Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
A loving look at the elusive lives of parents
Who are our parents, really? Why can’t we, as their children, see them clearly? What happens when a writer of enormous skill and compassion takes on his parents as a topic? These are questions explored by Richard Ford in his deeply moving new memoir, “Between Them.”
Ford has humble expectations for his memoir of his parents: “At day’s end, my fondest wish is that my notice of them will ignite thoughts in a reader’s mind that my parents can partly, usefully, occupy.” He succeeds in this. For weeks after reading this slim volume — just under 200 pages — I thought about it, about Parker and Edna Ford, and also about how I view my own parents and their lives. Ford imbues his writing with love, empathy and an honest striving for the truth, modeling, in a profound way, a method for seeing our parents as clearly as we can.
So who were Parker and Edna Ford? Ford gives each their own biographical essay, written three decades apart. Born in Atkins, Ark., Parker was “a large man, soft, heavyseeming, smiling widely as if he knew a funny joke.” He was not outwardly remarkable in any way, Ford writes, but rather “projected a likable, untried quality, a susceptibility to being overlooked.”
Ford, who wrote the essay about his father 55 years after his sudden death during Ford’s teen years, identifies many questions about his father’s early years. “Why, one wonders, had he left tiny Atkins, where he was from?” Ford asks. “I don’t know how people saw him. As a bumpkin? A hick? A mother’s boy?” Who was he, Ford wants to know, and what did people think of him? These are questions that will never be answered, he seems to be saying, truths that will forever elude him.
These questions also riddle his essay on his mother, who lived for decades after his father died and who presumably could have filled in some of her biographical gaps. Yet the gaps remain. Richard clearly adored his mother, writing at the beginning of his essay about her that “the act of considering my mother’s life is an act of love.” Like Parker, Edna grew up in Arkansas and was born in a backwoods town near the Oklahoma border in 1910. Her childhood was confusing and somewhat tragic: Her mother, after taking up with a man whom she would later marry, sent Edna away to a Catholic boarding school and later, when Edna returned home, “shockingly,” as Ford describes it, presented her to people as her “sister” instead of her daughter.
Despite this troubled childhood, Edna was funny, pretty and the owner of a curious intellect. When she met Parker, the two fell deeply in love and spent years roaming around the South, just the two of them. He was a traveling salesman, selling starch to small grocery stores, prisons, hospitals, even a leper colony. She was along for the ride. “Something about it all may have seemed unnarratable — unworthy or unnecessary for telling,” Ford writes of his mother’s inability — or refusal — to describe those carefree years in any real detail.
Years on, her fleeting references to that time made the 1930s seem like a long weekend. A loose, pick-up-and-go life. Drinking. Cars. Restaurants. Dancing. People they liked on the road. A swirling life that didn’t really have direction. She sometimes gave the impression of possibly untidy things going on, some recklessness of spirit that didn’t rise to the level of evil, yet something a son would be better off not to worry with.
The pair believed they were unable to have children, until Edna had Richard in 1944. Their life settled down after that. Richard describes feeling as though he existed “between them,” a beloved son but also existing between two people madly in love with each other.
Ford wrestles with the truth that his memories of his parents are not complete and that they exist in his mind because they likely were important to him, but may not be most representative of what was important to either of them. “Pieces can stand for the whole well enough,” he writes. “Though each must make a difference to me or I wouldn’t remember them so well.”
He acknowledges that he has used some of these memories in his books. The father, for example, in “Canada” resembles Parker Ford physically (“a tall, winning, smiling handsome six-footer … with a big, square, expectant face”). The mother is “tiny, intense,” with “a skeptical frame of mind,” like Edna. Yet, of course, Ford’s parents never robbed a bank, as the parents do in the novel. While he may take details for his stories, Ford takes care to make clear that he does not wish to use his parents’ stories as fodder for literature. “My parents, after all, were not made of words,” he wrote. “They were not literary instruments employable to conjure something larger.”