Drifting House (8 page)

“Just like a woman,” he said.

She was probably looking for a piano somewhere in the hotel. You couldn’t really blame ­her—the room was filled with the past, and Mother’s ghost seemed everywhere. It was too much, even for me.

“I can’t compete with a dead person.” New Mother slapped at her palm. Within minutes of coming home she had begun listing her grievances.

“Be quiet, woman.”

My father shoved the piano bench at her. When it hit the side of her knee, she fell.

He said, “You’ve humiliated me enough.”

“Let’s get some rest,” I said.

She rose shaking, her bad leg floundering behind her. She took the picture of my mother off the wall and held it like a shield.

“That’s not for you to touch,” I said. I grabbed for it, but she hugged it to her chest.

My father punched the piano keys, all dissonant notes.

“Getting you to listen is like reading the Bible to a cow,” he said.

“A new start’s overdue for everyone.”

“It’s been a year, only one year, since your best friend died.”

“I’m a woman. A woman.”

“You told her you wanted marriage as life insurance, nothing
more from me. Put the picture where it belongs, you ­middle-aged virgin.”

She began to cry. I stood between my father and her, wanting to walk out, wanting to be anywhere but here, but her fear kept me suspended. I knew that fear well.

“I’ll break the picture.” She held it high in the air. My mother, still young, still healthy, gazed hopefully out of the frame. “I swear I’ll break it.”

“She pitied you.” His voice thrummed with pleasure.

New Mother hurled the picture across the room.

The frame crashed to the floor, and glass struck out everywhere. With the last shards still tinkling, I scrambled to my knees and started picking up torn pieces of the picture. I didn’t care if I was a boy; there was a piece of my mother’s arm in my right hand, a shred of her nose in my left, and I was crying for my mother.

My father seized New Mother by her hair and hauled her to the floor.

Still, she didn’t beg to be forgiven. Instead she said, “No one knows who you are, but God knows!”

I was still angry and didn’t step between them when he dragged her out the door.

My mother’s image was too broken up. There was nothing left of her now. She was gone. What was left in the house was the meager life that the years had given her, the smell of a man who had terrified her into becoming invisible. There were my sisters who had married men they knew they could dominate if needed, and
me, unable to speak to people because anything that felt true about me was a secret.

Then I left the house.

I ran until I caught sight of them, and followed them from a ways back, calling to my father. But near the Han River walkway, I lost the two in the fog. I checked the parking lot, my hands feeling out before me. The rain swallowed the silence. The pleasure boat was docked, the paddleboats empty. One minute the rain thinned, then a sheet of rain fell so thick it erased my hands.

It must have been ten yards ahead on the riverside walk. I was straining to see when I spotted my father thrusting New Mother into the river water. Closer, enormous ­bubbles—her ragged ­breathing—rose up from the water. When he yanked her back up, New Mother’s breasts sagged out of her unknotted
choguri,
the skirt of her
hanbok
stuck to her heavy thighs. Her moan was like the sound of whales spuming. When he clawed off her hands, her body keeled over as he released her into the water.

I shouted, “I’ll get the police! I will!”

He thrust her in and out. There was no struggle now, no breath of resistance, nothing in that body except for her small exhausted sounds.

I scrambled down the embankment to the river’s edge. I was nearly on top of them, but he didn’t stop. Only then I locked him by his arms and hauled him off her.

He looked at me, his eyes black with anger. He said, “Go home,
jashik.
There’s no happiness here.”

New Mother’s flattened curls shrouded her face. She crouched on the cement, her breathing uneven.

I said, “Stop it, please. God is everywhere….”

He looked crazed, sad. He gripped himself, trying to contain himself. But then he was on me. His breath was hard on my cheek as he locked me from behind by my arms.

“Decades my junior and you think you have rights? You think we’re American?”

His teeth scraped against my ear.

“You’re no
baekin
from America with white skin. You look like me.”

I laughed, convinced there was nothing of my father in me.

“On your knees,” he said. “And I want real sorrow in that apology. Say it.”

New Mother said, “He’s your boy.” She flinched with fear at her own words.

“You.” He pointed through the fog to the ghostly cars. “Go away, woman. Leave my family alone.”

His eyes bore into her.

I told her, “Go! This isn’t about you.”

Finally she began walking backward, away from us, her eyes on him the entire time. “I’m getting help, don’t worry!” She kept screaming this until she was no longer there.

He squatted, his shoulders like a
ssireum
wrestler’s, his legs spidery. “I’ll break your legs if you don’t get down on them yourself.”

“Is this the only way, Abeoji, hurting people?”

“Who are you, telling your father what he is and what he isn’t? You
­mot-nan gaesaekki
!”

His voice rammed into me, he swore he would teach me.

His fist struck me in the stomach; his leg reared back. I heard a ­snap—like ice cracking in ­spring—as I fell. When the foot kicked out again, I balled up, my arms around my skull, and
waited for the blows from my father, the man I should love. I tried to imagine myself somewhere else, someone else, but I only saw myself on the cold pavement. I was young, a stranger in my own country, again my father’s easy victim.

His foot sailed out again; I did the unforgivable. That foot, my father’s own foot, I caught with one hand. Then I hit him.

He lay on the pavement. His lips were parted as if he were thirsty. The rain beat down on his face, his nose bled, and his forehead swelled a dull purple. He closed his mouth, opened it. He was trying to say something.

“Jingyu, I don’t know ­why—this ­anger—” He looked up. “Jingyu, don’t cry. Please.”

He kissed my head, my chest. His hands were wet, rubbery, as he caressed my hand. I saw he didn’t want me to leave him, like all the others had.

“You know what I think about every day?” I said. “I ask myself why God took the wrong parent.”

My father dragged himself up, his hair shiny against his forehead. I listened, unmoved by his weary breaths. “You know the old saying?” he said. “If your parents die, you bury them in the mountains. If your child dies, you bury him in your heart.” He reached for me the way he always did when he was calmer. “Adeul–ah, no one will ever love you the way I do.”

“What do you want from me?”

The rain came. My father sighed, the sound threadbare, labored.

“Jingyu, I didn’t have a father,” he said. “I don’t know how to be a father.”

I stood still. He paced, then turned back. His brogues made prints in the rain before they were washed away.

“This rage….” His voice slowed. “I can’t slow ­myself—”

“Enough, Abeoji.”

I walked away. When I held my hands out in front of me, they were shaking. They were strangers to me, these large knuckles and thick fingers I would grow into. I turned.

“Adeul–ah….”

I said nothing.

My father took off his shoes and laid them neatly on the cement as if he had just come home. He sat, legs folded over each other, then got up again, as if he wasn’t sure where he wanted to be. He walked over. His hands held my face, and he stared deep into my eyes. He kissed my cheeks.

“Adeul–ah, pray for me.” His voice dropped. “No matter what, tell them I drowned.”

And just as I moved toward him, my father turned his back on me and on God, and stepped casually off the riverside path and into the river.

I have not looked at photos of my father for years. His bloated river face and ­emptied-out eyes have faded for me, though I still hear his cadences, those broken incantations that rang through my childhood. Soon after my father’s passing, I stopped attending church. No matter how often New Mother reminded me that I was a pastor’s son, I could never go back.

During my college years I dutifully visited New Mother; sometimes I just made phone calls. Every year I poured the rice wine that my father liked so much over his grave and pulled the weeds around the tombstone; I ordered flowers for my mother’s grave,
stranded in America. Just after I graduated, I fell in love with and married a woman who nurtured the faith that I no longer could. Through her, even after we returned to America, a part of me stayed connected to Korea and to the church. I believed myself to be happy, or at least reconciled, as we settled in New Jersey, acquired our first mortgage, and took ­weeklong holidays in the ­summers and winters.

Time passed for me, time stayed still. Seoul is a city that, no matter its changes as it modernized, I will always remember as my father’s. On my last day there, I walked through Woo Meat Market, where merchants unload pigs’ heads leaking blood from the mouths and necks, and passed men staggering into the dark, men seeking brawls and seeking love. I saw the violence that my father had grown up with and passed down to us. I felt what my father must have always carried with him: the terrible war, its ­long-ago shadow that cast far beyond and drew you in like a thirsty curse. Only then I understood what the war had done to us.

When the monsoon rains descended that July, I thought of how he had wanted to walk with God but had been incapable of it. I see now that his slightly bowlegged walk is my walk; that my black, watchful eyes are his. When I see a stranger hunched over, devouring a cut of filet mignon as if it were a bowl of ramen, I see my father and the hunger he had grown up with. There he is for me, an orphan, hungry all his life.

E
VEN AFTER SOONAH
and their two children had left Seoul for Boston, Gilho Pak denied that he was what the news­papers dubbed a “goose father,” one of those men who faithfully sent money to his family living overseas. The original goose fathers, the term signifying their journey from one country to another, were Korean men who had been drafted or volunteered as mercenary soldiers for the U.S. army in Vietnam, and sent their salaries back to their family. But back then, there had been few jobs and a national landscape of poverty. Gilho was not a goose; he was entirely stationary. He was a successful accountant who did not associate himself with the Vietnam mercenaries, much less the so–called goose fathers reduced to eating ramen for dinner; those men so dishonest they had other women in their wives’ absence, men who collapsed from strokes, unearthed in their homes weeks later by neighbors, men less than men in their solitude. Unlike those fathers, his family’s absence made Gilho even more upright and correct in his behavior. Sex? He had never
understood the fuss. And what about Junho, his ­ten-year-old son, and his daughter, Jinhee, in American private schools, his wife’s ­language-school tuition that qualified her for a student visa, their living expenses? He’d had the foresight of a ­self-made man, and made sound investments before the country’s financial crisis in 1998.

Still, despite the books he finally had time to read and the spotless flooring he could maintain, loneliness made him feel like a house teetering on an eroding cliff. He dreaded the evening quiet of his apartment, and resorted to making phone calls to friends as he moved from room to room that rebuked him with their emptiness. The night he woke up hugging his daughter’s filthy baseball mitt, he decided to put a stop to this nonsense. So six months after separation from his family, he advertised, interviewed several candidates, then settled for a tenant, a boy who seemed as alone as Gilho.

The next week when Gilho came home, the tenant was sitting on the doormat. He had two suitcases stacked in front of him and a goose the size of an overfed house cat in his arms. A goose of all creatures, as if the boy was mocking Gilho. The bird shifted and revealed a splash of white paint across its ­dung-colored chest, as if ­God—though Gilho no longer believed in ­God—had slipped up with his paintbrush.

Gilho charged past the lanky boy and opened the door, but Wuseong scrambled to his feet and grasped his shoulder with his free hand. Gilho was about to dismiss him, call off their agreement, but he froze as he took in the boy’s anxious rosebud lips, the drooping pine needle scar that marred his chin, his shaved monkish head. Somehow, despite the goose’s grime, the boy managed to
look so clean. He was almost too pretty to be a boy, Gilho thought before he escaped into the apartment.

At the threshold the boy hovered and looked helplessly into the museum-white living room, just as Gilho had twenty years earlier when he, a farmer’s son from the island of Geoje, had been looking for cheap accommodations. He had been the first one in the family to attend college, and the first person in his village to be accepted by Seoul National University, the nation’s most prestigious institution. His father had killed two pigs in Gilho’s honor and held a party for the village, complete with a giant banner announcing his son’s achievements. Gilho had been an earnest student afraid of failing his family, overwhelmed by gratitude when a wealthy, popular girl on campus, now his wife, began paying attention to him. But over the years, he had excised the farm boy, stamped out his provincial traces, and become used to this new him.

“This ­goose—you didn’t mention a goose,” Gilho said. “Do you know how many germs it carries? It’ll infest my home.”

“Pak
ajeoshi
.” The boy’s address for older men was as supple as fresh rice cakes. He clutched the goose to his gaunt chest, and his eyes opened wide in alarm. “Oh, you can’t turn away a goose with only one good ­wing—she just found me! That’s like Superman without his cape. Like General Yi ­Sun-shin without his Turtle Ship. I swear she’ll be out of the way on the balcony.”