The Lost Father (2 page)

It is pathetic now to remember. They were ordinary girlish toys, full of netting and spotlights, sugar and ballet. I wanted wands, wings, glittery slippers from my father. I wanted to dance while someone watched me.

“Look at me,” I dared.

“Shht,” my grandmother used to say. “Keep still.” She settled my arms against my sides. “There now, that’s better. What have you got you think is so special, huh?”

“I don’t know,” I said. That was the answer to everything in childhood. “Nothing” and “I don’t know.”

My grandmother didn’t care about brightness in any of its forms. She didn’t care about fancy, shining things, she had all the money she needed. She didn’t care about intelligence or newness. My mother understood too that these qualities weren’t any closer to God. But God would always be there like the stones in the road, there was all the time in the world for God, we could go back and pick God up, after we were young. But when a person bad-off slanted across the street, when my mother helped someone old, she would remember. You could see it in her eyes.

F
OR YEARS
my mother and
I
waited together. We had been together my whole life. Other people had come into our family, but only she and I stayed. The hardest thing I ever did was leave my mother.

The spring before I first went away, to college, we drove out to get ice cream cones at night.

I told her she might still get married. “But he won’t be my father,” I said. Our time for that had passed.

My mother had tried substituting once before, in Wisconsin, with Ted Stevenson the ice-skating pro, but she thought it would be different here in California, the man would be rich, someone who could give us life.

“Well sure he will. You’ll see. Just wait and see.”

I had waited already a long time.

“I don’t need a father anymore. You don’t need a father when you’re twenty, Mom.”

“Sure you do. Just wait’ll you come home from college and want
to bring the boys and your friends to a place that’ll impress them a little. That’s when you’ll really need a father. And he’ll buy you things maybe, and make a nice place for you to bring kids home to and see. Just wait. You can’t know how you’ll feel then. You’ll see.” That was her way of getting off a subject when she had to.

“I already had a father and he wasn’t there.”

“He wasn’t there for me either,” she said.

“I don’t want one anymore.”

Then, later, she began to expect him too, but in a bad way, as a danger that could drive me from her.

M
Y MOTHER
had always talked to me about marriage. It was her great subject because it was what she never really had. She felt she had missed the boat, so she advised me, starting when I was very young, too young to do anything about her suggestions. College, she said, college was the promising time and place. When I was a child in Wisconsin, I already knew I’d go to college. From the way she talked it was a large green summer camp where everyone wore beautiful clothes. Hundreds of good young men just walked around waiting to be picked. When I wanted things in high school, the same as what she bought for herself, she’d scream at me, you, you don’t really need the clothes now, I need them, I’m the one who has to catch a man, you won’t marry any of these boys you know now. You think it’s important because you’re in it, but it’s really not. High school doesn’t matter. Unh-uh. She was angry at me. I still had it ahead of me—college—she was way past that. When you’ll really need the clothes and the house and the car and the everything is in college, and then maybe, if I get someone now, I’ll have it all to give you.

“Marry someone in college,” she said, “that’s when you meet the really great kids. Find him there.”

But then when I was in college, she didn’t like who I found. I didn’t want to marry him anyway. I used to say that I couldn’t imagine a wedding because I had no one to walk me down the aisle. But it was worse than just my father. We were a carnival freak show, us. And I didn’t like other people’s better families adopting me either. They seemed as bad, only with money. And not mine.

I always knew I wouldn’t do it my mother’s way. That seemed like an old-fashioned wish. When I went to my first wedding I was twenty-two
and I kept thinking that they were too young. Their faces looked round and liquid the same as always and they looked funny in their clothes. I was a bridesmaid in a mint green chiffon dress. All the rest of us were still just graduate students, or kids with promising stupid jobs. I didn’t envy the bride and groom at all. I thought I’d get married late. Well, I thought I knew exactly when. I thought twenty-seven. By then, I wanted to be rich and have the Beatles play at my wedding. That was already impossible. The Beatles had been apart for years. But I still thought about it. Poor people always want things like that.

You will, my mother whispered once. I didn’t really expect the things she promised anymore, but I didn’t disbelieve her yet either. She always told me we were royalty really. People didn’t know it, but we were. It was something we whispered about. I wasn’t supposed to tell.

I always wanted to marry an architect, even when I was a little girl. It was the first idea I had about who I wanted to marry. I thought I’d be a ballerina. And the only reason I’d thought of being a ballerina was our fifth-grade teacher was trying to teach us about money. We had to make a budget. First, he wanted us to choose a profession and ask for a particular salary. He let everyone be what they said and gave them the salary they had asked for. Mine was the most in the class. I’d asked for three hundred and fifty dollars a week. “Performers make a lot of money,” my mother had told me. “Go ahead and ask.”

“You have to ask for what you want in the world,” the teacher said. “Put a high price on yourselves and the world will probably be fool enough to pay it.” He was using me as a positive point, this teacher, to teach us all to feel entitled to more than we had. But I could tell in a way he hated me. He was like the others himself. Three hundred and fifty dollars a week was more than he or any of our parents earned in Wisconsin.

Even then I didn’t really want to be a ballerina. You would have to go somewhere like New York City to do that and I didn’t want to go. I didn’t even like practicing that much. My mother and Ted the ice-skating pro had never gotten around to putting up a barre for me in the basement. Dance was just the only thing I did then besides school. And what I was good at and cared about—marbles it used to be, and then cartwheels, a perfect, light, high cartwheel, hands sequential like the two parts of a footstep—everyone knew you couldn’t ask a weekly salary for that.

An architect was a funny thing to think of, where we lived. The houses were small tract, prefabs, most of them, with aluminum siding that, if you looked from a ways away, seemed like painted wood. People from the top part of town hired architects, but anyway most of those houses were just copies from other houses in slightly bigger, more glamorous places. The people had seen what they wanted in Minneapolis, say, or Milwaukee, and then had paid to have it built with its same columns along our smaller lake here.

I didn’t take ballet much longer after that year we made our budgets. When I was twelve, my mother and I moved to California so I could be on television. Even in California, my mother still never made three hundred and fifty dollars a week and I saw the world in a way much closer to my fifth-grade teacher’s than he could have imagined. Still, he shouldn’t have hated me. He didn’t know the half of it. My mom and I ate dinner on top of sealed-up cardboard boxes every night.

Is it a fortunate or an unfortunate thing, to own a life that makes you believe in the invisible? I still don’t know. Faith can come to a person slowly, like a gradual climb up a long stairs, or it can be heady and dizzying. Or it can be strong as an iron banister, never reached for or thought of at all. But the propensity for faith is inherent, like an organ or a sexual inclination. I always possessed the place for religion, but faith was unsteady in me, flitting. I didn’t always believe my father existed. The sacred had no voice for me, I was sure of it. I had been listening all my life. And whose faith was more true, those who searched for it, working and strained, or those who had never thought of it at all?

W
HEN
I
WAS EIGHTEEN
I left. It is a different thing to wait with another person than it is to wait alone. But I still believed.

I believed without knowing I believed and then, the year I was twenty-eight, I stopped. When that happened I did not know if I could continue. I had lived that way, trying, for so long.

Then the world was stiller, less light. Spirit was not everywhere but a common, transient thing.

All my life I had been looking for my father. It had been my own shame. Then, the year I was twenty-eight, I found him. And everything changed.

1

I
LIVED
in a small, low-ceilinged apartment beneath an old man. He was cane walking, stooped and Chinese. In the elevator he stood just to my eyebrows. He seemed to be completely alone. I weighed those factors at midnight, again, as I sat by the spray of lamplight over my textbook, while the vague, indoor noises of his television fell down through my ceiling. Outside my one window, another brick building rose, like a piece of dark paper.

I was twenty-seven and in medical school. The only reason I was in the East was to read these pages. I scratched out a note to the man above. “Dear Sir, Could you please turn down your television?” I balled it up. I had no garbage can. That was another thing. To Do.

And so I went to bed. I loved sleep. I was new in New York City, new in medical school, sleep was my voluptuous sanctuary. I slept in linen closets, on cots, floors, in waiting rooms on foam-covered chairs. I slept, and could sleep, anywhere. Under a sheet, my limbs would move in the thick pleasure of being unseen. I could sleep most times, especially if I had something warm. I dressed in layers of cotton and would leave some piece, a sweatshirt or a T-shirt, on top of a radiator. Then I took the warm thing and hugged it in my arms by my face and before the heat drained out of it I was fast asleep. I did that in boys’ apartments to help assuage the strangeness. I always woke up first, in the morning. I hated mornings there. They seemed so ordinary and industrial, machinery of the material world gearing up in hitches noisy outside. This life was approximate, I knew, standing at the window, whether or not there were any others.

I wanted to be a country doctor. I knew what I wanted my office to look like. It would be a room at the end of an orchard, with wooden bureaus and shelves, magnifying glasses, bird skeletons, nests, butterflies behind glass, a live parrot in a cage, an examining table with a clean roll of white paper. I would treat whole families, the migrant
cherry pickers, Gypsies who came to the Wisconsin peninsula every year, and I would keep their histories in an even penmanship in lined notebooks. There would be a small laboratory at the back. I was specializing in internal medicine, but I did not want to get too far away from home. Most people in the world suffered common, eternal diseases.

I’d picked New York because I had a vision of myself wearing white bucks and a pink cable-knit sweater, holding the silver subway pole.

I lived there, but I never had a strong sense of place. I was always standing at a window, looking at the buildings and a small portion of the sky. Even when I walked in the park by the river, the trees never seemed beholden to that place. They were trees that could have been anywhere, just trees. I’d come to get my training. I wanted to use the place, not the other way around, and I approached with a kind of wariness.

My first day of college chemistry, a Nobel Prize winner who’d discovered an element, now colored on the periodic table, said into the microphone, “Look to your left and look to your right. Because two of you won’t get in.” He didn’t even have to say get in what. We knew. That was Brown. The tall, off-handed man wasn’t even a doctor. He was a scientist. The distinction hardly mattered to me then. I found my pencil in my mouth. Two others waited, sharpened, in a clear case. I had a good seat, because I’d come twenty minutes early, but for those in back, video monitors on the ceilings played the lecture. And that was the last joke he told all semester, if you can call it a joke.

One out of three wasn’t bad odds. Four kids from West Racine’s two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-person class went to college. Any college. And they were teachers’ children. I came from a high school in California where all the mothers cared about was colleges and straight teeth. Pencils grated around me. Brown seemed full of valedictorians.

But that time I didn’t last in the East. I transferred, the next year, to Wisconsin, after my grandmother’s third stroke. Then, only once, she came to visit me in my dormitory room in Madison. I’d encouraged the trip. I thought she would be proud of me, on campus, and that she would enjoy the idea of a scholarly life. And she would have, but she was just too old. I saw when she stepped off the bus. She held the metal bar with two hands and her feet went off parallel, stiff coming down. She pointed to a green tin box on the curb. When my mother had tried college, she’d sent her sorority clothes home to be
laundered every other week and my grandmother had sent them back in this same box, all washed and pressed. Now she wanted to do the same for me. We walked a little through campus and she nodded solemnly with a downward frown. She gripped my arm too hard and I felt glad and relieved to get her into the dormitory. I had a good room and my roommate was gone for the weekend. At the hall kitchenette, I made my grandmother the Sanka that she liked. I’d bought powdered Cremora so it would be just like at home. When I walked back balancing the cup, I found she’d lowered herself to her knees. She had her hands on the top of the bed for balance. My mattress lay on an eighteen-inch platform that somebody’s boyfriend had built.

“You know what I’d do,” my grandmother whispered, the skin around her mouth gathering, “I’d get a saw and two such hinges”—she spanned her thumb and first finger to show me the size—“and build a door in here.” Her hand traced on the wood of the platform. “Then, if you hear anything trying to get in, you just crawl under and shut the door. They’ll never even know you’re here.”