A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

and then taken it in their hasty divorce.
    “How’s school, by the way,” my father said distractedly.
    “How’s what?” I was so surprised to be asked that. My father sounded confused, as if he’d been reading something and lost his place on a page.
    “School. You know? Grades? Did you get all A’s? You should. You’re smart. At least you have a smart mouth.”
    “I hate school,” I said. I had liked Jesuit where I’d had friends. But my mother had made me go away to Sandhearst because of all the upset with my father’s leaving. There I wore a khaki uniform with a blue stripe down the side of my pants leg, and a stiff blue doorman’s hat. I felt a fool at all times.
    “Oh well, who cares,” my father said. “You’ll get into Harvard the same way I did.”
    “What way,” I asked, because even at fifteen I wanted to go to Harvard.
    “On looks,” my father said. “That’s how southerners get along. That’s the great intelligence. Once you know that, the rest is pretty simple. The world wants to operate on looks. It only uses brains if looks aren’t available. Ask your mother. It’s why she married me when she shouldn’t have. She’ll admit it now.”
    “I think she’s sorry about it,” I said. I thought about my mother listening to half our conversation.
    “Oh yes. I’m sure she is, Buck. We’re all a little sorry now . I’ll testify to that.” The other voice in the room where he was spoke something then, again in an ironic tone. “Oh you shut up,” my father said. “You just shut up that talk and stay out of this. I’ll see you Thursday morning, son,” my father said, and hung up before I could answer.
    This conversation with my father occurred on Monday, the eighteenth of December, three days before we were supposed to go duck hunting. And for the days in between then and Thursday, my mother more or less avoided me, staying in her room upstairs with the door closed, often with William Dubinion, or going away in the car to her singing lessons with him driving and acting as her chauffeur (though she rode in the front seat). It was still the race times then, and colored people were being lynched and trampled on and burnt out all over the southern states. And yet it was just as likely to cause no uproar if a proper white woman appeared in public with a Negro man in our city. There was no rule or logic to any of it. It was New Orleans, and if you could carry it off you did. Plus Dubinion didn’t mind working in the camellia beds in front of our house, just for the record. In truth, I don’t think he minded anything very much. He had grown up in the cotton patch in Pointe Coupee Parish, between the rivers, had somehow made it to music school at Wilberforce in Ohio, been to Korea, and had played in theArmy band. Later he barged around playing the clubs and juke joints in the city for a decade before he somehow met my mother at a society party where he was the paid entertainment, and she was putting herself into the public eye to make the case that when your husband abandons you for a rich queer, life will go on.
    Mr. Dubinion never addressed a great deal to me. He had arrived in my mother’s life after I had gone away to military school, and was simply a fait accompli when I came home for Thanksgiving. He was a tall, skinny, solemnly long yellow-faced Negro with sallow, moist eyes, a soft lisp and enormous, bony, pink-nailed hands he could stretch up and down a piano keyboard. I don’t think my mother could have thought he was handsome, but possibly that didn’t matter. He often parked himself in our living room, drinking scotch whiskey, smoking cigarettes and playing tunes he made up right on my grandfather’s Steinway concert grand. He would hum under his breath and grunt and sway up and back like the jazzman Erroll Garner. He usually looked at me only out of the corner of his yellow Oriental-looking eye, as if neither of us really belonged in such a dignified place as my family’s