The Distant Land of My Father (26 page)

And then she explained: the
Gripsholm,
my father’s exchange ship, had docked in New York four days earlier, and my father had booked railway passage almost the second he had disembarked. He would travel on the Union Pacific to San Francisco, then the Southern Pacific to Los Angeles, and he would arrive at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, the seventeenth, at nine-thirty in the morning.

I sat stupidly listening to words I couldn’t quite take in. My grandmother said, “Well. Answered prayer. You’ll be a family again,” and although she leaned close to me and held me tight, I sensed a warning in her embrace. But that was not unusual. My father was not high up on her list. My mother had told me he never had been, really, not since he’d whisked her off to Shanghai so long ago.

I tried not to think of him that week. My mother did a few things to make the house ready, cleaning and walking through the living room over and over again, smoothing her skirt, fretting about whether or not he would like our home. I said, “He’ll like it, I know he will,” as often as I could without sounding mechanical, but I, too, was nervous, and I doubted that my reassurance helped. She only glanced at me and stared hard as if adjusting some internal focus, and then she said, “Of course,” as though I had been the one who was worried, and needlessly so. Then she would dust again and straighten the few magazines on the table next to the Morris chair.

That Saturday morning we were up early. My mother had made it clear that this was an occasion and that we should dress up, and by the time my grandmother pulled into the driveway, we’d been ready for half an hour. My grandmother drove, and as we headed west on the Arroyo Seco Freeway, my mother offered unsolicited driving advice, a first, and particularly remarkable since she herself had never learned to drive. The car smelled strongly of mints and perfume, usually good smells, but too strong that morning. I cracked a window in the backseat, craving fresh air.

At Union Station, we parked and went inside. In the huge waiting area, I stared at the high ceiling and wrought-iron hanging lights that seemed as wide as our kitchen table. My mother’s heels clicked loudly on the shiny tile floor, and I wanted to ask her to walk more quietly. People stared at us as if we’d been announced, and I wanted camouflage, some kind of cover. But there was no hiding us. My mother wore a magenta suit and she looked beautiful, like royalty. I wanted to tell her that we were too conspicuous, and that we should meet him in private and in comfortable clothes. But I, too, was dressed up in this very public place. Only my grandmother was in her everyday clothes, and it was the sight of her that told me that maybe everything would be all right.

My grandmother led us across the room to the Arrivals board, where we found that my father’s train would arrive on Track 8, through Gate D. We were early, and followed my grandmother to three empty seats in the waiting room. My mother wouldn’t sit down; she said it would wrinkle her skirt. She paced while my grandmother and I sat in the huge leather seats and played Paper Scissors Rock. My grandmother talked softly as we played, keeping my thoughts occupied, and I was so focused on her voice that I was startled to hear the announcer’s formal baritone over the immense speakers on the wall. The Southern Pacific Express from San Francisco had arrived. My mother smoothed her skirt for the twentieth time, then eyed me carefully. She nodded approval, and the three of us walked to Gate D.

As passengers began heading toward us down the long tunnel, I stood close to my mother, my grandmother a few feet behind us. I pulled hard at my bangs and looked carefully at everyone I saw. What if I didn’t recognize him? Passenger after passenger passed us: an old man in a homburg hat, a woman holding a sleeping baby, two soldiers in uniform, an elderly man and his wife speaking a language I didn’t know, all of them welcomed by others around us.
Not him, not him, not him,
I thought, and a new fear took shape: What if it wasn’t true? Maybe he wasn’t coming after all. I realized that I hadn’t really believed he was coming all week, and I felt ashamed.

And then I saw him. It was his walk that gave him away, a sort of let’s-get-down-to-business stride, and I was flooded with recognition and affection and relief. “It’s him,” I heard myself say, and my mother nodded without looking at me. When he was perhaps twenty feet from us, she dropped my hand and ran to him and threw herself into his arms, and I heard her sob and I saw her shoulders tremble.

I caught my breath at her unprecedented display, and at the strange sight of her in a man’s arms. I didn’t know what to do, but my grandmother rescued me. I felt her hand on my shoulder and she held me there for a moment and she leaned close to me and whispered, “Just wait a minute—it’s your turn next.”

I did wait and then it was my turn. My father released my mother from his embrace and looked straight at me so hard that I couldn’t have looked away if I’d wanted to. He squinted slightly as though sizing me up, an expression I’d known but forgotten, and I returned his stare and somehow faked calmness. I was, after all, still my father’s daughter, even in this faraway land of orange groves and jasmine. I smiled and said, “Welcome home.”

He smiled back and it was as though a conversation had taken place, and all my worrying about why he had taken so long to join us went away. I hurried to him and he held me close, and I tried not to notice how unfamiliar we were with each other. I remembered him lifting me up, holding me high above him, and while I knew that I was way too big for that now—I came not to his waist but to his chest—I was still surprised that he wasn’t doing it. I pressed my face to his dark suit and breathed in the smell of the train, leather and newspapers and cigarette smoke. And a scent that I knew was my father.

My arms circled him almost as easily as they circled my mother. The sensation startled me, and when he released me, I said, “You’re so thin,” then regretted it instantly as I saw embarrassment cross his face. I hadn’t meant to say it—his thinness was just so striking. His blue serge suit hung on him like drapery. I took in his gaunt face and tired eyes and pale complexion, and the fact that he appeared closer to my grandmother’s age than my mother’s, and I realized that commenting on his thinness was the kindest thing I could say.

He laughed. Barely, but it was a laugh, and his expression became more amused than embarrassed. “You’re right,” he said. “It just so happens I’ve dropped a few pounds.” He roughed my hair, then awkwardly tried to smooth it back into place. “Now look what the big oaf has done,” he said. “You’re too old for that now, aren’t you?” He glanced down at himself and shrugged, then he spoke to me in Mandarin.
“Wanshih tachi,”
he said, watching me closely to see if I remembered.

I did, surprising myself.
“Wanshih tachi,”
I said softly. It was a phrase my father had used all the time. “‘Ten thousand things will be all right,’” I said, and he grinned and squeezed my hand.

He turned to my grandmother then, and I felt my stomach tighten. She rarely spoke ill of my father, but she never spoke fondly of him either. But that morning even she softened at the sight of him. He looked as though he was about to say something, and he held out his hand to shake hands. My grandmother pulled him to her and held him for a moment.

“It’s nice to have you back,” she whispered.

“Not as nice as it is to be back,” he said.

We waited for his luggage, and when it came, we watched a porter load it into the trunk of my grandmother’s Plymouth, my father talking about his train trip. He had come from New York by way of Chicago, then in Denver had boarded the Rio Grande of the Western Pacific Railroad, which took him on what was called the scenic route, over the Rocky Mountains, through Salt Lake City, and finally over Donner Summit and into California. The trains needed some upkeep, he said. The coaches were run down, the cooling system hadn’t kept him cool. He was casual as breakfast, as though this morning were nothing more than a return from a business trip. My mother and grandmother seemed somehow in on the deal. They listened and agreed and laughed gently at his amazement over things we took for granted.

I listened impatiently to their small talk and waited for someone to say something interesting, something real about what had happened, and was happening now: that my father had come home. I had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out questions—
What took you so long? What happened over there? Did they torture you? Are you all right?
—but the few times I came close to giving in, my mother seemed to read my thoughts and she silenced me with a look. And so I just stared at him when I could, and told myself that he would be healthy soon.

My grandmother drove us home and pulled into our narrow driveway, and my father carried his bags inside. As soon as my father entered, our house felt as though it had shrunk, and I finally understood my mother’s nervousness. Now she began to chatter, something she did only when anxious. “There’s my bedroom—I mean,
our
bedroom,” she said, and motioned down the hallway. I thought I saw her blush. “Anna’s room is next to the bath, and through here is the kitchen, and, oh, Joseph, the garden is beautiful, though a little on the unruly side, but soon—”

“Eve,” my father said suddenly, and she turned from the kitchen doorway to find him standing at the edge of the living room, where he’d stopped barely six feet from the front door. They stared at each other for a moment. My grandmother and I exchanged a look.

“Slow down,” he said to my mother. “I’m here to stay. Just let me get my bearings.” And then the most unlikely thing happened: my mother burst into tears and closed the door into the kitchen behind her.

My grandmother and I exchanged another look and I tried to will her to get me out of the room. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and something else unlikely happened: my father laughed, not in a mean way, just a sort of relaxed amusement and relief. “Well, what did we expect?” he said to us. “She’s got this strange man called her husband moving in with her. She has a right to be a little nervous. Don’t you see?”

My grandmother looked at me. “I’ll check on your mother,” she said. “Why don’t you show your father around if he’s ready?” And she walked toward the kitchen.

I faced my father and attempted casualness. “What would you like to see?” I asked. But before he could answer, I blurted out my real question. “Do you like the house?”

He had walked to the fireplace and was running his fingers over the peacock tiles set above the hearth. He turned to me. “Do I like it?”

I nodded and felt an anxious what-have-you-done? tightness in my throat. What if his answer was no?

“You’re darned right I like it. They’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box.”

“Good,” I said, “that’s good,” and I shrugged, trying to pretend that the question wasn’t all that important. “Then maybe you should see the rest of the house?”

My father laughed and said, “I probably better if I’m going to find my way around.” And I led him through our home.

Within days, there was evidence of him everywhere. My mother had kept our house very spare—”No use cluttering things up,” she said—and only books and a few photographs took up space on the built-in shelves in the living room. She kept little more than was needed to cook for two, and she was a perfect match for wartime, the expert at salvage. Scrap metal, tin cans, cooking fat, rubber, paper, her old silk stockings—everything had another use when we were finished with it. My mother passed everything along with an efficiency that made me nervous. She read magazines the day they arrived in the mail, then packed them up for the Boy Scouts. The morning paper wasn’t in our kitchen long enough to get rumpled, and she regularly went through my closet as well as her own, pulling out pleated skirts and cotton blouses and dresses and shoes that she no longer wore or that I’d outgrown, tossing them all into the center of the room for me to fold and pack into boxes for St. Vincent de Paul’s poor. She did it so often that I commented once that I figured my job was simply to break the clothes in and make sure they were comfortable for the poor, a remark she did not appreciate.

With my father’s arrival, it was the sparseness that disappeared. He was a reader, but it was never just one book. Whatever he was reading was left wherever he’d been sitting when he got up to do something else. In the living room was
Guadalcanal Diary,
in the kitchen
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,
in the bedroom
See Here, Private Hargrove.
Copies of
Life
lay on the kitchen table, and sections of the
Los Angeles Times
drifted into every room. My mother’s reminders that the Boy Scouts were due went unheeded by my father. “I’m not finished,” he’d say calmly. “It takes a while to catch up on the world.”

True enough. Most afternoons, he rode the Red Car up the Oak Knoll Line to the Pasadena Main Library, a place he said he loved for its huge wooden tables and chairs and the strong scent of books, where he read newspapers and magazines for hours. When he finished, or when the library closed, he checked out still more books and lugged them home to our now-crowded bungalow.