I was where things had deviated and always sensed that. For all this to be a blissful life, love is certainly required, and a willingness—on my part—to fill some things in and deflect others.

His being gone must’ve created strains. My mother never complained in my hearing, though she was volatile—even in her loving. A shouter, a smacker, a frowner and a glowerer. Suddenly she’d had a baby. Suddenly she was too much alone in a strange city where old ties mattered and newcomers were foreigners. Possibly something about me—about my nature—also made things straitened. When I began to talk, I talked a great, great deal and wasn’t naturally passive or compliant. When he was gone, life with her was never completely calm. Though when he was back, calm was instantly, rigorously enforced. Which created its own strains.

As time went on, did I ever sense that something was wrong between them? No. It was my child’s outlook to think most things were right. And yet if life’s eternal drama is of events seeking a more perfect state, their life and mine was not that. My recalled feelings over that time—my little-boy life, in Jackson, on Congress, in my first years, in the forties and beginning fifties—are of a hectic, changing, provisional existence. They loved me, protected me. But the experience of life was of events, of things and people in motion, and of being often alone and to the side of things. Which did not make me sorry and does not now. But life wasn’t calm.

What did my father actually think about his situation, if he thought anything? Undoubtedly he thought, without much specificity, that there would be something more that would happen later. If he wondered whether he was good at fatherhood, he probably thought he was. He would’ve believed he was a good and pleasing pressure in the air of rooms he and we occupied; a continually welcome arrival into my mother’s life and mine. He might’ve actually thought he was not absent at all, but present—only not in body: just not there for doctor visits, for the dentist, to take me to kindergarten at Mrs. Nelson’s, to Sunday school; later on, for parent-teacher meetings, Cub Scouts, the swimming pool, the library, school pageants, and later yet for baseball try-outs and junior high graduation. This not-being-precisely-there is what was required to have his good job. And wasn’t I always brought along—to visit their few friends, to be put into bedrooms to sleep while beyond the wall they were drinking and talking and laughing? And there was New Orleans again, the Gulf Coast, Pensacola, occasionally Atkins and Little Rock—the places they went. There would be time—the later that was to come—to teach me things, to impart onto me a way to be. He called me “son.” I called him “Daddy.” People said I looked like him. He would not have thought that seventy years later I cannot remember the sound of his voice, but long to.

And for me, how was it?

I could not have formulated the thought that when I was a young child growing up, he was then a younger husband undergoing the transformation to being an oldish father; or that what my mother was experiencing in herself and with me, he was experiencing the other side of. He was my father. I knew that was important. I knew his physical dimensions.