The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  The detective didn’t particularly look like a detective. He wore thick-soled, tie-up shoes, the comfortable kind you often saw on college professors and legal aid lawyers. I rode down the elevator with him and walked him to the outer door. He told me when he was my age, he had lived in Queens and written a detective novel. A company called Endicott had offered to publish it. But the advance had seemed insultingly small and he had said no. That seemed to be all there was to it. “Probably my big mistake,” he said.

  I asked him where he lived now. Outside it was raining, silver falling in the darkness.

  “Queens,” he said. At the revolving doors, he put on his hat and buttoned his coat.

  He remained a polite man. All that September, he returned my phone calls but initiated only two. In October, he picked up a shred of a trail in Washington State, but after a few weeks, that seemed to go nowhere. I stayed over Christmas and I guess I left a lot of messages for him then. By the third week in January, I had to withdraw money from my inheritance. Four hundred dollars. I told myself that this was only the interest. That I still had what she left me. But by then I needed food. It wasn’t a choice anymore. It was erosion, life costing and wearing me back to nothing. That is the way I always was. With my mother and me, poverty was never far away. College seemed a lighter world. The other kids talked about money, even bounced checks, but none of it was real.

  It took a day getting the money to where I was. I’d started too late, when my checking account was already down below zero, so I had to call the Wisconsin bank long distance and ask them to wire it to me. All the people at that bank knew my grandmother and they didn’t like to hear that I needed money fast. That was like my mother.

  Finally, it was all done. I walked home with a bag of groceries, a hot barbecued chicken releasing its moisture up towards my face in the cold air. It made me think of sex with a woman. I clutched the bag tighter to me. At least I had the chicken. It would last that night and tomorrow. So tomorrow wouldn’t cost any money. Spent money was like that.

  By February, the detective sounded unhappy to hear from me. “Yes,” he said when I said who I was. He was like someone I’d slept with once. I called him on a Wednesday and then again on a Friday. He had that pause-then-all-right hello. It was dumb to call him when he didn’t want to hear from me, I knew it, but I had to. I couldn’t help it. Then, after, I felt worse.

  When I called again the first Monday in March, he asked if I’d like a refund and he would just quit. I felt sort of stung; my hand lifted up in front of my face. Had I been that bad? Fumbling, I said that was okay, and he turned all business, getting my address again and the zip code. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone giving up on me.

  And sure enough, four days later, his check arrived, the whole seven hundred and fifty dollars. In a way I was glad to have my money again. That was something.

  I WAS ALWAYS trying to find my father except when I was in love. And not too long after the detective whose name I’ve forgotten sent back my money, I met Bud Edison. His real name was Guy and he seemed enough. That was a year and then some time after.

  I’d had boyfriends, I guess the same amount of all that as anybody, but I was never partial to the ones who were there, the ones who fixed my car and noticed my haircuts and went with me to see afternoon movies. They seemed only the people who had picked me. I wanted to pick. And the men I picked were hard to know. I understood the pain of that, I recognized it in the first froth of attraction. I knew this was how it was with my father, but then a lot of girls were the same way and they had fathers and everything.

  I was twenty-seven and Bud Edison was, in a way, my first date. In the West, we didn’t do that. We’d go out with a bunch of friends or sort of hang out at someone’s house and then you’d get together and that was it. But Bud Edison was definitely a date. When we came out from the movie, a blind man asked us to walk him to the bus stop. We each took one of his arms. He tested the pavement in front of him with a nimble white cane. We weren’t looking at each other but we were there, holding him up on both sides. Once he almost slipped and I felt Bud Edison’s arm, on the other side, lifting him back up, as I did the same thing, and it was true, we were falling in love, as we waited for the bus.

  When the lighted bus swam away into the dark, Bud leaned against an old brick wall and pulled me to him by my two lapels. It was very cold, night clouds held still in the sky and we felt bulky in our coats and gloves. He wore a particular kind of woolen hat pulled down and in it he looked bald and like idiot boys I’d seen on the bus to special school in Wisconsin. Just then I understood for the first time: you can love an idiot, a blind man or an ugly woman as deep as you can love anyone. He pushed me against the wall then and kissed me, his eyes closed so he reached for me by feel as a young animal would.

  I was afraid to do anything wrong, so I never called him. I just waited. I counted the days between and each more day seemed like saved money. When I saw him, we did things that made New York seem like a place. I was still new and I’d stand on a street I’d never seen before and look up at the tall buildings and then back at myself. I didn’t know how I could keep him.

  He’d told me, “There are better-looking women than you, but no one smarter.” He had said he wanted us to have children, see our mix in them. The same day, he’d looked at me and said, “That’s really your best thing. The black. And those earrings.” The earrings were from my grandmother’s drawer, made of paste.

  There are few people whose presence can equal or even contain their absence, who can maintain a daily density. But when you meet them, the music starts and you go, oh, God. It is not a matter of decision. You are along for the ride as long as it lasts. I always knew that for me falling in love would mean being toppled over, darkened out completely. There was nothing else anymore I really wanted.

  BY THE SUMMER, I called him all the time, late at night and said, in a weak voice, “I don’t know.” I was the one who always wanted more. Once, he came to my apartment in a taxi and we walked to Grant’s Tomb. It was hours before light and I had just a jacket on over my nightgown. The trees swayed above us, ferny, mysterious, and it was a summer sky with full night clouds and the river. Kissing him, I could never quite get where I wanted. We knew we were young and this was the last of it.

  There were problems. I cried a lot. Even when we laughed and smiled there was a trace of sadness in it. He often took a deep breath and ran the pad of one finger over my face as if soon he would have to be remembering.

  I didn’t really blame him for leaving me. “I want to see you laugh again,” he said. After we stopped talking, I began writing him letters I didn’t send. I thought if I kept my vigil, I could give them all to him someday and then he would understand.

  “I’m on a plane to Wisconsin. One of my worse recurring fears, driving, flying—I even wear my seat belt now—is that I will die and no one will know—really how much I have loved you. You will sort of know but maybe doubt in time. I have loved you to the bottom of myself. It is the most valuable thing I ever had to give on this earth. Please value it.”

  Other letters had less sky in them. Some were pretty mean. I felt everything for him, the whole carousel of mouthing color. There were forty-three letters in all. Then I stopped writing, not because my feelings changed, but because I decided to do something else. I decided again to find my father. I had not seen my father for thirteen maybe fourteen years. Something like that. And even before, I did not know him really. I didn’t know what he was like, what kind of man he was. I had never seen him as much as I wanted.

  Then finally, when I was twenty-eight, I put the letters and everything I had from Bud away. I tied the papers with a ribbon in a cigar box from Boss’s Tobacco and Magazine Shop. I had packages like this, offerings to my father, all over my apartment. He was why I saved things. An envelope contained two butterflies and four dried flowers with their stems from the Glacier Trail. Paintbrush, black-eyed Susan, juniper and thimbleberry. My father wou
ld have been fifty-five this year, or fifty-six. I knew because my mother always told me that they were the same age. That seemed romantic to me, like a couple of equal height dancing.

  I was starting up again with my father because I wanted to end something. Sometimes I lost interest for a while, but it always came back. In a way I had been looking for my father all my life. But what I’d called looking had really been something else. I made substitutes. My efforts were superstitious. They were things I did to myself, for him. Many times I’d followed a man walking down a street until I could see his face. Then I just stopped, still.

  I had to stop dabbling and wondering, scribbling on stray envelopes, and admit how little I had. I would have to take actions in the physical world. I had not really been looking for him there.

  For a long time, I’d wanted to get into medical school more than everything—I believed that would be the rest. And here I was, in with hundreds of others. It didn’t seem like such a big deal.

  There are different ways to end a long passion. One is to find the thing you always wanted, even if you cannot hold it, to touch it once. Another is just to forget. Another, I suppose, is revenge. I never wanted revenge, for Bud Edison or for my father. I always wanted people back.

  LOOKING BACK NOW, I would say, for me, growing up without a father meant a sense of extraordinarily open geographic possibility. I would look at a map of the fifty states. At school, I volunteered to clean the blackboards so I could stay after and pull down the huge maps. I imagined my father and me on a long afternoon in the thin blue air of the Rockies, a yellow butterfly drifting before my eyes, nothing else but fields and line-stemmed flowers and sheer gray rock. Our shoes sank in the loamy mountain soil, my blue sneakers with white rubber rims and white laces and his man’s shoes, oblong, serious. Time hung as the butterfly, without moving at all, an arm’s length from us on the weightless air.

  I would spin the globe hard, all the oceans and countries streaking by in vivid school colors. I knew my father was not anyplace there.

  From the way I grew up, unattended much of the time, and in the country, I had a sense of vast space, slow open land and late afternoon diminishment and stillness. When we all lived together in my grandmother’s house, I would set the table, she’d peel her apron off and take my cousin Ben and me on a walk before we ate. That was like my grandmother. She always finished everything early. The walk was for my mother, too. She always looked rinsed and the two sides of her face seemed more even after we’d left her alone. My mother had changed rooms in the house since my father left. She stayed in the upstairs room she’d had as a child and she didn’t like us to go in. “Knock,” she used to say.

  We learned proportion from walking as the light left. We circled our old grandmother, who never once inquired how we were doing in school. The brick school stood in town, far away from where we lived. It was something we did by ourselves and seemed to hold no interest for our elders. We went off in the morning carrying lunch pails. It was like having a tiny job.

  From school, though, we had become regular children after all. We ran in the same kind of shoes the other kids had and we believed, as they did, in progress and all the things we could expect. Every afternoon, we rode the school bus home. I looked out the window and saw workmen high on poles, yellow helmets on their heads. I tried to believe that all the open land would eventually be strapped and bound by the nicked wooden poles and looping black telephone wires, so that someone anywhere could be found.

  For me, the telephone held magic. When I lived with my grandmother, my father came alive only through the old heavy black plastic receiver. He could be anyplace and I always sat in the corner of the kitchen in the chair with the luffed stuffing coming out of a cracked T in the vinyl. He called seven times over those years—I kept count: from Montana, Wyoming, Nevada twice, California, Arizona and Texas.

  I learned how to use the phone when I was very young, soon after I learned to walk and talk. It was a secret thing I did. I told nobody. Not even my grandmother or my best friend, later, when I had one. This didn’t fall within friendship. It was something else altogether. I always had a deep sense of the private.

  Through all the school field trips of fun, there would be a moment I’d slip away from the bus and the chain of singsong voices; I’d walk until I found a phone book in a dusty store in Michigan, say, under the ice cooler full of pop, and I’d look up my father’s name. Atassi. He could be there. Names were printed alphabetically. Other A’s. I couldn’t picture him though, in May, on this quiet main street, red wheelbarrows out the window already marked half-price. My father had always been different. The way he stood up straight. And then there were the letters before and the letters after. He wasn’t there.

  Then I changed a little. This was one more place he wasn’t: Flint, Michigan. Now I could enjoy it, see it, just Flint, a place somewhere, like so many others. My day didn’t matter so much anymore. The country seemed big, big. And what was I doing standing with a phone book in a store, only one dime in my pocket? Someone might notice me. I took my time walking back to the game. I saw the yellow bus perched in the distance, I heard my classmates’ voices like one village on a hill, far away. Old cherry trees blossomed on the green hillside of Flint, Michigan, and fog glaciered in, surrounding the trucks to their knees. I stopped and touched the frail, cool blossoms. I didn’t run. I knew I could bear whatever I was missing. I didn’t want excitement then. I was saving it. For later.

  Eventually I learned about 411. “Information,” they’d say, or “Directory assistance.” Telephones then, like cars at first, came only black and heavy. On mouthpieces you could taste other people’s breath, get the shine of their chins, smell the ends of their perfume. I held the receiver in my right hand a little away from my face. I lived with a grandmother very much afraid of germs. She’d taught me, when I was little, how to go to the bathroom in gas stations and how to use public telephones. In gas stations, it depended on whether it was the kind of bathroom with only one toilet or the type that had stalls. If there was only one, you locked the door. Otherwise you left the outer door open a little, so somebody nearby could hear if you screamed. One thing my mother and grandmother agreed on was the protection of my body from men. They made me practice scream. I felt embarrassed, standing on our own back porch, no one around us but trees. Across the street Paddy Winkler cut his lawn with a hand mower. He was blind but not deaf. I sent off weak sounds that flew and landed quickly. That was the thing about there, it stayed so quiet. My grandmother stood, her hands working together on the front of her dress, mouth different with worry, whispering, “Come on now, I can’t hardly hear you. Really scream so someone will come and save you. You never know who’ll be in there.”

  I was to take toilet paper squares and overlap them on the seat, using enough so that none of the porcelain showed. Chances were, the toilet paper dispenser would be empty and so I was supposed to carry, at all times, a packet of Kleenex for the purpose. Then, underwear down around knees, skirt held up, I was trained to balance carefully. The full weight of my bottom should hang a good two inches above the buffered toilet seat throughout the whole operation. My grandmother had demonstrated at home. After all this, of course, I was supposed to clean up for the next person. The main thing was, I should wash my hands. No matter what, I had to wash my hands, and good. This was a time before public awareness of the deforestation of our region in North America or the conservation of paper were much considered. In fact, our small city made paper: toilet paper, paper towels and all manner of industrial paper. I still see the name of our paper mill raised up in relief on the tin toilet-paper dispensers all over the country: Fort Howard. That is the only public reminder of my hometown. I once pulled Bud Edison, dazed, into a Ladies’ Room stall to see. “That’s where I’m from.” Racine is not a place that has produced that many movie stars or politicians.

  As for the pay phones, they formed another station where my Kleenex would come in handy. I could wet one with my m
outh and rub it on the plastic. But even so, I was to keep the whole instrument a few inches from my head. This became such a habit with my grandmother that she did it even at home, holding her own, daily-wiped receiver far out from her face. This accounted for her shouting, and for her frantic “What? What did you say, I can’t hear you,” when she was never even the slightest bit deaf. She looked at the instrument with such expressive suspicion, it seemed she expected the plastic to respond.

  I don’t mean my grandmother was ridiculous. She was asked to raise children at a time when she was already old and beginning to find trouble with the simple acts of reaching and bending. She felt she had to teach me and Ben about everything impending while she still could. She fashioned the kind of cautious childhood, though, that made me seek out danger.

  Over the years of my grammar school education, I called information, gave a hundred women with mother-cool voices the spelling of my father’s name. They never found him. Not even the wrong one. It is not a common name. It was because he was Arab. Egyptian. I understood that Egyptian was more foreign than German or even Swedish or Polish. I knew that my hair and skin came from Egypt, but the rest of me was American. “You look like a regular enough kid to me,” my grandmother said, frowning, after I’d pestered her.

  Later, the phone company started charging for information. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on those charges, maybe into the thousands. It was something I did absentmindedly, the way some people eat. This held an edge of risk but it was not risk. You could always hang up.

  I always knew my father gambled. Twice, he had been in Nevada when we talked to him. He’d been married there, to a woman named Uta. Once, my mother and I flew out to visit him when he was a waiter in Las Vegas. The second time I saw him, we went to Disneyland with Uta and Uta’s granddaughter. You might think we would have kept addresses and phone numbers, but none of that worked for us. My father disappeared without a trace. Other people, like my grandmother, deeply trusted the mails and used the telephone with determination. But we knew none of those systems bound. They broke. People could go absolutely lost. As a child I never owned stamps or an address book. I didn’t write thank-you notes or anything. My mother meant to teach me these things, but there was never time. We were always so behind.