The Lost Father

  “He could have found me.”

  “Why didn’t he, you think?”

  He shrugged. “Salimiddin thinks of Salimiddin.”

  “So then what?”

  “Well, then I guess I got married to your mom and the rest you know. You were conceived, Mayan, in Lebanon. In Ehamendown. A tiny summer resort in the mountains. And about a month later when she found out she was pregnant she raised hell. She really didn’t want to have a baby. She was turned off on sex, period. She was afraid she was gonna get another baby. She didn’t want a large family.

  “But when you arrived, she was happy and then she went crazy. The world didn’t matter anymore. Nothing else mattered. But there was no discussion of having any more children.”

  “But you went back to Egypt then with my mom?” I knew that already. My mother had talked about Egypt as “over there,” and she retained a relish for certain elements of the diet. In Wisconsin, she drove twenty miles to a woman from Armenia who cultured her own yogurt.

  “I was going to make my career there. I should have. I should have really made my life there, with the connections I had, from a big family, you know, and with my education. If I’d have stayed I’d be running the country now. I really could have, with my connections.”

  “Why didn’t you then?”

  “Well, your mother didn’t like it.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why really, she just wouldn’t have it. And you know, my father was still alive then and she was always a gorgeous girl and my father just adored her and he set us up in a brand-new apartment and he told me, whatever she desires she should have. But still she wasn’t happy. My cousin Mahmoud had married a German wife and she was a very elegant lady, very refined. And I asked her if she wouldn’t go over and talk to Adele every afternoon and she did and they became friends but that still didn’t do it. And then too she didn’t learn the language. When people talk and you don’t know what they’re saying, you know, you think they’re talking about you. I remember one day, we were with my sisters and they were all talking and giggling and Adele said to me, they’re talking about me. I said, no they’re not, of course not, Adele, and she said, yes they are, they’re laughing at me. And then, right there, she said to me, you’re lying, and she slapped me. For your wife to slap you in front of your three sisters, they think you’re not a man. You know that’s the way they think there. So we left. But I’ll tell you, Mayan, the day after we left, they sent a car for me, they went to where we were living, my brother said, and sent a car to take me to Cairo and make me the Minister of Finance. That’s the way they did it. They just sent a car. I heard that and it was like many airplanes going up and down inside myself. It would have been a different life for me, ha? Yah. But I had a wife here in Wisconsin and she was about to have a baby.”

  We are all endlessly telling the explanations of why we are not more. At a certain age, this begins. And for my mother and my father, the explanation was still, after all these years, the other’s name.

  “I should have stayed,” he said. “Yah.”

  I asked him if he’d ever given a talk at Saint Norbert’s, the college in Bay City. I knew he had. I’d heard about that talk all my life.

  “Oh, sure. And Mayan, they asked me for three lectures and I gave the first one and they said after that, that’s it, there wouldn’t be any more. They thought I was a Marxist. Well, that’s a Jesuit college. Can you imagine? Me a Marxist?”

  I shook my head sadly. No, I really couldn’t.

  “I said, I am from an aristocratic family in Egypt. I am a capitalist by nature. I was ten years ahead of my time. I only gave one of the three lectures. And I’m telling you, Mayan, it was my finest hour.”

  It must have been, I was thinking.

  “I said, we have to see Red China. I was twenty years ahead of my time. I was advocating the recognition of Red China.”

  “But was that after Michigan? Because I remember you living with us at my grandmother’s, but you said you left in Michigan.”

  “Well later on I came back to visit you and I don’t know, I guess we tried it again. We had some chemistry, your mom and I. But she was crazy.”

  “So after you and my mom broke up, why didn’t you go back and stay in Egypt?”

  “I don’t know really. I should have probably. But I would have had to go into the army. I would’ve been an officer because I had an advanced degree. But the old families had a hard time in the army when the socialists came in. One of the Higazi boys got badly beaten up. They say, you’re a Higazi, well I’ll show you.”

  Then Uta was on the staircase in a child’s nightgown, holding the banister, looking only at him. “Honey, don’t be much longer because I can’t sleep without you.” She hung there waiting for an answer.

  “Uta darling, go to sleep now, I am having a talk with my daughter. I’ll be up later but go to sleep.”

  “I’ll try again, but I don’t think I can sleep without you there.”

  It was hard not to blame her for everything. But she was old. And when we’d gone to Disneyland, years ago, she had been kind. She’d tried, more than he did, to make us seem like a father and daughter.

  “Take the dog, Uta. And try. Go on and try.”

  She thumped back up.

  He looked at where she was a moment, poured us each another cup of coffee. “I haven’t touched her for twenty years,” he said. “You know you asked me at dinner about Rilella and I couldn’t say because Uta doesn’t know. But that was me. I was married to her for two weeks. She was a dealer in Las Vegas and it turned out she was married to somebody else already.” He shrugged.

  The long story seemed to be gambling, but there wasn’t much he would tell. “It really ruined my life in a lot of ways, Mayan. Someday I’d like to go to a psychiatrist and find out what made me do it. I quit playing two years ago because I looked and saw I was getting old and I could end up with nothing. Alone, you know. I had to start preparing a little for the future. I haven’t been back once, to Reno or any of those places.”

  “What was your game?” I said.

  “Twenty-one,” he answered instantly, just like that. “The most I won was twenty thousand dollars. That was in London. The most I lost, I think, was ten. In the game of twenty-one, there are two problems,” he said. He peered at me with the most severity I’d seen.

  “One is greed. The other is if I am on a winning streak, I should bet big and know when to take a chance.”

  “Don’t the big casinos like in Atlantic City and Vegas cheat?” I said.

  “They don’t have to cheat, honey.”

  They don’t have to cheat. That’s what some people say about God. That He doesn’t have to intervene at all, that all the cards work out, like a long game of solitaire with a full deck.

  “The majority of people who gamble, gamble small. And they all lose. And even the big winners. I was in Monte Carlo once and I saw one of the young Saudi princes win fifty thousand dollars. And the owner of the casino sent a case of the best champagne to his room on ice. So I said to the owner, the guy just cleaned you out and you’re sending him champagne? And he said, oh, it’ll be back, that money’s just out with him on loan. On a high-interest loan.”

  “You should run a casino, you know about it all.” I spent my life cheerleading behind these two small adults, You could do this, Mom, sure you could, why don’t you, you still have time. They had both failed themselves. Neither could ever make the world work the way I already had and I gave it all up to find him.

  “Yah, but it takes a lot of money. I might like to teach again someday. That I may just look into one of these days. Some small college. I really threw away my career, Mayan, because I had a position I really loved I was chairman of the department at Firth Adams College, in Montana. And my career was just going up and up. They gave me tenure, they made me chairman, I’d probably be University president by now if I’d stayed. And I really threw it away. I took a group to the Middle East one Christmas, I’m telling you now, the worst
thing I ever did, and I went to a casino one night and I don’t know I kept going and going, I had lost some of the group’s money so I had to keep playing to get it back. I never did and I was so ashamed I left. So Uta came and of course we paid all the money back. See that’s one reason I could never leave her. She is a good person, Mayan, and she helped me when I needed help for all those years. And now that she’s dependent on me, I could never leave her.”

  I was nodding off, so we went to the garage and got into the car. He had a banana-yellow Cadillac, about seven years old. “One thing that has been very fortunate for me in the last six years is I have met a lovely woman in Sacramento, Elizabeth. I’d like you to meet her, Mayan. We see each other, oh, twice a week, sometimes more. And that has given me the real connection that I never have with Uta. The chemistry, you know, the inner … we just click.”

  “Does she mind you still being married?”

  “Well, she’s young. She’s just a little older than you are. She wants to do lot of things before she gets married. She wants to travel, lot of things, before she ties herself down.”

  “How old is Uta?”

  “She is eighty.”

  He parked in front of my hotel and we just sat there for a moment. I looked up. There were amazing stars. I turned and asked, a whim, “Do you practice Islam at all?”

  “No, not really. Not when I’m here. I like to think I believe in God and so on.”

  We said goodnight and I went to my room, locked the door. I slept like a stone.

  THE NEXT MORNING I didn’t want to be there anymore. I wanted to be done and go home. I had the shrill headache you get from eating too much chocolate and you know you won’t be okay again until the next day. It was half past eight and already hot. I heard a wind outside, moving eucalyptus buttons and hard unfertilized dates on the pavement. At nine o’clock exactly the phone rang and it was him.

  “You won’t believe it, honey. Didn’t I tell you the cousins would drive up? Well they’re all here and my sister Amina and my niece from Egypt. They rented a Pontiac and drove all night. So come on over as soon as you can, Mayan, and we’ll go out for brunch.”

  It seemed so much was going on and nothing was about what I’d waited for him for. Now I couldn’t say anymore what that was.

  EMILY CALLED.

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “There aren’t that many motels in Modesto. I’m calling from Briggs’s. The buyers asked the people they knew there and they all said it was either the Hyatt or something called the East West. I knew you wouldn’t be at the Hyatt.”

  “You’re in Racine?”

  “Yeah, I came home to see about the tent and all.”

  “Well, I’ll be there. I’m getting out of here tonight.”

  “You don’t have to. I mean it’s off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I just decided, I’m pretty young and there’s a lot of things I should do. No big deal.”

  “You called off the wedding?”

  “Mmhm.”

  “But how’s Tad taking it?”

  “You know, like you’d expect. Not good.”

  “What about all the people who are coming?”

  “Well, my father had the direct mail department go through the list and call them all. Except you. I’m calling you.”

  “God, Emily, what happened?”

  “Not any one thing. I don’t know. I was walking along the river. I’d had lunch on the top of the store with Dad and so we were walking, feeding the pigeons with a roll from lunch. I was saying how I was glad I was his daughter because he and I were really more the same than Mom in a lot of ways. And he looked at me and said, no, we really weren’t because Mom picked him and he said I never would have fallen in love with him. At first I said, of course I would’ve and he just said, not like he was mad or anything or even hurt, he just said, no, he knew me, and I wouldn’t have. Do you think I would have?”

  The guys Emily fell for were always the same. They were handsome, careless boys, all with a kind of smile that granted favors and dispensations.

  “Well, maybe not,” I said.

  “I don’t know, I just decided you were the smart one after all this time. All these parties I’ve gone to and all I’ve done for men these years, and what do I have for it?”

  “What do I have? Less than nothing.”

  “But you found your father.”

  “Yeah. I found him. I did.”

  I FASTENED ON MY WATCH as I was leaving the motel. I checked out. I could drive back to San Francisco, I promised myself, in eight hours. This I just had to get through. And why? Because they expected it. He did.

  When I walked into their duplex it was full of people, and I let myself stand still and answer questions. It was easy once I decided to give up all control.

  There were five Egyptian young men, all more foreign-looking than my father, none of whom spoke much English. Then there was their mother, a heavy, graceful woman in several sweaters, and their sister, who was eighteen, ample, pretty in a way with many moles, and neither of them spoke any English.

  And there was Diane Thayer. The day was worth it because of Diane. She was large the way some people are large, only on top, as if the bottom half of her body had been squeezed. Her hair was long, a dry limp mouse color, and her face was patched with pimples. She sure wasn’t the horse girl I’d imagined.

  “Youse people cut it out,” she said. “Talk in English.”

  All day there was a lot of food. First we drove to the Hyatt Hotel and ate from an enormous buffet. A man stood in a little enclave of heated aluminum plates making omelettes to order. There were piles of fruit, bowls of salads, trays of eggs Benedict, hams, bacon, prosciutto. There were two whole long tables of desserts. There was pasta. There were cooked entrees, chickens, hot vegetables. I stuffed myself even though I couldn’t taste anything. My throat hurt and I kept eating. He sat in the middle of the long table, with me on his left, Uta on his right. He kept filling my champagne. He talked raucously in Arabic so Uta had to say, “John remember, Mayan can’t understand you when you’re speaking in Arabic either.”

  “I keep remembering you as Momo,” I said. That was what my mother called him.

  “His name is John now,” Uta said.

  “That’s my name too,” he said.

  “Honey, don’t you remember? We agreed. His name here in this country is John. We call him John.”

  Fuzil, the lightest of my cousins, kept staring at me. Now he asked me, “We thought you were a TV broadcaster. Or radio. There was supposed to be an Atassi doing that in Ohio, I think.”

  “But she isn’t Atassi, is she?” Uta said. “Do you go by the name of—”

  “No. Mayan Stevenson.”

  He put his head down. No one said anything. That passed.

  “But you are part of the Atassi clan now,” Sahar said with flourish, “and you will attend our next Atassi summit!”

  There were loud jokes and toasts. More champagne. The aged, large Egyptian mother sat, lifting embroidery from her lap and working serenely, not understanding a word of the English looping past and participating as seldomly in the Arabic, only once in a while reaching a hand over the top of her daughter’s glass. Her eyes had a calm, straight quality of timelessness, as if she would sit in her sweaters and embroider wherever she was, wherever her energetic children carried her and put her, but in her vision there would always be the shimmering deep patch of field I’d seen in her backyard in Egypt.

  They were spirited boys, lovely, full of an immigrant’s uproar and victory, a buoyant charm. Nora, the eighteen-year-old girl, kept smiling generously. But the truth was, I didn’t care anymore. Now that I’d found him, I couldn’t have cared less about Egyptian cousins.

  It was an indolent day. It had to do I think with the weather. After brunch we went to a place that had steps going down to the river. The boys and my father helped the women down, as they stepped cautiously in their frag
ile shoes. We sat at tables by the river and then there was more champagne. I lapsed in boredom and felt the sun on my skin, I turned my face towards the easy pleasures. The day after getting what you wanted. The vague twitter of birds shimmering aloft in color.

  “Here you go,” my father said, handing me a tinfoil and cellophane bouquet of four grocery store roses. We were standing by my car saying good-bye. I had both his phone numbers now.

  I had recognized him and he did not know me, his only child.

  13

  BUT THAT DAY—that—didn’t last.

  It hangs there, discreet, a gem crystal, but it’s one day in with all the other days of my life.

  Over time he was still a man who had left his family and not tried to find us. I learned that people cannot be more or better than their lives. For one day they can. But everyday matters more. Love is only as good as days.

  I think of my grandmother now more than I think of him. “She saved you from a lot worse,” Timothy said once.

  At first it seemed amazing. So he was a restaurant maitre d’ living in Modesto. All the time he was just there. A month or so after I came back, Emily was over once and the phone rang and I picked it up and said, “Oh, hi Dad.” And just Emily’s face.

  He was only a man with his own troubles who didn’t manage to keep track of his wife and child. After all those years, I was wrong about him. He was only a man.

  LATER, IN LITTLE BITS, I tried to get from him what I needed.

  You know what I want to ask you sometime and I’m afraid to ask you this because I think you’ll think I’m mad which I’m not—but sometime you have to like, write me a letter or tell me or something why you … got out of touch with me.

  Yah.

  ’Cause I think it’s a—I don’t mean to make you feel badly, I really don’t, just—I think it causes me problems in my life.

  Okay.

  Not with you, really, but with men almost—

  Sure, sure.

  I kind of want to know why just so I can know—

  Sure. I will.