The Lost Father

  In Emory’s room, amidst the clutter, both of us picking at food on the trays, we were used to each other. It was like setting out for a long walk, the same road every time, familiar gravel, the path winding to dirt under a lane of trees. The sun set at different times, the sky lifted and fell, weather changed. I took out the needle and vials for blood, the stethoscope, his chart. We knew each other now. I no longer felt frightened before I went in to see Emory that nothing would start, it was as if we both knew our time and meeting place by the rusty gate, we swung the heavy thing open and with our hands clumsy in our pockets we just went.

  I ate both our desserts. The trays were empty when I carried them out again. Then I ran to the fifth-floor bathroom. It was a room where only one light worked, I didn’t know how long the other’d been broken, a mirror hung over the old porcelain sink that had the bulbous lines and taperings of my grandmother’s kitchen mangle. I looked in the mirror. Oh. Mirrors always disappointed me in myself. Tonight, again, I wasn’t going to look very good. I didn’t have time to go home and try to change myself. I didn’t have the right things anyway. Just the one pair of golden shoes. I always had one element but that was never enough to do much.

  I used to think I’d always lose. Anywhere with other women. So I’d not try. That way it might seem like I didn’t care. And that, maybe, if I had tried, just maybe, I could have shined too.

  But in other people, in Emory, the thing I could love was only their effort, the visible hub of want. Those toothpick structures. The awkward, the failed, the overardent.

  Once in college, Stevie Howard and I went to dinner at the Moonie House. After supper, we sat in a room with folding chairs. Everybody there did something. Three girls with thin long hair played guitar and sang. Somebody read a poem. All the others told them how good they were. People clapped, whistled, honked. We decided on the walk home that was the worst way to control someone. Was to make them confident in virtues they didn’t have because then they always had to come back to you.

  I was sure—with looks—I’d be the fool.

  JIM WYNNE’S RESTAURANT felt right, high red leather booths stained with use, cracked so the cushion enclosed you when you sat down on it. The place smelled of oil. The menu, written in tiny fancy script, plotted on for two feet. I’d been on time, my hair fixed up the best it would, lipstick, mascara and eye shadow. A touch of perfume from a sampler. Once, Emily Briggs led Mai linn and me through a Chicago department store and we stopped at the ground floor counters and asked for samplers of their best perfume. Emily knew all this stuff from Briggs’s, the department store her family owned in Racine. Mai linn still hit Philadelphia department stores twice a year. “Student budget,” she said.

  He was still not there and it was nine-thirty. I looked at the name I’d written down on my hand and it was there, the same as on the menu. I had a premonition he wasn’t going to come. I always felt like that. And then he was slipping in the booth, no apology, saying, “That guy will give you one headache, ’sa maniac. Waiter, we’ve gotta order in a hurry, I need a drink, you want anything? I’ll have Scotch, better make it double, and a plate of your pasta, whad’ya have tonight?”

  “How about the Matriciana?”

  “Fine. Make it wet.”

  “I’ll have the same thing, please. And a vodka.”

  A little candle flame wavered on the table and the waiter produced bread and our drinks, and this was pretty much the way I’d imagined, dark, like a date. The liquor helped. It seemed easier to smile.

  “We made a lot a progress here,” he said, opening the briefcase on his lap and taking out a manila file. “There was a woman who really dug for us out there at Wisconsin, she was just great, she remembered your father and she really went way out, a woman called, what’s her name, a Dorothy Widmer.”

  I had to rummage in my backpack for a pen, thinking W-I-D-M-E-R. I wrote this name down on the scallop-edged paper place mat. I thought it might be important to me. Later.

  “Awright, there’s a solid record of him in Wisconsin. He was at the university, there in Madison, in the early fifties, first as a student, and then he taught. In December ’59, he got offers from BU and MIT and Michigan State. And he took the job at Michigan State. And we got a birthdate. May 21, 1931.”

  I wrote that down, all of it exactly. That was my money’s worth. May 21, 1931. A trinket. My father’s birthday.

  “Oh, his grade point average, by the way, was 3.9.” The detective’s voice swelled brass with the good news. Fluttering began in me, wings beating in a shoebox.

  So those were the glory days of my father’s life—a 3.9 average, job offers.

  “East Lansing was the training ground for Harvard, they used to say,” my mother repeated through my childhood. “Who used to say?” I wanted to know. “And who-oo-oo cares?” My cousin Ben would chorus with me. Benny had a family, he didn’t have to sift through sands to find respectability, to weigh one grain against another, the glass, the stone, the lime. My mother had always been a great believer in education. Now, she kept talking about Columbia Medical School as if it were some great national monument.

  “The training ground for Harvard,” I’d heard my mother say that, perfectly earnest, head held high, in front of a dozen Racine ladies at Emily’s yellow eighth-birthday lunch. I guess the Racine women were too polite to contradict. Or maybe they just didn’t know. “That’s what they all say,” she’d capped it, though no one had whispered one word of dissent. Then she sighed. My mother had, apparently, for a while those years, tried to rally. She’d sucked in her breath, stood straight, hair coiled on top of her head, the pretty wife and young mother. Waiting for her husband to return. These duties proved truly beyond her and like any of us when we are ill, they shined for her with a hard semiprecious metal brilliance, just because they eluded her honest grasp. For a woman capable of making a home, preparing the dinners, maintaining the constancy necessary for the life my mother imagined, the work of it may have become boring. But my mother was never steady enough to be bored. The same was true of me. “You never sit still,” my grandmother had said. I felt too, I don’t know, almost grateful. And gratitude made me restless.

  “Jim, I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You’ve found other people’s fathers, right? What happened to them after? Do you know any?”

  “Like I said before when you asked, what they do with it is their business. Sometimes I find out something, but just by chance, you see what I’m saying. There was one guy, kind of famous guy, worked in movies. Never called. He just waited for the report. I billed him monthly and his accountant paid, always on time and always by check, I remember. The guy had gold checks. And then I finally did find the father. Podiatrist. Lived somewhere in the suburbs. Outside Chicago. Then, my client wanted me to interview the neighbors, put together a kind of profile on the guy. I ran into him year or two later. He said he never went and met him. Didn’t want to anymore. His business. He paid the bills, it’s his business.”

  I nodded my head yes. That was right.

  He turned to the file. “And after the job at Michigan State, he went back to work in Egypt. And this Dorothy Widmer got a Christmas card from him there. She’s a saver. She went way back in the files and found it. So we have a return address.”

  This had the ping of a pinball hit. It was something.

  Dorothy Widmer received a Christmas card addressed to her at the Alumni Association from my father in Egypt where he was, apparently, working in a refinery. Those must have been optimistic times. Times for keeping up contacts, including a return address on the card’s upper left-hand corner. That was something I never received from my father. A return address. I don’t think I ever got a letter.

  Twenty-nine years later, Dorothy Widmer still had it. Who was this Dorothy Widmer? Who were these Dorothy Widmers, these Marion Werths, and would I rather be them, files fattened with stray Christmas cards from men you never saw again or a being like my father who
traveled, dark, fleet, singular. Later, I believed, trails of him would be picked up in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon. Other places he’d called from. But they would seem inadvertent, probably less optimistic. Already then, batting around the West on his small wings, my father had begun his fall.

  Just then a waiter in a maroon jacket wheeled a cart to our booth and served us with fancy old-fashioned silver implements. It was wet, good pasta.

  Jim Wynne twirled the noodles around his fork, then cut the stray ends with a knife. “Now I’ll tell you what I wantcha to do,” he said. “Listen to me. I want you”—and he said this word-for-word slow, as if he were giving out the instructions for an important mission—“I want you to write a letter to this address in Egypt. It’s the Refinery, in Luxor. And his home address when he applied to the university is listed as 34 Sharia Miramar. Now you write to them and you tell them who you are and that you’re his daughter and do they have any information as to where he is or as to who might know anything about him, you understand?”

  I wrote the address down. Besides these names and dates, I’d been doodling with the pen, so I’d moved the place mat when the food came. Practically the whole paper was full. “Yeah, I guess, but remember, everybody always said he was here.”

  “I think he’s in Egypt,” Jim Wynne said. “And I’ll tell you why. That’s what Dorothy Widmer thought, by the way, because after that postcard, everything on him stops. I’ve pulled credit, I’ve pulled DMV, I’ve pulled insurance and it all stops. And the postcard says he’s glad to be home.”

  Maybe I’ll just go there, I thought. I gulped a sip of vodka like water and felt the shock in my teeth. Maybe tonight I’d sleep with this man twice as old as I was and then I’d get on a plane and just go.

  “What kind of a refinery?”

  “Oil. And that’s what she thinks he did. Otherwise, she thinks he would have kept up with her and the Alumni Association. She woulda heard something.”

  Who cared what she thought? She thought if he didn’t keep up with his child he was going to keep up with the Alumni Association? It sounded too much like the detective’d had one conversation with this Dorothy Widmer and that was all.

  “We’re trying to track down the wife now. You know he got married?”

  He got married. That stopped me. I put the pen down on the place mat. Married. Oh, okay.

  “He got married. And her mother died.”

  That her mother died somehow made her blond. A blond child-faced woman with an upturned nose, proper, curly-haired, named Maryanne. The kind of girl who was pretty in a newly pulled way and whose liquid face would soon harden like candlewax. My breath tucked up under one rib bone, caught there. “Which time?”

  “Wha?”

  “Which wife?” I’d met one other. Uta. She was older.

  “I got her name here. Lemme see and she went over with him to Egypt. And her mother died. An Adele August of Rural Route #3, Guns Road—”

  “That’s my mother!” I said. Some lid snapped shut. Now I was mad. “And they went to Egypt and they came back! And you’re drawing all kinds of conclusions from someone who hasn’t seen him since 1959. He lived here all through the sixties. I know that. I saw him. You’ve managed to trace him to 1959! I saw him in 1970! I told you that. He lived in Pasadena. That’s something I’m sure of. You’re telling me stuff I already know. I don’t need you to tell me he went to Madison and married my mother. I know that.”

  “Listen, Mayan, I’m tellin’ you, after that everything stops.”

  “It’s a hard case. I said that. That’s why I need a detective. I paid you to figure out what happened after 1970. Before that I know. I was there. Remember?” I could flash out with lights and fire.

  “You’re telling me that I’ve wasted three long days of work?”

  “Yes!”

  “Listen, we can close this case. Don’t tell me that. I’m saying to you as an informed opinion that he’s in Egypt. Nothing’s coming up on him here.”

  A moment later, I thought, he is saying this because he means he could quit working and take my money, he’s already cashed the check, he knows I can’t stop him, I have no power, he’s used to this, his contracts, his forms, he prevented my recourse the moment I signed my name. He does this for money every day and knows the laws and how they’re worded and protects himself completely so that I am at his mercy and there is nothing a small person can do. I am so at his mercy that only my kindness would inspire him to work, my fucking womanly flirtation, submission and gratitude. That is a way I’d felt in the end all my life. My mother was right about the damn world. At first I would try the other, justice, but that ran out early. So I did what she would do. I put my chin in my hands and looked up at him. Smiled.

  “Nothing anywhere here’s coming up. Nothing at all. There’s no trace of the guy.” He shrugged. “Nada.”

  Fine. That didn’t work. I folded up the white place mat and put it in my pocket. I just walked out, to his saying, “Hey. Hey!” A waiter stopped, two silver spoons in the air. A couple guys at the bar stared. I felt my skirt touch my leg. Okay, maybe I was becoming that kind of woman after all. I liked my back. Bud Edison used to run the side of his hand over it and say, this is my favorite part of your body. Backs always seemed to me the material aspect of desire. At least I felt victorious, leaving him with the supper bill.

  Unfortunately for me, that walk-out satisfaction never lasted. I should have known.

  I’d never been able to leave. I tried.

  I’d walked away from boyfriends too but never really. With my mother, I pretended to run away. Then I always came back crying and shivering, a raw mess, too desperate for principles, only needing food and things—wanting my bed for sleep and to forget. I knew at the core that I was not the one who could leave and never come back. The other could do that. Not me. That was a right someone had taken away from me, just by doing it first.

  That night I walked. With a guy like this detective, he just didn’t care. He’d shrug and throw down his cigarette. That was all. Then he’d go back to his pasta. That was just how it was. I felt further away than ever from finding him. And that was almost fine. It was a cold moist night and there were a few dim stars. The buildings loomed tall and hard except for one thin-lit skyscraper that seemed diaphanous, filmy. It made me want to be a politician, run the world. Oh, I believed in power the way poor people do. My mother and I had been small people. We believed power worked, even to find the powerless. The powerful could locate the powerless, but not the other way around. The powerful could keep themselves invisible, if they chose, while the rest of us lived waiting to be conjured or not at somebody else’s will and time.

  When I got home, a guy was leaning against the wall in my lobby. The date. I’d forgotten to call him. Damn. I’d meant to. He was mad now, it was after ten o’clock.

  “What happened?” he said.

  I brushed my arm like I’d never be able to explain it’s so much. “You got me at a bad time,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t even know you, but I’m sorry, I should have called.”

  “Yeah. You should have.”

  “Listen, things happen in people’s lives, okay? So just forget about it.”

  “All right,” he said. He was carrying something like a briefcase and he sort of swung it as he headed out the door. He wasn’t bad-looking, I saw in that instant—the profile.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I touched his arm, the layers of cloth. “This sounds weird, but I haven’t seen my father since I was twelve and I’m looking for him. I hired a detective and the detective called tonight and I thought we were getting close but it turned out to be nothing. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh,” he said and his briefcase was just hanging and his face went soft. This guy is going to be easy, I was thinking. Then right away I wanted him to leave. He shrugged. “You want to get something to eat?”

  I knew I should but I didn’t want to then. I promised him later.

&
nbsp; I STILL THOUGHT of Bud Edison all the time. It was too long, I knew I shouldn’t have. But I probably remembered something about him once a day. There was always a man I was suffering over. I had an unrequited crush even when I had boyfriends. I needed one to think about to get to sleep at night. Sometimes I lost one and I had to start another before that night’s sleep. I was never without one. Not one day of my life. It may sound like something hurtful. And I suppose it was. But it also allowed the hope of perfection.

  THAT NIGHT, Aleya Azzam called. “Hi, I’m not sure who you are, but you’ve left a lot of messages on my machine.”

  I startled right up in bed. “Hi. Thanks for calling me back. I was looking for an Azzam who might be my uncle. And he used to work for the United Nations. Do you know him?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe you were his wife. But your name is Azzam?” I’d left maybe twenty or thirty messages on her machine.

  “Yes, Azzam.” Her voice built a little. She seemed eager too.

  “But you’re not Egyptian or anything?”

  “Yes, I am Egyptian.”

  There was something about the first yes. The luck of it—not a common name.

  “Do you know any Atassis?”

  “My family’s cousins are Atassis.”

  “I’m an Atassi. My father’s name is Mohammed Atassi. He’s from Alexandria. Do you know him?”

  We were both getting excited now. “Yes. I’m from Cairo, but some of my family is from Alexandria. They always say the Atassis and the Azzams are cousins. Who is this other Azzam?”

  “He used to work for the United Nations,” I said.

  “Yes, my father said there was an Azzam who worked for the United Nations.”

  “I’d love to meet you sometime, to talk about Egypt. I’m planning a trip there in the spring.”

  “Yes. I would too. Are you here for long?”