The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  Danny had brought my cousin Hal along. I never hardly saw Hal anymore. Hal looked good; he was thin again and his hair now was light blond. His eyes came out stronger, their pale blue. He was one of the ones in Racine who weren’t prospering. What he did for a living was travel to Wisconsin Catholic schools and lecture about drugs and how they’d gotten him in trouble. I kept staring at his hair.

  “You been outside a lot?” I said finally.

  “In summer I’m out in the sun, in winter it’s Sun In,” he said. He shrugged. “Works. Five or six women on the string, that’s not bad, worth the price of peroxide.”

  Jordan gave him a look like, you heathen, but there was some awe in it too and appraisal, all while his lips stayed steady on his straw. Jordan was drinking diet Coke.

  “You serious about any of them?” I said.

  “See, the one I like is married to somebody else see. And she’s a good Christian woman so she probably won’t leave him. But I think she kind of likes me too.”

  Hal described the four others, just as Danny Felchner picked up my hand. One worked at Van Zieden Grieden, another at Fort Howard, one was a teacher and one a nurse. “In fact she was on the ward when Gramma was in, that last time.”

  I didn’t remember any nurse. Apparently she was freckled, thin, light brownish hair. But I only got there the last two days.

  “I remember her,” Danny Felchner said.

  I looked at him funny.

  “I was there when your grandmother was in the hospital, the three or four days before.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I really liked your grandmother.” He said that as if it had not the slightest thing to do with me, and I guess it didn’t.

  “Yeah, this Wendy told me something I didn’t even remember about that,” Hal said. “She said when Gram was in the delirium—”

  “I remember that,” I said. I was getting almost competitive, everyone else with their memories of her dying. When I came up that time, she didn’t even know me, any of us.

  “She kept saying, ‘Kids, have fun while you’re young. Live while you’re young.’ ”

  Danny Felchner looked at me, his crooked smile. “That’s true,” he said. “I heard her.”

  I’d never known. I punched my cousin in the arm. “And look at what a good job we’re doing.”

  “Live while you’re young,” Hal bellowed. Then he raised his drink. It was vodka and colorless.

  10

  I LANDED HOME if you could call it that. Bad. There was no real reason for me now to be anywhere. And New York was not a kind place to return to. It was busy and I didn’t look good and I had nothing. The sky was a strange color so I didn’t look up, and snow by the sides of the highway was old and pocked. I heard the steady roar of industry in the towered distance and closer, outside the taxi window, the equal bluff other random noise of a basketball on an empty playground. The school seemed vacant, abandoned. One black man, older than me, was dribbling.

  It was February. School had started. I had to go to the administration and meet my preceptor and the dean. I wore the suit my mother had bought me a few years ago. I looked in the mirror a moment before I left and shook my head. I was never right.

  We’d had a fight over this suit. I wore it to see her once in San Francisco, when Stevie got his Ph.D. Emily was along and Mai linn. My mother was going to take us to dinner in a fancy place. It was raining out and I came and met them all outside the restaurant with not just-washed hair, hair washed maybe the day before, and the wrong shoes. I had high heels in a plastic bag but I was wearing old sneakers because of the rain and so the pants folded over my shoe a little. My mother took one look at me and said, “Oh, Ann,” her face a cringe. “Why do you do this to me? I just wanted to go out once and have it be nice.”

  “I’m wearing the suit you bought,” I said.

  “And it looks like nothing. Four-hundred-dollar suit and you look worse than the little secretaries in the valley.”

  I took off a sneaker right there, standing on one foot, and replaced the heel.

  “Water ruins shoes, Mom.”

  “Oh, go ahead and ruin them then. Look at Emily, look at Mai linn, they look great. Just let me see you look nice once, give me that pleasure.”

  Mai linn and Emily and I went over the fight later, when my mother was alone in the hotel room, nursing her own hurts. Emily could see what my mother meant. “I know what she means too,” Mai linn said. It was the hair. They thought she was right about the hair. Mai linn was always a little soft about everybody’s mother.

  Sitting on the other side of the dean’s huge wooden desk, I was the accused in a tiny court. The heat clanged on stiffly. Outside the day was gray, dark already, though it was still morning. My preceptor and the dean both drank coffee. They were laughing at something I didn’t know. They had ceramic mugs that looked like their own and they didn’t offer anything. The dean made reference to my failed course last semester, my absence now. Then he closed the file and looked at me.

  “What seems to be the problem?” He had a large hairless head, with small features crammed together in the center.

  I looked down on my lap where I saw a stain. Ketchup. I started to make an expression but no words lifted out.

  “Pardon?” my preceptor said. She crossed one leg over the other and I watched the dean’s huge face follow it. Isabel Windsor. She was one of the women doctors who wore rings and many bracelets. My suit was all of a sudden dowdy. Her skirt was short and her legs draped long, ending in an undulating curve of foot.

  “It’s something personal,” I said. They waited a minute for more but I kept still. I almost told them something about a boyfriend but I couldn’t think of what fast enough. I didn’t remember the words. Jilted? That sounded too old-fashioned, from my grandmother’s life. Then too late, I remembered. Ditched.

  I wasn’t going to tell them about my father. That was too out there. And what could I really say? I’d driven around the West and spent about four thousand dollars, which was more than I had.

  I almost used my mother again. But this time I didn’t. I just sat and waited.

  The dean heaved in his chair with disappointment. Then I understood they were still waiting and that the price of staying in was to tell them the truth. I could tell them I had been in the West and I’d hired a detective. I had this mission and that was where I was. That would have worked, especially if I had found him. Instead of what I did.

  I’d done that all my life, told little stories about my family to get me out of trouble. Other people liked to laugh at us. We were always one of the families that made average people feel a little better about their lives.

  “A lot more effort is in order.” The dean’s mouth frowned, increasing the mass and volume of white on his face. His nod was a commandment.

  I obeyed. “Yes,” I said.

  “So you may begin again. But we’re going to suspend you for a year. And we’ll expect a major turnaround. You understand this is a warning.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re lining up outside the gates,” he said. “We know it’s a cage but they’re dying to get in.” At this he smiled and Isabel Windsor laughed, metal jingling. They liked that. At the doorway, I saw they were still sitting there, laughing. For them this was a routine day.

  Outside, harming my shoes in the wet snow, I passed through the gate. I stopped before I turned and tried to find their window. The light was on. I saw the shape of his head, squarish, the top corners rounded, like a loaf. They would be laughing too the day they told me I was out forever.

  I walked to the hospital where I used to work. I waited at the slow public elevator bank like everybody else, then went to my old ward. They’d filled my job. I stood and talked to two orderlies I knew at the nurses’ station but then they got busy. I just waited there anyway, I didn’t want to leave. But nobody really wanted to stand around and talk to me now. They had work, I was in the way. An old man stuttered out of Emory’s
room on a walker. That reminded me of my upstairs neighbor; I had to give him my cane. I hadn’t seen him since I came back and there’d been no noises from his TV drifting down. All of a sudden I hoped he was still alive.

  I’d left my door unlocked again. My suitcase was still where I’d first set it right in the middle of the room, open. I’d been back five days. I’d just been taking things as I needed them, one by one. My toothbrush was the only thing back where it belonged and I was out of toothpaste. I’d been using just water the last few days. Another thing. It made me feel kind of diseased. I’d taken the suit out this morning. Now I felt around the suitcase with my hand until I found the cane. I’d wrapped it in T-shirts. I saw how good it was all over again. I took it upstairs and knocked at my neighbor’s door. My body settled with relief when I heard the slow shuffle inside, then the machinery of locks. I handed him the cane horizontally. By then it was a true gift because I really did want it myself.

  “For you,” I said.

  “Where from?”

  “Wisconsin,” I said. “A church bazaar.”

  “Come, come,” he said, and then I was seated and his hands worked in the closet making us tea. The apartment smelled like something but I couldn’t say what. An old man antiseptic smell. The noise in the kitchen went on a long time, rattling and domestic clinks and I was glad because I didn’t have to talk. There was nowhere I had to be today. Or tomorrow. I felt dizzy with time. My arms hung loose in their sockets. Then he came out with a tray and covered pale green tea mugs, very proper. A napkin for each of us on the tray. I took mine and opened the lid. The tea steamed up at me, jungly-smelling. It tasted like bark and grass. He sat across from me and for some time we blew on our tea, saying nothing. It was odd, this silence, but I liked it. I sipped the tea, blowing it cool enough to taste. The not talking swelled and stayed and went on much longer than I’d thought it could, and now I positively enjoyed it like you would breathing the first clean breaths of pine mountain air and by then there was no question of breaking it. My life with my grandmother had been like that—long pure silences.

  Then it was done and I stood up to go. He shuffled with me to the door. “And how do you do with your collection? Your butterfly?”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t been doing much about it lately.”

  He stamped the cane on the floor. “But you must think of your own collection.”

  “It’s still there,” I said.

  I ran down the flight of stairs into my apartment and undressed. From the one window it was already tender evening light. I folded the suit up on one chair in a little pile for the dry cleaners. I had about ten little piles all over the apartment of things to do that a busy normal person could’ve accomplished all in one annoying day, but I lay down on the couch in my slip, the suitcase still open on my floor, not about to do anything because I didn’t have to.

  When the phone rang I was glad. “Emily,” I said, with more warmth around that name than I’d probably ever felt. I was grateful and I didn’t know how to say it.

  “The shower’s moved again, I know, I know. But my dad thinks the old people can’t handle the loft. So this is it, we’re going to do it at the Sign of the Dove. They’ve got this big room upstairs.”

  “Fine. Next week still?”

  “Yeah, Friday. Oh, God, you’ll never guess who told me about that space? Your old friend Guy Edison.”

  I stood with my hand on the back of my grandmother’s rocker, tight.

  “I saw him in this bookstore downtown. Remember I told you about that great bookstore that was shaped in a triangle? Well, I met him there and I told him about the shower.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Well, no. He took me to this great little Italian coffee shop and we had milk and cannoli. He sure knows a lot of places in New York.”

  “So you two are going to be friends?”

  “Well, I felt like I had to invite him to the shower. He asked if it was co-ed.”

  Now I truly did falter. I slid to the floor and put the phone down. I dialed Bud Edison. I hadn’t spoken to him for a long time but I knew his number. At his office, they told me he had a new extension. I lifted my shoe up off the floor next to me and wrote the number down on the sole.

  “I need to see you,” I said, when it was him. I knew a lot of time had passed but it was different for me, not being there. I’d carried him with me the way you would a picture of someone in a locket. It couldn’t be the same for him. I’d known that. For him the normal clock was on.

  He named a certain corner and said we’d just find a coffee shop nearby someplace. I got there first, on time, and when he came, we turned into a diner where the name was covered in scaffolding. I ordered coffee but it was hard to swallow. We sat across the booth from each other and my throat felt peculiar. I didn’t know if I could talk. I knocked the white coffee cup so it spilled in its saucer and on the table. I wiped it with napkins. Then I saw on my suit sleeve, there was a stain too. Maybe chocolate. That ice cream in North Dakota. My breath felt thin, insubstantial. I took two gulps of the black coffee. I wanted the hot to sting my throat open so I could talk.

  He took my hand over the tabletop, looked down and smiled as if at that. “So how are you, Mine.” That used to be his nickname for me, from my name said fast.

  “Bad.” I choked that out.

  He just rubbed my hand with his thumb and first finger. I closed my eyes. I wanted to stop right here. The end. This I could bear and forget. But he patted my hand and lifted his away and so I opened my eyes.

  I finished my coffee, what wasn’t spilled. Now I needed more. The first wash opened my throat a little, but right after it swelled up again. When a man did come and give us refills, I tried to say thank you but no words came out, only thin reeds of air. I swallowed more. Twice.

  He lifted his hand and moved it with his wrists through one of those light expressions I always loved him for. His eyebrows rose an inch and then down again softly, without disturbing anything underneath.

  “Don’t do this,” I said. “Please.” I was begging but it wasn’t the first time. And I wished I’d begged more in my life.

  He shrugged.

  Another bad wall toppled in me, all she could tell him. Emily knew all about me and my family and me looking for my father and what people had said about us. Things that maybe I didn’t even know. That was mine. Now, sometime she would just tell him, starting, Oh you didn’t know. They would maybe be in a walk-in closet, dressing, he would be buttoning cuffs. He might always think, now why didn’t she just tell me that? It bothered me so much, this thought. He never knew my mother.

  “Do you talk about me?”

  His eyes swept a half circle. “No, I only saw her that once, at the bookstore.”

  “Thank you.” It was a small thing but it meant something to me.

  “Don’t,” he said, and his hands were all over my face with the napkin.

  “She looks—”

  “She looks like a party.” His mouth went a certain way, part apology, part just oh well. “She’s fun, that’s all. It’s not being done to hurt you.” He took his wallet out of his back pocket. I searched in my pockets for a dollar, extracted one, wrinkled. “I got it,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go.” His hand guided my back. We stood on the corner where we’d met.

  That was the only instance I knew exactly as it was happening that I was seeing a person I’d loved for the last time.

  I STOOD WAITING as the travel agent mumbled out the numbers of my credit card into the telephone. I was charging the ticket and figured if they put the charge through, if they didn’t keep my card and say I was past my limit, I’d take it while I still could. He hung up the phone, everything normal, and started writing out the paper, and so there I was.

  “When would you like to go?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “You know you’ve got to have a visa.”

  “Yes.” I’d sent away for one a long time ago and then when I came
home from Montana it was just there in the mess of my mail, slotted like a prize. It was the only envelope that pertained to any future.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s twelve-thirty p.m., it’s international so get to the airport an hour and a half early.” He handed me the paper. I tried to take it but he didn’t let go of his side. “I’m going to Bora Bora,” he said, “South Pacific, four weeks from Tuesday. A lot nicer in February than Egypt. Half the price. I’ll show you the seashells.” He pulled out a colored spiral from his desk drawer.

  “Not this time,” I said.

  I touched the ticket, feeling No! and the thrilling abandon of the first arc of downward motion, that lift in the chest when you hang in the air after diving—something will happen now. I’d always wanted to pledge myself to finding my father or else. My mother and I had lived like that. We’d dared life. But no one seemed to be watching. In the end when we thought something had to happen, something or we would die, the days went on their regular selves and the fountains rushed and foamed on Wilshire Boulevard and the shop owners came with keys, like every morning, opening their big glass doors. We didn’t get rescued by any man, as we’d wanted, we just ended up calling my grandmother to wire us money again.

  It was till ten in the morning and I had the ticket. I wanted to find some Arabs before I went. I knew there were supposed to be grocery stores that sold baklava in Brooklyn somewhere. I stopped at the place across from school that sold hummus and tabouli and shish kabob in pita. But the guys there turned out to be Israelis. Nice guys, though. I told them the whole thing and they gave me a falafel. My so-called relatives sure hadn’t been any help. I’d called them both, oh, twenty thirty times since coming back. I was sure now they kept their machines on just to avoid me. Then I thought of the university. They’d have to have some kind of Arab Studies department.

  I kept asking directions and going upstairs. Finally, on the third-floor corner, I found Near Eastern Studies. The department office door was wide open and the room was painted yellow. A woman in black jeans and a black turtleneck with a hood stood near a floor-to-ceiling wire cage which held a parrot. Inside the cage, which looked homemade, was a large driftwood branch where the parrot perched. The woman stood holding a finger in to the bird, the phone from one old wooden desk to her ear. In her left hand, she delicately lifted a cheeseburger. From the glint of jewel, I saw she was married.