Well, you asked me for my thoughts and opinions and my memories of the man, and I’m going to give them to you, no matter what they do to your version of him. I know you’ll be asking the same of his other wives — or, I should say, ex-wives — so I won’t bother with what I know to be true of him after we got our divorce, because you’ll get plenty of that from the women who knew him later and better than I did during those particular years of his life. And who knows, maybe he’s changed. It sometimes happens. But even so, above all, I want to be fair to the man, because from what I’ve heard, he’s been fair to me. From what I’ve heard, he’s actually told people he still loves me, and that he loved me best of all, that I was his “true love.” I can understand that. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. We were so young, and you know what they say about young lovers, first lovers. Oh, I’ve gotten over him, all right, I mean, I can admit now that he was my first love, my true love, all that sort of thing, but I’m over him now. Because after all, you must remember he was the one who left. Not me. He was the one who walked out. Not me. He was the one who wanted the divorce, the one who got himself a lover while he was still married to me. Not me. I never did any of that. It makes it easier to get over someone if you’ve never done anything wrong to him. You can understand that.
But I’m sure that when he says I was his first love he’s telling the truth. I don’t think he lied to me about that, and maybe even after all these years he still does think of me that way. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing about him. You know what they say about first loves. We were young. I mean young. I was a fashion model then, for the Globe Department Store right here in Lakeland. A small-town girl, sure, but pretty. Some people said pretty enough to succeed as a fashion model in New York, even. You know all this, you’ve seen pictures, snapshots, and of course, you’ve talked to people who knew me then. Anyhow, that’s not important, except that naturally it helped me land your father.
He came south to Florida that winter, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father, your grandfather. Someone’ll probably go into all that in detail, so I won’t bother here. It’s a fascinating story, though. Whenever I tell people about it now, they simply refuse to believe that I believed it then, that he had killed his own father, I mean. But I always say, “Listen, if he believed it himself, why shouldn’t I believe it too?” Not many people can come up with an answer for that one.
Anyhow, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father that I first met your father. He came south to Florida, hitchhiking, with nothing more than what he could put in a single battered suitcase. Why he chose Lakeland I’ll never know for sure, but I think it had something to do with a construction job that was going on then. A lot of plumbing was involved, connecting up a couple of lakes in the area for a town water supply, something like that. I never paid much attention to the jobs he worked on, never really understood them very well, though of course I was a good listener and always made sure to praise him highly for his work, both to his face and behind his back.
He chose to stop running in Lakeland, after running all the way south from his family home in New Hampshire in the middle of the winter, hitchhiking on trucks, sleeping alongside the highway in places like Red Bank, New Jersey, and Raleigh, North Carolina. He had just turned twenty-two years old, big and strong and not afraid of anything or anyone, except the police, of course. I often think of him, now that you are doing the same thing at almost the same age, hitchhiking all over the country, sleeping by the side of the road and all, not afraid of anything or anyone, and you aren’t even afraid of the police, naturally, because you don’t think you have killed your father. Anyhow, I often think of your father during those years, and it gives me some slight comfort, because after all, he did the same thing, and no harm came to him for it.
I did say that he was big and strong then, didn’t I? Well, indeed he was. Never in my life had I seen a man as big and strong as your father was then. It’s where you get your height. He was wearing a T-shirt that showed all his muscles, and work pants, and he had come into the Globe to buy some underwear. He had just gotten off work at the pumping station. They were building a new pumping station that year and he had walked up to the foreman with his suitcase in his hand, and the way he told me later, he just said to the foreman, “You probably need pipefitters, and I’m the best damned pipefitter you’re ever going to get the chance to hire, so you ought to hire me whether you need pipefitters right now or not.” The foreman, who later tried to become your father’s friend, Bucky Walker, you remember him, he said, “Anybody thinks that high of himself is either so damned good I can’t afford to let him go, or so damned bad it’ll be a pleasure to fire him. So you’re hired, pal.” That’s how your father told it, and later, when Bucky told me the story, it was the same story, and Bucky had no reason to lie about it, because by that time your father had gone back up north and had left me with you as a baby here in Lakeland. Actually, Bucky was kind of interested in me then. He was hanging around the apartment a lot after work, drinking beer and talking about your father, wondering why he had gone and done what he had done. I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone along with Bucky the way he obviously wanted me to and had even married him after my divorce. And after he had divorced Sally, naturally. I mean, he was kind of a sweet man, and God knows, he was in love with me. I guess I never really told you much about all that, did I? Well, it doesn’t matter, because I was still so in love with your father that I couldn’t see the good side of any other man, even a man as sweet as Bucky Walker.
But I’m getting away from the thing I wanted to describe to you, how your father looked to me when we first met. I was modeling a pink one-piece Esther Williams bathing suit in a swimwear fashion show on the mezzanine of the Globe, and I had just started down the ramp when I caught sight of him coming up the stairs from the first floor, where he had bought some underwear. He told me later that, noticing a sign about the swimwear show upstairs, he’d decided to come and take a look. There wasn’t a beach at Lakeland, as you know, it’s so far inland, and at that time he had been in Florida for over a month and hadn’t seen a single woman in a bathing suit, and as he always said, that’s what Florida was to him, “Women in bathing suits and Coney Island with palm trees.” He’d seen the Coney-Island-with-palm-trees part, but so far he hadn’t seen anything of the women in bathing suits. So he decided to walk up the stairs to the mezzanine and take in the fashion show. Your father was always like that, very direct and not at all self-conscious. It didn’t matter to him that he was the only man in the place, or that he was dressed in a construction worker’s clothes, all dirty and sweaty and everything.