Between Them

Rather, he projected a likable, untried quality, a susceptibility to being over-looked. Deceived. Except by my mother

There was the terrible temper, not so much anger as eruptive and impulsive, born of frustrations with things he couldn’t do or hadn’t done well enough, or didn’t know—private dissatisfactions, possibly of the sort that had made his young father take a seat on the porch step one moonlit summer night in 1916, having lost the farm to bad investments, and poison himself to death out of dismay. My father’s temper wasn’t of that kind.

His sweetness, the large forward-leaning sunniness and uncertainty worked against that, allowed an opening for a life my mother could see and enter with the sound of her name. Edna.

A dandified farmer with a gold-headed cane in a small Arkansas town.

My father did not project “a strength,” even as a young man.

He confers—they confer—the administration of the week’s events, including my supervision, onto her.

Which is true and, to that extent, is fine with me.

HIS LARGE MALLEABLE, FLESHY FACE was given to smiling. His first face was always the smiling one.

The long Irish lip. The transparent blue eyes—my eyes.

writing these two memoirs—thirty years apart—I have permitted some inconsistencies to