We’re from Biloxi, Mississippi.” “Hello. I’m from Oscoda. It’s way up in Michigan.” “Hello. I live in Victorville.” I tried to learn the basic things the other boys knew and to talk the way they talked, pick up the slang expressions, walk around as though I felt confident being there and couldn’t be surprised. Berner did the same. Then we’d move away to some other place, and Berner and I would try to get situated all over again. This kind of growing up, I know, can leave you either cast out and adrift, or else it can encourage you to be malleable and dedicated to adjusting—the thing my mother disapproved of, since she didn’t do it, and held out for herself some notion of a different future, more like the one she’d imagined before she met our father. We—my sister and I—were small players in a drama she saw to be relentlessly unfolding.
As a result, what I began to care greatly about was school, which was the continual thread in life besides my parents and my sister. I never wanted school to be over. I’d spend as much time inside school as I could, poring over books we were given, being around the teachers, breathing in the school odors, which were the same everywhere and like no other. Knowing things became important to me, no matter what they were. Our mother knew things and appreciated them. I wanted to be like her in that way, since I could keep the things I knew, and they would characterize me as being well-rounded and promising—characteristics that were important to me. No matter if I didn’t belong in any of those places, I did belong in their schools. I was good at English and history and science and math—subjects my mother was also good at. Each time we picked up and moved, the only fact of life that made moving frightening was that for some reason I wouldn’t be allowed to return to school, or I would miss crucial knowledge that could assure my future and was obtainable nowhere else. Or that we’d go to some new place where there would be no school for me at all. (Guam was once discussed.) I feared I’d end up knowing nothing, have nothing to rely on that could distinguish me. I’m sure it was all an inheritance from my mother’s feelings of an unrewarded life. Though it may also have been that our parents, aswirl in the thickening confusion of their own young lives—not being made for each other, probably not physically desiring each other as they briefly had, becoming gradually only satellites of each other, and coming eventually to resent one another without completely realizing it—didn’t offer my sister and me enough to hold on to, which is what parents are supposed to do. However, blaming your parents for your life’s difficulties finally leads nowhere.
When our father took his discharge in the early spring, we were all of us interested in the presidential campaign then going on. They agreed about the Democrats and Kennedy, who’d soon be nominated. My mother said my father liked Kennedy because he imagined a resemblance. My father profoundly disliked Eisenhower for reasons having to do with American bombers being sacrificed to “softening up Jerry” behind the lines on D-Day, and due to Eisenhower’s traitorous silence about MacArthur, who my father revered, and because Ike’s wife was known to be “a tippler.”
He disliked Nixon as well. He was a “cold fish,” “looked Italian,” and was a “war Quaker,” which made him a hypocrite. He also disliked the UN, which he thought was too expensive and allowed Commies like Castro (who he called a “two-bit actor”) to have a voice in the world. He kept a framed photograph of Franklin Roosevelt in our living room on the wall above the Kimball spinet and the mahogany and brass metronome that didn’t work but came with the house. He praised Roosevelt for not letting polio defeat him, for killing himself with work to save the country, for bringing the Alabama backwoods out of the dark ages with the REA, and for putting up with Mrs. Roosevelt who he called “The First Prune.”
My father maintained a strong ambivalence about being from Alabama. On the one hand, he pictured himself as a “modern man” and not a “hill-William,” as he said.
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