Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  “Oops, right, you said ‘routine practices,’ didn’t you. Sorry, that’s different! And anyhow, you’re right. How on earth could poor Bob have guessed that those silly peasants would make such a fuss, when KGS put the land to such better use than they ever had? Beans? I mean, please. Or that KGS would be so sensitive about their lousy, peasant sportsmanship and maybe overreact a bit? You know what? We should console Uncle Bob in his travails, open up our family to receive him in the warmth of our love, let him know that we feel his pain. Would Uncle Bob ever hurt a fly? He would not! Things just have a way of happening, don’t they! And I think we should invite Uncle Bob over, for one last piece of serious meat, before he gets hauled off to the slammer.”

  John continues simply to look at Oliver, whose eyes gleam with excitement. When I reach over and touch John’s hand, he speaks. “I applaud your compassion, Oliver. But no need to squander it. I very much doubt it’s going to come to that.”

  “Really?” Oliver says. “You do? Oh, I see what you mean. That’s great, Dad. You mean that if it seems like Uncle Bob might start naming names, he’ll be able to retire in style, huh.”

  “Ooookay,” John says. “All right,” and a white space cleaves through my brain as if I’d actually slapped Oliver, but in fact Oliver is turning to me with concern, and he touches my face. “What’s the matter, Mom? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, darling,” I say. He reaches for my hand and holds it.

  “You went all pale,” he says.

  “I applaud your interest in world affairs,” John says. “But as the situation is far from simple, and as neither you nor I were there at the time, perhaps we should question, just this once—this once!—whether we actually have the right to sit in judgment. This will blow over in no time, Oliver, I’m happy to be able to promise you, and no one will be the worse for it. And should the moment arrive in which reason reasserts its check on your emotions, you will see that this spectacle is nothing more than a witch hunt.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Oliver says. “I mean, it’s bad. Or it’s good, it’s bad, it’s—”

  “Do you think we might cross off and move on?” John says.

  “Sure thing, Dad,” Oliver says, dropping my hand.

  John and Oliver appear to ripple briefly, and then a cottony silence drops over us. Even if I tried, I doubt I would be able to remember what we’d just been saying.

  Oliver prongs some salad, and John and I watch as he lifts it slowly toward his mouth. It actually touches his lips, when he puts it down abruptly, as if he’s just remembered something important. “So!” He beams at us. “What did you gentle people do today?”

  John pauses, then gathers himself. “The office, naturally. Then I caught a bit of the hearings, as I have to surmise that you and Kate did.”

  “We did, Dad, that’s very astute.” Oliver nods seriously again, then turns to me with that high-watt smile. “Your turn, Mom.”

  “I went into town,” I say. I stand up suddenly and walk over to the fridge, balancing myself on my fingertips against the reflective steel surface, in which I appear as a smudge. “I had an urge to go to the museum.” I open the fridge as if I were looking for something, let the cool settle against me for a moment, close the door, and return to the table.

  “You look so pretty, Mom!” Oliver says childishly. “Isn’t Mom pretty, Dad?”

  “Your mother was the prettiest girl at all the schools around,” John says wearily. For a moment, we all just sit there again, as if someone had turned off the current, disengaging us.

  “And what about you, Oliver?” John asks. “What news?”

  “None,” Oliver says, spearing some salad again.

  “None?” John says. “Nothing at all happened today.”

  Oliver rests the fork on his plate and squints into the distance. “Gosh, Dad.” He turns to John, wide-eyed. “I think that’s right—nothing at all! Oh, unless you count my killing spree in Katie’s physics class.”

  “Seriously not funny,” John says.

  “Whoops, sorry,” Oliver says, standing up and stretching. “Anyhow, don’t worry, Dad—I cleaned your gun and put it nicely back in the attic.”

  “Enough,” John says.

  “You bet, Dad.” Oliver bends down to kiss first John and then me. “I’m going upstairs now, to download some pornography. See you fine folks later.”

  The moon is a cold, sizzling white tonight, caustically bright. Out the window everything looks like an X-ray; the soft world of the day is nowhere to be seen.

  “When did you last talk to him about seeing Molnar?” John is sitting at the desk again. I glance at him then turn back to the window.

  “He won’t,” I say.

  “What are you looking at?” John says.

  I close the blinds. “He won’t see Dr. Molnar. He won’t agree to see anyone. He doesn’t want to take anything. He seems to be afraid it will do something to his mind.” I sit down on the bed. Then I get up and sit down at the dressing table.

  “Do something to his mind?” John says. “Isn’t that desirable? I treat him with kid gloves. I’m concerned. But this is getting out of hand, don’t you think? The raving, the grandiosity, the needling—wallow, wallow, atone, atone, avenge, avenge. And this morbid obsession with the hearings! Thank you, I do not understand what this is all about—what are we all supposed to be so tainted with? We may none of us be perfect, but one tries; one does, in my humble opinion, one’s best. And explain to me, please, what the kid is doing here—what’s his excuse? He should be at school.”

  “Darling, it’s normal for a college student to want to come home from time to time.”

  “He’s hardly ‘home’ in any case. For the last three days he’s been with Kate every second she’s not at school or asleep. I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually did go to her physics class today. Why the Ericksons put up with it, I can’t imagine. Have you seen that girl lately? She looks positively, what . . . furtive. Furtive and drained, as though she were . . . feeding some beast on the sly. What does he do to them? These wounded birds of his! It’s as if he’s running a hospital, providing charity transfusions to ailing vampires. That Schaeffer girl last year—my god! And before her that awful creature who liked to take razor blades to herself.”

  “Darling,” I say. “Darling? This is a hard world for young people.”

  “If any human being leads an easy life, it’s that boy. Attention, education, privilege—what does he lack? He lacks nothing. The whole planet was designed for his well-being.”

  “Well, it’s stressful to be away at school. To be studying all the time and encountering so many new ideas. And all young people like to dramatize themselves.”

  “I didn’t,” John says. “And you didn’t.”

  That’s true, I realize. John took pains, in fact, to behave unexceptionably; and I was so shy I would hardly have wanted to call attention to myself with so much as a hair ribbon. I certainly didn’t want drama! I wanted a life very much like the one I’d grown up with, a life like my parents’—a cozy old house on a sloping lawn, magnolias and lilacs, the sun like a benign monarch, the fragrance of a mown lawn, the pear tree a gentle torch against the blue fall sky, sleds and the children’s bicycles out front, no more than that, a music box life, the chiming days.

  “Young people go through things. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to become alarmed. He hasn’t lost his sense of humor, after all, and—”

  “His—excuse me?”

  “—and his grades certainly don’t reflect a problem. I know you’re thinking of what’s best for him. I know you’ve benefited, but he’s very afraid of medication. I don’t think he should be forced to—”

  “No one’s forcing anyone to do anything here,” John says. “Jesus.”

  “John, we don’t really have a gun in the house, do we?”

  “Oh for god’s sake,” John says. “We don’t even really have an attic.”

  “Just try to be patient with
him,” I say. “He loves you, darling—he respects you.”

  “I rue the day I ever agreed to work outside of the country,” John says.

  “Oh, John, don’t say that, darling! Even when it was difficult, it was a fascinating life for us all. And Oliver was very happy.”

  “I curse the day,” John says.

  Strange . . . Yes, strange to think that we used to move around so much. And then we came back and settled down here, in a government town, where everyone else is always moving. Every four years, every eight years, a new population. And yet, everyone who arrives always looks just the same as the ones who left—as if it were all a giant square dance.

  “What?” John says.

  “How did Bob look?” I ask.

  “Bob?” he says. “Older.”

  Driving back along the highway this afternoon, flowing along in the reflections on the windshield, the shadows of the branches—it was like being underwater. Morning, evening, from one shore to the oilier, the passage between them is your body.

  I stroke Oliver’s hair, but his jaw is clamped tightly shut and he’s staring up at the ceiling, his eyes glazed with tears.

  When he was little, he and I used to be on his bed like this and often I’d read to him, or tell him stories, and he liked to pretend that he and I were characters from the stories—an enchanted prince and a fairy, the fairy who put the spell on him or the one who removes it, or Hansel and Gretel, and we would hide under the covers from whatever wicked witch. His imagination was so vivid that sometimes I even became frightened myself.

  Yesterday I was sorting through some papers upstairs at my desk, when I noticed him and Kate outside on the lawn. He was holding the lapels of her jacket and they were clearly talking, as they always seem to be, with tremendous seriousness, as if they were explorers calculating how to survive on their last provisions. I could see Kate’s round, rather sweet face—at least it’s sweet when its not flickering with doubts, worries, fears—and then Oliver held her to him, and all I could see of her was her shiny, taffy-colored hair, pinned loosely up.

  It’s an affecting romance. It’s not likely to last long, though—none of Oliver’s romances do, however intense they seem to be. Oliver is way too young. In any case, I can’t help imagining a warm young woman as a daughter-in-law, someone who would be glad for my company, rather than someone beset, as Kate always seems to be, by suspicion and resentment.

  They came inside, and I could hear Oliver talking. The house was so silent I didn’t have to make any effort to hear the story he was telling, a story I’d certainly never told him myself, which he must have heard from the help someplace we’d lived or stayed during our time away, a strange, winding folk tale, it seemed to be, about a man who had been granted the power to understand the language of the animals.

  Oliver spoke slowly, in a searching way, as if vivid but puzzling events were being disclosed to him one by one. Kate said not a word, and I was sure that the two of them were touching in some way, lying on the sofa feet to feet, or holding hands, or clasped together, looking over one another’s shoulders into the glimmering mist that fans out from a story. And in the long silences I could feel her uneasiness as she waited for him to find the way to proceed. It was as if they were sleeping, making something together in their sleep—an act of memory. But I was a stranger to it, following on my own as morning after morning the poor farmer discovers the broken pots, the palm wine gone—as finally one night he waits in the dark, watching, then chases the thieving deer through the fields and hills all the way to the council of the animals—as the Leopard King, in reparations, grants him the spectacular power on condition that he never reveal it—as the farmer and his wife prosper from this power, year after year.

  The story spiraled in until the farmer, now wealthy, is forced to face an enraged accuser: “I was not laughing at you,” he says in desperation. “I laughed because I heard a little mouse say, I’m so hungry—I’m going into the kitchen to steal a bit of the master’s grain.”

  Oliver paused to let the story waver on its fulcrum and the shame of eavesdropping broke over me in a wave, but before I could get up and shut the door of the room or make some other alerting noise, Kate spoke. Her voice was blurred and sorrowful. “What happened then?” she said, but it was clearly less a question than a ritual acknowledgment of the impending.

  “Then?” Oliver said. “So—” He seemed to awaken, and shed the memory. “—then, as all the people of the village watched, the man’s lifeless body fell to the ground.”

  All that time we were away, during his childhood—which seems as remote to me now as the places where we were—and John was working so hard, Oliver was my companion, my darling, my heart. And I was shocked, I suppose, to be reminded yesterday that his childhood could not have been more different from mine, that he and I—who hardly even have to speak, often, to understand one another completely—are divided by that reality, by the differences between our earliest, most fundamental sense of the world we live in. I had never stopped to think, before, that he had heard stories from beyond the boundaries of my world. And I was really shocked, actually, that it was one of those stories, a story I never could have told him, that he had chosen to recount to Kate.

  My gaze wanders around his pristine room, as orderly as a tribute. When he’s away, no one would think of disturbing anything he has here, of course, any of his possessions. But I do sometimes come in and sit on his bed.

  He’s still focused at the ceiling as though he were urgently counting. “Shall I leave you alone, darling?” I say. “Would you like me to leave you alone?” But he reaches for my hand.

  “Oliver?” I say. “Darling?”

  He blinks. His startling, long, thick eyelashes sweep down and up; his eyes glisten. “Darling, Katie is a dear girl, but sometimes I worry that she’s too dependent on you. You can’t be responsible for her, you know.”

  He draws a breath and licks his dry lips. “I can’t be responsible for anything, Ma, haven’t you noticed?”

  “That’s not true, darling. You’re a very responsible person. But I just want to be sure that you and Katie are using protection.”

  He laughs, without lifting his head or closing his eyes, and I can tell how shallowly he’s breathing. “Protection against what, Ma? Protection against Evildoers?”

  “I don’t want to pry, darling. I just want to set myself at ease on that score.”

  “Be at ease, Ma. Be very at ease. You can put down your knitting, because whatever you’re fantasizing just isn’t the case.”

  Well, I don’t know. I remember, when we returned to the States, how it seemed to me, the onslaught of graphic images that are used to sell things—everywhere the perfect, shining, powerful young bodies, nearly naked, the flashing teeth, the empty, perfect, predatory faces, the threat of sexual ridicule, the spectre of sexual inadequacy if you fail to buy the critical brand of plastic wrap or insurance or macaroni and cheese. Either the images really had proliferated and coarsened during our absence or else I had temporarily lost something that had once kept the assault from affecting me.

  I became accustomed to it again soon enough, though, and I don’t know that I would have remembered the feeling now, that feeling of being battered and soiled, unless I’d just been reminded of Oliver’s expression when, for example, we would turn on the television and that harsh, carnal laughter would erupt.

  Maybe Oliver’s fastidiousness, his severity, is typical of his generation. These things come in waves, and I know that many of Oliver’s friends have seen older brothers and sisters badly damaged by all sorts of excesses. And it is a fact that Oliver spent his early childhood in places where there was a certain amount of hostility toward us—not us personally, of course, but toward our culture, I suppose, as it was perceived, and it wouldn’t be all that remarkable, I suppose, if his view of his native country had been tarnished before he ever really came to live in it.

  There were a lot of changes occurring in all the places where
John had to go, and foreigners, like ourselves, from developed countries, were seen to represent those changes. Fortunately, most of the people we encountered personally received us, and the changes that accompanied us, with great enthusiasm.

  In time, it came to feel to me as though we were standing in a shrinking pool of light, with shapes moving at the edges, but, especially at first, I was delighted by the kindness, the hospitality of the local officials, by parties at the embassies. Everyone was always kind to Oliver, in any case—more than kind.

  And there were always children around for Oliver to play with, the children of other people who had come to help, the engineers and agronomists and contractors of various sorts and people who were conducting studies or surveys, and children of the government officials to whose parties we went and so on, who invariably spoke English. And sometimes there would he a maid on the premises, or a gardener, who had children. But when we would drive by local markets or compounds, or even fenced-off areas, Oliver would cry—he would scream—to play with the children he saw outside the car window.

  John would explain, quietly and tirelessly, about languages, about customs, about illnesses. We brought Oliver up to share—naturally—but how does a child share with another child who has nothing at all? I always thought, and I still think, that John was absolutely right to be cautious, but the fact is, when Oliver was a bit older and John was away for some days, I would sometimes relent and let Oliver play with some of the children whom, for whatever reason, he found so alluring.

  Oliver had spent so little time on the planet, so all those places we went were really his life—his entire life until we came back—and maybe I didn’t take adequate account of that. Sometimes now, when I hear one of those names—Nigeria, or Burma, or Ecuador—any of the names of places where we spent time—it is as lustrous to me as it was before I had ever traveled. But usually what those names bring to my mind now are only the houses where we stayed, all the houses, arranged for us by the various companies John was attached to, similarly well equipped and comfortable, where I spent so much time waiting for John and working out how to bring up a child in an unfamiliar place.