What I remember of the place was a hot parade grounds surrounded by sparse pine trees, a flag pole with an anchor at its base, a stale shallow lake where I learned to sail, a smelly beach and boat house, hot brown stucco classroom buildings and white barracks houses that reeked with mops. There were some ex-Navy warrant officers who taught there — men unsuited for regular teaching. One Negro even taught there, a man named Bud Simmons who coached baseball. The Commandant was an old captain from World War I, named Admiral Legier.
We took our leaves in bunches, out on Highway 1 in the little Gulf Coast towns we could get to by public bus, in the air-conditioned movie and tamale houses, or hanging out in the vicinity of Keesler Air Force Base, in the hot, sandy parking lots of strip joints, all of us in our brown uniforms trying to get the real servicemen to buy us booze, and wretched because we were too young to go in ourselves and had too little money to be able to do anything but squander it.
I went home on holidays to my mother’s bungalow in Biloxi, and occasionally I saw her brother Ted who lived not far away, and who came to see me and took me on trips to Mobile and Pensacola, where we did not do much talking. It may be just the fate of boys whose fathers die young never to be young — officially — ourselves; youth being just a brief dream, a prelude of no particular lasting moment before actual life begins.
My only personal athletic experience came there at Lonesome Pines. I tried to play baseball on the school team, under Bud Simmons, the Negro coach. I was relatively tall for my age — though I’m more normal now — and I had the lanky, long-loose-arm grace of a natural ball player. But I could never do it well. I could always see myself as though from outside, doing the things I was told to do. And that was enough never to do them well or fully. An inbred irony seemed to haunt me, and served no useful purpose but to make me a musing, wiseacre kid, shifty-eyed and secretive — the kind who belongs in exactly such a place as Lonesome Pines. Bud Simmons did what he could with me, including make me throw with my other arm, which I happily did, though it didn’t help at all. He referred to my problem as not being able to “give it up,” and I knew exactly what he meant. (Today I am amazed when I find athletes who can be full-fledged people and also “give it up” to their sport. That does not happen often, and it is a dear gift from a complex God.)
I did not see so much of my mother in those years. Nor does this seem exceptional to me. It must’ve happened to thousands of us B. 1945s, and to children in earlier centuries as well. It seems odder that children see their parents so much these days, and come to know them better than they probably ever need to. I saw my mother when she could see me. I stayed in her house when I was back from school and we acted like friends. She loved me as much as she was able to, given her altered situation. She might’ve liked having a closer life with me. I’m sure I would’ve liked it. But it’s possible she was dreamy herself and in no particular mind to know exactly what to do. I’m sure she never thought my father would die, in the same way I didn’t think Ralph would die, except he did. She was only thirty-four, a small dark-eyed woman with skin darker than mine, and who strikes me now as having been shocked by how far she had come from where she was born, and having been more absorbed by that than anything. Her life just distracted her the way another person would, not in a hateful or a selfish way, possibly even the way my father had, but that I knew nothing about. I think she must’ve been worried about going back to Iowa, and didn’t want to.
Eventually she went to work in a large hotel called the Buena Vista in Mississippi City as the night cashier, and while she was there she met a man named Jake Ornstein, a jeweler from Chicago, and after a few months in which he made several trips down, she married him and moved to Skokie, Illinois, where she lived until she got cancer and died.
At almost that same time I won an NROTC scholarship through Lonesome Pines, and by pure chance enrolled at the University of Michigan. The Navy’s idea was to achieve a mix, and nobody got to go where they wanted to go, though I don’t even remember where I wanted to go, except it probably wasn’t there.
I do remember that there were times when I visited my mother in Skokie, taking the fragrant old New York Central from Ann Arbor and spending the weekend lounging around trying to be comfortable and make conversation in that strangely suburban ranch-style house with plastic slipcovers on the furniture and twenty-five clocks on the walls, in a Jewish neighborhood and in a town where I had no attachments. Jake Ornstein was fifteen years older than my mother and was quite a nice fellow, and I got along well with him and his son Irv — better, in fact, than I ended up getting along with my mother. She mentioned she thought my college was “one of the good schools,” but treated me like a nephew she didn’t know very well, and who worried her, even though she liked me. (She gave me a smoking jacket and pipe when I left for school — she was already in Skokie by then so that my leaving was from there.) For my part I’m sure I stared a lot and kept a distance. I’m sure we both tried to approach one another on some new level that could’ve flattered us both when we saw how we’d adjusted. But her life had gotten in front of her somehow, and I became someone out of another time, a fact I don’t hold against my mother and haven’t felt abandoned or disaffected because of it.
What could her life have been like, after all? Good, bad, both by turns? A long pathway through which she hoped to be not too unhappy? She knew. But only she knew. And I am not prone to judge a life I don’t know much about, in particular since things have turned out all right for me. The best I knew then, and still, is of my own life, which at the time my mother was married to Jake Ornstein, I was on fire to get on with. I know that she and Jake were happy, and that I loved my mother very much in whatever way I was able, knowing so little about her. When she died I was still in school. I went to the funeral, acted as a pallbearer, sat around Jake’s house for a weekend afternoon with the people they both knew, tried to think of what my parents had taught me in their lives (I came up with “a sense of independence”). And that night I got back on the train and slipped out of that life for good. Jake, afterwards, moved to Phoenix, married again, and died of cancer himself. Irv and I kept in touch for a few years, but have drifted apart.
But does that seem like an odd life? Does it seem strange that I do not have a long and storied family history? Or a list of problems and hatreds to brood about — a bill of particular grievances and nostalgias that pretend to explain or trouble everything? Possibly I was born into a different time. But maybe my way is better all around, and is actually the way with most of us and the rest tell lies.
Still. Do I ever wonder what my family would think of me? Of my profession? As a divorced man, a father, a quester after women? As an adult heading for life and death?
Sometimes. Though it never stays with me long. And, indeed, when I think of it, I think this: that they would probably have approved of everything I’ve done — particularly my decision to quit writing and get on to something they would think of as more practical. They would feel about it the way I do: that things sometimes happen for the best. Thinking that way has given me a chance for an interesting if not particularly simple adulthood.
By 9:30 I have nearly finished the few odds-and-ends details remaining before picking up Vicki and heading for the airport. Usually this would include a cup of coffee with Bosobolo, my boarder from the seminary in town, a custom I enjoy, but not today. We have had some good give-and-takes on such subjects as whether the bliss of the redeemed is heightened by the sufferings of the damned — something he feels Catholic about, but I don’t. He is forty-two and from the country of Gabon, and a stern-faced apologist for limitless faith. I usually argue for works, but without any illusions about where it’ll get me.