Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

By nine I am up, dressed in my work clothes and out in the side yard nosing around the flower beds like a porch hound. Following my speculations about Herb, I went back to sleep and woke up happy and alert — my mind empty, the sun speckling through the beech leaves and not a hint of ugly Detroit weather on the horizon. My trip to the Arcenaults, however, is still two hours off, and as is sometimes the case these days, I do not have quite enough to do. One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.

Beyond my hemlock hedge Delia Deffeyes is out in her yard in tennis whites, reading the newspaper, something I’ve seen her do a hundred times. She and Caspar have had their morning game, and now he has gone in for a nap. The Deffeyes and I have a policy which says that simply seeing each other in our yards is no reason to have a conversation, and normally we pass polite offhand waves and smiling nods and go about our business. Though I never mind an impromptu conversation. I am not a man who hoards his privacy, and if I am out in my yard spreading Vigaro or inspecting my crocuses, I am per se available for an encounter. Delia and I do occasionally engage in nuts and bolts publishing talk with reference to a book she’s writing for the historical society on European traditions in New Jersey architecture. My experience is years old, but I maintain a kind of plain-talk, common-sense expertise about matters: “Any editor worth his or her salt ought to appreciate the hell out of the kind of attention to detail you’re willing to give. You can’t take that for granted, that’s all I know.” It is all I know, but Delia seems willing to take a word to the wise. She is eighty-two, born to a storied American business family in Morocco during the Protectorate, and has seen a wide world. Caspar has retired out of the diplomatic corps and came to the seminary afterward to teach ethics. Neither of them has too many years left on earth. (It is, in fact, a revelation to live in a town with a seminary, since like Caspar, seminarians are not a bit what you’d think. Most of them are not pious Bible-pounders at all, but sharp-eyed liberal Ivy League types with bony, tanned-leg second wives, and who’ll stand with you toe to toe at a cocktail party, drink scotch and talk about their time-share condos in Telluride.)

Delia spies me down behind the children’s jungle gym, fingering a rose bud that’s ready to bloom, and wanders over to the hemlock hedge shaking her head, though apparently still reading. It is her signal and the premise of our neighborliness — all our conversations are just extensions of the last one, even though they are often on different subjects and months apart.

“Now here, Frank, look at this.” Delia holds up the front page of the Times to show me something. Church bells have begun clamoring and gonging across town. On all streets families are off to Sunday school in spanking new Easter get-ups — cars washed and polished to look like new, all arguments suspended. “What do you think about what our government’s doing to the poor people in Central America?”

“I haven’t kept very close tabs on that, Delia,” I say from the roses. “What’s going on down there now?” I give her a sunny smile and walk over to the hedge.

Her moist blue eyes are large with effrontery. (Her hair is the precise blue color of her eyes.) “Well, they’re mining all the ports down there, in, let’s see,” she takes a quick peek, “Nicaragua.” She crushes the open paper down in front of her and blinks at me. Delia is small and brown and wrinkled as an iguana, but has plenty of strong opinions about world affairs and how they ought to work out. “Caspar’s extremely discouraged about it. He thinks it’ll be another Vietnam. He’s in the house right now calling up all his people in Washington trying to find out what’s really going on. He may still have some influence, he thinks, though I don’t see how he could.”

“I’ve been out of town a couple of days, Dee.” I stand and admire Dee and Caspar’s pair of pink pottery flamingos which they bought in Mexico.

“Well, I don’t see why we should mine each other’s ports, Frank. Do you? Honestly?” She shakes her head in private disappointment with our entire government, as though it had been one of her very favorites but suddenly become incomprehensible. For the moment, though, my mind’s as empty as a jug, captured by the belling at the seminary carillon. “Come my soul, thou must be waking; now is breaking o’er the earth another day.” I find I cannot bring up the name or the face of the man who is president, and instead I see, unaccountably, the actor Richard Chamberlain, wearing a burnoose and a nicely trimmed Edwardian beard.

“I guess it would depend on what the cause was. But it doesn’t sound good to me.” I smile across the flat-trimmed hedge. I have to work at being a full adult around Delia, since if I’m not careful our age difference — roughly forty-five years — can have the effect of making me feel like I’m ten.

“We’re hypocrites, Frank, if that’s our policy. You should bear in mind Disraeli’s warning about the conservative governments.”

“I don’t remember that, I guess.”

“That they’re organized hypocrisy, and he wasn’t wrong about that.”

“I remember Thomas Wolfe wrote about making the world safe for hypocrisy. But that’s not the same.”

“Caspar and I think that the States should build a wall all along the Mexican frontier, as large as the Great Wall, and man it with armed men, and make it clear to those countries that we have problems of our own up here.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Then we could at least solve our own problem with the black man.” I don’t exactly know what Delia and Caspar think about Bosobolo, but I do not intend asking. For being anti-colonial, Delia has some pretty strong colonial instincts. “You writers, Frank. Always ready to set sail with any wind that blows.”

“The wind can blow you interesting places, Dee.” I say this with only mock seriousness, since Delia knows my heart.

“I see your wife at the grocery, and she doesn’t seem very happy to me, Frank. And those two sweet babies.”

“They’re all fine, Dee. Maybe you caught her on a bad day. Her golf game gets her down sometimes. She really didn’t get a fair start on a real career. I think she’s trying to make up for lost time.”

“I do too, Frank.” Delia nods, her face like lean old glove leather, then folds her paper in a neat paperboy’s fold that’s wonderful to see. I’m ready to dawdle away back to the roses and crab apples. Delia and I are sympathetic to each other’s private causes, and both realize it, and that is good enough for me. For a moment I spy Frisker, her seal-point, sleuthing around the hibiscus below Caspar’s flag pole, staring up at the bird feeder where a junco’s perched. Frisker has been known to prowl my roof at night and wake me up, and I’ve thought about getting a slingshot, but so far haven’t. “Man wasn’t meant to live alone, Frank,” Delia says significantly, eyeing me closely all of a sudden.

“It has its plusses, Delia. I’ve adjusted pretty well now.”

“How long has it been since you read The Sun Also Rises , Frank?”

“It’s probably been a while now.”

“You should reread it,” Delia says. “There’re important lessons there. That man knew something. Caspar met him in Paris once.”

“He was always one of my favorites.” Not true, though a lie’s what’s asked for. It’s not surprising that Delia’s view of the complex world dates from about 1925. In fact it might have been a better time back then.