The Lost Father (3 page)

She worried about the window. My roommate, Emily, and I lived in two rooms. The front one had a nice window with a tree outside. Other windows in the building had security bars but I didn’t want them because of the tree. I’d pushed my desk there and I scattered birdseed on the wood to lure birds: bluejays, robins and once a cardinal, skitting the meal over my papers as I worked.

I borrowed a car and drove my grandmother home. By the time we turned onto the old small roads outside Racine, she began to forget me. She could still take care of herself, alone in the house, but that was all. She was glad enough to let me go. At home, I undressed her and she went right to sleep, on her back, her nose the highest place on her.

L
IVING IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
, in the apartment with one window and the man who watched TV upstairs, I had no tree. I turned the light on first thing in the morning. But the brick wall outside, the hot plate on the floor in the closet, even the ticking pattern of cockroaches, made me know what I was there for. I felt a weakness in my neck. The book lay open to page 485. I stayed up later than I could, marking with yellow highlights, slowly and more slowly turning the pages. Getting in turned out to be the least of it.

I had nine thousand dollars in the bank. My inheritance. The
money represented a third of the proceeds from a gasoline station my grandmother had owned. For twenty-four years after her husband died, my grandmother had dutifully driven out to the Mohawk Gasoline Station every month to collect the rent. I had often gone along and waited in the car. When we drove up slowly, the car coasting into a slot by the high red and white pumps, the manager would run out, fill up our tank and hand my grandmother an envelope. Sometimes he had a bottle of chocolate milk for me and a straw. She always paid him for the gasoline and she tried to pay him for the milk, too. My cousins and I often collected gifts we didn’t deserve because we were the owner’s children.

I kept the money in the Racine National Savings and Loan Bank. I owned a small cardboard accordion file, where I slotted the dark green passbook under S, for security. I kept all my valuables in that file, my grandfather’s watch and my mother’s costume jewelry from her college years. I hadn’t touched the money yet and I felt some satisfaction, knowing I had more than the numbers printed in blue, because there would be interest. Sometimes, I took the book out and just held it.

I’d managed major expenditures without touching that. It had been a question, when I moved, whether to come lightly and buy a futon in New York or to truck the family furniture, my desk and the old gray couch from the living room, the bed and green-and-white-striped bedspreads. If I didn’t keep the stuff, nobody else would. I saved the money from my job after college at the Wildlife Sanctuary. The salary had been small but I had no expenses. After my grandmother’s fourth stroke, my senior year, I’d moved back into the house on Guns Road.

It seemed an odd thing to do, moving half a houseful of furniture across the country, worrying over trucks, examining the arrived familiar things for nicks and scratches. That is the middle class: paying thousands of dollars trucking pieces of junk from one state to another. These were not antiques or anything. But I was from the West. I hadn’t planned on my New York apartment being so small. I was embarrassed and I didn’t want people to know I’d moved all these chairs here. There was something not young about me when I was young. I lived in an overfull room, hitting my hipbones on table corners.

Once when I was asleep, I heard a thump against my door just
before it was light. The sky was streaked with gray and blue and a strange pale cream. I hadn’t locked the door. I just forgot. That was another thing I couldn’t get in the habit of doing right. I never locked doors. I reached down the side of my platform, touched the rough wood I’d shipped from Wisconsin. I thought of the hinged door. There was no hinged door. It was my own fault and now I waited on my back in bed. My mother had always been terrified and locked everything six times, even car doors. I hated that. I wanted to feel careless. I tried to be.

Later, the upstairs neighbor’s water rushing thoroughly in the walls, I turned on the light and opened the door. A new phone book, the yellow pages, slumped against the wood. This seemed hilariously funny. Once before, in Madison, I’d been in bed and I heard something alive land through the window. It turned out to be a twelve-pound cat. So far in my life, for me, nothing that followed was as bad as that first gasp.

It was just morning. Nothing had happened. The old man upstairs had on his TV already and I forgave him. I even liked it. I made a strong cup of coffee and began flipping through the yellow pages. I turned to the D’s.
Detective Svce
wedged between
Dentists
and
Diamonds. “See
Investigators—Private,” the book said. I almost didn’t, but I did. All the boxed entries advertised MISSING PERSONS. After MATRIMONIAL, they seemed to be the main attraction. Some firms bragged about the numbers of unmarked cars, others claimed international service. A lot of them seemed to be run by ex–police lieutenants and ex-district attorneys. One ad said UNUSUAL CASES! DIFFICULT PROBLEMS and I turned the corner of the page back, thinking that was me, until I realized, with a funny feeling, that missing persons did not seem to be unusual.

Right then I started calling agencies. I didn’t really mean to. It was an odd thing to do when I was always behind with work and sleep stole my time. A luxury meant caramel flan and cafe con leche at the green-lit Cuban-Chinese diner on Amsterdam. That morning, spatters of unremitting rain ticked on the window. There is glamorous and dull rain. This was dull rain.

The first detective put me on hold. He transferred me to Missing Persons. When I told Missing Persons what I knew, a sure-sounding guy said he’d be wasting my time. “You just don’t have enough. It’s a big country,” he said.

The next one was a young woman. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” she said while I told my story. I didn’t like talking about him. It reminded me of being a girl, standing still while the interrogation slanted down on me.
Have you heard anything from your dad? Do you miss him?
I felt sullen. But of course, I’d called her. Still, I said as little as possible. I answered her questions with yeses and nos. Mostly nos.

“Twenty-five hundred,” she said. “That’s ballpark, you understand.”

The next place I called transferred me three times before anyone would listen. But then, the man seemed kind. He said hmmm, thoughtfully and somehow impersonal in a way I liked, as if this weren’t my life we were talking about, but something general. “Why don’t we schedule a meeting just so I can hear all the facts.”

I had to ask him first, how much that would cost.

“Oh, nothing yet,” he said.

He actually came to my apartment. I suppose his seeing where I lived helped me with the price. Hard as it might have been for other people to believe, I felt sort of proud of my apartment. It was the first place I’d had on my own. Sometimes I missed that: the refrigerator door yawning open in the other room, Emily clomping in, a cat draping silkily around my legs. Here, no matter how poor I was, I had furniture. I felt proud and ashamed of that, depending on how the other person seemed.

I don’t even remember the detective’s name. This bothers me, but when I think about him, even hard, I know I don’t know it. I’m pretty sure I never even received a report from him, anything in writing. It’s all vague to me, the way a casual affair might be. That’s what I did instead of casual affairs my first year in the East.

I offered the detective tea and he accepted, then seemed to regret it as I clanged about my closet kitchen, bumping my hot plate on the floor, extracting two cups from their unlikely situation in the half-size refrigerator. “No storage,” I apologized. The apartment building had once been a hotel and the kitchen, a linen closet. Racine’s old downtown had this kind of brick building. Downtown and this kind of place meant squalor there, old single men with strange-smelling habits. The detective sat in my grandmother’s coil rocker. When I gave him his tea, there was nowhere for him to put it, so he held it in his open palm on his thigh. With his other hand, he took notes on what I told him about my father. He didn’t ask much. We settled on
a price of fifteen hundred. Seven hundred and fifty then, the subsequent seven hundred fifty upon location. C.O.D., so to speak. I wrote out the check. I hadn’t budgeted the money and I didn’t want to take it out of the bank. I didn’t want to use my grandmother’s gas station money to do this. I just wanted to do it. Sort of on the side.

That night I balanced my checkbook. I determined to stop buying Cuban coffee from the cart outside school. I had a predilection for little luxuries. They reminded me of my mother. Gish, the only one of my grandmother’s friends still alive in Racine, used to scold me for this. I should be saving my money for a house. “I myself buy Seal-test,” she said. “And, I’ll have you know, it’s very tasty. Plenty tasty.” I knew I’d never have a house.

After I’d subtracted the seven hundred and fifty dollars, I had forty left. Okay, so I wouldn’t go home for Christmas. I’d stay here and work. I’d been given to understand, by the detective, that this fee represented a reduction from his ordinary schedule and also, that mine was not a job he approached with any great optimism. What little information I owned was scarce. The last place I’d seen my father was California. I didn’t know if he’d held down any kind of job out there.

“It would really help if you could get that social security number,” the detective said. I shook my head. I had no way of getting it. My mother said she didn’t have it and she didn’t want me to find him anyway. Not just for myself, the way it was by then.

The detective wore a large, square ring on his middle finger, and I wanted it. Sometimes I used to get like that with a thing. I’d never owned a ring. His would have been too big, I’d have had to wind yarn around the bottom the way I did as a child with rings from my grandmother’s top dresser drawer. I’d fill my hands with family jewels and ask where each one came from, lifting them to the light by the kitchen windows. “Ugh, I don’t know. I don’t know where I got all such junk,” my grandmother said.

The detective didn’t particularly look like a detective. He wore thick-soled, tie-up shoes, the comfortable kind you often saw on college professors and legal aid lawyers. I rode down the elevator with him and walked him to the outer door. He told me when he was my age, he had lived in Queens and written a detective novel. A company called Endicott had offered to publish it. But the advance had seemed insultingly small and he had said no. That seemed to be all there was to it. “Probably my big mistake,” he said.

I asked him where he lived now. Outside it was raining, silver falling in the darkness.

“Queens,” he said. At the revolving doors, he put on his hat and buttoned his coat.

He remained a polite man. All that September, he returned my phone calls but initiated only two. In October, he picked up a shred of a trail in Washington State, but after a few weeks, that seemed to go nowhere. I stayed over Christmas and I guess I left a lot of messages for him then. By the third week in January, I had to withdraw money from my inheritance. Four hundred dollars. I told myself that this was only the interest. That I still had what she left me. But by then I needed food. It wasn’t a choice anymore. It was erosion, life costing and wearing me back to nothing. That is the way I always was. With my mother and me, poverty was never far away. College seemed a lighter world. The other kids talked about money, even bounced checks, but none of it was real.

It took a day getting the money to where I was. I’d started too late, when my checking account was already down below zero, so I had to call the Wisconsin bank long distance and ask them to wire it to me. All the people at that bank knew my grandmother and they didn’t like to hear that I needed money fast. That was like my mother.

Finally, it was all done. I walked home with a bag of groceries, a hot barbecued chicken releasing its moisture up towards my face in the cold air. It made me think of sex with a woman. I clutched the bag tighter to me. At least I had the chicken. It would last that night and tomorrow. So tomorrow wouldn’t cost any money. Spent money was like that.

By February, the detective sounded unhappy to hear from me. “Yes,” he said when I said who I was. He was like someone I’d slept with once. I called him on a Wednesday and then again on a Friday. He had that pause-then-all-right hello. It was dumb to call him when he didn’t want to hear from me, I knew it, but I had to. I couldn’t help it. Then, after, I felt worse.

When I called again the first Monday in March, he asked if I’d like a refund and he would just quit. I felt sort of stung; my hand lifted up in front of my face. Had I been that bad? Fumbling, I said that was okay, and he turned all business, getting my address again and the zip code. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone giving up on me.

And sure enough, four days later, his check arrived, the whole seven hundred and fifty dollars. In a way I was glad to have my money again. That was something.

I
WAS ALWAYS
trying to find my father except when I was in love. And not too long after the detective whose name I’ve forgotten sent back my money, I met Bud Edison. His real name was Guy and he seemed enough. That was a year and then some time after.

I’d had boyfriends, I guess the same amount of all that as anybody, but I was never partial to the ones who were there, the ones who fixed my car and noticed my haircuts and went with me to see afternoon movies. They seemed only the people who had picked me. I wanted to pick. And the men I picked were hard to know. I understood the pain of that, I recognized it in the first froth of attraction. I knew this was how it was with my father, but then a lot of girls were the same way and they had fathers and everything.

I was twenty-seven and Bud Edison was, in a way, my first date. In the West, we didn’t do that. We’d go out with a bunch of friends or sort of hang out at someone’s house and then you’d get together and that was it. But Bud Edison was definitely a date. When we came out from the movie, a blind man asked us to walk him to the bus stop. We each took one of his arms. He tested the pavement in front of him with a nimble white cane. We weren’t looking at each other but we were there, holding him up on both sides. Once he almost slipped and I felt Bud Edison’s arm, on the other side, lifting him back up, as I did the same thing, and it was true, we were falling in love, as we waited for the bus.