The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  “They run shelters all over the country. Lot of men on their own end up there.”

  In college, I’d bought a desk from the Salvation Army. It had cost ninety dollars and was the nicest thing I owned. Three men worked tying it down to the top of my car. When they were through, I had to climb in the open window. They’d roped the doors shut. I remembered their faces, nude, capped with wool hats. A roundness poured into their features when they realized the mistake. Their noses seemed too big then. They looked to their hands. They seemed used to trying and getting it wrong. I bellied in as fast as I could to show them it was okay. No problem.

  “I don’t think my father would be there,” I said. “He was a college professor and kind of a gigolo. He did things like run off with the department head’s wife or something, but I can’t see him that down and out.”

  “No, doesn’t seem likely, huh? I don’t know what to tell you.”

  She talked more. She had never seen her father. He’d left when she was six months old.

  “Did you look in phone books for him?” I’d never said that I’d done that, to anybody.

  This woman could snort without its being derisive. “That’s the first thing you do.” Everything about her voice was soft.

  “Oh.” I thought of sights: the Grand Canyon, monuments, space. I’d never seen those places. I pictured Mount Rushmore, a handkerchief of moths turning around Lincoln’s sandstone face. A person could be anywhere in this country. A nation full of privacies, jangling.

  “I tried everything. And with my job you know, even then, I couldn’t. But my father wasn’t born here.”

  “Mine either,” I said.

  “I didn’t have much to go on.”

  “Where’s yours from?”

  “He’s from Jamaica. Negril Beach.” She said that as if it were a sorrow. “But he left my mother when I was six months old. He worked for the railroad then, I don’t know, maybe he was a porter or something. Once I even called the railroad union but they didn’t have anything.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “That’s the kind of job I guess you might not keep forever.” I was just talking. I talked too much then. I guess I’d meant how the railroad lines dwindled in our lifetimes from something that started grand, with tablecloths and chandeliers, observation cars for the night sky. Now the trains went practically like buses. It was less an idea than just something to say.

  “He’s Jamaican,” she repeated, as if that explained something. “I imagine he was a porter or a conductor. Or maybe a cook.”

  I thought of the white gloves and brass shined buttons and I knew she had pictured them too until it was worn out for her, and she could get no more from it. “Are you married?”

  “I’m a widow.”

  “Do you have any kids?”

  She paused as if I were asking too much and I was, I knew I was, but then she said, “One son. I have one son. Look, I’d like to find him too because my mother’s dead and there’s nobody else there, but, I’ve been through a lot of therapy and after that it doesn’t seem so important anymore. When somebody does that to you, it makes you feel worthless. When they leave you. And when you understand that you’re not worthless, then it doesn’t matter so much anymore.”

  “I know,” I said and I sort of did know too. “I mean our fathers are probably not swell guys.”

  “No, I don’t think so. They’re not.” Her voice lifted a little.

  I took the phone and moved off my chair. I sat on the floor. That felt better, my back against the heater.

  “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s hard to find somebody. I even called people with his same name in the phone book.”

  I stopped. That had never happened to me. I never found the same name.

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know what to tell you. I suggest you go to a therapist. I gave up. But it took me five years. And a lot of therapy. Lot of hard work with a therapist.”

  “Is it an unusual name?”

  “No, it’s a common name.”

  She told me. Though I’d given her no reason to, not really. Her name was Venise King. She didn’t ask me my name at all, and I hadn’t told her, so even calling the FBI there would be no record, unless they kept track through the phones. And I doubted that. To do that would cost too much money.

  She was black. Her father had been a porter or a conductor or maybe a cook. He’d worked on the trains. Was I somehow pulling rank when I said I didn’t think mine would end up at the Salvation Army? Or did she pity me my scrap of vanity?

  But mine was not a common name. I felt guilty and relieved, as if we’d both opened our folded lottery papers at the same time and hers was the one with the X.

  HER FATHER might have had reasons. My family was not even disadvantaged. My mother’s family was regular middle class, upright, self-supporting, with savings in the bank and a cellar full of canned goods. She grew up with matching sweater sets and a red ukulele. I’d always been told my father’s family was royal over there, one of the nine richest in Egypt. I was poor but that was because my mother bought too many dresses.

  My father had never been in any war, either ours or over there. According to the encyclopedia, they had military coups every couple of years during the fifties and sixties. But none of the upheavals seemed to deprive my father of anything but money or even once, that we knew of, to see him into uniform. We escaped the world’s public trouble. But then, far away from everything in Wisconsin, we made our own.

  Once I met a man who was Indian and had grown up in boarding schools. People were too busy to raise their own children, he said. They were building the new nation. But I doubted that my father saw himself as any part of the New Egypt.

  And my mother paid no attention to public life whatsoever. She had never even learned to read the newspaper, except for her horoscope. It was a habit she could not sustain like so many others. We felt far away from the people sitting at the table making up rules.

  My grandmother had a working sense of community. The way she saw it, we made the fabric of the many. “Just be glad you aren’t—” my grandmother used to say, filling in the blank to give the necessary relief, the way she’d match a purse to a dress.

  There were fathers and daughters whose separation meant honest tragedy. For a long time I tried to believe we were that. But we were not. “He walked out on his own two feet,” my grandmother used to say.

  THAT SAME WEEK I had to fly home to see my mother. I was really mad. I hadn’t been speaking to her exactly and then she called and said that word. Cancer. It wasn’t the first time. Of course she was crying. It took nothing to set my mother crying. Crying was nearer her natural state than repose. Something had to trigger her to stop.

  She’d called me late on Wednesday and it was a holiday weekend, so the flight cost a fortune. Nine hundred dollars. I was mad at myself for minding but I couldn’t help remembering all those other times flights were in the paper, a hundred and thirty-nine dollars each way. Poverty doesn’t make squalor but it does let you see it in yourself.

  She was going to have to have her insides cut out and she wouldn’t get her period anymore. “They say after, your hair goes gray and I don’t know, you just age,” she said. She was going to need chemotherapy and radiation, she told me. That sounded really bad. A full hysterectomy. “I just don’t want it,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll even feel like a woman anymore, honey.”

  All this time, I had been trying to get away from her, but it chased me, something, I couldn’t get free. For one thing, she was in trouble. The convalescent hospital she’d been working for had been closed. There was some kind of investigation. I didn’t think she was working and I couldn’t see how she would be able to afford her life. She didn’t tell me much, she just hinted. I hated thinking about it, I was afraid to let myself imagine what would happen. This had been going on for a while now and it would probably go on a long time.

  That
Thursday I left the hospital early. I forgot about finding my father. My mother had already stopped it so many times in my life and now this. But she didn’t even know. All she knew was she was getting her femininity cut out.

  It was a wind-bright autumn day, changing, and I needed to get home and pack. Four o’clock light gilded the city behind me, all points and towers. My block still seemed a quiet forgotten neighborhood subject to a different lower light. At the corner, a wrought-iron fence protected one small churchyard and a poor row of flowers. The walls of the stucco church curved out convexly and all the windows were boarded with green shutters. The stucco took on a violet hue. I didn’t want to go. But I never liked to leave anywhere.

  I packed and dressed and carried my old suitcase with me. In the elevator my upstairs neighbor stood with his cane. It was reddish wood, silver-handled. At the ground floor, I offered to help him with my arm.

  “I don’t need,” he said. We walked together outside. “Cane just for looks. New York everybody push and shove, steal my taxi. I use cane, the people they just look and say oh-oh old man, and they very nice. Keep away.”

  A film was running at the Pleiades Palace, where I stopped on my way, and I pushed the heavy velvet curtains aside to get to Timothy, sitting on a high stool by the ticket booth. He had a tiny light there. He wasn’t watching, he was reading a big-print book.

  “So it’s cancer again?” he said, looking up.

  We just stood there a minute, the words and pictures moving below us like an outside rain.

  I COULD IMAGINE her doing absolutely anything anywhere. It seemed to me on the plane that day that whatever you imagined was true when you knew someone deeply enough. You can see them many ways they will never be and still, you are right—it is true. When I was young I used to mimic people, but that is not what I mean. I am not talking about imitating a tic or a limp or a way of talking. When you know a person to the bottom, nothing they do can ever surprise you.

  Your understanding of them is not bound by the limits of time or geography or circumstance or luck. I know my mother in prison, if she is never in trouble, never caught, I know her in bed, though I have never seen her with a man that way and what I know is not what she has told me. I know her married safe with money, though that will not happen to her anymore in her life, it could have, and I know the generous luncheon parties she would have given, frantic with flowers.

  We all own many existences besides the material one we are occupying now. But what I am talking about is not reincarnation. Because each version of ourselves, each possible manifestation, lives around us, like a circle of our own children, apparent to those who know us best.

  You can probably know a person like that once or twice in a lifetime. I hope it will happen to me again, with a man. I’ve sometimes, for a few moments, thought I was close. It seemed different, then, with a man, the way I love. But now I think that silvery quality to it, that solitary gasp, is not knowing a person. And that the way I know my mother is deeper than gender.

  Perhaps families of six or eight children get more. Or maybe my mother and I had something wholly extraordinary between us, with our clairvoyance. But I could stun my mother. She never knew me the way I did her.

  I wanted to picture my father those ways. I tried to. Because my father still could have been anything. I tried to see him rich, in a suit, showing me down the machine aisles of a factory he owned. I have been in factories and office buildings, but I couldn’t see him there. I could see other people I’d met before in the world. I tried to picture him a bum. I couldn’t really do that either. My mother and other people too had always told me he was a man with women. I tried to see that. Him in bed with a woman, lifting up under her hair, his ministrations. But I couldn’t. What I saw wasn’t him. All I could do was substitute other men, men I’d known.

  I tried teacher, doctor, politician, traveling salesman, driving. Nothing would come. All I could sense was a presence stationary in a chair, me stamping around the room in white, accusing, his face a still draped rag, showing no movement as I accused without time. He would never be as real on this earth as she was, even if I did find him alive.

  In six hours I was at the place where my mother was. LA. Somewhere I couldn’t save her. It was hot. Overpopulated. You knew just as you stepped off the plane. A kind of soot seemed dispersed in the air. I came out and looked over the expectant crowd of faces like so many balloons. Always, walking out of an airplane even if I knew no one was waiting for me, I couldn’t help but look.

  She wasn’t there so I kept walking with the line that seemed to know where it was going. Maybe she was at the luggage conveyor. I’d brought only carry-on. But she wouldn’t assume that. She always came to see me with two huge perfect suitcases too big to carry.

  When she wasn’t there at baggage claim, I ran to a phone booth, paged her, all the while looking around, worrying I was in the wrong place and wanting to get out. Then I just gave up and didn’t care anymore, like dropping a piece of paper. I was going to be in the airport for a while.

  It was a freak show, LAX. People looked like demons in their clothes and their hard hair.

  I stood at one of the doors, just outside. My mother was getting her femininity cut out. The palm leaves, high above, moved just a little, up and down in the sooted heat. In the distance I could see metal fences, random concrete, long lots of cars with strings of little plastic flags and the curved big freeway on-ramps.

  Finally, the white Mercedes screeched to a stop. She didn’t see me yet. She was all out in one jerk, standing with her hands angry on hips, surveying the world. She looked the same, straight up and down, with sunglasses. I took my time, my jacket looped from the peg hook on a finger behind me.

  FIRST SHE TOOK me on an errand. Something about the car. She left me sitting in an auto shop forty-five minutes while she was outside, standing by the open hood, pointing, talking to the submerged mechanic, riding him it looked like. This was just like my mother. I was used to it in a way. Even though I hadn’t seen her for two years. The couch where I was sitting was greasy and taped. There was nothing to read. One TV Guide with the cover partly ripped off. A girl calendar on the wall. There was time like this, just time.

  “Well say something,” she said later, driving the way she drove, full of gasps and skids and halts. “Ooh, watch out, I didn’t see that.”

  I didn’t say anything. I fingered the window well.

  “I had to do that,” she said.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “Well, to the doctor, what did you think?”

  It was a small square building, a kind of feminist women’s practice, a place I was surprised to see my mother, and the doctor looked gay but I guess she wasn’t, she had pictures of a man with kids. And when we went in it wasn’t cancer at all but precancerous cells, she didn’t need chemotherapy or even a hysterectomy, just her cervix scraped the way my friend Mai linn already had, when she was twenty-five.

  We were sitting in the doctor’s office.

  “I thought you said you had to have radiation,” I said to my mother.

  “I didn’t say that.” She shook her head. “Boy, you sure imagine things, brother.”

  She had to go into the hospital the next day. Sunday morning, she could go home. I already didn’t want to be there. I felt tricked. All I could do was count off hours.

  We had brilliant fights, with an arc of night. I kept wanting to go home. “Take a taxi,” she screamed, from the backhouse, where I heard things fall crashing around her, “damnit, damn you!”

  I was sitting out in the little garden, on my mother’s furniture. It seemed flimsy now, all her attempts. There was a ceramic rabbit sitting at the edge of the rose bed, a smaller one just next to it. A reclining concrete cat curled on the table with the umbrella. None of it was hers really. She bought these little ornaments, but she didn’t own anything. Not the land.

  I kept thinking of calling a taxi, but I didn’t want to go inside. My hands lay fal
low and useless the way they always did here. Here with her, I was a bomb, always ticking and waiting. I told myself a taxi from where she lived in Beverly Hills to the airport would cost a hundred dollars or even more. We both used money that way, always as the excuse to be stuck together. We couldn’t admit any love.

  The next day she packed her suitcase with all hard steps and jabbing elbows. She got up to do this at five o’clock.

  “Come on, get up, I’ve got things to do.” She shook my shoulder.

  “I don’t, so let me sleep.”

  “Hunh-ah, come on, get going. I want to straighten up here before I leave.” There was metal in her voice.

  So I sat there and watched her and listened to her for four hours.

  Then oddly, at the end, in a strange voice, she said she would take me to the airport. “What are you talking about?” I said. “Well,” she said with a high laugh, “to tell the truth, I don’t really want you to stay here, tonight when I’m not here.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I know you. You’ll take things. I never say anything, but I notice after you go, certain things are missing. I know you have my father’s ring and other little things. Choice things that are mine.”

  “You don’t trust me to stay in your house?”

  “No, I really don’t,” she said.

  That was just part of the long movement. Of course she didn’t drive me to the airport. I waited at the hospital. One of her friends, Audrey, a woman who had once been a starlet and still received fan mail from the third world, came to visit my mother in pigtails and a pink gingham blouse all kindness and child-voiced concern. I left them and wandered to the hospital cafeteria. Outside were bushes with flat waxy green leaves. Everything in LA seemed almost still.

  The next day she was like something hard cracked open so all the sweetness came out. She was soft and quiet and older and grateful. She begged me to stay longer. She thanked me for coming. To all of it I said no.

  I slouched in the space between her bed and the table, talking on the phone to New York. I was telling Emily she had to meet me for dinner the night I got back.