He was not really the golf type, but more the type to race cars, and he took it up, I believe, in a mindful way because it meant something to him, some measure of success in the world. I remember standing on a tee with him, both of us wearing shorts, looking down the long palm-lined fairway beyond which you could see a sea wall and the Gulf, and seeing him grimace toward the faraway flag as if it represented a fortress he was reluctantly about to lay seige to, and him saying to me, “Well, Franky, do you think I can hit it that far?” And my saying, “I doubt it.” He was sweating and smoking a cigarette in the heat, and I have a very clear memory of him looking at me then as if in wonder. Who was I again? What was it I was planning? He seemed struck by such questions. It was not exactly a heartless look, just a look of profoundest wonder and resign.

My father died when I was fourteen, and after that my mother placed me in what she called “the naval academy,” which was in fact a little military school near Gulfport called Gulf Pines (we cadets called it Lonesome Pines) and where I never once minded being. In fact, I liked the military bearing that was required there, and I think there is an upright part of my character which at least respects the appearance of rectitude if not the fact, and which school was responsible for. My situation at Lonesome Pines was somewhat more than average, since most of the cadets had come there from the broken homes of rich people or from abandonment, or because they had stolen something or burned something down and their families were able to get them off and sent there instead of reform school. Though the other students never seemed any different from me, just boys full of secrecy and not-knowing and abject longing, who thought of this time as something simply to be gotten through, so that no one made attachments. It was as if we all sensed we’d be gone someday soon in a sudden instant—often it happened in the middle of the night—and didn’t want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

What I remember of the place was a hot parade grounds surrounded by sparse pine trees, a flag pole with an anchor at its base, a stale shallow lake where I learned to sail, a smelly beach and boat house, hot brown stucco classroom buildings and white barracks houses that reeked with mops. There were some ex-Navy warrant officers who taught there—men unsuited for regular teaching. One Negro even taught there, a man named Bud Simmons who coached baseball. The Commandant was an old captain from World War I, named Admiral Legier.

We took our leaves in bunches, out on Highway 1 in the little Gulf Coast towns we could get to by public bus, in the air-conditioned movie and tamale houses, or hanging out in the vicinity of Keesler Air Force Base, in the hot, sandy parking lots of strip joints, all of us in our brown uniforms trying to get the real servicemen to buy us booze, and wretched because we were too young to go in ourselves and had too little money to be able to do anything but squander it.

I went home on holidays to my mother’s bungalow in Biloxi, and occasionally I saw her brother Ted who lived not far away, and who came to see me and took me on trips to Mobile and Pensacola, where we did not do much talking. It may be just the fate of boys whose fathers die young never to be young—officially—ourselves; youth being just a brief dream, a prelude of no particular lasting moment before actual life begins.

My only personal athletic experience came there at Lonesome Pines. I tried to play baseball on the school team, under Bud Simmons, the Negro coach. I was relatively tall for my age—though I’m more normal now—and I had the lanky, long-loose-arm grace of a natural ball player. But I could never do it well. I could always see myself as though from outside, doing the things I was told to do. And that was enough never to do them well or fully. An inbred irony seemed to haunt me, and served no useful purpose but to make me a musing, wiseacre kid, shifty-eyed and secretive—the kind who belongs in exactly such a place as Lonesome Pines. Bud Simmons did what he could with me, including make me throw with my other arm, which I happily did, though it didn’t help at all. He referred to my problem as not being able to “give it up,” and I knew exactly what he meant. (Today I am amazed when I find athletes who can be full-fledged people and also “give it up” to their sport. That does not happen often, and it is a dear gift from a complex God.)

I did not see so much of my mother in those years. Nor does this seem exceptional to me. It must’ve happened to thousands of us B. 1945s, and to children in earlier centuries as well. It seems odder that children see their parents so much these days, and come to know them better than they probably ever need to. I saw my mother when she could see me.