The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  My grandmother drove us home and pulled into our narrow driveway, and my father carried his bags inside. As soon as my father entered, our house felt as though it had shrunk, and I finally understood my mother’s nervousness. Now she began to chatter, something she did only when anxious. “There’s my bedroom—I mean, our bedroom,” she said, and motioned down the hallway. I thought I saw her blush. “Anna’s room is next to the bath, and through here is the kitchen, and, oh, Joseph, the garden is beautiful, though a little on the unruly side, but soon—”

  “Eve,” my father said suddenly, and she turned from the kitchen doorway to find him standing at the edge of the living room, where he’d stopped barely six feet from the front door. They stared at each other for a moment. My grandmother and I exchanged a look.

  “Slow down,” he said to my mother. “I’m here to stay. Just let me get my bearings.” And then the most unlikely thing happened: my mother burst into tears and closed the door into the kitchen behind her.

  My grandmother and I exchanged another look and I tried to will her to get me out of the room. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and something else unlikely happened: my father laughed, not in a mean way, just a sort of relaxed amusement and relief. “Well, what did we expect?” he said to us. “She’s got this strange man called her husband moving in with her. She has a right to be a little nervous. Don’t you see?”

  My grandmother looked at me. “I’ll check on your mother,” she said. “Why don’t you show your father around if he’s ready?” And she walked toward the kitchen.

  I faced my father and attempted casualness. “What would you like to see?” I asked. But before he could answer, I blurted out my real question. “Do you like the house?”

  He had walked to the fireplace and was running his fingers over the peacock tiles set above the hearth. He turned to me. “Do I like it?”

  I nodded and felt an anxious what-have-you-done? tightness in my throat. What if his answer was no?

  “You’re darned right I like it. They’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box.”

  “Good,” I said, “that’s good,” and I shrugged, trying to pretend that the question wasn’t all that important. “Then maybe you should see the rest of the house?”

  My father laughed and said, “I probably better if I’m going to find my way around.” And I led him through our home.

  Within days, there was evidence of him everywhere. My mother had kept our house very spare—”No use cluttering things up,” she said—and only books and a few photographs took up space on the built-in shelves in the living room. She kept little more than was needed to cook for two, and she was a perfect match for wartime, the expert at salvage. Scrap metal, tin cans, cooking fat, rubber, paper, her old silk stockings—everything had another use when we were finished with it. My mother passed everything along with an efficiency that made me nervous. She read magazines the day they arrived in the mail, then packed them up for the Boy Scouts. The morning paper wasn’t in our kitchen long enough to get rumpled, and she regularly went through my closet as well as her own, pulling out pleated skirts and cotton blouses and dresses and shoes that she no longer wore or that I’d outgrown, tossing them all into the center of the room for me to fold and pack into boxes for St. Vincent de Paul’s poor. She did it so often that I commented once that I figured my job was simply to break the clothes in and make sure they were comfortable for the poor, a remark she did not appreciate.

  With my father’s arrival, it was the sparseness that disappeared. He was a reader, but it was never just one book. Whatever he was reading was left wherever he’d been sitting when he got up to do something else. In the living room was Guadalcanal Diary, in the kitchen Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, in the bedroom See Here, Private Hargrove. Copies of Life lay on the kitchen table, and sections of the Los Angeles Times drifted into every room. My mother’s reminders that the Boy Scouts were due went unheeded by my father. “I’m not finished,” he’d say calmly. “It takes a while to catch up on the world.”

  True enough. Most afternoons, he rode the Red Car up the Oak Knoll Line to the Pasadena Main Library, a place he said he loved for its huge wooden tables and chairs and the strong scent of books, where he read newspapers and magazines for hours. When he finished, or when the library closed, he checked out still more books and lugged them home to our now-crowded bungalow.

  Only he never seemed to finish any of them, and his lack of attention worried me. I considered myself an expert on it, and on him, for I watched him every chance I got, staring so hard that I could feel the discomfort my scrutiny caused. But I couldn’t make myself stop. I wanted to know him, and because I somehow felt that my surveil-lance might help keep him here, the second half of my seventh grade was dominated by keeping watch on him. More than boys or clothes or girlfriends or parties or school, he was what occupied my thoughts. In the morning, I watched him shave, then pat Old Spice onto his wet skin, as though he were slapping himself awake. I watched him comb Vitalis into his short hair and brush his teeth with Pepsodent, and in the kitchen I watched him eat Shredded Wheat with enriched milk from the Adohr Dairy while he read every page of the Los Angeles Times. When he finished, he gulped juice and washed down three Benefax vitamins. If I thought he’d forgotten them, I reminded him. Then I had to hurry to school, for I always waited till the last minute possible to leave, frustrated that I had to be away for a few hours and afraid that I might miss some key gesture, some important fact that would explain my father to me.

  What I saw was a restless man. He couldn’t sit still anywhere for long, a condition he attributed to bad circulation, but I had my doubts. It seemed more than physical. At the movies, he’d have to get up at least twice. During Christmas vacation, just a week after his return, we went to the Rialto to see Olivia de Haviland in Government Girl, and later that week Gene Kelly and Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and Red Skelton in Thousands Cheer, and while I sat in my seat and stared hard at the screen, my father went to the lobby, supposedly to buy more popcorn. Baseball games were the same. That spring he took me to see a few Pacific Coast League games—the ones that weren’t blacked out—and each time, I found myself alone for at least a few plays, watching the Los Angeles Angels at Wrigley Field, or the Hollywood Stars at Gilmore Field, waiting for my father to return to our seats.

  At home he wandered through the rooms as though in search of something important, and it seemed as though he paced constantly. Sometimes in the late afternoon or early evening, he and my mother sat outside, sipping drinks and talking about the men of the day—Roosevelt and Eisenhower, MacArthur and Stilwell—but my father seemed unable to speak if he was sitting still, and he usually ended up touring the garden as he talked. Later in the evening, when he and I played Rook or Monopoly or hearts or Spite and Malice, he circled the card table between turns, chewing Black Jack gum and drinking a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and I was always calling him back—Your turn, it’s your turn!—so that every game took twice as long as it should have. After dinner when my mother and I listened to Burns and Allen or the G.E. All Girl Orchestra, my father would burst in with some question about rationing or library hours or how to catch the Red Car downtown. When my mother looked at him as though he were crazy and asked him calmly if she could answer his question later, he looked as confused as if she had answered in a foreign tongue.

  I knew part of the reason for his restlessness: money. Upon his release from Shanghai, he’d learned that all of his assets in United States banks—the bulk of his estate at that time—had been frozen by the U.S. Office of Price Administration, which had concluded that my father’s money was tainted with foreign control. “Much of it was money paid to him by the Japanese before the war,” my mother had explained to me quickly, letting me know she didn’t want questions, “and they won’t release it as long as we’re at war with Japan.” My father had provided my mother with enough to live on for several years when we left Shanghai, so we were far from destitute, but the fact that he
couldn’t get at the money—my own money, he said over and over again—irritated him immensely. If money was mentioned, he began his pacing all over again.

  But I thought it must be more than money. Late in the night, long after I’d gotten in bed and turned out the light and slid whatever book I was reading under my bed and fallen asleep, I woke to the sounds of my father’s midnight wanderings. Water running in the kitchen, the clink of ice in a glass. A bottle set on the tile counter. Muffled footsteps on the wooden floor, the creak of the Morris chair by the hearth as it took his weight. A few coughs, then the creak of the chair again, releasing him, and more footsteps, the compact whap of a book being shut. Then an encore, the whole sequence again. Each night that I heard him, I wondered if I should—if I could—get up and keep him company, for his sleeplessness worried me. Maybe he didn’t like it here. Maybe he was unhappy. Maybe I could help. But there was too much I didn’t know, and I never went to him, partly because I knew that he was a private man, but also because I had no faith that it was company that he hunted. And though I couldn’t imagine what else it could be, I sensed his aloneness was not the same as loneliness, and out of a mixture of caution and respect, I stayed in my bed and let him pass those nights unwatched.

  All that spring was a waiting time. My mother waited for my father’s health to improve and for him to become stronger. My father waited for Shanghai to be safe again and for his funds to be made available to him. And I waited for our house to feel normal, for my father to seem like the fathers of my friends: gregarious and confident and at ease. Making us into a normal family was something I’d taken on as a kind of project. I was sure we would get there; it was just going to take time.

  On a Saturday morning in April, I found my parents sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper. I’d begun sleeping late and I had just wandered in, still in my pajamas. The sun came in through the open window and the air seemed golden, our first really warm spring day. I liked the sight of the two of them sitting there together. My mother was in a skirt and blouse, dressy clothes for a Saturday morning. My father wore what he often did: a pair of khaki trousers and a clean white shirt. He was barefoot.

  It was clear that they were engrossed in their reading, so I opened the refrigerator and took the carton of orange juice and drank from it quickly, a stolen pleasure, then put the carton back and closed the door.

  “Get a glass, please.” My mother had not looked up.

  “How do you do that?”

  She glanced at me and seemed to have no idea what I meant. “See me all the time? Notice everything?”

  She smiled, taking my question as a compliment. “I just do,” she said simply. “It’s a bad habit, drinking from the carton,” she added, and stood from the table and took her plate to the sink. “Wonder where you picked it up?”

  My father and I exchanged a look as she rinsed toast crumbs from her plate, then shut off the faucet and dried her hands on a dish towel. “The two of you are on your own today,” she said. “I’m off to help Gran with some books. She’s taken on a couple of new accounts and has asked me to go along.”

  My father was instantly displeased. “On Saturday now? What’s next? Weeknights? A lunch box and uniform? A name tag and a paper hat?” He closed his paper and looked at my mother. “We’re not working class, you know.”

  My mother leaned over and stared at her reflection in the toaster, then put lipstick on and blotted her lips on a paper napkin. “You’re right about that,” she said. “We don’t work enough to be working class.”

  I looked at my father, expecting a laugh line next, which was the way he often defused my mother’s seriousness, but my mother went on before he could say anything. “You know how I feel about this. As far as the money’s concerned, we just don’t know what’s going to happen, Joe. Some income couldn’t hurt. And as far as you’re concerned, a job might be just the thing for you. I see you dragging around here, and dragging yourself up to the library, and dragging yourself home, and that’s it. Look where you are! Los Angeles. People come from all over the country for the jobs here. I think that some sort of employment would be in your best interest.”

  “It would do me good,” my father said dryly.

  “Exactly,” my mother said.

  “Cure what ails me.”

  She gave him a look. “I don’t know that I’d go that far.” Then she picked up her purse and looked me up and down, while I wondered what self-improvement program she had in mind for me. “You’re sleeping too late, Anna, it isn’t good for you. The morning’s half gone, and you’re barely awake. The Boy Scouts will be by today, so you’ll need to gather up the magazines and newspapers for them. Everything can go,” and she paused. “Got it?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Everything goes.”

  Then she looked at the two of us once more—I had the feeling we did not pass muster—and she left.

  My father was silent for a while, staring at the crossword but not writing anything in. I poured myself a bowl of Rice Krispies and filled it with milk, then sat across from him at the table. Finally he said, “What is it you’ve got planned for today?”

  I shrugged and said, “Nothing,” through a full mouth.

  He laughed. “I’ve got a project for us,” he said. “We’ll surprise your mother. Not exactly paid labor, but something to keep us off the streets.” He nodded toward the garden. “How about if we tackle that wilderness you two call a backyard?”

  I followed his gaze outside. “Maybe,” I said. And then, worried that my hesitation might hurt his feelings, I said, “Okay.”

  We were quiet for a moment, both of us staring outside. I was trying to figure out the right answer, for it was a tricky proposition. My mother was defensive about almost anything negative my father said about our house, and I’d come to understand that he had not been as impressed with our efforts at relocation—my mother’s word—as she had wanted him to be. There were only casual comments from him—Boy, this is cozy, all right. Wonder why the guy built this place so small?—but my mother took them all personally.

  The garden was even trickier. My grandmother made a point of referring to it as “charmingly untamed,” her quiet way of reminding us that everything out there had been allowed to grow wild. Her comment was meant to inspire my mother to gain control of all those vines and blossoms and growth, but it never did. My mother loved the garden the way it was. Often when I came home from school I found her outside, standing among wild blackberries and unpruned peach trees and tangled wisteria and jasmine that went everywhere. The blackberry bushes grew along the back fence, and a small patch of romaine lettuce grew in the back corner, the result of some past resident’s labor. The ground was a crazy quilt of star jasmine, Job’s tears, and St. Augustine grass—at least those were the ones my grandmother could name, but there were patches of other vines and shrubs as well, things she’d never seen before.

  That April morning the whole place was green from winter rains, and I loved the way it looked. But when I’d finished my cereal, my father told me to get dressed and meet him outside and we’d see what we could do.

  I put on shorts and sneakers and a cotton shirt and found him outside pacing. Though it wasn’t hot out, his face was flushed. He looked at me and said, “It’s a mess out here. Nobody’s done anything for years. This could be a nice little place out here, but it’s just gone to pot.”

  I shrugged. “We’ve been sort of busy.”

  “I don’t mean you two,” he said generously. “You’ve got plenty to do. I mean that nobody’s looked at it for a long time. It’s been neglected.”

  “Well,” I said, and I heard my mother’s defensive tone in my voice, “there just hasn’t been time,” as though he hadn’t heard me the first time. “But we were going to get to it eventually,” I added. I looked at him and knew my expression was blank, but I nodded for emphasis.

  “That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” he said.

  He began to tell me what we would do. We’
d cut back the jasmine and blackberries, he said, and get some trellises so we could train them, and the blackberries would bear more berries eventually. We’d prune the peach and plum trees, we’d plant tomatoes and strawberries—we must be the only ones around without a proper Victory Garden, he said—and maybe a few herbs for my mother, and some lavender. And flowers, he said, sweet peas and stock for scent, and roses, with bougainvillea and wisteria to add a little color.

  He walked all around as he talked, and finally he faced me, his eyes alert. “You see, Anna? We can really make something out here. The two of us.” He paused for a moment and looked down. “My father taught me about growing things when I was a boy. It’s only right that I should pass on what I learned.”

  “All right,” I said nervously, for my father rarely mentioned his father. I heard the tentativeness in my voice and tried to remedy it. “It sounds great. I think it will be beautiful.”

  He laughed and leaned down to pull a weed. “Oh, it’ll be beautiful, all right. Just you wait. You’ll have the prettiest place on the block.”

  The transformation of our garden was already well under way by the time my mother got home that afternoon. I was pulling up grass in the back corner when I heard the back door open and close. I looked up in time to see the surprise on her face, and I saw the dismay as well. If my father saw it, he gave no notice. He called to her that we’d found something to do with ourselves and that we were doing it for her, so she’d have beauty just outside her window. Then he went back to work, and that was that. My mother stood watching him for a moment, and when I met her eyes, I saw an expression that had become familiar since my father’s return, a mixture of resignation and affection and worry.