The Lost Father (17 page)

And everything else I did, every subject in school, anything I concentrated on, that became a way to know him. This is a quality of discipline—it will subject any practice to its rules and turn them into prayer.

I was still in medical school, but barely. I went to classes, I tried to memorize. But I was behind. I didn’t go to my study groups, didn’t do anything.

I had this secret life about to begin—and I was happy. That is the only way I’d ever lived. I’d never been so what I did every day was the point. People like that with their normal ambitions seemed so plain to me, like drills. Jobs, school … I was drawn to people who did them but always gave their best to something else hidden and invisible.

I suppose that is what my parents did. My mother’s jobs were never really jobs, they were what she clunked out to do every day for a paycheck, skimping out early afternoons, the files settled in her cradled arms, guilt’s assuagement, the paycheck a means to dinners, running butter and sour cream on potatoes, and dresses like dream, filmy things we wanted and couldn’t afford that wouldn’t last anyway but we couldn’t get out of our minds until we possessed them.

B
Y WEEK FIVE
I said I needed to go over everything we knew and didn’t know.

“Mayan, for what we’re paying these guys they’re gonna do the checks on their own sweet time. I’ll call you the minute I know anything. Period.”

Meanwhile, things were going on at school that I should have been doing. There was a party at somebody’s house, after midterms. I stayed until eleven-thirty. The next day when I came home, a guy called me and said, “Hi, this is Jordan David. Remember me? I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner some night.”

It was a big party. I didn’t know which one he was.

At work in the hospital and in my apartment, I grabbed the phone after the first ring. I always expected it to be the detective, with news. So far the answer to everything was Nope.

I hated phones. They were one of the things like airplanes I was convinced were ruining life. They were made to save time and cure distance but did the opposite, only teasing, the way the mirage of food and water must be in the desert.

And I spent too many of my nights on the phone. Most of my friends were far away. I still didn’t really feel like I lived in the East. I said, all the time, that after this was done I’d move back. I promised that on the telephone to people at two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning, the TV sounds from my upstairs neighbor filtering down. Now I wonder what I could have done in my life then if I’d only been paying attention.

I walked to school, dumb and used in the morning from too little, vivid sleep. All my dreams happened in dark red. A flier rasped at my feet. I passed an empty school yard, then just a lot; even here there was unused land, you felt the value drop in Harlem from the peace of the sky, the feel of the side streets. If you are here you will stay slowly. Time is not for you until the end.

T
HE DETECTIVE
had definitely become like a lover. He was sick of me. I begged. I called him from a pay phone at the library. I cared and he didn’t. He hadn’t returned my messages for days.

Then one night taking an old woman’s pulse, counting, they paged me and it was him, excited again, pleased with himself. He had that bouncing-on-his-chair sound. “Listen, we got a lot of stuff on your father. We’re typing up a report right now, I’m gonna send it to you.” My heart stilled when I heard that and then it started again fast and regular like a small bird just held in the palm, after hysterical flight.

“Send me a report? Forget it! I want to see you today. How about dinner?”

“Wha, tonight? I dunno if I can do it.”

I had plans that night too. I had a date with the guy from the party, whoever he was. But I knew if I let the detective off the phone without a promise, I might never get him again.

“Listen, Jim, I just want to sit down with you and hear what you’ve found and that way I can ask questions if I have them and we won’t waste a week in the back and forth.”

“Hold on a second, lemme see where I am.” I held on. He was gone a long time. Two orderlies passed, pushing IVs, in the slow, regular pace of early evening. Hospital time. “Awright, well, I gotta be in Manhattan for a seven o’clock meeting, that’ll go on, I don’t know two hours, maybe longer. So it’s gotta be late, you see what I’m sayin’?”

“Fine.”

I knew I should have named a place, but I really couldn’t think of one. My insisting was just bluster. I would have perfectly accepted a no. It’s what I expected really. “Where do you want to meet? I should know a good place, but I’m in the library all the time, I don’t even …”

I was working through my closet. I tended to keep an outfit four or five years and just wear it every time I needed dressy. But he’d already seen the one. “The dress,” a guy at school had said, lifting my sleeve between his fingers. I’d been surprised to hear it cast in a dowdy way. It had been fine just a year ago. It was the same. Nothing about it had changed.

My mother once shook her head badly and screamed, “How can you do this to me! I only see you once a year, can’t you just look nice once and let me be proud of you?”

That time I’d wheeled back on her and yelled. “You bought this for me! You bought this for me three years ago and you loved it then!”

“Then! Honey, that was three years ago. And you’re not twenty-five anymore.”

“L
EMME SEE
,” Jim Wynne was saying, “I’m gonna be midtown, meet me at a place called Polanciani’s—on, what’s, damnit all. Tina,” he screamed, “where’s the Italian place with the red booths that I like? Awright. Forty-five, between Seventh and Eighth, you got that? Nine o’clock.”

The two plastic trays on the cart outside Emory’s room were lukewarm now. I lifted one. The potato dish with bits of hamburger clinging. Thursday. I felt bad for letting them cool and hurried to Emory’s room. I still took both trays. If I didn’t eat, it’d be a change for us. I could skip food tomorrow. I had to call that guy too and cancel our date. If I even had his number. But not now.

The toothpick factory rose under the window. He’d rebuilt and changed the place I’d bumped. Cardboard boxes lined the room, a pile of newspapers stacked next to the door. Emory had to move. A diagnosis of periocarditis allowed nine weeks in the hospital. He had been there eight. After that, they decided Emory was okay. Or okay enough to let out. We’d prescribe prednisone for when he got out. It cost too much money to keep a person here.

I kept imagining a safe place, one room, a small bed in the corner, regular meals on a plain wood table and Emory left free to work and roam the grounds, grounds like the ones at the Belgian monastery back home in Racine. The monastery had tiny rooms, just a bed and a dresser. It had rolls of land, going from the top of the hill down to the river. They had lawns and gardens and a vineyard. It all had that quiet static feel of private, almost unoccupied land. The place was nearly empty now. There were old men and a few young boys who were studying to enter the order. There were more flat white stones in the graveyard under the ash trees. They rented out rooms to people like me for seventeen dollars a night.

That was the kind of place I’d always wished for for my mother. A place in the country, almost anywhere, it didn’t have to be beautiful in a spectacular way. Let the rich keep the beaches, this could be plain land, glory would come not from heights or size or jagged contrast but just the sky. Trees would grow there, an uneven orchard, land bound in beyond sight with a solid wood fence and old gates. Institutions exist to give adults childhoods, the ones who needed them now. Everyone would have a clean room where they were allowed their own few things. A chair brought from home, a few pictures on the wall, my mother’s hairbrush, Emory’s shirt that he works in hanging on a peg, an old backpack sagging against the corner. And food served by an ample older woman with a regular eye towards kindness, who refused any seasonings even with the good kitchen garden just outside, and went by the day and recipe so that nothing was ever unknown and new except the sky.

Emory’s foot was tapping. “Makin’ me leave. To stay, I gotta do something else. Find something bad enough to get in somewhere for a while, but nothing so that I’ll suffer. No place low.”

“No.”

“I’ve got a record, couldn’t get worse.”

“Sure could.”

I was sitting on the bed, he was at his desk, twining string around his hands. This was more my life than the date I was supposed to be having. Dating never seemed true. I mean I wanted it, but I never had the right kind of time. Either I fell in love and that was enough to darken out everything else or I felt like I was lying. I always had something big in the front of my life that I couldn’t tell the guy. Those nights when he told you his interests and you told him yours, they made me feel less where I was than just staying at my job or going home. Or calling a friend far away. And there was always the movies.

“There is no nice place to go, Emory. And then you’d lose all control.”

“I know.”

Emory had two arrests, on five counts, but no convictions. His crimes were simple thefts. He’d once worked in a large art supply store where he’d been caught stealing. When he was a school janitor, he was arrested for taking items, not of material but sentimental, even intimate, value from teachers’ and administrators’ desks and, in a few cases, students’ lockers. The largest object stolen was a child’s rain slicker and black buckle-up galoshes. A letter was removed from a teacher’s desk, a small mirror from the principal’s secretary, drawings were ripped out of students’ notebooks. In both cases, the judge dropped the charges.

In Emory’s room, amidst the clutter, both of us picking at food on the trays, we were used to each other. It was like setting out for a long walk, the same road every time, familiar gravel, the path winding to dirt under a lane of trees. The sun set at different times, the sky lifted and fell, weather changed. I took out the needle and vials for blood, the stethoscope, his chart. We knew each other now. I no longer felt frightened before I went in to see Emory that nothing would start, it was as if we both knew our time and meeting place by the rusty gate, we swung the heavy thing open and with our hands clumsy in our pockets we just went.

I ate both our desserts. The trays were empty when I carried them
out again. Then I ran to the fifth-floor bathroom. It was a room where only one light worked, I didn’t know how long the other’d been broken, a mirror hung over the old porcelain sink that had the bulbous lines and taperings of my grandmother’s kitchen mangle. I looked in the mirror. Oh. Mirrors always disappointed me in myself. Tonight, again, I wasn’t going to look very good. I didn’t have time to go home and try to change myself. I didn’t have the right things anyway. Just the one pair of golden shoes. I always had one element but that was never enough to do much.

I used to think I’d always lose. Anywhere with other women. So I’d not try. That way it might seem like I didn’t care. And that, maybe, if I had tried, just maybe, I could have shined too.

But in other people, in Emory, the thing I could love was only their effort, the visible hub of want. Those toothpick structures. The awkward, the failed, the overardent.

Once in college, Stevie Howard and I went to dinner at the Moonie House. After supper, we sat in a room with folding chairs. Everybody there did something. Three girls with thin long hair played guitar and sang. Somebody read a poem. All the others told them how good they were. People clapped, whistled, honked. We decided on the walk home that was the worst way to control someone. Was to make them confident in virtues they didn’t have because then they always had to come back to you.

I was sure—with looks—I’d be the fool.

J
IM
W
YNNE’S RESTAURANT
felt right, high red leather booths stained with use, cracked so the cushion enclosed you when you sat down on it. The place smelled of oil. The menu, written in tiny fancy script, plotted on for two feet. I’d been on time, my hair fixed up the best it would, lipstick, mascara and eye shadow. A touch of perfume from a sampler. Once, Emily Briggs led Mai linn and me through a Chicago department store and we stopped at the ground floor counters and asked for samplers of their best perfume. Emily knew all this stuff from Briggs’s, the department store her family owned in Racine. Mai linn still hit Philadelphia department stores twice a year. “Student budget,” she said.

He was still not there and it was nine-thirty. I looked at the name I’d written down on my hand and it was there, the same as on the
menu. I had a premonition he wasn’t going to come. I always felt like that. And then he was slipping in the booth, no apology, saying, “That guy will give you one headache, ’sa maniac. Waiter, we’ve gotta order in a hurry, I need a drink, you want anything? I’ll have Scotch, better make it double, and a plate of your pasta, whad’ya have tonight?”

“How about the Matriciana?”

“Fine. Make it wet.”

“I’ll have the same thing, please. And a vodka.”

A little candle flame wavered on the table and the waiter produced bread and our drinks, and this was pretty much the way I’d imagined, dark, like a date. The liquor helped. It seemed easier to smile.

“We made a lot a progress here,” he said, opening the briefcase on his lap and taking out a manila file. “There was a woman who really dug for us out there at Wisconsin, she was just great, she remembered your father and she really went way out, a woman called, what’s her name, a Dorothy Widmer.”

I had to rummage in my backpack for a pen, thinking W-I-D-M-E-R. I wrote this name down on the scallop-edged paper place mat. I thought it might be important to me. Later.

“Awright, there’s a solid record of him in Wisconsin. He was at the university, there in Madison, in the early fifties, first as a student, and then he taught. In December ’59, he got offers from BU and MIT and Michigan State. And he took the job at Michigan State. And we got a birthdate. May 21, 1931.”

I wrote that down, all of it exactly. That was my money’s worth. May 21, 1931. A trinket. My father’s birthday.