The Lost Father (74 page)

During dinner we talked about food.

“I think the best restaurant in town is yours,” Uta said.

“I have a good chef,” he conceded. “See, the others can’t afford him. I stole him away from San Francisco.”

“The way he makes that salmon is, umph.” She shuddered in exactly the way I’d seen poodles shake, after immersion.

We’d already had champagne. Now we were drinking white wine from enormous long-stemmed goblets.

“We had quite an Arabic dinner last week,” Uta said.

“Do you like Arabic food, Mayan?” he said.

I shrugged. “I eat a lot of dates.”

It took them a long time to ask me how I found them. And the truth was, by then I didn’t feel like talking about it. It seemed too long and not that interesting. But they asked so I told them I’d had a detective. I said, too, that I’d talked to Dr. Geesie and Dr. Kemp in Montana.

“Oh, Duke Kemp. How is he? I should call him. He’s a nice guy.”

“Yah, he said if I ever found you I should ask you to call, he said he’d love to talk to you.”

“I should give him a call,” he said, “yah,” in an attenuated way that made me know he never would. It was like my shoes from Beirut.

“I think he’s alone, he has no kids. He’s sick too, he said.”

“He’s gay, I think, Duke Kemp. Uta, did you hear, she saw Duke Kemp. Yah I’m pretty sure he’s gay.”

I told them the little incidentals. I told my father about the woman in Madison from the alumni association.

“Dorothy Widmer?” he said. “No. I don’t remember that.”

And then I said that I’d checked marriage records. I said that I’d found his marriage record to a woman called Rilella, but that then I couldn’t find any Rilellas anywhere under the sun.

“That’s not your name, is it, Uta?”

“No, no, she’s Wells. She’s Uta Wells.”

“Of course I’m Uta Atassi now, but I was Uta Wells, yes.”

“What was that with Rilella?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it.”

“But it was definitely you. Because it had my mom listed as the previous marriage.”

“I don’t know, Mayan, it must be a mistake. Because I never heard of that name.”

That was that. He looked clear ahead, lifted his fish to his mouth, tasted.

“The lamb is very good,” Uta said.

I stuck with marriage. I told them the only Atassi in the California records was a Sahar Atassi, who was my age or a little younger, and married to a Diane Thayer. “I even wondered if you’d had more kids and he was my brother, but he listed his father as Tarik.” I poked him in the ribs, trying to be playful. So this is how you do it, I thought as I went along. This is how it works.

“Oh, you found Sagi! That’s my nephew. Sure. I was at his wedding,” he said, tapping his chest. “I was his witness. Uta, when we get home, we have to call the nephews. They will be so happy for me.”

“Oh, yes they will, John,” Uta said. “That’s where we were last weekend, down at Sagi’s and they made the most delicious Arabic meal.”

I could have sent away for that license and it would’ve had my father’s name on it. I smarted. But still, it wouldn’t have been easy to find him from that. It really wouldn’t have. I’d tried to track this Sagi and his wife, Diane Thayer. I hadn’t found anything on them.

“You know, Mayan, one of the nicest things that’s happened to me in the last years is my sister’s sons have come from Egypt. My brother-in-law came before he died and we got very close then at the end. And now his sons are here and I’ve helped them out, you know, with jobs and all, and we see each other pretty often, every other month or so.
The oldest one is a doctor down in Santa Barbara and the others are there this weekend because their mother is over from Egypt with the little sister. They’re trying to arrange a marriage for her with a guy in Kansas City. But I think that’s off now. But we’ll call them. Wait till we get home. We’ll call them.”

I didn’t tell them I’d been in Egypt. I don’t know why. I just didn’t want to. They seemed too normal. As if it were the most average thing in the world that we would be sitting there eating this fancy dinner with too many flavors on one thing and I would be telling them I’d combed every period of their lives and walked places they had lived and met people they knew and they just smiled and chewed and said, oh, how is he. I should call him. Yah, yah, my father said, gazing into his wine before tasting, as if what I was telling him made him think more of that time in his life with Duke Kemp or at Sagi’s wedding than it did of me finding him, spending hours in telephone booths, any of that. None of his questions was about me or my search. None of them at all. It was as if I’d happened to meet Duke Kemp at a dinner party that I was going to go to anyway.

I asked him, just blandly, if he’d been back to the Middle East. “Sure, sure I’ve been back a number of times, but I haven’t been there since 1975. Uta was there. I got Uta up on a camel. She’s got the picture of herself on the hump.”

He paid for dinner and I fumbled and offered to contribute, fool that I am.

W
HEN HE GOT BACK
to his town house, all he could think of was calling his nephews. He was a long time talking in Arabic. “Would you like to say hello to your cousins, honey?” he said, handing me the phone.

They sounded much more foreign than he did, and we only talked a minute. There was nothing to say. They said how much they wanted to meet me. “Me too,” I said right away. I told Sagi about finding his marriage license but that he wasn’t at that address anymore.

“I know,” he said, “we moved. But if you would have written me a letter I would have gotten it.” That stunned me. I put down the phone.

“I’ll bet they all drive up,” he said, hitting his knee.

Uta yawned. “So Uta, darling, why don’t you go to bed and I’m going to make a pot of coffee and have a long talk with my daughter.”

She didn’t want to go. She minced while he plugged in the coffee maker and took out the can of coffee from the refrigerator. She stalled halfway up the stairs. “Don’t be too long, honey,” she said, “because you know how I can’t sleep without you there in your spot.”

He brought the pot of coffee to a TV tray in the living room. He drank coffee black. I had to ask for milk.

“Now I am going to tell you the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said. It became clear after a few hours of conversation that he was a man whose only intellectual activity for years had been reading the daily newspaper. “I am telling you because you are my daughter and I love you and because I really always loved you even though I did not know you and you didn’t know me.”

I wanted to stay awake and hear but I was sleepy. My mind was like one small animal, alert but frightened, in a corner of a huge cave. It was trying to see out of the large darkness to the light, straining.

“I thought if I died, you would not know.” His eyes wetted again. I felt moved by the sight of his sad, heavy-lidded eyes, but I also felt nagged by something I couldn’t quite identify. Perhaps it was the way he presented his emotions, the angle of their focus. He was so certain he was going to be the one to die.

He seemed to assume my sturdy, unimperiled existence somewhere else, and only wondered if I would be there to mourn his passing. And with my mother, our lives hadn’t been so safe.

“I thought that if I died, you would not know.” He repeated this as if it were the most profound thing in the world. And I suppose it was, for him. But if anything else happened I wouldn’t know either. And what would his dying mean if I hadn’t ever really known him? What about if I died?

“Are your parents alive?” I asked him although I already knew the answer. I knew he hadn’t even gone to his father’s funeral.

“No, not my father. But I saw him before he died. I spent time with him. In 1961.”

“What was that like?”

“It was a very structured relationship, very businesslike. My brother-in-law, Tarik, he was forty years old and he would go and kiss my father’s hand every morning and put it on his forehead.”

“What was your mother like?”

“I never liked my mother. She was a troublemaker. An opportunist. But she was a survivor. She had to do what she had to do to survive.
My father was not an easy man to be married to. He might have slapped her. She had no rights. When you married a man like that over there you’re stuck. Two or three times he beat her. It was civilized slavery, really. He had three daughters and one son and we were chattel. He owned us.

“But I still love my dad. I don’t know why. I still dream about him years after he died. Basically he was a giver. As harsh as he was. When the holy Ramadan came on, he took us out to get everybody new suits and new shoes. Whatever. And he didn’t care about any of that for himself. Shoes or clothes. But he was a stubborn guy.

“Before Nasser took over, Mayan, he was a multi-multi-millionaire. We had all kinds of land, buildings. And he had all his money in the banks. And in the late fifties when I was studying at the American University in Beirut and I saw what was happening, I tried to tell him, get it out, move it to Switzerland, and he said, No, they wouldn’t dare do that.

“And in 1961, two-thirds of it was gone. They left us some buildings. A little land. But one day he was worth fifteen, twenty millon, the next day half a million. It was tragic. It killed him. A year later he died.”

I shrugged. I could hardly pity them. I grew up poor. And two thirds of fifteen million gone was not half a million. But it never would have been my money anyway.

“Didn’t Nasser make life better for the peasants, though?”

“Yes, he did, and I am in agreement with what he did. I don’t think it is fair for one guy to own the destinies of all these peasants. As a child my father would take me to the village. He was like God. He would inspect their work. If he didn’t like it, he’d slap them, he’d beat the shit out of them. And they’d be on their knees begging, Oh master, tomorrow I’ll do better. At the same time, he worked all his life. But I was happy when Nasser took over the land and all. When I was young I spent too much.”

Not on me, I was thinking. Not on us. We were living on very little, my mom and I.

“I went to the American University in Beirut. And I always was fascinated by America, American things. So after I graduated I came to study at Columbia University. I lived at 116th, I forget what the cross street was, I rented a room from an English professor. And I worked part-time at a store on Madison Avenue called Countess Mara. They sold ties.”

The ties. The Uncle was right. I pinched the inside of my hand to remember to ask him about the Uncle.

“I wrapped the packages for Christmas. And for Christmas, they gave each employee a turkey. And I took mine home and gave it to the English professor’s wife. And she was just delighted and said, ‘Well, come back on Christmas day and I’ll cook it for dinner.’

“And the day of Christmas eve, they closed the store early in the afternoon and had a party for the salespeople and the wrappers and the administrative staff. And they had a very elegant party and I saw trays of red glasses and trays of white glasses. And this was my first year from Egypt and I was very innocent. I didn’t drink, I was a virgin, everything. So first I tried the white glass but that was too sour for me. And then I tried the red glass and that was sweet and I thought, okay, that’s for me. They were Martinis and Manhattans. And all I know is that a couple hours later, I was the life of the party. I was telling stories and people were laughing. And I don’t know how, a couple hours after that I managed to get to the subway. And this was during the Korean War, I remember because a GI in uniform helped me. He must have seen that I was drunk and he asked me where I was going and he told me he’d tell me when I should get off.

“And I got to my room where I lived and I went to sleep and when I woke up it was the day after Christmas. I missed the whole Christmas and the turkey altogether. And to this day, I won’t touch a Manhattan. Just the taste of it makes me sick. To this day.”

I said, “I met Salimiddin when I was trying to find you.”

“That right? Is he still there? He must be pretty old by now.”

“Yeah, he was, I think.”

“That right? He helped me a little when I first came to New York. He would take me to good restaurants and whatever club was the hot place then and show me where to go and how to order. You know, I didn’t know anything about Western life.”

We were still for a moment. “He never made ambassador and that was his dream. He wanted to attend parties at the White House and rub shoulders with the Kennedys and date those women. He was a second secretary but he didn’t live like a second secretary. He always had a Porsche and the most stylish clothes, always a girl on each arm. I don’t think he did much work. And he didn’t do what you have to do to make people like him. Even when my cousin Mahmoud was Minister of Foreign Affairs, Salimiddin came to me and said, Now is my moment, please ask Mahmoud. And I went to Mahmoud and
asked him on my behalf, but even Mahmoud wouldn’t do it. Those were the days when the ministry was made of families, you know. They needed an Atassi to put up for the minister. So Mahmoud got it.

“I almost married Salimiddin’s sister. She even wrote and asked him. He said, he’s crazy but if you want to, okay, go ahead. But she was unattractive. She was short and her face was ugly. Yah. Salimiddin is very smart and all but he’s a little stiff. He gave the worst talk when I brought him to Madison. And I warned him, I said, Salimiddin, you’ve got to bring them in, you’ve got to say something to get the audience interested. I’d been building him up as a delegate, here he was second secretary or something.”

“What was his subject?”

“Trusteeship in these small African countries. And he went on with the most academic, dry talk you can ever imagine for over an hour.

“But that is when I met your mom. I was president of the International Club and she came that night to hear Salimiddin speak. I met her afterward, at the reception. She was a gorgeous girl full of energy, full of life. I was madly in love with her.”

“I kept pestering him to find you. He was going to the Middle East and he was supposed to check around there, but he never called me back. And I called him a few times.” Like seventy.