The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  My mother was shaking her head, and the expression on her face was pained. “I should have figured that out. Or you should have told me. That’s not it at all. You’re just about the main attraction as far as your father’s concerned.”

  And then I told her the same thing she’d told me a thousand times. “It will be all right,” I said.

  My mother sighed. “Yep,” she said. “That’s sort of our party line, I guess.”

  That evening she fixed creamed chipped beef on toast, which she barely touched. While she watched me eat, she asked about my math homework and the fifth-grade picnic, which was only a few weeks away. When we’d finished dinner, she excused herself to go and freshen up for her bridge group that night. As I was clearing the table and rinsing our dishes, she came in and asked me if I was sure I would be all right by myself. It was only recently that she had started to let me stay at home alone, instead of dropping me off at my grandmother’s, and I told her I was fine. She wrote Mrs. McCubbin’s phone number, which I’d known by heart for months, on the pad by the phone, and she left.

  I locked the front door behind her and waited five minutes to be sure she wasn’t coming back for something. And then I went to her room.

  The letter was on her dresser. I unfolded it and turned to the last page and found the place where my mother had stopped reading: “I have tried not to say too much, Eve, so that you can read all of the above to Anna. The truth is that I am a changed man, and I suspect I would be unrecognizable to her. I have lost weight; my nerves are worn thin; I am always anxious. Regret is a backdrop to all my thoughts, and it isn’t just staying that I regret. It’s not that specific. Rather, it’s a feeling of general sadness that I suppose comes from a series of bad decisions, things I wish I could change, one after the other. My chances of changing those things are slim, I’ll wager. I don’t find myself good company, and I am less than proud of the man I have become.”

  I let my breath out and just stood there for a few minutes, holding my father’s letter as I tried to remember the details of his face. It shouldn’t be hard, I thought. He’s your father; surely you know what he looks like. But I couldn’t; I couldn’t even remember his voice. And although I stared hard at his neat black cursive and tried to conjure him up from the words on the page, all I could see was his short blond hair and his eyes, bright blue and intense.

  My father was right: that unlikely letter was the last we heard for many months. Everything stopped after Pearl Harbor—postcards, letters, wires—and we heard nothing, an ominous silence worse than the sporadic bursts of news that had preceded it. Although he was imprisoned by the Japanese in November of 1942, it was not until March of 1943 that my mother received official word of it from the International Red Cross. This was, she said, the bad news she’d been expecting. She said there was some good news: the camp seemed to be for political prisoners, and perhaps my father would not be held for long. For the first time, I didn’t ask any questions. I finally understood that there was much my mother didn’t know, and that asking only made things worse.

  By summer my mother had heard that there was talk of repatriation. Again, I didn’t ask questions, not even what “repatriation” meant. Instead I just went to my grandmother’s huge dictionary the next time I was at her house, where the closest word I could find was repatriate, which meant “to bring or send back (a person, esp. a prisoner of war, a refugee, etc.) to his country or the land of his citizenship.” I wrote the definition down on a piece of notebook paper and kept it in my binder. It was the exact word I’d been looking for; it was what I’d wanted all along.

  Over that summer, as my mother began to believe that my father might soon be released, she acted as though the news was something fragile. She told almost no one, as though speaking of my father’s return might jinx it. In the first week of September, she was notified by the U.S. State Department that my father would be boarding the Swedish exchange ship Gripsholm on the fifteenth of September as part of an exchange of American and Japanese civilians, and that he would arrive in New York in mid-December. Even then she remained cautious. I began to think that she wouldn’t really believe it until he was standing in front of her.

  I understood her caution. I felt like even saying the words might do something bad, but it wasn’t only the idea of jinxes and bad luck that made me cautious. I was nervous about seeing him, even though that was what I’d wanted for years. But by then we had been separated from him for five years, nearly half my life. Fathers in general were unknowns to me. I didn’t know how to act around them, I was always nervous around my friends’ fathers. Now I saw that even my own father was an unknown, and I found myself wondering what he was like. I could describe him on cue—how he looked, things he said, what he liked to eat, the qualities he valued in a polo pony. But the man I knew was a thirty-one-year-old businessman in Shanghai, a millionaire who had everything he wanted. A man in a white dinner jacket, standing in the kitchen with a tumbler of Scotch in his hand, about to go out for the evening; a businessman sitting at a carved blackwood desk, a Philippine cigar in his mouth, a green fountain pen in his hand as he scratched away on a yellow legal pad; a polo player in jodhpurs and riding boots, pacing in a gravel driveway as he held forth on ponies and automobiles and Chiang Kai-shek, while his chauffeur polished the chrome on the Packard. But the man who was joining us was a thirty-six-year-old ex-prisoner who was being sent home with only what he could carry, a man who had not lived in or even visited the United States in fourteen years. I thought it was possible that my father was someone I didn’t know.

  I guessed that he was faced with the same problem, for my mother and I were changed as well. My mother was thirty-three, but when I looked at photographs of her from Shanghai, I sensed a trick, a sort of optical illusion. She somehow looked younger now than she had in Shanghai. On the weekends she went out with friends, and though she wasn’t flirtatious, I could see she liked being around the husbands of her friends, and that she enjoyed the looks she got when we were at the beach or the movies. She seemed to get prettier as she got older, and her prettiness bothered me. I would watch her smiling and laughing at a party or barbecue or just talking to the box boy while we waited in line at the Market Basket on Huntington Drive, and I’d think, Can’t you just look like the other moms?

  I noticed those things. I was almost thirteen. I was just under five feet tall and weighed ninety-five pounds. I had wavy brown hair that just touched my shoulders and bangs that I pulled at when I was nervous. In the middle of September of 1943, a week after we heard that my father would soon be released, I started seventh grade at South Pasadena Junior High, where I would go through the ninth grade. It was a sprawling tiled-roof structure on Fair Oaks between Oak and Rollin, with a clock tower and an inscription over the entrance that read: Along the cloistered arcade of the junior high school, youth treads its happy way toward the fullness of life. I wasn’t so sure about what I was treading toward, or just what “the fullness of life” meant, but I liked the sound of it, and I liked where we lived. With my blue eyes and freckles and hair bleached a little lighter by the sun, I even looked like a native, a California kid, my grandmother said. I considered that a compliment, though what my coloring really meant was that I took after my father. I saw that as a compliment, too, and a good sign: maybe we would have other things in common as well. Maybe he would like it here, too, maybe he would love the things I loved: the beach, the warm days, the orange groves, the dark purple mountains against the pale blue sky.

  I hoped he would, for I thought this place might feel strange to him. My mother warned me that he would need time to adjust. He was returning not to home, but to a country he’d left almost fifteen years earlier, a country that, by the time of his return, had been at war for two years. Newsreels and air raid warnings, rationing and blackout curtains and windows stripped with tape to prevent shattering during a bombing had become everyday things for us. As we grew more certain of his return, I tried to see our lives through his eyes.
But I couldn’t imagine what that view was like, and I took up wishing again: Make him like it here, I thought. Let this feel like home.

  On December 13, my mother and grandmother and I went to early Mass at Holy Family. It was the Feast of Saint Lucy, a fourth-century martyr and virgin who refused suitor after suitor and for her obstinacy was condemned to live in a brothel. But when the time came for her to be taken, she could not be moved from her room. Her frustrated accusers then tried to burn her at the stake, but she wouldn’t burn, and she was finally beheaded. And now her feast day was the festival of light, held on one of the shortest and darkest days of the year.

  My grandmother told me about Saint Lucy over breakfast. She saw to it that I knew many of the saints, and feast days and memorials and solemnities were all occasions for me, days to honor some person who had loved God and pleased Him in always amazing ways. My mother was quieter than my grandmother in her admiration, and though she listened, she rarely commented on what my grandmother said.

  That day she was making hot cross buns for breakfast, and when the buns were ready, the three of us ate breakfast in the kitchen. The steady sound of the rain and the warmth of the kitchen and the smell of dough and cinnamon made the rest of the world seem far away, so when there was a knock at the door at a little after nine, I was startled.

  My mother went to see who it was, and when she came back, she held a telegram, which she opened and read without speaking. Finally she looked first at my grandmother, then at me.

  “He’s coming,” she said simply, though she didn’t really seem to understand what she was saying. “He’ll be here on the seventeenth.”

  “Who?” I said. I just wanted to hear her say it.

  The look she gave me bordered on rebuke. “Your father,” she said, but she too sounded amazed.

  And then she explained: the Gripsholm, my father’s exchange ship, had docked in New York four days earlier, and my father had booked railway passage almost the second he had disembarked. He would travel on the Union Pacific to San Francisco, then the Southern Pacific to Los Angeles, and he would arrive at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, the seventeenth, at nine-thirty in the morning.

  I sat stupidly listening to words I couldn’t quite take in. My grandmother said, “Well. Answered prayer. You’ll be a family again,” and although she leaned close to me and held me tight, I sensed a warning in her embrace. But that was not unusual. My father was not high up on her list. My mother had told me he never had been, really, not since he’d whisked her off to Shanghai so long ago.

  I tried not to think of him that week. My mother did a few things to make the house ready, cleaning and walking through the living room over and over again, smoothing her skirt, fretting about whether or not he would like our home. I said, “He’ll like it, I know he will,” as often as I could without sounding mechanical, but I, too, was nervous, and I doubted that my reassurance helped. She only glanced at me and stared hard as if adjusting some internal focus, and then she said, “Of course,” as though I had been the one who was worried, and needlessly so. Then she would dust again and straighten the few magazines on the table next to the Morris chair.

  That Saturday morning we were up early. My mother had made it clear that this was an occasion and that we should dress up, and by the time my grandmother pulled into the driveway, we’d been ready for half an hour. My grandmother drove, and as we headed west on the Arroyo Seco Freeway, my mother offered unsolicited driving advice, a first, and particularly remarkable since she herself had never learned to drive. The car smelled strongly of mints and perfume, usually good smells, but too strong that morning. I cracked a window in the backseat, craving fresh air.

  At Union Station, we parked and went inside. In the huge waiting area, I stared at the high ceiling and wrought-iron hanging lights that seemed as wide as our kitchen table. My mother’s heels clicked loudly on the shiny tile floor, and I wanted to ask her to walk more quietly. People stared at us as if we’d been announced, and I wanted camouflage, some kind of cover. But there was no hiding us. My mother wore a magenta suit and she looked beautiful, like royalty. I wanted to tell her that we were too conspicuous, and that we should meet him in private and in comfortable clothes. But I, too, was dressed up in this very public place. Only my grandmother was in her everyday clothes, and it was the sight of her that told me that maybe everything would be all right.

  My grandmother led us across the room to the Arrivals board, where we found that my father’s train would arrive on Track 8, through Gate D. We were early, and followed my grandmother to three empty seats in the waiting room. My mother wouldn’t sit down; she said it would wrinkle her skirt. She paced while my grandmother and I sat in the huge leather seats and played Paper Scissors Rock. My grandmother talked softly as we played, keeping my thoughts occupied, and I was so focused on her voice that I was startled to hear the announcer’s formal baritone over the immense speakers on the wall. The Southern Pacific Express from San Francisco had arrived. My mother smoothed her skirt for the twentieth time, then eyed me carefully. She nodded approval, and the three of us walked to Gate D.

  As passengers began heading toward us down the long tunnel, I stood close to my mother, my grandmother a few feet behind us. I pulled hard at my bangs and looked carefully at everyone I saw. What if I didn’t recognize him? Passenger after passenger passed us: an old man in a homburg hat, a woman holding a sleeping baby, two soldiers in uniform, an elderly man and his wife speaking a language I didn’t know, all of them welcomed by others around us. Not him, not him, not him, I thought, and a new fear took shape: What if it wasn’t true? Maybe he wasn’t coming after all. I realized that I hadn’t really believed he was coming all week, and I felt ashamed.

  And then I saw him. It was his walk that gave him away, a sort of let’s-get-down-to-business stride, and I was flooded with recognition and affection and relief. “It’s him,” I heard myself say, and my mother nodded without looking at me. When he was perhaps twenty feet from us, she dropped my hand and ran to him and threw herself into his arms, and I heard her sob and I saw her shoulders tremble.

  I caught my breath at her unprecedented display, and at the strange sight of her in a man’s arms. I didn’t know what to do, but my grandmother rescued me. I felt her hand on my shoulder and she held me there for a moment and she leaned close to me and whispered, “Just wait a minute—it’s your turn next.”

  I did wait and then it was my turn. My father released my mother from his embrace and looked straight at me so hard that I couldn’t have looked away if I’d wanted to. He squinted slightly as though sizing me up, an expression I’d known but forgotten, and I returned his stare and somehow faked calmness. I was, after all, still my father’s daughter, even in this faraway land of orange groves and jasmine. I smiled and said, “Welcome home.”

  He smiled back and it was as though a conversation had taken place, and all my worrying about why he had taken so long to join us went away. I hurried to him and he held me close, and I tried not to notice how unfamiliar we were with each other. I remembered him lifting me up, holding me high above him, and while I knew that I was way too big for that now—I came not to his waist but to his chest—I was still surprised that he wasn’t doing it. I pressed my face to his dark suit and breathed in the smell of the train, leather and newspapers and cigarette smoke. And a scent that I knew was my father.

  My arms circled him almost as easily as they circled my mother. The sensation startled me, and when he released me, I said, “You’re so thin,” then regretted it instantly as I saw embarrassment cross his face. I hadn’t meant to say it—his thinness was just so striking. His blue serge suit hung on him like drapery. I took in his gaunt face and tired eyes and pale complexion, and the fact that he appeared closer to my grandmother’s age than my mother’s, and I realized that commenting on his thinness was the kindest thing I could say.

  He laughed. Barely, but it was a laugh, and his expression became more amused than embarra
ssed. “You’re right,” he said. “It just so happens I’ve dropped a few pounds.” He roughed my hair, then awkwardly tried to smooth it back into place. “Now look what the big oaf has done,” he said. “You’re too old for that now, aren’t you?” He glanced down at himself and shrugged, then he spoke to me in Mandarin. “Wanshih tachi,” he said, watching me closely to see if I remembered.

  I did, surprising myself. “Wanshih tachi,” I said softly. It was a phrase my father had used all the time. “‘Ten thousand things will be all right,’” I said, and he grinned and squeezed my hand.

  He turned to my grandmother then, and I felt my stomach tighten. She rarely spoke ill of my father, but she never spoke fondly of him either. But that morning even she softened at the sight of him. He looked as though he was about to say something, and he held out his hand to shake hands. My grandmother pulled him to her and held him for a moment.

  “It’s nice to have you back,” she whispered.

  “Not as nice as it is to be back,” he said.

  We waited for his luggage, and when it came, we watched a porter load it into the trunk of my grandmother’s Plymouth, my father talking about his train trip. He had come from New York by way of Chicago, then in Denver had boarded the Rio Grande of the Western Pacific Railroad, which took him on what was called the scenic route, over the Rocky Mountains, through Salt Lake City, and finally over Donner Summit and into California. The trains needed some upkeep, he said. The coaches were run down, the cooling system hadn’t kept him cool. He was casual as breakfast, as though this morning were nothing more than a return from a business trip. My mother and grandmother seemed somehow in on the deal. They listened and agreed and laughed gently at his amazement over things we took for granted.

  I listened impatiently to their small talk and waited for someone to say something interesting, something real about what had happened, and was happening now: that my father had come home. I had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out questions—What took you so long? What happened over there? Did they torture you? Are you all right?—but the few times I came close to giving in, my mother seemed to read my thoughts and she silenced me with a look. And so I just stared at him when I could, and told myself that he would be healthy soon.