Authors: Richard Ford
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a good answer,” Wade says. “I didn’t think I did. Living alone didn’t seem so bad after being married for twenty-nine years. What do you think?”
“It has its plusses, Wade. Did you meet Lynette up here?”
“I met her at a rock concert, and don’t ask me what I was doing there because I couldn’t tell you. This was in Atlantic City, three years ago. I’m not a joiner, and if you’re not a joiner you can end up in some pretty strange places proving to yourself how independent you are.”
“I usually end up staying home reading. Though I get in my car sometimes and drive all day, too. It sounds like what you’re talking about.”
“That’s not so good, doesn’t sound to me like.”
“It isn’t always, no.”
“Well, anyway. Here was ole Lynette. She’s about your age, Frank. Been widowed, divorced, and came to this concert with a Spanish guy who was about twenty-five. And he had just up and disappeared on her. I won’t tell you all the gory details. But we ended up out at the Howard Johnson’s on the freeway drinking coffee and talking the truth to each other till four in the morning. It turns out we both had a yearning to do something useful and positive with what time we had left to us, and neither one of us was much of a perfectionist, by which I mean we both knew we weren’t exactly perfect for each other.” Wade folds his arms and looks stern.
“How long before you got married, Wade? Not that long, I’ll bet.” I direct a sly grin at Wade because a big sly grin needs to come on his face at the thought of that starry night on the smoggy Atlantic City Expressway, and I’m glad to help him out. It must’ve seemed to them that they had beached together on a blasted, deserted shingle, and were damned lucky to be there. It is not a bad story, and worth a hundred grins.
“Not
that
long, Frank,” Wade says proudly, cracking the very grin needed to get into the spirit of that old charmed time again. “Her divorce was settled, and we didn’t see any use waiting. She’s a Catholic, after all. A divorce was bad enough. And she didn’t want us to be living together, which would’ve been fine with me. Only in a month I was married, and had this house! Boy!” Wade smiles and shakes his head at the remarkable singularity of unplanned life.
“You struck it rich, I’d say.”
“Well, Lynette and I are opposites of a sort. She’s pretty definite about things. And I’m a lot less definite, nowadays anyway. She takes being a Catholic pretty seriously—more so since her son got killed. And I kinda let her have her way there. I joined just for her sake, but we don’t hold mass here, Frank. I’d say we were just alike in the one thing that counts—we’re not rich people, and I’m not sure we really love each other or need to, but we want to be a good force in a small world and give a good accounting in the time that’s left.” Wade looks at me on the steps as if I were going to judge him, and he was hoping I’d come down and give him a big crack on the shoulders like a linebacker. I’m sure he has told me all this—a subject we might’ve gotten into in greater depth at the Red Lobster, and where I might’ve done more of the talking—because he wants to give me a fair sense of what the family is here, just in case I was weighing joining up. And it’s true that the Arcenaults are a world apart from what I expected. Only better. Wade couldn’t recommend himself or his tidy life to me in sweeter, more agreeable terms. What better prospects than to hitch up here. Forge a commitment in Sherri-Lyn Woods (odd weekends and holidays). I might eventually make friends with Cade, write him a subtle letter of recommendation to a good junior college; get him interested in marketing techniques instead of police work and guns. I might buy my own Whaler and dock it behind the house. It could be a damn good ordinary life, that’s for sure.
Though for some reason I am nervous and embarrassed. My hands are still cold and stiff, and I stuff them inside my pants pockets and stare at Wade blank as a tomb door. That I withhold at just this moment is a major failing in my character.
“Frank,” Wade says, sharp-eyed and studious now. “I want to hear from you on this. Do you think it’s too little to do with your life? Just collect tolls, raise a family, work on an old car like this, go out on the ocean with your son and fish for fluke? Maybe love your wife?”
I cannot answer fast enough, all reluctance aside. “No,” I almost shout. “Not a bit. I think it’s goddamn great, Wade, and you’re a damn lucky son of a bitch to get it.” (I’m shocked to hear myself call Wade a son of a bitch.)
“There’s more romance, I’d guess, in what you do, though, Frank. I don’t see a lot of the world where I stand, though I’ve already seen plenty of it.”
“Our lives are probably a lot more alike than you’d think, Wade. If you don’t mind my saying so, yours might even be better.”
“There are a lot of things went into an old car like this, if you get my meaning.” Wade smiles proudly now, happy for my vote of approval. “Little touches I can’t put into words. I’ll come down here at four in the morning sometimes and tinker till daylight. And I have it to look forward to when I drive home. And I’ll tell you this, son. Any day I come up upstairs, I’m happy as a lark, and my devils are in their dungeon.”
“That’s great, Wade.”
“And it’s every bit of it completely knowable, son. Wires and bolts. I could show you everything, though I can’t tell you. You could sure do it yourself.” He looks at me and shakes his head in amazement. Wade is not a full-disclosure kind of man, no matter how it might seem. And in this case, I know exactly what he’s discovered, know the worth and pleasure it can be to anyone. Though for some strange reason, as I look down at Wade looking up at me, what I think of is Wade alone, walking down a long empty hospital corridor, holding a single suitcase, stopping at a numberless door and peeking in on a neat, empty room where the bed is turned down and harsh sunlight comes through a window, and things inside are clean as they can be.
Tests
are what he’s here for. Many, many of them. And once he’s walked in the room he will never be the same. This is the beginning of the end, and frankly it scares me witless and gives me a terrible shudder. I would like to hug him now, tell him to stay out of hospitals, meet the reaper at home. But I can’t. He would get the wrong idea and everything between us would be ruined just when it’s started so well.
Above us, in the fitful activity of the house, someone has begun to play the bass intro to “What’d I Say” on the electric organ, the four low minor-note sex-and-anticipation vamp before ole Ray starts his moan. The hum sinks through the rafters and fills the basement with an unavoidable new atmosphere. Despair.
Wade glances at the ceiling, happy as a man could have any right to be. It is as if he knew this very thing would happen and hears it as a signal that his house is in superb working order and ready for him to find his place in it once again. He is a man completely without a subtext, a literalist of the first order.
“I feel, Frank, like I’ve seen your face before. It’s familiar to me. Isn’t that strange?”
“You must see a lot of faces, Wade, wouldn’t you guess?”
“Everybody in New Jersey’s at least once.” Wade flashes the patented toll-taker’s grin. “But I don’t remember many. Yours is just a face I remember. I thought it the moment I saw you.”
I can’t bear to tell Wade that he has taken my $1.05 four hundred times, smiled and told me to have myself “a super day,” as I whirled off into the rough scrimmage of Route 1-South. That would be too ordinary an answer for his special kind of question, and for this charged moment. Wade is after mystery here, and I am not about to deny him. It would be as if Mr. Smallwood from Detroit had turned out to be a former grease jockey at Frenchy Montreux’s Gulf, who had changed my oil and given me lubes, only I hadn’t noticed, but suddenly did and pointed it out: mystery, first winded, then ruined by fact. I would rather stay on the side of good omens, be part of the inexplicable, an unexpected bellwether for whatever is ahead. Discretion, oddly enough, is the best response for a man of stalled responses.
Behind me the kitchen door opens, and I turn to see Lynette’s cute cheerleader’s face peering down at both of us, looking amused—a palpable relief, though I read in her look that this whole man-talk-below-decks business has been scheduled in advance and that she’s been minding the kitchen clock for a prearranged moment to call us topside. I’m the lucky subject (but not the victim) of other people’s scheming, and that is never bad. It is, in fact, a cozy feeling, even if it can be put to no good use.
The brooding, churchy Ray Charles chords come down louder now. This is Vicki’s work. “You men can talk old cars all day if you want to, but there’s folks ready to sit down.” Lynette’s eyes twinkle with impatient good humor. She can tell everything’s A-Okay down here. And she’s right. If we are not great friends, we soon will be.
“How ’bout let’s eat a piece of dead sheep, Frank?” Wade laughs, giving his belly a rub. “Agnus dei,” he chortles up toward Lynette.
“That is
not
what it is,” Lynette says, and rolls her eyes in the (I see now) Arcenault manner. “What’ll he say next, Frank? Agnus Dei is what
you
are, Wade, not what we’re eatin. Heavens.”
“I’m sure too tough to chew, Frank, I’ll tell you that right now. Haw.” And up out of the shadowy basement we come—all hands on deck—into the warm and sunlit kitchen, the whole Arcenault crew arrived and ready for ritual Sunday grub.
D
inner is a more ceremonial business than I would’ve guessed. Lynette has transformed her dining room into a hot little jewel box, crystal-candle chandelier, best silver and linens laid. The instant we’re seated she has us all join hands around the obloid so that I end up uneasily grabbing both Wade’s and Cade’s (no resistance from Cade) while Vicki holds Wade’s and Lynette’s. And I can’t help thinking—eyes stitched shut, peering soundlessly down into the familiar death-ball of liquid crimson flame behind which waits an infinity of black soul’s abyss from which nothing but Wade and Cade’s cumbersome hands can keep me from tumbling—what strange, good luck to be reckoned among these people like a relative welcome from Peoria. Though I can’t keep from wondering where my own children are at this moment, and where X is—my hope being that they are not sharing a fatherless, prix fixe Easter brunch at some deserted seaside Ramada in Asbury Park with Barksdale, back on the sneak from Memphis, taking my place. That news I could’ve passed a happy day without, though we can never stop what comes to us by right. I am overdue, in fact, for a comeuppance, and lucky not to be spending the day cruising some mall for an Easter takeout—the way poor Walter Luckett no doubt is, lost in the savage wilderness of civil life.
Lynette’s blessing is amiably brief and upbeat-ecumenical in its particulars—I assume for my benefit—taking into account the day and the troubled world we live in but leaving out Vatican II and any saintly references unquestionably on her mind—where they count—and winding up with a mention of her son, Beany, in a soldier’s grave at Fort Dix but present in everyone’s mind, including mine. (Molten flames, in fact, give way at the end to reveal Beany’s knifey mug leering at me out from oblivion’s sanctum.)
Wade and Cade have both put on garish flower ties and sports jackets, and look like vaudevillians. Vicki gives double cross-eyes at me when I smile at her and attempt to act comfortable among the family. Talk is of the weather as we dig into the lamb, then a brief pass into state politics; then Cade’s chances of an early call-up at the police academy and speculation about whether uniforms will be assigned the first morning, or if more tests will need to be passed, which Cade seems to view as a grim possibility. He leads a discussion on the effect of driving fifty-five, noting that it’s all right for everybody else but not him. Then Lynette’s work on the Catholic crisis-line, then Vicki’s work at the hospital, which everyone agrees is both as difficult and rewarding a service to mankind as can be—more, by implication, than Lynette’s. No one mentions our weekend in the faraway Motor City, though I have the feeling Lynette is trying to find a place for the word Detroit in practically every sentence, to let us all know she wasn’t born yesterday and isn’t making a stink since Vicki, like all other divorced gals, can take care of her own beeswax.
Cade cracks a baiting smile and asks me who I like in the AL East, to which I answer Boston (my least favorite team). I, of course, am behind Detroit all the way, and know in fact that certain crucial trades and a new pitching coach will make them virtually unstoppable come September.
“Boston. Hnuhn.” Cade leers into his plate. “Never see it.”
“Wait and see,” I say with absolute assuredness. “There’re a hundred and sixty-two games. They could make one smart trade by the deadline and pretty much have it their way.”
“It’d have to be for Ty Cobb.” Cade guffaws and eyes his father slavishly, his mouth full of a dinner roll.
I laugh the loudest while Vicki crosses her eyes again, since she knows I’ve led Cade to the joke like a trained donkey.
Lynette smiles attentively and maneuvers her lamb hunk, English peas and mint jelly all nearer one another on her plate. She is an understanding listener, but she is a straightforward questioner too, someone who wouldn’t let you off easy if you called up the crisis-line with a silly crisis. It seems she has me fixed in her mind. “Now were you in the service, Frank?” she says pleasantly.
“The Marines, but I got sick and was discharged.”
Lynette’s face portrays real concern. “What happened?”