The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  It was only when I went to bed that night, when my door was shut and I was sure that my mother was asleep, that I let myself cry.

  A few days after the telegram I was at my grandmother’s house after school. The heat wave had retreated as abruptly as it had arrived, leaving the weather cool and rainy. We sat at her kitchen table and played Scrabble. I wanted to talk to her about my father. I wanted comfort, and some reason to hope, and a reminder that he was a good man, if an unusual one.

  “My father’s in Shanghai,” I said casually.

  My grandmother nodded without looking up from the board. “So I hear.”

  “It’s probably for the best,” I prompted. Say something good.

  She said nothing.

  “There’s some sort of reason,” I added, hoping she would explain it.

  She placed a G on the board and said, “Grommet. That’s twelve points.” Then she took a breath as though she were trying to be patient. “Anna, I’m going to tell you something, and I’m telling your mother, too,” she said. “Your father is a difficult man. I’m sure he has his good side, and I suspect his heart is sometimes in the right place. But his good intentions never become actions, and you’ll only be hurt if you allow yourself to depend on him. It’s not a question of love. It’s a question of who he is, and what he wants.”

  I nodded, stung. The sound of the rain made what she was saying more difficult to hear, as though the weather were in agreement.

  “Your father is a troubled man. He has no vision, can’t see what’s right in front of him. He is, was, and always will be an opportunist who watches out solely for himself. He will be affectionate with you when it serves his purpose. You will not be part of his life when it doesn’t. And the sooner you accept who he is and distance yourself from his influence, the better off you’ll be.” She paused and took a breath. “I’m being harsh, you think. But it’s true, and I don’t want you hurt. You and your mother have done nothing wrong. Your father is a risky person to love.” I fought tears. She nodded at a bottle of Hires root beer that I’d opened and forgotten. “Take a sip of something and get back to the game. I’ve said all I can say, and all you can hear.”

  I was silent for perhaps a minute. Listening to her made me feel disloyal, and I hated hearing it. “You’re very wrong,” I said softly. “You’ve no idea what kind of person my father is.” And then, before she could answer and in an effort to appear casual, I added a Y to the board and said, “Cyclops. Fourteen points.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, I was diligent about not recalling what my grandmother had said. If I didn’t remember her words, then maybe I wouldn’t believe them. And maybe they wouldn’t seem so true.

  The rest of that fall brought us two more telegrams that gave us no reasons for my father’s stay in Shanghai, and no reason to hope he would return any time soon. My mother said she didn’t like it, but she didn’t know that she had many choices. Mostly she just stayed busy. She’d always had a full social life, but it got even busier after that telegram. She said yes to bridge parties, cocktail parties, dinner parties. She got more invitations than she could accept, but although she went out night after night, she didn’t seem happy. She didn’t seem exactly unhappy, either. She just seemed neutral, as though she was going through the motions.

  I, on the other hand, was on a roller coaster that fall. I felt different every day, as though I were controlled by some force outside myself. One morning I woke up happy and couldn’t wait to get to school. Three hours later I’d be despondent and discouraged, almost in tears over a bad grade on a quiz or my friends not waiting for me for lunch. I cried when I got home from school, and I couldn’t have said why. I didn’t like how I looked: my hair was too thick, my face too round, I wished my eyes were brown. I knew only extremes: I had no energy or too much, I was starved or couldn’t even think of food, I slept for hours or couldn’t fall asleep till late at night. I thought maybe I missed my father so much that I was going a little crazy, and I worried that people could tell.

  Two months of that up-and-downness passed, and one evening my mother found me in my room, the lights off, the shutters closed, the air still. It was the week before Christmas, and almost time for dinner. She’d knocked lightly, thinking I was napping. I was awake, but I didn’t answer because I’d been crying and didn’t want her to know. But when she opened the door a crack, she felt how stuffy the room was and she came in to open a window and saw that I was awake.

  She opened the shutters and cracked a window, then sat down on the edge of my bed. I looked up at her and thought how beautiful she was and how unbeautiful I was. She smoothed my hair from my face and I saw the worry in her expression and felt worse than ever.

  “What is it, Anna?”

  I shook my head. “I’m just tired.”

  “Then you’ve been tired for a long time. I can see how unhappy you are.”

  I turned away from her. “I’m all right,” I said.

  She waited, rubbing my back lightly. I tried to think what to tell her, how to explain what was wrong, what was bothering me without alarming her. I tried to think logically, to be calm. But finally I just blurted everything out.

  “I cry all the time and some days I hate school and some days I love it and my friends are nice but they hurt my feelings and I don’t like the way I look and I feel so lonely sometimes and it’s not your fault and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong—” I stopped for a moment and looked at her to see if she was alarmed or frightened or disgusted. But she just looked worried and like she loved me, so I gave in and told her what I was afraid of. “I think something’s wrong with me.” And I began to sob.

  My mother smiled, but in a way that was so gentle that it gave me hope. “Oh, Anna,” she said, in the same way she’d said it since I was little, and she just held me for a few minutes, rocking me. When my crying had slowed, she said, “Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re not crazy, you’re not sick. You’re just . . .” She paused. “You’re just fourteen,” she said finally. “This is what it’s like. And having a missing father doesn’t help. But you’ve got a mother who’s not going anywhere. Who’ll be right here as long as you need her. And it will get better. I promise.”

  I took a few breaths, trying to be calm. “Are you sure?” I asked, because my mother was always polite. If I was crazy or disturbed, she might not tell me.

  “I’m positive,” she said firmly. “I felt exactly like you do when I was fourteen.” She smiled again. “Only I don’t think I could have explained it as well. Fourteen is just like that. You feel a little crazy, but after a while, things start to make sense again. You’ll see.”

  I nodded again, still not completely convinced. My mother smoothed my hair, and then she was still, gazing out the window. “Your father is making a terrible mistake by not returning,” she said. “And there’s nothing I can do about it. I can tell you that he’ll regret it for the rest of his life. He’s missing out on the best thing in the world.” She looked at me. “And that’s you.”

  I smiled finally and felt so grateful to her that I almost started to cry again.

  “Don’t forget that: this is his mistake. The fact that he hasn’t come home is no reflection on you. It’s just evidence of his bad judgment.” She looked at me evenly. “Which, unfortunately, is something that we can’t control.”

  In the middle of June, I graduated from ninth grade at South Pasadena Junior High School. The next night my mother and grandmother and I celebrated by going to dinner at Musso’s on Hollywood Boulevard, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood. My grandmother had told me stories about the bar and its past patrons, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald, and I felt famous by association as soon as we sat down in one of the red leather booths.

  We ordered New York strip steaks and onion rings from Glen, a handsome blond waiter-but-hoped-to-be-actor whom my grandmother had known for years. As he tossed our salad at our table, he smiled at me and I smiled right back, for I c
onsidered myself eligible for flirtation. I was fifteen and a half, and at the graduating dance at the Women’s Club the night before, Mark Young had kissed me good night and told me he’d call me soon, and could I go to Santa Monica beach on the Red Car with him? I was giddy with excitement and giddy at the prospects of romance.

  After dinner, when Glen had cleared our places and brought us glass dishes of vanilla ice cream, my grandmother presented me with a small box from D & G Jewelers. I clumsily tore off pink flowered wrapping paper and opened the box, and I found inside a Lady Elgin watch, similar to one my mother wore, only smaller. It was, I thought, the most elegant watch I’d ever seen, and I was amazed that it was mine.

  I looked at my grandmother across the table and held the watch out to her. “Can you put it on me?”

  She nodded and looked pleased, and she took the watch from its small box and undid the clasp. I held my arm across the table while she fastened it around my wrist. “There,” she said, “it’s perfect. And it’s something you’ll wear for a long, long time, Anna, in the best of health and with much happiness, I hope.”

  It was something in her voice, a catch or a seriousness, that alarmed me, and I tried to ask her my question with a look: What’s wrong?

  My mother answered before my grandmother could by taking an envelope from her purse and holding it out to me. “And I have something for you, too, Anna.” She patted my arm lightly with the envelope.

  I took the envelope and opened it carefully. Inside was a thick packet of paper, and I looked at my mother for explanation. It looked very official, and it made me nervous.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to take everything out.” She took a deep breath. “It’s tickets, Anna, to Shanghai. We’re going to see your father.”

  All I could do was nod. My mother had been in a strange mood all that week, and suddenly everything fit, and I felt a sense of dread. I held the envelope in front of me, remembering my seventh birthday, hot chocolate on a cold winter’s morning after Mass in Shanghai.

  My mother took the envelope from me and slipped it back into her purse. “I know you’re surprised. But I’ve thought about this for a long time. We leave in a month, and I don’t know when we’ll come back. But it’s time to be a family again.”

  I stared at the tablecloth, trying to figure things out. Seeing my father was exactly what I’d wanted for a long time, but that desire had waned, and the thought of going to Shanghai and of leaving my grandmother and my friends made me sink into our booth. The whole thing felt like a punishment. And I was wary. What evidence was there that my father wanted to see us?

  “Couldn’t we just wait for him to come back?” I asked, and I looked across the table at my grandmother, as if the decision were hers.

  She met my eyes for a moment and I saw anger in her expression. “It’s no use asking for help from over here,” she said. “Your mother knows what I think of her plan, but she’s determined.”

  My mother was shaking her head. “I can’t live like this anymore,” she said softly. “It’s not right to be separated. If he’s chosen not to return to us, then we’ll just go to him.”

  “It doesn’t seem to bother him,” I said. “You even said that this separation is his fault.”

  My mother let her breath out. “Yes, it is,” she said. “Nonetheless, we are the ones who are going to remedy it.” She took a sip of water. “Families don’t live like this. I’m his wife, you’re his daughter, and I’m all out of excuses as to why I don’t live with my husband. It’s time to join him.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t look at my grandmother—I knew I’d cry if I did. I was already dreading saying good-bye.

  My mother had booked passage for us on the Danish freighter Laura Maersk, which would arrive in San Pedro Harbor from New York via the Panama Canal on the fifteenth of July, then depart for Shanghai the following day. Two days before that, Heather, who listened to my nearly endless complaints and tears and anger and woe, had a goodbye party for me at her house. Toward the end of the evening, Mark Young asked me if he could talk to me alone, and when I said yes, he took my hand and led me behind a lattice gate just outside Heather’s backyard. He kissed me there, a real kiss this time. Then someone called my name and he stopped, and he looked at me and told me he would miss me and that I was the prettiest girl he knew. I wanted to say, Kiss me again!, but all I could do was nod and tell him I liked him a lot, giving myself plenty of reason to think up all the things I could have said in the days that followed.

  I hardly saw my grandmother that last week, and when I did she was almost stony, as though this departure had been my idea. But I understood the feeling of being mad at the one who was leaving, no matter what their reason, no matter whether they deserved your anger or not, and her mood didn’t bother me. Apart from a quick hug when she was leaving our house the night before we sailed, she did not say good-bye.

  Which was all right, because the day we left was bad enough as it was. Our belongings were packed in boxes and ready to be put into storage, which my grandmother would arrange for once we were gone, and our bungalow itself had become an empty box. Heather lingered in the house until she started to cry, and my mother gently suggested that she go home, that I would write to her soon.

  My mother was in good spirits when we boarded the ship, and with the good-byes over with, I began to cheer up, too. My mother suggested that we stay on the deck to bid farewell to California’s coast, and we found two chairs and faced them toward the rear of the ship. The Laura Maersk was guided by tugboats from the harbor to the sea, first through San Pedro Harbor’s Turning Basin, then the Y-shaped Inner Harbor, then the channel and into the Outer Harbor, and finally past the breakwater. But as Cabrillo Beach Park faded in our wake, my mother’s good spirits seemed to as well. She grew quiet, and when we could no longer make out a single thing on shore, she said she was going below to rest, and that I should not wake her for dinner.

  It was the start of what turned out to be a pattern. For most of that journey, my mother was fatigued and out of sorts, and I was left to my own devices. Her inattention and bad humor made me cross at the start, because I saw no reason for them. We were doing what she wanted, weren’t we? She was the one who’d dreamed this whole thing up; I was the one who had reason to be unhappy, because I was the one who hadn’t wanted to go. But somehow we’d traded places. She had slipped into the role of the morose captive, and I had become the carefree adventurer. I’d decided that going to Shanghai at the age of fifteen was a very glamorous and exotic thing to do, and that there was no reason not to enjoy it.

  No one bothered me on the ship, about what to do or where to go, about the dishes or the trash or homework, and I did what I wanted. I sat in the afternoon sun and played shuffleboard with anybody I could find—old men, middle-aged women, young married couples who seemed not that much older than I was. I read shadowy mysteries and risqué romance novels that my mother wouldn’t have approved of had she noticed, and I sat on a deck chair and pretended to doze near a couple I was sure were newlyweds so that I could eavesdrop on their romantic talk. I wrote letters to Mark Young that I planned on mailing from Shanghai, letters in which I tried to sound worldly and independent: Miss you dreadfully—I ache for your smile!—but life is very full here in exotic Shanghai, and there is so much to take in!

  And I spent hours imagining our arrival and our reunion with my father. In my mind, he would be waiting on the dock as the Laura Maersk approached. He would shield his eyes against the sun as he looked up at the ship and anxiously scanned the deck for us. Because of his eagerness, he would spot us long before we found him, and he would call out and wave his arms. When we came off the ship, he would say, “What took you so long?” Then he would wink at me and boast about how much I’d grown. He’d ask me if I had boyfriends, and he’d say they must be lining up for miles, and I would blush. I imagined the scene several times a day, refining it and adding to it each time, and soon the whole thing felt real, far mo
re remembered than imagined.

  On August 7, we reached the estuary of the Yangtze River. We’d seen the coast of China for several days. When the blue of the ocean turned muddy, my mother smiled and said we were getting close.

  And then we were there, traveling up the Whangpoo toward the Bund. My mother and I stood on the deck and she pointed out Woosung, and then, on the east bank of the Whangpoo, Pootung with its docks and oil yards, its fish canneries and factories. I nodded vaguely as she talked quietly about the geography of this foreign place I once knew, but my thoughts were not on what she said. I was thinking about the only thing I could just then: the heat.

  It was impossible to ignore. I felt captured, bound, and gagged, and though I had thought I remembered the heat and had told my mother I did when she tried to prepare me for it, I was certain I’d never known anything like it. There was no breeze, nothing to even push the hot air around. Heat clung to us, a suffocating feeling, and I looked frantically at my mother and thought, What have we done? It was as though we’d traveled to hell, by choice.

  My mother wiped her face with a lace-trimmed linen handkerchief that looked as limp as wet tissue, then glanced at me. “You see?” she said. “This is what I was talking about.”

  The ship docked at the Bund, and I stared hard at the famous skyline. I had hoped that the names would come back to me at the sight of those buildings, but not many did. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, I thought, and I remembered rubbing the lions’ noses. Jardine Matheson, and the Customs House, with Big Ching—words I hadn’t thought of in years surfaced in my mind like bits of wreckage from a sunken ship. I couldn’t remember any of the others, but I told myself I would relearn them, and my spirits rose as I looked below and saw a small crowd on the dock. I scanned the crowd quickly for my father, half hoping he’d be on stilts again. But there were no stilts, and no one who resembled him, at least from that distance.