The Distant Land of My Father (45 page)

I stared hard at my hands and pulled my veil further over my face. I could not look at him, and so I sat in silence until I was sure he was gone, knowing that I was a coward and a liar, and certain I could never forgive him.

To those who attended my mother’s Rosary and funeral Mass, I suppose I was my mother’s daughter, perfectly composed. But what appeared as composure was simply denial. I floated through it all, through every part of the official observances of my mother’s death, telling myself it wasn’t real and working hard at not thinking about what was happening. The viewing and Rosary on Wednesday night, the funeral Mass on Thursday morning, and afterward the walk out of the church behind the casket, the drive to the cemetery behind the hearse and the walk through thick grass to the plot, the priest’s quiet graveside prayers, the last condolences of friends afterward—all of it was a blur, dreamlike and indistinct.

So that when it was finally time to leave the grave—to really say good-bye—I didn’t want to go.
As long as I’m here,
I thought,
she won’t be buried, and it won’t have really happened.
And so I lingered at the curb near the Cadillac that was to take my grandmother and Jack and me home, perhaps forty feet from the grave, talking with the few friends who remained and working at keeping them there. I held Jack’s hand tightly and thanked the priest, I talked with my grandmother about anything I could think of and ignored the seriousness and exhaustion in her eyes, and I just kept thinking,
Don’t go.
When I felt a hand on my shoulder, I turned eagerly, ready for more distraction, and I found myself facing my father.

For a long moment, we just stared at each other. His eyes were even bluer than I had remembered, and his hair was more white than blond. He wore what he’d worn the day before—white shirt and blue tie, navy blue blazer, gray slacks—and I saw that he was heavier, and that he’d aged. But I would have known him a mile away.

It was clear that he was waiting for me to speak, but I couldn’t, from stubbornness or anger or awkwardness or grief, or maybe all of them at once. I could only stare, and wait for him to say something.

“Anna,” he said finally. “I’m so sorry.” The anguish in his face was plain.

I nodded, and fell back on good manners. “Thank you for coming,” I said, and I hated the falseness in my voice.

He shifted his weight and looked beyond me, clearly uncomfortable. “Is it all right if I say good-bye?”

I nodded mechanically, and he turned and began walking toward the grave.

I followed him, I don’t know why—some sense of propriety, the need to make sure he did nothing wrong, I don’t know, but I went with him. When he reached the grave, he stood for a moment and took a deep breath. “I was so foolish,” he whispered, and though I wasn’t certain he was talking to me, I nodded. It was a sentiment I shared.

The casket had been lowered into the freshly dug grave, and a large sheet of plywood covered the opening. My father leaned down and took a handful of earth, then held the plywood back and dropped the earth on the casket. He whispered,
“Tsaichien”
—good-bye—and then he stood and wiped his hands on his pants, and he turned to leave.

I think it was the sound, the barely heard softness of a handful of dirt falling on the casket lid, that made something come loose inside of me. I caught my breath, and he looked at me anxiously, afraid he’d done something wrong. I shook my head, trying to tell him I was all right, but I started to cry and it was clear that I wasn’t all right at all. Without hesitating, he took me in his arms and held me close. A part of me worried that people were watching and that I was causing a scene. But then I breathed in the scent of Old Spice and cigars and something like sandalwood, and as I felt something inside give way, I let myself be comforted by my father.

new moon

IN HER WILL
, my mother left me the small bungalow on Bucknell along with most of her estate. While the inheritance didn’t make Jack and me rich, it did make us more comfortable, and in May, when we moved into my mother’s house, it was as though we let our breath out a little. During our almost two years of marriage, Jack had taken just about every odd job he could find on weekends and after school, anything to bring in some extra cash. After my mother’s death, those odd jobs stopped. That was her greatest gift to me: the freedom she gave Jack.

Moving into the bungalow was a bittersweet experience, a home-coming and a good-bye. Those first few evenings, after long days of unpacking boxes and trying to keep Eve entertained in the process, Jack and I would sit on the patio drinking cheap Chianti from juice glasses, holding Eve and listening to the cooing noises she made when she was happy. The garden was wild again and the scent of jasmine and gardenias seemed to almost bring my mother to life.

I missed her more than I could have imagined. During the winter and spring we’d spent together, she’d become my friend and confidante, and we saw each other or talked on the phone every day. Underneath our friendship was the bond of my father, for she alone understood how I felt. He was the secret we rarely spoke of, the fact that was always there.

With her death, a part of my life just disappeared. Many times a day, I picked up the phone and put it down again, remembering too late. Over and over, I thought to tell her something, or ask her something, or see if she’d like to do something, and over and over, I reminded myself that she was gone—a fact that never made any sense—and the dull ache inside me would start up again.

As the days grew longer over that spring and summer, so did my grief. I had expected it to lessen, but instead there was day after day after day where everything just hurt, one thing after another. Opening a closet hurt because of the scent of Chanel No. 5 that lingered there. Glancing out at the garden hurt because of the sight of the wisteria, growing wild and untamed in the back corner of the garden that my mother loved. Coming home hurt because of the memory of her watering the grass in capri pants and a cotton peasant blouse nearly twenty years earlier, when we’d first arrived from Shanghai. And in a strange way the days that didn’t hurt were worse, days that were just long and slow and flat with absence.

I came to feel like a spectator. I watched myself hold Eve each night and rock her to sleep. I watched myself make waffles or French toast or Dutch baby for breakfast, and I watched myself set the kitchen table and make dinner and clean up afterward. I watched myself fold laundry, read
Goodnight Moon
to Eve, pay the bills, and make love with my husband, and I watched myself cry when I couldn’t hold it in, all the while waiting for my life to feel familiar again.

When my father and I parted at my mother’s graveside, I assumed that it meant what most of my good-byes with him had meant: that I wouldn’t see him again for years, if ever. There was no talk of exchanging telephone numbers or addresses, there was no mention of getting together again. There was just an embrace and the feel of his solid chest against me, then a whispered “Good-bye, Anna.” And that was that.

So on a warm afternoon in June of 1955, two months after my mother’s death, I was caught off-guard at the sight of his handwriting as I leafed through the mail. I was glad Jack wasn’t home and that Eve was sleeping. I wanted to read whatever it was unobserved, even by my infant daughter. I put his letter aside until I’d looked at everything else. Then I ripped open the envelope and found a piece of folded-up yellow legal paper. I unfolded it and read what my father had thought important enough to write:

My dear Anna,

1. Hope you and yours are thriving. I think of you often.

2. All goes smoothly here. Chickens are laying well. Photo enclosed.

3. Have been drinking V8 juice for breakfast every day for two weeks. Energy is much better. You might try it.

4. The enclosed is for your Eve, with affection.
With love,
your Dad

My dad,
I thought, a phrase I’d never used. Inside the envelope was a black-and-white snapshot of my once-upon-a-time millionaire father surrounded by nine wire baskets of eggs. He wore a light-colored T-shirt and dark trousers, and he held a chicken, and he grinned at the camera as though this were really an occasion. Behind him stretched a long narrow structure that I guessed was a chicken coop. I stared at the picture for several moments, trying to absorb it, wondering who had taken it. And then I laughed. He looked so proud, so pleased with himself, surrounded by those hundreds of eggs. I wondered why he’d sent it. Was he hoping I’d feel sorry for him or proud of him? I couldn’t guess.

There was something else in the envelope: a small pink tissue-wrapped square, as hopeful as a promise. When I’d managed to peel off the tape and unfold the tissue paper, I found a small silver heart-shaped locket on a thin chain. It was clear that it was not new; it was worn and slightly tarnished, and the back of the locket was scratched. But it was lovely, delicate and almost lacy. I held it for a moment, then took it and the photo and put them in a Joyce shoe box on the top shelf of the linen closet, where I kept anything to do with my father. It was a meager collection: the few letters and telegrams that my mother had received from Shanghai, which I’d found after her death, newspaper and magazine clippings telling of his imprisonment and release by the Communists, and a birthday card he’d given me when I was a child.

I wrote a hurried postcard, more a reflex than a decision, the result of my grandmother’s twenty-year emphasis on the importance of prompt correspondence—that and the fact that I didn’t want to feel like I owed him anything. Actually I wrote four quick postcards, but the first three ended up in the trash. The first one sounded too formal. The second one sounded too friendly. The third sounded awkward. The fourth probably wasn’t much better, but I’d had enough:
Hi,
I started, because I hadn’t called him anything in so many years that nothing felt right.
Got your note and the gift for Eve. Thank you. We’re all fine. Glad things are going well for you. Best, Anna.
As I walked quickly to the mailbox on the corner, Eve in my arms and the postcard in the back pocket of my jeans, I wondered how many tries it had taken him to write his letter.

I didn’t mention the letter to Jack or my grandmother. It just seemed more trouble than it was worth. And I figured that that letter was a one-time thing, no reason to make a big deal out of it.

But a week later there was another letter, and the week after that there were two, and within a month it was clear that what I’d considered a one-time thing was becoming a regular correspondence, at least on his end. Though my father wasn’t a predictable writer, he was a frequent one. His letters came like the wind, in impetuous bursts. There’d be nothing for a week, and then three letters would come in a row, sometimes two in one day.

At the start, they were like the first one, not much more than a few handwritten lines on a legal pad, the items usually numbered. Later they were typewritten, the type uneven, mistakes X’d out, the style formal, even self-conscious, his comments limited to the baby’s health and well-being and whatever was in the news—George Meany and the AFL/CIO, President Eisenhower’s heart attack, the Warsaw Pact. He often enclosed clippings with his letters, with comments scrawled across the top:
This guy knows what he’s talking about,
or
Can you beat that?
But most often he simply said,
Please read.
There were other enclosures besides the clippings—coupons for baby food, advertisements for vitamins. There was only one constant to all of the letters.
My dear Anna
was how they always began. I did not respond.

Then a few days before Christmas a package arrived. I opened it angrily, thinking,
Now what does he want?,
a strange reaction since all he was doing was sending us gifts. Inside the box were a blue-and-red rep tie for Jack, a small stuffed bear for Eve, and a book for me—
Baby and Child Care
by Dr. Benjamin Spock. I stewed around the house for a while, cross with him for upping the ante, and cross with myself for my reaction. I realized I wouldn’t rest until I’d sent something to him in return, so the next day I put Eve in her pram and walked to the Fair Oaks Pharmacy, where I asked the clerk for a suggestion and on his recommendation spent two dollars and ten cents plus tax on the Kings Men Twosome, which contained a bottle of Kings Men After Shave Lotion and one of Thistle & Plaid Cologne. I went home and packaged them up and sent them off as fast as I could, my just-get-it-over-with intentions a far cry from any Christmas spirit. I wasn’t giving anything, really. I was just trying to get him off my mind, and off my conscience. All I wanted was for him to go away.