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

house. He knew, I suppose, he wouldn’t be there forever and was happy for a reprieve from his usual life, and to have my mother as his temporary girlfriend. He also seemed to think I would not be there much longer either, and that we had this in common.
    The one thing I remember him saying to me was during the days before I went with my father to the marsh that Christmas—Dubinion’s only Christmas with us, as it turned out. I came into the great shadowy living room where the piano sat beside the front window and where my mother had established a large Christmas tree with blinking lights and a gold star on top. I had a copy of The Inferno , which I’d decided I would read over the holidays because the next year I hoped to leave Sandhearst and be admitted to Lawrenceville, where my father had gone before Harvard. William Dubinion was again in his place at the piano, smoking and drinking. My mother had been singing “You’ve Changed” inher thin, pretty soprano and had left to take a rest because singing made her fatigued. When he saw the red jacket on my book he frowned and turned sideways on the bench and crossed one long thin leg over the other so his pale hairless skin showed above his black patent leather shoes. He was wearing black trousers with a white shirt, but no socks, which was his normal dress around the house.
    “That’s a pretty good book,” he said in his soft lisping voice, and stared right at me in a way that felt accusatory.
    “It’s written in Italian,” I said. “It’s a poem about going to hell.”
    “So is that where you expect to go?”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t.”
    “‘ Per me si va nella citta dolente. Per me si va nell’eterno dolore .’ That’s all I remember,” he said, and he played a chord in the bass clef, a spooky, rumbling chord like the scary part in a movie.
    I assumed he was making this up, though of course he wasn’t. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
    “Same ole,” he said, his cigarette still dangling in his mouth. “Watch your step when you take a guided tour of hell. Nothing new.”
    “When did you read this book?” I said, standing between the two partly closed pocket doors. This man was my mother’s boyfriend, her Svengali, her impresario, her seducer and corrupter (as it turned out). He was a strange, powerful man who had seen life I would never see. And I’m sure I was both afraid of him and equally afraid he would detect it, which probably made me appear superior and insolent and made him dislike me.
    Dubinion looked above the keyboard at an arrangement of red pyracanthas my mother had placed there. “Well, I could say something nasty. But I won’t.” He took a breath and let it out heavily. “You just go ahead on with your readin’. I’ll go on with my playin’.” He nodded but did not look at me again. We didn’t have too many more conversations after that. My mother sent him away in the winter. Once or twice he returned but, at some point, he disappeared. Though bythen her life had changed in the bad way it probably had been bound to change.
    The only time I remember my mother speaking directly to me during these three days, other than to inform me dinner was ready or that she was leaving at night to go out to some booking Dubinion had arranged, which I’m sure she paid him to arrange (and paid for the chance to sing as well), was on Wednesday afternoon, when I was sitting on the back porch poring over the entrance requirement information I’d had sent from Lawrenceville. I had never seen Lawrenceville, or been to New Jersey, never been farther away from New Orleans than to Yankeetown, Florida, where my military school was located in the buildings of a former Catholic hospital for sick and crazy priests. But I thought that Lawrenceville—just the word itself—could save me from the impossible situation I deemed myself to be in. To go to Lawrenceville, to travel the many train miles, and to enter whatever strange,