had we been able to stand outside of our circumstances we’d have known who we were and had become. Such changes are not easy to evaluate when they’re occurring.
All sorts of people came in and out of the DIAL house. There were several rooms—at least twelve. It was three-storied and in need of paint, with many windows. It had been owned once by a well-known judge, who’d had children and grandchildren—one of whom, it was said, still occupied the top floor and suffered shell shock from the war, which wasn’t long over. I would sometimes gaze up at what I fantasized was his window, and believe I saw him looking out, obscured by a thin curtain. I never saw him outside, though I would not have recognized him if he walked up to me and said my name.
Secretaries lived in the DIAL house. Waitresses. Married couples, young and old. Commercial travelers passing through town. Musicians who played the local honky-tonks, and whose loud cars would be parked in front but then disappear in the early hours. My mother, as I said, believed unsavory things went on there and required me to stay away. Two men lived together there, I knew—younger men who were window dressers downtown. They would sometimes come and go holding hands.
There was also an entire family living in the DIAL house. The father drove a cab he owned and parked in front. They were Irish—something I knew because my mother spoke to the wife on occasions and had learned about them. She felt these people—the MacDermotts—were exceptions to her severe views about the other residents. She respected the MacDermotts because they were Catholics, which she’d been raised up to be in Illinois, and because they were a family holding together far from where they belonged. She saw them as brave.
These Irish, the MacDermotts, had a son and a daughter, and possibly because they had not been in town long, these two did not go to school. The boy, Niall, was a year older than I was. The girl, Kitty, was younger and stayed indoors most of the time. But Niall was outgoing and friendly and sometimes would drive the cab when his father was sick—which was often. My mother was very clear that I was not to have anything to do with anyone in the DIAL house. The buxom, winking secretaries, the cheap musicians, and the two queer boys—I should be wary of all of them, as if they carried an illness.
But she made an exception when it came to Niall MacDermott, who was tall, sandy-haired, blue-eyed and polite, and spoke in his happy musical way she liked hearing. It seemed to bring her out of her worries and woes. Some quality of being Irish, she believed, allowed the world not to bother him too much. It allowed a widow, such as she was, to accede to a brighter view.
Sometimes Niall MacDermott would come across the street and perch on our porch steps and tell me about how life was in Ireland. He had gone to Catholic school in a town called Strathfoyle. His family had left there, he said, and come here for better chances. He didn’t think, however, that for his father to be driving a cab instead of working on the docks was much of an improvement. Plus, living where they were, in a rooming house, crammed into small bad-smelling spaces when they’d once had a whole house paid for where they’d come from—it made no sense to him.
I, of course, had nothing to tell Niall that was as interesting as the things he had already done in almost the same amount of life. I knew only the one other place we’d lived—near where my father was born, in Kansas. And I knew that my parents had never gotten along too well, and that I wanted to go to military school but now couldn’t. And I knew that my father had died—not long before the MacDermotts moved to the DIAL house. Niall asked me what it was like to have my father be dead—in particular, whether I’d had to see him dead—which was how such things happened in Ireland. He’d had to see his grandfather in his coffin, ghastly-looking and wearing a light gray suit. He would never forget it, he told
me. He asked me if my mother was thinking of finding a boyfriend, which he said would not happen in Ireland. Widows stayed widows there, or left town—which was unfair. He asked if I’d talked to the “two fellas,” the window dressers. They were nice, he said. Nothing was wrong with them. He asked if I thought his sister Kitty was pretty (I didn’t) and said that they were “Irish twins”—nine months apart, to the hour.
To all these questions—seated where we were on the brick porch steps—I gave, I know, unsatisfactory answers. I had seen my father in his coffin, but it hadn’t shocked me. I wanted my mother to have a boyfriend, so she would not pay so much attention to me. I much preferred to hear about the life in Strathfoyle, which was mysterious and inviting, a place where, when I went out to my own life, I would go, even though Niall assured me I would likely not be welcome. People wouldn’t be nice to me, he said. There were too many unfriendly English running things. Though if Strathfoyle was a part of Ireland, I could not see what English people, who lived in a whole other country, had to do with anything.
What I did understand, though, was that I didn’t know much and possibly never would; while Niall MacDermott knew a world of things that mattered to him and would play a part in his future, rather than what he knew being just an accident of who he was and where he was born.
AS MY SCHOOL YEAR WENT ON NIALL’S FATHER—WHOSE NAME WAS Gerry—was more and more “under the weather,” which was how Niall put it. My mother, in the meantime, seemed to grow less agreeable about the MacDermotts. She said that Mrs. MacDermott—Hazel—had hinted that Gerry had a drink problem; and on another occasion, that he had a “lung condition” from smoking, and that being in Mississippi, where it was damp, made it worse. Arizona would be better.
My mother said that Gerry’s problems were a “burden of the genes,” and I should stay away from him. Though Niall, to my surprise, she maintained a regard for, describing him to me as ambitious and attractive and smart, which I believed to be true. And because my classmates treated me the way they did, having Niall willing to act toward me as his “younger friend”—not his equal but nearly—seemed a good opportunity. A chance to model myself on someone with a future.
Harry was what Niall called me. As in “Ain’t that just right, Harry?” “You’re taking the piss now, Harry,” or “Go on with ya, Harry.” I didn’t entirely understand these expressions, but liked it when he said them. My name, in fact, wasn’t Harry, but Henry Harding, after my father, who, my mother said, had been named by his uppity relatives after a famous painter. When I asked Niall why he called me Harry, he just laughed and said, “Oh, it’s just that calling you Henry Harding is a bit of a mash-up, a fat word sandwich.” No one in Ireland would ever use it. Niall, he said, was the commonest name in all of Ireland. It signified passion. And owning it made people enjoy him and everything work out smoother. Being Irish, I believed, carried lessons worth learning. It did not occur to me—or it occurred to me only indistinctly—that I was of course not Irish and would never be.
After a while—though my father’s death and its complexities hung over life inside our house—in my dealings with Niall MacDermott my father did not come up so much. I knew Niall’s willingness to befriend me had begun with nothing more than an act of kindness. Yet I also thought that he liked my mother, who was more than twice his age but looked younger and liked him. More than once I featured a reckless scene of my mother and me and Niall on a train bound for Chicago or New York or someplace far away from Mississippi, where people would know nothing about us and would not see us as the mismatched parts we were.
My father had died in July. But by October, my mother had become accustomed to working at the hotel, and to an extent had stopped considering the world, including the people in the DIAL house, as the sworn enemies of all things dear to her. It may also have been that she’d met Larry Scott by then, who was, of all things, a college professor and was divorced, and whom my mother had met—where I never knew. He did not take much interest in me nor I in him.
School had not gotten better for me, and I disliked it, though my grades were satisfactory. I’d begun to think again about a military school I’d heard of in Florida, considering whether I should run away and simply show up there and plead to be taken in, which I felt would cause my mother to relent and give her permission. How this could work out was not part of my thinking. We had almost no money. My military school fantasy, I already understood, would eventually come apart like paper in water.
Niall MacDermott had now begun to drive his father’s taxi more, and often at night, when his father stayed in. Out our front window I would see the cab sitting at the curb in front of the DIAL house, its yellow roof light lit up and the motor running. “Irish Cab” plus a phone number was stenciled on the door. The figure of Niall would be in the driver’s seat, reading a paperback book in the dim inside luminance. Niall smoked cigarettes—like his father—and occasionally he’d flick a butt or an ash out the side window. The cab was a four-door Mercury of a late-40s model and had a ball-cap visor to block the sunshine when the cab was operated during the day. It was not as nice a car as my mother’s Ford.
On Friday before Halloween, which was to be on Saturday, I came home from school, and Niall was again sitting in the cab in front of his house. If a customer called, the phone rang in the house, and Niall’s mother or his plump sister would come out and down the walk and tell Niall where he was supposed to go, and away he’d drive. Niall had told me his father had made the decision to accept blacks as customers, as long as they were picked up at a house and transported to another house. He would not pick them up from the street, Niall said. This was not how things were done in Mississippi. Blacks had their own cab companies, the way they had their own everything else. Niall told me his father was expecting trouble—from whites and blacks—but was not afraid. Ireland sported its own troubles, he said, and you got no place running from them. There were too many blacks who needed to be taken places to ignore them. He would pick up someone who was English. How bad could it be to pick up a black man.
When I saw Niall in the cab in the afternoon, he waved as if he’d been waiting for me. I hadn’t seen him in several days and believed he’d been working at night. He climbed out and came across in front of our house. And right away I noticed something different about him. He looked sharper. His hair was shorter and neater so you saw more of his handsome, smiling face, which looked scrubbed since he did not shave yet. He was wearing what I came to know as an argyle sweater and a snappy pair of brown corduroy trousers and polished black shoes. I had the feeling that he was leaving—possibly back to Ireland—and was waiting to say good-bye. There was a fragrance about him, like lemons—similar to the tonic you got at the barber, where I went for my haircuts when my father was alive and there’d been a life I fitted into. My mother cut my hair now and didn’t do a respectable job.
“I picked up a whore in the cab last night.” Niall just started off talking, as if we’d been having a conversation already. Which we hadn’t. For some reason he was looking straight at me—intense—in a way he’d never done, as if he was trying to make an impression. He seemed charged up but also to be keeping something back. He said “whore” so as to sound like “hure.” I don’t know how I even knew this word, but I did. I also knew what hures supposedly did, without knowing the particulars. “She wanted me to drive her down to New Orleans. Which of course, I couldn’t. So she told me interesting things about the higher-up gasbags in this town,” Niall said. “Hilarious things.”
“What are they?” I said. Again, Niall seemed changed. He seemed to me to be over twenty, and to want me to be over twenty also. Only I wasn’t. I was just a boy whose mother cut his hair and who missed his father and woke up at night, realizing he’d been talking without knowing who he’d been talking to.
“Oh. I’ll have to tell yez,” Niall said. “You’ll bleed with laughin’ ’n be ragin’ for something new every time. Which I might just can supply. She also says there’s a whole
big part of New Orleans jammed up with Irish. I have a feeling I’ll be seeing her again, if you get what I mean.”
I guessed he meant he would take this woman in his father’s cab again, and maybe she would tell him more hilarious stories about officials in town—whoever they were—and maybe drive to New Orleans.
“I was just after speaking to your mam,” Niall said, still with the effect of keeping something hidden. This had all come out of nowhere. Plus, Niall had been talking to my mother by himself, which meant something. I guessed this was how growing up happened. One fine day you’re not who you’d been. “She says you like the pictures. Is that an actual fact?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.” And I did. On Saturdays, when my father was there, he would take me downtown to the Prestige, where we’d sit through a whole afternoon slate, taking in horse operas (he called them), comedies with the Stooges, a jungle show, cartoons and newsreels from World War Two and Korea. After which we’d walk sore-eyed out into the sun, and I’d feel weak, and also as if I’d somehow done something wrong. I didn’t know what. Which all ceased when my father died. I hadn’t been to a movie since then, and my mother didn’t have time to take me and wouldn’t let me go alone.
“Look, then,” Niall said. I could see his pack of “smokes” under the argyle, in his shirt pocket. “How ’bout we steal the cab tonight and go out to the Holiday. Under sixteen goes in free. You’re well under sixteen, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve been old gloomy pants long enough. Your mam thinks it’ll do ya’ up, and I’m sure it will. I’ll regale you at length about the higher-ups and their perverted shenanigans.”
I was already sixteen—by several months. But I looked young for it, which didn’t make me happy. I knew Niall meant I could lie and sneak in. “It’s a Bob Hope gasser,” Niall said. “We’ll have a ball.” Immediately I wondered if he intended to take the hure with us and what would happen then. I’d never been to the 51-Holiday, which was on the outskirts and was a drive-in. Once, at night, my father had driven us past when a show was playing. “There’s the old passion pit,” he said. “You’ll be snugged in there someday.” On the big screen, a chariot race was in progress—with wild horses and men in gold armor waving swords and shouting—all in complete silence. From the back seat where I could see, these events on the screen seemed to be really happening—not in a movie, but out in the night, as if there was another existence that I could see but not go into. I liked it.
