The Lost Father (58 page)

“Uh-ha.”

“Named Atassi, A-T-A-S-S-I. And the first name is John.”

“Uh-ha.”

“And I’m wondering if you have any records left.”

“Yes, he was a professor here for a short time.”

“He’s actually my father.”

“Oh.”

When people didn’t talk much, I talked more. “And I haven’t seen
him since I was a very young girl, before, way before he taught here. He left our family in sort of an unfortunate way, but now my mother and I are looking for him.”

“Uh-ha. Well, we sure wouldn’t have any way of knowing where he’d be at this time.”

“No. That was a long time ago. I know.” Her features were sharp and well-proportioned but the face itself seemed too large. Her eyes and nose and mouth seemed pressed together in the middle. I noticed her blouse was a delicate material, ruffled on the front, a floral that must have taken ironing. She prepared this morning before work, for what? Just for this? I looked around the basement office, the light falling in a slant from above. Yes for this. For work. For everyday. For nothing. “Although actually Rosabeth Larson had an address from 1976 which is—”

“Oh.”

“Something.”

“It’s more recent than what we have.”

“We were going to ask you if you by any chance had a social security number.” It was just easier to say we.

“Well, she said I could verify it if you had it, but that uh, she’d rather I didn’t give that out.” She? Oh, they’d called. They were on to me. My fingers fiddled in the lining of my pockets. I felt fugitive, frayed. I looked sideways at the wall.

“Is there no way you can give it to me because I’m his daughter? I realize this—”

“Uh-ha. Well, I just talked to them over there and that’s what they said.” So that was it. Damn that clean Denise. Damn Rosabeth Larson.

“If I could get one?”

“I could verify it, uh-ha.”

“Hmm. How could I do that! Well, I don’t know what to say. I don’t have one.”

“Uh-ha.”

“So I guess I’ll have to just let that go.”

“If he … would he be teaching at another institution, I wonder?” She was just lightly talking at the tops of things.

She had what I wanted in that dungeon. I kept feeling there was some way I could push her more. In New York, her little I’d-rather-not meant yes. With most women if they said I’d-rather-not,
you could get it out of them. Anything but an absolute no was a yes and she hadn’t given me anything absolute. So I just jabbered.

“I don’t know, he’s a kind of mystery to us. He left in a sort of bad way, apparently. From Montana, I mean from you here. And we don’t know where he went next.”

“Uh-ha.”

“There’s some sense that he might be in California.”

“Oh, uh-ha.”

“Um, he’s Egyptian.” I was fidgeting there in my bulky frayed coat, my fingers small and close like gnats.

“Uh-ha.”

“And so he’s a naturalized citizen and we’ve been trying to call, well, we’ve been trying to call information in Egypt.”

“Oh. Uh-ha.”

“You know for directory assistance. But that is really hard. Because there’s about a million Atassis, such an unusual name here but there—”

“Well, I spose. Sure.”

Her face moved in familiar expressions. She was sympathetic the way Marion Werth got at the library counter with cranks. Always pleasant on the surface, but she was very far inside. I looked at this woman. She had on white-pink lipstick, her nails were filed in ovals, her plump fingers carried rings. She seemed such an unlikely guard for the magic number.

I kept trying, though. Something would open her.

“So, we’re not, we’re not having terribly good luck.” I laughed like a goon. “But we’ll keep trying.”

“Unless, I don’t spose the dean’s office would have anything on file?” She was like my grandmother without my grandmother’s sadness, the deep lines of her complexion smoothed.

“I’ll check. I don’t know this offhand but would my father’s social security number be connected in any way to my mother’s?” This was a last ditch fling.

“No, no they’re all separate. Unless she mistakenly took his and used it.” Here she laughed in a can’t-we-wives-be-naughty way.

“But she probably didn’t. She’s worked for years so I suppose she wouldn’t have.”

“Uh-ha.”

“And if I can find any trace of a social security number to verify?”

“Surely.”

“I’ll come back. What’s your name?”

“Well, my name is Josephine Lockhardt and I am payroll assistant.”

I
WALKED ALONG HITTING WALLS
. Brick walls stone walls plaster. So she had it. Clearly she had it. Josephine fucking Lockhardt with the heart locket who was payroll assistant could open the old manila file and see the typed numbers, nine between two dashes, that meant nothing to her but would change my life and she wouldn’t give them to me. I hated flowers. She was iron beneath those waves of ruffle. Hard ringing metal. I wanted to harm her. Really. And it was all her duty. Rules. She believed in them the way my grandmother did. As if they must have some reason, some higher good reason none of us could ever know in our earth-close life. Screw that. What could it possibly have been to her?

I stopped at an outside pay phone.

“It’s Teal County Medical Insurance,” I told Wynne. “That’s located in Eileen, Montana. And the date of birth is May
21, 1931
. That’s what they had too so it must be right.”

“That’s confirmed then. I thought that coulda been wrong to tell ya the truth. Now we’re going into a confirmed date of birth and we know his insurance carrier. We’re makin’ progress. You gotta remember, see you’re talking to me different now, you’re lightening up a little and that’s the way you gotta be. You can’t let them frustrate you.”

“I know.”

“We’re up to ’75, maybe ’76. That’s good. Here’s what I want ya to do,” he said. “Nothing. I don’t want you to do anything further. Ya hear? Just write, do me a favor, will ya? I want you to write a very, it doesn’t have to be any detailed thing, anything fancy, just write down what happened and the people you talked to and anything else so I have it in the file, awright?”

“She wanted to give me the social security number, the woman in payroll, it’s just that they’d called before I got to her. From personnel.”

“Awright, give me her name and I’ll bypass her. You just leave it
to me. It can’t be done now, you’ve got to give it time. We’ll see with the insurance company, maybe.”

“Any news from the passport guy?”

“Not yet.”

“I forgot to tell you. The woman from Reno he was married to here had money. She might have owned a hotel or restaurant in Reno. The problem is we don’t know her last name.”

“We’re gettin’ real close now.”

“If we could get her name, I could probably call her kids.”

“If she’s a woman who owned hotels, you understand, we can work with that in itself.”

“One more thing though. The restaurant’s name was the Donner Lodge or something like that. And a guy here thought my father had worked there once. Now the question is, do you want to try and go the social security route with them?”

“Here’s what you should do, see you’re the daughter and also a female voice sometimes is better.”

“But the last time you told me doing it myself was a big mistake.”

“Here’s what you do. Now. On this you’re going to be direct.” He thought acting could get him out of this. He was all contradiction and bluff. I already knew he was a charlatan. “Awright? Because this is different.”

Why, I felt like saying.

“You’re going to call up where he used to work. You’re going to explain to them exactly who you are. You’re gonna give them, you’re going to tell them you’re happy to give them your phone number, your address, all that. Say you’ve been searching for your dad, that you understand
he
had been looking for
you
. Understand what I’m saying? You don’t think he’d even know where to reach you. Now there you gotta lie a little. You’re a doctor, you’d been on a fellowship, whatever, you hadn’t even been in the country. He’d been looking for you maybe some years ago and you’re now trying, the last you heard he was here. And then put in some hearts and flowers. Very intense, you understand? Because, they just gotta have a social security number.”

“Right.”

“Do they know where he is now? As simple a question as that. Now remember one thing, the thing to do is, when you do these things, you’ve got to somehow get people to want to help you. That’s not an
easy task. But somehow, through a voice or a tone or something, you’ve got to make them want to help you, you understand? Use some charm.”

“Okay.” Charm. I smarted a moment when I put down the phone. I touched the side of my neck the receiver touched. I was getting a rash there. I must not have charm, I smiled a grim way, because I sure couldn’t get Wynne to want to help me much.

I
STOOD THERE
at that outside pay phone, glad to be told what to do. Even though I had no faith left in the detective. He was just talking too, off the top of himself. I was pretty far gone. I dialed and dialed. I called the Donner Lodge four times before I got through to owners, who had never heard the name Atassi. They bought the place ten, twelve years ago from people they said were named Gilbert.

I tried Gilbert. Maybe that was Uta. Information in Nevada gave a U.J. on Bradley Square in Sparks, another just U.

“Hello, I’m looking for Uta Gilbert? Hello?”

They hung up.

The plain U got a recorded message: “Hey there, you’ve reached the Goodtime Country Dancers. If you’re trying to reach Linda or Ukiah, we can’t come to the phone right now …”

So many different lives and I wasn’t having any of them. Square dancing. My hair was blowing in the wind, stiff from the cold. I was half frozen, attached to the metal phone, following my father’s bones. That was what I wanted from my youth: I wanted to bury him. And then go back to the colored circle by the mulberry bush, wet hands on both sides of mine, and join the game.

I called J.D. Nash in Wisconsin and he told me some good news and some bad. He’d found a marriage of my father’s in Orange County, California, to a woman named Agnes Rilella, in 1965. But then he’d found their divorce in the same county, later that same year. I spent an hour and a half on the phone calling California information for Agnes Rilella, a name I liked. Nothing. And the absence of Rilellas from the face of the earth, as if marrying my father had kept her and all her relatives from ever listing their phone numbers again, made me almost believe in his power. But then there was Sahar Atassi, the twenty-seven-year-old engineer who married the much younger Miss Diane Thayer of Mountainview, three years ago. They might
have had nothing to do with my father and they couldn’t be found either.

I was so nervous and crazy I could hardly listen to Mai linn talk. I kept thinking of all the things I had to do. I heard a noise and then I saw it was my foot hitting the pole. Before we hung up there was the small clicking I’d come to associate with Mai linn’s absorption. “Mayan? I think you’re up to about twenty-eight hundred on the credit card.”

“Don’t tell me anymore,” I said.

I tried the State Liquor Authority in Nevada. Then California. That was an idea from the owners of the Donner Lodge. They had been nice. I knew now what the detective meant when he said we. He meant me. I’d do it. I was crazy enough to stand outside for three hours at one phone booth just dialing, not letting go. I tried Nevada, California, nine states in all. Just one more, I promised. Each time I thought of my phone bill. I had no idea, I knew I was probably into the thousands. That made me shudder on the left.

There was a moment of hope in Oregon when a woman named June said, “I’ll check,” and I heard the whirring computer keys. But no go. Nothing in Oregon or anyplace.

Finally I couldn’t dial. I stopped for a moment. The tip of my first finger hurt. I looked at the hand and it was bad. Blue-black and ballooned out in a blood blister. I put down the phone gentle, into its holder. I felt my neck. I had a rash.

Then I started again. I made twenty-eight calls in all and on the twenty-ninth, a recorded voice came on and said my card number was not valid. I did it again, then called the operator and she said there was no mistake the number I was telling her had been stopped. So my card had given out. They knew.

I
BIKED TO THE
Social Science Department, my fingers off the handlebars, but it was already locked. I went back to try Dean Daniels once more.

“Hiya,” Sandy said. Sandy was his secretary. She knew me. “Frank told me that he’s gone to Rotary and won’t be back until tomorrow, but he said that if you called or came by again there’s nothing that he could add to what President Fipps already talked to you about.”

“Try again tomorrow,” I said, tapping my pockets with chapped hands.

I wielded the bike in the thin mountain air, light on the handlebars, wobbly, thinking, actually the goddamn detective didn’t do a fucking thing. I was really a fool to believe what people say.

It kept coming back at me like something bad, the dates, the calendar time. My father taught here in this bowl of mountains, he felt these cedars finger inside his chest, he politicked the department, he tied ties for faculty dinnering the years I went through high school. He wasn’t everywhere and nowhere. He was just here in Montana. It was as if I’d believed he truly vanished and no longer walked on the earth. That was where my feelings had started. This was entirely different. Now I felt duped. If he was only here, he could have sent for me, he could have been a typical, exasperated, disorganized divorced dad, hapless, producing felt-lined long boxes with pearls for my birthday or Christmas. I could have flown on planes, been met at the airport by him and Uta. I wouldn’t have liked Uta, I never would have, but she would have tried to be kind, tried more than he did. And my mother and I would have accepted. We would have been cooperative, if not buoyant. He could have called us too seldom on the telephone and we would have complained to our grandmother but never to him; and to every question he asked long distance, answered fine.