Father's Day

by Simon Van Booy

  “How long?”

  “About fourteen hours, with a layover in California.”

  “That’s awesome,” Jason said. “Maybe I’ll take my daughter there someday.”

  Jason tried to remember all the things he’d done in the summer with Harvey when she was little, like staying up to watch Alfred Hitchcock movies and going to the gardens at Westbury Mansion, and pretending to be millionaires.

  On cold weekend mornings they’d loll on the couch like zoo animals, staring at the Weather Channel, wandering what earthquakes felt like or how quickly they could get to the roof to escape a tsunami or a blizzard. Once when they were playing, News 12 Long Island announced a tornado watch, and they gave themselves forty minutes to get the Polly Pockets, Duncan, Mr. & Mrs., Pink Bunny Baby, Tuesday, and Megatronus to safety by strapping them to a convoy of Hess trucks, which they rolled through the darkening house. When it was time to make lunch, Jason heated some beans on the stove, and they watched storm coverage on TV.

  Aside from a few trips to Montauk and Pennsylvania, Harvey had never been on a real vacation. She had never flown on an airplane, nor stayed in a hotel that offered room service or had people carry her bags.

  But on the Cross Island Ferry, when wind pushed them across the deck, how they laughed . . . and on the children’s motorcycle carousel at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, Harvey’s hands on the pink grips, her babyface chiseled with seriousness . . . then her voice on the long car ride home, as she talked herself to sleep . . .

  WHEN JASON GOT to the art school, a security guard asked if he had an appointment. Jason showed him a photocopy of Harvey’s application and the letter they had received from the school, inviting them to visit. The guard wanted to know what was in the bag and why his daughter was not there with him.

  Jason unzipped the knapsack and showed the guard one of Harvey’s best drawings. “It’s supposed to be album art,” he said. “Like something you’d see on a CD cover. That’s me right there,” he said, pointing to a man in sunglasses riding a motorcycle. “And that’s my daughter in the background.”

  “It does look like you,” the guard said. “Even got the little tattoo right there on the neck.”

  “And check this out,” Jason said as he unwrapped the fuel tank from a ragged beach towel. “My daughter actually airbrushed this. I told Professor William Reiner I’d drop it off because I was worried about it getting lost in the mail.”

  The guard said that Professor Reiner’s office was on the fifth floor, all the way down the hall to the left.

  When the elevator doors opened, there was a giant flat-screen television mounted to a back wall, tuned to cartoons. A few students stood watching. Jason watched too.

  “I love this next bit,” a girl said. “When the monster becomes just this giant mouth? Oh my God, it’s so cool.”

  Jason imagined Harvey standing next to the girl, watching the cartoon with her friends, then going out for pizza. She’d need a new backpack for her artwork and probably some new pens and art supplies . . .

  Jason tried to remember what the guard had said as he walked down a long hallway with framed posters of cartoons he recognized from TV. He wondered if students from the college had worked on them. What a dream it would be for Harvey to draw something that people saw on TV.

  After studying the posters and imagining his daughter’s name written at the bottom with the other credits, he found the office. On the wall outside was a sign that read:

  W. REINER

  ROOM 105

  CARTOONING/ILLUSTRATION/ANIMATION

  DEPT. CHAIR

  Jason knocked lightly and waited. Then he knocked again, but nothing happened. A couple of students walked past, gesticulating and talking in loud voices. Jason felt suddenly vain and conspicuous, realizing it might be hours before the professor came back. He might even be off for the day, or the week, or the semester.

  He decided to take another look at the posters and try to figure out what he was going to do. For the next hour, he studied first-year watercolor drawings that were pinned up on a yellow bulletin board. The best ones were pictures featuring animals wearing clothes, ballet dancers, a naked cannibal, a girl in a park crying, and a zombie eating someone’s organ.

  Farther down the corridor was a cabinet of clay figures wearing clothes cut from real fabrics.

  Then a voice took him by surprise. “They’re good, aren’t they?”

  Jason swiftly turned, knocking the man’s leg with his bag.

  “The guard downstairs said there was a parent waiting to see me. Might that be you?”

  Jason nodded, then followed the man back to his office. “It’s basically that my daughter really wants to come to the school,” he said, his hands shaking. “The thing is, she’s really talented, and—”

  Professor Reiner offered him a seat. “Have you taken the tour?”

  “Oh yeah, weeks and weeks ago. And we applied already, but it turns out she didn’t get in.” Jason foraged around in his bag for the letter.

  Professor Reiner seemed annoyed. “We only have a certain number of seats we’re allowed to put in the classroom. It’s not really my decision.”

  “But your name is on the letter,” Jason said, unfolding it.

  “That’s right, but it’s the admission committee that makes the decisions in these cases. My name is just a formality.”

  “So that’s not your signature?”

  “Again, it’s really not my decision,” the professor said, but Jason had already unwrapped the airbrushed fuel tank from the towel and plonked it on his desk.

  The professor put on his glasses. “This is very good,” he said. “Do you ride a motorcycle, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Not anymore,” Jason said, and raised the hem of his pants to reveal the hard white plastic of his prosthetic limb.

  “You’re joking,” the professor said, and quickly lifted the hem of his own pants, revealing the hard gray plastic of an almost identical prosthetic device.

  ON THE TRAIN back to Long Island, Jason read over everything he’d jotted down in the meeting. Then he went over in his mind how he was going to tell Harvey.

  Bursting in through the front door, he tripped over one of Harvey’s shoes.

  “Sorry, Dad!” Harvey said. “I thought you were working a double?”

  “Forget about that!”

  “Why aren’t you mad? And why are you all dressed up?”

  “Come with me . . .” he said. “Because you’re going to freak out.”

  Harvey had cooked spaghetti, and there was a lot left over. Jason dragged some into his mouth with a fork. Then he sat next to his daughter on the couch and went over each detail. After he’d told her everything, Harvey got up to make coffee. Jason couldn’t understand why she wasn’t more excited.

  “The way you told the story,” she said, “I thought you were going to say I’d been accepted!”

  “It’s not as easy as that. I found out the process is very fair, Harvey.”

  “I’m just not good enough. That’s what it is.”

  “Jesus Christ, Harvey—it was your SAT scores. I saw it right there on the frickin’ computer screen with my own eyes. All you need to do is go to Nassau Community for a semester or two. I can pay for it. Take some art classes, retake the goddamn SAT, get your GPA up, and apply again. We’ve got someone on the inside now. This is big. We’ve got a contact.”

  “I just feel like I’ve failed. Other kids don’t have to do all this, why do I?”

  “Quit worrying about other people, for Chrissakes, Harvey.”

  “And we still have to pay for it, Dad, remember? Even if I do get accepted.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jason said. “We have a plan—we got something to work with. You’re being like one of those dementors in Harry Potter, just sucking out all the positive energy.”

  “Did he say I would definitely get in if I applied again? Did he say that?”

  Jason shook his head passionately. “He can’t say stu
ff like that, Harv. There’s an application committee. It’s the pen pushers you gotta convince.”

  “But I told everyone at school I was going there in the fall, and now I’m not.”

  “You’ll get there, Harvey,” Jason insisted. “Just retake the SAT and do what the professor says.”

  “Community college is just so depressing. I said I’d never go.”

  “Let’s at least visit.”

  “I’d rather work at Dairy Barn my whole life.”

  But a few days later, Jason came home and found Harvey on the couch filling out Nassau Community College admission forms.

  When he stood over her grinning, she gave a long sigh and closed her eyes. “Don’t say it, Dad, just don’t say a word.”

  XLV

  “YOU GOT IN eventually, Harvey, and look at you now. Plus, those two years at Nassau Community gave me a chance to save more money.”

  Harvey asked the bartender to bring their check.

  “Thanks for always being on my side, Dad. Not a lot of kids can say that.”

  The boy and his father from Winnipeg had left their Paris guidebook on the bar. On the cover was a photo of the Mona Lisa.

  Harvey pointed to it. “That’s the most famous painting in the world.”

  “I saw it in a movie once. Someone stole it, but then a bunch of crazy nuns got it back.”

  Harvey checked the time on her phone. “Do you want to go see it?”

  “The Mona Lisa? Sure.”

  “We’ve got an hour before they close.”

  Jason held up his injured thumb. “Don’t you owe me something from the gift shop first?”

  THE TAXI DRIVER was from Poland and spoke to them in English. He said it was a good time to visit the museum, because everyone would be leaving. He had never seen it himself, but his wife had taken her sister when she came to stay from Warsaw after her divorce.

  The driver stopped where the tour buses pull in. “This is the best entrance to use,” he said. “But be quick, because I’m not allowed to stop here.”

  Harvey led her father into the glass pyramid, and they descended to an elegant spread of gift shops and cafés.

  After buying tickets from a machine, a young security guard pointed them up a staircase against the flow of people.

  As they moved quickly arm in arm through the galleries, Harvey realized that she’d never been in a museum with her father. “What do you think so far, Dad?”

  Jason said he was thinking about where each painting had come from. Had it always been famous? Or did it once hang in some old English pub? Or in someone’s house?

  Harvey said she always thought about who made the painting, and what the weather was like, and when they stopped to eat lunch, and how, once it was finished, the artist had to carry it wrapped in cloth, through busy streets, hoping to get a good price.

  “You think about that because you’re an artist,” her father said, stopping to glance at a small Italian panel with bold colors. “Jeez, Harvey, what’s with all the naked babies?”

  “Um, it’s Jesus, Dad.”

  “Yeah, but how do they know what he looked like?”

  Harvey couldn’t say. “Don’t all babies look the same?”

  Frosted-glass ceiling panels spread light evenly through the galleries, and there were stone seats in some of the windows where you could sit and watch people outside.

  “Smells like incense in here,” Jason said. “Smells like a church.”

  When they passed paintings of Jesus as a man, Jason wanted to stop. “Crazy how they hung him up like that,” he said. “With nails through his hands and feet.”

  Harvey agreed. “I’ve always thought how strange it was that Christians use the way Jesus was killed as the symbol of their faith.”

  “Yeah, right.” Her father nodded. “Like wearing a gun around your neck if he’d got shot.”

  “I don’t think the Romans had guns, Dad.”

  “I know that, Harvey, I’m not stupid. I’m just sayin’.”

  Harvey said that one of the earliest memories of her first father was seeing him put a golden cross on a woman’s neck at his jewelry store. “The cross came out on a cushion,” she said. “A little red cushion, the kind used to carry precious things.”

  “It was probably Christmastime,” she said. “But I was standing at the back of the shop with my mother.”

  THE Mona Lisa was in a glass case with its own security guard, a middle-aged woman with a blue blazer and a walkie-talkie. Tour guides held colored flags in the air so people knew where to congregate.

  Harvey and Jason had a good view, though people kept pushing in front with their phones out.

  “I must be stupid after all,” Jason said. “But it doesn’t look any better to me than the other pictures in here.”

  Then there was a surge of people, and they moved with the current to another gallery, where there were much larger paintings and a circular bench with purple velvet for people to sit on.

  “So, Dad. Now you can say you’ve seen the Mona Lisa.”

  “To be honest, Harv, I can only relate to this stuff if it reminds me of something from real life, like that painting of dead fish right there,” he said, pointing to a shadowy canvas. “It’s me and Vincent after a day on the boats.”

  “I think that picture means that simple things can be beautiful too,” Harvey said, grabbing on to his arm. “Like a father and daughter washing the car or eating taco pie.”

  “Or changing the oil,” Jason added. “Now that you’ve moved out and don’t help me no more, I take it to Jiffy Lube.”

  “I was gonna work there, remember?”

  “That’s below you now, Harv.”

  “Nothing’s below me, Dad. Don’t ever think that.”

  As they were leaving the museum, they passed the security guard who had given them directions. He was about Harvey’s age.

  “So, you see it, monsieur? The Mona Lisa?”

  Harvey said she couldn’t believe how crowded it was, even at closing. The guard told them it was the most popular picture in the collection, then asked if Jason had a favorite painting. As he thought about it, Harvey noticed the guard looking at the tattoo on Jason’s neck as though it were something in a gallery.

  “Yeah, I do got a favorite,” Jason said, finally

  “Let me guess,” the guard said. “Mona Lisa?”

  “No,” Jason told him. “There was a little girl with short hair sitting in a park someplace, real happy—just smiling away on a tree stump or something.”

  The guard was impressed. “Sounds like Raeburn. That’s one of our finest pieces.”

  “Well, I had that for real, buddy,” Jason told the guard, pointing to Harvey. “Before she grew up, of course.”

  “You’ve still got it,” Harvey said, poking him in the ribs. “I’m still here.”

  WHEN THEY WERE outside, Jason noticed there were places to sit and said he needed to rest his leg before going any farther. Harvey followed people across the cobblestone square with her eyes, until they rounded a corner or were too small to see.

  A crowd of people near the glass pyramid was taking group photos. Other people pushed bicycles, or smoked, or held hands, or read things on their phones. Children ran ahead, then stood panting in one place until their parents caught up.

  Harvey reached deep into her purse and pulled out the envelope she’d been saving until his last day in Paris. “I just can’t wait anymore,” she said, holding it out for Jason. “I need you to know.”

  “What is this?

  “Please, Dad, just take it.”

  “Should I open it?”

  “Yes, Dad. Look at what’s inside.”

  Jason removed the documents and glanced at the first page. “Is this the adoption paperwork we did with Wanda?”

  “No,” Harvey said. “It’s adoption paperwork from when I was born.”

  Jason looked at her, confused.

  “I know everything,” she said. “Everything you’ve been to
o afraid to tell me for the last twenty years.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Harvey felt her life coming apart. “Please stop pretending,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend anymore.”

  But Jason just sat there with the grainy photocopies, trying to understand what she was telling him. When the papers almost blew away, Harvey grabbed them and stuffed everything back into her purse. The makeup around her eyes had smudged. “I was only a week old when your brother and sister-in-law adopted me,” she said.

  Jason’s eyes fell upon the little stones under his feet.

  “I’m not your niece after all,” she said. “We don’t even have the same blood.”

  The tip of the envelope was showing from her purse. Jason looked at it. Wanted to pull it out. Rip it to pieces. It startled him that words could have so much power over their lives.

  “Are you angry?” Harvey said, wiping a sleeve across her eyes. “Are you mad that I found it out? This secret you kept for so long?”

  But Jason just sat there, unable to speak.

  “What I really want to know,” Harvey said, her voice faltering, “what I really want to ask you, is if it ever crossed your mind to refuse. Wanda must have told you at the beginning that I was adopted. Why didn’t you say no?”

  When he didn’t answer, Harvey tugged on the sleeve of his motorcycle jacket. “Dad?” she said. “Dad?”

  He looked at her. At the woman she had become.

  “You don’t have to protect me from the truth anymore,” she said.

  “What truth?”

  “That we’re not even related!”

  Jason closed his eyes then spoke slowly and quietly. “Remember the time you woke up screaming one night, Harvey? And I carried you out to the driveway in your Hello Kitty pajamas, and we went all the way to the city, then drove around Times Square and opened the sunroof so the car could fill up with light? Do you remember that?”

  “You let me sit in the front seat.”

  “That’s truth, Harvey, not what’s written on a piece of paper or in blood too small to see—but the memory of how it felt being together.”

  WHEN THE CROWDS leaving the museum had thinned to only a few, random bodies, Harvey said she was ready to go on, and they took a path through the gardens of the Tuileries, toward the Métro at Place de la Concorde.