The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  “No, no they’re all separate. Unless she mistakenly took his and used it.” Here she laughed in a can’t-we-wives-be-naughty way.

  “But she probably didn’t. She’s worked for years so I suppose she wouldn’t have.”

  “Uh-ha.”

  “And if I can find any trace of a social security number to verify?”

  “Surely.”

  “I’ll come back. What’s your name?”

  “Well, my name is Josephine Lockhardt and I am payroll assistant.”

  I WALKED ALONG HITTING WALLS. Brick walls stone walls plaster. So she had it. Clearly she had it. Josephine fucking Lockhardt with the heart locket who was payroll assistant could open the old manila file and see the typed numbers, nine between two dashes, that meant nothing to her but would change my life and she wouldn’t give them to me. I hated flowers. She was iron beneath those waves of ruffle. Hard ringing metal. I wanted to harm her. Really. And it was all her duty. Rules. She believed in them the way my grandmother did. As if they must have some reason, some higher good reason none of us could ever know in our earth-close life. Screw that. What could it possibly have been to her?

  I stopped at an outside pay phone.

  “It’s Teal County Medical Insurance,” I told Wynne. “That’s located in Eileen, Montana. And the date of birth is May 21, 1931. That’s what they had too so it must be right.”

  “That’s confirmed then. I thought that coulda been wrong to tell ya the truth. Now we’re going into a confirmed date of birth and we know his insurance carrier. We’re makin’ progress. You gotta remember, see you’re talking to me different now, you’re lightening up a little and that’s the way you gotta be. You can’t let them frustrate you.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re up to ’75, maybe ’76. That’s good. Here’s what I want ya to do,” he said. “Nothing. I don’t want you to do anything further. Ya hear? Just write, do me a favor, will ya? I want you to write a very, it doesn’t have to be any detailed thing, anything fancy, just write down what happened and the people you talked to and anything else so I have it in the file, awright?”

  “She wanted to give me the social security number, the woman in payroll, it’s just that they’d called before I got to her. From personnel.”

  “Awright, give me her name and I’ll bypass her. You just leave it to me. It can’t be done now, you’ve got to give it time. We’ll see with the insurance company, maybe.”

  “Any news from the passport guy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I forgot to tell you. The woman from Reno he was married to here had money. She might have owned a hotel or restaurant in Reno. The problem is we don’t know her last name.”

  “We’re gettin’ real close now.”

  “If we could get her name, I could probably call her kids.”

  “If she’s a woman who owned hotels, you understand, we can work with that in itself.”

  “One more thing though. The restaurant’s name was the Donner Lodge or something like that. And a guy here thought my father had worked there once. Now the question is, do you want to try and go the social security route with them?”

  “Here’s what you should do, see you’re the daughter and also a female voice sometimes is better.”

  “But the last time you told me doing it myself was a big mistake.”

  “Here’s what you do. Now. On this you’re going to be direct.” He thought acting could get him out of this. He was all contradiction and bluff. I already knew he was a charlatan. “Awright? Because this is different.”

  Why, I felt like saying.

  “You’re going to call up where he used to work. You’re going to explain to them exactly who you are. You’re gonna give them, you’re going to tell them you’re happy to give them your phone number, your address, all that. Say you’ve been searching for your dad, that you understand he had been looking for you. Understand what I’m saying? You don’t think he’d even know where to reach you. Now there you gotta lie a little. You’re a doctor, you’d been on a fellowship, whatever, you hadn’t even been in the country. He’d been looking for you maybe some years ago and you’re now trying, the last you heard he was here. And then put in some hearts and flowers. Very intense, you understand? Because, they just gotta have a social security number.”

  “Right.”

  “Do they know where he is now? As simple a question as that. Now remember one thing, the thing to do is, when you do these things, you’ve got to somehow get people to want to help you. That’s not an easy task. But somehow, through a voice or a tone or something, you’ve got to make them want to help you, you understand? Use some charm.”

  “Okay.” Charm. I smarted a moment when I put down the phone. I touched the side of my neck the receiver touched. I was getting a rash there. I must not have charm, I smiled a grim way, because I sure couldn’t get Wynne to want to help me much.

  I STOOD THERE at that outside pay phone, glad to be told what to do. Even though I had no faith left in the detective. He was just talking too, off the top of himself. I was pretty far gone. I dialed and dialed. I called the Donner Lodge four times before I got through to owners, who had never heard the name Atassi. They bought the place ten, twelve years ago from people they said were named Gilbert.

  I tried Gilbert. Maybe that was Uta. Information in Nevada gave a U.J. on Bradley Square in Sparks, another just U.

  “Hello, I’m looking for Uta Gilbert? Hello?”

  They hung up.

  The plain U got a recorded message: “Hey there, you’ve reached the Goodtime Country Dancers. If you’re trying to reach Linda or Ukiah, we can’t come to the phone right now …”

  So many different lives and I wasn’t having any of them. Square dancing. My hair was blowing in the wind, stiff from the cold. I was half frozen, attached to the metal phone, following my father’s bones. That was what I wanted from my youth: I wanted to bury him. And then go back to the colored circle by the mulberry bush, wet hands on both sides of mine, and join the game.

  I called J.D. Nash in Wisconsin and he told me some good news and some bad. He’d found a marriage of my father’s in Orange County, California, to a woman named Agnes Rilella, in 1965. But then he’d found their divorce in the same county, later that same year. I spent an hour and a half on the phone calling California information for Agnes Rilella, a name I liked. Nothing. And the absence of Rilellas from the face of the earth, as if marrying my father had kept her and all her relatives from ever listing their phone numbers again, made me almost believe in his power. But then there was Sahar Atassi, the twenty-seven-year-old engineer who married the much younger Miss Diane Thayer of Mountainview, three years ago. They might have had nothing to do with my father and they couldn’t be found either.

  I was so nervous and crazy I could hardly listen to Mai linn talk. I kept thinking of all the things I had to do. I heard a noise and then I saw it was my foot hitting the pole. Before we hung up there was the small clicking I’d come to associate with Mai linn’s absorption. “Mayan? I think you’re up to about twenty-eight hundred on the credit card.”

  “Don’t tell me anymore,” I said.

  I tried the State Liquor Authority in Nevada. Then California. That was an idea from the owners of the Donner Lodge. They had been nice. I knew now what the detective meant when he said we. He meant me. I’d do it. I was crazy enough to stand outside for three hours at one phone booth just dialing, not letting go. I tried Nevada, California, nine states in all. Just one more, I promised. Each time I thought of my phone bill. I had no idea, I knew I was probably into the thousands. That made me shudder on the left.

  There was a moment of hope in Oregon when a woman named June said, “I’ll check,” and I heard the whirring computer keys. But no go. Nothing in Oregon or anyplace.

  Finally I couldn’t dial. I stopped for a moment. The tip of my first finger hurt. I looked at the hand and it was bad. Blue-black and ballooned out in a blood blister. I put down the phone
gentle, into its holder. I felt my neck. I had a rash.

  Then I started again. I made twenty-eight calls in all and on the twenty-ninth, a recorded voice came on and said my card number was not valid. I did it again, then called the operator and she said there was no mistake the number I was telling her had been stopped. So my card had given out. They knew.

  I BIKED TO THE Social Science Department, my fingers off the handlebars, but it was already locked. I went back to try Dean Daniels once more.

  “Hiya,” Sandy said. Sandy was his secretary. She knew me. “Frank told me that he’s gone to Rotary and won’t be back until tomorrow, but he said that if you called or came by again there’s nothing that he could add to what President Fipps already talked to you about.”

  “Try again tomorrow,” I said, tapping my pockets with chapped hands.

  I wielded the bike in the thin mountain air, light on the handlebars, wobbly, thinking, actually the goddamn detective didn’t do a fucking thing. I was really a fool to believe what people say.

  It kept coming back at me like something bad, the dates, the calendar time. My father taught here in this bowl of mountains, he felt these cedars finger inside his chest, he politicked the department, he tied ties for faculty dinnering the years I went through high school. He wasn’t everywhere and nowhere. He was just here in Montana. It was as if I’d believed he truly vanished and no longer walked on the earth. That was where my feelings had started. This was entirely different. Now I felt duped. If he was only here, he could have sent for me, he could have been a typical, exasperated, disorganized divorced dad, hapless, producing felt-lined long boxes with pearls for my birthday or Christmas. I could have flown on planes, been met at the airport by him and Uta. I wouldn’t have liked Uta, I never would have, but she would have tried to be kind, tried more than he did. And my mother and I would have accepted. We would have been cooperative, if not buoyant. He could have called us too seldom on the telephone and we would have complained to our grandmother but never to him; and to every question he asked long distance, answered fine.

  In a jolt, I backbreaked for a deer, stopping the bike with dragged feet. It was beautiful, the ragged lope, stiff and unevenly weighted, and it left a trail of new footprints in the snow. I was almost to the parking lot, ringed with woods. I could have ended up at college here. Without knowing. I could have come as a student and he would have stood at the front of the room as my teacher. A podium and behind it, shuffling through notes, him. Dad. Dressed as a college professor. That seemed preposterous, incredible.

  Then my mother’s voice stamped through me, laughing: you would have never gone to Firth Adams College. And it was true. I wouldn’t have ended up here. I was always planning for somewhere better.

  STILL IN MY LONG COAT, I biked past the theater. I stopped and pushed the big doors back. They were there again, all of them, still the lush full world. Two girls in sheets and head wreaths walked near the lip of the stage. Behind them a brown rabbit streaked across.

  From a large old chandelier on the ceiling, ribbons of all colors trailed like a maypole. I just sat down, chin in hands, elbows on knees. Someone settled in next to me, I felt the knees of their jeans against mine.

  They picked up my hand that was stiff like a claw. They set it on their knee where a rip was so I felt the warm hard of skin. Knee. I still wasn’t sure if this was boy or girl. I chanced a look. Boy. Good.

  “Remember me?”

  No, I told him.

  “Remember heaven?” Just then a cymbal sounded somewhere and the shimmers hung in the air. “I’m the angel.”

  We were the same size. Our legs matched. Our shoulders leveled. The moon hung low like an ornament and the walls were painted an old orchard. This was almost romantic except for me. I was the same as before. My head itched. I was wrong all over. The shoelaces were unlaced and gray-wet trailing the ground. I had a scratch on one side of my ankle. A rash. I kept putting a finger there and then to my mouth tasting blood.

  I said all my things and he listened. I talked and talked for a long time like filling up a bucket with tiny things.

  “Mmhm,” he kept saying as I talked too much.

  Then he took my chin in his hand between two fingers and kissed me. I felt the rough of his cheeks, his lips fitting into mine. He slipped his tongue under my top lip crossing and recrossing the ridge there.

  I must have sputtered and choked. I ended up hugging my knees, head down away from him. “I’m dirty,” I said like it wasn’t bad but I couldn’t help it anymore.

  I got up then and ran. I swooned out in the air again, dizzy with high pleasure. He had been the apparition. I thought of the trapeze swinging, empty on an empty stage.

  I WENT BACK into personnel and started a polite conversation with Denise. But then pretty soon I was yelling. “It’s not my fault this is my father. This could’ve happened to you—you could have been born me. You were just lucky, don’t you see the difference? It’s just one number—”

  I was sobbing and yelling, pulling a piece of my hair out and an odd thing happened. I disappeared. I was truly invisible. The office took on an odd sound. A kind of intermediary quiet, like sand running. It was the sound of the world without me.

  A wall clock hummed its slow patience. On the other side of the counter someone plucked the keys of an adding machine and then there was the ticker-tape whir of the strip calculations.

  Denise stared down at the slow shuffle she was doing with the paper and cards. It was a day. Every person in the office was busy working slowly. I was not there. My spill of noise, my rash, people moved around me. Denise said a bright “Can I help you?” to a man at my left and they didn’t see me or hear me, none of them. I was not there.

  If I’d stayed a minute longer I might have never come out the same. That is the tearing, shrill way to madness.

  But somehow I found my face in water in a many-sinked bathroom, the cool tick of it, one line streaking down my neck, clavicle, then breast.

  Then outside, I was slower now, afraid. It was still daylight but I went back to the motel.

  WHEN I OPENED MY DOOR at the Holiday Inn, Jordan was sitting on the bed, a bag between his knees.

  He kept looking at me and looking. I remembered how I was and put my hand on my hair. There was nothing to do to help it anymore. I just stood there unevenly, hands by my sides. He was looking to see me really as I was and he was watching his love leave, like a person packing, it was gathering its things now and clamping the buckles and then with one long glance over the shoulder it was gone and he was only looking at me, raw, a girl he had slept with a couple times and come all this way for, to the far Northwest, because she was in some kind of crazy trouble that had nothing to do with him.

  “I brought donuts,” he said, holding up the bag. He said that with incredible sadness. I had told him about how nowhere but the West had decent donuts, how Stevie and I had become connoisseurs. Jordan remembered every little thing I said. This was a funeral for him. He lifted the lids off take-out coffees and extracted small white napkins from the bag. He looked pretty good even here. His shirt was wrinkleless and he wore a quilted orange down vest. His hiking boots were brown leather, worn in the right amount.

  I reached in the donut bag and didn’t even look. I guess I was hungry. He must have just gotten there. The bag was still warm and smelled like sugar. I pulled out a big one. “Nutmeg?”

  “Cardamom. You were right. This is the kind of town that would have great donuts,” he said. He and I lamented the lack of fine donuts in New York or California or anywhere we’d want to live. You had to be in Wisconsin, the Midwest, somewhere that didn’t get many kinds of lettuce.

  He lifted up my hand, very gently—more gently than he would’ve still in love with me, because then there was an element of rough fear—opening it on his palm. “You know I’m taking you home.”

  “I have a lot more to do here.”

  “Go look at yourself in the mirror.” His voice was hard.


  The donut was greasing my chin and nose tip and all around my mouth. “I wasn’t expecting guests,” I said, lifting the donut delicately like a wineglass. “Anyway, let me eat first.”

  “Eat. We have lots of time. And you need it. I got us two seats on a noon flight tomorrow.” He crossed his arms over his head and slowly reclined, as if he were at the end of a sit-up. He landed softly on the pillow. I kept eating. He’d bought all different kinds. This one was chocolate glazed. “There’s another coffee in the bag,” he said, “milk instead of cream.” Another thing he remembered.

  I just kept eating. It was all quiet. I heard myself chewing, the unevenness. Jordan’s eyes had closed and I was glad not to be watched while I ate. I ate the way a fox does. I held the food, tore at it, looking at nothing else, felt only the blood rising to my face. Then after the excitement of the first three, I looked around. He was a kind of man I couldn’t bear; he was always listening. He remembered me. I was conscious about my table manners. In a little while he got up fast and darting in a way that reminded me of a mosquito. “I’m running a bath for you,” he yelled over his shoulder. I was to the end of the bag anyway, the bottom now transparent with the gold shine of oiled wax paper. Walking away he had a swing to him. He walked like he knew he had a right to walk on the earth.

  I kept eating methodically. I was finishing what I’d started. I looked at the eclair while I ate it, appreciating the cool custard filling. I was trying to remember when I’d last eaten. Breakfast and then breakfast the day before.

  Then I gave in. I took clothes off, dropping them as I went across the floor, so by the time I met the steam of the bathroom, it was only a T-shirt. I stood in the tub water and he pulled it off as if I were a child.

  “Mayan, you’ve lost about fifteen pounds.”

  “Good.”

  He put his fingers around my wrist. “Not good. Your bones show through. You’re too thin, Mayan.”

  He bent over the bath, reaching the little plastic bottles the Holiday Inn provided.