Vintage Ford (4 page)

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” Mack was not angry. He was, instead, a thing that anger had no part in, or at least had long been absent from, something akin to exhaustion, where the words you say are the only true words you
can
say. Myself, I did not think I'd ever felt that way. Always for me there had been a choice.

“Do you understand me?” Mack Bolger's thick athlete's brow furrowed, as if he was studying a creature he didn't entirely understand, an anomaly of some kind, which perhaps I was.

“Yes,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Well then,” he said, and seemed embarrassed. He looked away, out over the crowd of moving heads and faces, as if he'd sensed someone coming.

I looked toward where he seemed to be looking. But no one was approaching us. Not Beth, not a daughter. Not anyone. Perhaps, I thought, this was all a lie, or possibly even that I'd, for an instant, lost consciousness, and this was not Mack Bolger at all, and I was dreaming everything.

“Do you think there could be someplace else you could go now?” Mack said. His big, tanned, handsome face looked imploring and exhausted. Once Beth had said Mack and I looked alike. But we didn't. That had just been her fantasy. Without really looking at me again he said, “I'll have a hard time introducing you to my daughter. I'm sure you can imagine that.”

“Yes,” I said. I looked around again, and this time I saw a pretty blond girl standing in the crowd, watching us from several steps away. She was holding a red nylon backpack by its straps. Something was causing her to stay away. Possibly her father had signaled her not to come near us. “Of course,” I said. And by speaking I somehow made the girl's face break into a wide smile, a smile I recognized.

“Nothing's happened here,” Mack said unexpectedly to me, though he was staring at his daughter. From the pocket of his overcoat he'd produced a tiny white box wrapped and tied with a red bow.

“I'm sorry?” People were swirling noisily around us. The music seemed louder. I was leaving, but I thought perhaps I'd misunderstood him. “I didn't hear you,” I said. I smiled in an involuntary way.

“Nothing's happened today,” Mack Bolger said. “Don't go away thinking anything happened here. Between you and me, I mean.
Nothing
happened. I'm sorry I ever met you, that's all. Sorry I ever had to touch you. You make me feel ashamed.” He still had the unfortunate dampness with his
s
's.

“Well,” I said. “All right. I can understand that.”

“Can you?” he said. “Well, that's very good.” Then Mack simply stepped away from me, and began saying something to the blond girl standing in the crowd smiling. What he said was, “Wow-wee, boy, oh boy, do
you
look like a million bucks.”

And I walked on toward Billy's then, toward the new arrangement I'd made that would take me into the evening. I had, of course, been wrong about the linkage of moments, and about what was preliminary and what was primary. It was a mistake, one I would not make again. None of it was a good thing to have done. Though it is such a large city here, so much larger than, say, St. Louis, I knew I would not see him again.

CALLING

A year after my father departed, moved to St. Louis, and left my mother and me behind in New Orleans to look after ourselves in whatever manner we could, he called on the telephone one afternoon and asked to speak to me. This was before Christmas, 1961. I was home from military school in Florida. My mother had begun her new singing career, which meant taking voice lessons at a local academy, and also letting a tall black man who was her accompanist move into our house and into her bedroom, while passing himself off to the neighborhood as the yard man. William Dubinion was his name, and together he and my mother drank far too much and filled up the ashtrays and played jazz recordings too loud and made unwelcome noise until late, which had not been how things were done when my father was there. However, it was done
because
he was not there, and because he had gone off to St. Louis with another man, an ophthalmologist named Francis Carter, never to come back. I think it seemed to my mother that in view of these facts it didn't matter what she did or how she lived, and that doing the worst was finally not much different from doing the best.

They're all dead now. My father. My mother. Dr. Carter. The black accompanist, Dubinion. Though occasionally I'll still see a man on St. Charles Avenue, in the business district, a man entering one of the new office buildings they've built—a tall, handsome, long-strided, flaxen-haired, youthful, slightly ironic-looking man in a seersucker suit, bow tie and white shoes, who will remind me of my father, or how he looked, at least, when these events occurred. He must've looked that way, in fact, all of his years, into his sixties. New Orleans produces men like my father, or once did: clubmen, racquets players, deft, balmy-day sailors, soft-handed Episcopalians with progressive attitudes, good educations, effortless manners, but with secrets. These men, when you meet them on the sidewalk or at some uptown dinner, seem like the very best damn old guys you could ever know. You want to call them up the very next day and set some plans going. It seems you always knew about them, that they were present in the city but you just hadn't seen a lot of them—a glimpse here and there. They seem exotic, and your heart expands with the thought of a long friendship's commencement and your mundane life taking a new and better turn. So you do call, and you do see them. You go
spec
fishing off Pointe a la Hache. You stage a dinner and meet their pretty wives. You take a long lunch together at Antoine's or Commander's and decide to do this every week from now on to never. Yet someplace along late in the lunch you hit a flat spot. A silent moment occurs, and your eyes meet in a way that could signal a deep human understanding you'd never ever have to speak about. But what you see is, suddenly—and it
is
sudden and fleeting—you see this man is far, far away from you, so far in fact as not even to realize it. A smile could be playing on his face. He may just have said something charming or incisive or flatteringly personal to you. But then the far, far away awareness dawns, and you know you're nothing to him and will probably never even see him again, never take the trouble. Or, if you do chance to see him, you'll cross streets midblock, cast around for exits in crowded dining rooms, sit longer than you need to in the front seat of your car to let such a man go around a corner or disappear into the very building I mentioned. You avoid him. And it is not that there is anything so wrong with him, nothing unsavory or misaligned. Nothing sexual. You just know he's not for you. And that is an end to it. It's simple really. Though of course it's more complicated when the man in question is your father.

When I came to the telephone and my father's call—my mother had answered, and they had spoken some terse words—my father began right away to talk. “Well, let's see, is it Van Cliburn, or Mickey Mantle?” These were two heroes of the time whom I had gone on and on about and alternately wanted to be when my father was still in our lives. I had already forgotten them.

“Neither one,” I said. I was in the big front hall, where the telephone alcove was. I could see outside through the glass door to where William Dubinion was on his knees in the monkey grass that bordered my mother's camellias. It was a fine situation, I thought—staring at my mother's colored boyfriend while talking to my father in his far-off city, living as he did. “Oh, of course,” my father said. “Those were our last year's fascinations.”

“It was longer ago,” I said. My mother made a noise in the next room. I breathed her cigarette smoke, heard the newspaper crackle. She was listening to everything, and I didn't want to seem friendly to my father, which I did not in any case feel. I felt he was a bastard.

“Well now, see here, ole Buck Rogers,” my father continued. “I'm calling up about an important matter to the future of mankind. I'd like to know if you'd care to go duck hunting in the fabled Grand Lake marsh. With me, that is. I have to come to town in two days to settle some legal business. My ancient father had a trusted family retainer named Renard Theriot, a disreputable old
yat
. But Renard could unquestionably blow a duck call. So, I've arranged for his son, Mr. Renard, Jr., to put us both in a blind and call in several thousand ducks for our pleasure.” My father cleared his throat in the stagy way he always did when he talked like this—high-falutin'. “I mean if you're not over-booked, of course,” he said, and cleared his throat again.

“I might be,” I said, and felt strange even to be talking to him. He occasionally called me at military school, where I had to converse with him in the orderly room. Naturally, he paid all my school bills, sent an allowance, and saw to my mother's expenses. He no doubt paid for William Dubinion's services, too, and wouldn't have cared what their true nature was. He had also conceded us the big white Greek Revival raised cottage on McKendall Street in uptown. (McKendall is our family name—
my
name. It is such a family as that.) But still it was very odd to think that your father was living with another man in a distant city, and was calling up to ask you to go duck hunting. And then to have my mother listening, sitting and smoking and reading the
States Item
, in the very next room and thinking whatever she must've been thinking. It was nearly too much for me.

And yet, I
wanted
to go duck hunting, to go by boat out into the marsh that makes up the vast, brackish tidal land south and east of our city. I had always imagined I'd go with my father when I was old enough. And I
was
old enough now, and had been taught to fire a rifle—though not a shotgun—in my school. Also, when we spoke that day, he didn't sound to me like some man who was living with another man in St. Louis. He sounded much as he always had in our normal life when I had gone to Jesuit and he had practiced law in the Hibernia Bank building, and we were a family. Something I think about my father—whose name was Boatwright McKendall and who was only forty-one years old at the time—something about him must've wanted things to be as they had been before he met his great love, Dr. Carter. Though you could also say that my father just wanted not to have it be that he couldn't do whatever he wanted; wouldn't credit that anything he did might be deemed wrong, or be the cause of hard feeling or divorce or terrible scandal such as what sees you expelled from the law firm your family started a hundred years ago and that bears your name; or that you conceivably caused the early death of your own mother from sheer disappointment. And in fact if anything he did
had
caused someone difficulty, or ruined a life, or set someone on a downward course—well, then he just largely ignored it, or agreed to pay money about it, and afterward tried his level best to go on as if the world was a smashingly great place for everyone and we could all be wonderful friends. It was the absence I mentioned before, the skill he had to not be where he exactly was, but yet to seem to be present to any but the most practiced observer. A son, for instance.

“Well, now look-it here, Mr. Buck-a-roo,” my father said over the telephone from—I guessed—St. Louis. Buck is what I was called and still am, to distinguish me from him (our name is the same). And I remember becoming nervous, as if by agreeing to go with him, and to see him for the first time since he'd left from a New Year's party at the Boston Club and gone away with Dr. Carter—as if by doing these altogether natural things (going hunting) I was crossing a line, putting myself at risk. And not the risk you might think, based on low instinct, but some risk you don't know exists until you feel it in your belly, the way you'd feel running down a steep hill and at the bottom there's a deep river or a canyon, and you realize you can't stop. Disappointment was what I risked, I know now. But I wanted what I wanted and would not let such a feeling stop me.

“I want you to know,” my father said, “that I've cleared all this with your mother. She thinks it's a wonderful idea.”

I pictured his yellow hair, his handsome, youthful, unlined face talking animatedly into the receiver in some elegant, sunny, high-ceilinged room, beside an expensive French table with some fancy art objects on top, which he would be picking up and inspecting as he talked. In my picture he was wearing a purple smoking jacket and was happy to be doing what he was doing. “Is somebody else going?” I said.

“Oh, God no,” my father said and laughed. “Like who? Francis is too refined to go duck hunting. He'd be afraid of getting his beautiful blue eyes put out. Wouldn't you, Francis?”

It shocked me to think Dr. Carter was right there in the room with him, listening. My mother, of course, was still listening to me.

“It'll just be you and me and Renard Junior,” my father said, his voice going away from the receiver. I heard a second voice then, a soft, cultured voice, say something there where my father was, some possibly ironic comment about our plans. “Oh Christ,” my father said in an irritated voice, a voice I didn't know any better than I knew Dr. Carter's. “Just don't say that. This is not that kind of conversation. This is Buck here.” The voice said something else, and in my mind I suddenly saw Dr. Carter in a very unkind light, one I will not even describe. “Now you raise your bones at four a.m. on Thursday, Commander Rogers,” my father said in his high-falutin' style. “Ducks are early risers. I'll collect you at your house. Wear your boots and your Dr. Dentons and nothing bright-colored. I'll supply our artillery.”

It seemed odd to think that my father thought of the great house where we had all lived, and that his own father and grandfather had lived in since after the Civil War, as
my
house. It was not my house, I felt. The most it was was my mother's house, because she had married him in it and then taken it in their hasty divorce.

“How's school, by the way,” my father said distractedly.

“How's what?” I was so surprised to be asked that. My father sounded confused, as if he'd been reading something and lost his place on a page.

“School. You know? Grades? Did you get all A's? You should. You're smart. At least you have a smart mouth.”

“I hate school,” I said. I had liked Jesuit where I'd had friends. But my mother had made me go away to Sandhearst because of all the upset with my father's leaving. There I wore a khaki uniform with a blue stripe down the side of my pants leg, and a stiff blue doorman's hat. I felt a fool at all times.

“Oh well, who cares,” my father said. “You'll get into Harvard the same way I did.”

“What way,” I asked, because even at fifteen I wanted to go to Harvard.

“On looks,” my father said. “That's how southerners get along. That's the great intelligence. Once you know that, the rest is pretty simple. The world
wants
to operate on looks. It only uses brains if looks aren't available. Ask your mother. It's why she married me when she shouldn't have. She'll admit it now.”

“I think she's sorry about it,” I said. I thought about my mother listening to half our conversation.

“Oh yes. I'm sure she is, Buck. We're all a little sorry
now
. I'll testify to that.” The other voice in the room where he was spoke something then, again in an ironic tone. “Oh you shut up,” my father said. “You just shut up that talk and stay out of this. I'll see you Thursday morning, son,” my father said, and hung up before I could answer.

This conversation with my father occurred on Monday, the eighteenth of December, three days before we were supposed to go duck hunting. And for the days in between then and Thursday, my mother more or less avoided me, staying in her room upstairs with the door closed, often with William Dubinion, or going away in the car to her singing lessons with him driving and acting as her chauffeur (though she rode in the front seat). It was still the race times then, and colored people were being lynched and trampled on and burnt out all over the southern states. And yet it was just as likely to cause no uproar if a proper white woman appeared in public with a Negro man in our city. There was no rule or logic to any of it. It was New Orleans, and if you could carry it off you did. Plus Dubinion didn't mind working in the camellia beds in front of our house, just for the record. In truth, I don't think he minded anything very much. He had grown up in the cotton patch in Pointe Coupee Parish, between the rivers, had somehow made it to music school at Wilberforce in Ohio, been to Korea, and had played in the Army band. Later he barged around playing the clubs and juke joints in the city for a decade before he somehow met my mother at a society party where he was the paid entertainment, and she was putting herself into the public eye to make the case that when your husband abandons you for a rich queer, life will go on.

Mr. Dubinion never addressed a great deal to me. He had arrived in my mother's life after I had gone away to military school, and was simply a fait accompli when I came home for Thanksgiving. He was a tall, skinny, solemnly long yellow-faced Negro with sallow, moist eyes, a soft lisp and enormous, bony, pink-nailed hands he could stretch up and down a piano keyboard. I don't think my mother could have thought he was handsome, but possibly that didn't matter. He often parked himself in our living room, drinking scotch whiskey, smoking cigarettes and playing tunes he made up right on my grandfather's Steinway concert grand. He would hum under his breath and grunt and sway up and back like the jazzman Erroll Garner. He usually looked at me only out of the corner of his yellow Oriental-looking eye, as if neither of us really belonged in such a dignified place as my family's house. He knew, I suppose, he wouldn't be there forever and was happy for a reprieve from his usual life, and to have my mother as his temporary girlfriend. He also seemed to think I would not be there much longer either, and that we had this in common.