“Yes,” Wales said. “I did. That’s right.” He smiled at her.
“Good,” she said. “Good.” Then she turned away, and hurried toward the revolving doors as the man in the tuxedo had done, and quickly disappeared. Though he waited then for a time, just outside the yellow marquee — a man standing alone in a brown coat; waited until whatever disordered feelings he had about their moment of departure could be fully experienced and then diminish and become less a barrier. They were not bad feelings, not an unfamiliar moment, not the opening onto desolation. They were simply the outcome. And in a short while, possibly at some instant during his drive back up the lake, he would feel a small release, an unburdening, the sensation of events being completed, so that over time he would think less and less about it until it all seemed, upon reflection, to be almost perfect.
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.