The Lost Father (15 page)

My mother, one thing about her, sometimes she appreciated a thing so much, a petal of the world, like a meal or a pair of shoes.

A man across the table was asking me where I came from. “Wisconsin? I lived a lot of places, but mainly a small city in Wisconsin. Racine.” Sometimes when people asked I just said California. It
depended. I was the only nonwife at the table. All I had to do was answer simply and smile. The older women had to work harder. I didn’t feel bad about that at all. It just felt like something I had. In me. Particularly.

The women must have watched with a curl of rue in their laughs. They recognized my vulnerability more than I did.

After, we stood outside the school gates, a wife and a different husband holding bowls of flowers that had been the centerpieces to take home. Standing, talking, touching each other’s wrists and coat shoulders, we moved frugally, all university people, enchanted by the winter flowers. The first cab came, a couple folded in, and I jumped in too, they were going in my direction. From inside I saw my date stand there hands in his coat pockets, his thin hair in the front moving in the wind and then in a few minutes I was home.

My apartment was a ravage around me; I just added to the mess. I untwined scarves, slipped off shoes, rolled down tights. I took the earrings out and set them on a table. Pretty soon I was in my slip, fabrics draped over every chair and doorknob. I felt loose at last. It came from a country childhood, I always took my good clothes off when I got home. I grabbed a bill envelope and pushed the button to play my phone messages.

“ ’S Wynne, I’ve got quite a bit of information already about your father. Date of birth and I’ve got up to where he’s been, I tracked his life up to the seventies. I think I’m gonna get him soon, I think so. I think I’m gonna get him. Get back to me, make sure you get back to me tomorrow afternoon but it looks encouraging.”

What was so strange then was time. I’d been looking for my father, always, forever, but now it seemed, it only began yesterday and a night was already too long to wait. Absolutely too many hours. Before I could have gone on waiting without end.

Now I could begin to imagine an after.

And when I found him, would I wait, lose eleven pounds, get in shape, go shopping? Would I charge a new suit to wear to meet him and worry about it later? Or would I just jump on a plane and go?

I
HAD TO GET OUT
. I put on jeans and grabbed my jacket. I had to get out. I never felt this. Ever. Usually I was housebound. I liked to stay home. But tonight I had to go outside.

I went to Tacita de Oro, the corner place, and sat on the first
counter stool. The inside of the neon sign spurted fretfully; green letters and a perfect yellow cup and saucer. Chinese and Spanish food. Order to take out.

They had cigars, flan. “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” played from a little radio.

Why was their coffee so good? The same guys as always worked behind the counter, the one I liked with no chin and glasses, neat, and the other better-looking one, not my favorite.

When I come home to you, San Francisco …

It was one of those nights where everything seemed meant for me. Near my shoulder, a girl whispered, “Can you lend me five dollars?” I shook my head no. “Ya sure?” she said.

I thought of my mother laughing and crying entirely without me.

I felt the way I did when I knew a few days before I officially heard that I’d get into medical school, I just knew, and that it would change my life.

I kept buying coffees for a dollar.

The man with no chin and glasses was now eating his dinner. He sat at a table, his ankles nicely crossed, hands on the cloth. A plate of rice and one of stew. He stared at the food, mixed it and lifted the spoon to his mouth very slowly. Everything seemed beautiful and mine. I felt I was going to lose this life. I would lose it because I would want to. How could I stop? There was once before Mai linn went away, when she still lived in Racine. She and Ben were in their days. I said, I was afraid if I went with my mother to California, we’d forget about each other. Mai linn knew already that she was going to move and Ben would be far away.

Mai linn was already unsentimental. “It seems sad to you now because now you don’t want to lose us. But it won’t be sad then. You’ll keep knowing the people you bother to.”

That has not always been true. We have all lost, Mai linn the most. But it was mainly that: mainly our own desire that left.

I came here alone. I counted: the butter on the counter, hot sauce, soy sauce, ketchup, sugar, salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, toothpicks, cigars, flan. I wanted to remember it all.

F
OR ONCE
, I really couldn’t sleep. It was one o’clock, then two. It went on and on. This was really a disaster. I had class all morning. Then work. Emory. The TV noise drizzled down from upstairs. I got mad
and madder. Didn’t he ever stop? I suppose for him night was nothing, he didn’t have to get up in the morning, he didn’t have to memorize femurs, he didn’t have to worry about flunking out. Finally, I pulled jeans on from the floor, stamped upstairs and got ready to knock. The noise spread out of the apartment, leaking. It was definitely him.

He opened the door, first giving me a hard blank look, then remembering, and said, “Come in, come in.” What could I do? He ushered me into his apartment. He wrung his hands in front of his pants. “I make tea,” he said as if this were the middle of the afternoon. His pants were some shiny fabric. Old men’s pants.

On a small table covered with faded fabric, the TV. As I’d suspected, this was right over my desk. It was positioned at the far end of the room, all the furniture facing it. On the same little table sat a bouquet of false flowers and a stick of incense, like a sad altar. It looked like an old movie running, black and white, with rounded cars and cops. Up here, it didn’t seem so loud. When he brought tea out on a tray, he stopped and snapped the thing off.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said. What was my problem?

“Company,” he mumbled and his lips spread. Some teeth were missing.

He rubbed his hands together, then sat down across from me, picking up his teacup in both hands.

The tea was bitter and dry and tasted something like cherries.

“Did you use to work for Columbia?”

“Used to be professor,” he said. “Mathematics.”

“Were you married?”

“I never marry. No,” he said.

And then I knew I couldn’t say it. I just couldn’t. Now I tried to think of some excuse. For being here.

“Oh, there are your canes,” I said. You couldn’t miss them. There they were. Three, all wood, each a little different, hanging on a hatrack on the wall.

“I collect,” he said. He went up to touch the one on the far right. It had a silver handle, tarnished. “Present,” he said, “my niece in California.”

“Oh,” I said. “Nice.”

He rubbed his hands again. “I show you something,” he said. He was relishing this visit. Now I had to find a way to get out. The apartment
looked like a cave. It was bare and dimly lit and the walls seemed streaked and browned. I couldn’t make out any bed. Maybe the couch I was sitting on was where he slept. If he ever slept. He made noises in the closet, and I thought of slipping out, but then he emerged with something wrapped in layers of yellowed tissue paper. He unwrapped and unwrapped, smoothing each wrinkled sheet of tissue out with his creased palm on the table. Finally, he lifted a cane up in both hands. The whole top half gleamed bone.

“My father’s,” he said. “You collect?”

That stopped me a moment. It was a question I hadn’t been asked for years. Where I was from, in Wisconsin, everyone collected. Paddy Winkler collected guns. People collected stamps, souvenir spoons, different teacups. Merl Briggs collected ormolu, Majolica china and this year’s shoes from her twice-a-season shopping trips to Chicago.

Women collected Hummel figures, antique doilies, all manner of colored glass bottles. It was odd not to own a collection. Teachers regularly expected children to tote something to school and elucidate for Show and Tell. Many of the more prosperous families collected religious tokens, such as rosaries blessed personally by the pope or relics: splinters cased in oval glass and worn around the neck, supposedly from the wood of His cross; pieces of certain saints’ hair, packaged in little boxes, with glass open sides, the hair, laid on velvet, translucent, no larger than a capillary or a nerve. For some reason, the saints seemed always to be blond. Once, for a while, I kept asking my mother if she had one of my father’s hairs.

“No,” she said. I remember her shaking down a pillow into a clean white case.

“But you must have one somewhere.” I could get like that.

She laughed, a little distracted. “Well, I don’t know where.”

“I collect butterflies,” I told the man.

“Butterfly!” he said.

Last year, I spent so many nights in the hospital. A wooden drawer with its silver handle intact stood upended at the nurses’ desk, butterflies pinned behind glass. It had been left there by the first patient I knew who died. No one else seemed to like it much. One day the head nurse touched each of her elbows and said it gave her the creeps. Then it was turned to the wall, finally an aide moved it to the closet. I almost asked if I could take it right then, but I decided no, this job was something I really wanted to be good at, I
wanted to do it right. If I did really well there, I promised myself, on the last day, I would take it or, if I felt I deserved it, I’d summon the nerve to ask.

It was odd, though, wanting to take something out of a place that had so little. But I did. Mai linn said a psychologist told her that when people treat kids who were sexually abused, the shrinks can’t help imagining the crime and wanting to touch the girls, too. “It’s a turn-on, a little,” she said. “I mean they don’t do anything, that’s just one of the things they fight.” She sighed. “Everyone in this culture wants to touch girls.”

By the end of the year, I deserved the butterflies. I knew that, but then I didn’t really care anymore. I asked anyway, the day before the new shifts.

“You can keep ’em,” the head nurse said. “You’re the only one around here who liked ’em anyway. You like ’em, Druse?” she asked the orderly.

He shook his head, wheeling the squeaking intravenous cart down the hall.

I touched the drawer of butterflies with its rough silver handle.

“Do you think the father would want them back?” I said.

The nurse shook her head no, she didn’t think so.

A father from Illinois had brought the butterflies to his son. I remember the father’s hands, huge, callused, embarrassed of their size, soft and helpless in his lap. He sat beside his son’s bed, wishing for another form, those butterfly tentacles, with their capacity for reception. I never saw a mother.

The son died while it was still snowing. We were the same age then, twenty-seven. He was an architect. Jack. When he first came to the hospital, he spent his hours drawing his ideal chair. “For a competition,” he said. One day he finished, and I took the drawing and the written forms and mailed them for him, Federal Express. I never heard if he won or not. Later that day, I lifted his gold wire glasses off his face once and rubbed his skin with a cool washcloth, touched with witch hazel. I brought my own witch hazel from the health food store and carried it around in my white hospital jacket pocket. People liked it. The glasses stayed like that, notched, one leg over the other, in a triangle, on the bedside table.

“Butterfly.” The old man’s fingers made a gesture. “Up your ceiling? Or in cage?”

Then I thought what he saw. Butterflies aloft everywhere in my
warm small room. Spots of beating color on the ceiling. Or maybe an elaborate bamboo cage.

“Oh, no. No. Dead. Dead butterflies. Pinned.”

“Ah, yes,” he said and looked down at his hands.

“You should come down and see them some time,” I said, nodding, standing up. “But now I have to get home. Sleep,” I said, too loudly, the way I couldn’t help talking to old people.

I went back down. My door was open again. I just could never get in the habit of locking.

He didn’t turn his TV on. Still, I couldn’t sleep anyway. I got up and stared at my textbook, until I caught myself reading the same paragraph three times. Then I hit the bed. I must have fallen asleep eventually because the ringing phone in the morning woke me up.

It was my mother. “I have something to ask you, honey, and I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Go ahead. Ask.”

“Don’t be afraid to tell me. Ann, are you on drugs?”

“No, Mother. Is that all? What got you started on that?” I had this bad tendency to laugh whenever she accused me of anything. I always laughed, whether or not I’d done it. And she took that as a sign of guilt. She always had.

“Well, how are you going through all this money then? Merl Briggs wrote me that they called her from the bank. They’re worried about you.”

Goddamn small-town bank, goddamn Merl Briggs. “Mom, life is expensive in New York, okay? I don’t spend a lot of money.”

“Well, be careful, because Gramma left you ten thousand—”

“Nine!”

“That’s nine more than I was left. That’s a lot of money, nine. That’s more than I have and when that’s gone, there’ll be nothing, do you understand? I can’t give you anything!”

4

T
ODAY I:

left my card in the cash machine.

broke two glasses, washing the dishes. That’s out of three that I had.

flunked a test. Anatomy. Bad.

tore the apartment apart looking for my butterfly-wing pin. It was a scene of a boat on a river, made out of butterfly wings. I pulled every pocket inside out. I didn’t find it. It was lost. Really gone. I hate that, it starts me going.

Then I got a ticket for riding my bike through a red light. The cop had a helmet that fastened under his chin. He just wrote, his profile stern. I wondered about his hair. He might have been younger than I was.

The worst thing was I broke one of Emory’s towers. I knocked it with my leg and a rampart of glued toothpicks separated and fell.