The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  SOME DAYS EMILY ran with me. She ran in all white like a tennis player. I sighed at the end of running, my body used for the day, spent but nothing else. In the pawing of our running shoes on the sidewalk, stretching, the question was there, neither of us saying it: so what are you going to do now?

  WITH PERSIMMONS and cream from the farmer’s market, I went to see Timothy. He still lived in the garage, but he’d moved his couch and his books to an empty storefront around the corner, a place with a sign on top that still showed the faded traces of lettering, spelling Cora’s Cash Shop. I waited in a chair when I got there. His inner door was closed. A few minutes later, a woman with a baby sidled out, saying, “Thank you.” Timothy saw other people now. On his desk were the standard forms from Welfare and Aid to Women with Dependent Children. He held office hours Wednesdays, when he wasn’t at the Pleiades Palace.

  “I’m damaged,” I said, walking into the new room.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “In elementary school even, you don’t know how much it meant to me, every A. I remember specific ones and then how it looked, the whole row. Getting into medical school was the happiest day of my life. You know who’s running the world? In your field and in science and in every other field? People from good families. Not people like me. I was just barely keeping up and now I’ve thrown it all away.”

  “You took a risk.”

  “I thought I was doing it for love. I wanted love to work. More than anything, I wanted that to work. I had school but it wasn’t enough. But now I’ve gone and ruined what I had. My mistake was trying to be cool and pretend I didn’t care. I tried to be like other people. I didn’t know my limits. Nobody gets everything.”

  “You did a brave thing. You wanted more than just school. People with lives like yours do succeed sometimes but they can’t always connect with other people. But some people who had rough starts manage to do both. You’re trying to do both.”

  “I could’ve made things different. I could have. I could have left California and gone home to live with my grandmother. I could’ve just gotten on a train home. My mother would’ve sent me. I was afraid my grandmother was too old. That she’d die. But if she’d died—she wouldn’t have, she didn’t die until later—but if she had the Briggses would’ve taken me.”

  I noticed his collection of prayer beads on the windowsill to the left of the aquarium. They were hanging over the window, all six of them, the nuns’ beads made of waterlily seeds, the Franciscans’ heavy wooden beads, the Buddhist bone beads on a yellow cord and whatever the other three were.

  “Yes, they probably would have.”

  “Emily isn’t damaged.”

  “You wouldn’t want to marry Tad.”

  “I know.”

  “You couldn’t have left your mother then, when you were a child.”

  My head turned, lolling, looking around the room. I didn’t really know what to say right now.

  “What do you think you’ve ruined?”

  “Well, medical school, and I have no savings. No job. Now that I’ve cut the string every bead’ll fall on the floor and go in all directions and scatter like marbles all over the place and I’ll never be able to find them again. I don’t know if I even want to go back to medical school.”

  Timothy stood up and walked to his jacket, hanging on the doorknob. He took a Swiss army knife from the pocket. He always carried that. He opened it to a small hinged metal scissors. He nodded towards the beads hanging over the window. “Try it.”

  “No.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I took the scissors, felt the knife weigh in my hand. I walked to the beads. “Which one?”

  “Take your pick.” I liked the bone beads but I picked the nuns’, a gift from one of Timothy’s teachers. I didn’t want to ruin any of these looped beads. They were a perfect thing to collect; valueless; they had been used so many times, touched, to pray on.

  I cut the string and nothing happened. It snapped and became a long line, not a circle, but intact.

  “They’re knotted,” Timothy said. “Bring them here. We can tie them again. Sometimes, in some ways, you’re going to be behind other people. You have to consider your start in life and what you’ve done.” I handed him the beads and he showed me the tiny knots. He gave the ends back to me to tie. Our heads near each other, I saw again how thick the lenses of his glasses were.

  “Sometimes I think I don’t really want to be a doctor. I picked that because it was safe and I wanted to make money. Be a success. In Montana, you should have heard, all the Ph.D.’s were calling each other doctor. But I think if I were really free, if I’d had a different life, I would’ve been an architect.”

  “You’ve never spoken of pursuing the really lucrative fields of medicine.”

  I shrugged. “Mmm, I don’t know.” I’d always thought I would be in family practice or maybe a child psychiatrist. “But it feels rich. Even if it isn’t.”

  Then a kid with a boom box walked outside and for a long minute, we heard music.

  It was organ music and gradual and then it was gone. For some reason, listening, I felt honored, like I was opening a gift. I felt like someone was telling me they loved me, one to one, me privately. And that is what heals. A person loving another person. In the same room or over time.

  “Do you believe in God?” I said, suddenly.

  I waited for Timothy to answer, thinking that if every person who heard the piece of music got something from it, that was the multiplication of the loaves. Music for everyone who needed it enough. Timothy still hadn’t answered and he never did.

  At the end I sat up cross-legged. I was concentrating on the string and the beads. Finally I slipped the tiny knot tight. I stood up and gave them back.

  “You can keep them.”

  But I hung them back up on the window, with the others. You should never break up a collection. And you shouldn’t give away a gift.

  We used to eat whatever I brought together, in the kitchen of his house in the garage. I brought these persimmons for today. They were ripe and soft, translucent at the tips.

  I WAS idle.

  At the museum, I met Jordan on his lunch hour. We walked through a show of architectural drawings, contest entries from the Soviet Union, plans that had never been built. I caught him looking at me sideways, when I was studying a civic courthouse.

  “What are you staring at,” I said finally, wheeling around at him.

  He looked down, shaking his head some more. “I don’t know, you just look different to me. I don’t know what it is. You didn’t ever tell anybody what I did out there, did you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Can you even believe that was us?”

  “You know I have a record,” I said. I’d never told anyone. I didn’t know why I was starting now.

  “For what?” His voice got harder, I was used to that in him. It wasn’t disloyal. He was prepared to take the worst and accept it. He was bracing himself.

  “Parking tickets. I mean that’s how it started.” It was a bad time in my life, I’m not sure why. “It was right when I was leaving Wisconsin to come to medical school. And I had a lot of parking tickets. I hadn’t paid them and they caught up with me. So I went in to the clerk, it’s like a little bank where you pay, and I had the summons they’d sent me and where they wrote the total amount it was sort of blurry. I was at this counter, getting a check ready, and I just erased a zero. So instead of three-hundred-seventy dollars it was thirty-seven. And I went to the counter and paid the thirty-seven. And the clerk was normal. I left feeling like I got away with something. Then I get a worse summons, to criminal court. I had to delay coming to medical school for a week. I missed the orientation.”

  “I can’t believe they booked you for that.”

  “Yeah, I had to get a lawyer and everything. I wrote a letter to the judge. They dismissed it, in the end, but the morning before court, I was sitting outside the room, the court was only this room, and the
re were three or four other people on the benches. Turns out they’d been bused there from jails. They were comparing jails, which ones didn’t have toothbrushes, which ones never had toilet paper. I mean, it was scary. And then one of them looked at me and asked which place I was from. They completely believed I was one of them.”

  He put his arm around me. “Oh. Little you.”

  I shrugged him off. “So I could never be a lawyer. Which I don’t want to be anyway.”

  “Sure you could. You have to be convicted of a felony to disqualify for the bar. You know, do something more like, what I did in Montana.”

  “I never want to be anything you could disqualify for. You know what I mean?”

  “No. Plenty of people don’t get into medical school.”

  “I’d have rather been something else anyway. Like this.” I pointed to the hall of drawings. “You could have been a criminal and you could still do this if you were good enough.”

  “You were an architecture major weren’t you?”

  “City planning. Hey, don’t tell anyone that, okay? I never told anybody. And it’s weird because everyone around me, all these people I knew were doing other things, like that was when they had those blue boxes so you could charge your long-distance calls to big corporations? And I don’t know, Emily stole a doctor’s notepad to write herself notes when she wanted to change her flights around at the last minute. I think I felt worse because most of them were middle-class kids and they didn’t really mean it. They wouldn’t have done it alone. Or been ashamed to tell people. I did it because I really needed the money. I meant to.”

  “So did they.”

  “Not the same.” I shrugged.

  “I’m glad I know you,” he said.

  He had to get back to work then and I roamed through the museum. I reminded myself, it’s two o’clock, eat lunch. After, I walked to Columbia and started wandering in the architecture building reading the bulletin boards, sort of standing there. Men darted in and out of offices. I saw notices for contests: one for a national monument, one for a lamp. I wrote them all down, the addresses, the specifications, the deadlines, dutifully, in the notebook I used to keep for finding my father.

  At home I drew sketches for the contests, each one of them, and sent them off to the addresses. But when that was all done I went back to what I always did and even hated now, just because what else was there for me to do. I went back to finding him.

  ALL INVESTIGATION is the same. You call a lot of different people. You ask questions, one leads to another, they form a chain. Science is like that. When I looked for a doctor for my grandmother, after the first stroke, it was the same way. Years later, I watched Emily Briggs sit cross-legged on the bare floor of her new apartment in New York, calling department stores all over America, trying to buy a dress she’d seen in a magazine because she believed it was the dress Isabel Archer wore on the day she discovered Europe. Texas had the dress but not her size.

  And investigation was not all discovery. It was mostly not. It was mostly the mundane next ten things. Sending the three dollars for the copy from the county clerk’s office. Calling back after somebody-you-don’t-know’s lunch. You woke up late no matter what time, and lists grew on paper in your own hand. Sometimes I forgot the end.

  No one wanted to hear all the steps it took to find anything. But I’d never believed all this would work for him. Maybe all searches end the same. You are changed forever but not by what you were looking for.

  I scribbled the name of the one more person to talk to, felt the scrap of an address, thrilled at an achieved phone number. That was a life. I kept promising myself just this one more thing, this was the last. Still, I was nagged by the thought of going back to Montana; in a way I knew I’d never be satisfied until I met every person who’d been touched by my father, every student who’d heard him lecture, any secretary or mailman who had a rub with his life. It felt like I’d never be able to sit still again. Any ending before the real ending was arbitrary.

  I could not stop. Egypt hadn’t done it.

  I was becoming a crazy person. Stray. I let so many things go. Now I’d stopped even opening my bills.

  I avoided people. I was so ashamed. This had gone on too long, farther than it should have and I knew better. Other women my age had obsessions with bad men. This was worse. I kept wanting to make the infinite end.

  I was using the money from Emily just to live on. I paid a hundred on the credit card so they wouldn’t close it yet and decided to keep the detective on for more. That was Timothy’s idea.

  “Yeah,” Wynne said when he heard it was me on the phone. It had been that way for some time.

  “Hiya. I was thinking, Jim, we should have a meeting and maybe I should pay you some more money. I’d like you to do some computer checks on the basis of what we’ve got now. I’ve got the social. But I need to get back to work and stay out of it.”

  “Well, there’s a lot we can do, now we got the social. We made a lot a progress already. So when you wanna come in? What—you want to retain me for another thousand or so?”

  “Eight hundred.” I knew could borrow more.

  “We can work with that, have to cut some corners, but it can be done.”

  It gave me some small pleasure to know that this was the one time I could get him to meet me where I wanted. And I used that. I made a date for my place a week from tomorrow.

  BUT I WAS CHEAP. Cheap enough that the idea of paying the detective more after what he’d done so far tugged at me. That’s why our date was not until a week from tomorrow. I decided to do a little in the meantime. To be thorough. I am an overachiever. My mother was right.

  I found the phone-book room in the New York Public Library. Thanks to Dr. Geesie. I’d probably touched a thousand phone books in America over the years, always looking for my name. But this was to make sure. Most of those were out of date by now anyway. A part of me warned: people who live unlisted don’t all of a sudden list. I’d always been listed. I kept myself easy to find. This was plain work. I had little to no hope. I was just doing it. At some point, you had to be systematic.

  I hadn’t known there was such a thing as a phone-book room. It was a small room, high ceilinged, with a greenish overhead light casting down. Phone books from every city in every county in every state slouched on the old shelves. I started with Washington State. Nothing.

  No one else was there. I shut the door quietly and lifted out the two cafés con leche from my backpack, opened the lids. I was not an obeyer like my grandmother. Today I needed this.

  I went through Oregon. Nevada. Montana. Idaho. I found nothing but I didn’t really expect to. This was almost—I didn’t know—insurance. I moved to Arizona. No Uta Gilberts anywhere either. No Rilellas. Then California. In Oakland, California, I found an Atassi. A Farouk Atassi.

  Then I was there.

  I knocked over a coffee so I had to get out of that room fast. I cleaned it up the best I could with my T-shirt. I ran down the marble stairs to the wooden phone booths in the lobby.

  It all went very quickly then. Farouk was this woman’s husband. She sounded regular, nice. I said I was looking for John Atassi.

  “He’s an older guy, right? We haven’t seen him in three, four years. We saw him in Mill Valley, Sausalito, something like that.”

  Three or four years.

  “Um, he’s my father.”

  She gave me her husband’s number at work. He was more foreign-sounding. He said he was thirty-five and a structural engineer from Luxor. I asked him if he was going back there or if he’d settled here for good. I was trying to make conversation. He said yes, he wanted to move back at the end of the summer, it was fairer to the world that way.

  I said yes, and thought how far from my father.

  He said they’d seen my father a few years ago. My father, he said, managed a big Italian seafood restaurant in Mill Valley, but Farouk couldn’t remember the restaurant’s name. “And your mother is sick?” he said.

&nbs
p; “Yes,” I wavered, spinning. How did he know that?

  “In Reno, she was sick, I remember.”

  Oh. “No, that’s not my mother. That was his second wife.” Reno death records, I scribbled down. Maybe Uta had died. Then, for a moment, I wished I could talk to Uta. Almost more than my father. I wished I could fly to Reno and find Uta somewhere in a junky desert spa, with huge metal immersion tanks littered around like a graveyard, and take an afternoon talking to her through all these years. I had a feeling my father was going to be one of those people who is not there even when he was there. I wanted to talk to the people to the left and the right, the people around him, the way you can trace an ant’s path by the ant itself or by the banks of sand on either side.

  Farouk had a brother in New York. A doctor. He was my age. I couldn’t stop hopping around the tiny phone booth in my socks when Farouk told me this. The brother’s name was Ali and Farouk gave me his number. He told me Ali was gone, in Ohio, for the weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday. But I called that number about a hundred times before Monday.

  This was so much so fast. All of a sudden these Atassis had seen him. Farouk was going to ask around, he said he’d call some other relatives in Florida.

  “Atassis too?” I said.

  “Yes, they are cousins. Amer Atassi and his brother.”

  He gave me both his numbers and his parents’. It made me feel so good when people gave me numbers. I knew I could find them again.

  I didn’t wait for Farouk to ask around. I called J.D. Nash in Wisconsin and whispered, “I think he’s still alive.” I asked him to check his death index in California. If he was there three years ago and didn’t die …

  I got a hold of Marion Werth early the next morning. Callie was already out at work. I could hear the light ssst of Marion filing her nails while we talked. Marion made the windows in the millinery and accessory shop. But she didn’t go in until ten. I told her about what I found, in Mill Valley or Sausalito.

  “Gracious,” she said. “Right here. Wouldn’t that be something.”

  I asked her to find me a detective out there. She would know what it took. It couldn’t be much different than tracing family trees, only faster, because people gave them money to spend. They didn’t have to wait for the mail.