The Distant Land of My Father (25 page)

My mother turned to the last page of the letter. “‘I have tried not to say too much,’” she began, and then she stopped and read the rest of the page to herself.

“What?” I asked.

She was still reading and didn’t answer at first. Then she glanced at me and said, “It’s just more about Shanghai.” She refolded the letter and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

My mother didn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally, “but I’m going to believe that he is. I’m not sure how I would function if I considered the alternative.”

I nodded, stunned by her lack of reassurance, a first. For four years, she had told me over and over again that he would be all right, that he would be here soon.

Now she sank into one of the kitchen chairs and leaned forward, her forehead resting on her palm. “I never imagined he wouldn’t come,” she said softly. She sounded truly confused, and she shook her head and laughed sadly. “I thought I was saving him, by leaving. I knew he’d never leave on his own, no matter how bad things got. I just thought that if we left, he’d come, too.” She looked at me and her expression was pained. “What did I do?”

I took a deep breath. “It wasn’t you,” I said. “I think it was me.” She looked at me quickly. “What do you mean?” “I think he didn’t come because of something I did. Maybe he’s mad at me.”

My mother looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

I shrugged slightly, feeling some relief at telling her the secret I’d held for so long. “I don’t know what I did, but I think he must be angry with me over something. Why else hasn’t he come?” I’d rarely seen him angry with my mother, so it had to be me. I looked to her for an answer yet again.

My mother’s face softened. “Oh, Anna, it has nothing to do with you. He loves you, he’s crazy about you.” She smoothed my hair. “How long have you thought that?”

I shrugged again, trying to seem as though it weren’t important. “A few years,” I said, and I looked down. “Since second grade, I think.”

My mother was shaking her head, and the expression on her face was pained. “I should have figured that out. Or you should have told me. That’s not it at all. You’re just about the main attraction as far as your father’s concerned.”

And then I told her the same thing she’d told me a thousand times. “It will be all right,” I said.

My mother sighed. “Yep,” she said. “That’s sort of our party line, I guess.”

That evening she fixed creamed chipped beef on toast, which she barely touched. While she watched me eat, she asked about my math homework and the fifth-grade picnic, which was only a few weeks away. When we’d finished dinner, she excused herself to go and freshen up for her bridge group that night. As I was clearing the table and rinsing our dishes, she came in and asked me if I was sure I would be all right by myself. It was only recently that she had started to let me stay at home alone, instead of dropping me off at my grandmother’s, and I told her I was fine. She wrote Mrs. McCubbin’s phone number, which I’d known by heart for months, on the pad by the phone, and she left.

I locked the front door behind her and waited five minutes to be sure she wasn’t coming back for something. And then I went to her room.

The letter was on her dresser. I unfolded it and turned to the last page and found the place where my mother had stopped reading: “I have tried not to say too much, Eve, so that you can read all of the above to Anna. The truth is that I am a changed man, and I suspect I would be unrecognizable to her. I have lost weight; my nerves are worn thin; I am always anxious. Regret is a backdrop to all my thoughts, and it isn’t just staying that I regret. It’s not that specific. Rather, it’s a feeling of general sadness that I suppose comes from a series of bad decisions, things I wish I could change, one after the other. My chances of changing those things are slim, I’ll wager. I don’t find myself good company, and I am less than proud of the man I have become.”

I let my breath out and just stood there for a few minutes, holding my father’s letter as I tried to remember the details of his face.
It shouldn’t be hard,
I thought.
He’s your father; surely you know what he looks like.
But I couldn’t; I couldn’t even remember his voice. And although I stared hard at his neat black cursive and tried to conjure him up from the words on the page, all I could see was his short blond hair and his eyes, bright blue and intense.

My father was right: that unlikely letter was the last we heard for many months. Everything stopped after Pearl Harbor—postcards, letters, wires—and we heard nothing, an ominous silence worse than the sporadic bursts of news that had preceded it. Although he was imprisoned by the Japanese in November of 1942, it was not until March of 1943 that my mother received official word of it from the International Red Cross. This was, she said, the bad news she’d been expecting. She said there was some good news: the camp seemed to be for political prisoners, and perhaps my father would not be held for long. For the first time, I didn’t ask any questions. I finally understood that there was much my mother didn’t know, and that asking only made things worse.

By summer my mother had heard that there was talk of repatriation. Again, I didn’t ask questions, not even what “repatriation” meant. Instead I just went to my grandmother’s huge dictionary the next time I was at her house, where the closest word I could find was
repatriate,
which meant “to bring or send back (a person, esp. a prisoner of war, a refugee, etc.) to his country or the land of his citizenship.” I wrote the definition down on a piece of notebook paper and kept it in my binder. It was the exact word I’d been looking for; it was what I’d wanted all along.

Over that summer, as my mother began to believe that my father might soon be released, she acted as though the news was something fragile. She told almost no one, as though speaking of my father’s return might jinx it. In the first week of September, she was notified by the U.S. State Department that my father would be boarding the Swedish exchange ship
Gripsholm
on the fifteenth of September as part of an exchange of American and Japanese civilians, and that he would arrive in New York in mid-December. Even then she remained cautious. I began to think that she wouldn’t really believe it until he was standing in front of her.

I understood her caution. I felt like even saying the words might do something bad, but it wasn’t only the idea of jinxes and bad luck that made me cautious. I was nervous about seeing him, even though that was what I’d wanted for years. But by then we had been separated from him for five years, nearly half my life. Fathers in general were unknowns to me. I didn’t know how to act around them, I was always nervous around my friends’ fathers. Now I saw that even my own father was an unknown, and I found myself wondering what he was like. I could describe him on cue—how he looked, things he said, what he liked to eat, the qualities he valued in a polo pony. But the man I knew was a thirty-one-year-old businessman in Shanghai, a millionaire who had everything he wanted. A man in a white dinner jacket, standing in the kitchen with a tumbler of Scotch in his hand, about to go out for the evening; a businessman sitting at a carved blackwood desk, a Philippine cigar in his mouth, a green fountain pen in his hand as he scratched away on a yellow legal pad; a polo player in jodhpurs and riding boots, pacing in a gravel driveway as he held forth on ponies and automobiles and Chiang Kai-shek, while his chauffeur polished the chrome on the Packard. But the man who was joining us was a thirty-six-year-old ex-prisoner who was being sent home with only what he could carry, a man who had not lived in or even visited the United States in fourteen years. I thought it was possible that my father was someone I didn’t know.

I guessed that he was faced with the same problem, for my mother and I were changed as well. My mother was thirty-three, but when I looked at photographs of her from Shanghai, I sensed a trick, a sort of optical illusion. She somehow looked younger now than she had in Shanghai. On the weekends she went out with friends, and though she wasn’t flirtatious, I could see she liked being around the husbands of her friends, and that she enjoyed the looks she got when we were at the beach or the movies. She seemed to get prettier as she got older, and her prettiness bothered me. I would watch her smiling and laughing at a party or barbecue or just talking to the box boy while we waited in line at the Market Basket on Huntington Drive, and I’d think,
Can’t you just look like the other moms?

I noticed those things. I was almost thirteen. I was just under five feet tall and weighed ninety-five pounds. I had wavy brown hair that just touched my shoulders and bangs that I pulled at when I was nervous. In the middle of September of 1943, a week after we heard that my father would soon be released, I started seventh grade at South Pasadena Junior High, where I would go through the ninth grade. It was a sprawling tiled-roof structure on Fair Oaks between Oak and Rollin, with a clock tower and an inscription over the entrance that read:
Along the cloistered arcade of the junior high school, youth treads its happy way toward the fullness of life.
I wasn’t so sure about what I was treading toward, or just what “the fullness of life” meant, but I liked the sound of it, and I liked where we lived. With my blue eyes and freckles and hair bleached a little lighter by the sun, I even looked like a native, a California kid, my grandmother said. I considered that a compliment, though what my coloring really meant was that I took after my father. I saw that as a compliment, too, and a good sign: maybe we would have other things in common as well. Maybe he would like it here, too, maybe he would love the things I loved: the beach, the warm days, the orange groves, the dark purple mountains against the pale blue sky.

I hoped he would, for I thought this place might feel strange to him. My mother warned me that he would need time to adjust. He was returning not to home, but to a country he’d left almost fifteen years earlier, a country that, by the time of his return, had been at war for two years. Newsreels and air raid warnings, rationing and blackout curtains and windows stripped with tape to prevent shattering during a bombing had become everyday things for us. As we grew more certain of his return, I tried to see our lives through his eyes. But I couldn’t imagine what that view was like, and I took up wishing again:
Make him like it here,
I thought.
Let this feel like home.

On December 13, my mother and grandmother and I went to early Mass at Holy Family. It was the Feast of Saint Lucy, a fourth-century martyr and virgin who refused suitor after suitor and for her obstinacy was condemned to live in a brothel. But when the time came for her to be taken, she could not be moved from her room. Her frustrated accusers then tried to burn her at the stake, but she wouldn’t burn, and she was finally beheaded. And now her feast day was the festival of light, held on one of the shortest and darkest days of the year.

My grandmother told me about Saint Lucy over breakfast. She saw to it that I knew many of the saints, and feast days and memorials and solemnities were all occasions for me, days to honor some person who had loved God and pleased Him in always amazing ways. My mother was quieter than my grandmother in her admiration, and though she listened, she rarely commented on what my grandmother said.

That day she was making hot cross buns for breakfast, and when the buns were ready, the three of us ate breakfast in the kitchen. The steady sound of the rain and the warmth of the kitchen and the smell of dough and cinnamon made the rest of the world seem far away, so when there was a knock at the door at a little after nine, I was startled.

My mother went to see who it was, and when she came back, she held a telegram, which she opened and read without speaking. Finally she looked first at my grandmother, then at me.

“He’s coming,” she said simply, though she didn’t really seem to understand what she was saying. “He’ll be here on the seventeenth.”

“Who?” I said. I just wanted to hear her say it.

The look she gave me bordered on rebuke. “Your father,” she said, but she too sounded amazed.