The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  “Practice?” I asked.

  “Your faith,” he said. “Do you go to Mass, receive, all that?”

  His question surprised me. “Of course,” I said, “I never stopped,” for it was as though he’d asked if I still breathed.

  He nodded. “That’s good. And you’ll raise Eve in the Church.”

  “Yes,” I said, and I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. I could remember going to Mass with my father on Christmas Eve, and that was it. Even then, he didn’t receive—my mother was the believer. What possible concern was this to him?

  “That Pope you’ve got, Pacelli, he’s not so bad as people think.”

  This comment surprised me. My grandmother was Pope Pius XII’s constant albeit respectful critic. “What is it you like?” I asked.

  It was his turn to look surprised, and he waved my question away. “Oh, there’s plenty. What’s not to like? That aloofness that bugs everybody is a small thing, just his manner. He’s worked toward good all along. Tried to prevent the war, then tried to stop it. Saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. And he’s figured out that communism in Eastern Europe is no small thing.” My father shook his head. “He’s on the right track, that guy.”

  I listened with something like amazement, and I had to work to keep from laughing. It was so like my father to speak of the Pope with such familiarity, such casualness, using his family name, talking about him as though he were an old acquaintance and critiquing the Pope’s views as though he were the expert. I considered pointing these things out to him, but it seemed futile. “Well, maybe you’re right,” I said.

  He nodded as though I’d stated the obvious. “He knows where he stands,” my father said, “and there’s no inching him over, left or right. That’s a good thing.” He took a long drink of tea and refilled his cup and mine, then he leaned toward me. “I’ll tell you, Anna, and this is free advice, worth every penny you paid for it, but you have to have something to hold on to. Some sort of center, something you can turn to in a difficult time. My dad raised me with that, and I threw it all away, like it was some old coat that I’d outgrown. That little Eve there, she needs education, and she needs a real grounding in the faith. Don’t overlook that.”

  “I won’t,” I said evenly, and then I corrected myself: “I’m not.” And I tried to figure out how I’d gotten into the position of defending myself to him.

  He laughed softly. “Now look, you’ve got your back up, I’ve offended you. But I’m right about this one. Promise me you’ll raise her with a strong faith, all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I stopped myself from saying what I was thinking: But not because of you. “I’ve never considered doing otherwise,” I added.

  He nodded and I waited, thinking this was only the start of the advice, but nothing came; he was suddenly quiet. He straightened his chopsticks, then tapped his fingers on the white tablecloth. He moved the bottle of soy sauce closer to the jar of hot oil, and then he looked around the restaurant as though awaiting reinforcements. I could hear him humming softly, and I recognized the awkwardness you see in people who spend most of their time alone.

  I finally attempted conversation. “How are the chickens?” I asked, and immediately felt ridiculous at the question.

  He shook his head. “Not so good, not so good,” he said. “I mean they’re fine. They’re just not mine anymore. I threw in the towel and sold the place two weeks ago. Enough is enough for that business. I’m moving on to something steadier.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “This and that. The details are boring. Suffice it to say I’m in the Bradbury Building. You know it, down on South Broadway? Lot of marble and wrought iron? I think your grandfather officed there a long time ago. It’s just to tide me over, until something better comes along.”

  “In Los Angeles? But you live in Carpinteria.”

  He shook his head. “Lived,” he said. “Not anymore. My place up there went with the chicken farm. I’m an Angelino now, I’ve moved to Bunker Hill, right by Angels Flight. I can walk downtown, argue with the soapbox preachers in Pershing Square, eat lunch at the Yorkshire Grill, be at the Main Library in five minutes flat, and I’ve got Grand Central Market for my groceries. I’ve had enough of the sticks. Even the ocean didn’t make up for the isolation.”

  I cleared my throat. “You’re living here now?”

  He laughed grimly. “Don’t worry, Anna. The old man won’t be showing up on your doorstep every week. Today’s an exception.”

  I nodded weakly, embarrassed that my panic had shown, but panicked nonetheless at the prospect of having him so close. “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s wonderful that you’ll be nearby.”

  He waved my words away. “We’ll see about that,” he said, and then his new friend the waiter saved him from having to say more by setting plates of steaming food on our table.

  My mother and I had done a pretty good job of avoiding Chinese food since our return from Shanghai in 1946. I don’t think she’d ever liked it much in the first place, so it wasn’t hard for her. I, on the other hand, loved it, but at the black-and-white age of fifteen, abstaining from it had seemed both a matter of principle and a show of loyalty to my mother. And then it became habit.

  And so my mouth watered as soon as I smelled the food: fried noodles with shrimp, steamed dumplings—chiaotzû—a plate of steamed vegetables, steamed white rice. I must have stared, for my father leaned forward and touched my hand.

  “You wanted something else? It doesn’t look good to you?” he asked, worry in his voice and his expression.

  I laughed. “No, it looks wonderful. And I’m starved. I haven’t had this in a long time,” I said.

  He smiled and glided easily over the reference to the past. “Dig in,” he said. “Eat all you want. We’ll keep ordering more until you’re full.”

  I did dig in, and if eating and enjoying Chinese food made me in some way disloyal, I was a traitor on a grand scale. It was heaven: the taste of ginger in the chiaotzû, the hot peppers in the noodles, the crispness of the carrots and water chestnuts. Even the taste of steamed rice with soy sauce was a treat. I didn’t speak for a full five minutes, just shoveled it in as fast as I could, as though I hadn’t eaten for days. I put a few noodles on the tray of Eve’s high chair and let her fool with them as I went to work. When I finally came up for air, I found my father grinning at me.

  “Food of the gods, eh?” he said.

  I nodded and stopped eating for a moment. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  My father looked pleased. “Hao sho,” he said, and he watched to see if I remembered, which I didn’t. He shrugged. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “The pleasure is mine.”

  During the second week of August 1956 as I reached and then passed my due date, my father called every day. Finally, on the fifteenth, when he called and got no answer, he figured something was up and took the bus to Huntington Hospital, where he stood at the nursery window and stared intently at the rows of bassinets. He pestered a nurse, telling her he just had to see the Bradley baby, until she held up his second granddaughter for him to see. Then he just stood there, shaking his head, telling those around him that she was his. That was where Jack found him, and he brought my father to my room. I was drowsy, and when he smoothed back my hair and kissed my forehead, it was as though I’d dreamed him, the way I did as a child.

  He came to see us two weeks later. It was a gray day, overcast and dark but it wouldn’t rain, a muggy Friday morning that had me feeling tired and unpretty. I had the blues, and when Jack left to teach school, I was sure the day would feel endless.

  So when my father appeared at our front door a little after ten, I was less than thrilled about having a visitor. I was still in my robe, my hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I hemmed and hawed at the doorstep, but he was insistent and invited himself in. He marveled over the baby I held in my arms—two-week-old Heather, whom we had named for my best friend, past and present. Eve had fo
llowed me to the door and was holding on to my robe. Her wavy hair was mussed and she was still in summer pajamas with one sock on, one sock off. My father knelt so that he was her height, and he told her how grown up she was, and Eve nodded knowingly. She was one and a half years old, and pretty sure of herself. Her pediatrician had said she was approaching her first adolescence, and I had winced.

  Then my father told her how lucky she was to be a big sister. Eve looked unconvinced. In those two long weeks since Heather’s arrival, she had found that having a little sister mostly meant less attention and more competition. My father saw things differently. “You are the eldest daughter,” he said urgently. “Ti i—that’s you, you’re ‘number one.’” I saw a hint of satisfaction on Eve’s face.

  I offered him coffee then, which he refused. But he said he’d like to sit down for a minute, and he followed me into the kitchen.

  Heather had fallen asleep in my arms, and I laid her gently in a bassinet we’d set up in the corner in the kitchen. I lifted Eve into her high chair and gave her a handful of Cheerios to play with, and my father and I sat at the table.

  “I have something for you,” he said, and he handed me a parcel the size of a bar of soap wrapped in newspaper.

  I unwrapped it and found a small teak box that I recognized immediately. Its corners and top were rounded, and the dark wood was so polished that it gleamed, and if you didn’t know what it was, you might not know how to open it, or even that it opened at all. But I did, and I gently slid the cover back the way I’d seen my father do it when I was a child.

  The box held my father’s chop, a column of pale marble three inches tall, a half inch square. On the bottom was his seal, the name Schoene in Chinese characters. Beneath the chop, in a separate compartment, was a square of thick red ink.

  It was like handing me a piece of my childhood, something known and loved and forgotten all at once. As a child in Shanghai, I’d seen my father use his chop a hundred times, carefully placing his seal next to his signature on letters and contracts and other legal documents, the red ink as bright as a warning. I had coveted it, and had never been allowed to play with it.

  “I loved this,” I said.

  He nodded. “I had it made just a month after your mother and I arrived in Shanghai, when I got my first job. I felt like it made me a resident, not a visitor. That was important to me.” He ran his hand over his hair. “It’s one of the few things I have from those days.”

  “How did you manage to keep it . . .” I paused, searching for a phrase, for there seemed to be an unspoken rule that we never talked of Shanghai. “With everything that happened, how do you still have it?”

  He shrugged the question off. “That’s a long story,” he said, “and one I’m not up to telling. The point is that I want you to have it.” He was quiet for a moment, and I waited. A dog barked in the distance, and the wind stirred in the eucalyptus tree outside, the one my father and I had planted years before. He tapped his fingers on the table as though he were impatient. “I know you can’t just forget everything I’ve done, Anna,” he said finally. “But I’d like to make amends. I’m hoping you can begin to forgive me.”

  I stared at the chop and ran my finger over its surface, hard and smooth and cool, and I understood that he was giving me his past. For the first time, my caution toward him began to dissolve, and forgiveness seemed possible.

  I took the chop from its case and held it up to the light. The carved end was stained with red ink, as though it had just been used. I pressed it carefully into the small square of red ink in the box. “Is this how you do it?” I asked.

  He smiled slightly, watching me. “Yes,” he said.

  I took the newspaper that the box had been wrapped in, and I pressed the chop down on a smooth corner. When I lifted it, the Chinese character for our name was bright red against the black newsprint, a declaration.

  “Welcome home,” I said.

  He nodded. “Hsiehhsieh,” he said. He looked me in the eye, and I remembered: Thank you.

  In the years after my mother and I left Shanghai in 1938, I became something of a conjurer, able to imagine my father in any scene I wanted. Thanksgivings and Christmases, Easters and birthdays and summer vacations—after a while, I filled in the father-shaped holes without even trying. I knew how he would act, what he would say, where he’d sit, who he’d talk to, how it would feel to have him there.

  And so Thanksgiving Day 1956, when he finally was there after all those years when he wasn’t, was a strange day, almost eerie. At long last he’d reappeared, just as I’d wanted him to on that hot July afternoon in Shanghai when he was kidnapped, and just as I’d wanted him to for years after that. It was as though all those years of conjuring had finally paid off.

  I’d invited him tentatively, but he’d accepted without hesitating, and he knocked on our door at three o’clock on the dot on that cooler-than-usual November afternoon. He wore a white shirt and a paisley tie, a navy blue blazer and gray flannel slacks, and looked quite dapper, I thought, and I was proud to introduce him to my in-laws. If he was at all uncomfortable, it didn’t show, and while I wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, I felt a kind of giddy nervousness. It was alarming to see him: I’d be in the kitchen and glance into the living room to see him handing Jack’s mother a glass of sherry and talking about President Eisenhower’s reelection a few weeks earlier. Or I’d be putting bowls of mashed potatoes and gravy on the dining-room table and catch sight of him in the kitchen with Jack’s father as he carved the turkey, my father offering unsolicited but good-natured advice on his every move. The rest of Jack’s family, his parents and his brother and his family, seemed to take my cue and to act as though my father had just returned from a long trip. Even my grandmother welcomed him. She sat in what had become “her chair” in the living room, the Morris chair that my father had loved. She liked it because it was easy for her to get up from, which was important because of the arthritis that was becoming more and more noticeable. My father pulled up an ottoman and sat next to her, and when the food had been blessed, I saw her take his hand and I heard her say, “It’s good that you’re here.” And I was amazed.

  Over that next year, he eased himself into our lives. He was with us on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, on my birthday and Eve’s in January, and by spring he was something of a fixture. He watched the girls for me whenever we needed him, day or night, and he called several times a week, often at odd times—early in the morning when I wasn’t quite awake, late in the evening when everyone had wound down, at dinnertime, when the girls were tired and cranky and dinner the only important event. He never said hello or identified himself. He just started in with whatever he wanted to talk about. With Jack he talked politics and cars and sports and the economy. With me he just asked how the girls and I were, and he offered health advice. “How is everything over there?” he’d say, as though we lived much further away. When I called him and asked how he was, his answer was always the same: “Better since you called.”

  After a few months of regular visits, he asked if he could do a little gardening. He didn’t have much of a yard at his place, he said, and the exercise would do him good. When I said yes, it became a weekly thing and we settled into a pattern: my father taking the bus from Bunker Hill to Huntington Drive, then walking the few blocks to our house, always appearing on our doorstep at around nine in the morning, an offering in the form of a bag of caramels in one hand, and a duffle bag holding his dirty laundry in the other. He’d work in the garden, Heather and Eve helping or hindering as the spirit moved them, then he’d finally come inside at around four in the afternoon. Once he’d showered, we’d sit at the kitchen table and have a cold beer together and talk.

  He had opinions about everything. He worried about the riots in Little Rock, Mao’s visit to Moscow and Khrushchev’s to East Germany, the Russians’ success with Sputnik, and our failure with a satellite of our own. He followed polo, and spent most Sundays in February and March at Will Rogers Memo
rial Field on Sunset Boulevard, watching matches. He liked the horse races at Santa Anita as well, not for the betting, but for the pleasure of watching the horses, he said. He liked to go early in the morning and watch the horses work out. His favorite cars were Triumphs (for sports cars) and GM (for everything else), and he was not subtle about expressing his concerns over the Studebaker Parkview Wagon that Jack had bought. He tried to talk us into signing up for Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Book a Month Payment Plan, which allowed you to buy the entire set over two years at a reasonable monthly cost. “Those girls of yours will be needing it for school before you can blink,” he said. “You’d be smart to invest in it now, so you’re ready.” He got along easily with Jack, and he was careful to the point of vigilance about overstepping his bounds and our privacy. “Don’t want to wear out my welcome” was always his good-bye, and once he decided it was time to leave, there was no convincing him to stay.

  He was just as careful about his own privacy, so much so that I knew very little about his life apart from us. I never saw where he lived; he said it was a little cramped and that once he’d cleared some things out, he’d have us over, but it never happened. Once he mentioned that he attended the Church of the Open Door, a nonsectarian church that met in the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, on South Hope, next to the library. He didn’t speak of friends, or how he managed to live—I knew he’d left Hong Kong with almost nothing. I knew he sold scrap metal only because he asked if he could sell some old pipes that Jack had stacked by the garbage after we’d had some plumbing repairs done. He never said just what he did at the Bradbury Building, either. I found that out myself.

  One afternoon when I was downtown I stopped in to say hello, thinking I could surprise him. But when I looked at the building directory, I did not see my father’s name, and when I asked the guard in the lobby where his office was, the guard laughed.

  “There’s no office, Miss,” he said. “Joe’s the night janitor around here. His shift starts at six P.M.” The guard looked at me with curiosity. “Is there a message?”