Vintage Ford by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

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 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” in her 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.
    â€œThat’s a pretty good book,” he said in his soft lisping voice, and stared right at me in a way that felt accusatory.
    â€œIt’s written in Italian,” I said. “It’s a poem about going to hell.”
    â€œSo is that where you expect to go?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “I don’t.”
    â€œ
‘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.
    â€œSame ole,” he said, his cigarette still dangling in his mouth. “Watch your step when you take a guided tour of hell. Nothing new.”
    â€œWhen 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