The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  But nothing turned out the way it seemed it would. Fifteen years later, Carrie was at home, working at Briggs’s, bottom-heavy like a pear. Kim ran away to Chicago and became a fashion model in Japan. And when she came home, she paid for everyone, Eli Timber, Sister Mary Bede, Carrie and Corinna. They all said she was real loose with money. They kept the clippings of her from the magazines. Nuns from other Wisconsin cities who’d never met Kim sent her cut-out picture to Sister Mary Bede.

  MY GRANDMOTHER was always getting old. As if time were running out and nobody knew but us, a chestnut fallen on the sidewalk that she couldn’t pick up anymore—I reached down to get it, my hand touching the stain on the cement, and when I rose our eyes met and we were in love for a moment the way anyone is in love, a man and a woman, a mother and a child. It was a kind of race. Could she stay standing long enough to deliver me, done, an adult? Or would she have to give me back to my mother? Even then, she’d lost her vigilance. She must have known something about Stevie. I expected her to stop me, but she didn’t. She was tired. She climbed upstairs to go to bed at five after seven. It was more than tired. She was old. She didn’t care so much anymore or she did care, but about different things, vastly different things than younger, headstrong parents. They had ego in their children, themselves planted over again like sex. My grandmother held something else altogether and what it was in her wasn’t attached to me but by then to something high and vague as heaven.

  All that time, I assumed, she was holding on to see me into college. We’d talked about college, the nuns and she and I in a conference room. This was during one of the times my mother was away without me. But my grandmother always seemed mild about college, veering into, We’ll see. You never know, she’d say.

  She would have rather delivered me to a husband. That would have let her rest.

  FOLLOWING THE ROAD I was supposed to be on, I drifted into a windy, rising neighborhood of comfortable houses with shallow lawns and two-car garages. Lights began softening windows but there was still daylight too, a poignant winter blue. Finally I found the address and stopped the car. It was a stone house made with thin horizontal stones and a wooden garage door, shrubs lining the walkway. I stepped out slowly and straightened my skirt. I hadn’t really thought that much about what I’d say to this man. The air smelled good, someone had a fire going. An open garage door across the street showed a boy mandering over a flat table of tools, his large, labile back. I remembered the luminous beauty of suburbs, the deep safety.

  I walked up to the door thinking this was the same uncertainty I’d have when I neared the house that held my father, but it wasn’t true, this was easier, and when I stood there hearing the doorbell ring through the house, what I felt was hot, real embarrassment.

  Then I thought, what if nobody’s home?

  But a tall woman opened the door, a beagle beating against her leg, and she smiled, asking if she could help me. She was long-necked, long-faced, long-thighed, her hair pulled up and behind her in an oval bun.

  “Is J.D. Nash here, please?”

  “Sure, come on in. Jay,” she called through the house, “you have a vis-itor.” I followed her, her long feet canvassing the stone floor. Then the man emerged, blinking, fitting on a pair of thick plastic glasses.

  He, too, was long-faced, long-legged and long-armed. And bald. One hand took the glasses down again and polished them on his shirt while the other arm was already out meeting me. He couldn’t have guessed who I was yet. I knew he’d be nice. The sleeves of his shirt came down almost to the elbows.

  “Do I know you?” He looked at me as if he were on the verge of recognition.

  “No you don’t. I’m Mayan Stevenson and, God—”

  “Oh, I know who you are.” He had a soft voice. I wondered if he was always like that.

  “My grandmother got in touch with you a while ago.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. His face was so long it seemed to be composed of two interlocking circular compartments. When he smiled, the bottom became rounder, cinching the middle.

  “To find my father.” This last thing seemed a confession.

  He led me through a family room where two tall teenage boys lounged in stocking feet, long-faced, big-eared, blond. “Paula? I’ll be in the office, this is Mayan Stevenson, Lillian August’s granddaughter.”

  Now it seemed incredibly right that my grandmother had found this J.D. Nash. He was a civil servant. A blotter printed State of Wisconsin Bureau of Vital Statistics covered his desktop and there was a State of Wisconsin Municipal Authority paperweight, too. I suppose that was just the place I’d expect Jackson Fenwick and my grandmother to dream up. It was the obvious place, the bureau you’d get if you looked in the phone book for it. My grandmother had such trust. If you were missing a person, you looked in the state of Wisconsin’s lost and found. She had no idea what vanishing power she was up against. He could disappear between the lines of an alphabetical listing, he could will himself invisible and remain forever. I thought of my grandmother’s weekly letters to me and to all her relatives. She believed the systems worked the way they were supposed to.

  “And my grandmother died now six years ago.”

  “Yes, I know that. I was sorry to read about it when we processed it—you know, my department, Bureau of Vital Statistics, well, the notice came in to me and of course, I recognized her name. I sent a card, I don’t know if it got there and you saw it, I’m assuming it did.” He said all this in a mumble with his long head near his chest.

  “And now I’m looking for him.” I tried to make a joke. “He’s a wily guy.”

  J.D. Nash smiled at me, bashful, as if I were really something. He looked like a melon smiling, his forehead held the same slope.

  “I thought you might call someday to do this. I’m glad you did” was what he said.

  This man had been waiting for me. Long before I knew he existed. This was so good.

  He bent over his desk drawer. “I’ll have to look up the file. I can’t quite recall where I left things.” His fingers raced over the file tops, but he couldn’t resist, even doing that, looking at me. I don’t think I’d ever felt that before: a stranger’s fascination. I could have sat in that chair, arms lax on the armrests, all night.

  “We take in exchange students and we’ve had a number of them from your father’s part of the world,” he said. “We had two engineering students and a medical student; last year we had a young woman from India. We’ve got the two boys so when we talk to the cultural group here we always ask for girls. And apparently we were lucky to have her because they tell us everyone wants the girls.”

  So he was a man with sons and no daughter. He liked me. I was secure in that already. There are the people who like you and the people who don’t, even if you work to make them. I knew I could get him to give me a back rub.

  “Here. I do have all the correspondence. I think what I’ll do is make you copies of this so we both have it.” All of a sudden I was protected. I could have gone to sleep right then and there. I didn’t panic anymore where I’d be tonight, food, anything. He said, “Now this goes back, oh, prettinear twenty years already. What do you say, why don’t we just have some supper and then, after, we could walk to a copy shop that’s open near campus and Xerox the papers for you then.”

  The line of men on the way to my father, they were all different, each one. They could have never been him. They were more like my stepfather or my mother’s boyfriends, when both of us were sorry. I knew there was an underground trail of women who would eventually lead to him too. This guy liked me, though. He liked me easily after I’d tried so hard with the lawyer. I’d always had that—the some men who just liked me and the others I spent my life chasing.

  And I felt he’d taken the search from me, like the box I’d been carrying. He could lift the weight and I’d follow. This J.D. Nash had some special interest in us. I didn’t even wonder why. He was like all rectitude. I was just grateful.

  He walked out of the door o
f his study, skating a little on the stones, calling “Paula,” and I followed.

  So there were homes like this really. I mean, you always kind of knew but then you think, no, everyone’s life feels more or less the same from inside. Everybody has their forty-two thousand eight hundred and sixty-four minutes of happiness. But we sat around a plain wooden table, a modernish iron candle holder supporting candles with rich, wavering flames that smelled vaguely of warm honey. Dinner was like a restaurant. Paula Nash passed out a plate to each of us with a chicken portion, a sauce with some kind of liqueur and cherries and herbs and vegetables. Mashed potatoes. Green beans. Hot biscuits. It was just the four Nashes and me. The exchange student was at a lecture at the International House.

  All of sudden, I felt sorry for the Briggses. I’d always guessed they didn’t know how to live. But I’d thought that was just jealousy. Jay Nash was explaining who I was to the two boys and Paula chewed evenly, her forehead so high and rounded I thought, ballet, and then I bumped my elbow on the son next to me and realized I had someone on my left and I dropped my napkin and then, to make matters worse, knocked my knife down, too. When I was under the table retrieving, I saw Paula Nash’s two feet, long and thin, the beating beagle held between them.

  “So you’re from New York?” One of the boys spoke when I popped up.

  “Well, she’s from Wisconsin, but she moved to New York. She lives there now.”

  “And do you like it there?” That son, across from me, wore glasses. I glanced at his brother on my left. Both boys were their parents’ length, wand-touched, handsome. Their hair was corn-blond, their skin young and just fitting, their features rounded and tentative.

  “Yeah, I do. I mean, it’s a fun place to be young.” They were looking at me for more and so I lied. “There’s a lot to do. Lot of parties, and wonderful restaurants, museums.” I was trying to remember things I’d read about in magazines.

  “You’re not scared or anything?”

  “No. Oh no.” I giggled. “Sometimes I even forget to lock my door.”

  At that Paula Nash looked at me sternly. It was hard for her to seem stern because her chin was rounded to her neck.

  The conversation went on like that. I asked Paula if she worked. She did, she said, she was a nurse. Curtains over the long span of windows were almost floor-length, they left about three inches showing.

  I sat back in my chair. So there were families like this in Wisconsin. Jay was telling me about his sons, that they liked to go ice fishing. He reached out and touched the smaller one, on the side of his neck below his ear. That was it—fathers. Those two boys charmed him without doing anything. But I did too. From being a girl.

  Later Jay Nash and I sat in front of the fire. He’d made us a pot of coffee and lent me big hand-knit socks. He opened TV trays for us to write on. He had his glasses affixed again.

  “I’m giving you both my numbers, my work number and my home number,” he said, inscribing a clean manila file.

  This helped me. I was used to things not working. I loved knowing where to find somebody. God, I thought, I am far away.

  We’d already decided that I’d stay the night. In the morning, we would make copies of all the papers.

  “So then you’ll have the story from beginning to end,” he said.

  End, I thought, what end? There is no end.

  “For example, I am not sure you know about the, as the attorney called it in one of his letters, the Cairo Caper. I notice that I’d written about that in detail, but then I decided not to send the letter. You’re never certain whether you’re telling people anything they want to hear or—”

  “I want to hear everything.”

  “Well, I left it out. Later, I think I sent a summary of it all to your grandmother and so she in the end had it.”

  He handed me the file. “Now, this is the more detailed paragraph that I did not finally send to Fenwick, Stone and Arbinger.”

  I held the yellowed paper, marked with the State of Wisconsin Seal. “Apparently, events took a sad turn for Dr. Atassi after 1973. According to Firth Adams College, Dr. Atassi conducted an extension course tour of alumni and local citizens interested in Egyptology to the Middle East. The participants reported that Dr. Atassi was an amusing and informative guide through the Holy Land, the Pyramids and the Sahara. Several women particularly mentioned an enjoyable trip up the Nile. But apparently in Cairo, a group of women led by Dr. Atassi were cruelly deceived in a casino and were left stranded the next day when he disappeared. It was first suspected that he had run into foul play; however, it was later discovered that he went to Europe. He eventually made his way back to the United States and resigned from his position at Firth Adams College. He never returned for his papers or other possessions. A Firth Adams graduate later reported having seen him working as a maitre d’ at a restaurant in Southern California. Dr. Gunther did not know the name of the city or restaurant where he was reported to have been seen.”

  “That’s a dead end,” J.D. Nash said.

  “Yeah, that sounds pretty dead end.” We sat staring at the fire for a while. It was a clean stone fireplace, the flames leapt against the dull rock sides. I tried to think of my father in Cairo. On a camel. Casinos probably looked about the same anywhere. The line that got me was about him leaving his possessions behind at Firth Adams College. Maybe they were still there. A pipe, one of those felt desktop blotters with leather on either side. Maybe a cup for pencils and pens. I wanted it preserved, the whole office, so I could walk in and find the vertical-ribbed glass on the door, the brass peg, his jacket on it, a smell still in the sleeves. But of course, the things would be packed in standard boxes and stored somewhere. Probably thrown out.

  I went slowly through the rest of the letters on the TV tray, thin tissue paper with raised typewriter marks, sometimes a hole where they dotted the i. Most of them seemed to be written by Mr. J.D. Nash to various members of the faculty at this Montana college. The answers to his letters all told one or another form of no. I finished them, closed the file. Montana.

  “But,” he said, “what I thought would be most helpful at this time, what we could do is check the indexes, the vital statistics indexes in likely states.”

  I guess he would think of that. Sometimes the world is wonderfully coherent, with a place for everyone. Officers of law and order, managers of vital statistics.

  “Each state retains its own vital records,” he told me, “and there’s always an index to those vital records, a death index, a marriage index, a birth index. Do you know if the person you have hired explored any of these possibilities at all?”

  “I don’t think he did. What he did was he looked at DMVs and at credit—” At credit whats I didn’t know.

  “And he found nothing, huh?”

  “No. Nothing of any use. I keep wondering if, do you think Firth Adams College would possibly give us the social security number?”

  “Oh. Well, I bet he would. The man I spoke to there was a Dr. Gregory Geesie. He’s there, in the file. He was, let’s see, chairman of the International Relations Department at Firth Adams when your father left there in ’73. It sounds like your father was marking time after that ’73 debacle. You know, your father might’ve just been doing a fill-in job until he …”

  Until he what, that was the question. “Yeah, it does sound like that, and it’s been a while. So.”

  “But you know there’s always the possibility that he did return to Egypt. On the other hand, given the life-style to which he had become accustomed, he probably didn’t.” He giggled a little.

  We talked back and forth like old sisters chatting and speculating. Like my mother and her friend Lolly on the porch, going on about some man’s absence.

  How kind. How kind it was for him to take this up with me. He made it feel like it was our search, together. This was another person like Venise King I had to write or call if I ever found him. I could be bad like that. I never got in the habit of courtesies like thank-you notes. Emily
sat me down and tried to instruct me at age twenty-two. It was a funny thing, learning manners people expected from you as an adult. I was no one but my mother’s child. And she had far too much rage in her to develop my steady good habits.

  “I guess,” I said, “given that he was in the US, it seems pretty steadily from ’56 to ’73, there’s no particular reason we should think he’s gone back to Egypt except that he’s not showing up on any of these computer checks.”

  “Unless he took some a.k.a., you know, another name. If he were avoiding creditors, maybe.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That could be the case.” He said that carefully, as if it could hurt me. That couldn’t hurt me. I thought probably a lot worse. I turned to the side and through the dark window saw the moon, a yellow sickle moon. This was a good house.

  “I tried calling information there in Alexandria, that’s where he’s from, and that was no easy feat. For one thing it’s almost impossible even to just get an operator. And when they finally did get through was at three-thirty in the morning and I gave them the name, Atassi, and they said they had too many listed. They said there were a hundred Atassis.”

  “You know, I’m surprised I never met your father and mother because we were all students here at the University of Wisconsin at the same time, well, they were each a year older.” The beagle moved between J.D. Nash’s knees now. The beagle was long-faced too.

  “It’s a long time ago,” I said. I wondered what made a man like J.D. Nash join me in this. I was more selfish. Still, good as he was, I would have rather had my father be my father. My parents were big, glamorous. My mother was popular in college. A Tridelt. She would never have gone out with someone like J.D. Nash. She should have, probably. “I wonder. Do you think I could talk to this Geesie.”

  “I don’t see why not. You can identify yourself of course as his daughter. He was quite talkative when I spoke to him. Now he might be guarded for fear of offending because obviously that was a great—”