Richard Ford - Independence Day

I t would be of no great interest to hear me expound on all I tried and started out to do during this time—1984, the Orwellian year, when Reagan was reelected to the term soon to end, the one he has more or less napped through when he wasn’t starting wars or lying about it and getting the country into plenty of trouble.

For the first few months, I spent three mornings a week reading to the blind down at WHAD-FM (98.6). Michener novels and Doctor Zhivago were the blind people’s favorites, and it is still something I occasionally stop off and do when I have time, and take real satisfaction in. I also looked briefly into the possibility of becoming a court reporter (my mother had always thought that would be a wonderful job because it served a useful purpose and you’d always be in demand). Later, and for one entire week, I attended classes in heavy-equipment operation, which I enjoyed but didn’t finish (I was determined to aim at less predictable choices for a man with my background). I likewise tried getting a contract to write an “as told to” book but couldn’t get my former literary agency interested since I had no particular subject in mind and they by then were only interested in young writers with surefire projects. And for three weeks I actually worked as an inspector for a company that certified as “excellent” crummy motels and restaurants across the Middle West, though that didn’t work because of all the lonely time spent in the car.

At this same time, I also got busy shoring up my responsibilities with my two children (then ages eleven and eight), who were living with their mother on Cleveland Street and growing up between our two households in ordinary divorced-family style, which they seemed reconciled to, if not completely happy about. I joined the high-priced Red Man Club during this period, with a mind to teaching the two of them respect for nature’s bounty; and I was also planning a nostalgic update trip to Mississippi, for my old military school’s class reunion, as well as a trip to the Catskills for a murder-mystery weekend, a hike up the Appalachian Trail and a guided float down the Wading River. (I was, as I said, fully conscious that taking an extended flier to Florida, then France, had not been scrupulous fathering practice and I needed to do better; though I felt it was arguable that if one of my parents had done the same thing I’d have understood, as long as they said they loved me and hadn’t both vamoosed at once.)

All told, I felt I was positioning myself well for whatever good might come along and was even giving tentative thought to approaching Ann for an older-but-wiser reconsideration of the marriage option, when one evening in early June Ann herself called up and announced that she and Charley O’Dell were getting married, she was selling her house, quitting her job, putting the children in new schools, moving kit and caboodle, lock, stock and barrel, the whole nine yards up to Deep River and not coming back. She hoped I wouldn’t be upset.

And I simply didn’t know what in the hell to say or think, much less feel, and for several seconds I just stood holding the receiver to my ear as if the line had gone dead, or as if some lethal current had connected through my ear to my brain and struck me cold as a haddock.

Anybody, of course, could’ve seen it coming. I’d met Charley O’Dell, age fifty-seven (tall, prematurely white-haired, rich, big-boned, big-schnozzed, big-jawed, literal-as-a-dictionary architect), on various occasions having to do with the delivery and pickup of my children, and had at that time officially declared him a “no-threat.” O’Dell is commandant of his own pretentious one-man design firm, housed in a converted seamen’s chapel built on stilts (!) at the marsh edge in Deep River, and of course pilots his own 25-foot Alerion, built with his own callused hands and fitted with sails sewn at night while listening to Vivaldi, yakkedy, yakkedy, yak. We once stood one spring night, on the little front stoop of Ann’s house — now mine — and yammered for thirty minutes with not one grain of sincerity or goodwill about diplomatic strategies for corraling the Scandinavians into the EEC, something I knew not a fig about and cared less. “Now if you ask me, Frank, the Danes are the key to the whole square-headed pack out there”—one tanned, naked knobby knee hiked up on Ann’s stoop railing, one bespoke deck shoe dangling half off his long big toe, chin balanced pseudo-judiciously on big fist. Charley’s usual attire when he isn’t wearing a bow tie and a blazer is a big white tee-shirt and khaki canvas walking shorts, something they must hand out at graduation at Yale. I, that night, stared him straight in the eyes as if I were paying rapt attention, though in fact I was sucking one of my molars where I’d discovered a randy taste in an area I couldn’t floss, and was also thinking that if I could hypnotize him and will him into disappearing I could have some time alone with my ex-wife.

Ann, however (suspiciously), wouldn’t give in on the several evenings she and I paused together by my car in the silent dark of divorced former mates who still love each other, wouldn’t crack smirky jokes at Charley’s expense, the way she always had about all her other suitors — jokes about their taste in suits or their dreary jobs, their breath, the reported savage personalities of their ex-wives. Mum was always the word where Charley was concerned. (I guessed wrongly it was respect for his age.) But I should’ve paid closer attention and torpedoed him the way any man would who’s in charge of his senses.

As a result, though, when Ann gave me the bad news on the phone that June evening just at cocktail hour — the sun having cleared the yardarm in butler’s pantries all over Haddam, and trays of ice were being cracked into crystal buckets, leaded tumblers and slender Swedish pitchers, the vermouth hauled out wryly, the smell of juniper flaring the nostrils of many a bushed but deserving ex-hubby — I was kicked square in the head.

And my first on-record thought was of course that I had been bitterly, scaldingly betrayed just at a critical point — the point at which I’d gotten things almost “turned around” for the long canter back to the barn — the commencing point of life’s gentle amelioration, all sins forgiven, all lesions healed.

“Married?” I, in essence, shouted, my heart making one palpable, possibly audible clunk at the bottom of its cavity. “Married to who?”

“To Charley O’Dell,” Ann said, unduly calm in the face of calamitous news.

“You’re marrying the bricklayer!” I said. “Why?”

“I guess because I want somebody to make love to me more than three times after which I never see them again.” She said this calmly too. “You just go to France and I don’t hear from you for months”—which wasn’t true—“I actually think the children need a better life than that. And also because I don’t want to die in Haddam, and because I’d like to see the Connecticut in the morning mist and go sailing in a skiff. I guess, in more traditional terms, I’m in love with him. What’d you think?”

“Those seem like good reasons,” I said, light-headed.

“I’m happy you approve.”

“I don’t approve,” I said, breathless, as if I’d come straight inside from a long run. “You’re moving the kids away too?”

“It’s not in our decree that I can’t,” she said.

“What do they think?” I felt my heart thunk-a-thunk again at the thought of the children. This, of course, was a serious issue, and one that becomes urgent decades beyond divorce itself: the issue of what the children think of their father if their mother remarries. (He almost never fares well. There are books about this, and they aren’t funny: the father is seen either as a stooge wearing goat horns or a brute betrayer who forced Mom into marrying a hairy outsider who invariably treats the kids with irony, ill-disguised contempt and annoyance. Either way, insult is glommed onto injury.)