The Lost Father (25 page)

Emily didn’t quiet down until after Mai linn and I had both left. Then, inexplicably, she missed us.

Ben and I had always been close but we had been rivals too, over my grandmother. “You gave her the hand without the purse.” My mother tried to console me. “She likes you better. I can just tell,” she said. My aunt Carol would never have done that.

“I like you both the same,” our grandmother always said, like she was slicing a loaf of her bread open with a knife, into even parts.

A
ND WHAT MADE
Mai linn a compelling child was never a matter of size, hair, or face shape anyway. Of anything material. She was a child with an already clear character.

She was able to give things away. She did her homework, all of it, lying on the floor, the hour she came home from school. She always had a sense of order. Even young, Mai Linn lived a way we somehow knew would be permanent and irrevocable. She had almost nothing. She shed things, keeping her life portable. Her rooms all felt the same. She’d paint them white, hang a bamboo shade and put sisal on the floor, and she’d lay a futon in the corner, maybe one slim black modern lamp, a few books.

Once I had the two of them over to my dorm room and we went through my closets. “Throw,” Mai linn said, “throw.” Her arm would bend in a perfect right angle. Emily watched in horror. She was a saver and unlike me, she never worried about it. After Mai linn left, Emily and I snuck things back from the garbage.

Mai linn always surprised me with her ruthlessness. She seemed to have no regrets.

I understood I wanted to know her always, to stand over a sink rinsing vegetables together at the end of life and learn age from her, from the sharpness of her slightly bitter belly laugh. She would lose nothing to time.

Neither of us talked too much about our parents. Little had changed since our childhoods; there was still almost nothing to say. But they were a fact in us, like a number.

M
AI LINN WAS MOLESTED
by her foster father every Sunday in the basement room until she ran away forever, at sixteen. To other people, she was many other things first. But to Mai linn that was what she was first.

Eli Timber had assented to the man because the social workers had said he directed the Hebron High School Marching Band.

She never told me what he looked like or smelled like, anything physical. He had built her the basement room himself, battening it with insulation for sound. They said they put her in the basement so she could practice her saxophone. But even with the soundproofing, her scales drifted into the ceiling around insulation padding up through the floors to where the foster family slept on double beds. But Mai linn never stopped. She said after he left her Sunday nights, ascending the slow stairs back to the kitchen, she played in the dark, from memory. Above her, she heard him turn on the faucet for a glass of water. He drank it, set the glass down in the sink. She saw it there every Monday morning, empty. She’d made transcriptions, borrowing from the violin and the viola repertoire and, especially, from the cello. For a year, she played one long Bach solo cello sonata, before bed every night, like a prayer. Sometimes this was ten o’clock, sometimes this was midnight, sometimes later. Mai linn never thought anything of transcription. She was no purist in that way.

Practicing, Mai linn told me much later, was the way she ensured that she would have the hours she needed alone every day. She needed time and a room alone to feel right. “Like being inside a clean lung,” she said.

She wrote letters to Eli Timber, but they were almost all about music. For a while, she kept in touch with Ben too. They had a system with pay phones. I saw him running in a diagonal up the junior high school lawn once, with a tearing violence I’d never seen in him. Drugs, I thought. We had read about drugs. Ben told me later a blue uniformed cop had just stood up out of a car. If they’d tied that one call to all the other calls, our grandmother would have had to pay. His parents were like mine. They had no savings.

But Ben couldn’t give Mai linn a place to live. I’m not sure he ever saw how much she really needed. A house, clothes, dinner every night, all those days and years. Eventually, his helplessness dried up her romance. She felt ashamed for the size of her need. She ran away to San Francisco and lived with a guy there. The asshole artist named Kevin June.

She was known for carefulness. In college, she’d taken science for two years and she’d won a big prize in biology. They told her she had good hands. But then she quit. For a long time, Mai linn didn’t talk about the North Dakota foster family. Klicka, their name was. Then she did in a torrent and all the bad came out. For a while she went to a group. Secrets weigh, she said now.

The worst thing was the secret. But if we are lucky, secrets end. You turn adult in a world of people holding your same shame.

I’
D ALWAYS BEEN ASHAMED
. My father left. What did that make me?

I began to tell people about the detective. The guy, Jordan, and other people too. Mai linn knew and Emily and of course Timothy and Stevie Howard. And that made me closer to my friends. I thought of Mai linn with her secret, which was, in a way, the opposite of mine. When we were young, we were sure no one else could understand. But everything that happened to us had happened before. Most of my friends knew my mother from a long time ago. Mai linn’s real parents were saints like on wood or in lockets.

Mai linn owned two pairs of shoe trees. Beautiful old ones, wooden. For a long time, I thought maybe they’d been her mother’s and she’d carried them all the way from Asia the way refugees grabbed the family silver candlesticks. But when I did ask I found out she came with absolutely nothing. A car slowed at her school one day, a long black limousine, and picked her up and took her to an airplane and that was the last she saw of anything. She bought the shoe trees here in an antique store. And she never owned more than two pairs of shoes, not counting sneakers.

She was good at all the possible things you could be good at without doing yourself any lasting advantage. In childhood, they were jacks, marbles, cartwheels, singing, dancing, carrying a tune.

She could have been a scientist. She got A pluses at Berkeley and a scholarship for her last two years. Then she quit to play jazz.

She shrugged, saying, I don’t want to succeed.

She had boys’ dead-end interests too. Pool, cars, baseball. Mai linn was the only girl I ever knew who truly cared about baseball, not to fit in with men. She liked it because it was without general time. It had time subject only to itself.

I
TOOK OUT MY SAVINGS BOOK
from the accordion file every night and just looked at the numbers. I knew I was going to withdraw more. By the end, it would probably cost all of it. But I still hadn’t called Homer Hollander in the bank at home. I just looked at the printed numbers.

I was always bad with money. I’d never gotten money right. Some people did. Timothy didn’t own a wallet. Crinkled bills stretched the pockets of his leather jacket. We were always somewhere outside and it was cold then, we were in some line for a first-run movie, or in some little side restaurant and he’d reach in the deep pockets of his jacket, greenish from age, getting dollars and fives, tens, with his square fingers, counting them out, paying for me for some small reason and we’d file into the movie, the waiter would hand us our drinks in glasses, like everybody else.

I kept calling the Uncle and getting his machine. I left messages with my number and each time a different request. This was my tenth or eleventh message and he still hadn’t called me back. After a while if someone didn’t call you back it became easier and easier to pester them. I called the Azzam woman with the pretty voice too. I was up to about seven on her machine. This seemed time most likely wasted. Calling people who might have no relation whatsoever. I felt I was way in now, looking for my father. But so far, all I’d really done was talk on the phone.

M
AI LINN LEFT
R
ACINE
in 1969. I moved with my mother to California in 1970. Emily was left alone then, her friends safely gone, but Ben was still never more than decent to her, in his regular way. That, perhaps, was bearable until he met Susie—a girl none of us had ever thought about before or known. That was in the high school. He was with Susie until he died, in the car accident, three years later.

When we were children, I loved games where you sat in a circle cross-legged and closed your eyes and someone else came around and touched the top of your head. Duck duck goose. But this was what I imagined: one day my hair would be touched and he would be there and that would be the signal and he would take me out of my life, out of my first-row desk, out of the classroom where the nun would still be teaching the parts of the plant and photosynthesis.

Later I hoped it would be the Hollywood agent in a long coat
who would be in the cafeteria and see my good table manners and pick me.

I always knew I would have to leave the circle of game.

I don’t know. We were children. We had that too. We had the other but we had that too. I put on my red cowboy boots with my cousin and Mai linn and we danced hoedown to country western music. We ran silently, like the truest stealth of light and shadow through tall fields of wheat and corn where no one minded us, we made ourselves invisible to no one looking. Mai linn grew up in a small North Dakota town, climbing hedges, making holes, yelling for other children to follow her and they did. There were moments, sure, for each of us when we stood still and fixed on a thing, a car on the highway, the moon in the sky and thought of our parents, who they were and what their absence made us. But that too was not all. There were other children, songs. Other children lured us back into the game, at least I sat in the circle, my hands in their hands, even if in my spirit, I was chasing other far things. And both of us had, most of the time, turned our backs on that truer self, and gone running, arms open, to join in the game.

6

I
T WAS AN ORDINARY
Wednesday morning, but I woke up wanting to be pretty. I stood in front of the mirror. I didn’t know, really, what I looked like. It started out when you were a girl staring in the mirror and seeing your face. You recognized yourself but didn’t know what that was, if that was good or not. The way you learned was only people telling you.

Emily had said once, “Someone in love with you could really find you beautiful.” She said that like she’d discovered something where everyone else had looked. I had been trying on one of her hats.

Once, when I’d cried in a whole loop to my boyfriend, Paul, about everything, he’d said, “Oh, come on. You have a lot going for you.” People agreed too readily when I told them I felt bad about my looks. They quickly mentioned other things that were good about me.

The last time I saw Merl Briggs, she’d said, “You look glamorous. You didn’t use to think of yourself as glamorous but I guess you do
now.” Her voice was wistful, as if all that had been good in me was gone.

I don’t know why I was thinking about this just then. Maybe I wanted to be presentable to my father.

It was something I never talked about long with anyone but my mother. I was embarrassed when other people mentioned my appearance. I thought I was plain, but not completely. And like with her paste jewelry, my mother could make me valuable, but she could take it away again. Most things my mother said, I’d stopped believing years before, discarded. Almost everything she said, except about my body. And that was bad. I had legs I couldn’t show and a neck that wasn’t as good as anybody else’s, but sometimes, when she was happy and we were alone in a way that made the room small, she could look at me and say,
oh you’re beautiful
, with awe in her voice.

I didn’t want to give up the chance of that.

I
T WASN’T
too many times I’d had said to me the word beautiful in my life, and it never really rested still. It had the tentative quality of a butterfly’s landing, or the hurried tripping whisper people get when they lie. Bud Edison told me I was beautiful, and my mother. Two people. Even Stevie Howard, who’d said he loved me, never did that. I tried to warn Bud Edison, when he told me he loved me. “You see, you’re only the second person who’s said that to me in my life. I’m not somebody who a lot of people say that to.” It made an impression on me.