Vintage Ford (5 page)

The one thing I remember him saying to me was during the days before I went with my father to the marsh that Christmas— Dubinion's only Christmas with us, as it turned out. I came into the great shadowy living room where the piano sat beside the front window and where my mother had established a large Christmas tree with blinking lights and a gold star on top. I had a copy of
The Inferno
, which I'd decided I would read over the holidays because the next year I hoped to leave Sandhearst and be admitted to Lawrenceville, where my father had gone before Harvard. William Dubinion was again in his place at the piano, smoking and drinking. My mother had been singing “You've Changed” in her thin, pretty soprano and had left to take a rest because singing made her fatigued. When he saw the red jacket on my book he frowned and turned sideways on the bench and crossed one long thin leg over the other so his pale hairless skin showed above his black patent leather shoes. He was wearing black trousers with a white shirt, but no socks, which was his normal dress around the house.

“That's a pretty good book,” he said in his soft lisping voice, and stared right at me in a way that felt accusatory.

“It's written in Italian,” I said. “It's a poem about going to hell.”

“So is that where you expect to go?”

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

“
‘Per me si va nella citta dolente. Per me si va nell'eterno dolore.'
That's all I remember,” he said, and he played a chord in the bass clef, a spooky, rumbling chord like the scary part in a movie.

I assumed he was making this up, though of course he wasn't. “What's that supposed to mean?” I said.

“Same ole,” he said, his cigarette still dangling in his mouth. “Watch your step when you take a guided tour of hell. Nothing new.”

“When did you read this book?” I said, standing between the two partly closed pocket doors. This man was my mother's boyfriend, her Svengali, her impresario, her seducer and corrupter (as it turned out). He was a strange, powerful man who had seen life I would never see. And I'm sure I was both afraid of him and equally afraid he would detect it, which probably made me appear superior and insolent and made him dislike me.

Dubinion looked above the keyboard at an arrangement of red pyracanthas my mother had placed there. “Well, I could say something nasty. But I won't.” He took a breath and let it out heavily. “You just go ahead on with your readin'. I'll go on with my playin'.” He nodded but did not look at me again. We didn't have too many more conversations after that. My mother sent him away in the winter. Once or twice he returned but, at some point, he disappeared. Though by then her life had changed in the bad way it probably had been bound to change.

The only time I remember my mother speaking directly to me during these three days, other than to inform me dinner was ready or that she was leaving at night to go out to some booking Dubinion had arranged, which I'm sure she paid him to arrange (and paid for the chance to sing as well), was on Wednesday afternoon, when I was sitting on the back porch poring over the entrance requirement information I'd had sent from Lawrenceville. I had never seen Lawrenceville, or been to New Jersey, never been farther away from New Orleans than to Yankeetown, Florida, where my military school was located in the buildings of a former Catholic hospital for sick and crazy priests. But I thought that Lawrenceville—just the word itself—could save me from the impossible situation I deemed myself to be in. To go to Lawrenceville, to travel the many train miles, and to enter whatever strange, complex place New Jersey was—all that coupled to the fact that my father had gone there and my name and background meant something—all that seemed to offer escape and relief and a future better than the one I had at home in New Orleans.

My mother had come out onto the back porch, which was glassed in and gave a prospect down onto the backyard grass. On the manicured lawn was an arrangement of four wooden Adirondack chairs and a wooden picnic table, all painted pink. The yard was completely walled in and no one but our neighbors could see—if they chose to—that William Dubinion was lying on top of the pink picnic table with his shirt off, smoking a cigarette and staring sternly up at the warm blue sky.

My mother stood for a while watching him. She was wearing a pair of men's white silk pajamas, and her voice was husky. I'm sure she was already taking the drugs that would eventually disrupt her reasoning. She was holding a glass of milk, which was probably not just milk but milk with gin or scotch or something in it to ease whatever she felt terrible about.

“What a splendid idea to go hunting with your father,” she said sarcastically, as if we were continuing a conversation we'd been having earlier, though in fact we had said nothing about it, despite my wanting to talk about it, and despite thinking I ought to not go and hoping she wouldn't permit it. “Do you even own a gun?” she asked, though she knew I didn't. She knew what I did and didn't own. I was fifteen.

“He's going to give me one,” I said.

She glanced at me where I was sitting, but her expression didn't change. “I just wonder what it's like to take up with another man of your social standing,” my mother said as she ran her hand through her hair, which was newly colored ash-blond and done in a very neat bob, which had been Dubinion's idea. My mother's father had been a pharmacist on Prytania Street and had done well catering to the needs of rich families like the McKendalls. She had gone to Newcombe, married
up
and come to be at ease with the society my father introduced her into (though I have never thought she really cared about New Orleans society one way or the other—unlike my father, who cared about it enough to spit in its face).

“I always assume,” she said, “that these escapades usually involve someone on a lower rung. A stevedore, or a towel attendant at your club.” She was watching Dubinion. He must've qualified in her mind as a lower-rung personage. She and my father had been married twenty years, and at age thirty-nine she had taken Dubinion into her life to wipe out any trace of the way she had previously conducted her affairs. I realize now, as I tell this, that she and Dubinion had just been in bed together, and he was enjoying the dreamy aftermath by lying half-naked out on our picnic table while she roamed around the house in her pajamas alone and had to end up talking to me. It's sad to think that in a little more than a year, when I was just getting properly adjusted at Lawrenceville, she would be gone. Thinking of her now is like hearing the dead speak.

“But I don't hold it against your father. The
man
part anyway,” my mother said. “Other things, of course, I do.” She turned, then stepped over and took a seat on the striped-cushion wicker chair beside mine. She set her milk down and took my hand in her cool hands, and held it in her lap against her silky leg. “What if I became a very good singer and had to go on the road and play in Chicago and New York and possibly Paris? Would that be all right? You could come and see me perform. You could wear your school uniform.” She pursed her lips and looked back at the yard, where William Dubinion was laid out on the picnic table like a pharaoh.

“I wouldn't enjoy that,” I said. I didn't lie to her. She was going out at night and humiliating herself and making me embarrassed and afraid. I wasn't going to say I thought this was all fine. It was a disaster and soon would be proved so.

“No?” she said. “You wouldn't come see me perform in the
Quartier Latin
?”

“No,” I said. “I never would.”

“Well.” She let go of my hand, crossed her legs and propped her chin on her fist. “I'll have to live with that. Maybe you're right.” She looked around at her glass of milk as if she'd forgotten where she'd left it.

“What other things do you hold against him?” I asked, referring to my father. The
man
part seemed enough to me.

“Oh,” my mother said, “are we back to him now? Well, let's just say I hold his entire self against him. And not for my sake, certainly, but for yours. He could've kept things together here. Other men do. It's perfectly all right to have a lover of whatever category. So, he's no worse than a lot of other men. But that's what I hold against him. I hadn't really thought about it before. He fails to be any better than most men would be. That's a capital offense in marriage. You'll have to grow up some more before you understand that. But you will.”

She picked up her glass of milk, rose, pulled her loose white pajamas up around her scant waist and walked back inside the house. In a while I heard a door slam, then her voice and Dubinion's, and I went back to preparing myself for Lawrenceville and saving my life. Though I think I knew what she meant. She meant my father did only what pleased him, and believed that doing so permitted others the equal freedom to do what they wanted. Only that isn't how the world works, as my mother's life and mine were living proof. Other people affect you. It's really no more complicated than that.

My father sat slumped in the bow of the empty skiff at the end of the plank dock. It was the hour before light. He was facing the silent, barely moving surface of Bayou Baptiste, beyond which (though I couldn't see it) was the vacant marshland that stretched as far as the Mississippi River itself, west of us and miles away. My father was bareheaded and seemed to be wearing a tan raincoat. I had not seen him in a year.

The place we were was called Reggio dock, and it was only a rough little boat camp from which fishermen took their charters out in the summer months, and duck hunters like us departed into the marsh by way of the bayou, and where a few shrimpers stored their big boats and nets when their season was off. I had never been to it, but I knew about it from boys at Jesuit who came here with their fathers, who leased parts of the marsh and had built wooden blinds and stayed in flimsy shacks and stilt-houses along the single-lane road down from Violet, Louisiana. It was a famous place to me in the way that hunting camps can be famously mysterious and have a danger about them, and represent the good and the unknown that so rarely combine in life.

My father had not come to get me as he'd said he would. Instead a yellow taxi with a light on top had stopped in front of our house and a driver came to the door and rang and told me that Mr. McKendall had sent him to drive me to Reggio—which was in St. Bernard Parish, and for all its wildness not really very far from the Garden District.

“And is that really you?” my father said from in the boat, turning around, after I had stood on the end of the dock for a minute waiting for him to notice me. A small stunted-looking man with a large square head and wavy black hair and wearing coveralls was hauling canvas bags full of duck decoys down to the boat. Around the camp there was activity. Cars were arriving out of the darkness, their taillights brightening. Men's voices were heard laughing. Someone had brought a dog that barked. And it was not cold, in spite of being the week before Christmas. The morning air felt heavy and velvety, and a light fog had risen off the bayou, which smelled as if oil or gasoline had been let into it. The mist clung to my hands and face, and made my hair under my cap feel soiled. “I'm sorry about the taxi ride,” my father said from the bow of the aluminum skiff. He was smiling in an exaggerated way. His teeth were very white, though he looked thin. His pale, fine hair was cut shorter and seemed yellower than I remembered it, and had a wider part on the side. It was odd, but I remember thinking—standing looking down at my father—that if he'd had an older brother, this would be what that brother would look like. Not good. Not happy or wholesome. And of course I realized he was drinking, even at that hour. The man in the coveralls brought down three shotgun cases and laid them in the boat. “This little
yat
rascal is Mr. Rey-nard Theriot, Junior,” my father said, motioning at the small, wavy-haired man. “There're some people, in New Orleans, who know him as Fabrice, or the Fox. Or Fabree-chay. Take your pick.”

I didn't know what all this meant. But Renard Junior paused after setting the guns in the boat and looked at my father in an unfriendly way. He had a heavy, rucked brow, and even in the poor light his dark complexion made his eyes seem small and penetrating. Under his coveralls he was wearing a red shirt with tiny gold stars on it.

“Fabree-chay is a duck caller of surprising subtlety,” my father said too loudly. “Among, that is to say, his other talents. Isn't that right, Mr. Fabrice? Did you say hello to my son, Buck, who's a very fine boy?” My father flashed his big white-toothed smile around at me, and I could tell he was taunting Renard Junior, who did not speak to me but continued his job to load the boat. I wondered how much he knew about my father, and what he thought if he knew everything.

“I couldn't locate my proper hunting attire,” my father said, and looked down at the open front of his topcoat. He pulled it apart, and I could see he was wearing a tuxedo with a pink shirt, a bright-red bow tie and a pink carnation. He was also wearing white-and-black spectator shoes which were wrong for the Christmas season and in any case would be ruined once we were in the marsh. “I had them stored in the garage at mother's,” he said, as if talking to himself. “This morning quite early I found I'd lost the key.” He looked at me, still smiling. “You have on very good brown things,” he said. I had just worn my khaki pants and shirt from school—minus the brass insignias—and black tennis shoes and an old canvas jacket and cap I found in a closet. This was not exactly duck hunting in the way I'd heard about from my school friends. My father had not even been to bed, and had been up drinking and having a good time. Probably he would've preferred staying wherever he'd been, with people who were his friends now.

“What important books have you been reading?” my father asked for some reason, from down in the skiff. He looked around as a boat full of hunters and the big black Labrador dog I'd heard barking motored slowly past us down Bayou Baptiste. Their guide had a sealed-beam light he was shining out on the water's misted surface. They were going to shoot ducks. Though I couldn't see where, since beyond the opposite bank of the bayou was only a flat black treeless expanse that ended in darkness. I couldn't tell where ducks might be, or which way the city lay, or even which way east was.