The Lost Father (53 page)

“As I said on the phone, I’m actually John Atassi’s daughter. And I haven’t seen him, my family hasn’t seen him for years.”

“Well, I sure don’t know where he is,” Dr. Geesie said, rocking. “But this is Dr. Kemp. I asked him over because he knew your dad better than I ever did.”

Dr. Kemp was tall, with a ponytail of very dull silver hair. He wore black jeans and cowboy boots and made a slight bow in my direction. “But now I don’t know where you could find him either,” Dr. Kemp drawled.

I settled into one end of the couch as Dr. Geesie rocked. Dr. Kemp paced in long strides back and forth over the small carpet. His head was level with a chandelier. He kept eating raisins from his hand. I heard the sound of a loud cuckoo clock. Dr. Kemp refilled his raisins from a cut-glass bowl on a doily. I counted the decanters of candy in this room—there were nine. I turned to Dr. Geesie and said I’d heard about him from Mr. Nash in Wisconsin.

“Mr. Who?” he said. His skin, particularly at the neck part that
showed through his open collar, gathered in folds, the hair follicles raised like a plucked chicken.

“Mr. Nash?” Maybe I should have said Dr. Nash. “He talked to you a number of years ago, I think. He told me that you had known my father.”

“Well, that’s correct. But I don’t remember any Nash. That very well could be though. Your dad and I were both in the Social Science Department. But I’m no longer at the university. Dr. Kemp either.”

“I haven’t seen my father for a long time. I’m basically trying to look for him just as a sort of family thing.” I didn’t want them to think I wanted money or anything.

“I have never heard a word,” Dr. Geesie said. “I taught there several years after he left and so far as I know, nobody ever heard a word from him.”

“Disappeared,” Dr. Kemp said.

“Yeah, that was our experience of him too.”

Dr. Kemp cleared his throat. “He stopped talking to everybody tied up in the university.”

Dr. Geesie had a way of moving his tongue so a small click emerged, a sound on an insect register. “He never came back to his office! He left everything on his desk and just vanished.”

So my father’s office: it existed, like a preserved shack full of some stranger’s daily things I always hoped to find every time I entered a woods and never did.

“Nobody ever saw him again.”

“God, that’s so strange,” I said.

“Well, that’s correct. It is strange. The custodians had to come in and box everything up. University had to pay to ship it all to him.”

It was gone. At that moment, I’d have rather had the contents of those boxes than him. I would have given anything for an uninterrupted day in his office with his things. “I wonder if I could get the address they mailed it to?”

“Well, the person to contact there would be Dean Daniels. If anyone a-tall would know, the dean would. And if he doesn’t know, let me tell you, no one knows.”

“And what’s his first name?”

That seemed to embarrass Dr. Geesie. His face wobbled and his eyes scratched frantically through the air. “Oh, gosh, my memory is terrible, do you remember, Dr. Kemp?”

“Don’t think I ever knew.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“Well, he’s Dean Daniels anyway. That’s correct. He’s university dean. What was his name? He was a strange fellow, your father, let me tell you.”

“Really? I just knew him as a child.” A glass bowl etched with robins was filled to the brim with candy wrapped in fancy colored foil. I wanted one. But it was across the room.

“Well, I hate to talk about your father as—”

“No, that’s okay, I’m not expecting any hero.”

“He was utterly”—his t’s were hard, tongue pushing the back of front teeth with a sissing force, a sputtering, bittered firecracker—“charm-ing. When you met him. Utterly charming. He would particularly charm women. But he was basically conniving as all get out. When he wanted something like tenure or to be chair of the department, he would stack the decks.”

“Oh? How?”

“Well, by ingratiating himself to the administration and playing one person off against another.”

“Oh. That’s not good.” I said.

“Very Machiavellian. But he did it all under charm, you see. You’d meet him, he’d have a big smile, he was always impeccably dressed. Why, I’ll bet you he was among the two or three best-dressed people at Firth Adams!”

That wouldn’t have done it for my mother at all. She’d been one of the best-dressed people in the state of Wisconsin. And that hadn’t been enough.

Dr. Kemp kept pretty quiet. He was still pacing, head down, eating raisins. I looked at the two men. All of a sudden, for some reason, I wondered if they had children. Dr. Kemp had no wedding band. Dr. Geesie did, with a starburst of some kind at the center.

He went on about my father’s clothes. “Always just beautiful suits. Oh, and the silk ties, he had one tie with all different colored butterflies, I remember. He looked like a prince. Very very charming.”

“ ’Cause I remember even before that,” I said. “The last time I saw him I was about twelve and he was even then sort of losing his hair and all.” I tried to laugh a little. Both these men had hair.

“No, he didn’t have much hair,” Dr. Geesie conceded. “He had kind of a, you know, fringe. But I think his most attractive physical feature was his eyes. He had
most
attractive eyes.”

It seemed odd that Dr. Geesie would mention clothes. Dr. Kemp wore a silver belt buckle. He had a certain style. He kept his hair back in a plain liver-colored rubber band. But Dr. Geesie had on a short-sleeved blue shirt, some kind of trousers, worn slippers with plaid inside. His hair had gone yellow, not white.

Then I began to think that maybe Dr. Geesie and Dr. Kemp weren’t really friends, that Geesie had probably called Kemp just so he’d have proof of me for his old-man gossip and that was what Dr. Kemp kept silent over, his invitedness and dislike of Doctor Geesie. Now he was unwrapping the green foil for a chocolate in his big hands.

“Are you both married?”

“He is, I’m not,” Dr. Kemp drawled.

“I am married.” Dr. Geesie nodded.

“Did he seem settled in America at the point you knew him? Or do you think he might’ve gone back to Egypt?”

“Oh, no,” Dr. Geesie said, “I got the impression that he was definitely ensconced here.”

Dr. Kemp stopped. “ ’Course he might have been desperate enough to go back to Egypt. You know. Feeling that he no longer had a future here. But I think he liked the Western style of life. Pleasures of the flesh and whatnot. He liked to drink and do all these things. I think he has a feeling for the Middle East. I think he loves it dearly. But he didn’t want to go back to a Muslim country where he’d have to live like a Mormon.”

“Did he publish any papers?”

“Nothing that I know of,” Dr. Geesie said. “But there was no great pressure. The idea was that Firth Adams was a teaching institution. We were supposed to be Top Teachers, see. Devote all our time to teaching students and advising students. Sort of the Williams College of the West.”

The Williams of the West. Like East Lansing was the Training Ground for Harvard. The one-way analogy. Talk about unrequited. In the East, you didn’t hear anyone from Williams or Harvard talking about them. It was the way poor relatives everywhere mentioned their rich affiliations much more frequently than the illustrious remembered them.

“Do either of you know anyone who might have been sort of close to him?”

“No. Because if he was close to anyone it was the women. Not the men,” Dr. Geesie said. The underground of women again.

Dr. Kemp cleared his throat. “He knew a number of the Arab students. But I don’t remember any faculty.”

“That’s correct,” Dr. Geesie said.

I wanted to ask. But I felt like I knew already. They were both men without children.

“I would just hear, you know, that he had gone with people and even supposedly some secretary at the college, but I don’t know who that was. And I made it a point not to ask questions. You never know when things’ll get back.”

“I think he did chase around.” Dr. Kemp stood leaning against a wall now, peeling a tangerine. The tangerines were in a china bowl with the faint tracings of a dragon painted on it, mostly gone from washing. “I never knew any of them by name,” he said.

“Right. Which is a pity,” I said. “Do you have any recollection of him being married or anything?”

“Why sure,” Dr. Kemp said, pacing again. “His wife’s name was Sonia.”

“Well, I knew too there was a woman he was calling his wife,” Dr. Geesie said, “but of course I have no idea whether or not they really were married.”

“Is she still here?”

“I don’t know what happened to that. He was stepping out on her. He’d move out and be living in an apartment for a while and then he’d move back in again. And this went back and forth. I only heard about it through the grapevine. And as far as I know, she left here with him when he was fired.”

“She had money,” Dr. Kemp said in a straight low tone as if that underlined everything, which, I guess in a way, it did.

“Do you remember her maiden name?”

He shook his head. “I always knew her as Sonia Atassi. She was from the Reno area.”

“But you know,” Dr. Geesie said, “if we had the last name, you could probably track it down. You might get a Reno telephone directory. I would try, although he had an unlisted number here in Montana. You might also try Las Vegas and Palm Springs. Where’re you from?”

“Oh, I live in New York. I’m in medical school.” I wondered how long that would still be true.

“New York,” Dr. Geesie said. “Couldn’t get much further away.”
Just then the cuckoo clock dinged two-thirty. A wooden carved goose revolved out with a girl following, all to a cranked merry-go-round tune.

“Why sure. Any major library should have telephone directories from around the country. I know the Missoula one does.”

I said, “Actually I think I met his wife except I thought her name was Uta. Was she older than he was?”

“Could be. Maybe it was Uta, I don’t know why I think it was Sonia,” Dr. Kemp said. He stared down at me intently for the first time. “You were from the first marriage,” he said.

“Yes.” I’d never thought of it like that. For me it was the marriage, no matter what.

“I knew your mother. You see, I first met John when I taught for a semester at the University of Wisconsin.”

“Oh. Wow. That’s funny.”

“How is she?”

“She’s great. Fine.” I didn’t want any of these people near my mother. I always thought she was so fragile.

“I don’t know if she’d remember me but give her my regards.”

“I will,” I said. “You know I met the second wife once. Once we flew out and we all went to Disneyland.”

“He certainly
is
a man of mystery,” Dr. Geesie said.

“Sure is,” I said, thinking that old men and old women sound alike.

“Now, let’s see. How you could find him,” Dr. Geesie said. “I suspect he’s probably in Nevada somewhere. But how you can find him down there in that maze, that I don’t know. If he even kept his same name.”

It’s not the same name, I wanted to say, it’s his name. His real name. But then I remembered it wasn’t. His real name was Mohammed Abdul Atassi. “Do you think the school would give me his social security number? Then I could call the Social Security Department and see if they’d help.”

“I have done that with genealogy,” Dr. Geesie said. A genealogist. I should’ve known. “But the only success I’ve had is when someone is dead. And then they will take about a year and they’ll phone you back personally and say, well, now you asked about such and such a person. And they’ll tell you, well, that person died at such and such a place—”

“Huh.”

“—at such and such a date,” Dr. Geesie finished. “That they will do.”

“He could be dead,” I said. “I wouldn’t know. He didn’t have any children up here, did he?”

“No,” Dr. Kemp said. “She had children. Grown.”

“But not with him?”

“Not with him.”

Dr. Geesie rushed in, “No, no, no. He wasn’t the type that would want children.”

“But he has one actually.”

“Yes, and isn’t it strange that he didn’t try to keep in touch with you?” That seemed mean. Asking me to answer.

“Well, it’s awful.” What could I say.

“Yas I think that’s, uh, unfortunate,” Dr. Kemp said.

“Do you have children yourself?” I asked Dr. Geesie. The clock ticked one chime for the quarter hour.

“No,” Dr. Geesie said. “My wife and I never did have children.”

I looked to Dr. Kemp. “Me?” he said, a large hand on his chest, “I’m not married.”

“Did he ever mention us?”

Dr. Geesie looked at Dr. Kemp. Dr. Kemp was now eating M&Ms.

“Why sure, I knew that you existed,” he said. “But that’s all.”

I shook my head.

“Well, you know, if it hadn’t been for his gambling.” Dr. Geesie clicked his tongue again. “As I say, he was overly ambitious professionally but that’s not unusual, there are a lot of people in academic life who are
that
way. His Achilles heel was his gambling. That’s what got him in trouble in Cairo.”

Now Dr. Kemp started. “We had an extension program for alumni and local people. It was a way the faculty could make a little extra money. By planning a trip somewhere. I did mine in Eastern Canada.” I could see Dr. Kemp standing in a marsh like one arrow, his binoculars following a high triangle of geese. “John decided to take a group to the Middle East. He’d gone the year before to Seattle to see some mummies and they all loved that so a lot of the same ones signed up again. And he said he had a terrific program all organized. They were going to stop in New York at the UN and they were going to do something in Rome. Well none of that materialized, but still nobody was particularly concerned.”

“It was mostly women, if I’m recalling correctly,” Dr. Geesie said. “Dr. Atassi and fifteen or twenty women.”

“Older ladies, you know, local people. A few of them even had an Egyptology club. They put together those replicas of Egyptian urns, you know, it was a little like paint-by-number. It was a pretty expensive trip. And so it was the banker’s wife and her mother. That kind of person. And the first week or so, everything went pretty well. They took a boat up the Nile and they liked that. They saw the Pyramids.”