The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  “I always liked your mother. Very beautiful woman.”

  I nodded my head. “She’s nice,” I said.

  “Tall, no?” he said, his eyebrows asking.

  “No,” I said. Then I thought he didn’t really remember her, beautiful was just something he said about women.

  As I left, I turned to tell him where I lived. He hadn’t asked. “I live up near Columbia,” I said. “When you get back from your trip maybe you can come up there and I’ll make you some dinner.” He’s family, I was thinking.

  He agreed, though not enthusiastically. “Good, Columbia, good,” he said.

  That was okay. I’d made my decision. I would take what I could get.

  Later, on the way to the bus, I kicked a garbage can. I heard a person’s footsteps behind me. I waited for the man to pass and then I kicked it again. I was glad to be wearing my old shoes. I should have pressed for his number in Egypt. He may not have wanted to give it to me. But formal considerations would have prevented him from saying no.

  I was a realist. I was not above getting what I needed even from people who didn’t especially care for me. I grew up poor. I could never afford to be proud. My mother had a flashy pride anyway, and I saw where that had gotten her. This man himself wasn’t really the point anyway. I could do that, sometimes, put away the normal prides like little glass bottles, each holding a different color, separate on a shelf.

  WHEN I FINALLY stepped off the bus, fliers and old leaves blew up around my ankles and touched through my socks. It felt good to be back where I knew. Everything here hovered lower to the ground. I passed the slice-of-pizza store with its high good tremolo oregano smell, the open fruit market where an immigrant stood hosing vegetables in the dark. Suddenly, lit in the window of the shoe store, I saw them: golden shoes. High-heeled, curved like swan’s necks. I wanted them. All of a sudden. They were not the kind of thing I would usually ever buy. I stopped, took a pen out and wrote on my hand, golden shoes.

  Back in the apartment, I called California to tell Stevie Howard about the Uncle. Stevie Howard was a boy from home in Wisconsin, the one I should have slept with first. I lay on my floor with my legs up crossed on the wall. I told him the Uncle had no idea where my father was.

  “And you believe him?” Stevie said. That stopped me a minute. I hadn’t wondered that exactly.

  “Sure I believe him. Why would he lie?”

  “I wouldn’t be sure I believed him.”

  I heard wind, that gathering sound of leaves. “You outside?”

  “Yup. Sweeping.” I liked to know where Stevie was when I talked to him. He never sat anywhere normal, at a desk say, when he talked on the phone. He owned the kind of phone you could carry around. I could see him now, in the backyard of the Berkeley house, sweeping the sidewalk by his garden, eucalyptus rattling like so many years, dropping more buttons for him to clear. We had grown up across the road from each other. I knew how he was.

  “I should have asked him for more. Like did he have names and phone numbers of my relatives in Egypt.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you. Why didn’t you ask?” Stevie said.

  I sighed. Partly I hadn’t because of his accent. His speech took on a high grand tone, full of velvet curtains and stages, well-being, power. “I will.” Like so many times, I knew what to say after.

  “So you really want to start this whole thing again,” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “I’d set a definite limit this time,” he said. “Like you’ll spend just so many days and then give up.”

  The rasping sound of Stevie’s rake stopped and I knew what it could feel like to stand in that backyard, just leaning your chin on the old wooden end of a tool, watching the sky and waiting for all you didn’t know to begin.

  SO I CALLED the relative back. The phone clicked onto an answering machine, his thick, accented voice saying, “I yam not home as you can tell.”

  I asked him to call me. At the end I paused. I didn’t want to say my name. I’d let him think it was Atassi. He wouldn’t connect at all to Stevenson. Still, it seemed like a lie. My mailbox and my phone bills and everything said Stevenson. Then I just said Atassi and hung up.

  I ripped through the phone book checking for Azzam. One was listed, an A. Azzam. I called and got another machine, a high musical girl’s voice saying, “Hey, it’s Aleya and I’m not home right now …” I thought she was maybe married to the other Uncle. Or his daughter. I said I was Mayan Atassi to her machine too. The second time, a lie is always easier.

  THAT NIGHT I looked around the walls of my apartment. They made me tired. They were bare and cracked but alive with sound from pipes and from my neighbor’s television above. I felt too much myself. Like the yellowish color of these old walls, that came from a day of strangers and then just talking on the phone.

  In bed holding my pillow, I tried to think of my father in a Salvation Army shelter. Black men, white men, bald men, all men and my father. His chin would go a certain way for being there. He wouldn’t like it. Who would? I suppose, who does? But if you’re used to it, my grandmother would say. That was true. And he wouldn’t be used to it. After years of fine restaurants, wine, silk ties, this? But there must have been so many moments of such questions already in his life. They would settle in a certain way of his lips, lines crossed there, a folded mouth. No, he wouldn’t like it, but he would be doing it anyway, standing in line, quietly, straightening the soles of his good shoes. Eventually, another man might make a joke and my father’s held expression would break, his short upper lip sassy, a big-shot smile. He would have a buddy. They’d make a plan. They would shuffle up to the soup ladle together and sneer at the food. But he would eat.

  That was something I’d done all my life: held my pillow in my arms at night and closed my eyes and tried to see my father. I had nothing really, not even pictures. My mother had burned every trace of him when he’d left that first time. She’d thrown her ring over the Brooklyn Bridge when she went on the honeymoon with Ted Stevenson. She did that even though I’d told her I wanted it for me someday. “No, that you can’t have, honey, that’s mine to do with what I want to.” I sometimes pictured it—the spindly cabled Brooklyn Bridge, glazed yellow car lights at night, choppy green-gray water and her slender ring with its small diamond, never large, slipping in, slanting down, finally lodging in the far bottom sand, among big rusty metal parts of machines. From some low place, all the things of the world must have seemed debris, junk after the circus left the town.

  My mother bought a huge expensive scrapbook for me when I was born. In it was a small bouquet of tiny yellow roses, my birth certificate with my inked baby footprints and ajar with my fallen-out first teeth, and the plastic strip of her hospital identification bracelet, for when she checked in Bellin to deliver me. Then she had a few things, a crayon drawing of a tree and a sheet of paper I’d printed full of A’s. But most of the book was empty. She kept it in the attic near a suitcase full of stuff she meant to put in it someday. Nothing she did for me like that was ever finished.

  I fell asleep at night trying to imagine my father different ways. He could have been anywhere, in jungles, hotels, alleys, casinos, on stage somewhere, and even when I saw the president with his children on television, it seemed easy to blur and forget and feel happy in my chest for a moment like a dissolving taste, that it was him. It was easy to slip when someone was not there. I never did that with anyone else. I never pictured a different grandmother or a different cousin, even, a different mother. I always knew, with a sinking claim, she was mine.

  Just talking to the FBI had done something. I’d started to finish this. Now I was really looking for my father and I would not stop until the end. I’d marked the date in my book, wrote down Venise King’s name. I really did mean to call her again if I ever found him.

  The strangest thing was having said out loud what had been my secret. And then hearing Venise King recognize it and find me familiar. He had always seemed to
me truly different from other people missing in the world. My mother had told me how lucky I was to be one of our family and not other people. And I’d believed her. In a way I’d always believed we were better than other families.

  3

  I WAS ALWAYS doing things over again in my life. I lost things, replaced them, bought things twice. Nothing around me was well ordered. I was getting a detective again. I had done this before. But I knew I hadn’t really done it right the first time. The first detective was nothing like me. I’d picked him because he was the cheapest. I found him when things were terrible and I was alone. No boyfriend in the picture and the old one didn’t want to talk to me. Now it seemed to me that it hadn’t been true what I’d always thought. That I let things stop my course. Maybe my efforts had failed and there was nothing I could do about it. This wasn’t just now. It was all my life. I was going to find out if it was possible.

  This was the last time.

  “I WANT A LOCATE,” I said, to the girl who answered the phone.

  “You’d like him to find somebody?” she asked.

  “My father.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  This didn’t seem to surprise anybody. There were a lot of missing dads. I wondered if anything betrayed that; if you could see it in a man, a gesture of his wrist, maybe, or the way his chin was near a school playground.

  When the detective came on the line, I pushed the record button on my answering machine. I hadn’t done that before. I just felt like it. A slight, strange mechanical sound beeped every minute or so.

  “Wynne here,” he said. His name was Jim Wynne.

  I told him what I wanted. “I’ve tried a number of things and been unsuccessful,” I said. Yes. That was true.

  “What have you tried?”

  “Well, um …” I felt guilty then. I couldn’t really say. I’d not stepped on cracks in sidewalks, I’d torn flowers, saved butterflies. I’d burned food. I had shrines all over my apartment but nothing I could tell him. “I hired a detective once before, and I just try to review a lot of phone books, um …”

  “What did this detective do?”

  “I think he did a lot but he didn’t come up with anything.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. I could maybe look it up.”

  “Do you have your father’s full name?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, sweetheart, listen to me. My suggestion to you is you get some, do you have a file or anything together? Get all the information you have together—”

  I interrupted. “There’s very little information.”

  “Do you have a report from the other investigator?”

  “No, I mean I might have it, but I don’t know if I can even find it. I don’t think he even gave me one. I haven’t been very organized about this and all of a sudden I want to get organized and do it, but I’ve been sort of haphazard.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “Atassi?” Hearing myself say it felt strange. I said it again, spelling it out.

  “Well, if he’s still using that name, that, you know, that in itself is helpful, ’cause that’s not a very popular name, is—”

  “No, very unpopular name. I’ll tell you, there’s never any listing in the phone book for it.”

  “All right. Well then, why don’t you come to the office?” He gave me the address. It was somewhere I’d never heard of. “That’s at Cadman Plaza,” he said. “Cross the street from Brooklyn Criminal Court Building.”

  “What do you think we can do?”

  “We can try and find him.”

  “How would we do that though?”

  “Aw, there’s many ways. Computers. Ah, with credit, with—”

  “That’s a good idea.” I was easy to please. I felt held in his confidence. Emily’s father’s lawyer had recommended him. I knew he was famous in a local way, like Sal and Carmine’s, the pizza place near Columbia. I was that much like everybody else.

  “All right. Bring everything you can. All the information you have.”

  My voice fell into a soft wail. “I’ve got like everything in my head. I don’t really have any information, I’m sorry, I wish I had more, believe me.”

  “I’m gonna give you a flat rate so you won’t get—”

  “Could you tell me what it is so I can … afford it.”

  He laughed. This was wonderful. “Eleven fifty including expenses.”

  “Eleven hundred fifty dollars?” I wanted to make sure. This guy was supposed to be famous. I didn’t want him to be talking thousands.

  “That’s to you. I charge fifteen hundred, that’s what I normally charge.” My grandmother would never have fallen for an old pitch like that but I did. Why me? she would’ve said, why are you doing me favors? You don’t even know me.

  “What would expenses …”

  “No, no, no, no. That includes expenses.”

  “Oh, okay. Sure. That’s great.” I was remembering the first detective. Maybe if I’d paid more, his interest in me might have lasted.

  “Awright, come on in tomorrow. Just call Tina before you leave and make sure. Oh, by the way, you want to tape conversations on the phone there’s a way to do it without the beep. You have to buy a gizmo at the Radio Shack. See, it’s illegal so all the regular machines have that noise now. ’S’annoying.”

  THE DETECTIVE DAY was Wednesday. I thought of canceling. I had a party that night and then a date to something else.

  This wasn’t really my life. I wanted to cancel.

  In bed, I made a list. If I went, as soon as I left the apartment, I’d be gone, there’d be no time to come back and change, so I’d have to be dressed for the night and bring along everything I needed. I sort of had a date. I didn’t know if it was a date. He was an older guy, a professor. Gastroenterology. I hated this. Dressing up and doing all that. I was back in bed, shower-wet, still planning. I’d have to put on my black velvet dress and wear that on the subway to Brooklyn. The dress was my aunt’s from before she was married. It was definitely the only thing I had. The dress. I wore it a lot.

  Wednesday was my one day off. I felt like staying home. But I always did. I was two vertebrae systems behind in anatomy. I thought of my grandmother looking down at me, saying, yah yah, you’re like me, aren’t you? My grandmother always did stay home. I thought of her now, maybe for the first time ever, as a woman of my own age. She never went anywhere. So much of my life was making myself. She lived a life without dread. She was alone in the country and raked leaves in men’s heavy clothes, hauling them into three or four huge piles and then setting them on fire herself. She stood by, watching, tall, with white hair. She wore a lumberjack plaid red cap. She made a peculiar sight. Even then, I’d never wanted to go to school in the morning, never wanted to leave that house or the warm car. She had an automatic garage door and something in my chest pressed like a clamshell being forced open, as the wall lifted and exposed us and we rolled going backwards over gravel.

  But I’d canceled the detective last Wednesday. I had to go if I was ever going to go.

  So I went, in my black velvet dress and sneakers, old pumps knocking in my backpack. I’d bought the golden shoes. I just charged them. They were expensive, so much I didn’t put them on to wear. I carried them home dry and clean in the tissued box. That night I’d tried them. What I didn’t realize until just then, seeing them in the mirror under the whitened, crenellated bottoms of my jeans, was I really had nothing to go with them. I put them in my closet. I knew I’d find use for them later. I believed, absolutely, in that other higher life. I almost brought them with me for tonight but they were still too new. I wanted to save them. Tonight wasn’t enough.

  I was on the subway at noon. I couldn’t stand to put on makeup, especially in the morning, so that was in the pack too, in a Ziploc baggie. Getting off at Borough Hall I came out at a wire-fenced segment of what seemed to b
e a freeway. Cars zoomed by feet away from me. I didn’t know where I was. They kept telling me on the phone it was right across from the court building. This was a busy intersection, ramps and construction. I didn’t see any court building. No columns, anyway. I expected all courts to look Greek. They did at home in Racine.

  I tapped the shoulder of a large-backed man at a pay phone, who turned away. I waited until he hung up. “What do you want?” he said.

  “Do you know where the court building is?”

  “That depends. Criminal or civil? Depends on what you done.” He looked me over, slowly, deciding. My black dress seemed flimsy here, too long, eveningish. There was no good way to explain.

  “I’m not going to court. I’m going across the street to 67-42 Tillary Avenue.”

  “Oh.” He stared again, trying to decide whether to believe me. Then he just pointed. I passed a laundry with a clock. I was still early. This neighborhood reminded me of the old industrial Midwest. Poor but white. Less than urban. I turned and walked through a market. For no reason. I hadn’t eaten anything but I felt queasy. I’d always liked to just walk through markets and look at food. When I was new here, some nights, I’d go to the bright stores and walk through the aisles. This market had little bananas from the islands. They were dry and sweet. I’d never seen those in the West. I thought of getting some now, but my throat closed. In the market’s refrigerator section, they had the same fancy kinds of pasta and expensive ready sauces posed on the shelves. In poor neighborhoods everything—even the canned soft drinks—had different names. Inca Cola.

  I passed a shoe repair store, with a display in its small window—two foot-shaped pieces, one on the right smoothed with a sheet of rubber. The other had the kind of hole that’s bad to look at, a deep hole, layered and ragged at the edges. A hand-printed sign on brown cardboard, pointed BEFORE SOLE FIX.

  Jim Wynne’s address turned out to be a high-rise building. Names, most of them attorneys, appeared on the listing board. Handy by the courts, I supposed. I was alone in the elevator and glad of it. My hands touched my two earrings. Still in my ears.