The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  I had rare capacities for concentration, but always for the wrong thing. In school, I couldn’t really pay attention. All our exercises seemed small, everything on paper made up. I think they thought of me then as a normal kid. They didn’t know. I fasted. I was the first anorexic in America. I made it up myself. All my girlfriends dieted too but I possessed more discipline. It entered me like the spine that had always been missing. I was growing up without order. We had no rules. My mother meant to, but we were always too far behind. So when I made the promise to myself I kept it, absolutely. I’d burn a whole meal and smelling it disappear into the sky was almost the same as eating. I could step into a bakery and distinguish the chocolate and the glazed caramel, the soft bland sweetness of the buns. That was enough.

  Once, I went to a fund-raising benefit for the Racine Public Library’s refurbishment. Marion Werth, our librarian, held the sides of the podium and read a speech about the history of Racine, the French fur traders and Menomenee Indians coloring the clear river waters with war paint and open blood. It was my fifth day of eating only lettuce and raw cow corn. My mother would cut a head of tight iceberg into four. We’d sprinkle red wine vinegar and salt on it and stand there eating in the bare kitchen. She was always dieting too. It was May and on the way home from school, I just walked through the cornfields, picked the small fresh cobs and stood there eating them. I was ten. Nobody watched those fields.

  Each plate at the benefit was supposed to cost a hundred dollars. But nobody had paid for me. Our eight-plate table had nine people. The Briggses bought a whole table for the department store, and at the last minute they invited me. Emily and I were supposed to share a plate. A Black Forest Torte, intricately layered, waited at the center of the table for Marion Werth to finish. We knew it was a Black Forest Torte because there was a little cream-colored card propped there, calligraphed in brown-gold, that said so. Everyone said Marion Werth wrote only with fountain pens and brown ink. Uniformed Catholic High boys, holding polished silver cake servers, stood stationed by each table. The one by ours slipped his into his pants pocket. The fancy end stuck out. Emily Briggs at that time had a weight problem. She was short-legged: “long-waisted,” she herself called it. She was wearing a blue party dress, and her graduated pearl necklace. Finally the audience was applauding, Marion Werth ducked into something half a curtsy, half a bow and then Catholic High boys bent over tables to cut the fancy cakes. “Two please,” I heard Emily ask for. Then our small plate was jammed with two large slabs of the thing, one with a huge pink frosting rose. Our plate was so full a side of one piece went over the end of the china. You could see the layers—the middle one seemed to be cream with whole cherries suspended in it. I bent down close to it. I tried to get the smell. There was some bitter chocolate, a high shrill cooling scent like mint.

  I promised myself I wouldn’t eat it, but I’d never seen a cake this fancy. My grandmother was a baker, but you needed contraptions to make a cake look like this. It was the kind of cake I’d imagined I’d eat at the big city restaurants I’d go to with my father. I wanted to take the piece home to my mother, to somehow save it. But they had cloth napkins and Emily already had ours on her lap. I didn’t have a purse.

  Emily took a bite and then another. She looked around and then whispered to me, “I got two pieces, one for you and one for me, so eat some, okay?”

  I picked up a dry fork and fingered it down to the prongs, but I didn’t touch the cake.

  “If you don’t eat this, it’ll look like I took two just for me.” There was horror in her voice. She was begging. She wiggled on her seat, shifting weight from one buttock to the other. She squirmed in pinned misery. Emily felt watched, too, not by one high being but by everyone low and close, the teenage boys at every table.

  She kept eating and pleading. “They’ll think I’m a pig!” She looked near crying. Her urgent whispers didn’t stop. Neither did her fork. I guess she thought however much she ate would look like less on our plate. I wanted to help her. My fork scrolled the air, my wrist shook, my mouth filled with spit that felt sweet and fattening itself. But I couldn’t. She was temptation. You couldn’t listen to other people. If you did you would get lost in the world. You had to keep the promise. The bad changed itself into pleading faces and good reasons, but as soon as you bent to them, they disappeared, forgetting, and you would lose your course forever. Eating was eating, no matter why. I wanted the cake so water rose from my throat and fell back again in poignant trickles like nostalgia. But I felt commanded not to eat and I didn’t, as if a bar of metal lay in my mouth.

  She had gone through a piece and a half and was still working.

  My cousin Hal was one of the servers. He bent down behind us, looked at our plate, moved a hand across each of our backs—that stopped Emily, fork partway to her mouth with a whole cherry on it—and said, “Oink, oink,” and then she did start crying and it was too late, there was no explaining and she would never forgive me.

  At my least I was sixty-seven pounds. I went into Bellin Hospital first and then they put me in Brown County. But my mother encouraged me, sort of. She wanted me to be thin.

  I was ruined before I ever had my chance. And blame is everywhere and nowhere, pollen in the wind. I was dry now. My period was never much. The doctors said they didn’t know; it may come again, it may not.

  And Emily Briggs turned out beautiful, tall and long-legged.

  WHEN I WENT to work in the hospital at night, I bought something to eat on the way. I liked kimchee. It was strange-smelling and hot and it felt like the kind of food that cleaned you out and burned more calories than it was. I got a pound of it at the Korean market across the street from the hospital. I ran streaking across then, it was almost dark, and I felt the water-swelled air in the loose arms of my hospital coat and all the lights—the green traffic lights, the gel of fuzzy deep yellow taxi beams, blue-spilling store signs, red brake signals—seemed to acquire weight and substance jingling on my wrists like transitory jewels.

  I was becoming a doctor because going to the doctor’s office as a child meant going downtown, to the city part of where we lived. There, on Monroe Street, the office held a kind of clean peace. Music came out of the walls, we waited in rooms full of shiny, expensive new magazines. We felt rich and clean. Our grandmother had scrubbed us carefully beforehand, using the rough corner of a washcloth for our ears. She seemed timid, holding her purse, facing the doctor.

  “What do you hear from Adele?” the doctor asked. My mother was gone a lot then. Before we moved, she’d take off for California by herself and leave me with my grandmother.

  “Nothing, why?” My grandmother looked up at him, curious, but curious the way someone is, prepared for pain.

  “Just wondered. Great girl, Adele. Spunky.”

  “Not a thing, I heard. I haven’t heard a thing.”

  Doctors’ offices seemed to make even my mother feel she had to behave like other people. Later, when we lived in Los Angeles, it was the one place I could count on her kindness. Sometimes I would get candy, a slow lollipop that lasted hours until the white string came out bare and stained with color.

  The hospital I worked in felt so different from those clean offices.

  Now, my mother tells me, I wouldn’t recognize her anymore. I have lots of gray now in my hair, she said, with a little falling laugh. I’ve stopped taking it out, you know, dyeing it.

  I try to imagine it hanging, pewter-colored, the same hair, just the same.

  I want my mother to have whatever limited happiness she can still find on the earth.

  We had been through something amazing together. Our drive west, our life alone, without other people. We had been to such heights maybe nothing in either of our lives again would equal. A violent intimacy full of animal sweetness, rage, diamonds of light raw sun, blooded fur, a mixing of spit and tongue.

  We have been, ever since, too dull. As if our life then spent the most of us.

  BEFORE I LEFT the hospital for the nig
ht, I walked to Emory’s door. I turned the knob, heard the thick metal apparatus crunching and stepped in the cold gray room. He was on his belly on the bed, clutching his pillow the way he did when things were worst. The room smelled wet and dim. The blinds weren’t drawn and light from outside cornered in.

  “Do you want company?”

  He waited a moment before answering, as if reviewing hope. “No.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “I should be alone.”

  “Have you taken your medicine?”

  “No.”

  “Should I make you, Emory?”

  “Not now, Doc. Just leave me be.”

  Other people would have made him, doctors, the candy striper Lynn would, I probably should have, but I left Emory as he was and stepped out, leaving him to one of his nights. The days after gave his best hours of work. I knew this cycle, instinctively, from my childhood with my mother. I could remember the watery, just-born cast of the world, as if it were always Sunday morning, with new irises, sharp-pointed, deep purple and frail papery yellow, after one of those nights. Then, the same red terror ran in both of our veins and we were on the long bad ride together.

  I left with my carton of kimchee, eating the end of it. Outside it was warm. The dark seemed to carry water sounds. Okay, I’m out, I’m done, I thought, and the moisture lipped my skin. A streak of fear ran through me as I bent down to unlock my bike, already thinking of being home in my apartment, whom I’d call, what if Emory woke up bad and I’m not there.

  All you have to do to become somebody’s God is disappear.

  2

  I CALLED THE FBI.

  First I’d started a letter to Marion Werth, who worked at the Racine Public Library. All my life, she had stood behind the main desk and stamped my books every Tuesday afternoon, small-eyed, quick-fingered, interested. She was a tall woman with red curly hair and freckles, who wore a suit each day in a different color. She wore primary colors, no prints, and each with matching earrings and accessories. She had six in all. I’d counted. She was the aunt type. She took an interest in every kid’s personal life and she tried to instruct us with books. I knew her because she had taught me how to pin and label my butterfly collection. She felt glad I read—not that many children in Racine did—but she didn’t trust me, because I wouldn’t sit on the chairs.

  For all her size, she moved with a dainty grace. I would have bet anything that she had never, even at ten years old, been a tomboy. Nothing I could do with my legs felt right. So I crouched in the stacks, leaning against walls, dustying my school uniform on the floor. My grandmother didn’t mind. It gave her something to do. Keeping me clean.

  Every Tuesday night, Marion Werth led a group of Racine women in a club to build their family trees, placing names and pictures in little oval circles of cardboard cutouts. One of the women embroidered hers. Each of them did it her own way, some with felt and sequins and all manner of millinery ornament, others with colored construction paper and scraps and scissors. One nun I knew—Sister Mary Bede—meticulously scripted hers in tiny letters on a single piece of eight-by-eleven paper. It was just like her. Tidy, not wasting. My grandmother’s friend Jen represented each relative with a different dried flower. The men got spikier plants, mostly thistles and cacti. She pressed them all behind glass, the flowers and names and labels—birth dates, death dates and some handwritten descriptions, like “such bright red hair they all said” or “never married. Funny” or “he drank and the wife ran around, it wasn’t so good.” She pestered my grandmother to join, but my grandmother wouldn’t budge. “Uchh, I know who they are already. There’s no one fancy. What do you think, you’re going to find a queen or a duke in there, Jen?” My grandmother sat down at the kitchen table every night for an hour and answered letters from her relatives, but in a different way. The club women each wanted something. My grandmother’s letters mostly contained Wisconsin weather. Sometimes she would mention the name of a bird she’d seen.

  The club women traced and traced, through the mail. They all hoped for some tie to the Revolution or at least to some great family, with a coat of arms or its own tartan plaid. So far, none of them had found much. When I flew home last time, my second Christmas in medical school, I saw posters stapled on the nicked old telephone poles announcing a public library exhibit of the Family-Trees-In-Progress.

  I’d never liked Marion Werth that much—she didn’t like me—but I’d always respected her. She was famous in Racine for her organization and her cheerfulness. Her plump hands and long freckled fingers and always elegantly filed and polished nails. Her fingers, in particular, expressed an exquisite febrile sensibility. They were creamy-colored and very nimble. She was our career woman. In a town that size, people were famous for preposterous things. Everyone knew about Katie Maguire’s jelly donuts. Or Dolly Henahan’s handmade silk felt on Styrofoam Christmas tree balls. If you were fat and neat you would be known for that, but not if you were just neat or just fat.

  I stopped halfway through my letter. I never thought much of the mail. It seemed to take too long and I didn’t have the patience. I was like that then. I couldn’t wait the normal time and then I ended up waiting forever.

  There had to be a better way, I figured. Faster. And so I called an old boyfriend. I was still young enough that, when in doubt, I’d call an old boyfriend. My mother used to tell me how someday we’d own a house. We’d buy it for almost nothing, she said, because it would be a fixer-upper, and all her admirers would come around, and when I was a little older, my boyfriends too, and instead of taking us out to fattening meals, they’d drop over and do something useful, like paint a wall or fix wiring.

  This was the guy I’d been with in college. I used to call him The Prosecution. He worked for the Justice Department now. I always thought if I were a lawyer I’d be defense. I feel too guilty myself to be that sure.

  “I don’t have much access,” Paul said. “He wouldn’t show up on my file unless he had a federal felony conviction.” That seemed above even my father’s abilities. But he typed the name in anyway, while I waited. I was kind of surprised he remembered it without my saying.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Good.”

  “You’re right, good.”

  “I guess good.”

  “You’re still nuts.” Then he suggested the FBI.

  I didn’t want to call then. Not right away. I am not exactly an unarrested person. I have a record somewhere, they pressed my thumbs in ink, marked them on a paper form, took my unhappy picture. And this was not for anything hip, like drugs or a protest march either. It’s something old I’m not proud of. That’s when you’re glad how big and sloppy a country this is. When you are part of the mess. When it is you wrong, you want history to lose its beads and forget. And you can calm some knowing it will. My record is in some colorless file cabinet somewhere. It might be as hard to find as my father.

  And from what little I knew about him, I didn’t guess my father would be pleased to see FBI men at his door either. He could’ve been a petty criminal, something of a gigolo. My mother once said he’d run off with a department head’s wife. Or was it the daughter? He might have been almost anything then. Not good, I thought. But not unforgivable either.

  I didn’t want to call, but it came down to boredom and studying one day and there I was still safe at my desk, the book glaring, picking off a dry geranium opening the whole astringent garden of smell. I was supposed to go to a party later and I didn’t really want to and I shouldn’t have, I was so behind, but I thought I really had to, I said I would, people would be mad if I didn’t. It would be all the same people. In classes, we hated each other, every day. But then at parties everybody got drunk and told all kinds of things. At the last party, a forty-year-old woman came up to the guy I was standing next to and said, “I really have problems with you, and now I’m going to tell you why.” The parties began in one apartment and then rumors started that everyone was going to another apartment on
the East Side. And from there the party would divide and congregate again downtown. I never made it past the second move. I probably didn’t stay long enough.

  I left before midnight so I could take the subway. I only had two real friends in New York, Timothy and Emily, and neither was from school. Emily was from before. She’d moved to New York after I did and she’d just started working at the Metropolitan Museum. Her father knew somebody there.

  Three afternoons a week, I worked at the hospital, for Dr. Chase. Mornings I had classes and the rest of the time I studied or meant to. Memorized. Did you ever want a letter in the mail or a phone call or a stranger at the door, anonymous flowers—some touch from the outside to change your life? If you haven’t, try reading Robbins’s Pathology.

  I called information.

  “What city, please?” the operator said.

  I didn’t know where the FBI was. Everywhere you didn’t want them. “Washington, D.C.,” I said.

  “We have a local listing, ma’am.”

  I got a nice-sounding woman and I told her what I knew.

  “You don’t know me but I’m looking for my father who’s been sort of missing for a long time. The last time I saw him was 1970. You probably can’t help me but I wanted to call because I hoped at least you might be able to tell me what to try.”

  She laughed a laugh, not funny. “I’m the wrong person to talk to. I looked for my father for five years and even with my job I couldn’t find him. I gave up. But usually, we usually tell people to call the Salvation Army.”

  “The Salvation Army? Why? What do they do?”