The Lost Father (24 page)

O
N ONE OF HER TRIPS
, my mother bought fancy sailor suits, one for Ben and one for me. Mine was a dress and his was shorts, both were shiny white-and-blue material with satin ribbons. We wore them with new socks and white shoes, first at Easter and then again one Saturday morning in April. She took us to Boss’s Tobacco and Magazine Shop. The square store felt strange and downtown. It was a glass cube with nickel metal over the doors and windows. The glass looked greenish from the outside, where everything told spring, the blossoms heavy, vibrating their stiff branches, clouds moving in the sky. Inside, it smelled old from tobacco and heating oil. This was the most male place I knew. A machine revolved, displaying pipes and lighters and cigarette holders and cases that never ceased to draw our hands to the glass. Our close breath clouded it, obscuring the very things we wanted to see. The man behind the counter gave us pipe cleaners to amuse ourselves. We sat on stools at his counter, eating pie and fooling, making figures with the colored pipe cleaners. My mother stood in her raincoat by the magazine rack and browsed.

That was when she met Mrs. Briggs. The way we always heard the story later, Mrs. Briggs saw us in our sailor suits, just children fidgeting on the stools, and she took out a crumpled handkerchief and started crying. And this pealing of female tears changed Boss’s. She had just been to the doctor’s office and found out she couldn’t have more children. Emily would never have any brother or sister.

Bald Bruce Nadel moved briskly behind the counter, wiping. My mother approached Mrs. Briggs and they talked. The Briggses were people we would not ordinarily know. They were rich; everything kept them separate. They owned thick-walled cars, they lived on a hill in a big house architects had come from Chicago to build, they looked neat and quiet and normally there was no excuse to get near them. I had seen them before in clothes like you only saw in movies: long
dresses and fur stoles. Doc Briggs owned the largest department store in Racine, called Briggs’s.

“You could give them so many advantages that I can’t,” my mother remembered saying.

“I need some time to straighten myself out and get
me
better” is what Mrs. Briggs repeated to Emily, years later, what she never forgot my mother saying.

We still knew nothing. The lady stopped her crying and dabbed at her face with a striped handkerchief. We toyed with our pie crusts; the banana cream insides all eaten, we pushed against the counter wall with our feet, making our stool tops spin.

“Kids, sit still,” my mother said and I remember how piercing sharp the order.

She must have worried that we’d change the Briggses’ minds.

Later, when we were alone, my mother told me I would move in with the Briggses.

“For how long?” I asked.

“Just for now,” she said. “I’ve got to get away for a little and then I’ll come back for you and we’ll move somewhere else and find a house for the two of us. But for a while, instead of just living with Gramma, who’s getting old and can’t do so much anymore, you can stay at the Briggses’. And they’ll give you a nice bedroom with a canopy bed, would you like that?”

I nodded yes I would like that.

She continued. “And they’ll get you nice clothes from their store and they have a piano, I bet if you ask her someday, just say I’d love to learn how to play, they’d arrange piano lessons. You wait and see. Really, they can give you anything you want, honey. Just think, you won’t have to pay for things in Briggs’s.”

I was supposed to get to know Emily so my mother could be friends with the parents. I knew that. And I would try. Things like that did seem easier for me. My mother always told me it was because I was a kid.

In school, I wandered during lunch to the orchestra room, slipped around black music stands to the piano. When I looked at a piano, so ordered and tensely ready, it seemed it would just play. It was a shock—those first few sounds. I didn’t know how, I really didn’t. Notes from my random fingers plinked thin and odd in corners of the room. I lifted my hands up, thinking I’d start again, this time some music would just … go. Footsteps voiced into the room. I stilled,
caught. Eli Timber, the district music teacher, slid down on the bench next to me. Uh-oh. Now I’d be in trouble.

“So you’ve discovered a musical calling?” He talked like that.

“No,” I said. I was shy then when men talked to me. “I don’t know.”

“But would you like to learn anyway?”

I nodded yes that I would. I couldn’t think of what to say.

“Do you have a piano at home to practice on?”

“No, but I might have soon.”

He put my hands on top of his hands the way my father, when I was a little girl, danced with my feet on top of his feet. He’d pull me by the arms so I went generally in the right direction. My hands over his like that, Eli Timber began to play something I remember and have been looking for ever since.

“So you and your mom might move and then she might buy a piano? You can rent one, you know.”

“No.”

He kept playing. It was faint, like people going away through a woods of all birches rising from a single plane. “No? So. How does moving help the practice problem? Because, Ann, in music, practice is everything.” Then he ran a flourish up the keys, leaving my hands behind.

“I mean, I might move. Not my whole family.”

“By yourself?”

I nodded. “And where I’ll move they already have a piano. I’m probably going to live with the Briggses.” As soon as I said that I thought I shouldn’t have, I was telling a secret. “But I’m not supposed to tell.”

Everyone knew who Briggses were.

“Well, and is that good, moving in with the Briggses?”

“Yes,” I said. But it made me nervous that he asked. He should know. “I’ll get my own canopy bed.”

For three months I went to the orchestra room during lunchtime and afternoon recess. Eli taught me scales.

When he wasn’t there, I made up a song of my own. My father had wanted to be a songwriter. It galled my mother. She wanted him to be world famous or at least make money.

My song went, When you are/All alone/And you’re so unhap-py/You just sing this lit-tle song/And try and make it snappy.

But it turned out the Briggses wanted a boy. They wanted Ben, not
me. And when my mother mentioned the idea to her sister, Carol of course said no and started another family fight and the Briggses just left it that we kids should all be friends. That was how Emily and I first got to know each other. Years later, Emily fell in love with Ben with a straight, steady concentration no one had ever seen before in her.

It didn’t turn out so bad after all, my mother said. “You’re getting in good with Emily, she can introduce you to a lot of the nicest kids, you just watch, when you’re older they’ll probably get you invited to Cotillion.” We’d read about Cotillion in
White Gloves and Party Manners
. Marion Werth directed the Racine Cotillion, with Eli Timber, in the old Elks Club the first Friday of every month. The girls wore fancy dresses and gloves and there were little pretty refreshments the boys delivered to you on a napkin. Sounded good to me.

O
UR TRIANGLE OF
friendship broke up after Emily grew her hair back in. She wanted to be a girl again. After I talked her into refusing for three years, she finally said yes to Cotillion. She wanted my cousin Ben to go too. She felt all she’d ever known for him. Even now, I don’t understand why he didn’t like her. Ben never cared about rich girls. I felt faintly responsible, though I know that was not exactly right either. But if he’d been able to bring more good out of himself for her, some allowance, it would have made all our lives better—his, mine and Mai linn’s too. Emily’s parents watched her with a long love bent for protection. All of their consternation settled on the simple fact that the one thing they could not do was to make Ben look at her and act towards her the way she wanted. This was only a sixth-grade crush. But Mrs. Briggs called my aunt Carol and when Carol apologetically told her she didn’t know what she could do and invited Mrs. Briggs to her bridge club, Mrs. Briggs resorted to my mother. My mother talked to Ben. That only made it worse. Then Emily begged her parents, sobbing face down, slanted on her bed one Saturday afternoon, legs swim-kicking the pillows, to leave him alone. Helpless, they instead yielded to her greedy wish to remove every obstacle in her way. First and most difficult, there was me. But the Briggses shied around me, always. I was Ben’s cousin, I could see him whenever I wanted. The only thing they took away from me that I knew of was that piano practice. That and I didn’t get invited to Cotillion. Mai
linn proved to be an easier problem. Mai linn was just a stem-thin girl, the first one Ben ever wanted to touch. When she found out they were going together, Emily went to bed for five days.

I spent time in the house on the hill but the Briggses never felt to me like family. Mai linn came closer to that than Emily. Mai linn lived next door to us with my aunt and uncle when she was eleven. She’d been with another family in Racine and before that, the orphanage. The trouble was she came with a saxophone. My aunt Carol, try as she did, could not bear her practicing. We tried setting her up in the barn, and a few nights, I took her out there with the flashlight and she played under the one bare bulb and the sheets of moon through splinters in the old wood, but she felt afraid of mice and just empty darkness and so she left us.

But finally, it was Ben’s desire that delivered Mai linn to the Greyhound bus that took her to the foster home where she was never cared for. The Briggses saw Mai linn as the fever infecting their sturdy blond girl. And then Mrs. Briggs found out what Mai linn had made Emily do. Practicing for boys, Emily told her mother. We’ll never know but we all felt sure that Mrs. Briggs made scarved missionary visits to all the prospective good houses in Racine and warned the mothers, begging them, for her child’s sake, not to take in the Asian orphan. So by the time Eli Timber, in his odd straight jeans and small-collared shirt and wrong tie, knocked to implore the women, they stood warned and implacable.

They found her a foster home in Hebron, North Dakota. Eli Timber acted as her sponsor with the church. He tried to place her with a musical family in Racine first; he asked the Briggses, the way he’d tried, on my behalf, to convince them to let me come practice on their Düsseldorf grand piano every day after school, and both times they refused because of Emily.

We didn’t say anything, my grandmother and I. In a way it was always simple when people left. The night after Mai linn left, we were sitting at the kitchen table in our pajamas, spooning the rough ice cream from a square box, and my grandmother said, “I suppose sometimes you wish you were over there in that fancy house on the hill too.”

“No I don’t, Gramma,” I said. I never did.

E
MILY TRIED
to take solace from the future. She was sobbing on her bed, and my mother and her mother sat down over her. “You watch,” my mother told her, “he likes her now, but when he’s older he’ll go for girls more your type. You wait and see.”

I was sitting in a chair in the corner. My mother was doing this to get in good with the Briggses. I just waited, my hands on the chair arms. “She’s a real cute child, sure, but she won’t grow. She’ll be short when she’s an adult and that little face will just get rounder. And once you cut that hair off, she’d be nothing. A little chipmunk. Really, you’re much prettier, Emily Ann.”

“Yes, look at how pretty you were even without the hair.” Mrs. Briggs ran a finger along her daughter’s widow’s peak. She was glad the hair was back.

Emily stilled on the bed. She rubbed her eyes and tried to think of Mai linn as a dull college student, maybe not even a college student because she was an orphan and who would pay? Even then Emily knew to take for granted that her father owned shares of the
Press Gazette
and the Fort Howard Paper Mill. She bittered her life for what she didn’t have but she already believed to the bottom of herself that she deserved all she had been randomly born with. She tried to picture Mai linn older: round-faced, four-eyed, unpopular. Average.

A new gale of sobs winded Emily. “It’s good to be short, all the popular girls are short!”

“Now it is, but it won’t always be,” Mrs. Briggs promised, glancing down the length of her own leg. This exasperated her. She had always been long-boned, light-skinned. That was how she’d become Mrs. Briggs.

“You don’t know anything, Mom.”

“No, honey, really,” my mother said, pushing herself in. But no matter how hard she tried, Emily never liked her.

Mr. Briggs stood at the bottom of the stairs yelling. “Emily. Get down here this minute. Emily, come here.”

“I don’t want to,” Emily mumbled.

“Emily Mae, I’m going to count to ten. One, two, three—”

She ran down with a huff and Mr. Briggs took her off in the car to buy her the ruby and pearl ring she still has.

My mother and Mrs. Briggs ought to have taken a different course in consoling her. There were better things to teach a child than to wait. Because the envied never go away. They only change faces and
bodies, names, fan into multiples, so the future becomes an ever expanding staircase of them. You can wait your whole life for someone to come and for the others to go away.