by Mona Simpson
I DROVE THROUGH A LANE OF TREES. They were plane trees, fisted, rare, trees I wouldn’t have guessed possible in the Midwest. I knew from Stevie: there is not one continent without pine. And so many species have been mixed and transplanted from the last piratical century of expansion and conquest. Stevie had a Ph.D. in trees.
I was driving to see the lawyer Pat Briggs had mentioned. The lawyer was a man without children. I knew, everyone knew, that he and his wife had had a child who died years ago. The wife had taken the girl to the Twin Cities for treatment before she died and she stayed there for two years, after. Then she came back and that was all I’d ever heard about it. Jackson Fen wick was the richest lawyer in Bay City. He worked in a wooden office downtown, but this was his vacation and he’d asked me to drive out to his house. This was a district, forty miles south from where I’d lived, that I’d never seen. It was a neighborhood of big old houses that looked blinded and closed for long winters. At the end of his lane, you came to a plateau. A thicket of dry winter rosebushes still kept you from the approach to the house. I parked my grandmother’s car and got out. From here you could see down the hill and many hills, ridged in the distance. This was a way hardly anybody in Wisconsin lived.
How could this man have accepted my grandmother’s money?
A woman met me at the door. I’d expected a maid, from the movies, but it was Mrs. Fenwick and she had a kind, oval face, her hair just bunned back, some gray running in it. She was dressed all in suede, suede jeans and a suede shirt and suede loafers, and she moved noiselessly on the bare floors. She had many small teeth and an inwardly moving smile.
“Jackson’s in the study, I’ll bring you on out there,” she said. A fire broke and whispered in the living room as we passed. The room admitted filtered, goldish light. I felt right away all that was wrong with the Briggses’ house.
Jackson Fenwick sat, feet up, reading at a mahogany desk. From the opposite bookshelf came the low murmur of a football game on a small, cube-shaped television.
“Ouch, oh no, come on, get him down, get him, hold him, oh no.” Jackson Fenwick turned the game off. “Have a seat,” he said to me. He exhaled. “They’re not on top today,” he said. His wife slipped out, closing the wood door behind her. On one side, the wall opened to windows revealing an empty garden.
“You know, there is a box sitting around somewhere, in the Briggses’ basement maybe, with those records” was the first thing Jackson Fenwick said.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Pat and Merl tried, pretty thoroughly I think.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe it got thrown out somehow.”
“I doubt it. They’re not really a family that throws things out.”
One knee bent and he caught it with his arms. “That’s for sure true.”
“Do you remember much?”
“I’m searching back a long ways here, you understand. I looked into it when the Briggses brought your grandma in and she asked me to find him in view of you. There were two colleges involved,” he said. “And one was I think in Montana.”
“When was this, do you remember?”
“Oh, 1970 maybe, ’72. Remember I’m pulling this out of some cobwebs. And that was the last contact that anybody had had. Now I did have a name—and I believe it’s somewhere in my notes in that box—of a guy who was probably as close to a friend as anybody your father ever had in the world. And I believe I talked to that guy—again I’m pulling a lot of stuff out of the hat—but I believe I actually talked to the guy.”
“And did he have any idea where my father was?”
“Well, it wouldn’t’ve surprised me. I got the feeling that he did but he wasn’t going to tell me. I think he was pretty suspicious.” I could understand somebody being suspicious of Jackson Fenwick. The way he talked. The guy was never just a guy but the best friend your father ever had. In the world. Maybe if I called, I was thinking. Or found the man, drove to where he lived, spent a day with him, took a walk. This friend—there were so many questions—
Just then, Mrs. Fenwick carried in a tray of tea with a plate of what smelled like warm gingerbread. She asked me if I wanted lemon or milk as she poured. Then she served us each the gingerbread, spooning whipped cream from a silver bowl so cold tiny beads of water formed on the outside.
“Mmph,” Jackson Fenwick said. “Where’d you get this recipe, honey?”
I noticed her hands had spots like large freckles on the tops of them. This was something my mother worried about. She used lemon juice and the insides of vitamin E tablets to bleach them.
Her long neck bent, as if from the weight of her head, and she said, “Piro’s?”
“In Chicago.”
“Yes.”
“You know what she does? We go somewhere and find something we really like, a superior pasta, or this, this was the best gingerbread I’ve ever had, she’ll go the next morning to the kitchen and knock and have the chef show her how he does it.”
Mrs. Fenwick stood a moment looking out the window to the still winter garden, her hands fallow on the front of her apron. Her profile was strong and settled. Then she turned back to us and smiled. She was a woman in whom even a smile contained elements of sadness.
“Beatrice doesn’t like winter. Where she comes from, it doesn’t get this cold.” Outside, there were lemon trees, bare, and a large fig.
She closed the door behind her again and Jackson Fenwick said, hands basketed, “I am a lucky man.”
I liked him kind of. I wanted him to like me. So I told him a little about my life. I was a way I thought he’d want a young woman to be. I told him that I was from here and that now I was in New York City in school to be a doctor. I told him I was pretty alone. I told him that I’d hired a detective and that he had checked credit and driving records and was now trying to do a search with immigration.
“I think your father traveled under a foreign passport,” he volunteered.
“Did you ever come across a social security number?” I said.
“Your father used a number of aliases, if I recall,” he said, almost as if I were to blame. “I think he had more than one social security number.”
Aliases. For some reason that made me think of my father, benign, in prison. In the institutional mirror, a little black-and-white picture of himself, with a wavy border.
This guy wasn’t at all charmed. None of what I said was working. He acted like I was responsible for being the unwanted kid of a man like my dad.
“Did Pat tell you, I don’t know if Pat told you, but Marion Werth at the Racine Library unearthed something about him. See, your grandma had her on the case, too. She’d done some work on family trees, some such thing, but nothing like this before, I’m pretty sure of that. And Miss Werth dug up something pretty bad, I think. Something about getting some poor old ladies arrested. And when your grandmother heard about that, that was when we all stopped.”
He looked at me while he said that as if I inherited all this.
“I see.”
“In fact, you might try and get in touch with Marion Werth. She was in on all this. Maybe she’s got that box.”
“God, we don’t know anything,” I said. “He could even be in Egypt. See, it’s weird that he’s not turning up on any of these computer checks.”
“By the way, I came to think there was a distinct possibility,” Fenwick said, his hands straight now, the fingers touching only at their tips, “that he was dead.”
The garden out the window looked still and old. A blue bird fluttered and beat its wings on the tilted birdbath pooled with brown water and old leaves. Somewhere a woman was cooking in the kitchen, using superior ingredients, reading handwritten recipes. This was nothing like love.
“Um, what made you think that?”
“Well, I had a feeling he might’ve conned the wrong people. He was mixed up with some Middle Eastern oil people. There was some educational program he was supposed to be putting to
gether for them.”
All of a sudden, I wanted to go.
Mrs. Fenwick came to the door to offer us more. “Mayan, anything? Jackson? Would you like your warm-up?”
“I sure would, honey,” Jackson Fenwick said, swinging his legs off the desk and standing. I bolted up and streaked in an angle to the door. “Bye, thanks,” I said, from a distance. I opened the heavy front door and let it drop back into its locks. Then I ran on the stone steps to my car.
I had heard once before that he’d taught in the West. My mother told me somebody had said so. That was years ago. And just this last week, in boredom, I’d paged through the architecture books in the Briggses’ library and found a note I’d written two summers earlier on the inside cover. It said Idaho and the names of seven colleges, with the phone numbers of their personnel offices. I guess I’d kept it as a partial record, for when I would be more thorough later on. I never felt I’d checked a place completely. You couldn’t do enough.
A light random snow began to fall and it stuck to the road like a thin soft veil of decoration just enough to make the wheels feel light, as if we were skating, about to take off. I’d call Marion Werth in California.
He might be dead.
I was not ready for him to be dead, even though I couldn’t see him, even though I never heard him, even though I didn’t know where he was.
I didn’t believe I’d find him, not really. If I needed him I knew he’d never answer. I couldn’t imagine his rescue, any salvation, except from myself and hard work and good habits and all the everyday things we all know, but I was not ready for him to be dead, forever, buried nowhere I could find and touch the ground, before I saw him and he recognized me as his child.
Father had become the name for a rock, a stark gray cliff in the Colorados, the echoing forever unanswered.
Still, he could not be dead.
My grandmother’s heavy Oldsmobile flew over the narrow roads, sleek with snow. Briggses’ house was empty when I got home, save Dorothy, who sat at the kitchen table with rubber boots on over her shoes, hands folded, work done, ready to be picked up to go home. I waited there with her, until the twin milky lights cornered in the room and she ran outside to her nephew’s truck.
I lay belly down on Emily’s bed, talking on her Princess phone. I tracked down Marion Werth in California. It didn’t take too long. Four calls. Research, it occurred to me, was the same, whether you were searching out an old friend’s phone number, a jacket seen in a magazine, or a doctor for the person nearest you.
I found Marion Werth in Fruitvale, California, picking up her phone after the second ring in the same lilt-upending voice she’d always had. “Hel-lowoh.”
She thrilled hearing it was me calling from Wisconsin. I could see her in her house, sitting on a chair, her nails filed into curves, the discreet pink of a seashell’s insides. Her talking voice had always had an upswing breathless quality. “Well you can imagine it didn’t give us any pleasure to hurt people we loved or even to worry them but they seem to be settling down some now. My family. We’ve started some regular correspondence. Tell me, what does it look like right now?”
“What?”
“Racine,” she said. “Is it snowing? Does it have that real winter smell?”
“Yeah, sort of. It’s a windy day. Dark. Snowy. You know what that’s like.”
“Yes I do.”
I thought of all the men on the way to my father. Marion Werth was from my own life. This was different.
She told me about the farm. Sort of midwestern, she said. It had a big porch they were painting blue. They’d already sent away for seeds of lilies of the valley, bleeding hearts, lilac bushes and gooseberries. The kitchen was huge and it had an old Wedgewood stove with a pancake griddle. They’d painted the kitchen walls apple green with white trim. She was sitting at a little table they’d found at a thrift store. It was very clean now. Now, she said. They’d had to get down together on their knees and scrub every tile in the kitchen and bathroom with toothbrushes and Ajax, and I could see them, their differences erased by the common midwestern horror of dirt, at unkempt oldness, lack of pride, sagging forgetfulness in a home. They’d painted the radiator a bright silver and found a piece of marble at a flea market to rest on top of that.
The farm was a small date farm, between Petaluma and Santa Rosa. They had dates, two cherry orchards and a field of artichokes. In summer, most farmers set up stands on the road tourists drove to the Napa Valley. Callie worked modernizing the farm all day and he’d enrolled in the agriculture school at Davis. She drove into Santa Rosa to the hat and glove shop. Tonight, Callie had found fresh cherries at ninety-nine cents a pound, “Can you imagine, Bing cherries in January?” so she’d made a pie, “In fact the pastry recipe your grandmother gave me once years ago with the cider vinegar in it. And no butter. It uses corn oil.” I’d always liked the first sour bite of cherry pie. It sat right now cooling on the ledge, they’d go out and eat it soon and watch fireflies in the dark. They had eucalyptus trees in their backyard and date palms.
She sounded more for herself than she’d ever been. I was glad. It had been worth a call to hear that. I almost didn’t want to ask her about the box.
But I couldn’t not. I was that far in. I put the box and its questions in places they didn’t belong. I was beyond etiquette.
But I didn’t want her to think I was calling only about the box. There were too many people I’d lost like that. It was like a carousel. I didn’t have time enough, it seemed, to just have friends. My years for play would come later. My mother had always promised me that. Too much of what I did had a point. And it wasn’t even my own. I felt like I was chasing the world to find a grave. All this had been set for me by my parents.
So I just said it. “Marion, do you remember anything about a box of papers that were records of my grandmother’s and Jackson Fenwick’s?”
She paused a minute, thinking, I supposed. I just waited for her to tally up her memory and tell me she’d never seen the thing. But then she told me, of course she remembered the box, very well. When they’d driven out west they’d taken only her Volkswagen bug, they’d gone camping all of August in Glacier National Park so they’d traveled light, but that she’d put the box and other valuables, for safekeeping, in the basement at the convent.
“So you know about that. I wasn’t sure, Ann, if they told you they were doing that.”
“They didn’t tell me. But, I finally found out. See, I’m looking for my dad myself now. I’ve hired a detective and all.”
“Have you!” she said. “Oh my goodness.” She sounded funny and I wondered if I’d offended her somehow, or if she dispproved.
“You know, we may just do that ourselves. Callie is adopted and he’s always wanted to meet his real mother. Complicated lives we all have. Tell me what you find, won’t you?”
“Maybe the nuns threw that box out,” I said.
“Oh, heavens no. The nuns never throw anything out. They haven’t lost a button since 1949 in the fire.”
The nuns’ fire in 1949—something we all knew about that was as big as the war in Racine, killing half a generation of teachers and nurses and more than thirty cats.
I KNOCKED EIGHT TIMES on the huge wood front door before a nun I didn’t know whispered in long robes to admit me. She left me sitting on a bare bench in the hall. I’d asked to see Sister Mary Bede.
All our lives, nuns were a part of the inside clockwork of things. When I went to their school they lived in the convent behind and when I came without a lunch, they made me a sandwich. They’d take me into the huge dry kitchen and get out bread from an ordinary breadbox, lunch meat. Even nuns, they were women.
In first and second grade, we had made altars in school. Little shrines we held on our laps on the bus. I made them secretly at home too. But all the things I wanted for my altar were lost, thrown away, because my mother was such a romantic. The ring, wedged in river sludge at the bottom of the river in New York City, a place I
had never been then, the pictures lost in some shoe box in the attic.
Sister Mary Bede, in new eyeglasses, came down the hall, her face lit in amused pleasure. I was so glad to see her. I wanted to stand in the hallway and talk but then she told me it was suppertime there and she had to get back, so I followed the unsteady beam of her flashlight down the steps which she descended terribly slowly, jagged, with each step a hand grasp worthy of life on the old wood banister. I imagined all of their time was accounted for, the way they accounted for children’s time when they taught. We scratched with light over one hundred boxes, old skis, big restaurant-sized food supplies, rickety bookshelves of Catechism readers until we finally hit the neat tied tarp covering Marion Werth’s goods and we found mine, carefully labeled.
Sister Mary Bede probably knew what I was doing but she didn’t ask anything. We went slowly back up the stairs and it was only at the door that she stalled me.
“I remember your class,” she said, her old face hanging close to me, her eyes bright and the rest all gone. “I still have a picture.” From the folds of her habit she withdrew a black-and-white picture of our class. I was in the front row, my hair pulled tightly back, my legs apart, my face with an expression of astonishment. We all looked like foreign children, it was that long ago. She was the second-grade nun and then, years later, she came to teach us Latin.
“Thank you, Sister.” This was the woman who taught me how to write cursive. We had thick pencils and first for a long time we drew circles, then oblong loops, just to loosen our wrists for the new writing. She must have been middle-aged, then. Age was a way we never even thought about nuns. She filled the classroom ledge with jars of cocoons and wasp nests and the blue and speckled eggs of different birds.
“I’ll say a novena for you,” she said. “Whatever you find.”
I was halfway down to the car when the door opened and she stood outside. “You know, your grandma’s Gish slipped last night. She’s under, she doesn’t hear a thing anymore.”
