The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  “All I do here is eat,” Danny said.

  A few card tables looked almost like antique stalls in city flea markets. These were less antiques than stuff from the basement and attic, but at one, Danny found his prize. A tablecloth of names. There it was: a round, standard tablecloth, the borders factory-printed with maroon and brown, green-leaved, unpretty flowers. But a woman must have had all her guests from 1941 on sign the tablecloth. You could see the dull gray lead signatures under embroidery yarn. They spanned the forties though the sixties. Then she’d embroidered each signature a different color.

  A tablecloth of handwritten names, colored as a circus poster. I looked it over. I recognized some families I knew, but none of the girls was there.

  “And her children are selling it,” he whispered to me. “Twenty dollars. Why would you sell a thing like that?”

  I saw a cane. I’d never noticed canes until the man upstairs but this was a pretty one, light wood—all his had been dark—rustic but perfectly smooth, with some gnarls and raised joints of branch intact. The more I looked, it went beautiful. “How much is this?”

  “I’ll take three,” the man said, slot-mouthed. He wore a T-shirt, arms crossed in front, muscles pressing everywhere.

  I bought it for the man upstairs and then walked with it myself down the aisles. It felt good in the hand. I liked it. I hoped I’d really give it to the old man. My mother did that. Whenever my mother bought a present for anybody she got one for herself too, and she kept the one with the better color or without the scratch. It was so hard for her give away anything. She always felt like she had so little herself.

  Danny had spread his tablecloth out across the worn knees of his black jeans. “I wonder who made it. You think their mother? Must be the mother.”

  I pulled him back through the crowded aisle. Danny’s mother, Amber Felchner, was the fattest woman we knew growing up. She was a good cook. The other women on Guns Road were always borrowing her recipes. They usually had some chicken or meat in them and a Campbell’s cream soup and biscuits baked on top of it all. But Jim, her husband, and her two boys, they never got fat. Danny and I then were sharing a paper plate of sticky rice crispy and marshmallow squares. You had to grow up in the Midwest not to find these things disgusting, but if you did grow up here there was something indoors about them. All walls and ceilings and safety and rain.

  “Excuse me, he just bought this from you. Do you know who made it?”

  An older woman with an ample face, vastly freckled, waited before us, her square hands useless, lifted. “Oh, why sure, my mother made that. She did it for their twenty-fifth anniversary. Never used it. ’S never been used. I found it upstairs in a drawer wrapped in brown tissue.”

  “You don’t want it yourself? You sure you want to sell it?” Danny held it out as a kind of accusation. He couldn’t help himself. It occurred to me then how he had loved his mother and that, by now, she might be dead. Fat people died. “She’s gonna die soon,” my mom had said about Amber Felchner, thirty years ago. She’s gonna die soon. Every time you mentioned Amber Felchner, that was her refrain. My grandmother would shake her head, saying, “Such a pretty, pretty face.”

  The woman shriveled, somehow folding the many freckles. “Shucks no, I’ve got so much of such stuff around the house. You take it. Take it if you think you’ll use it.” The woman picked up the tiny white price tag affixed with white string to the corner, professionally, as if this were a store. “Twenty. I put on twenty.” She reached into the glass mason jar and picked out a ten, moved to give it back. “That was high. Here. Take this.”

  Danny backed off, mouth open, jawy. “No, are you kidding? It’s a great price, do you know what I’d pay for this in Chicago?” He pressed it, folded, to his chest. “I love it.”

  “Enjoy it, I’ll be glad if you get some use out of it,” she said. “And remember it all goes to Saint Agnes. New altar boys’ robes and choir books.”

  “What a trip,” he said, walking out to the car. Now we were eating Mexican vertical donuts, hot and melting with powdered sugar. International sophistication in Racine seemed to exist mainly in baked goods. Sweets from many countries. I’d been there under a day and I could feel I’d already gained.

  “I should really go back and give her another twenty. Can you believe she sold this?”

  I could believe. No problem. I’d known houses choked with hand-touched things. One tablecloth wouldn’t be this mother’s only legacy. People repeated themselves. There were few true quirks in character. This solid freckled woman, a daughter still at fifty, had probably always lived cluttered and impeded by meant mementos from her mother. Children like that don’t need to save.

  I tried to remember Danny better from when we were little. His brother was normal, but I don’t think Danny had many friends. He was always at home with his mother.

  I thought of the freckled woman, her red, preparatory hands. Her mother every day gave her what we looked for at flea markets. I remembered Emily’s monument of a birthday cake, built and worked over with butter cream. I could see the little glass cups of food coloring, tinting the white frosting, the metal fluting frosting gun, their maid did most of the work but Merl signed her name, in frosting, at the end, on the right-hand bottom corner. It had a flourish to it. People who expressed themselves expressed everyplace, signing even things they barely touched. People like my grandmother kept on hiding over and over again, every day of their lives until the end when they finally disappeared, once and for all, leaving behind not even a signature.

  I looked over at Danny. “You remember my mom?”

  His head went down so it shook parallel to the ground. “Your grandma was such a nice person,” he said. “Yeah, she was a great woman. I remember kids laughing at me over something and your grandma saying, ‘Ugh, don’t you care what they say, you just go about your own business, let ’em laugh, they’ll get tired of it pretty soon and pick on someone else.’ ”

  The funny thing was my grandmother was as bad as the others about Amber’s Danny, behind his back. She blamed Amber for it.

  “Where to now?” He put his boot on the dashboard. I must have looked at it funny because he said sorry and pulled his leg back, both arms around the knee. I’d never seen a boot on that dashboard before. My grandmother always kept her car perfect.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you have to be somewhere?”

  He shrugged. Bells began to peal from churches. It must have been five o’clock.

  I said, “I kind of don’t want to go where I’m supposed to.”

  “Well, let’s go downtown then.”

  Nothing here was far from anything else. I parked halfway down the block on Main Street. The library was one way, Boss’s the other. “Where to?” I said. We just sat.

  “I can buy some tobacco at Boss’s. Check out the magazines.”

  I ran first to the library. It was still early but already darkening, winter. People rushed by carrying packages in both hands. I was thinking, I didn’t even know what the country looked like: Egypt. I wanted to see and for some reason I wanted to know now, before I had to face the Briggses. I shuffled up the white long steps to the big doors. The Racine Public Library and Museum were attached, in this old building with the columns. At the main desk, under a huge wreath, I asked for Marion Werth. She had an office upstairs in a cage but I expected she would be walking through some part of the library now. Maybe they had their own Christmas party. I looked forward to her right then, her round face and red fringe of bangs. I wondered if it would be a red dress or a green dress. Her earrings would definitely have a Christmas theme: wreaths or trees or sleighbells that jingled.

  “Up, they’re gonna say, whatever happened to the girl that jingled,” Eli Timber teased her one year. Stevie Howard was there too. All the teenage guys noticed what she wore and flirted with her. It was like practice.

  “The girl who jingled? That was me!” she said, stamping a bookleaf. She had a cheerfulness, something proper
you found only in the Midwest.

  “She’s not here anymore,” the kid behind the desk said. I looked at him. He was someone I didn’t know.

  “Will she be in next week?” I thought vacation. Maybe she even found some relative on the family tree and took the train to meet him. Despite myself, I got excited about that.

  “She doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “Since when?”

  “August.”

  I asked him where she worked now and his lips went tight and his chin crumbled the way some people’s do. “I can’t say that, ma’am, only that she is no longer employed by the Racine Public Library.”

  The kid was what, no more than eighteen or nineteen. Stern. I wanted to slap his chin for daring to imply anything less than right in Marion Werth’s conduct. He bothered me so much I forgot what I was there for. Then I turned around and saw into the big reading room, the library tabletops under the slow shower of electric light: a father stood behind two children; leaning over them, pointing to things in a big book. A black teenaged boy stood gazing at the standing globe, his fingertips all on the surface of one yellow continent. An old woman sat in the corner by a swan’s-neck lamp, the newspaper stretched taut between two gloved hands. The pads of her glove fingers were black. Kids browsed, slouching, at the new arrivals rack. A deep bright blue pressed against the long windows. It was quarter after five, the big clock on the north wall said. I went to the world atlas and found it: Egypt. It looked pretty large. I drew the shape in pencil on my checkbook. I decided I’d learn it the way I could anytime draw Wisconsin.

  Wind skeeted down the empty main street, newspapers caught on alley garbage cans. I pulled up my collar. This was what it was like here. Sunset, brown-red and a sorrowing pink under looming purple clouds, stretched between the smokestacks across the river. The brick paper mill’s windows lit yellow-orange.

  I stopped at a phone booth on Main Street and called the detective long distance. I couldn’t stay mad at anyone long. I had too many of my own problems. And with Jim Wynne, it was just like making up after any fight. We both sounded subdued, lower now. I put my hand on the glass, pressing to stretch, and for one moment, I looked down and saw myself in my jeans and thought, someone across the street could be glancing at me right now the way I’d watched people in phone booths, and I must—from this far away—assume some mystery, too.

  We decided. I’d open the box and then he’d start work on whatever leads I found from that. So I’d have to get through Christmas alone.

  “And what about the passport guy?” I said. “You were going to check on that.” I’d gotten to feel that I had to keep the lists and remind him. That was a bad feeling, but if it was true, it was true. He’d never surprised me with anything good. Not since the very beginning, before the check was cashed. Still, I didn’t think he was a bad man. I guessed it was normal to be lazy.

  “Yeah, he’s workin’ on it, you know for what I paid him he’s not gonna rush, but he’ll, he’s a good guy, he’ll do it. I should be getting something from him any day now.”

  I tried to force him into a dinner when I got back.

  “I’ll have whatever’s in the box then, we can just go over it together. I’ve got my calendar,” I said. I already owned a calendar for the new year. I balanced the thing on my bent leg in the phone booth. January 5. I dallied a moment, writing his name down.

  “Awright,” he said in an upsigh way that made me know he was going to cancel. “Do you have those two addresses in Egypt, the Shahira Miramar and the Refinery? From that report I gave you?”

  It was snowing outside, the street already furred with gray slush.

  “Yeah,” I said. That reminded me of when my mother wanted me to write to the United Arab Republic to ask where my trust fund money was. She told me all my life, I had a trust fund for college. Then the summer before I was supposed to go she said she was worried because nothing had come for me in the mail. Who was supposed to send it, I said. Well the Arabs, she said. You don’t have a name or documents? Did you have the name of the lawyer or anything? No, but it was said that it would be done. It was promised me. When? Well, when you were born.

  That summer when I was still hoping stupidly and watching the mail just because the other side was shell after shell of horror, I drafted a letter to my father’s family. My mother went to dinner once in a while with a fat dark-skinned man named Fiaz. He was some kind of Arab but he’d said once to me that he didn’t know my father or my father’s family. He was from a different country altogether. I don’t remember anymore which one. But my mother said he could take my letter to the family.

  I wrote, “My mother has told me that you made arrangements for my college education at the time of my birth. As I am going to college in September, I need to know as soon as possible whether this is true.”

  She rewrote the letter for me with her friend Audrey. Audrey, she said, knows what men over there are like. These Arabs.

  “Dear Relatives” (they wrote), “I have not seen my daddy for years and years,” it began. “And now I am a straight A student in Beverly Hills High School hoping to go to college and study medicine. My mother works hard but she is all alone. Men ask her out on dates but she is too worried about me and my education. I have nowhere to turn for help.”

  It went on like that, all begging.

  I refused. She could write it if she wanted but not like that in my name.

  “Okay, it’s your life,” my mother said. “But I know these men. I know what they’re like. They don’t want you to just be so blunt. And tough.”

  Later she said my trust fund was her jewels.

  JIM WYNNE TOLD ME the Miramar address had been on my father’s record when he first came to the University of Wisconsin. It was that old. I supposed it was probably his home. I couldn’t believe it would be there anymore.

  Dorothy Widmer, that dust-file angel, had located it. I wasn’t that far from Dorothy Widmer right now. Powell Street went along the river a ways and then veered up into the highway. Madison was what, less than a half day’s drive away. I thought, maybe I should meet her. But no, why. The feather had touched her once but never again. Maybe she’d been his lover. I thought a lot of women probably were. Still. I fingered the travel agent’s card in my wallet. On the back, I had the numbers written for the flights to Egypt. I imagined Dorothy Widmer egg-shaped, yearning. Egypt was my last resort. Secret. If I went there, I had to find him. I didn’t tell the detective. I didn’t want him thinking I had any more money.

  “Do that,” he said. “Write to them.”

  “I did already.”

  “Oh. Good,” he said. That surprised him. “See, we’re gettin’ someplace now. See now you’re catching on. Your attitude’s better. We’re makin’ a lot of progress.”

  We hung up, together. Except I’d lied. That was my first lie to him. I didn’t feel like writing to those thirty-year-old addresses without zip codes. I just didn’t do it. I never trusted much good coming from the mail. Those systems broke. Or they worked but for other purposes, to relay the mundane tops of things. My grandmother’s letters, sent and received, all recounted what was that day cooked and eaten. What parts of the body ached how and which ointments were tried as new relief. Those letters arrived. The ten-cent stamp could carry them. Once, absolutely alone with my mother in Los Angeles, I escaped out of the apartment and ran. After a while I just walked. Nobody was following me. She’d wait mad for me to come back in. I passed mansions with vast lawns and saw no people. Just for nothing I opened a mailbox and spread wide a fan of cobwebs.

  No one in Los Angeles bothered with letters. It was too long and simple a wait. And people other places were too far away.

  Danny Felchner was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette at the counter of Boss’s. Piped Christmas music came in from an old radio on the top shelf. I didn’t want it to be Christmas. I wanted just any other ordinary day. I slid onto the stool beside him.

  “Who’d you call?” he said.

&nb
sp; “Secret.”

  “Try these then,” he said, and slipped a pair of sunglasses over my eyes.

  With his finger, he revolved a circular wire rack of sunglasses. Next to it was a standing head mirror. The glasses were tinted silver. I looked criminal and mean. “Nope,” I said.

  He spun the rack harder, then lifted off another pair. “These are better.” He fitted them over my ears. This pair was delicate, bookish. I liked them. I’d always believed people looked more intelligent in glasses.

  Danny took them off my eyes and put them in my coat pocket. “Here,” he said, patting the pocket. At first I flushed embarrassed, pleased. That he was going to buy me something. I liked it so much when someone did something for me I didn’t know how to be. It pleased me too much just when someone liked me.

  “Come on,” he said, a hand under my elbow. Then I understood. He wasn’t going to buy them for me. We were going to steal the sunglasses from Boss’s. Then I felt ashamed for being so happy.

  I was scared, real scared but with a sharp edge of thrill too, walking out as if something electric and loud, a buzzing, might start when I passed under the nickel plate door and my whole body felt different that second, but then we were out going to the car and his hand was still on my elbow and I shrugged it off. I wanted to be alone and all of a sudden it seemed late, night was blowing over the river, silver clouds, and the joy ride felt done.

  Sunglasses. Now I’d have them. I already did have health insurance from school. Two out of three. But I didn’t like stealing from Boss’s.

  It seemed to end our aimlessness. “I better get there,” I said, my foot on the car floor. “Where should I bring you?”

  He shrugged. “I’m parked by Price’s,” he said. “You can leave me anywhere.”

  “What are you doing? Are you going to your parents tonight?”

  “No,” he said.

  I all of a sudden wanted to invite him with me. But it was the Briggses’ and I couldn’t really. I mean I could but it was a statement. But then I got mad.