The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  “Well, that’s correct. It is strange. The custodians had to come in and box everything up. University had to pay to ship it all to him.”

  It was gone. At that moment, I’d have rather had the contents of those boxes than him. I would have given anything for an uninterrupted day in his office with his things. “I wonder if I could get the address they mailed it to?”

  “Well, the person to contact there would be Dean Daniels. If anyone a-tall would know, the dean would. And if he doesn’t know, let me tell you, no one knows.”

  “And what’s his first name?”

  That seemed to embarrass Dr. Geesie. His face wobbled and his eyes scratched frantically through the air. “Oh, gosh, my memory is terrible, do you remember, Dr. Kemp?”

  “Don’t think I ever knew.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “Well, he’s Dean Daniels anyway. That’s correct. He’s university dean. What was his name? He was a strange fellow, your father, let me tell you.”

  “Really? I just knew him as a child.” A glass bowl etched with robins was filled to the brim with candy wrapped in fancy colored foil. I wanted one. But it was across the room.

  “Well, I hate to talk about your father as—”

  “No, that’s okay, I’m not expecting any hero.”

  “He was utterly”—his t’s were hard, tongue pushing the back of front teeth with a sissing force, a sputtering, bittered firecracker—“charm-ing. When you met him. Utterly charming. He would particularly charm women. But he was basically conniving as all get out. When he wanted something like tenure or to be chair of the department, he would stack the decks.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “Well, by ingratiating himself to the administration and playing one person off against another.”

  “Oh. That’s not good.” I said.

  “Very Machiavellian. But he did it all under charm, you see. You’d meet him, he’d have a big smile, he was always impeccably dressed. Why, I’ll bet you he was among the two or three best-dressed people at Firth Adams!”

  That wouldn’t have done it for my mother at all. She’d been one of the best-dressed people in the state of Wisconsin. And that hadn’t been enough.

  Dr. Kemp kept pretty quiet. He was still pacing, head down, eating raisins. I looked at the two men. All of a sudden, for some reason, I wondered if they had children. Dr. Kemp had no wedding band. Dr. Geesie did, with a starburst of some kind at the center.

  He went on about my father’s clothes. “Always just beautiful suits. Oh, and the silk ties, he had one tie with all different colored butterflies, I remember. He looked like a prince. Very very charming.”

  “ ’Cause I remember even before that,” I said. “The last time I saw him I was about twelve and he was even then sort of losing his hair and all.” I tried to laugh a little. Both these men had hair.

  “No, he didn’t have much hair,” Dr. Geesie conceded. “He had kind of a, you know, fringe. But I think his most attractive physical feature was his eyes. He had most attractive eyes.”

  It seemed odd that Dr. Geesie would mention clothes. Dr. Kemp wore a silver belt buckle. He had a certain style. He kept his hair back in a plain liver-colored rubber band. But Dr. Geesie had on a short-sleeved blue shirt, some kind of trousers, worn slippers with plaid inside. His hair had gone yellow, not white.

  Then I began to think that maybe Dr. Geesie and Dr. Kemp weren’t really friends, that Geesie had probably called Kemp just so he’d have proof of me for his old-man gossip and that was what Dr. Kemp kept silent over, his invitedness and dislike of Doctor Geesie. Now he was unwrapping the green foil for a chocolate in his big hands.

  “Are you both married?”

  “He is, I’m not,” Dr. Kemp drawled.

  “I am married.” Dr. Geesie nodded.

  “Did he seem settled in America at the point you knew him? Or do you think he might’ve gone back to Egypt?”

  “Oh, no,” Dr. Geesie said, “I got the impression that he was definitely ensconced here.”

  Dr. Kemp stopped. “ ’Course he might have been desperate enough to go back to Egypt. You know. Feeling that he no longer had a future here. But I think he liked the Western style of life. Pleasures of the flesh and whatnot. He liked to drink and do all these things. I think he has a feeling for the Middle East. I think he loves it dearly. But he didn’t want to go back to a Muslim country where he’d have to live like a Mormon.”

  “Did he publish any papers?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Dr. Geesie said. “But there was no great pressure. The idea was that Firth Adams was a teaching institution. We were supposed to be Top Teachers, see. Devote all our time to teaching students and advising students. Sort of the Williams College of the West.”

  The Williams of the West. Like East Lansing was the Training Ground for Harvard. The one-way analogy. Talk about unrequited. In the East, you didn’t hear anyone from Williams or Harvard talking about them. It was the way poor relatives everywhere mentioned their rich affiliations much more frequently than the illustrious remembered them.

  “Do either of you know anyone who might have been sort of close to him?”

  “No. Because if he was close to anyone it was the women. Not the men,” Dr. Geesie said. The underground of women again.

  Dr. Kemp cleared his throat. “He knew a number of the Arab students. But I don’t remember any faculty.”

  “That’s correct,” Dr. Geesie said.

  I wanted to ask. But I felt like I knew already. They were both men without children.

  “I would just hear, you know, that he had gone with people and even supposedly some secretary at the college, but I don’t know who that was. And I made it a point not to ask questions. You never know when things’ll get back.”

  “I think he did chase around.” Dr. Kemp stood leaning against a wall now, peeling a tangerine. The tangerines were in a china bowl with the faint tracings of a dragon painted on it, mostly gone from washing. “I never knew any of them by name,” he said.

  “Right. Which is a pity,” I said. “Do you have any recollection of him being married or anything?”

  “Why sure,” Dr. Kemp said, pacing again. “His wife’s name was Sonia.”

  “Well, I knew too there was a woman he was calling his wife,” Dr. Geesie said, “but of course I have no idea whether or not they really were married.”

  “Is she still here?”

  “I don’t know what happened to that. He was stepping out on her. He’d move out and be living in an apartment for a while and then he’d move back in again. And this went back and forth. I only heard about it through the grapevine. And as far as I know, she left here with him when he was fired.”

  “She had money,” Dr. Kemp said in a straight low tone as if that underlined everything, which, I guess in a way, it did.

  “Do you remember her maiden name?”

  He shook his head. “I always knew her as Sonia Atassi. She was from the Reno area.”

  “But you know,” Dr. Geesie said, “if we had the last name, you could probably track it down. You might get a Reno telephone directory. I would try, although he had an unlisted number here in Montana. You might also try Las Vegas and Palm Springs. Where’re you from?”

  “Oh, I live in New York. I’m in medical school.” I wondered how long that would still be true.

  “New York,” Dr. Geesie said. “Couldn’t get much further away.” Just then the cuckoo clock dinged two-thirty. A wooden carved goose revolved out with a girl following, all to a cranked merry-go-round tune.

  “Why sure. Any major library should have telephone directories from around the country. I know the Missoula one does.”

  I said, “Actually I think I met his wife except I thought her name was Uta. Was she older than he was?”

  “Could be. Maybe it was Uta, I don’t know why I think it was Sonia,” Dr. Kemp said. He stared down at me intently for the first time. “You were from the first marriage,” he said
.

  “Yes.” I’d never thought of it like that. For me it was the marriage, no matter what.

  “I knew your mother. You see, I first met John when I taught for a semester at the University of Wisconsin.”

  “Oh. Wow. That’s funny.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s great. Fine.” I didn’t want any of these people near my mother. I always thought she was so fragile.

  “I don’t know if she’d remember me but give her my regards.”

  “I will,” I said. “You know I met the second wife once. Once we flew out and we all went to Disneyland.”

  “He certainly is a man of mystery,” Dr. Geesie said.

  “Sure is,” I said, thinking that old men and old women sound alike.

  “Now, let’s see. How you could find him,” Dr. Geesie said. “I suspect he’s probably in Nevada somewhere. But how you can find him down there in that maze, that I don’t know. If he even kept his same name.”

  It’s not the same name, I wanted to say, it’s his name. His real name. But then I remembered it wasn’t. His real name was Mohammed Abdul Atassi. “Do you think the school would give me his social security number? Then I could call the Social Security Department and see if they’d help.”

  “I have done that with genealogy,” Dr. Geesie said. A genealogist. I should’ve known. “But the only success I’ve had is when someone is dead. And then they will take about a year and they’ll phone you back personally and say, well, now you asked about such and such a person. And they’ll tell you, well, that person died at such and such a place—”

  “Huh.”

  “—at such and such a date,” Dr. Geesie finished. “That they will do.”

  “He could be dead,” I said. “I wouldn’t know. He didn’t have any children up here, did he?”

  “No,” Dr. Kemp said. “She had children. Grown.”

  “But not with him?”

  “Not with him.”

  Dr. Geesie rushed in, “No, no, no. He wasn’t the type that would want children.”

  “But he has one actually.”

  “Yes, and isn’t it strange that he didn’t try to keep in touch with you?” That seemed mean. Asking me to answer.

  “Well, it’s awful.” What could I say.

  “Yas I think that’s, uh, unfortunate,” Dr. Kemp said.

  “Do you have children yourself?” I asked Dr. Geesie. The clock ticked one chime for the quarter hour.

  “No,” Dr. Geesie said. “My wife and I never did have children.”

  I looked to Dr. Kemp. “Me?” he said, a large hand on his chest, “I’m not married.”

  “Did he ever mention us?”

  Dr. Geesie looked at Dr. Kemp. Dr. Kemp was now eating M&Ms.

  “Why sure, I knew that you existed,” he said. “But that’s all.”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, you know, if it hadn’t been for his gambling.” Dr. Geesie clicked his tongue again. “As I say, he was overly ambitious professionally but that’s not unusual, there are a lot of people in academic life who are that way. His Achilles heel was his gambling. That’s what got him in trouble in Cairo.”

  Now Dr. Kemp started. “We had an extension program for alumni and local people. It was a way the faculty could make a little extra money. By planning a trip somewhere. I did mine in Eastern Canada.” I could see Dr. Kemp standing in a marsh like one arrow, his binoculars following a high triangle of geese. “John decided to take a group to the Middle East. He’d gone the year before to Seattle to see some mummies and they all loved that so a lot of the same ones signed up again. And he said he had a terrific program all organized. They were going to stop in New York at the UN and they were going to do something in Rome. Well none of that materialized, but still nobody was particularly concerned.”

  “It was mostly women, if I’m recalling correctly,” Dr. Geesie said. “Dr. Atassi and fifteen or twenty women.”

  “Older ladies, you know, local people. A few of them even had an Egyptology club. They put together those replicas of Egyptian urns, you know, it was a little like paint-by-number. It was a pretty expensive trip. And so it was the banker’s wife and her mother. That kind of person. And the first week or so, everything went pretty well. They took a boat up the Nile and they liked that. They saw the Pyramids.”

  “One woman passed out,” Dr. Geesie said. “Kidney stones.”

  “Why sure, but he couldn’t help that,” Dr. Kemp said. “The way I heard it was everything went along pretty well until Cairo. They saw hieroglyphs and what-have-you. They saw some more mummies, I suppose. He got those old ladies up on camels. They all came home with their picture of that. And then one night, he took all the ladies out on the town. And that started all right too, they went to a fancy restaurant—”

  “As fancy as they’ve got over there,” Dr. Geesie interjected.

  “And they ate in a big tent with an opening where they could see the moon and the stars. He was always good that way. With wines and food. But then he brought them to a casino. And I guess the first casino was all right. They walked around and saw everything. But the manager there wouldn’t give them credit. So he rounded all the ladies up and took them to another casino.”

  Dr. Geesie was rocking again and shook his head. “A place they never should have been. Never ever.”

  “Yas. The second one was more down and out. A few of the ladies said later, they thought something was funny when they were following all these dark alleys. I don’t know what he told them, maybe that they were all millionaire’s wives, who knows, but he got them spread out over the casino, some were at blackjack, quite a few at roulette, one or two at the slot machines, and they gambled all night. I guess they liked it.”

  “Why, they lost almost thirty thousand dollars!” Dr. Geesie said.

  “They just kept going. They thought it was some kind of big free party. He told them it was play money, the chips, and he’d paid some kind of admission fee for them all. They thought they were at a bingo game.”

  “He hooked them on it!” Dr. Geesie said.

  “Of course he was playing blackjack.”

  “On their credit too!” Dr. Geesie said. “After he went through the tour money.”

  “He was upstairs at some kind of private table. Then, I suppose, it was closing time.”

  “Whatever closing time is in a casino over there,” Dr. Geesie said.

  “It must have been pretty late. The women got together with their coats and purses and all and the fellows running the casino weren’t about to let them go. They wanted them to pay up. And of course this was all in Arabic. And then, the gals noticed, they can’t find him anywhere. They said over there the police all wear white. They said at first when they came they thought they were doctors.”

  “Ended up in jail that night,” Dr. Geesie said.

  “And he just split?” I had to keep myself from laughing. I knew this was terrible, but it was kind of funny too.

  “He just disappeared,” Dr. Geesie said.

  I asked. “What did they do, the old ladies?”

  “Well, they wired home to their husbands! They had no money! No program!” Dr. Geesie nearly shouted. His hands were white gripping the arms of the chair. “Fortunately that one woman’s husband was director of the bank here and he got right on a plane and went over and bailed them all out. Well, they wondered for several days where Atassi went and then they thought there was foul play and maybe he’d even been killed in Cairo. So this fellow from the bank got in touch with the US Embassy and the Embassy got in touch with the local police. They discovered that he had taken a plane for Athens, Greece. He’d gone from there to Rome and from Rome to Paris and from Paris to London and then to New York. First-class! And all this within a week after they’d left. And so here I was sitting in my office one day and a student came in and said, ‘You know the strangest thing, I thought Dr. Atassi was in the Middle East but I saw him on the street in Missoula.’ I said, ‘Oh no, that�
��s not possible,’ and the student said, ‘I tell you I saw the man with my own eyes,’ and I said, ‘Well that just couldn’t be, he is in, he is in Egypt or in Lebanon somewhere.’ Well, within a couple of days why the whole thing broke, of course, and the women called long distance to the university president, and said, ‘We’re stuck in Cairo and Dr. Atassi’s disappeared.’ ”

  He was still a doctor, even disappeared.

  I missed medical school in a vague way, sitting in a room looking out at the rain. “So how did he explain himself?”

  “Well, that he woke up one day with a lot of amnesia and the money was gone,” Dr. Kemp said. “Nobody really believed him. They wanted him to go to a psychiatrist.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” I said.

  “It got a lot of publicity,” Dr. Geesie said. “The papers ate it up.”

  I tried to remember: call local newspaper for its archives.

  “They had insurance, I think, to cover the money that was spent,” Dr. Kemp said, “they didn’t prosecute or anything of that sort. He just disappeared and, as far as I know, Uta went with him. Or Sonia. But I think it was Uta. Actually, she did leave him once while he was here. But she went back to him when his problems increased. She loved him a great deal.” He said that with a gravity. I liked Dr. Kemp.

  “If you only had her maiden name.” Dr. Geesie made his clicking sound.

  “But I really can’t think back to anyone who was a close friend,” Dr. Kemp said. “I’ve thought about him several times since. Actually, he hurt me in many ways.”

  “What?”

  “Well, he conspired to get me kicked out of the chairmanship. He was very efficient and also a good teacher. But he had certain flaws in his personality. And one is gambling.”

  “Another is leaving his children.”

  “Yas, I feel the same way.” Why couldn’t this man have been my father? Anyone else would have been easier.

  Dr. Geesie was sitting at the edge of his chair. “When he left, they published in the newspaper all the bills he’d run up! Why, he owed the dry cleaner alone more than eight hundred dollars! It turned out, he was borrowing money from the secretaries all that time. They never said anything about it until after he was gone and then of course it was too late.”