The Lost Father (29 page)

“I did notice that,” Jen said later.

“I did too,” my grandmother confirmed.

Hans seemed downcast to them and older. A few attempts at beard wisped on his cheeks.

“Unsuccessful,” Gish said. “Like a fool.”

He was studying at the university now, he told them, engineering. This made him look sad.

“Oh, but that’s good,” Jen said.

“Good for you.”

“You regularly read that there’s lots of work for engineers.”

“And always the building, more building, they’re building, building, out by me even, too, way over there.”

“Where I am too. Ugh, the noise.” That was Gish.

“But it must be lucrative.”

“Oh, yes, gracious, I should think so.”

Downcast. The wife seemed cold at first. “Well, I suppose so, four women coming to their door in the middle of the day, what is she supposed to think!” But then she thawed a little. By the end she was running back and forth from the small kitchen to the living room, delivering coffee and little ham salad sandwiches.

They got to almost like her.

“Oh, but did it smell down in there. I didn’t want to eat with that either, but here she brings it out and it’s just us there and so I nibbled at one.”

“ ’Course I suppose she’s got her studies too, they’re both in school. It can’t be easy,” my grandmother said.

Before they left he apparently put a tape into a tiny player and danced a turn around the small living room with each of the women.
My grandmother didn’t like it. I don’t suppose the others did either. She said the room was so small and cluttered they bumped into furniture and the baby cried. Nobody probably much wanted to be dancing.

As they left the ladies fumbled awkwardly with their purse clasps. They gave him a little something for the child. They walked all the way back to their hotel and found themselves depressed. Instead of staying on as they’d planned, they took the train to Frankfurt that same night, spent a lackluster day there shopping and then came home.

So that was that for Europe. The girls had had enough of it. If you asked my grandmother, she’d say, “I’d just as soon stay home.”

B
UT THAT FIRST TIME
—we can only imagine its opulence. There must have been palatial hotels kept up for the business of visiting old women and foreign bankers. Places with plush ballrooms where old women could dance under chandelier light with handsome strangers. I imagined my grandmother’s face open in a surprised smile. After a day of sightseeing, even in gondolas, on a mountain, Hans had herded them back to their rooms in plenty of time to dress for dinner.

Gish had asked him, “Is it casual more or just a nice dress or sort of formal?”

He knew what they wanted. “Formal,” he said, lips severe. “Do you have anything long? Floor length?”

They assured him. “Oh, yah yah, sure.”

“Do it your best, ladies,” he said, “tonight’s the night.”

And they’d scurried up to the private rooms and begun bathing and powdering and putting on their makeup. They called each other in to zip up the long back zippers and to fasten the clasps on the good watches and bracelets because they couldn’t see them so well anymore. Out came the cuticle oils and dabs of perfume. The mink stoles, all first bought from my grandfather’s pelts, musty from not being worn these twenty years and lingering in stale closets. My grandmother hadn’t worn hers since her husband had been alive to lift it off her shoulders.

She wore pearls, which now held a patina of worth, from being touched.

They pushed on elbow-length gloves. These were dresses and
accessories they wouldn’t have dared buy now or anytime in the last fifteen years but which they’d kept, carefully tended in their closets, on the chance that they might need them, once more.

And here they were, wrapping themselves in those taffetas and silks and satins, marveling that they still fit and at how good these soft and shiny fabrics felt against their skin, remembering, with a shiver, what bareness meant to an arm and then fur, lush and hot, on the outside shoulders.

They descended the stairs, heads high as they’d tried to keep them fifty years ago. This was the generation of girls whose mothers made them parade around the house, balancing Polish and German and Czech Bibles and heavy bilingual dictionaries on their heads. Their mothers had grown up in Europe. They had learned how to clasp and unclasp the small pearl buttons on gloves, they had learned how to waltz.

But the girls grew up in Wisconsin, where there was no need for ballroom manners and few opportunities for grand entrance until now, when, over sixty, they descended more glamorous than they had ever been, one by one, down the stairs.

I picture them as butterflies. Rene first, a painted lady in her thistle-colored plaid; Jen in orange and black with ruffles, a monarch; my grandmother, a Question Mark, the largest angel wing, in a straight dress of pure melon; and Gish, a swallowtail in an all-black sheath. My grandmother was tucked in the middle, second to last.

They ate at a round table, the five of them, tasting the herrings and foreign cheese, drinking champagne. Hans was adept at keeping the champagne moving from the silver ice bucket into their glasses. He wore a tuxedo, fashionable that year. He relished these touches. He, like they, had a predilection for the fancy.

There is a certain kind of man who understands older women. Hans loved the fruff of it all, the ruffles settling, fastidious care. This sort of man serves as the ideal host amongst finery. He immediately recognizes talent in a first-rate waiter. Usually, he is a man who is not paying.

It was funny to think that my father was a little bit like Hans.

M
Y GRANDMOTHER SIPPED
her champagne and began to feel herself rise. Her body seemed to swell with lightness from the lower sides of
her back through her shoulder blades, as if wings were pushing through her skin, beginning to extend.

At home, she made her own farm of liquor in the basement cellar, which was still cluttered with her husband’s tools and saws and wood slabs and, on the other side, his Polynesian bar. Occasionally, in the winter, she crept down with a flashlight and liberated a bottle. Cherry bounce. She’d have a little glassful and then she’d climb down again, holding the banister, and put the bottle back.

She drank and her mouth opened to show more teeth in a wordless smile. The others were talking, a steady, above-water melody of how good everything was, how tasty that, did you get some of this, yes, I had a bite.

Drinking … all this was new and not new. My grandmother sat there still and rising, her cheeks full and embarrassed in the pleasure of someone giving her something.

She had dined out, years ago, with Art. Then it was always four, them with another couple. Rene and George. Jen and Alfred. Just now it occurred to my grandmother how Gish must have felt then, during those couple years. “Aw, shucks, I’ve got to work at the Coliseum anyway,” Gish had said at the time and no one had pushed her because no one knew quite what to do with an extra woman. At a holiday yes, of course, sure, but not an ordinary Saturday night out. In the flush of inclusion, after so many years alone, in her delicate, hesitant appreciation, my grandmother remembered Gish and only then understood the randomness of fortune. Years before I was born, Alfred had asked Gish first and she had said no.

Everything had been built lower then. The glasses were not these tall flutes, but low wide cups, with not clear pink bubbles rising, but a heavy amber liquid. The table was low, as was the ceiling, the area they sat in was banked by a waist-high wall of polished mahogany. She had dressed up then too, but differently. Then she’d worn woolen suits, straight skirts and matching jackets, only a collar of fur, coordinated bags and heels. They’d had to be sophisticated women then.

Now, these were the dresses of childhood dolls and Hollywood movies. Their husbands would have frowned—they wanted their wives in neutrals. These were candy colors, the long gloves of ocean-liner pomp, royalty and Europe. And here they were ascending. The ceilings vaulted up towards the light of clouds.

Everyone seemed dressed in what would have seemed to us costumes.
I saw that in New York sometimes. Yale girls in gem-colored dresses spilling out of unmarked doors, standing on the lit porch of the Plaza, tilting a little from their toe to heel, waiting, the wind dallying in their sleeves, their dresses without them in the dark windows of all of those little stores on Madison Avenue, deserted at midnight. Teatime at certain hotels you saw them, in hats and gloves, where all the doormen wore livery and braids. When I remembered my grandmother’s Europe, I blamed less. If you love a person once, it changes everything.

Strings of the orchestra sawed as the meal thinned to desserts which came, first elaborately, in spun sugar baskets nesting ice cream, then in smaller and smaller tarts and petits fours. With the champagne still pouring, Hans took each of them for a perfect swooning dance around the floor.

First Rene, then Jen, my grandmother tucked in the middle, beautiful, but never knowing that and not calling attention. The man is supposed to lead:
The man is supposed to lead
, people had been telling me all my life. “A-hem,” I’d been told again and again, gliding across the floor with the boy who was my partner. I supposed learning with my grandmother, I became the man.

They danced and danced. It felt good and in the dizzy swirl of lift, my grandmother thought she saw her own face reflected like a shine of cloud in the polished high boots of many men, men in military regalia, stars on the ceiling, ta da deedum, dada da da.

Later that night, he came to each of their rooms, in the same order. Rene, then Jen, my grandmother neither first nor last, nor assuming, then Gish.

He bent over my grandmother’s bed and lifted her soft hand and kissed it. He asked if he could have some little thing to remember her by. She gave him the pearls. She didn’t know what else to do. And on the plane home, each of the girls confessed that they left things—a string of pearls, a fox stole, a watch and a garnet ring—in Europe, at that last hotel. None of them seemed too upset.

A
T MY DOOR
, a brown paper bag, many times wrinkled, waited on the ground. In it was a little box, cotton-battened, glass-fronted, with two butterflies inside. “To your collection,” neat printing on a piece of lined paper said. The man upstairs. I took it in, I’d left the door unlocked again, and I knew just where I had a nail. Stevie Howard
had visited once and done two days of home repair. When he left, he bought me a toolbox with things like nails.

I put the butterflies up on the wall next to the cement print. One thing I did have of my grandmother was a rough cement square, boxed in a cedar frame I built crookedly when I was ten. It hung on my wall, over the desk.

When I was ten, I read books we called how-to, about animal tracks and electronics. I wanted to build a ham radio. I loved the idea of contact with the greater nighttime world far away, the voices of truck drivers. Nights I tinkered at the kitchen table making a battery from a book and lead and zinc I’d bought from the hobby shop. That you could make a thing like that way out where we were in the country—that seemed amazing. These were my own inquiries that my grandmother supported but didn’t follow me on.

But I also liked the animal-following solitary crafts of the snowbound forgotten country where I lived. Those days they’d graduated me to the second floor of the library, which was the young adult division. Sometimes I strayed to the full-adult sections, like natural history. There was a hanging constellation of the Milky Way galaxy there, planets made from painted Styrofoam balls. I wanted any of the sciences then. They seemed new. And I lived among everything old. That was my school life, downtown.

I was still younger at home. I made animal tracks with cement. I woke up early one January Saturday morning and the sun beat hard on the snow so a little deep dirt and mud showed, the trees shuddering, and the cedar needles glittered, shrugging offloads of snow and the new and the old seemed the same again. I trooped out before eight o’clock in her clothes and mine, sealing, warm, loose. I tracked the fields where the drifts still came deep and took imprints of rabbit and deer prints. I got a rabbit, a deer, a squirrel and what might have been a fox. It kept me all morning. When I came back in, she had her back to me by the stove. I had the idea then in the kitchen. I didn’t ask her, I told her. “Gramma, I’m going to take your handprint.”

“Ugh, why do you want a thing like that? You’ll just throw it out.”

“No I won’t.”

“Oh, it’ll end up in the basement.”

“Gramma, I need it.”

“Well, all right if you say so but hurry up about it then or your breakfast’ll get cold.”

I made her grease her hand with Crisco and then Vaseline. She
didn’t like this. You made a plaster cast first and then reversed it. She took her ring off and, palm smeared with Vaseline, she had to press down in the plaster.

“Ugh, such a mess,” she said. “Well, what we wouldn’t do for science, huh? That’s my contribution to the world of learning.” Later that night, she gave herself another manicure, to get off all the little bits of plaster.

Now I was glad I had that. It was her right hand. Right hand and your left, what you are and what you were supposed to be.

I stood up and set my own hand into her imprint, matching. My fingers were thinner and a little longer. But it almost fit.

It was the end of the day again. I was spending the last of my grandmother’s money to find my father. She would not have wanted this. “Ugh, shucks, throw your money away why don’t you,” she would have said. “We worked hard for our money and here you’re going to get rid of it chasing him and what does he care for you?”

She would have rather talked about my boyfriends. “So now you have Paul and Stevie,” she said once when I was in college, “what are you going to do? Which one do you like better?”

I asked her about her husband, how she knew.

“Knew what?” she said. “I knew him from just around where I lived. He raked the leaves for my dad.”