The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  What day was today, I was thinking. Oh no. Back in New York City, I’d had a hair appointment. All that was a different life. I’d missed my appointment with Shawn.

  He sat on the closed toilet seat and I just sunk in warm water. It was good to weigh for a while in someone else’s hands.

  My one arm dangled out over the porcelain, I wanted to feel the cool. He picked it up, turned the wrist so it almost hurt and then stared at my palm again. I yanked it back and under the water. I had writing on that hand, my left. I’d scribbled a note to remind myself, “Gamblers Anonymous.”

  “I thought of that too,” he said. “Actually, my father did.” His father was a journalist and he’d always done well with the Anonymouses. He’d written articles about groups like that. He’d won some prize.

  “You’re ruining yourself.”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

  “Well, now tell me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Start anywhere. Just blab.”

  “I’m nowhere. After all this. I’ve burned my life down to the ground. The detective has started treating me like an old lover.” I looked at him. He was listening. We were talking, this time, like friends.

  “He lies. He contradicts himself. Things he said were any day now, like checking passport records, two months ago, he doesn’t even mention. One minute he’s telling me he could have gotten the social security number from here if I hadn’t gone and blown it and then I find another place in Nevada where my father worked and he tells me to go do the same thing again.”

  “Maybe we should give him some more. Throw money at him,” Jordan said.

  “My millions.” I laughed in a bad way, with sharp points. “I’m scared. I am literally scared to know how in debt I really am, Jordan. My phone bill. It’s got to be over a thousand dollars. But anyway, I’m gonna pay the guy more when for this much he got us to 1957? I got us to 1976 and I’m supposed to pay him?”

  “I know. But you’re in this far already and now you’ve got some information. Maybe with what you know now he can really do something.”

  “I don’t trust the guy anymore. Before Christmas he told me he had someone checking out the passport records. Any day now, he says. He’s inconsistent. It goes on and on. Oh, and it was paramount that I find out if my father had any insurance. Then I did. And I got the name of the company. We’ll see what he does with that.”

  He lost my track halfway through. I must have sounded cracked. I did.

  “Are you crying?” he asked, after a while.

  “I’m tired. How can you even see in this steam? There’s so much still to do. There’s old addresses I want to check, if I can go to places like the gas and electric company, all kinds of little things like that you wouldn’t think of, they have records, maybe they’d tell me where he lived here and what was his forwarding address.”

  Jordan just sighed and squeezed my hand and I stayed in the water a long time, now and again saying more ideas of where to look. When I finally stood up, he covered me in towel.

  “Go to bed now,” he said.

  “It’s not even eight.”

  “You need it,” he said. “I’ll sit by you.” I lay with my back to him under the covers. He sat on the bed, sheltering. “The thing about all these little leads and hints, Mayan, they’ll never end. They’ll go to infinity and you could spend the rest of your life. We’ve got to go.”

  “You go.”

  He sighed and I slept in and out and I heard him stand up and sigh again and stretch and move around the room. When I woke up more, he’d opened the curtains and the night was true and black with stars and he was sitting in a chair reading my little Hans Christian Andersen book I’d found in a box Gish had saved for me of things from my grandmother. It was a tiny book with my name written in it by my mother, signed, Love, Mother and Dad. That was how old it was. The book was covered in waxed paper, I knew by my grandmother, the edges folded perfectly, like an envelope.

  “Look what I found,” he said.

  It was a piece of old wide-lined elementary school paper I’d written on and stuck in the book. It was a list:

  Gills Rock

  Ironwood

  Escanaba

  Flint

  Madison

  Chicago

  Peshtigo

  Janesville

  Kewaunee

  Those were places I’d taken field trips and looked up my father’s name in the telephone book. I’d been keeping track. The farthest was Chicago. The rest were in Wisconsin and Michigan. I knew he probably was not there. But they were the only places I’d been to yet then. I’d meant to always keep track; if I kept track long enough … The pencil marks had faded and the penmanship was primitive, big, like drawings of animals.

  If someone had told me then as a child that phone books came out new every year … I couldn’t have borne it, the exhausting size of work ahead.

  He stood up, wringing his hands. The room seemed all shadows, the one bureau a rounded known thing. “I’ll stay and help you one day. Can we make that deal?”

  Wind rattled the cheap metal window frame.

  I waved him away.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you this right away, but Emily’s coming tomorrow. She’s flying in to Fargo.”

  “What’s Emily going to do in Fargo?”

  “She’s coming with a dress she wants to have fitted on you. And she wanted to go to Fargo instead of here, she called all around to find the closest place to Montana that had a seamstress. Apparently you have to have a certain sort of seamstress to sew this kind of Italian silk she has.”

  I snorted. “No you don’t.”

  “That’s what she said. It’s not as if I grew up around a lot of Italian silk. Anyway. And she and I both talked to Timothy. He thought that it was a good idea too.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that. I’m fine. And I’m embarrassed now. Getting all my friends, everybody talking about me.”

  “She wanted to come, Mayan. I didn’t make her.”

  Now we were yelling. We had hardly ever been like this.

  “Anyway, Fargo’s not—where is Fargo anyway? It’s far.”

  “It’s not so far. We’ll get you on a plane or a train or a bus, I don’t know, anything, and she’ll meet you at the station. You’ll forget this, have a good time, eat and drink a little, do whatever you do with a dressmaker.”

  “No! I don’t want to. I’m here and I’m going to finish this.”

  He covered his face with his hands. “Okay, tell you what. You go and meet Emily and I’ll stay here by myself and see what I can do.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Not from me you haven’t.”

  “I’m not going to leave without my car anyway.”

  “I’ll drive your car. I’ll give back the rental and I’ll drive all night to Fargo. All right?”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute or maybe more.

  “Well, okay? Say something, Mayan.”

  EVEN TODAY I don’t know why I said yes. It was probably only embarrassment. The idea of the three of them having conversations about me in concerned, attractive tones. It seemed the best way to stop it was to be there. I was someone who liked to keep the elements of my life apart. The idea that they’d found one another, Timothy and Emily and this guy Jordan, it made me shudder. And now they were focused on me in Ambrose, it seemed impossible to go on with my activities. I felt watched. There was not enough here to defend. My project had always been a project that depended on the dim light of worldly unconcern. It thrived in secret because there was nothing visible to show.

  The Greyhound bus left at eleven.

  I went once more to the president’s office. He had on another bow tie and different suspenders. “I have neither seen nor heard of him in the intervening years,” he said, this time.

  I told him I just wanted to leave my name and number in case he ever did hear anything. I wrote it all out, neatly on a sheet of pap
er.

  “Where is 212?” he asked.

  “New York. I live in New York.”

  “I knew it was one: New York, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles.” This seemed to warm him some, it being New York. That was the most impressive thing I’d told him. That I lived in New York. “I use those numbers regularly,” he said. That flimsy vanity made me almost like him.

  “Oh, well great. Thank you, Dr. Fipps.”

  “And what is your first name?”

  “It’s Mayan Stevenson,” I said. I didn’t judge that he deserved an explanation.

  We waited for the bus in back of the tin diner. I put my hand on the roof of the car. It was hard to leave the Olds. I had my six things counted and locked in the trunk. He promised not to open it. The bike was strapped now to the top.

  I SLEPT THROUGH most of the ride and when I woke up, the bus was steeping through mountains and snow, brushing close to wide fir branches. It was too hard to look. I closed my eyes again and went to sleep tasting the collar of my coat. There was always a quarter-sized wet spot there, like a childhood winter, tasting your breath through the scarf.

  The bus stopped for food breaks and you could walk down the small main streets of these western towns, but I just stayed in and pressed my head in the corner of the seat and slept.

  Emily met me at the station in Fargo, which was next to the YMCA. Fargo was a regular city, noisy, and I was glad to see her. She had a rented red Ford parked out in front, where a line of men sat on benches half bent over. She moved the long stick shift with grace and deliberation. We drove through the old part of the city. Smoke blued out into the sky.

  “I thought we could do this dress thing first,” she said. She was following a crude map and gradually the streets became, not newer, but more high and polished. “Believe me, finding someone who knew how to sew around here wasn’t easy. But her name is Alma and she’s a Czech. Apparently very good. She used to do the costumes for the Kansas City Opera. Now she has her own store.”

  “Fashion in Fargo,” I said.

  “Don’t laugh. You’re close.”

  ALMA’S ATELIER the sign said in theatrical cream-colored cursive on maroon. The store was wedged between a furrier and a jeweler called LaVake, who seemed to also carry cut-glass and silver. The doorbell pealed a high operatic fall.

  Then we were crushed into a small room, lushly carpeted with a little circular rise before full-length three-way mirrors. The mirrors worked as a sort of shrine. The carpeted foyer was a little soiled and jammed with fabric bolts and tiny marked cardboard boxes of thread and pins. The back room was fitted with fabric heads and millinery projects in various states of completion.

  Emily opened a large box and extracted the dress. The seamstress bent in close, her head down and her bulbous gnarled hands up under the sheer fabric. It was a fine faint pink, evenly transparent.

  “Is gorgeous,” the dressmaker said, lifting the silver framed bifocals down from her heavy hair. “You need underneath something.”

  Emily had the underslip folded in tissue. It was the sheerest white cotton, plain, exactly the same straight box shape as the dress.

  I hated dresses that showed my legs and especially my knees. I had horrible knees.

  “So is for you?” the dressmaker said, running her gaze slowly over my contours a way I hated. “Go. Try it on.”

  I bunched the thing in my hands. The woman took it from me and laid it out over my arm. “Is fragile,” she said.

  “Where?” I wasn’t going to take my clothes off just me while they both stood there.

  She showed me to behind a curtain, a little corner with no mirror.

  “With green shoes,” I heard Emily saying, while I pulled my T-shirt over my head. “Light green but rich, you know what I mean? And a square heel. Very simple.”

  The dressmaker began to ask Emily about her dress and she started to describe it and then I came out with mine on, still in my sneakers and athletic socks. They stopped talking.

  “Mayan, it’s your size. I had it made your size.”

  “She too thin,” the dressmaker said, head down, making tching noises even with pins in her mouth. “Got to eat. Eat while you’re young and you can enjoy it. The men they don’t like the skinny skinny women. They like skinny women. That’s just the women think they do. And when you get older is bad, around the chest is all skin like a chicken, all gathered up like this, no good.”

  She was down on the carpet now, I felt her hair against my knees. She took pins from her mouth, setting the hem.

  When she came to the back and shoulders Emily stopped her. “Don’t make it as small as she is now,” she said. “The wedding’s still five weeks away. She’ll gain. I’ll make her.”

  WE WAITED IN A SODA SHOP, sipping seltzer. Emily ate a whole sundae in front of me, black and tan. She made them take it back the first time because they used cold caramel. She wanted hot fudge and hot caramel.

  I didn’t want anything. An hour and a half later, Alma came into the store, with the dress in a large cardboard box. She herself was wearing a mink coat and matching hat.

  “I leave a little room,” she said, pinching my hips. I was thin enough so the pinch hurt. It hurt a little just to sit.

  Emily bent down writing her check. She always looked diligent when she signed credit card forms or wrote checks. She looked more intently serious then than any other time as if money were the most solemn duty in this life.

  Jordan arrived in Fargo the next day, with the social security number.

  “How did you get it?” I said, the first thing. I hadn’t even said hello. This was the first time he’d truly impressed me.

  His voice got sharp. “I don’t want to talk about it now, okay?” he said. This was not like him. At the hotel, he was rushing us around, pushing our backs. “I want to put Emily on her plane and I want us to get going so we can dump this car back in Wisconsin and fly to New York tomorrow night. I have to get back to work and so do you.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. God. “I never said you had to come here.”

  “I know. But we’re finished. So let’s just go now.”

  This wasn’t like him. And anyway, I had nothing to get back to. But we saw Emily onto her flight.

  She stood at the gate looking a way she hardly ever did, the knees of her jeans bagging, her hair uneven. “You sure you shouldn’t chuck the car or get a driveaway for it and come back home?”

  They both looked at me. It was up to me.

  “I’d take it myself,” Jordan said.

  “Nah,” I said, looking at my shoes. “I want to do it.”

  She had just the box with the altered dress in it and her bright silver carry-on suitcase. Jordan carried her suitcase until they wouldn’t let him anymore and then he bent down to kiss her.

  Then we were in the car driving the straight black road through the flat landscape. It was late afternoon and already getting dark. Everything, all around, looked blue.

  He stared straight ahead from the steering wheel. I just studied my hands and low small things out the window. It felt like he was ticking. If he didn’t want to talk to me, he didn’t have to.

  “First thing,” he finally said. “Emily is a good woman. I don’t want to hear any more about that dress. She didn’t come out here for the dress.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “She loves you, Mayan. She was worried about you.”

  He stared at me then and the car swerved a little on the road, but there was no one else for miles, just a red-brown truck that looked toy, it was so far away.

  “What are you trying to tell me, you’re interested in her? I don’t care. Be my guest. You think you can break up her and Tad, go ahead and try.”

  “I am not in the least interested in Emily and I never would be. Obviously. I’m saying this for you, Mayan.”

  I just looked out the window.

  “And the way I got the number I don’t want you to ever tell anyone. I mean it. No one.”

  I
was interested all of a sudden.

  “I went to see Rosabeth Larson. One look at that suit made me know there was no asking her. She wasn’t going to break any rules. But there were all these girls in little Rosabeth Larson suits waiting in line with their little clipboards to take a typing test for the job of Ms. Larson’s administrative assistant.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, among many of my talents that you’ve overlooked, I type fast. Plus apparently Rosabeth Larson doesn’t want a younger Rosabeth Larson working alongside her. She wanted me.”

  “You got the job.”

  “No, not exactly. Your ex-asshole boyfriend, no I’m sorry, your ex-boyfriend who is still an asshole, Bud Edison, he got the job.”

  I laughed. Then I looked at him with my head down.

  “But seriously. I’m a lawyer, Mayan, and stealing documents like that, it’s illegal, I could be disbarred for that. And then what would I do? My grandfathers come to my law school graduation to have me kicked out of the bar forever for impersonating a secretary in Montana? I don’t want Emily or anyone else to find out about this. I mean, even if we don’t know each other in a year, don’t tell anyone.”

  “But what did you do?”

  “Oh, she showed me around the whole place and then she went to lunch. They’ve got four filing cabinets. It didn’t take too long.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I left.”

  “You just split?”

  “I didn’t leave a formal letter of resignation.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks.” There really was no way to thank him. It was just numbers. All this for numbers.

  We drove all night, taking turns, and we entered Wisconsin at dawn. He kept calling ahead for the plane schedules. He was so eager to get home. I wasn’t. I felt a little insulted or something that he wanted this to be over so. The last plane out was at seven o’clock. I called Danny Felchner from Route 29 between Wausau and Shawano. He said he’d meet us at the Radisson. We could have a few drinks there, he’d take the car to my cousin’s and first drop us at the airport across the highway.

  And it all went just that way.

  The Radisson across from the airport was new and redwood, with young Oneida kids in black jeans taking drink orders and carrying in luggage.