When he started college at the age of seventeen, he had already jumped a year ahead in high school. He was actually annoyed at himself for having wasted a whole summer after graduation, when he could have taken three or four courses instead. He kept on jumping ahead, zig-zagging his way through the American colleges, University of Texas at Austin, Princeton, eventually completing his doctorate seven years later at Washington University in St. Louis with a dissertation he wrote in a month. Maybe he sensed even then Kubrick’s astronaut snapping at his heels. He would sit in his office until the small hours. There was a couch on which, to the consternation of the janitor, he would catch a couple of hours’ sleep before getting up and going back to work again. The janitor was convinced he was homeless and tried his best not to make a noise with his broom, but my father sensed nothing, or almost nothing, being so completely absorbed in his dissertation, The Theory of Strongly Interacting Particles. It contained a model for calculating complex quantum systems. When it was finished, he had saved five years. He was twenty-four years old. He rested a moment on the couch.
but that’s already too many images, too much knowledge. For now, my dad is a shape moving in the dark, a word, Daddy, and the sound of my mother’s voice. He is made of paper twice folded and pushed through the letter box in oblong envelopes edged with red and blue stripes. Although I have never met him, at least not as far as I remember, I do have a strong feeling that he’s important, perhaps one of the most important people in my life. The mere fact that everyone somehow knows of his existence, that he’s out there somewhere, even though only my mother and my maternal grandmother and my godmother have actually ever seen him, is sufficient to indicate that this is the case. I realize he’s the person the others refer to when they ask about my dad. My information about him is sparse, though saturated with adventure. He lives in America, he’s a nuclear physicist, and since he works at an American university, he is, by the very nature of things, unable to be with my mother and me.
His significance can to a large extent be gauged from the care the envelopes require, and the ritual that emerges around them. They are not torn open in haste, to be read while leaning back against the kitchen counter like other letters, but slit open with a special knife and then read out loud on one of the two small oat-colored wool sofas.
My mother would unfold the paper, which was the color of full-fat milk and so thick it seemed almost like fleece, and if you held it up to the window the watermark shone, the university coat of arms in a circle the size of a cherry plum, and then she would read out loud, in stops and starts, going back through the sentences, then eventually reading the whole letter from the beginning in its entirety, as fluent as a piece of music, and I snuggled up to her with my obscure and very own idea about the person concealed behind those spoken words.
The very special thing was the heart drawn by hand at the bottom of the page. The way it was drawn gave a sense of the three- dimensional, of the heart indeed being an organ of flesh and blood, and that the arrow, Cupid’s dart, penetrated deep and irrevocably into its soft, plump cushion.
Clean bedclothes, regular bedtimes, fresh air. Milk at every meal, three glasses full, not to be spilled. Each morning the world awakened anew, and I was bundled up in the duvet and taken to the high-chair to consume a piece of bread and cheese and half a kiwi or a boiled egg. It was a world populated by women, my mother and my maternal grandmother and my godmother, as well as my grandmother’s other friends from the home economics school who would come together and offer each other bitter-tasting chocolates from fine, gold-lined boxes while talking about those who weren’t there.
At nursery school, which was full of women who for reasons unknown to me had wrapped colorful rags around their heads, I heard about someone they called God, and since whoever that was had according to them created the world, I naturally assumed that person to be a she.
When my mother came back from America with a baby under her arm and as much as could fit into a bag, she moved back in with her mother and father. She took a typewriting course and learned shorthand, and accepted a job as a secretary in the city. With me under her arm and as much as could fit into a bag, were wordings I would use if ever I had to describe how my mother had gotten on a plane and come home from America when I was hardly a year old. She found a small apartment not far from her parents and went to and from work every day by train. As if by magic, she was able to make a new day appear out of her sleeve every morning.
Whenever my grandmother and my mother spoke about my dad, my grandmother would say: He’s always had such kind eyes. Later, after my grandmother died, my godmother appropriated her words: John’s always had such kind eyes.
Another characterization was this: John’s as good as gold.
A third: There’s not a bad bone in his body.
A fourth: The absent-minded professor.
These were words uttered in chorus when the envelope with the monthly check inside either came far too late or did not come at all. He was forgetful, with no sense of time, and my mother had to remind him. But it was not for want of good intent. I understood that he was not entirely present on the planet in the same way as other people.
Each day we snipped a centimeter off a tape measure that hung from the fridge door. When Daddy comes, my mother would say, and whatever came after those words had wings. Daddy’s coming soon. Only two more days till Daddy comes …
In an essay about her father, Siri Hustvedt writes about how she and her sisters would wait every day for their father to come home, and the intense happiness that accompanied the sound of the door opening, when they would run toward him “as if he was a returning hero,” shrieking, “Daddy’s home!”
I felt an excited shudder of recognition when I first read that passage, even though the situation she describes is not one that I ever knew. My dad never came home to us after work like that to let himself in through our door, and yet something inside me still shrieks Daddy’s home! along with Siri Hustvedt and her sisters when I read those lines. All these women, a whole house full, and then the father comes home with the scent of the big wide world on his sleeve, guarantor of there being a life outside the home. Is it then a fact of life that all little girls, regardless of whether they have a father or not, put their ears to the floorboards to listen for his footsteps? I think so. Perhaps the scene has been performed and performed again over such great spans of time that it has taken residence within us, taken on a life of its own, and taken over, not knowing, or perhaps not caring, whether there even is a father. Perhaps the father is a mythological imperative in any girl’s life. And while the original footsteps fade away, making it impossible to say what is myth and what is nature, if there ever was a first time a father’s footsteps sounded, or if little girls have simply waited always, we wait. The same way a bird finds its way to Africa without having flown the route before, we wait.
He has since told me about how I stood holding my mother’s hand, dressed in something like a sailor suit, waiting for him in arrivals, tense with excitement. I can work out he was talking about the summer I turned three, because we moved from the place we were living, some white brick-shaped buildings across the road from the Technology Park in Virum before my birthday. I remember nothing from the airport, nor from the journey home, but I do remember the moment we opened the door of our apartment and I looked at the hall. I remember every detail. It was the same as I had seen every day, our two-bedroom apartment, my mother’s and my home, the hall with the grass-green carpet and the three dome-shaped lamps, the short passage leading into the living room, I had seen it all many times before, and yet at that moment I saw it for the first time. The oat-colored sofas, the dining table, the leather couch my mother used for her bed at nights. My eyes gathered it all up like pebbles picked from a beach.
The image of the daughters and the returning father turned on its head: I came home, because he was with us.
I saw my home, the two-room world in which my mother and I lived, because m
y father saw it.
I showed it to him by seeing it.
Even today I have the feeling that we can go into a room together, he and I, and look at the people and the situations and the objects in it with a quite fundamental open-mindedness, the kind that exists at the moment of waking, the moment before you realize who you are and the world pulls itself together into something recognizable. A feeling of being able to turn myself, or us both, into liquid. Of our becoming eyes.
It has something to do with his quiet manner. Conversely, his field of research, theoretical physics, is filled with the most colorful characters. The times I have been to conferences with him have been like excursions with the gallery of characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A busload of oddballs with the profoundest understanding of matters of which the rest of us have only the very dimmest notions, and yet with their shoelaces left undone. Once, one of my father’s colleagues quite inadvertently made a lady faint in a supermarket just by turning around. The sight of him was enough. My dad, though, is not the kind to make others faint. He doesn’t take up space, is never obtrusive. Not even when anyone else would find it irresistible, like at my birthday parties, where someone will always be eager to impress him with homespun theories of quantum physics, or will venture to put forward popular-science explanations of wormholes and what-have-you, inspired by YouTube clips featuring Stephen Hawking. Not even then will he succumb to the temptation of correcting them, entertaining with shaggy-dog stories from the world of science, or in any other way making himself out to be clever.
Instead he remains quietly on the periphery, a perfect witness, mild, nonjudgmental, impartial. There he will stand, in all humility, jangling the keys in his pocket. Sipping his Scotch, clearing his throat, on the borderland and yet at the center, for, without him in any way inviting it, everyone in his vicinity will strive to make an impression on him. Not only me, but everyone, his colleagues, my sisters’ men, strangers meeting him for the first time. Without him wanting it to be so, or doing anything to make it happen, the whole world and all its wonderful chaos will gravitate toward him, fawning, showing off, hoping for his acknowledgement.
Niels Bohr’s grandchild: Right, John? What do you think, John? Remember, John?
And my dad agreeing, the lightness of his chuckle, friendly and warm: Certainly! Right!
And then when I’m with him, like that day we came home from the airport when I was barely three years old, my eyes become his. Or: I take possession of the world by seeing it for him. He sees what I see. I see the world in front of him.
I tell myself it has always been that way. I tell myself we’ve always shared a particular wordless understanding. It’s not something I’ve talked about with him. I tell myself he feels the same, and that that is exactly what is meant by wordless understanding. It exists without words.
in the middle of the room that was normally our living room, moving boxes were stacked up into a big brown cube. The two small sofas with their wool cushions, the dining table, the chairs, my mother’s couch. In the boxes were the lamps from the hall, and all our other belongings too.
My room was the last to be packed and the first to be unpacked in the new place. There was a sloping lawn and the room had a different shape, squarer, but everything was put exactly the same as before, with only minor deviations due to the room’s dimensions, but the desk was there, and the red boxes with the wheels on the bottom, and the bed was made up with the green stripy cover that had once been my maternal grandfather’s, and before I knew it, the world had turned a quarter revolution and it was evening, and I was put to bed in my own bed in a new place, where there would be new friends to play with, in a new nursery school.
And still later there would be new places with new trees in which I could climb, and new schools, and new mail slots through which striped envelopes would fall. A year and a half would pass, or perhaps two or four, and then my mother would look at me with eyes that said it was time to fetch the moving boxes up from the basement again.
I learned to deal with it and could assemble them in less than a minute, bending the side flaps down and knocking them into place with a hollow bat of my hand, and later, when they were empty again, unfolding them and stacking them next to each other, big brown squares leaned against the wall, always with the flap down in the same top corner to stabilize the stack. We became proficient, my mother and I, we were good at moving, never putting so much into a box that we would be unable to pick it up and carry it ourselves. And to the work of packing belonged the very particular job of sifting and sorting, we took stock and made decisions about what ought to be passed on. But of course, the letters were exempted from such decision-making, they had their own box to themselves in the basement, carried with us religiously every time we moved. Daddy’s letters.
i don’t know where we got the kite from or how this whole kite launch came about, but suddenly, like in dreams, we’re involved in the project of putting the kite in the sky. We’re on the grass in front of the next apartment we lived in, my mother and I, it faced this huge, sloping lawn, and there is my dad, we’re running, his pockets are jangling, the wind takes hold and the kite is snatched upwards. Into the air. His hands are busy, he gives the kite more line, adjusting all the time in accordance with the wind. The kite hovers. And then it drops, abruptly like a bird of prey, toward the grass, as if it saw something there. My dad runs toward it, with me on his heels.
The line has snapped or is tangled up, something, at least, is wrong, because he rummages in his pocket, which is heavy with all manner of objects, until finding a red pocket knife with a little white cross in a circle. I remember clearly the way he unfolds the blade with his fingers, his long fingers with their pronounced knuckles and joints, and cuts away the tangle, joining the rest of the line swiftly with a knot. I admire the pocketknife in his hands. It’s something I haven’t seen before. A knife pulled from the jangling pocket of a pair of cigar-brown pants. Pleated men’s pants, perhaps corduroy, a pocket with a knife in it. Standing there on the grass with a dad, my dad, with Daddy, his jangling pockets, his pocketknife, and his hands. His hands are an incomparable discovery, the way they work, dealing with the line, fixing the kite: they’re incredible, a miracle. They made him real to me, and proved he existed.
•
Otherwise it was hard to form a clear picture, to bring him into focus between his annual visits. Mostly when I thought about him I would see him as if through a rainy windowpane. A distant figure, an outline, a feeling. In the summer, a week that coincided with his attachment to the Niels Bohr Institute, he appeared from out of the dimness with his little suitcase and checked in to the Hotel Østerport, a tall, dark man from the other side of the Atlantic, slender, with an eagle-like nose and dark brown, almost black, wavy hair, thick black-rimmed glasses. His hands and his jangling pocket. The brown laced shoes, rubber-soled. Hair washed and combed back, parted at the side, the smell of Old Spice. His clearing of the throat and tendency to get himself into a fluster. Transparency sheets and his worrying about them, the ever-irreplaceable transparency sheets that so often got left on trains in Eastern Europe on his way to some important conference. Johnnie Walker, water and ice. His way of conversing, standing in our kitchen, hand in pocket, jangling, while my mother made dinner. His way of eating, with the fork in his right hand, knife resting unused on the edge of his plate. His small, astonished laughter. His willingness to acknowledge. The words right and certainly.
But mostly his hands and the way they fumble with a camera or reach for his breast pocket for something to write with. The checked shirts, whose breast pockets were crammed with writing implements, Sharpies, markers for his transparency sheets, and the particular yellow mechanical pencil whose thick leads emerged by twisting it in the middle. It was as if his breast pocket and all its writing implements, especially the mechanical pencil, were a part of his very self, belonging to him as the hammer belonged to Thor, the trident to Neptune. Whenever something needed to be writt
en down (which was often), he reached for his breast pocket, his fingers finding the mechanical pencil as if they had eyes. In the same pocket, a thick, transient wad of folded-up papers, an improvised notebook. If he needed to write down a message, an address, or a phone number, he would take off his glasses, snatching them from his face almost, and go through the wad, wildly concentrated and with eyes wide open and peering, as if he were examining each piece of paper through a magnifying glass or a keyhole to see if there might be some small corner of white still available, and then he would twist the mechanical pencil to bring out the lead and jot down the message in handwriting so meticulous it very nearly resembled text on a printed page, handwriting I knew so well from his letters …
The world we shared comprised overwhelmingly paper and words, airmail envelopes with letters inside, his handwriting, the smell of stationery. Hallmark cards on Valentine’s Day, postcards from places with names like Pisa, Paris, Palo Alto, Taxco, Turin, Trieste, Cologne—this is sounding like a poem—Caracas, Cape Town, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Varenna, Geneva, postcards with rounded corners or serrated edges, and twice a year the pale blue checks from the bank in Lockhart with the printed message Happy Birthday! or Merry Christmas!
In that world, objects became infused with meaning, physical objects like the presents he sent, or more especially those he brought with him when he came on his visits.
This morning when I woke up I decided to make a list of them. It contains twelve items. Twelve objects given to me by my father. I remember the circumstances in which each was given, though the objects themselves are for the most part gone, broken or passed on, a couple of children’s books, toys by Fisher-Price, some games, a pocket transistor made of plastic, that sort of thing.
Lone Star Page 3