Paper Daughter

by Jeanette Ingold

  And since neither Mom nor I had wanted to move to New York, we hadn't asked for more. Though after he got killed, Mom, over breakfast one day, had suddenly exclaimed, "Who'd have thought Manhattan might be safer than Seattle?"

  I hadn't answered her then, but I did now, aloud, in the glue-smelling, paper-webbed, memory-tangled lonely mess of a garage. "No one. No one!" No one would have thought it, and what happened wasn't right, and I didn't know what to do with this clipping or with all the stuff that was still wet, or with the way I felt...

  How I wished I had someone to talk to and work with. A brother or a sister. Perhaps a big family. Aunts to chatter and keep everyone fed and uncles to string more drying wires and help with bundling cardboard for recycling.

  Or even a friend. If Bett and Aimee weren't fifty miles away in the San Juan Islands, I might have called them to come over. But they were.

  So I put the award banquet story safely back on the line, and then found and rearranged several items that were still damp.

  ***

  It was Thursday by the time all the things we'd taken up from Dad's office were completely dry. I was mentally dividing the garage into areas for a preliminary sort when Mom came out to tell me she was on her way to work.

  "I hate leaving you with all this," she said.

  "I've got a plan. And the work will keep my mind off starting at the Herald next week. I'm ready to admit I'm getting ner vous."

  "Not too late to change your mind. Whoever's running the intern program probably chose alternates."

  "No," I said. "I want to do it. I just want to do it well. If I don't, I'll embarrass myself, you, and the teachers who wrote me recommendations."

  "Maggie!" she exclaimed. Sudden, laughing exasperation made her sound like her old self. "You'll do fine! You're your father's daughter. You've got printer's ink in your veins!"

  I held my breath, waiting for the wipeout I was sure would follow when Mom's mirth collapsed atop memories. But this time it didn't. She gave me a hug. "You'll do yourself, me, and your teachers proud. Which reminds me. Did you call your father's prep school?"

  For a moment I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I remembered the letter saying he wasn't on its alumni list. Even though Dad hadn't kept up with associations there, Mom wanted the school to know he'd died.

  "Not yet," I said. "I'll do it today. I promise."

  ***

  Once Mom was gone, I began a rough triage, identifying papers as toss, keep, or decide later.

  At first I worked quickly, but pretty soon my scanning became reading. I stopped to study the draft of one of Dad's columns. His published articles had always been so smooth and seemed so effortless that the draft surprised me, with its arrows and inserted words and cross-outs over cross-outs.

  Then I began reading his reporter's notebooks, which I went through as I picked them up. Some were from twenty years earlier, others quite recent, and the images they brought to mind made me feel a bittersweet ache. And a swelling pride, too. This was the dad I knew, but more, also. Someone connected to the world in a thousand ways and able, through his writing, to let others know what that was like.

  Dad hadn't recorded just what he saw as he went after a story; he also got the sound and smell and feel, sometimes even the taste of it. Quoted words got a context and often a reminder of how they were said. "Shouted over the scream of machinery..." "Whispered, as her eyes searched the deserted street..."

  I smiled at the way, in between notes such as those, he'd jotted down personal reminders like "Pick up the turkey"—that would have been Thanksgiving two years past—and research questions: "Federal law in effect when? Any changes?"

  And he'd tracked ongoing projects: the effects of a factory closure, tourism trends, a business forecast. In a notebook so new the last pages were blank, he'd written, "Progress on family project, finally? Possible search will end right here! Give mail a week, then fly CA."

  It sounded like a story he'd worked on for a good while, but I didn't recall him mentioning it. Often, at dinner, he did talk about his work.

  I thought he must have received whatever he was looking for, since I was pretty sure he hadn't made any recent trips to California.

  I flipped to the next page, but the only thing on it was a note. "The trouble with small deceits is that the poet was right: they do become tangled webs. And you can't foresee who will become ensnared in them or who will be hurt if you tear back through to the truth."

  I felt guilty reading thoughts that Dad had obviously written only for himself. It was crossing a line of privacy I'd never have crossed when he was alive. But I told myself that maybe he'd have wanted me to read his notes now. They were probably the last things I'd ever learn directly from him. Things and ideas that maybe he'd intended to tell me about one day.

  Or explain. Obviously Dad was thinking about some lie someone had told when he wrote that last entry. I thought there was probably a story there I'd have enjoyed hearing.

  CHAPTER 3

  I didn't take a break till noon, when I put a frozen lunch in the microwave and set about keeping my promise to call Dad's school.

  Intending to get the number from the school's website, I turned on the computer Mom kept in the kitchen, and while it was starting up, I brought in the mail.

  A postcard from the national headquarters of Dad's college fraternity fell out. It was a form for reporting address changes, but someone had written on it, "No Steven Chen in our records."

  This was absurd, I thought. How could two places Dad had been a part of both have lost track of him?

  The microwave beeped that my lunch was done, but I ignored it and called the prep school instead. A recorded message said that the office was closed for summer maintenance, but in case of emergencies...

  So I called Columbia University and asked to be connected to Dad's fraternity house.

  "We have no listing for that," a campus operator told me.

  "But you must," I said. "My dad was a member."

  "Are you sure you have the fraternity name right? My own kid calls himself a Delt, when really the proper designation is—"

  "I think I do," I said, "but I could check. Is there someone who would look up my father's records for me?"

  She referred me to an online website where I meandered around, followed outside links, and never did learn anything. The only reason I gave it any time at all was that the fraternity mix-up, coming on top of the letter from the prep school, created a puzzle that nagged at me.

  Finally I dug through sympathy cards looking for one from a Bill Ames, who'd written that he was a college friend of Dad's and had seen the obituary. Using his return address to get a home phone number, I called and heard my call being forwarded to his cell.

  When he answered, I explained the trouble I was having connecting with Dad's old fraternity. "I thought perhaps you might have been in it with him."

  He didn't reply, so I said, "You did go to Columbia with my father?"

  "Certainly," he said. "Though after we got our degrees, I didn't stay on for graduate work the way he did, going into journalism."

  "But the fraternity?" I said.

  "We weren't in one. The two of us worked together on a cafeteria steam line."

  "Maybe you're thinking of another friend," I said. "I don't think Dad had a job while he was in college."

  "Sure he did. Work-study, like me. Plus, Steven held down outside jobs. He had to, being on his own."

  I disconnected, aware of a gnawing anxiousness, even though I knew Mr. Ames must have confused my dad with someone else.

  Dad's parents hadn't been rich, but they'd had enough money to put him through one of the priciest prep schools in the country and then through an Ivy League university.

  Dad hadn't been comfortable talking about how well off they'd been—probably, I'd always thought, because he didn't want me thinking money was what counted. But Mom had told me how his parents, who'd died while Dad was in college, had set aside enough for
his schooling and then left the rest to the natural history museum where they'd served as directors.

  She liked to tell that part because the same museum had once funded some of her own parents' research, and she always said, with a coincidence like that, how could she and Dad not have ended up together?

  So, no, there was no way my dad had had to work his way through school.

  I knew that, yet I made one more call.

  This time I telephoned the museum to ask about my grandparents. The man in charge of the museum's foundation was very nice on the phone. And very certain.

  "Yes, the Chens were active with the museum for many years," he told me. "But," he went on, "they died in the 1970s, quite elderly and without any children or grandchildren." He knew that positively.

  No children. No grandchildren. I thought of another possibility. "Perhaps there was some other couple by the name of Chen on your board of directors?"

  "Possibly, before my time," he said, but then, after checking, he told me, "No. I've looked all the way back to when the museum was built."

  I hung up, feeling as though I'd been yanked upside down and that everything that should be steady and familiar was now swinging by, blurry and weird.

  Arms crossed tightly, I fought for control. A turmoil of questions and answers raced across my mind.

  Why? Why would my father, who'd always said a person was only as good as his or her word, have lied about his parents and about how he'd been brought up?

  I couldn't come up with an explanation that would make his lie be all right. In fact, I couldn't think of one that I could even believe.

  He made up a story because he was ashamed of the truth? I couldn't imagine it.

  Because he wanted a background that would help him fit in with the business world he wrote about? That seemed even less like him.

  Again, I tried to tell myself I'd stumbled onto a trail of mistakes. The prep school, Columbia, Mr. Ames, the museum man—I wanted so much for them all to be wrong.

  Yet along with learning not to lie to others, I'd grown up being taught not to lie to myself. Dad had been particularly big on that.

  "Don't ever deny what you know," he once told me. He'd been talking about a business that had gone bankrupt because its owner had closed his eyes to problems he hadn't wanted to see. But Dad had made the point seem personal, a lesson for me. I shouldn't ever refuse to look at the truth.

  And eventually a truth that I couldn't ignore emerged from my circling thoughts. Dad had never adequately explained his decision to bring us to Seattle, and now I had a reason. The move made sense if it had nothing to do with coming here and everything to do with avoiding New York and the East Coast, where he'd be closer to a phony background. Where he'd be at more risk for his lies being discovered.

  I stayed by the phone a long time, thinking. I turned around and around the heirloom jade ring Dad had given me one Christmas, saying it was to remind me to be proud of who I was. Was it just a stage prop, bought from some jeweler who sold antique pieces?

  I didn't care what family Dad came from. And I cared even less whether he came from a ton of money or from no money at all.

  I just wanted him to have been honest about it.

  Then another idea occurred to me. Maybe Dad didn't know where he came from. Didn't know who he came from.

  That last morning, he told me I didn't have to decide, at sixteen years old, who I'd be the rest of my life.

  Is that what he'd done? At some point, did he pick who he'd be? Because he didn't know?

  I remembered the notebook entries I'd read just that morning, and I went out to the garage and read them again.

  "Progress on family project, finally? Possible search..."

  What if that didn't refer to a story Dad had been working on, but was about looking for the unknown persons who were his own family? What if he'd started a search to find out who he was, but had kept it to himself? Maybe he'd wanted to tell Mom and me, but hadn't known how.

  That would explain the next entry, about lies leading to tangled webs and hurting people. Because if what I'd learned from my phone calls was true—and if the truth was that the most basic stuff Mom and I had always believed was really false—

  I broke off, ensnared by my own web of illogic.

  I was holding myself so rigidly my stomach muscles hurt. I felt angry and mixed-up. Off kilter. Felt, most of all, betrayed.

  Nobody likes to be lied to, not by strangers trying to sell things or by casual friends making excuses for promises not kept. But lies like those are part of life. You guard against them, and if you get taken in anyway, the person you're most annoyed with is yourself.

  Which is different from when you're taken in by a lie told by somebody you trust one hundred percent.

  And it's especially different when that somebody is your father and the lie is so huge you can hardly comprehend the questions it raises.

  I huddled on the garage floor, arms around my legs, chin on my knees, not able to get past the two biggest ones.

  First: If Dad wasn't who he'd always said, then who was he?

  And second: Who did that make me?

  The harder I concentrated, the more blank my mind seemed to go. And then, somehow, the questions shifted just enough that I finally came up with sort of an answer. It didn't matter about Dad. I didn't need to be anyone other than who I'd always been.

  Really, nothing had changed except that I'd made a few phone calls and learned a few things I didn't want to know. Things I could choose to forget.

  I wouldn't even have to tell my mother. When she asked how my call to Dad's school had gone, I could tell her the school records were correct now, which would be the absolute truth.

  Qualms fluttered through me—an inkling that forgetting might not be that easy, a twinge of guilt that maybe I owed my father more.

  But I flooded out the qualms with a sudden, flat-out rage.

  It wasn't right for Dad to have built our family on a lie. It was selfish and mean, and I hated him for all the hurt I was feeling. And I wished he were there with me so I could tell him. So I could yell every mean thing I could think of and hurt him more than he'd hurt me.

  Well, he'd got one thing right, anyway. Telling me I didn't have to decide right now who I'd be for the rest of my life. That meant that I could decide, if I wanted to.

  I shoved the jade ring into a pocket of my jeans, and I ripped every page from the notebook. Then I tore the pages and even the notebook cover into shreds, which I buried deep in the trash.

  I'd made my decision. I would be just exactly who I'd always been.

  FAI-YI LI

  The old man waited at the door for his sister, listening to the sound of her walker on the pavement. "What took you so long?" he asked.

  "Lines at the stores," she said. "If you shopped, you would know."

  "Was someone just here? I heard a car."

  "No." She pushed by, threatening his balance. "Go sit. You are in my way."

  He opened the living-room blinds to let in the afternoon sun, although he knew she would soon close them. The brightness created orange-veined patterns on the insides of his eyelids, as jagged as the remembered pictures he often saw and as branched as the words that went with them.

  More and more often these days, he lived in those scenes.

  SEATTLE,1932

  "What is your name?"

  "Li Fai-yi," I answer.

  "We do not believe you."

  "Li Fai-yi." The name comes strangely to my tongue, stranger still to my mind. But I have to remember. That is who I must say I am.

  "And your sister's?"

  "Li Sucheng."

  Two men sit across a table from me. One asks questions in words I do not understand, and the other puts them into my language so that I will. He does not say why he sometimes turns the names around, Fai-yi Li, Sucheng Li, putting the family name last.

  "And your age?"

  "Fifteen. We are both fifteen. Twins."

  "And wh
y do you wish to be admitted to the United States?"

  "To be with our father, Li Dewei." I wonder if I should give other reasons also. To work. Togo to school. I cannot tell them, To keep Sucheng from being arrested.

  "You say he is your father. How do we know?"

  "There are papers. You have papers from him. Please look."

  The man in charge flicks through a file. His stomach growls, and he mutters to the other man, the bad-smelling one who translates. "We're going for lunch. Wait here, boy."

  So I wait alone in the small room, sitting straight-backed, elbows in, at the scarred white table. My own stomach growls, sounding loud over the muffled, crying-out, calling-sharp, despairing, ordering, submitting, many-languaged voices coming from the other side of the thin wall.

  I wonder if I will ever again know days when no one is a stranger, no word unknown, when the next moment is predictable and unthreatening. I know I must remain alert, but I am so tired from struggling to understand the men's questions.

  How long will they be gone? I should be remembering what I have said, so that I will say it exactly the same way again, but my mind separates from my will, roving across real pictures instead of the ones I have memorised.

  I see the village where my sister and I and our parents and grandparents were born. A place where one did not have to look very far back to find one life becoming another, or dream very far forward to find life stretching out that way. Only along the sides of a person's life were there fixed boundaries, and beyond them an unknown of half-believed tales.

  I think of how one night I sat apart, smelling the food my mother and sister were cooking, trying to understand the laughter of men talking about crops and weather and politics andpeople. A second cousin from the city told of planning to go to America, which he called the Gold Mountain. There, he said, there was so much wealth—gold for the picking up—that nothing else mattered.