by Mona Simpson
“You won’t give me that letter? It’s my father.”
“I told you our policy.”
“My father,” I said. “Doesn’t that give me any rights?”
She looked as if she was looking at me but she wasn’t. She was spotting the wall to my left. Then she turned down and wrote something I couldn’t see.
“I wonder if I might talk to Rosabeth—”
That took another wait in the chair.
“Rosabeth Larson, may I help you.” She lowered an arm down for me to shake. She looked like women I knew in Wisconsin, that curled married hair, a plain good face, scuffed pumps.
“Hi, my name is Mayan Stevenson and I’m in medical school.” I must have been far gone, I was gesturing. “Back on the East Coast,” I said and then I laughed idiotically for no reason. “But I’m here—”
“Denise briefed me on your conversation,” she said, folding her arms.
“Can I ask one thing?”
“Certainly.”
“Are there any conditions in which, legally, one would be able to get—”
“You bet, if I had a subpoena. Certainly, I would be able to give out the information.”
“I’ll have to find out what the legal procedures are for things like that because—” I stood up. “Okay, I’ll check into that.”
“The only other thing that I could do is just send you anything that might be a matter of public information. Can I have your address, please?”
“Oh, I’m at the”—my hand was going again—“the Holiday Inn down here on Nine.”
That got me a look, angled and steady. She shook my hand again, once, hard.
OUTSIDE THE PERSONNEL OFFICE, blue sheets of paper listed job vacancies. Administrative Assistant: 60–70 wpm, telephone work, filing.
The sky still showed the first wisps of light, my exhaustion now seemed clean and earned. It was just eight-thirty. I loped across the highway to the coffee shop. I already knew where things were here. The little things I had to do for comfort. It was a small campus and there was this one tin diner. Students and truck drivers had taken all the booths so I sat on a stool. I lifted my hand on the counter and I was surprised how red and thick my hand was, how ragged the coat sleeve. I fingered an end of my hair. Better wash, I thought.
I found a broken pencil in the bottom of my purse and wrote “Wynne: subpoena, passport” on a paper napkin. I had so many lists going. My pockets and purse were full of little scraps that my fingers balled while I talked to the administrators. I pushed the little balls under my fingernails until it hurt. But now, writing lists I’d lose and never read, it was morning still and I’d ordered breakfast: I’d decided to eat one meal a day, and it felt like I’d set up a little industry. I was following a chain of names. Sometimes for minutes I forgot the end. All I could think was the next name, like the next move in chess.
From the phone on the wall by the bathroom, I called the detective. It had been a long time. I was calm with him. I wanted his help more than I still believed in it.
“Hi. I’ve got a lot more information. In 1973, he was teaching in Montana at Firth Adams College.”
“Yup.”
“And the last address they have for him is from 1976, in California. Now here’s the problem.”
“Yabanow, wait a minute. You’re going too fast. The last address they have for him was in California? Was that an address I didn’t have?”
“Who never had?”
“Did I ever have that address?”
“Jim, you never got past, you know, ’57.”
“I didn’t have that address. That what you’re saying?”
“Right.”
“Go ahead.”
“The problem is they won’t give it to me. Nor will they give me his social security number. They can’t. Legally. Because that’s personal information. They could if I had a subpoena.”
“Yup.”
“Is there any legal way to get a subpoena?”
“No, you have no court case.”
“Oh, it has to be a court case?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, that was my question.”
“No court case. No subpoena power.”
“Okay, so with confidential stuff like that there’s just no getting it?”
“Of course there is. All you gotta do is give it to me in writing and then I’ll see if I can get it for you.”
“Well, I was very honest with them, though. I went in and told them I was his daughter.”
“You went in where?” His voice wavered funny, as if he pulled the phone six inches away from his head and looked at it.
“I’m here, in Montana.”
“That was a big mistake.”
“Well, maybe it is.”
“Listen, I can tell ya the truth. It was a mistake. Not the way to do it. Not when you deal with them. I can do better from here on the phone. Gimme everything you got in writing and I’ll see if I can get it. It’s gonna be harder now. I may or may not be able to succeed, but send it over. And go home. You’re makin’ yourself crazy over this. You’re gettin’ hysterical.”
“She’s—the woman I talked to’s—gonna get me everything in the file that’s public information.”
“Awright. But she has his social security number?”
“Well, yeah, he worked here, she must. And she’s got to have insurance forms too. There’s also, he was also married here.”
“Now listen to me, hold on a minute, awright? What you gotta do is send me all that information. And then I’ll handle it from here. You understand what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Were any of those associations any help?” Once, he’d given me a list of American Arab associations. Those addresses came from a book he had, published in 1962.
“Unh-uh.”
“None?”
“I mean, I’ve written to ’em all.” This was simple. The second lie is always easier.
“Right. So get me all that information you got and then give me the names of the people that you spoke to. Because I’m gonna have to see if I can avoid ’em. If I can I probably can get that information. Now, I may not be able to. But with the social”—he sighed—“we certainly would be in better shape.”
“I just—Tell me one thing. I mean, I don’t understand why I couldn’t get some sort of legal authorization, this is my father we’re talking about.”
“At this point in life you should really know that. I’ll tell you why. A subpoena is issued by an attorney, awright? The attorney can issue the subpoena because he’s an officer of the court by virtue of having become an attorney.”
“Any attorney?”
“Any attorney. But listen to me. You’re not listening because you’re jumping way ahead and what you’re thinking right now I can tell you is dead wrong. He has to get what they call an index number. In other words he files a suit. Only when you have a lawsuit and you put down the index number and what judge it’s before, can you issue a subpoena.”
“Oh.”
“In other words, you can’t issue a subpoena just to get the information. You have no court case, you have no right.”
“Mmm.”
“My God, everyone’d be issuing subpoenas to everyone. We cannot issue you any subpoenas.”
“Even if—”
“No lawyer can issue you a subpoena.”
“Hm.”
“So you can forget about the subpoena. It’s totally out.”
An extremely heavy man pressed by me. He latched the bathroom door with a delicate metal hook. The diner walls were flimsy. I heard everything slowly as it happened.
“See, it’s a small school and I don’t think you’re going to be able to get this stuff because this woman was efficient. I mean, nice but efficient. If we could only get this damn address from ’76.”
“Well, we’re makin’ progress, Mayan. None of these things’re easy. It’s very few of them come easy at all. You’ve just got to be patie
nt and not get frustrated. You’ve got to use your head, be calm even though you’re emotionally tied into this thing.”
“I wonder if I keep calling this woman too.”
“If you keep calling her what?”
“It just seems to me eventually they’d give us this information. Maybe not.”
“Well, sometimes persistency pays off. If you do it the right way, and if you’ve got the right individual they bend a little. Did she give you your father’s date of birth?”
“We have that.”
“Yeah, but did she confirm it?”
“I didn’t ask her to.”
“See, that’s one thing. Give her that date of birth. Maybe we’re off or maybe he’s using a different date of birth. I’d verify the date of birth, ask her, would you please just verify this date of birth. And then ask her again if she could get the social, which I doubt, or the medical. Anything. And let me know.”
Just then the man emerged, buckling his belt again. He had snake-skin boots. He looked away from me too as if we’d had some intimacy.
“I didn’t even ask for a social. I knew that was pushing my luck. But I’ll see if I can get the medical.”
“Awright, and then as long as you can, push your luck.”
I went back and swiveled onto my stool at the counter where my coffee was cooling. I already knew I wouldn’t send him anything in writing. I just wouldn’t. Mail seemed too slow. For me now. For this time.
I’d vowed not to eat the night before and I hadn’t. But it was nine-fifteen and now I was starving. The waitress slapped down my order: blueberry pancakes, steaming, the plate running with butter.
AFTER BREAKFAST, I bought a comb. On the counter by the cash register, there was a cardboard display of plain black combs and a glass bowl of nail clippers for sale. And I went to the bathroom and combed. The diner mirror was broken off on one corner, but the glass was clear, too clear. Ridges stayed in the hair from my comb. I looked at myself and thought, no wonder. A large red pimple had grown on the tip of my nose. I thought of driving back to the hotel and grooming, taking the day, but then some determination welled in me again and I decided, no I’d just keep going, it shouldn’t matter what I looked like if I tried hard enough. I dragged across campus, my ankle hurt I didn’t know why and then I endured Denise in personnel again. She looked at me the worst way. But still I sensed something decent in her, duty-bound proper. If you demanded, she’d do it. Dryly, her fingers flipping over the keys of her computer board or through the pages of her file defiantly, with a taut flex in them. But she would set her chin and do her duty. She was a girl who had been toilet-trained on time and adeptly, a girl who wore clean underwear to bed, a girl who would never pee in a lake or a pool.
She told me, she just told me, the name of the insurance my father had: Teal County Medical. So he did have insurance. Probably if I ever found him, he’d be wearing sunglasses and carrying a closed umbrella. Then I tried to pull a social security number out of her. She actually checked in her manila file. “We don’t show one,” she said.
“But could they have paid him without it?”
That tricked her. “Probably not,” she said, head bent down so I could see the sheer discipline of her part, “that would be payroll anyway.”
Then she confirmed his date of birth. That was something anyway, not just another name to call. I felt it when Jim Wynne told me the first time and even more now. It was something true and absolute.
And I walked out feeling, enough. I wanted something before more work. I knew I should go to payroll next but I just ambled. It was a cold bright day and wind seemed to curve around every surface, making the tree trunks and buildings shine. Students wore bright parkas and heavy boots that clunked on the snow, now streaked old white, gray and brown.
Then I saw the bike for sale. A cardboard sign was masking-taped to the handlebars of a thick-wheeled three-speed with a square wire basket on the front. “$15 or best offer” was scrawled at an angle up to the right corner, and a dorm number. I asked a girl who stepped back and pointed and I found the dormitory and climbed up four flights of stairs to the room. A boy answered, which surprised me because it was a girl’s bike. I seemed to have roused him from sleep. He lifted the hem of his red shirt and rubbed his stomach, yawning. I knew, without touching anything, that his skin was warm.
I held out a ten and a five.
He squinted and his mouth flickered in an expression of incomplete understanding. “Ya wanna buy it?” he said. Now he was scratching that belly.
I nodded dumbly. I tried to smile.
“Well, hey. Cool,” he said. “Waita minute.” He took a pair of corduroy pants from the floor, and pulled a key from the pocket. “Here ya go.”
I ran down the stairs, dragging one hand on the mud-streaked wall. The key worked and I wound the coiled chain in the metal basket. I wasn’t really dressed for a bike; I had my old long coat that clung around my legs, I must have looked like a witch, tails flapping, but it was fun, speeding down the icy drive to the building that housed payroll, the hard chapping wind on my cheeks. I only rode a few minutes and then locked the bike in front of the building. I took care now because it was mine. Well at least I have that, I was thinking.
The payroll office was a dungeon in the back basement of the gym. A heavyish woman, wearing a tiny gold heart locket around her neck, stood behind the counter. We were separated by bars. She had short curled hair, tended hands and an eager expression about the lips. A cloud of smell came from her, deep irises.
“Hello, I just spoke to Rosabeth Larson. And I’m looking for, I don’t know if you’re going to have any information. I’m looking for someone who left in 1973.”
“Uh-ha.”
“Named Atassi, A-T-A-S-S-I. And the first name is John.”
“Uh-ha.”
“And I’m wondering if you have any records left.”
“Yes, he was a professor here for a short time.”
“He’s actually my father.”
“Oh.”
When people didn’t talk much, I talked more. “And I haven’t seen him since I was a very young girl, before, way before he taught here. He left our family in sort of an unfortunate way, but now my mother and I are looking for him.”
“Uh-ha. Well, we sure wouldn’t have any way of knowing where he’d be at this time.”
“No. That was a long time ago. I know.” Her features were sharp and well-proportioned but the face itself seemed too large. Her eyes and nose and mouth seemed pressed together in the middle. I noticed her blouse was a delicate material, ruffled on the front, a floral that must have taken ironing. She prepared this morning before work, for what? Just for this? I looked around the basement office, the light falling in a slant from above. Yes for this. For work. For everyday. For nothing. “Although actually Rosabeth Larson had an address from 1976 which is—”
“Oh.”
“Something.”
“It’s more recent than what we have.”
“We were going to ask you if you by any chance had a social security number.” It was just easier to say we.
“Well, she said I could verify it if you had it, but that uh, she’d rather I didn’t give that out.” She? Oh, they’d called. They were on to me. My fingers fiddled in the lining of my pockets. I felt fugitive, frayed. I looked sideways at the wall.
“Is there no way you can give it to me because I’m his daughter? I realize this—”
“Uh-ha. Well, I just talked to them over there and that’s what they said.” So that was it. Damn that clean Denise. Damn Rosabeth Larson.
“If I could get one?”
“I could verify it, uh-ha.”
“Hmm. How could I do that! Well, I don’t know what to say. I don’t have one.”
“Uh-ha.”
“So I guess I’ll have to just let that go.”
“If he … would he be teaching at another institution, I wonder?” She was just lightly talking at the tops of things.
“I don’t know, he’s a kind of mystery to us. He left in a sort of bad way, apparently. From Montana, I mean from you here. And we don’t know where he went next.”
“Uh-ha.”
“There’s some sense that he might be in California.”
“Oh, uh-ha.”
“Um, he’s Egyptian.” I was fidgeting there in my bulky frayed coat, my fingers small and close like gnats.
“Uh-ha.”
“And so he’s a naturalized citizen and we’ve been trying to call, well, we’ve been trying to call information in Egypt.”
“Oh. Uh-ha.”
“You know for directory assistance. But that is really hard. Because there’s about a million Atassis, such an unusual name here but there—”
“Well, I spose. Sure.”
Her face moved in familiar expressions. She was sympathetic the way Marion Werth got at the library counter with cranks. Always pleasant on the surface, but she was very far inside. I looked at this woman. She had on white-pink lipstick, her nails were filed in ovals, her plump fingers carried rings. She seemed such an unlikely guard for the magic number.
I kept trying, though. Something would open her.
“So, we’re not, we’re not having terribly good luck.” I laughed like a goon. “But we’ll keep trying.”
“Unless, I don’t spose the dean’s office would have anything on file?” She was like my grandmother without my grandmother’s sadness, the deep lines of her complexion smoothed.
“I’ll check. I don’t know this offhand but would my father’s social security number be connected in any way to my mother’s?” This was a last ditch fling.
