There was his leaning-forward sweetness, his humor. His uncertainty-seeking-certainty. His bodily softness and rich smell. I knew the words for what he did to make a living. I knew the words for where he went—things I’d have known from infancy.

But did we have “interactions”? Of course. I must have told him about things—learning to swim at the YMCA, about General MacArthur’s visit to Jackson in 1952, which he missed. About trying (unsuccessfully) to earn Cub Scout badges. And later, about wanting to go to Camp Mondamin. I have no memory of anything being a problem, of ever feeling I wasn’t getting him enough. There was a way that his not being there most of the time became a kind of privileged state for me, a distinction among the other boys. It was as if I came to like having him gone. Though it also meant that I could not—when those same boys eventually asked—paint a clear picture of my life in one sentence or even four.

I have already said that what I don’t know about my parents ought not be thought a quality of their lives. And yet, for me—different from my mother and different from him—his continual absence, much more than his intermittent presences, has become (and perhaps was all along through childhood) much of who he was. Memory has pushed him further and further away until I “see” him—in those early days—as a large, smiling man standing on the other side of a barrier made of air, looking at me, possibly looking for me, recognizing me as his son but never coming quite close enough for me to touch.

HOW WE LIVED IN JACKSON WAS SMALLY. My mother, who’d been taught by nuns, now joined the Presbyterians—a church close to our house—because my kindergarten teacher was a member there. “Accepted by profession of faith” my mother’s certificate stated. My father, who never attended, joined “by letter,” though he’d been raised a Presbyterian. A red-brick school—Jefferson Davis School—was next door, where it still sits. I was to go there. My mother was friendly—when she knew you—but did not make friends easily and was suspicious of the other children on our street, children who lived in rooming houses in upstairs apartments. Being a transient herself, she looked askance at transients. There were the old families in their big white houses up and down the block. They, in their turn, were wary of us. My mother and I ate in the boarding-houses up Congress by the capitol, two blocks south. Or sometimes we bought our meals at the steam-table at the grocery, which was not far away. We walked to town, the two of us—to the two department stores or to the movies. I rode the bus alone to kindergarten, walked the two blocks from the stop down Keener Ave, then took the bus home after lunch. Most always, he was not there—my father. Though I remember his Ford sitting at the curb on weekends, remember the sound of him in the house, in the bathroom, snoring in his bed. I remember the size of him.