The Lost Father (72 page)

I skidded the car to a stop. On the slope, there was a red picnic
table in the dull light. Under cherry blossoms. That was it. I had dreamed of that before. And all of a sudden, I stepped out and the air was a billow of cool expansion. This had been it, what I was driving half the country to see. And now I had seen it.

From Mantica, a smell of manure came from the open windows, heavy like meat. Beyond a long field, there were shanties and farm buildings. When he was doing research for his Ph.D., Stevie had come this way, to study a particular tree disease in the Sierra. There was a lab station in Blodgett. What if I’d come along and we’d gone into his restaurant knowing nothing? That wasn’t even a question anymore.

For me, this reunion cost time and money and life and work.

Or maybe I didn’t believe enough. Maybe if I’d waited longer. But my father was born in 1931. He would be fifty-five. How much longer could I wait?

B
Y THE TIME
I heard on Thursday, certain things were obvious, a flat bottom in my stomach. I came right away. But it wasn’t jump on a plane. I haggled with the travel agent, complained about the price. I felt grim about it all.

“Should I bring something good?” I’d asked Emily. “Or just jeans.” I kind of wanted to go in just my regular stuff.

“Bring one thing so you can dress up if you need to. You don’t want to be thinking about clothes.” She went to her closet, chose an older dress, a loose print that was long. She knew I liked long. “Take this.”

“Not the suit?”

“No.”

I did as I was told.

So many dead ends had stopped me still before, numerous enough I couldn’t count: times at phone booths, me standing alone at a gas station in a new state, somewhere in the West spelling A-T-A-S-S-I to an operator with a slow accent. There was always no listing, more than a thousand times, a thousand places, some twice probably, more. And the absence of Gilberts and Rilellas from the face of the earth, as if marrying my father had kept women and all their relatives from ever listing themselves in phone books again.

Now I was entering Modesto, a valley city, with its own curving concrete freeway ramps like a child’s game. I picked one and ended up
on a long tree-banked street leading to downtown. That turned out to be good. Gridded cities were easy and the numbered streets followed in order. In ten minutes I was driving past The Lighthouse, a stucco building that looked like anywhere else. His house was close by, but the one-way streets stalled me. Then, there it was. It was across the street from a regular-looking park, just flat grass, a chain-link fence all around and a dirt baseball diamond. It was a duplex on a street of duplexes. His was pale brown. It looked closed up, the blinds drawn.

I
WASN’T READY THOUGH
. Not yet. I wasn’t clean.

I drove around looking for a hotel. I went towards what I thought was charm in the distance and turned out to be a decrepit Elks Lodge. Old in the East meant good, in the West it was something else. I checked into a motel, unpacked and made coffee on a little hot plate they had in all the rooms. This was good. I was an adult and I could handle a motel. I showered, washed my hair.

Before I’d come it was this big question whether or not to call him. I didn’t want him to have a chance to say no. I figured if he didn’t want to talk to me, I’d get more from having him tell me that with a face than I would from just having him say no and hanging up on the phone. “I don’t want to ask him,” I’d told Mai linn. “I want to just be there.”

But now that I was here I worried about manners. Maybe he was busy at certain times. Out the window Modesto didn’t seem to move, except the top ferns of palm in the light wind. There seemed no need for all this. Out the window a couple walked by, arms curled around each other’s backs in one s.

I called the restaurant number. It rang and rang. Nine times. Eleven. I hadn’t planned what I’d do if he was there.

I tried again. Sixteen.

I called the hotel’s front desk and asked how to make local calls. Yes. I was doing it right.

I steadied myself, pulled the towel up further on my chest. I poured another cup of coffee, then I called information, checked the number.

I didn’t panic. I dressed and walked out to the motel lobby. I told the girl there I wanted a reservation at a place called The Lighthouse.

“They’re not answering, now,” she said, after a few moments. “I’m so sorry, would you like me to give you their number?”

“Do you know if they’re open?”

“I guess they can’t be open if they’re not answering.”

“You don’t sound sure. Is there anyone here who would know for sure?” I looked around. The office was small and empty.

“I’m pretty sure they’re not open today if they’re not answering the phone now. Otherwise they’d be there already serving lunch.”

“Do you know if they’re open tomorrow?” Each word was a tooth. Tomorrow was Sunday. My rage hardened dense as a block. Not again.

“No, I doubt it. If they’re closed today they’re probably closed tomorrow too.”

“Thanks,” I said. A little bell hung on the lobby door tinkled behind me as I left.

There was nothing to do. I’d have to go to the house. I tried to think what if no one was there. I felt that trickle almost like a relief; I knew how to make a day in a strange city. Outside the motel a stray piece of paper ticked, blowing on the gutter. I’d find a coffee house, write letters, I’d see a movie while it was still light out.

Then I’d planned such a safe easy day for myself, full of consolations, I almost wanted that.

I blow-dried my hair. I put on makeup, mascara and eyeliner. When I searched for the lipstick, I found Ali’s chocolate hardened like goo at the bottom of my pack. A white shirt, jeans, the earrings. The shoes with the ghost of Edison’s phone number. As I walked outside, I thought of my soles sanding against the pavement, wearing the numbers of his location all away.

Then I went. I parked in front of the duplex.

I turned the motor off. I knew now as I looked at the blind face of the town house, this could be another dead end. Another false tip, a mistake, another place he wasn’t. I promised myself, this would be my last dead end. I’d give up. I had to get back. I had to so bad.

First I moved my stuff to the trunk. I had my backpack with Timothy’s camera in it. I took his picture out from where I’d saved it and looked at it in my palm. In the little picture, he looked about my age, proud-seeming, well-dressed, not exactly handsome. In a sharp double-breasted suit. I put it away again. Whatever society there was in America didn’t work the way my mother and dad thought it should,
from looks. Education was the great leveler and opportunity, if you wanted that. It wasn’t, as my mom thought, a matter of clothes.

Then I had a hard time fitting the key into the lock, I wobbled on my heels. I thought, my father could be at his upstairs window wondering who the crazy woman was ministering to her car door. At least, I had the consolation, he’d never in a million stars guess me.

I saw the door. A screen door and then a wood door. I didn’t see a nameplate or anything but I pushed the doorbell and I heard it work inside and then a little dog was barking madly, I don’t know how I knew it was a little dog, bellow size I guess, hurling itself against the door.

“Oh, only the dog’s home,” I thought, letting myself down, and then the door opened. There was the wire mesh netting of the screen door, the dog, turning flat against it, head to tail, a terrier, longhaired, messy, a man in a maroon bathrobe, barefoot, pajamaed, I only recognized at the shoulders was my father.

“What do you want?” he said, his eyebrows sharp in a V.

He looked at me a full moment and I knew him, the curled lip, the chin tilting the whole face like a bowl. His eyes ran back and forth over me and got nothing. He didn’t smile. He seemed foreign then. His face was thinner now, a smooth vertical. He’d lost hair down the center and grown beautiful.

“I’m looking for John Atassi,” I said. “And that’s you, isn’t it?”

I wondered for a moment if I would have to prove who I was and I thought of the shoes he once promised me he would get me in Beirut when he left and I smiled because of course I couldn’t put on the slipper and lift my leg up to show because it wouldn’t fit, I had grown, time had come in and changed the ending and I was not the same anymore. My mother still had a basket with a half-knit sweater for the tiny child I was.

He said “Yes,” and the face was nude like an old sad clown’s, full of mime, and I told him, because he did not know, “I am your daughter,” and then everything turned different, he was jumping and yelling, he pulled me in waltzing, crying over my hand. I knew he would never remember the shoes from Beirut, he’d forgotten years ago, maybe even while he was saying the words of the promise, like the disappearing ink of fireflies on a Wisconsin night sky.

I was in and he was only a man.

12

“Y
OU
KNOW, HONEY
, you should of called,” he said after the tears were over, wiped delicately from his face with his own hand, holding a colored tissue Uta delivered to him. “We almost went away for the weekend. We were going to drive up to the mountains.”

Uta tched. “Yes, we were planning on it.”

“Isn’t it lucky, Uta, we didn’t go. Yah, it’s really fortunate. We could have just been gone.”

The day I met my father was the way Stevie described his own wedding, long and hot and rich with food. Stevie was always asking everyone else what his wedding was like, as if he wasn’t there. I was in a daze. All around me was light and heat and noise and lots of champagne.

And there is no one I can ever ask.

His house was ordinary, nothing. Walking through the little entry hall, I immediately revised everything. He had standard furniture. It could have been rented but it wasn’t new enough.

Uta was still there, in nylons and slippers, carrying a Kleenex box over to him. She offered me one too, but only after.

Uta: nobody thinks their parents could do better than each other. Few people ever have such positive proof. Four-foot-eleven, brittle, she had odd points of hair where sideburns would be, a style Liza Minnelli adopted briefly in the late ’60s.

We settled ourselves down in the furniture and Uta brought a pot of coffee.

His eyes were red from crying but we’d stopped.

“Your father is a great man,” Uta said to me.

Oh really, why? I felt like saying, what has he done? From what I hear he’s not been so dandy to you.

“He’s just a wonderful, wonderful man. I’ve seen him go through so many things. I really admire him.”

I kept stealing shy looks at him and he was just there. I couldn’t tell if he looked like me or not. His skin was whiter than I’d thought. Ramadan had been better looking.

Like any strangers, we talked about geography. Modesto, Stockton,
Yosemite, the immediate area. I said I liked Berkeley. I said that I was there last summer, visiting Stevie, my childhood friend.

“Well, how come you waited till now then?” my father said. “Why did you take so long?”

“How come I waited till now?” I hit his shoulder a way I thought was playful. This was how I’d seen people do it. “You’re hard to find. I’m not that hard to find. Maybe I am. I don’t know.”

“Your mom’s still listed in Los Angeles?” he asked idly. The answer to that was yes. She was.

“You wanted to play the cello, didn’t you?” Uta asked out of the blue.

“I played drums for a while, when I was a kid.”

“No, I think it was the cello,” she said. “Well, did you ever do it?” She said that as if it were some accusation. “Where was she born?” she asked him instead of me.

“She was born in Bay City, Wisconsin.”

“But wasn’t Adele pregnant in Egypt?”

“Yah, we lived in Luxor. I was working for a Saudi petroleum company. We had a brand-new place but she just didn’t like it. She didn’t like the food. Didn’t like the style of life. She just was unhappy. But you were born here, in Bay City. July 2, ’58, see yah. Yah.” He had a foreigner’s voice. Then he lapsed, looking out into the small patio. “Midafternoon.”

“You find out all kinds of things now maybe, huh?” Uta volunteered. “Did you ever know your birthday?”

“Sure she knows her birthday.”

“Birthtime, I mean.”

“No, I don’t think so. I have a birth certificate but I don’t think it has a time on it,” I said. “And your birthday is May 21, 1931, right?” His birthday was the same day as Yasir Arafat’s, even though Arafat’s was in 1929. In my wilder moments I’d let myself think they were the same person.

He shrugged. “I don’t have a birthday. Isn’t that funny. But you know in those days, Mayan, in Egypt, they didn’t have a doctor come and deliver a baby. They had a kind of traveling midwife, an itinerant. And I was the youngest of four children and one day I asked my mother when I was born and she couldn’t remember. Can you imagine that? She just didn’t know. They didn’t keep track of those things the same way they do here. And so next time the woman
came around, we asked her and she didn’t remember either so when I came to school here, to Columbia University, I just made it up.”

S
O
THE ONE FACT
I had from Jim Wynne didn’t even turn out to be true.

I
ASKED HIM ABOUT MY BIRTH
. I told him that my mother had always said I was in an incubator. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “It was a normal birth. ‘Huna London,’ I said, ‘Sheesh, Huna London.’ ” Then he just broke out and cried. “You know there’s not a day that went by when I didn’t think of you. And now when I’m getting older I thought what would happen if I died. You wouldn’t even know. I wouldn’t know how to find you.”

I cried a lot too and let him hold my hand in his. My hand was always wet from his tears. I noticed, though, that his hands weren’t mine either. They were small hands, boxy. I recognized my mother more and more in my own body.

I didn’t think it exactly then, but I wasn’t so hard to find. And why wasn’t he going to find me until he was dying? But he spoke well, in a way that didn’t suggest questions.