The Distant Land of My Father (48 page)

Over that next year, he eased himself into our lives. He was with us on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, on my birthday and Eve’s in January, and by spring he was something of a fixture. He watched the girls for me whenever we needed him, day or night, and he called several times a week, often at odd times—early in the morning when I wasn’t quite awake, late in the evening when everyone had wound down, at dinnertime, when the girls were tired and cranky and dinner the only important event. He never said hello or identified himself. He just started in with whatever he wanted to talk about. With Jack he talked politics and cars and sports and the economy. With me he just asked how the girls and I were, and he offered health advice. “How is everything over there?” he’d say, as though we lived much further away. When I called him and asked how he was, his answer was always the same: “Better since you called.”

After a few months of regular visits, he asked if he could do a little gardening. He didn’t have much of a yard at his place, he said, and the exercise would do him good. When I said yes, it became a weekly thing and we settled into a pattern: my father taking the bus from Bunker Hill to Huntington Drive, then walking the few blocks to our house, always appearing on our doorstep at around nine in the morning, an offering in the form of a bag of caramels in one hand, and a duffle bag holding his dirty laundry in the other. He’d work in the garden, Heather and Eve helping or hindering as the spirit moved them, then he’d finally come inside at around four in the afternoon. Once he’d showered, we’d sit at the kitchen table and have a cold beer together and talk.

He had opinions about everything. He worried about the riots in Little Rock, Mao’s visit to Moscow and Khrushchev’s to East Germany, the Russians’ success with Sputnik, and our failure with a satellite of our own. He followed polo, and spent most Sundays in February and March at Will Rogers Memorial Field on Sunset Boulevard, watching matches. He liked the horse races at Santa Anita as well, not for the betting, but for the pleasure of watching the horses, he said. He liked to go early in the morning and watch the horses work out. His favorite cars were Triumphs (for sports cars) and GM (for everything else), and he was not subtle about expressing his concerns over the Studebaker Parkview Wagon that Jack had bought. He tried to talk us into signing up for Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Book a Month Payment Plan, which allowed you to buy the entire set over two years at a reasonable monthly cost. “Those girls of yours will be needing it for school before you can blink,” he said. “You’d be smart to invest in it now, so you’re ready.” He got along easily with Jack, and he was careful to the point of vigilance about overstepping his bounds and our privacy. “Don’t want to wear out my welcome” was always his good-bye, and once he decided it was time to leave, there was no convincing him to stay.

He was just as careful about his own privacy, so much so that I knew very little about his life apart from us. I never saw where he lived; he said it was a little cramped and that once he’d cleared some things out, he’d have us over, but it never happened. Once he mentioned that he attended the Church of the Open Door, a nonsectarian church that met in the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, on South Hope, next to the library. He didn’t speak of friends, or how he managed to live—I knew he’d left Hong Kong with almost nothing. I knew he sold scrap metal only because he asked if he could sell some old pipes that Jack had stacked by the garbage after we’d had some plumbing repairs done. He never said just what he did at the Bradbury Building, either. I found that out myself.

One afternoon when I was downtown I stopped in to say hello, thinking I could surprise him. But when I looked at the building directory, I did not see my father’s name, and when I asked the guard in the lobby where his office was, the guard laughed.

“There’s no office, Miss,” he said. “Joe’s the night janitor around here. His shift starts at six
P.M.
” The guard looked at me with curiosity. “Is there a message?”

I opened my mouth to tell him there had been a mistake, and then I stopped because suddenly things made sense: my father’s silence about his work, his guardedness in conversation.

“No message,” I said, and I hoped the guard would not tell my father that a young woman had asked for him.

I watched my father more carefully after that. I saw that he always wore the same clothes when he gardened, and I saw how gratefully he accepted whatever I’d fixed for lunch. In our conversations, he often mentioned bargains he’d found—“Safeway’s got tomatoes on sale,” he’d tell me, “you should stock up, Anna.” Or potatoes or bananas or cereal or noodles, whatever was reduced.
That’s my father,
I’d thought, the eternal businessman, always on the lookout for a good deal. I’d figured that he was just a good shopper, the type whose day was made by saving a few dimes. I understood now: he could afford only what was on sale. But he never talked about needing anything, or money being tight, or not having enough. And I stopped asking.

Nor did he talk about the past. He never mentioned my mother, or Shanghai. If the conversation veered in any of those directions, he curtly changed the subject, making it clear that that was off-limits. I honored that preference, though it apparently didn’t apply to the girls. I sometimes overheard him telling them stories and describing places from my childhood.

“You would never have wanted to leave if you’d been in Shanghai then,” he told them one rainy afternoon. “You could go anywhere in the world from the Shanghai Harbor, you could start up any business, you could be anybody you wanted to. Nothing was impossible there.”

“Shanghai,” Eve said softly, and Heather, always the mimic, tried to copy her and managed to make a soft
shhh
sound, which made Eve laugh.

My grandmother said I was doing the right thing but that I should still be careful. I shouldn’t loan him money, she said, unless I didn’t need it back. I shouldn’t depend on him, I shouldn’t expect anything from him. I listened to her and hoped she would be wrong but I also braced myself for the awkwardness I would feel the first time he asked to borrow money, or the first time he didn’t come when he’d said he would.

Those things never happened. He never asked for money, he never let me down. He was as faithful as anyone I’d ever known, and when my grandmother told me to look carefully at who he was, what I saw was a changed man, a man whose presence calmed and cheered me. And in the end, I abandoned her warnings and let myself be reclaimed.

On a cool afternoon in March of 1959, I was putting groceries away when my father came into the kitchen. He’d worked outside, then showered, and he smelled of soap and aftershave. After showering he’d watched
Mr. Wizard
with the girls, a show he’d taught them to like, and I’d left them alone in the den, the three of them sitting close together on the sofa, all of them entranced. Eve was four, Heather was two and a half, and they were both crazy about my father. The three of them seemed to have their own little world. When Eve had begun to talk a few months before her second birthday, she shortened Grandpa to just Pop, and that became his name to them.

When he came into the kitchen, my father took two bottles of Schlitz from the refrigerator, opened them, and put one on the counter for me. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and took a long drink. I’d folded his clean laundry and left it on the table for him.

“You do too much for me,” he said. “You shouldn’t fold all those clothes. That’s what I was coming in here for.”

I laughed. “I can do laundry in my sleep,” I said. “Not to worry.” The sound of the girls’ laughter floated in from the den, a light, watery sound that I always wanted to capture. “How’s Mr. Wizard?” I asked.

My father shook his head. “Those two rascals of yours think he’s the real thing, all right.”

I nodded. “Did you know they’ve taken to calling you Mr. Wizard?”

He laughed, but I could see he was pleased. “Not this old know-nothing.”

“Yep,” I said. “They’ve told their friends that their Pop can make anything grow. They call you Wizard of the Garden. They think you know magic.”

My father took another drink of beer. “They’re smart ones, all right. They’re good girls, Anna.”

I was filling a canister with flour, and there was a seriousness in his voice that made me look at him. When I did, I found him watching me closely. “I have a favor to ask you,” he said.

I swallowed. Here it was, I thought, after all these years: the request for money my grandmother had warned me about. I wiped my floury hands on my black slacks and left smudged handprints on my thighs. Then I said, “Of course.”

My father laughed. “I know that tone of voice,” he said. “You’re thinking it’s money I want.”

“No,” I said, my voice high and fake. “Why—” I started, but he waved the rest of my question away.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “What I’m going to ask has nothing to do with money.”

He had a habit of leaving the two middle buttons of his shirt undone and using the shirt as a pocket, and he reached into it and took out a packet of papers, which he unfolded and smoothed on the kitchen table.

“It’s my will,” he said. “I’d like you to be executrix of my estate.” He laughed softly. “I use the word
estate
loosely. It just means that I’d like you to handle whatever I leave when I die.”

I abandoned the groceries I hadn’t gotten to yet and sat down at the table. “All right,” I said.

He slid a few stapled pages to me across the table and I began to read.

I, Joseph Schoene, residing in the County of Los Angeles, State of California, being of sound and disposing mind and memory and not acting under duress, menace, fraud, or undue influence of any person whosoever, do hereby make, publish, and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, hereby expressly revoking all other and former wills and codicils heretofore made by me. I hereby give, devise, and bequeath all of the rest, residue, and remainder of my estate of every kind or nature and wherever situated, including property over which I have power of appointment, to my only child, Anna Shoen Bradley. I hereby nominate and appoint her as Executrix of this, my Last Will and Testament, without bond required.

I tried to read quickly, partly because he was watching me, and partly because I did not want to dwell on it. But the last paragraph was hard to skim:

I do not want a pagan approach to burial. At long last, I am a believer. When my body has died, my soul will have left this earth. I have few friends, and no desire for a service. My personal preference, unless my daughter has a different notion, would be cremation with ashes scattered at sea.

When I looked up, I found him watching me carefully. I nodded, trying to tell him that I accepted his wishes, and then I took a good long drink of beer, hoping it would undo the knot in my stomach.

My father tapped the table four times. “Cheery stuff, eh?” He cleared his throat.

I nodded. Then I asked, “Is there something wrong with you?”

He laughed. “There’s plenty wrong with me.” I must have looked shocked, because he quickly said, “No, not like that. There’s plenty wrong up here”—he tapped his head—”but in here”—he tapped his chest—”I’m healthy as a horse.”

We were quiet for a moment. My father looked out the window, and his expression reminded me of the way he used to gaze at the skyline of Shanghai from the verandah in Hungjao, as though he were searching for something. “I’ve lived longer than I thought I would, all things considered, and maybe I’ll live to a hundred. But at this late stage of the game, I’ve learned that you never know. And I’ve made so many mistakes, and taken wrong turns just about every time I could.” He shook his head. “These papers aren’t about any big estate, and you won’t find yourself an heiress when I die. After all these years, I just want to do things right.” He looked down, and his voice was low. “I guess I’m trying to save face.”

I nodded. “You already have, in my eyes,” I said.

He looked startled for a moment, then he just looked relieved. He laughed softly and mussed my hair the way he did when I was a child, and I felt my cheeks redden from his affection.