The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  Still I had that one bauble from him, my father’s birthdate, which was precious. I thought of it like one yellow emerald earring.

  Marion Werth and this new man in California were completely different. Tom Carson was ex-FBI. Detectives were all either ex-cop, ex-psychologist, or ex-actor. I was learning a little about the trade. No more ex-actors for me.

  Marion Werth and Tom Carson called me together Friday morning and said they’d like to do Department of Motor Vehicle and three credit checks in both Nevada and California.

  “That’ll cost $90,” Marion said, after Tom laboriously explained the details. “I’m keeping a close eye on the budget.”

  I told them I thought Jim Wynne had already done DMV and credit.

  “I’d rather go ahead and do it again ourselves, if you don’t mind.” This man sounded square-headed, crew-cutted, level.

  If they found him he’d just be visible on the earth. They’d do it the old way, brick by brick by brick. There was no magic to them.

  I couldn’t let them do it alone though. By then I needed the work to shape my days.

  I called the chambers of commerce in Mill Valley and Sausalito for the names of their big Italian restaurants. And their big seafood restaurants. I did it like a clerk. Black women were my salvation. I called all eleven places. Nothing. They’d never heard of him.

  I hated this. I wanted to be done with this and young. I wanted to wriggle into short skirts and go.

  I WAS EITHER ON THE PHONE or idle. I found myself dreaming of dresses and planning dinner parties. But never for now. For after.

  MAYBE BY THE TIME you found a person, they were always beside the point. You don’t need them so much anymore. What I needed most now was to find a way back to my life.

  I called Marion Werth Thursday night. Just the routine checking-up-on-the-detective call. She was at the millinery store. I heard the friss of people in the background. “Mayan, I think we’ve found him. He’s in Modesto. He works in a restaurant. I wanted to wait a day before I told you and let Tom do all the double-checks.”

  All I could do was ask for more. “Did you hear anything else about him?”

  “Not really yet. He turned up with a California driver’s license. It all cost seventy-five dollars.”

  I wanted to sue Jim Wynne. That was the first thing I thought.

  He was there all along, the first place we checked. It was probably the laziness of one assistant, one of the contacts he’d talked to on the phone. Just a random typical sloppy error in the world which mattered to me and no one else. What if I’d believed Wynne and stopped?

  One thing I knew, I didn’t know many things now, but one thing I did know was that waiting would have never worked. My father had no plans to find me.

  The infinite ended that day.

  I MADE AIRPLANE RESERVATIONS. For tomorrow. And then I had nothing to do. For the first time, maybe ever.

  I wandered through the rooms, rubbing my hands on my jeans. Everything seemed already done. In a flurry, I went outside to the small corner market and bought oranges and flowers, waxy anemones. I bought new milk for coffee. Then I rushed back and set the oranges on the table, the flowers in a pitcher. I began to dust.

  My suitcase was packed. That took no time. Now that he was found, only in California, I didn’t even think of buying a new suit. My ordinary clothes would do.

  I was disappointed in more ways than I understood. That he could be found.

  Disappearing was all you had to do to become somebody’s god. And maybe being found was all it took to be mortal again.

  I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was discovering here. Later I dusted and cleaned the bathroom and the windowsill. I shoved open the window to the clear night air. I looked at small things randomly and for a long time. I opened my anatomy book and memorized two charts just for pleasure. The hand bones and the eye muscles. Wonder is a luxury of a certain emptiness of purpose. Wonder is the rest of the day after you find what you were looking for all your life.

  On my desk, in the mess of papers where I had my father’s tiny picture, was the engraved invitation, brown on white thick paper. Emily’s wedding. It was in a week. I didn’t even know if I’d be back.

  I WENT OVER TO EMILY’S, but she only had a few minutes before she had to be somewhere. I zipped her up. Still, something lovely rose in the shape of her spine, it was straight like a tulip stem.

  “Listen, Emily, I found him. And I’m going tomorrow to California. I think I’ll be back for the wedding and even the dinner the night before, but I might not be. I don’t know anything right now.”

  “My God, you found him. Where is he?”

  “Modesto, California. He works in a restaurant.”

  “Shit.” She sat down on her bed. “You’re just going to fly out there? Have you called him yet?”

  “Huh-uh. I’m not giving him the chance to get out of town.”

  “God, I’m jealous, kind of. I mean, what an adventure. Can I come?”

  “You probably have every hour booked between now and next weekend.”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said. “Three meals a day.”

  “How’s all that going?”

  “I saw my dad this afternoon and he told me, ‘Honey, if I’m walking you down that aisle and you don’t feel right, you go ahead and turn around and I’ll walk you back out.’ ”

  “After all that money?”

  “Three hundred people. And the tent. I wanted it to look like a circus tent. And it does. It’s white, with a hole in the top. So you can see the stars. Hey, I don’t have to go to this dinner. Or you could come. I could lend you something to wear. Why don’t you stay here tonight? Sleep over.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “God, let me know from out there how it goes. I mean I completely understand if you can’t make it back, but I don’t even want to go through with it if you and Mai linn aren’t there. That’s the best part, you guys in those dresses. I wanted them to be like flowers. I think you’d wear it again after. I know everybody says that about bridesmaids’ dresses, but these I think you really would. And you need something like that.”

  Yeah, right.

  I called the detective from Emily’s phone while she was finishing in the bathroom.

  “How’s New York?” Tom Carson asked. He said Marion had left to drive home. She and this man I’d never met had found my father, whom I’d been looking for all my life.

  “Good,” I said. “I don’t know, I guess kind of cold tonight. I bought the ticket for tomorrow morning.”

  He told me that we had a work address and a work phone number. The place was called The Lighthouse. Its address was 808 Third Street in Modesto. Emily passed me a lipstick liner. I wrote on the back of a receipt. They were all over, in her house.

  “Do we know for sure he’s still there?”

  “Yes. I’ll tell you what I did. I called and asked about making reservations. And I said, well what time does the kitchen serve until? They said they usually close at eight but what time did I want?”

  “That’s kind of strange for a restaurant.” It sounded shady to me.

  “Yes it is. So then after the reservation chat for a few minutes I said, is John Atassi still there? And they said, oh sure. We could, if you want, get a home address but that’ll cost you about another sixty.”

  “Let’s do that. And see if we can find out anything more about the restaurant too. Sounds like a front, closing at eight o’clock.”

  Nothing would have surprised me.

  I CALLED HIM again an hour later.

  The address was 970 Fifth Street. “That’s as of last June,” he said.

  “Sounds near Third Street.”

  “Yes it is. Oh, and the restaurant is a nice restaurant. I wanted to tell you we do have an office in Modesto too, so if you run into any trouble, they’ll try to help you out. And you have Marion’s number. She says she’ll stay by the phone all day.”

  I sat on the windowsill and waited for Emily to c
ome home. You could see stars and the church across the street and the stores’ awnings on the ground floors, the upstairs lighted windows. New York looked tranquil and small that night. I wanted to come back here already. Maybe by the time you find somebody, they are beside the point.

  THEN I WAS DRIVING a rocket-silver car to Modesto. It was the first time I didn’t just rent the cheapest. I flew to Oakland, slept on Stevie and Helen’s little futon on the clean floor. I slept open on my back and woke easily, dark fir branches tapping the high windows, a new blue-and-white streaked sky. Stevie was still asleep, but Helen and Jane were up with me. Helen was taking corn muffins out of the oven. A wind came in from the back door, we heard the turning of leaves and pine needles shifting on the porch floor. Their life seemed simple. Helen’s kimono smelled of laundry soap. Her feet were straight and bare, the linoleum floor clean. Jane sat with her lunch box open, putting in things her mother handed her, one thing at a time.

  Then I was driving, first through sleeping Berkeley, then east on 580.I pressed the computerized radio search button and sang along to every AM hit from my life I could catch the end of. Stevie was always telling me how many people died changing stations on the radio. He told me that once from his car phone, on the way to the Sierras. Then when the land spread out clear past Livermore, I turned the radio off and rolled the window down and remembered this wasn’t just any day I wanted to use up and forget. This was a day that would have to make a difference.

  So then I watched the sky. I tried to remember things for a while. This was spectacular land anyway. The hills were navy shale and hard in the distance, pure slate, what you’d call mountains in the Midwest. And closer, it was only rolling hills, dry-colored, haylike, with fields and trees and pastures mixed together. The land, though, took up only a small portion, a thin strip on the bottom of what you saw because the sky that day was all things, light and dark, dull and sunshot, full of clouds and windy dashes.

  I was remarking to myself to try and remember that it was a clear blowy day, the way you always thought of dumb, simple things like the weather on days like births or deaths or weddings because everything is too big and too small at the same time, and just when I’d wished I could write it down so I’d remember for sure, something broke gently and it was raining around me.

  Every time I let myself think too long I started crying, not over anything particular. I was just crying and the rain kept coming over all the slick metal and glass of this warm car. You could control the heat by pressing buttons with pictures on them to blow on your ankles or warm your seat or rush to the back of your neck. I controlled the heat.

  Then the road carved into the hills and on the banks of the low rises, cherry trees lurched like a misshapen exercise class half bent down in the old orchard. And the funny thing was that some of these crooked windy trees, glazed slick with rain, bandaged by gray-blue fog, some of them were in blossom, some not yet, and some trees blossomed only in a patch as if a hand had touched one part and made it glow. The way these trees had spaced themselves, twisted and deformed by weather, rain dulling everything, the dark clouds and the shadowing light made the rare blossoms seem almost miracle, a smile on a damaged child.

  I skidded the car to a stop. On the slope, there was a red picnic table in the dull light. Under cherry blossoms. That was it. I had dreamed of that before. And all of a sudden, I stepped out and the air was a billow of cool expansion. This had been it, what I was driving half the country to see. And now I had seen it.

  From Mantica, a smell of manure came from the open windows, heavy like meat. Beyond a long field, there were shanties and farm buildings. When he was doing research for his Ph.D., Stevie had come this way, to study a particular tree disease in the Sierra. There was a lab station in Blodgett. What if I’d come along and we’d gone into his restaurant knowing nothing? That wasn’t even a question anymore.

  For me, this reunion cost time and money and life and work.

  Or maybe I didn’t believe enough. Maybe if I’d waited longer. But my father was born in 1931. He would be fifty-five. How much longer could I wait?

  BY THE TIME I heard on Thursday, certain things were obvious, a flat bottom in my stomach. I came right away. But it wasn’t jump on a plane. I haggled with the travel agent, complained about the price. I felt grim about it all.

  “Should I bring something good?” I’d asked Emily. “Or just jeans.” I kind of wanted to go in just my regular stuff.

  “Bring one thing so you can dress up if you need to. You don’t want to be thinking about clothes.” She went to her closet, chose an older dress, a loose print that was long. She knew I liked long. “Take this.”

  “Not the suit?”

  “No.”

  I did as I was told.

  So many dead ends had stopped me still before, numerous enough I couldn’t count: times at phone booths, me standing alone at a gas station in a new state, somewhere in the West spelling A-T-A-S-S-I to an operator with a slow accent. There was always no listing, more than a thousand times, a thousand places, some twice probably, more. And the absence of Gilberts and Rilellas from the face of the earth, as if marrying my father had kept women and all their relatives from ever listing themselves in phone books again.

  Now I was entering Modesto, a valley city, with its own curving concrete freeway ramps like a child’s game. I picked one and ended up on a long tree-banked street leading to downtown. That turned out to be good. Gridded cities were easy and the numbered streets followed in order. In ten minutes I was driving past The Lighthouse, a stucco building that looked like anywhere else. His house was close by, but the one-way streets stalled me. Then, there it was. It was across the street from a regular-looking park, just flat grass, a chain-link fence all around and a dirt baseball diamond. It was a duplex on a street of duplexes. His was pale brown. It looked closed up, the blinds drawn.

  I WASN’T READY THOUGH. Not yet. I wasn’t clean.

  I drove around looking for a hotel. I went towards what I thought was charm in the distance and turned out to be a decrepit Elks Lodge. Old in the East meant good, in the West it was something else. I checked into a motel, unpacked and made coffee on a little hot plate they had in all the rooms. This was good. I was an adult and I could handle a motel. I showered, washed my hair.

  Before I’d come it was this big question whether or not to call him. I didn’t want him to have a chance to say no. I figured if he didn’t want to talk to me, I’d get more from having him tell me that with a face than I would from just having him say no and hanging up on the phone. “I don’t want to ask him,” I’d told Mai linn. “I want to just be there.”

  But now that I was here I worried about manners. Maybe he was busy at certain times. Out the window Modesto didn’t seem to move, except the top ferns of palm in the light wind. There seemed no need for all this. Out the window a couple walked by, arms curled around each other’s backs in one s.

  I called the restaurant number. It rang and rang. Nine times. Eleven. I hadn’t planned what I’d do if he was there.

  I tried again. Sixteen.

  I called the hotel’s front desk and asked how to make local calls. Yes. I was doing it right.

  I steadied myself, pulled the towel up further on my chest. I poured another cup of coffee, then I called information, checked the number.

  I didn’t panic. I dressed and walked out to the motel lobby. I told the girl there I wanted a reservation at a place called The Lighthouse.

  “They’re not answering, now,” she said, after a few moments. “I’m so sorry, would you like me to give you their number?”

  “Do you know if they’re open?”

  “I guess they can’t be open if they’re not answering.”

  “You don’t sound sure. Is there anyone here who would know for sure?” I looked around. The office was small and empty.

  “I’m pretty sure they’re not open today if they’re not answering the phone now. Otherwise they’d be there already serving lunch.”


  “Do you know if they’re open tomorrow?” Each word was a tooth. Tomorrow was Sunday. My rage hardened dense as a block. Not again.

  “No, I doubt it. If they’re closed today they’re probably closed tomorrow too.”

  “Thanks,” I said. A little bell hung on the lobby door tinkled behind me as I left.

  There was nothing to do. I’d have to go to the house. I tried to think what if no one was there. I felt that trickle almost like a relief; I knew how to make a day in a strange city. Outside the motel a stray piece of paper ticked, blowing on the gutter. I’d find a coffee house, write letters, I’d see a movie while it was still light out.

  Then I’d planned such a safe easy day for myself, full of consolations, I almost wanted that.

  I blow-dried my hair. I put on makeup, mascara and eyeliner. When I searched for the lipstick, I found Ali’s chocolate hardened like goo at the bottom of my pack. A white shirt, jeans, the earrings. The shoes with the ghost of Edison’s phone number. As I walked outside, I thought of my soles sanding against the pavement, wearing the numbers of his location all away.

  Then I went. I parked in front of the duplex.

  I turned the motor off. I knew now as I looked at the blind face of the town house, this could be another dead end. Another false tip, a mistake, another place he wasn’t. I promised myself, this would be my last dead end. I’d give up. I had to get back. I had to so bad.

  First I moved my stuff to the trunk. I had my backpack with Timothy’s camera in it. I took his picture out from where I’d saved it and looked at it in my palm. In the little picture, he looked about my age, proud-seeming, well-dressed, not exactly handsome. In a sharp double-breasted suit. I put it away again. Whatever society there was in America didn’t work the way my mother and dad thought it should, from looks. Education was the great leveler and opportunity, if you wanted that. It wasn’t, as my mom thought, a matter of clothes.