The Lost Father (43 page)

“Did he come to the store?”

“I don’t remember him myself but I s’pose he might have. Did he smoke, do you know?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know.

G
ISH’S FUNERAL
was at Shauer and Schumaker, run now by Jen’s second son. I recognized a lot of people: the man who’d sold my cousins and me our childhood shoes and had given us a prize for every year’s new pair of Keds, as if growing a size larger were a meritorious achievement, Sister Mary Bede, Bruce Nadel, all the girls’ families, their sons and daughters and grandchildren, the owners of Coliseum Cinema. I recognized the Queen of Hearts and the Dunce, who both looked older out of their costumes.

I went around to every flower arrangement looking for the card that said Hans. Rene had died first, then Jen, then my grandmother. My grandmother had left Gish all the girls’ correspondence from Hans in her will. My grandmother had gone second to last. So Gish had owned pictures of Hans and their worn card set, even though Gish hadn’t been able to see anymore. The tablecloth was stitched with red and black clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds.

Later, I stood in the cemetery in my heels, snow seeding the ground. Danny Felchner leaned next to me holding my elbow.

“How did you know her?” I asked.

“Movies,” he said. The cemetery ground seemed deep and forever absorbing. My car was parked at the edge of the trees and I’d said my good-byes already. I was leaving from here and not going home. I was going to drive today to Madison to talk to the first man whose name I’d found in the file. I had contacts in Madison, Reno, the state of Montana. I would drive. I had to get out. I never felt that. Usually I was housebound.

The detective was far away and I was not going back. I was closer. I had a car. Maybe it had been a mistake ever to think anybody else could find him. This was something that if it could be done, it would be done by me and me alone.

“I’ll come along,” Danny whispered, his breath wet in my ear. He looked at me with a long drill. “I need an adventure.”

“No,” I said.

“I can use it as a scouting trip. We can search and shop. I have a credit card,” he said, and he rummaged in his pocket and extracted it, to show me, just the green plastic card all by itself.

Two young men dug the hard earth with awkward lurches, their tails flapping in rebound to the ground’s resistance, the shovel handles vibrating. Gish had always been the very last.

D
RIVING IN A CALM UNENDING SNOW
, I was far away from any kind of life. From here, it seemed my twenties hadn’t been so different. I’d had my college. I’d had my summer backpacking in Europe with a boyfriend. I’d had breakups and long night conversations with Stevie and Mai linn. But now I was stepping out of the parade. In New York, school started tomorrow and I was already late for my job. I’d left Racine too, with my suitcase of holiday clothes, my grandmother’s Oldsmobile and one credit card I wondered how long would last.

Still, away from it all, I felt I was living my one true life.

I had the map open on the seat next to me. I’d bought a Wisconsin atlas from Boss’s. I was driving to a J.D. Nash, who had signed eleven letters in the documents I’d now read over again many times since that first night in Boss’s. J.D. Nash’s penmanship had a backslant. I hoped he was still alive. I figured I’d make it to Madison today and from there, after—I didn’t know, I hadn’t let myself completely think. It would depend. Everything depended now. I’d never lived like this—so free and determined by outside things. I had a fate. I’d tried too long to fight it. Now I would succumb. The last place anyone seemed to have seen him, according to the found letters, was a tiny point far in the Northwest. Ambrose, Montana, at a college called Firth Adams. I’d found Ambrose in the library atlas. It was in mountains, near a slightly larger town named Galilee. I had the box sitting on the floor of the passenger seat, the paper heart of the car. Half of me whispered that I’d drive all the way there.

The sky seemed to be on my side. The afternoon luffed out timeless and silent in the soft fall of snow. I was the only car on this road, it was a two-lane highway, and driving was even and good. Occasionally, I passed a farmhouse far back in the curved banks of snow. The radio didn’t work, but everything else ran perfectly, my cousin Hal used it and when he was away, Paddy Winkler would run the motor once a day standing still. Paddy couldn’t get a license because he was blind. No cop would have ever come to our back road, but Paddy was a scrupulous person, like my grandmother. That was the cord of their friendship, a sympathy they found in so few people, really, around them in the world. Paddy would ride a tractor in the field, just for the fun of speed. “ ’S legal,” he’d shout back at me, “nobody says I can’t do it.”

Many people seem conventional, but few truly are. My grandmother and Paddy were two such people. They would obey the rules always, even when no one, absolutely no one, was watching.

I was different. I learned morality and even manners, slowly, on a hard steep staircase.

I didn’t want music now. I felt safe in the car, absolutely private. I thought about men. They seemed so far away. Jordan in New York seemed tinier now and more random than the dot labeled Ambrose on the map.

Little girls were supposed to go through stages of hating boys. But I never did. I thought of them too much. I always wanted something from one boy and even though the boys changed, I always wanted the same thing. And I never got it. I still hadn’t.

The first boy in the world was my cousin Ben—and now he was dead.

Then came Carl Otter. In the class picture Sister Mary Bede showed me, he looked like the other seven-year-old boys, all wore the same crew cut, which made their heads look like certain pelts of fur. But he was the one I wanted it from then. He seemed to have a secret.

And he chose me, too. But it was different for him. I went over to his house after school. In his small backyard, he showed me how he hit the ball with a bat. The bat wobbled in his grip and he missed many times, scuttling down on the ground to retrieve the ball. He said his father was teaching him how every day, when he came home from work. I watched and felt the cross-armed impatience you get not just from wasting time but from wasting time when there is something
important you should be doing. I was too pointed even then. Social life was already only a means. What I needed from him, this wasn’t it. All the slow, average activities he found to amuse us I knew to be beside the point.

Even though we lived a long way apart, Mrs. Otter and my grandmother set arrangements for Carl and me to play. It didn’t matter that he was a boy and I was a girl. Our friendship made something fragile, like the two wings of a moth, and these women respected it. Arrangements seemed ponderous. They worked them out over the telephone in advance, my grandmother shouting, Down Nine, can you hear me? Then you turn in at Guns Road, can you hear?

My grandmother drove into town to pick Carl and me up from school. Then, because I lived in the country, we used the best part of the day outside. I had butterfly nets and it was near summer, so we ran miles through the fields in pursuit of fragile color. We lifted the captured insects into jars, the lids of which my grandmother had punched holes in with a hammer and the end of a knife. She made us put grass in for them to eat. At night, she emptied them back into the sky. I found her standing on the porch holding the points of her elbows in her palms, the empty jars on the porch near her shoes. “There now,” she said.

Carl came another day in winter and we made snowmen, large, wobbly globes that ceased to be spherical and took on the squarish shape of ballbearings. They became so big they touched our thighs and then they stopped where they were because we couldn’t push them anymore. We ravaged the long front lawn. Behind us, we left the yard rutted with trails of snowballs. Jagged uneven tracks showed the frozen muddy earth. After three hours of our play, the yard looked like a white cake, eaten off and played with, left in messy pieces on the plate.

My grandmother never minded. She said, no, why should she, she was glad we had our fun. She was glad we could have some fun with just snow. But I wonder now if it was me and I lived in that quiet empty country, I’d want the snow to stay pure in its frozen steady waves, unbroken. I’d chase the children away.

Eventually, the car dwarfed in sunset, we watched Carl’s mother drive up our road. My grandmother had coffee made for her and she wrapped warm molasses cookies in a bag for them to take along home. It was a kind of life none of us will ever know again.

Carl stamped his rubber boots on the porch while we said goodbye. My grandmother walked Mrs. Otter to her car so Carl and I would be private. We felt embarrassed standing where they could watch us. And it wasn’t just them. The day with Carl was nice, but it wasn’t … what? I’d wanted something out of it. Something permanent. I didn’t know what it was. I thought I would recognize when I had it. And it would last. On the porch there, latching his boots, Carl said that he liked me and that I liked him. “Like” then meant something more hierarchical. But that was the end for him, all he needed. Then he was ready to run to his mother and go home. I wanted more and when I said, wait, and pulled his jacket sleeve, his eyebrows pushed closer together and he asked, what?

And that was the way it stayed.

The light passed out of Carl. Anyone watching would have thought that I was fickle and my grandmother sat me down and talked about the importance of keeping friends. But I hadn’t changed my mind. All we ever did was play. I’d never liked that. I’d only endured it waiting for something else. And I finally understood that for days and years it would just be more of that slow toil. Whatever it was I needed, we never came close and the next boy rose into my attention. I saw the flicker of light behind in him.

I don’t feel I missed too much in childhood. Play was just a taste I didn’t have.

At Gish’s funeral, I’d asked Sister Mary Bede about Carl Otter and she’d known where he was because his mother was active in the church. Carl Otter was stationed in Germany with the air force.

I stopped for gas. The station was red and small with one standing globe and the pumps, and the sky all around was deep with swirls of blue and white and a hint of gold, hidden like religion underneath. My one frail tie to my life now was through pay telephones, and Jordan screamed at me, “You better get back here, you were supposed to come home two days ago, I left flowers in your apartment—you didn’t even lock your door—I was worried about you. School’s already started and you flunked one class last semester. They’re going to kick you out, Mayan. It’s not worth it! You can find him later. But do this first.” He was out of control, loud. But voices through plastic are always tiny and I hung up the phone. I was outside by a field of dry stubbled corn, dusted with snow. I thought of the flowers, dead by now, in my apartment. I stamped the cold blacktop and went back
to the car with the hard steering wheel I could feel and my map out in front of me and I kept driving.

Those days in Wisconsin, when I was growing up, people worried about girls’ bodies. My grandmother taught me, when I was too young to understand almost anything, that I should never take candy from a man in the park and never never let someone in a public bathroom touch me. It was always assumed boys would want to touch me. And this saying no was quite an alarming thing to explain, my grandmother’s lips curled tense with purpose and her voice hardened. Because of course, generally, I was supposed to be nice.

But I was supposed to tell if a boy wanted to kiss, God forbid more than that. My grandmother needn’t have worried.

I was the one who always brought up the subject.

I liked boys better than girls but they were small, too, fallible. The boys who, in the picture now, all looked old-fashioned with earnest foreheads and delicate hands, moved fluid with difference then. I had my favorites. But they stopped being favorites when I knew them and then they didn’t seem enough. We played and did our homework, talked about our teachers. But they were no different. I wanted something big that would shake me through clothes like wind. I knew that was what my mother was waiting for, too. Even when she was married to an ordinary man who took out the garbage when she told him.

I grew up with women. Still there were men everywhere. But none of the ones I knew ever answered the mystery.

There was Paddy Winkler across the street. And the man who managed my grandmother’s gas station. I knew the other fathers on our road. Pat Briggs talked to me about buildings and lent me picture books. I knew those men, and Ted the ice-skating pro and my boyfriends later, but they were not it. They were not it at all.

There was a time I thought they should have been. Once, not that long ago, I’d called Ted Stevenson. I’d tracked him down. He wasn’t hard to find.

Then I called the orthodontist my mother had gone out with in Los Angeles, the man who had fixed my teeth. With both Ted Stevenson and the orthodontist, it was good, in a way, to recognize their voices. They seemed glad to hear from me too, our voices had something at the beginning of the conversation like,
there
, the last piece of the puzzle. I knew a lot of little things about them each, what they liked to eat in the morning, that Ted was a man whose mouth went a certain
way, a person afraid to want too much for himself. He liked prime ribs medium rare, he wore turtlenecks, he cherished his car. He felt safest all alone in the basement office of the ice-skating rink. The orthodontist was a goofy man. I remembered his manicured hands, his wall-long aquariums, his rare fish and coolie loaches, which my mother overfed in the middle of the night and eventually killed, his trick lamps. He had lived a raucous indulgent life full of comfort. When I called him I found that, now, his children grown and living in other cities, he had moved back into the house on Arden Drive with his first wife, a woman my mother had never found pretty.

Still, after a while, those phone calls sputtered out. We hurried off the phone with promises to keep in touch and never did.