The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  “I’ll go through the phone book and run over during my lunch-times and meet each one.” I heard her excitement building the way it had in Racine.

  THE ONCE I did lock my apartment I goddamn lost the keys. As soon as I searched my pack and knew they weren’t there, I figured out what had happened. I’d dropped them in. The only place they could have gone was an open manila envelope I’d had with papers I’d given to Emory. They were articles I’d Xeroxed for him on a drug and a used copy of Van Gogh’s letters. My key ring had probably dropped in too.

  It was late at night and so I just slid into a taxi. I rode all the way to Brooklyn, where Emory had moved. I knew the general area. But then when we got there, it was dark and scarce and not that many lights were on in the buildings. I told the driver everything and then I had to get out to look up the address. I stopped in a lit tiny supermarket, old, like from years ago, with sawdust on the floor and a Nehi Orange sign on the blank coolers, and asked to use the telephone book.

  Guire, I remembered the landlord’s name was. Guire.

  There was nothing listed.

  Then I wanted to stop at the phone booths and call information for a new listing.

  I stopped at one and it was broken. I put a quarter in and nothing. I should have left but I didn’t. I put another quarter in and then another. I stumbled back to the taxi driver and told him. The car moved silently in the dark to the next standing phone. I moved to go out, then I had to admit it. I had no quarter. He gave me one. This time the machine took my money again and flickered alive, but then nothing.

  I had to go back and tell him that. He asked me, I had no idea where I was going?

  It occurred to me then the man must think I’m crazy. Not all the telephones in Brooklyn could be broken.

  We drifted in the dark streets around the school where Emory was supposed to work. But there were buildings and buildings and it could have been any. The driver had turned the meter off. I asked him to wait there and I would run into the school.

  It was March and it was wet outside more than cold and the dry grass blew a little on the lawn. There was an old-fashioned door, painted brown, with nickel fittings and a push bar. The school was low and vast and covered with blond bricks. I rattled the door. It was locked. I ran on the grass, sinking in my heels past windows figured with dark cut-outs and a fringe of plants and jars on the wide sills. There was a central door leading off a sidewalk that went to a tall flagpole. No one had taken the American flag down that night and it ripped and seared in the wind. I knocked on the door and I heard chains rattling and echoing. Still, I didn’t see a light anywhere.

  I kept on and finally I thought I heard footsteps. I quieted and waited them. Yes. It was something. I heard them behind the door, shuffling. Finally, a working of metal and chain and the door opened just a wedge inch and I saw eyes.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I’m looking for Emory Sparn?”

  The eyes registered nothing. Then the hand on the door moved and he showed himself. A small man with a huge plastic garbage barrel on wheels, the broom attached.

  “Do you know him? The night janitor?”

  The man made an expression, a shaking of his whole body, from the shoulders up, and his face and big ears jiggled and I knew he could not hear or did not understand or would not talk, he was through now, he pushed the door back shut and began to maneuver his cart around and I heard a sound issuing from him, a slight wheeze leaving like the stream of air from an open balloon, and I crossed the lawn, feeling the wet on the tops of my feet and slid back in the taxi and told him I gave up and we’d go back home.

  I’d just call a locksmith. We rode slowly over the Brooklyn Bridge and I asked him about himself. He’d turned off the meter a long time ago. My mother had always made me know, when people do things for you, you owe it to them to at least ask about their life and to listen.

  I asked him where he was from. He was foreign. He had some accent.

  And he was from Jordan, he said. His whole family was still there. His wife, his four children. He had a young boy, thirteen months old. The rest were older, teenagers. So what was he doing here? I asked. He didn’t tell me exactly. He said he was a doctor and a scholar. A scholar of what? I said. And he told me Islam. I told him my father was from Egypt and he was a Moslem too.

  And what about you? What are you? he asked. Now he was looking back at me over the seat, peering.

  “I’m nothing,” I said. “Not really.”

  “Well you should read for yourself and decide. You should read the Koran and read the Bible and read the Torah. Read yourself and decide.”

  “My mother is just,” I said, “you know, American.”

  He started to lecture me. I believed the guy was a scholar. He had an educated way about him.

  “How often do you get back?” I said.

  He paused before he answered. “Every three or four weeks,” he said.

  He said he was writing something, too. A small pamphlet. A book. He said his brother was the head of the Kuwait Shipping Company. He seemed to want me to get something from what he was saying.

  Finally we returned where he’d found me to the front of where I lived and I gave him all the money I had. It was nineteen dollars, not enough.

  “What is your name?” I said. “I’ll write it down and watch for your book.” I looked before he answered to where they had his name and his picture under plastic on the glove compartment.

  “Forget about that,” he said, “forget the name. Remember my face,” and he held it for a moment, forward off his neck like a pert sunflower, in a strict expression as he would pose it perhaps for a newspaper photographer. “Remember this face. Someday you will know who I am.”

  THE WIND BRITTLED COLD when I stepped out. Ohmygod, I was thinking, he thinks he’s the next Kahlil Gibran, but he wasn’t really that way. I pulled my collar up and stood a moment, watching the car lights bob away in the dark. I still had so much to do. I had to call a locksmith and listen while they put me on hold and told me their minimum nighttime scandal rates. I had to wait on the bench in the lobby until they finally came and then plead with them to please take my check.

  But I was excited again. He was maybe the truth. He could be someone important in the world and hidden. Remember my face, forget the name.

  He was a terrorist, I decided. Maybe my father was too.

  MY LAST DEAD END was more than a voice on a phone or paper records. Ali. Farouk Atassi’s brother was finally home from Ohio.

  It was Wednesday and I was all dressed up. My suit was delivered back perfect from Emily’s dry cleaner. Putting my jacket on, I winced: I still hadn’t talked to my mother. I hadn’t gone to see her since her cancer. Now I didn’t know when I would. I had no more money. I kept pushing her name down, not thinking of her. She could wait until after this was done. I buttoned the jacket, fitted the collar down. That morning, I’d received a letter with many stamps of animals, from Ramadan. He’d written “I love you” in big childish letters. There was more I couldn’t understand.

  Ali and I had a plan for dinner. His directions to his house turned out to be exactly correct except in miniature. His two miles went on forty minutes through the worst part of Brooklyn. Finally though, I walked up from the subway into innocent Queens.

  He opened the door, thin-faced, and we climbed shag stairs to his apartment. He looked young, too thin, he still had pimples. He was nerdy, not like my father. Not like Ramadan. Not the Omar Sharif type, more like the foreign student in weird clothes, who you didn’t know what nationality he was only different. The apartment seemed absolutely standard, a TV running on without sound. He offered me Turkish coffee and while he moved in the kitchen, making it, I touched the springy prongs of a brass tree on the table next to me.

  Ali’s English was halting, but under that lay a supple fluency. He told me about the hospital where he worked and showed me the pile of manila envelopes, all applications for a sub-specialty residency in pulmonary.

&nb
sp; He really got going when I asked him about his visit to Ohio. It turned out he’d gone to see his fiancee. In 1986, in America, he was having an arranged engagement. But it turned out the marriage was off. He worked his hands together like old women in the Midwest used to on the laps of their aprons. “The Koran says, you marry for your family, love will come later. It will be hard for a Westerner to understand our ways. And you. Your father married Americans. But see, you. You haven’t seen your father. You’re looking for him. In a good Muslim family, this would never happen.”

  “A good anything family.”

  “But your father fell away from the religion. He married an American and—” He shrugged. “To us, family is the most important thing.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you want her to be pretty?”

  “Looks are not the most important thing to me.”

  “What about this girl in Ohio? What does she look like?”

  “She is average. Not what you say gorgeous. Just average.”

  “How did you find her?”

  “My family heard about her family and that she was a doctor and a good family, so my mother called them up.”

  “And then what?”

  “They said, okay, we can have a meeting, she wasn’t engaged or anything. So we went, my mother and father and brother, and visited Ohio.”

  “And?”

  “What do you mean ‘and’?”

  “Then what happened.”

  “Well, we continued. I called her on the telephone and we talked and I visited twice. This was my second visit. But we learned we would not be able to get along, so we had to break it off.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a question of values. I told you, it will be hard for a Westerner to understand.”

  “Oh, Ali. Try me.”

  “Well, in our religion what the parents say goes. So we talked about what would happen if there were disagreement between my mother and my wife. And she wants her life partner to be with her, she wants what she says to go. And I would have to go with my mother. So, it is not possible.”

  “The old mother-in-law problem. Listen, Ali, tell me, if there were five young girls, all from good families, and your mother approved of all five. Say one is prettiest and you just have the most chemistry with her, wouldn’t you want her?”

  “Yes, sure, of course, if there are five, you pick the one with the most. But there are not five. Young women are hard to find here.”

  It was late and I was beginning to give up on dinner. I was hungry but I still had the long subway ride home. I thought of what I had back in my refrigerator. I could get beans and rice at Tacita de Oro. I was trying to plan my meals now. I’d gained eight pounds. Ali moved in the kitchen, fixing another round of Turkish coffee.

  “Ali,” I called, “you know I think there’s another cousin of ours in New York who’s an engineer. Thirty years old. Aleya Azzam is her name.” I didn’t say that she didn’t have time for me.

  “Is she chemical engineering?”

  “No, civil. Bridges and stuff.” An Egyptian woman my age, not pregnant, hovering over a hinged-part model of a bridge. She’d become a figure for me. Her bridge would be so different from bridges Emory made with toothpicks and glue, little bits of broken glass and string, whatever he could find. Aleya’s bridge would be built with money, connecting somewhere to somewhere else. Cars would run on it.

  This time when he brought in the tiny coffee cups, very proper, on a tray, he also carried a red satin box of chocolates. “From my mother when she was here,” he said. I took a couple out on a napkin to be polite. When he returned the tray to the kitchen, I snuck the chocolates into the bottom of my backpack so I wouldn’t have to eat them. I didn’t like to eat junk.

  “She’s very spunky,” I called out.

  “Oh, I should have to meet her.”

  “I mean, you can’t marry her, Ali, she’s your cousin. But I think you’d like her.”

  He blushed. “I didn’t mean to marry her, I just meant—”

  I waved him away. “I know.”

  Then we started looking at his family pictures from Oakland. Farouk’s wife, the young woman I talked to on the phone, wore full veil. All the women did, and not the stylish veils. They looked ageless, sexless. No wonder looks weren’t the most important thing.

  I complimented him though on how nice they all seemed. I tried to see myself in these people’s snapshots and I just couldn’t. I pulled back my bangs from my forehead, which was what people always did, to show how Middle Eastern I looked. “Do you think I look Egyptian?”

  “No,” Ali said.

  “Oh,” I said. I’d always heard that I had an Egyptian face. “This part here.” I’d seen it in Egypt. Hundreds of faces pear-shaped like mine, flat cheekbones, something oriental.

  “Yes, but you’re” here he relied on his hands to take in all of me, “your way of dress, everything, you are American. If you walked down the street in Cairo, people would look.”

  I smiled. They had. I remembered the neighbor’s kids staring at me.

  “Our girls are raised differently. They don’t have boyfriends and so much experience as Westerners have. Have you had—” Here again he relied on his hands.

  This was the first time I had ever been asked about my virginity by a stranger.

  And so what did I do? I lied. “Well, I haven’t had boyfriends, no. My career, it’s very hard to get into medical school here. All my twenties, I’ve just worked and worked.”

  This pleased him. He gave me a look I can only describe as being like a slanted ray of light emanating from a dark bucket.

  “Why did you say, about Azzam, that I could not marry her because she is a cousin?”

  Oh, so that was it. “Because we don’t do that here, blood relatives.”

  “In our religion, many people marry their cousins. Perfectly fine.”

  “What about genetic problems? Hapsburgs and all that. Chins.”

  “I am a doctor and I tell you, it’s perfectly fine.”

  I didn’t make a big deal out of it that I was a medical student too. And anyway, right then, I wasn’t. It was time for me to go. I stood up, rubbing my skirt front. “So you don’t know anything more about my father, like where he is or anything?”

  “We only saw him that once with another cousin, Kareem, and then Kareem went back to Germany. But your father was running a big restaurant. I don’t think he had such a good job. He fell away from the religion.” Ali made an expression like a shrug with his mouth. “He married an American wife.”

  “Two,” I said.

  “His job, it was not such a good job. And he left your mother.” He looked as if, what more was there to say.

  “He’s still my father,” I said.

  “Yes. But you see, in our religion, we don’t live that way.”

  “In mine either,” I said. Not that I had one, exactly.

  I rifled quickly through his manila envelopes of pulmonary applications. I nixed Kansas, told him he’d hate Alabama, and pulled Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Baltimore to the top.

  “He’s probably somewhere in California,” he said.

  I pulled Ramadan’s letter out of my backpack. “Could you translate this?” I said.

  He read a little and looked at me strangely, in a slant again. “You were in Egypt?”

  I nodded.

  He put the letter down. “Lower class. Uneducated. Your taxi driver fell in love with you.” He laughed. “He wants to come over here and start a life, he says. Study. It’s nothing. Throw it away. You’re not in his class. You are like Princess Diana to him.”

  It was not like that. I had seen the house. I had to ask him for the letter back. He walked me to the subway station and waited until the train came. I knew he was already eyeing me to marry. I slipped into the car, waving—at least I didn’t have to worry about him trying to kiss.

  MARION WERTH CALLED ME THE NEXT NIGHT, saying, “Well, I think I found an agent for you. His name is Tom Cars
on and he used to be in the military and then with the FBI. I called seven or eight of his references and they all said they had good luck with him. I’ll tell you what, see if you like this idea, I thought I’d work on it with the agent. And I thought if I learned from this and we found him, then after, we’d hire the same person and I’d help to find Callie’s mother.”

  I decided then and there to send her the eight hundred dollars I’d borrowed to pay Jim Wynne, wrapped in tin foil.

  J.D. Nash called me an hour later and told me there was no listing in the death index.

  “So he’s alive.”

  “Most likely,” J.D. Nash said. “Most likely he is.”

  I started to go seriously crazy. Now I believed I would find him, and soon. I couldn’t stay still. I didn’t want to be inside. I just walked around on the street. I went into Tacita de Oro and slid onto a stool. I ordered one cafe con leche and drank it hot, fast, scalding.

  Now, I decided, writing down my resolves on the napkin, I had to fire Wynne. There was more than one kind of man in the world. And I knew Marion. I trusted her. I understood her methods. They could be explained. I’d stopped trusting people who claimed to know more than they could tell me. In what I didn’t understand being truer than what you could lay out on a table and see plain. Maybe I’d stopped believing in the invisible, even to find him.

  From the pay phone outside Tacita de Oro, I dialed Jim Wynne’s number. Then I hung up. This would be hard. But I made myself do it again. “Hi. It’s me. Listen, I decided I need a detective in California.”

  “Awright,” he said and hung up.

  That was all it meant to him. I put down the phone and started walking. I didn’t want to go home yet. It was spring already, almost warm. Now I began to doubt whether Wynne had done anything he said he had. If he’d really done a DMV check, why didn’t he come up with the older Atassis in Oakland? Farouk must have had a license. Could he have lied about everything?

  There was something shoddy about him always. His mystery was all there was to him. “I’m gonna find him. I’m getting close, I know I am.” Yeah, right. He talked that way before he cashed my check. All confidence and then it’s, oh yeah, you, what’s new? He was what they meant with the old name, Confidence Man.