The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  My mother did not move. “I wanted to believe you did,” she said softly. “And Anna—” she started, but she did not finish.

  My father nodded. He took her hand and held it between his own, but said nothing.

  Later, I remembered going upstairs and getting back into bed, but I did not remember falling asleep. When I opened my eyes and saw my father sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought only moments had passed.

  “I’d forgotten you did that,” I said.

  He shook his head, not understanding. “What?”

  “You used to watch me sleep when I was little,” I said. “I’d forgotten that till now.”

  He nodded and smiled slightly, and the conversation I’d overheard came back to me. I glanced at the window and saw that it was morning.

  My father was quiet for a few minutes. He looked even more tired than he had in the night. Finally he said, “Do you know what I do every day?”

  I shook my head and thought that he was the most unpredictable person I knew.

  “The way I look at it, I fix things,” he said. “Every day, I get out of bed and people come to me and tell me what they need. They need tires or newsprint or a truck chassis. They need a generator or a radiator or scrap metal by the pound. So I get it for them: I know where to buy just about anything anybody can think of, and I deliver it back to the guy who asked. All day, all week, I get things no one else in this city can. I’m the guy who can make it work.”

  He looked at me to see if I was listening. I nodded.

  “But you,” he said softly. His voiced cracked, and he cleared his throat and looked toward the window. “You’re a problem I can’t fix, Anna, the first one in a long time. And now I’m stuck.” He tried a casual smile and failed. “I can’t have you and your mother here. It’s not safe. Shanghai’s not a city for a young girl.”

  I nodded, suddenly wanting the conversation to be over with. “You don’t love my mother,” I said matter-of-factly. I was so tired of not knowing, of my mother’s weak excuses for him, of telegrams that said nothing and evenings where he barely noticed us. I just wanted to understand.

  “No, I—” he started, but he stopped and let his silence be his agreement.

  I went on without hesitating, as though I were the one in charge. “So we’re going home, and we won’t see you again.”

  He nodded and I watched him for a moment. I decided I wanted to see what he knew. So I said, “How old am I?”

  He laughed. “Fifteen. You’ll be sweet sixteen on the seventeenth of January.”

  “What’s my favorite color?”

  “Blue. Always has been. Especially blue-green, like the ocean.”

  “Why do I love elephants?”

  “Because Chu Shih told you they brought good luck. You believed everything he told you, because you loved him, too. Which made him a lucky man.”

  I nodded, remembering Chu Shih and how good I felt when I was with him.

  My father was waiting. “That’s it?” he said. “Did I pass?”

  I looked at him evenly and asked the real question. “After we leave Shanghai, will I ever see you again?”

  He winced and looked as though he were experiencing physical pain. “Yes,” he said. “Don’t ask more than that. But yes.” Then he stood and left the room. A minute later, I heard him leave our flat.

  The day before we sailed, he took us to lunch, a grim and nearly silent meal at the Cathay Hotel. When he brought us back to our flat on Rue Ratard, he said he’d be by in the morning, but even I saw that he had no intention of doing that. At the chipped door to our flat, he embraced my mother and kissed her cheek. He hugged me and held me to him for a moment. Then he was gone. He did not say good-bye.

  My mother closed the door and leaned against it heavily. I was trying to take everything in, and to choose one question out of the many that I had. Finally I asked, “Do you know who she was?”

  My mother looked down and smoothed her skirt. “Her name is Leung Mancheung. Your father has known her for years, through business.”

  “She’s not pretty,” I said flatly.

  My mother laughed at first, and I looked at her, startled. Then, in the space of a minute, she began to cry. “Your father loves beautiful women. The fact that she’s not a beauty tells me he must truly care about her.”

  I blurted out what I really wanted to know, what I couldn’t figure out. “Do you still love him?”

  She looked away from me. “Yes,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  We left Shanghai the next day, October 8, 1946, just two months after we’d arrived, and almost nine years since we’d left the first time. But this time I understood that our departure was permanent. There was no tearful good-bye with my father at the ship this time, no waving, no stilts. Only my mother and me boarding the President Cleveland for the second half of its maiden voyage.

  For me, the trip home felt endless, but for my mother it was worse. For the first time in my life—and maybe in hers, I thought—she was not beautiful. Her color was bad, and she had aged several years during our two months in Shanghai. The change had probably been gradual, but I hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t until we were surrounded by the blue of the Pacific, with China’s vast coastline no longer visible behind us—it wasn’t until we were away from my father—that I realized that she was ill.

  I felt foolish and ashamed for not seeing it earlier, because when I looked at her on the ship, it was so obvious. Her skin had a yellowish tint to it, as did the whites of her eyes. She had lost weight, and the beautiful suits and afternoon dresses she’d bought for our trip hung on her. I saw how fragile she was, how carefully she negotiated stairs, how slowly she walked down the hallways. The sight of her was painful, and I considered my father to be the cause of her condition. And as we traveled further and further from him, I grew angrier with him by the day, and my anger led to a resolution: I would not allow him into my life again.

  graduations

  MY FATHER WAS A MAN who, over the years, developed a frequent and strong association with the word debt. Early in his career in Shanghai, he borrowed regularly and shamelessly from almost anyone he could talk out of their money. He was also well known for his attempts to pass bad checks. He seemed to believe that a dollar borrowed was a dollar earned, and his use of the phrase “urgent need” came to mean nothing more than plain old broke.

  As an adult, still years before I encountered all of his final debts, I became aware of a debt of my own. I owed him much, I saw. My stability, for example. My good taste in boyfriends, and later in choosing my down-to-earth husband. My cautious nature in just about everything. My dislike of drama and deceit, and my wariness of a quick profit, extravagant spending, and out-of-whack ambition. I owed all of my honest and conservative qualities to my father, for from the moment my mother and I left Shanghai that second time, I became determined never to be like him, and never to be involved with anyone who was. My father, I decided, was the embodiment of what not to do, and by extension I came to believe that anyone who was unlike him was safe, and dependable, and worthy of my affection. It was all a matter of common sense.

  When my mother and I returned to Southern California in November of 1946, our days had a quality of déjà vu to them. Once again, my grandmother met us at San Pedro Harbor and drove us to her home. Once again, I was awed by the startling beauty of Southern California—the brilliant flowers, the soft light, the spread-out feeling of the place—even though we’d been away for only a few months. And once again, I spent my first few nights in the small guest room in my grandmother’s house. The old trundle bed was still there, the dragonfly comforter freshly cleaned, the sheets stiff from being dried outside in the sun, and I slept so long and hard that when I woke I had to think for a moment to remember what day it was.

  But not everything was the same. We were no longer waiting for my father. And when my grandmother met us on that first day, I saw her sadness and surprise, the reactions she could not mask as she took in m
y mother’s thinness, her wanness, her tentative smile. She was a fraction of herself.

  At dinner that first night, the three of us sat as we had nearly nine years earlier at my grandmother’s old oak dining table, my grandmother at the head, my mother and me on either side of her. My grandmother made spaghetti, and after she served us, she poured Chianti for herself and my mother, then looked at me and took a third crystal wineglass from the sideboard behind the table.

  “I think you’re entitled after what you’ve been through,” she said. She poured half a glass, then glanced at my mother, who winced. My grandmother put her hand on my mother’s shoulder as she passed behind her chair. “All shall be well, Genevieve. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” She seated herself at the head of the table and I looked at her gratefully, for I found I could believe her. For the first time since last summer when my mother had presented me with our tickets at Musso’s, I felt hopeful.

  My grandmother lifted her glass and held it in the air for a moment. “To my girls,” she said, “and to home,” and my mother and I raised our glasses and clinked.

  When my mother clinked her glass with my grandmother’s, her hand shook and she quickly put her glass down. Then she smiled tentatively and said, “Be careful, Mother. You don’t want us getting too comfortable here or we’ll never move out. We’ll be here long enough as it is.”

  My grandmother laughed. “The longer you’re here, the better I like it.”

  My mother shrugged. “Good thing,” she said. I was cheered by the seriousness with which she was eating her spaghetti, and by the roses in her cheeks, even if they were from the Chianti, and even if her cheeks were a little sunken. “We’re going to be here for a while, you know. It’s going to take some time to get everything out of storage and get the house livable again. At least a few weeks.”

  My grandmother shook her head. “Not that long,” she said, and she set her fork down. “Confession is good for the soul, Genevieve, and to forgive is divine, as I hope you’ll recall. I didn’t have your things stored. They’re all in the house, packed up and sitting in all those boxes, just as you left them.”

  My mother’s expression relaxed. “But that’s wonderful. Things will be far easier than I’d thought.” She turned to me. “Do you see what a charmed life your grandmother leads? She’s so rarely forgetful that even when she is, things work out.”

  When my grandmother answered, her voice was matter-of-fact. “I didn’t forget. I was never convinced that you’d be gone for very long. I know the man, Genevieve.”

  My mother pursed her lips as though keeping words captive. She nodded, but said nothing. As far as I know, they said no more about our early return.

  In our bungalow the following week, my mother and I pushed open the windows and French doors to air everything out as we unpacked and put things in order. I stacked blue willow plates in the kitchen cupboards and forced myself not to think about the Bridge of Nine Turnings that led to the teahouse in Yu Gardens in Shanghai’s Old City, the model for the teahouse in the blue willow pattern. I polished our copper pots and pans till they gleamed and caught the sun, then hung them from the wrought-iron rack over the stove. I unpacked the linens and stacked them neatly in the small closet in the hallway, and I breathed in their strong scent of cedar as though it had been prescribed. I told myself that the hard part was over, and as I worked in our house, I worked at putting things in order inside of me as well. My mother had told me in Shanghai, No more waiting, and I believed her; she was different now. And I thought I knew what to do. I could, I thought, pack up my feelings for my father as well, and haul them up to the attic of my heart, where I would not trip on them, or come upon them unexpectedly, or hurt myself on their sharp edges. No more wondering when he was coming or wishing he were here or feeling like our lives were always on hold. When that felt harsh, I reminded myself of what hurt the most: that this had been his choice.

  A week after our arrival, I started tenth grade at South Pasadena High School and tried to pick up where I’d left off, despite the fact that I’d missed the first two months. But soon I was seeing the same friends, and we talked about the same boys, and I was invited to parties and dances, which I went to as dutifully as if they’d been acts of charity, gritting my teeth and thinking, I can do this, for everything had an unreal quality to it for that first month. At the start, friends asked about my father and about the trip and about what Shanghai had been like. But my answers were less than enthusiastic, and they heard what I didn’t say: that I didn’t want to talk about it. Mostly they left me alone, no questions asked. Then they just acted like nothing had happened, like I’d never even been away, and I was grateful for their casual disregard of the disaster of our trip to Shanghai. Only Heather sensed how bad things had been. “You look so sad,” she said over and over again. “Are you sure you’re all right?” I only nodded. Talking about it only made things worse.

  My mother was more direct on the subject of my father. “He is no longer part of our lives,” she said simply, and she gave me a look that told me the matter was settled. Over the next months, she worked hard at making certain her statement was true. His name was not mentioned; there was no sign of him in our home; if she was questioned about him by some well-meaning soul, she simply said they’d separated, and left it at that. She even went on a couple of dates with the brothers of friends or the bachelor acquaintances of neighbors, though she never saw the same man twice. The evenings she went out left me pacing around the house with an argument going on in my head. I was mad that she’d gone, but I understood her reasons. In the end, I just ended up even angrier with my father. All of this was his fault.

  We heard nothing from Shanghai. We heard nothing that fall, nothing in January of 1947 when I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license. Nothing that spring, nothing in June, when I finished my sophomore year. By then I’d become pretty good at not thinking about him. My mother had removed the photographs of him from the bookshelves and table in the living room, and the only one that remained was in her bedroom. I made sure I didn’t do more than glance at it. Schoolwork had helped, too. When my mother and I had first returned from Shanghai, I’d found that studying like crazy helped me not to think about things, and I’d gotten straight A’s ever since. I especially loved history, where you could get some perspective on things, and where the past made sense.

  When a small package arrived in February of 1948, the middle of my junior year, the familiar handwriting and Shanghai postmark and foreign stamps that nearly covered the box all seemed like a trick. My first thought was that it must have been sent years ago. Why would he send anything now? Did he even remember us?

  But when I ripped open the brown paper, my hands shaking, I found a small card inside that wished me a happy seventeenth birthday. To my dearest Anna, it read. With love from your Dad.

  My mother wasn’t home—a blessing, I thought—and I opened the box quickly and found a pair of pearl earrings. I liked them as soon as I saw them; they were sophisticated and looked like jewelry that a college girl would wear. But it didn’t matter, and I didn’t waste time. I left the house and walked quickly to Monterey Road, then to Fair Oaks and then to Mission Avenue, straight to D & G Jewelers, where Mr. Vagnino, who had made my mother’s wedding ring and the gold locket that held my baby picture, looked at the earrings for a moment and sighed.

  “They’re basically on the order of costume jewelry,” he said with a shrug. “No gold, fake pearls. But they look all right, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t, and I happily sold the earrings to him for fifty cents. I told him they were a gift from a relative I didn’t like, and I begged him to promise not to tell my mother about our transaction. When he reluctantly agreed, I thanked him and hurried to Holy Family Church, where I gladly dropped my two quarters into the St. Vincent de Paul box by the door, happy to be rid of any trace of my father.

  I didn’t tell my mother about the earrings or what
I’d done with them, and although the guilt made me feel grimy and suspect, my stubbornness won out. A few weeks later when we were on our way to afternoon Mass, she pulled over several blocks before we’d reached the church. My stomach tightened. It was the middle of March, the third week of Lent, and as I prepared myself for the coming accusation, I told myself it was for the best. I’d confess to my mother and confess to Father Locatelli, and the matter would be closed.

  “I have something to tell you,” my mother said, “and I might as well tell you now even though it won’t be final for another year.” She took a folded sheet of paper from her purse and held it out to me. “This is a conversation I never intended to have, Anna, and I’m sorry for my part in this. But it’s all I can do, after everything that’s happened.”

  She was confessing, not accusing. Although what she said wasn’t what I had expected, I nodded as I unfolded the sheet of paper, for I already knew what it was. I’d heard bits and pieces of my mother’s conversation over the past month, and I’d taken several phone messages from Andrew Martin, my grandmother’s attorney. I was actually almost proud of myself for knowing, before I was told, that my mother was filing for divorce.

  But I still wanted to see it in black and white. I looked carefully at the paper I held, at its formality and officialness and fact. It was dated that day, which explained my mother’s nicer-than-usual appearance—the midnight-blue suit, the cream-colored blouse, the white gloves, the hat—and her vagueness about her plans earlier that day.

  Book 2783, I read, Page 335. And then:

  Genevieve Schoene, Plaintiff, vs. Joseph Schoene, Defendant.

  Interlocutory Judgment of Divorce

  (Default)

  It is adjudged that plaintiff is entitled to a divorce from defendant; that when one year shall have expired after the entry of this interlocutory judgment a final judgment dissolving the marriage between plaintiff and defendant be entered, and at that time the Court shall grant such other and further relief as may be necessary to complete disposition of this action. That plaintiff is awarded custody of the minor child with rights of reasonable visitation reserved to the defendant.