The Lost Father by Mona Simpson
My apartment was a ravage around me; I just added to the mess. I untwined scarves, slipped off shoes, rolled down tights. I took the earrings out and set them on a table. Pretty soon I was in my slip, fabrics draped over every chair and doorknob. I felt loose at last. It came from a country childhood, I always took my good clothes off when I got home. I grabbed a bill envelope and pushed the button to play my phone messages.
“ ’S Wynne, I’ve got quite a bit of information already about your father. Date of birth and I’ve got up to where he’s been, I tracked his life up to the seventies. I think I’m gonna get him soon, I think so. I think I’m gonna get him. Get back to me, make sure you get back to me tomorrow afternoon but it looks encouraging.”
What was so strange then was time. I’d been looking for my father, always, forever, but now it seemed, it only began yesterday and a night was already too long to wait. Absolutely too many hours. Before I could have gone on waiting without end.
Now I could begin to imagine an after.
And when I found him, would I wait, lose eleven pounds, get in shape, go shopping? Would I charge a new suit to wear to meet him and worry about it later? Or would I just jump on a plane and go?
I HAD TO GET OUT. I put on jeans and grabbed my jacket. I had to get out. I never felt this. Ever. Usually I was housebound. I liked to stay home. But tonight I had to go outside.
I went to Tacita de Oro, the corner place, and sat on the first counter stool. The inside of the neon sign spurted fretfully; green letters and a perfect yellow cup and saucer. Chinese and Spanish food. Order to take out.
They had cigars, flan. “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” played from a little radio.
Why was their coffee so good? The same guys as always worked behind the counter, the one I liked with no chin and glasses, neat, and the other better-looking one, not my favorite.
When I come home to you, San Francisco …
It was one of those nights where everything seemed meant for me. Near my shoulder, a girl whispered, “Can you lend me five dollars?” I shook my head no. “Ya sure?” she said.
I thought of my mother laughing and crying entirely without me.
I felt the way I did when I knew a few days before I officially heard that I’d get into medical school, I just knew, and that it would change my life.
I kept buying coffees for a dollar.
The man with no chin and glasses was now eating his dinner. He sat at a table, his ankles nicely crossed, hands on the cloth. A plate of rice and one of stew. He stared at the food, mixed it and lifted the spoon to his mouth very slowly. Everything seemed beautiful and mine. I felt I was going to lose this life. I would lose it because I would want to. How could I stop? There was once before Mai linn went away, when she still lived in Racine. She and Ben were in their days. I said, I was afraid if I went with my mother to California, we’d forget about each other. Mai linn knew already that she was going to move and Ben would be far away.
Mai linn was already unsentimental. “It seems sad to you now because now you don’t want to lose us. But it won’t be sad then. You’ll keep knowing the people you bother to.”
That has not always been true. We have all lost, Mai linn the most. But it was mainly that: mainly our own desire that left.
I came here alone. I counted: the butter on the counter, hot sauce, soy sauce, ketchup, sugar, salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, toothpicks, cigars, flan. I wanted to remember it all.
FOR ONCE, I really couldn’t sleep. It was one o’clock, then two. It went on and on. This was really a disaster. I had class all morning. Then work. Emory. The TV noise drizzled down from upstairs. I got mad and madder. Didn’t he ever stop? I suppose for him night was nothing, he didn’t have to get up in the morning, he didn’t have to memorize femurs, he didn’t have to worry about flunking out. Finally, I pulled jeans on from the floor, stamped upstairs and got ready to knock. The noise spread out of the apartment, leaking. It was definitely him.
He opened the door, first giving me a hard blank look, then remembering, and said, “Come in, come in.” What could I do? He ushered me into his apartment. He wrung his hands in front of his pants. “I make tea,” he said as if this were the middle of the afternoon. His pants were some shiny fabric. Old men’s pants.
On a small table covered with faded fabric, the TV. As I’d suspected, this was right over my desk. It was positioned at the far end of the room, all the furniture facing it. On the same little table sat a bouquet of false flowers and a stick of incense, like a sad altar. It looked like an old movie running, black and white, with rounded cars and cops. Up here, it didn’t seem so loud. When he brought tea out on a tray, he stopped and snapped the thing off.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said. What was my problem?
“Company,” he mumbled and his lips spread. Some teeth were missing.
He rubbed his hands together, then sat down across from me, picking up his teacup in both hands.
The tea was bitter and dry and tasted something like cherries.
“Did you use to work for Columbia?”
“Used to be professor,” he said. “Mathematics.”
“Were you married?”
“I never marry. No,” he said.
And then I knew I couldn’t say it. I just couldn’t. Now I tried to think of some excuse. For being here.
“Oh, there are your canes,” I said. You couldn’t miss them. There they were. Three, all wood, each a little different, hanging on a hatrack on the wall.
“I collect,” he said. He went up to touch the one on the far right. It had a silver handle, tarnished. “Present,” he said, “my niece in California.”
“Oh,” I said. “Nice.”
He rubbed his hands again. “I show you something,” he said. He was relishing this visit. Now I had to find a way to get out. The apartment looked like a cave. It was bare and dimly lit and the walls seemed streaked and browned. I couldn’t make out any bed. Maybe the couch I was sitting on was where he slept. If he ever slept. He made noises in the closet, and I thought of slipping out, but then he emerged with something wrapped in layers of yellowed tissue paper. He unwrapped and unwrapped, smoothing each wrinkled sheet of tissue out with his creased palm on the table. Finally, he lifted a cane up in both hands. The whole top half gleamed bone.
“My father’s,” he said. “You collect?”
That stopped me a moment. It was a question I hadn’t been asked for years. Where I was from, in Wisconsin, everyone collected. Paddy Winkler collected guns. People collected stamps, souvenir spoons, different teacups. Merl Briggs collected ormolu, Majolica china and this year’s shoes from her twice-a-season shopping trips to Chicago.
Women collected Hummel figures, antique doilies, all manner of colored glass bottles. It was odd not to own a collection. Teachers regularly expected children to tote something to school and elucidate for Show and Tell. Many of the more prosperous families collected religious tokens, such as rosaries blessed personally by the pope or relics: splinters cased in oval glass and worn around the neck, supposedly from the wood of His cross; pieces of certain saints’ hair, packaged in little boxes, with glass open sides, the hair, laid on velvet, translucent, no larger than a capillary or a nerve. For some reason, the saints seemed always to be blond. Once, for a while, I kept asking my mother if she had one of my father’s hairs.
“No,” she said. I remember her shaking down a pillow into a clean white case.
“But you must have one somewhere.” I could get like that.
She laughed, a little distracted. “Well, I don’t know where.”
“I collect butterflies,” I told the man.
“Butterfly!” he said.
Last year, I spent so many nights in the hospital. A wooden drawer with its silver handle intact stood upended at the nurses’ desk, butterflies pinned behind glass. It had been left there by the first patient I knew who died. No one else seemed to like it much. One day the head nurse touched each of her elbow
It was odd, though, wanting to take something out of a place that had so little. But I did. Mai linn said a psychologist told her that when people treat kids who were sexually abused, the shrinks can’t help imagining the crime and wanting to touch the girls, too. “It’s a turn-on, a little,” she said. “I mean they don’t do anything, that’s just one of the things they fight.” She sighed. “Everyone in this culture wants to touch girls.”
By the end of the year, I deserved the butterflies. I knew that, but then I didn’t really care anymore. I asked anyway, the day before the new shifts.
“You can keep ’em,” the head nurse said. “You’re the only one around here who liked ’em anyway. You like ’em, Druse?” she asked the orderly.
He shook his head, wheeling the squeaking intravenous cart down the hall.
I touched the drawer of butterflies with its rough silver handle.
“Do you think the father would want them back?” I said.
The nurse shook her head no, she didn’t think so.
A father from Illinois had brought the butterflies to his son. I remember the father’s hands, huge, callused, embarrassed of their size, soft and helpless in his lap. He sat beside his son’s bed, wishing for another form, those butterfly tentacles, with their capacity for reception. I never saw a mother.
The son died while it was still snowing. We were the same age then, twenty-seven. He was an architect. Jack. When he first came to the hospital, he spent his hours drawing his ideal chair. “For a competition,” he said. One day he finished, and I took the drawing and the written forms and mailed them for him, Federal Express. I never heard if he won or not. Later that day, I lifted his gold wire glasses off his face once and rubbed his skin with a cool washcloth, touched with witch hazel. I brought my own witch hazel from the health food store and carried it around in my white hospital jacket pocket. People liked it. The glasses stayed like that, notched, one leg over the other, in a triangle, on the bedside table.
“Butterfly.” The old man’s fingers made a gesture. “Up your ceiling? Or in cage?”
Then I thought what he saw. Butterflies aloft everywhere in my warm small room. Spots of beating color on the ceiling. Or maybe an elaborate bamboo cage.
“Oh, no. No. Dead. Dead butterflies. Pinned.”
“Ah, yes,” he said and looked down at his hands.
“You should come down and see them some time,” I said, nodding, standing up. “But now I have to get home. Sleep,” I said, too loudly, the way I couldn’t help talking to old people.
I went back down. My door was open again. I just could never get in the habit of locking.
He didn’t turn his TV on. Still, I couldn’t sleep anyway. I got up and stared at my textbook, until I caught myself reading the same paragraph three times. Then I hit the bed. I must have fallen asleep eventually because the ringing phone in the morning woke me up.
It was my mother. “I have something to ask you, honey, and I want you to tell me the truth.”
“Go ahead. Ask.”
“Don’t be afraid to tell me. Ann, are you on drugs?”
“No, Mother. Is that all? What got you started on that?” I had this bad tendency to laugh whenever she accused me of anything. I always laughed, whether or not I’d done it. And she took that as a sign of guilt. She always had.
“Well, how are you going through all this money then? Merl Briggs wrote me that they called her from the bank. They’re worried about you.”
Goddamn small-town bank, goddamn Merl Briggs. “Mom, life is expensive in New York, okay? I don’t spend a lot of money.”
“Well, be careful, because Gramma left you ten thousand—”
“Nine!”
“That’s nine more than I was left. That’s a lot of money, nine. That’s more than I have and when that’s gone, there’ll be nothing, do you understand? I can’t give you anything!”
4
TODAY I:
left my card in the cash machine.
broke two glasses, washing the dishes. That’s out of three that I had.
flunked a test. Anatomy. Bad.
tore the apartment apart looking for my butterfly-wing pin. It was a scene of a boat on a river, made out of butterfly wings. I pulled every pocket inside out. I didn’t find it. It was lost. Really gone. I hate that, it starts me going.
Then I got a ticket for riding my bike through a red light. The cop had a helmet that fastened under his chin. He just wrote, his profile stern. I wondered about his hair. He might have been younger than I was.
The worst thing was I broke one of Emory’s towers. I knocked it with my leg and a rampart of glued toothpicks separated and fell.
I was nervous. I guess that was it. Or maybe I was always like this. I looked at my hands with wonder. They looked big. Maybe I was always this bad.
I rolled my bike to the Pleiades Palace. I didn’t want to ride anymore. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t have an umbrella or a hat so my hair was flat strands on my forehead and over my ears by the time I got there. Elementary school kids in bright-colored hooded slickers fidgeted in a long line. You could hear the zup of their rubbery sleeves and boots, making squeaking noises. Timothy ushered them in the way he ushered anyone, bending down to take tickets, making conversation. The kids settled in the movie seats, unbuckling galoshes, dropping coats.
We stood behind the velvet curtain listening to their swaying voices. “It’s all happening so fast,” I whispered. “I wanted to find him all these years and now this really might be it. And I don’t know if it’s even a good time. What about Emory? He expects everyone to leave him. And school.”
“The projectionist’ll close up,” Timothy said. “We can go.”
He took his jacket off the peg and opened a black umbrella over us as we walked outside. We headed down towards the river, trees tenting over us, the choral rain echoing on all sides. “And I don’t know,” I said, “lately I’ve been liking my life here.”
“What makes you think it’s going to happen so fast?”
“This detective sounds like it might. Yesterday they were checking computers in five states. He said it could be any day now.” He’d called again today, panting on the phone. “I’m gonna get him, I can feel it, I’m gonna get him soon”—his breath going almost creepy. “Oh, by the way, you said to hold your check for a few days and it’s been three, so I’m gonna go ahead and put it through, awright?” The money had come from the Racine National Savings and Loan, with a note from the president saying Prudence! When this goes, that’s all there is. I knew him. He was my grandmother’s friend Jen’s brother-in-law, Homer Hollander. The bank building had white pillars and the names of the virtues carved at the top in stone. Constance, Prudence, Charity, Pride, Honor and Hope. Good families in Racine named their daughters these things. Their sons they called Lewis and Donald. It seemed I was giving away my share of the bank at home, and what would I get for it?
“Even if he shows up on a computer,” Timothy said, “that’s not necessarily going to be his current address, they’re going to have to cross-check, send somebody there or call …”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid. Tonight I’m not even sure I want it.”
He put a hand under his ponytail, pulled the rubber band out and swung the hair free on his back. He kept the plain liver-colored rubber band on his wrist. His wrist was wide, the bones round. His cuff touched my cheek. The old suede chafed rough on my skin like a man’s face, this time of day. “You know, you don’t have to see your father when you find him. You’ll have all the information. You can wait. It might be enough just to know.”
“Yup.?
It had stopped raining. Timothy took the umbrella down. And the sky thickened to that liquid deep blue it did just before it was really dark and lights came on, the bridge lamps and strings of lanterns across the river making the buildings over there look like a small carnival. I still wasn’t used to eastern light and weather.
“Will you go alone?”
I shook my head, sending water flying. “Who would I take?”
“You could bring a friend. Stevie. Or Emily.”
“Naa. I’d have to bring my mom or somebody who knew him. And she’s not into it.”
“No.”
“I kind of want to go alone.” I’d have rather had someone. A brother or a sister. The way it was, my family things were an embarrassment. After all this time it was still hard to be different. And the being different didn’t go away ever. But that was my life: alone. There was a spare thrill to that, too.
“I wonder where he’ll be.”
“The West somewhere.” I shrugged. “Some people you just know aren’t in the South. And I can’t see him in the Middle either.” I knew a lot of places. I’d had years of driving. Now I was settled down to my dark apartment and quiet books. “He tried Wisconsin. And Michigan. Like it won’t be Arkansas or Texas or Georgia. Not the plains. He’d never be in Boston. I haven’t seen him in so many years but I still have all these ideas. Maybe he’s nothing like I think. Maybe he’s right over there in New Jersey.” We stood looking at New Jersey a moment, the green banks, rich from rain.
The sky and water were hardening into their colors, their edges making one sharp line.
But I knew he wasn’t in New Jersey. I absolutely knew.