The Lost Father (54 page)

“One woman passed out,” Dr. Geesie said. “Kidney stones.”

“Why sure, but he couldn’t help that,” Dr. Kemp said. “The way I heard it was everything went along pretty well until Cairo. They saw hieroglyphs and what-have-you. They saw some more mummies, I suppose. He got those old ladies up on camels. They all came home with their picture of that. And then one night, he took all the ladies out on the town. And that started all right too, they went to a fancy restaurant—”

“As fancy as they’ve got over there,” Dr. Geesie interjected.

“And they ate in a big tent with an opening where they could see the moon and the stars. He was always good that way. With wines and food. But then he brought them to a casino. And I guess the first casino was all right. They walked around and saw everything. But the manager there wouldn’t give them credit. So he rounded all the ladies up and took them to another casino.”

Dr. Geesie was rocking again and shook his head. “A place they never should have been. Never ever.”

“Yas. The second one was more down and out. A few of the ladies said later, they thought something was funny when they were following all these dark alleys. I don’t know what he told them, maybe that they were all millionaire’s wives, who knows, but he got them spread out over the casino, some were at blackjack, quite a few at roulette, one or two at the slot machines, and they gambled all night. I guess they liked it.”

“Why, they lost almost thirty thousand dollars!” Dr. Geesie said.

“They just kept going. They thought it was some kind of big free party. He told them it was play money, the chips, and he’d paid some kind of admission fee for them all. They thought they were at a bingo game.”

“He hooked them on it!” Dr. Geesie said.

“Of course he was playing blackjack.”

“On their credit too!” Dr. Geesie said. “After he went through the tour money.”

“He was upstairs at some kind of private table. Then, I suppose, it was closing time.”

“Whatever closing time
is
in a casino over there,” Dr. Geesie said.

“It must have been pretty late. The women got together with their coats and purses and all and the fellows running the casino weren’t about to let them go. They wanted them to pay up. And of course this was all in Arabic. And then, the gals noticed, they can’t find him anywhere. They said over there the police all wear white. They said at first when they came they thought they were doctors.”

“Ended up in jail that night,” Dr. Geesie said.

“And he just split?” I had to keep myself from laughing. I knew this was terrible, but it was kind of funny too.

“He just disappeared,” Dr. Geesie said.

I asked. “What did they do, the old ladies?”

“Well, they wired home to their husbands! They had no money! No program!” Dr. Geesie nearly shouted. His hands were white gripping the arms of the chair. “Fortunately that one woman’s husband was director of the bank here and he got right on a plane and went over and bailed them all out. Well, they wondered for several days where Atassi went and then they thought there was foul play and maybe he’d even been killed in Cairo. So this fellow from the bank got in touch with the US Embassy and the Embassy got in touch with the local police. They discovered that he had taken a plane for Athens, Greece. He’d gone from there to Rome and from Rome to Paris and from Paris to London and then to New York. First-class! And all this within a week after they’d left. And so here I was sitting in my office one day and a student came in and said, ‘You know the strangest thing, I thought Dr. Atassi was in the Middle East but I saw him on the street in Missoula.’ I said, ‘Oh no, that’s not possible,’ and the student said, ‘I tell you I saw the man with my own eyes,’ and I said, ‘Well that just couldn’t be, he is in, he is in Egypt or in Lebanon somewhere.’ Well, within a couple of days why the whole thing broke, of course, and the women called long distance to the university president, and said, ‘We’re stuck in Cairo and Dr. Atassi’s disappeared.’ ”

He was still a doctor, even disappeared.

I missed medical school in a vague way, sitting in a room looking out at the rain. “So how did he explain himself?”

“Well, that he woke up one day with a lot of amnesia and the money was gone,” Dr. Kemp said. “Nobody really believed him. They wanted him to go to a psychiatrist.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” I said.

“It got a lot of publicity,” Dr. Geesie said. “The papers ate it up.”

I tried to remember: call local newspaper for its archives.

“They had insurance, I think, to cover the money that was spent,” Dr. Kemp said, “they didn’t prosecute or anything of that sort. He just disappeared and, as far as I know, Uta went with him. Or Sonia. But I think it
was
Uta. Actually, she did leave him once while he was here. But she went back to him when his problems increased. She loved him a great deal.” He said that with a gravity. I liked Dr. Kemp.

“If you only had her maiden name.” Dr. Geesie made his clicking sound.

“But I really can’t think back to anyone who was a close friend,” Dr. Kemp said. “I’ve thought about him several times since. Actually, he hurt me in many ways.”

“What?”

“Well, he conspired to get me kicked out of the chairmanship. He was very efficient and also a good teacher. But he had certain flaws in his personality. And one is gambling.”

“Another is leaving his children.”

“Yas, I feel the same way.” Why couldn’t this man have been my father? Anyone else would have been easier.

Dr. Geesie was sitting at the edge of his chair. “When he left, they published in the newspaper all the bills he’d run up! Why, he owed the dry cleaner alone more than eight hundred dollars! It turned out, he was borrowing money from the secretaries all that time. They never said anything about it until after he was gone and then of course it was too late.”

“The more I think of it,” Dr. Kemp said, “I’m sure the wife’s name is Uta. I think the fatal flaw is the gambling, you know, it’d be like alcoholism or any number of others. He can’t seem to resist it. It’s one of the reasons I thought he had probably gravitated back to a gambling area. She might have even owned a hotel or a restaurant somewhere in Nevada. I seem to remember something about that.”

“Do you remember the restaurant’s name?”

“I think he even worked there one summer. Or maybe that’s how they met. But the name, what was that? It might have been something
like Donner Pass. Donner Lodge. We’re not giving you much, but I suppose it’s more than you had.”

“Ut-terly charming,” Dr. Geesie said again.

“I grew up with my mom. Which may have been lucky actually.”

“Well, you’d have had a number of crises,” Dr. Kemp said. “I don’t know if they even have a Gamblers’ Anonymous thing or not. But he also, I think, had delusions of grandeur. He always wanted to be more important than he was. The gambling thing was like buying lottery tickets. You think you’re going to be rich tomorrow.”

Dr. Geesie clicked again.

“I mean, I buy them, mind you,” Dr. Kemp said. You knew that Dr. Geesie never had.

“But it sounds like he had money anyway from his wife. So what did he need more for?” He should have known how little we had. What we did. How we managed.

I watched Dr. Kemp unwrap and eat another chocolate. “You want one?” he said and then threw it across the room. It was blue foil. That set Dr. Geesie shoving himself up from the armrests and carrying the bowl of turtles around the room.

“I should have asked you already,” he mumbled. “My wife usually—she’s at birthday club.”

“I’d like to know what’s happened to John,” Dr. Kemp said. “You know, he can sell himself and what he believes in. I don’t know whether Uta has stuck with him. She loved him very much. And you know, put up with a lot.”

“I hope she’s still even alive to find,” I said. “I remember her being pretty old.”

“She might be in her sixties, I don’t know,” Dr. Kemp said.

“He’d be fifty-five now. I know ’cause that’s how old my mom is and they’re the same age.” This seemed an increasingly fragile bit of romance.

“ ’Course I’m seventy,” Dr. Kemp said.

“I’m seventy-six!” Dr. Geesie said, like,
so there!

God, I’d probably offended these guys, saying she was old enough to be dead. I tried to cover it. I said, “I bet she’d be about ninety now.”

“No, she was younger than I was,” Dr. Kemp said. “Well, she might be my age, I don’t know. She had some wrinkles, I guess.”

“Was she a nice person?”

“Yas.”

“Was she smart and everything?”

“Why sure. And, as I say, she put up with a lot.”

There was a racket at the front door, then a delicate stamping. “Well, hello.” Dr. Geesie’s wife took off plastic shoe covers and hung up her scarf. “I won’t bother you,” she said, tiptoeing through the room.

Dr. Geesie looked to Dr. Kemp. “Do you think she should check the Western Division of International Studies?”

“He doesn’t seem like the joiner type,” I said. It was like umbrellas and sunglasses. The medical insurance I might have been wrong on. The college probably gave him that.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Kemp said, “we can’t tell you more.”

“All these people from years ago, why would you remember?” I shrugged.

“You remember some, like Ted Bundy was a student of mine,” he said.

“Oh, neat.” I was winging it. I didn’t know who Ted Bundy was. But the name sounded like some New England blazered politician. I talked too much. I talked too much all the time then. I just filled in the spaces.

“He was a very good student,” Dr. Kemp said.

Mrs. Geesie came in and snapped the TV. “I’m just putting on the picture with no sound,” she said. “Gregory, call me when you see my show.”

“She has her show she watches every day,” Dr. Geesie said. It seemed pretty soon time to go.

“Your mother may not remember me,” Dr. Kemp said.

“She doesn’t like the idea of me finding my father. So I probably won’t tell her right away.”

“Well I can understand why you’d like to find him. One likes to have some kind of contact. It doesn’t have to be close. The way he treated you you probably wouldn’t want to be close. But you’d still like to know. If you ever do find him, I’d like to hear.”

“I will. I’ll call you.”

“John and I were good friends, I think he treated me shabbily but, you know, I still have some feelings about him. I don’t have any bitterness.”

“No. You don’t sound like it.” I stood up to go. On the TV were
cut shots of bells in a cool place, a high tower. I wanted to hear them. All of a sudden, I wanted to hear music. Then a jewelry box opened somewhere else in the house and its vain cranked music sounded like an ice-cream truck.

“Well, he’s either down on his luck or all of a sudden he made it big. I don’t feel that he would be sort of in between.”

“What’d you say your first name was?” Dr. Geesie asked me.

“Mayan.”

“Mayan,” Dr. Kemp said. “Why sure, I think I did hear him mention your name.”

“Well, I don’t know what else to tell you,” Dr. Geesie said, “but there you’ve got some of the bad and some of the good. He was a charming fellow.” He shoved himself up again and stood holding the bowl of M&Ms.

“I knew that a daughter existed, why sure,” Dr. Kemp said. “Existed. That makes you sound like a statistic.”

I was writing out my phone number on slips of paper. I asked them to call me collect if they ever heard anything. I kept stealing glances at the TV. It was still the high cold heavy metal bells.

“Oh, well,” Dr. Kemp said. “I’m always broke.”

“So definitely call collect then.” Sometimes you crave music in a way that seems physical. This was in my chest.

“I have drug bills of two hundred dollars a month. And none of them are fun drugs.”

“Do you have something wrong?”

“Oh, I have angina and diabetes. I’ve got the ball of wax.”

At the screen door, I asked. “Oh, Dr. Geesie. What’s your middle name?” George, I had decided.

Just then, the woman bent down in front of the TV, her heels rising out of her shoes. Bells spilled loudly and filled the room like a higher ceiling, a clean height.

“Graybner,” He said. “Gregory Graybner Geesie. All my brothers and my father have the same initials. G.G.G.”

I
WAS THINKING
of changing my name. It was just a little thing. I should have done it once when I changed schools. It would have been easy. I changed schools so many times. I didn’t like to write my name. Mayan Amneh Stevenson. It was a kind of alias and not legal. But it was printed on my driver’s license, all lines of credit. All my school
records said this. My social security number was wrong, faked anyway, so I could work in Dean’s Ice Cream Diner when I was thirteen. My mother shrugged at the time. “You’ll just get your money a year earlier when you’re old. You can be sixty-four. That’ll be nice.” Sometimes I took comfort in the big mess of this country. In not being found.

I was Mayan, a word you could finger like two beads on a chain. I had a chain with just two pearls. One of the times I’d seen my father when I was a child, we went to a restaurant that served oysters. You were guaranteed to get a pearl. We ate the whole plate of them and we didn’t find a pearl, so they went to the back and got us two more oysters and this time they each had a pearl. We thought they had a special pail of them in back that they knew had pearls.

“But how could they know?” my mother said.

“X-rays,” I said, a smart aleck.

They put them on an add-a-pearl-necklace right then, but I’d never gotten any more. Whenever we ate with my father, we ate better. We had whole meals of fancy food and dessert. We ate it all and never worried about our weight because we knew this would be just once and not always. It wouldn’t last, it would go away and remind us that chances are only once, taste ephemeral, and life in this world, all its sweetness and rain, is nothing to count on continuing because it will, but only without us. Time is short, attachment expensive, but it was worth it for us to eat every time. It never tasted enough. We had such appetite. The thing I still love best about us, my mother and me, is that we wanted so.