Vintage Ford by Richard Ford Page A

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.
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œNo?” she said. “You wouldn’t come see me perform in the
Quartier Latin
?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “I never would.”
    â€œWell.” 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.
    â€œWhat other things do you hold against him?” I asked, referring to my father. The
man
part seemed enough to me.
    â€œOh,” 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