Between them, there began to be more audible talk about my “needing” to go to a better school. What was wrong with the one where I already went wasn’t explained. There was also overheard comments about keeping the house on Congress as a rental, pocketing income and accruing equity. There was even talk of my mother’s parents “helping out.” My father’s salary at Faultless had risen only to two seventy-five a month. There was a sensation of mounting—what? Tension? Anticipation? Need?
And then, one day, they suddenly bought a house—or my father did. Just one day, so it seemed to me. I had never seen it before, though it was on a street where we often drove slowly along. Berlin Drive. Number 4262.
The house was new and painted pale green—like the ones in Gentilly—with a water oak in the yard, a carport, three bedrooms, a red front door. It sat on a half-acre lot (it’s still there today). Young neighbors were living next door at 4276—the Barfields, who were congenial. On the other side was an open field. Nearby streets were named after famous cities in Europe. Athens, Brussels, London—all Drives. In due time all would be a neighborhood. A Mr. Charles Galloway was the builder. Exact replicas of our house were on other streets nearby, in different colors. One had its carport on the other side. To me, these duplications were both strange and disappointing. Though if my father noticed them, he didn’t talk about it.
My mother’s parents came forward, as promised. My father lacked a sufficient down—$1,700—ten percent of the seventeen thousand asking price, much less than the cost of a used Ford today. A loan was arranged. He would manage the monthly payments. They would keep the house on Congress. Possibly this money from his in-laws was embarrassing, a diminishment. But no one said so. In short order, an Oldsmobile ’88 was also purchased, new off the showroom floor—with what money I don’t know. It had a pink top with a charcoal gray body—a color combination popular at the time.
I have singled out our new house and our shiny car because together they compose the last celebratable events of my intact family life. It’s possible to believe that my two parents were already out on some long causeway of uncertainty, and that my father was trying to make this final present last. The suburbs gave him a sense of accomplishment, of affiliation, of having achieved both distance from where he’d begun, as well as some blessed distraction from his health troubles—all evidence that he had not failed. In other words, progress. Mississippi—up to now bland and indifferent—had become a place where he was a man of his own created circumstances. He was invisible, but different from how he’d been invisible. It satisfied him almost completely.
ONCE WE WERE THERE and settled on Berlin Drive, and I had started in the new school (where I not surprisingly hated it), and he had begun going to work again—gone Monday, home Friday—family life became surprisingly less manifest. The suburbs must facilitate this. I know my father was happy. His good humor surged. He told jokes again and did some singing—though he did not become more relaxed. Photos again bear this out. He was liked by our new neighbors—they both were—although it was understood he would not be home much, and I to a degree would become a de facto charge of the neighborhood.
To me, he grew more marginal, even less a presence, more a shadow than a weight. This might’ve been the expected “later” time when he would teach me things, when we would grow close. But that did not happen, though again I can’t say I felt deprived.
Parker, Jackson, Mississippi, 1956
He had a concrete patio laid in, bought a new hammock, and an air conditioner for his company car. He became interested in planting pine trees behind the house—though he planted too many, too close together, and they didn’t thrive. He set out tomato plants. He planted St. Augustine and azaleas and a magnolia tree—the state tree. Though once this new life was underway, he became broodingly concerned about his mother, in Atkins. She was in her eighties and declining. He feared she would soon die. So he drove the long distance back and forth to see her when he could. He attended more baseball games I played in, he drove his new car on the weekends, and once when I fell into trouble with the police for stealing car parts, he exhibited an unexpected patience and grace toward me, which my mother did not exhibit.
Did he now think about different things he could do apart from traveling and being away from us? He was not even fifty-five. Did the two of them, newly situated, consider new plans? Did they talk about all that time when it had just been the two of them along, and how far they’d come? I don’t know. So much of the way I saw our life presumed continuity and the certainty of my own endurance. Knowing my parents’ qualms, fears, their new longings in any way similar to the way I knew my own would be only approximate, given that they said almost nothing about such things. Conceivably it was a rich time for them together. Although it’s likeliest that their thoughts about their future were merely that it would happen.
Which is what it did.
In retrospect, the advent of death can cast a too dramatic light on the events leading toward it.
As I said, he had not been sick, that I knew of. There had been no crisis of some other kind. My trouble with the police might’ve worried him. But since he’d been sympathetic about this, I’d begun to think he and I might inch closer now. My sixteenth birthday was soon to come, February 16th, 1960. He’d bought me a basic Gibson guitar, which I badly wanted, and had paid for some lessons. He and my mother were cheerful. He’d gone to the Senior Bowl football game in Alabama not long before—had gone by himself because he felt like it—and been pleased to be able. It was as if some new breadth in life had opened for him.
On a Friday night he came home as usual. It always seemed like he came from Louisiana. There was the usual elation in our new house. Bright lights. Some drinking in the kitchen, laughing, his jokes, rehearsing the week that’d ended. My mother made beef stroganoff—a new dish. Nothing was out of the ordinary. I watched Rawhide on TV. They went into her bedroom and closed the door. At some point later he went to bed, and then I watched television until midnight. And then I went to sleep.
At six I was awakened by my mother saying my father’s name. “Carrol.” Which is what she called him. “Wake up. Carrol. Wake up. What’s the matter? Wake up.” Then more loudly. “Wake up!”
I got out of bed in my pajamas, went into the hall and to the door of the next room, which was his. My mother was leaning forward beside his bed, over him. My father was gasping for air in his bed. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving except for the gasps. He looked—his skin did—gray. “Wake up!” my mother said insistently but different from that. “Carrol, wake up.” She held his shoulders, put her face close to his and shook him. But he did not move. “Richard, what’s wrong with him?” she said. She looked around at me. She was about to cry and was becoming panicked. She was on the verge of something bad. It was February 20th, 1960—four days after my birthday.
I don’t know if I said “I don’t know” to her question. But I came forward, got up onto the bed where he was, and took both my father’s shoulders in my hands and shook him. Very hard. Not as hard as I could, but hard. I said his name—Daddy—several times. He took a deep breath in and let it out strenuously—in a way that made his lips flutter, as if he was trying to breathe (though I think he was dead). With my two hands, I turned his face upward, used my thumbs to pry his loose, fleshy mouth and teeth open, and I put my own mouth over his and breathed down into him, into his mouth and throat and (I imagined) into his chest. I didn’t know how to do this, or if it made sense. I’d only heard about people doing it. But I did it several times, possibly ten. And the result of my efforts to breathe for him, or to bring my breath to him and wake him up and be alive, was nothing. He did not breathe again or utter another sound.
After some time on my knees, on his bed with him—when I must’ve begun to conceive the thought that he was dead—I got down and turned to my mother, who had by then backed into the open doorway and put her fists to her temples, watching all that was going on in front of her. I don’t know that
I said anything to her. I may have stifled some sound deep in myself. But my mother said, “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Which is when I went past her—as she was saying this—and down the hallway to call the doctor. His house was not far from ours. Such things—the doctor coming—were more usual then than they are today.
THE REST IS TELL-ABLE BUT, TO ME, of less importance. My father, who died on that day, is buried in Atkins, Arkansas—not beside his wife but beside his mother and father. When my father was lying in the funeral home in Jackson and had been “viewed” for a day, his brother, Pat, came down from Little Rock, asked no one’s permission, and quietly ordered my father’s body to be transported on a freight car to Atkins for burial in a family plot too small for my mother to share. My mother, who was unhinged, heard about this only in the hours after the train had departed. It was too much for her, and too late to try to change anything—or so she felt. I was too young to be of use. My father’s mother, Minnie, was still alive—eighty-three, born in County Cavan. This was how they did things. His mother would own him at the last.
Grievous wrong lives on in this act. And nothing’s to be done. In the end, he was gone from my mother one last time. Right or wrong, in her way of thinking eternity would not be theirs together. It is not the saddest thing I know. But it is one of them. Out of respect for them, and out of love, I do not visit their two graves, since it was together that they knew life most brightly, and together I prefer to think of them.
But hardly an hour goes by on any day that I do not think something about my father. Much of these things I’ve written here. Some men have their fathers all their lives, grow up and become men within their fathers’ orbit and sight. My father did not experience this. And I can imagine such a life, but only imagine it. The novelist Michael Ondaatje wrote about his father that “. . . my loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult.” Mine is the same—and also different—inasmuch as had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become. And while not to have written anything would be a bearable loss—we must all make the most of the lives we find—there would, however, not now be this slender record of my father, of his otherwise invisible joys and travails and of his virtue—qualities that merit notice in us all. For his son, not to have left this record would be a sad loss indeed.
My Mother, In Memory
Edna Akin, 1928
My mother’s name was Edna Akin, and she was born in 1910, in the far northwest corner of Arkansas—Benton County—in a place the location of which I’m not sure of and never have been. Near Decatur or Centerton. A town that may no longer exist. Or not a town at all—just a rural place. That is near the Oklahoma border there, and in 1910 it was a rough country with a frontier feel. Only ten years before, robbers and outlaws had been loose on the landscape. Bat Masterson was still alive then and not long gone from Galena.
I remark on this not because of its susceptibility to romance, or because I think it makes my mother’s life unique, but because it seems like such a long time ago now, and such a far-off and unknowable place; and because it is my mother, whom I knew very well, who links me to that foreignness, that other thing I don’t know much about and never did. This is one quality of our lives with our parents that is often overlooked, and so devalued. Our parents intimately link us, closeted as we are in our lives, to a thing we’re not, forging a joined separateness and a useful mystery, so that even together with them we are also alone.
The act of considering my mother’s life is an act of love. And my incomplete memory of her life should not be thought of as incomplete love. I loved my mother the way a happy child does, thoughtlessly and without doubts. And when I became an adult, and we were adults who knew one another, we regarded each other highly. We could always say “I love you” to clarify our complicated dealings without pausing. That seems perfect to me now and did then.
I have already said that my mother and my father were not a pair for whom history had much to offer. This might’ve had to do with not being rich or with their both being country people and insufficiently educated, or with not being particularly aware of many things. For my mother, history was just small business, forgettable residues—some of them mean. Nothing in her past was heroic or edifying. The Depression—hard times all around—had something to do with that. In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father’s salesman’s job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn’t look.
About my mother’s early life I don’t know much—for instance, where her father came from. Akin suggests the possibility of Irish Protestants. He was a carter, and my mother spoke of him lovingly, though not at length. “Oh,” she would say, “my daddy was a good man.” And that was that. He died of cancer in the 1930s—but not before my mother had been relegated to him by her mother—almost a waif. This was before she was twelve. My sense is that they resided, daughter and father, back in the deep Ozark country, near where she was born, and that for her it had been a good time while it lasted. I don’t know, however, how long that was, or what she was enthusiastic about when she was a young girl, or what her thoughts and hopes were. She never told me.
Of her mother there is more to say—a story. She was from that same north Arkansas backwoods and had sisters and brothers. There was rumored to be Osage blood—oil-well Indians who’d lost it all. But I know almost nothing about my grandmother’s parents, although I have a photograph of my great-grandmother and my grandmother together, along with my grandmother’s new, second husband, all of them seated in a rustic farm wagon. My mother is in this picture, but in the back. It is a photo posed in a studio, possibly in Fort Smith in the mid-twenties. It is meant to be comic. My great-grandmother is old, grim, witchy-looking; my grandmother, stern and pretty in a long beaver coat; my mother young, with piercing dark eyes aimed straight at the camera. Nothing is particularly comic.
Essie, Bennie, Granny, and Edna, Fort Smith, Arkansas, 1928
AT SOME POINT SHE—MY GRANDMOTHER—had left her first husband, my mother’s father, and taken up with the younger man in the picture, Bennie Shelley—a boxer and a roustabout. This may also have been in Fort Smith. He is a pretty, blond boy. Slim and quick and tricky. “Kid Richard” was his ring name. I am his namesake, though we are not otherwise related. My grandmother was older than Kid Richard. But to quickly marry him, she lied about her age, took a smooth eight years off, and almost immediately began to dislike having her pretty daughter—my mother—around.
And so for a period—everything in my mother’s life seemed to happen for a period, never for long—she was sent off to live at the St. Anne’s Academy. Again, in Fort Smith. This must’ve seemed like a good idea to her father, up in the mountains—but now no longer her guardian—because he paid her tuition to be taught by the nuns. I don’t know what her mother—whose name was Essie or Lessie or just Les—did during the time my mother was in school. It was only three years—to grade nine. Possibly she tried to secure a firmer grip on Bennie Shelley, who was from Fayetteville and had family there. He’d worked as a waiter when he wasn’t boxing, and soon went into the dining-car service on the Rock Island, which meant living in El Reno and as far out the line as Tucumcari. Unquestionably she sought to rule him and tried, with middling success, to do so all her life. She must’ve sensed she could go a long way with him and that he was her best and possibly last chance for something. A ticket out of the sticks.
My mother remarked often how much she’d liked the sisters at St. Anne’s. They were severe. Knowledgeable. Imperious. Dedicated. But humorous, too. It was there, as a boarding student, that she gained what education she ever did. She was an average student but was liked, although she smoked cigarettes and was pretty and talked back, and was often punished. If she had never told me about the nuns, if their influence on her life hadn’t been made cl
ear to me, I might never have understood a great deal about my mother. St. Anne’s cast both a light and a shadow into her later life. In her heart of hearts—as her Irish mother-in-law darkly suspected—my mother was a secret Catholic. Which meant (to her) that she was a forgiver. A respecter of rituals and protocols. Reverent about the trappings of faith and about inner disciplines, although she was uncertain about God. All I’ve ever thought about Catholics—good and not good—I first thought because of my mother, who was never one, but who lived among them at an impressionable age and liked what she learned and liked who taught her.
But for reasons I know nothing about, her mother—now demanding (shockingly) that her daughter be known as her sister—took her out of St. Anne’s, mid-year. Which was it for school, even though my mother was not a welcome addition to her mother’s life. I have never understood why her mother took her back. Money, conceivably. Just one of those unexplained acts that changes everything.
With her parents, now, there was moving. From north Arkansas to Kansas City. To El Reno again. To Davenport and Des Moines—wherever the Rock Island took Bennie, who was going forward in the dining-car service and turning himself into a go-getter. Soon, he would climb down off the railroad and take a job as a caterer at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, where he put my mother to work as cashier in the cigar stand, and where, for her, a view of a wider world opened a tiny inch. People from far away came to Hot Springs to take the bathing cures. Jews from Chicago and New York. Canadians speaking French. Europeans. Rich people—all of whom she sold cigars and newspapers to. Because she was pretty, she met baseball players. Big-league teams trained in the mountains there at that time. The Cardinals. The Cubs. She met Grover Alexander and Gabby Hartnett. And sometime during this period, when she was seventeen and living with her parents and working long hours, she also met my father, who clerked at the Clarence Saunders grocery on Central Avenue, and they fell in love.