The Lost Father (41 page)

Mai linn turned from the steering wheel. “Yeah, that’d be good, huh? Some shirts of his or something?”

“I didn’t mean a shirt. I meant work he did or something. Or a watch or old jewelry from his family.”

What’s wrong with a shirt? I was thinking. But I just said no.

It had started to snow. Small dizzy particles trembled in every direction, up and in curved sideways trajectories, they seemed to mill more than fall.

“Want some music?” Mai linn knew these streets, we could have never found the place alone. She turned on the staticky radio and found a woman’s voice like polished walnut, and for a moment I was just grateful to be there, circling the streets of this old city, part of the decrepitude and endurance and escape that fused to make jazz. The woman sang brokenly about rose petals on a staircase and in the snow I understood that a kind of lasting beauty could only come from accident or failure, that that was one of the axioms like gravity and the taste of the cigarette smoke in precipitation and then Mai linn slowed the car to a stop and we stepped out in the brick block of buildings with her torn envelope of address to find where she would play.

Mai linn was playing in a spotlight then, past the small rectangular desk that was the ticket booth, after two narrow flights of stairs. Inside, the light was right, deep yellow-orange, and on stage, she looked neat and studious in baggy charcoal pants, round boy’s sneakers, a suit jacket, tie and suspenders, pigeon-toed, knee-bent, her hair clipped behind, glasses on, blowing like all anger and discovery. We sat in an old padded booth and ordered brown drinks. Even closing my eyes I saw the dizzy snow.

O
UR LAST NIGHT
, at Stevie’s old house, Jane woke up and came out into the kitchen. Helen was in the bathroom. We’d all been sitting at the table, talking about looking for my father. I was telling everyone I loved, as if I were leaving on a long trip.

“You got a
detective
?” Jane shrieked. She had a loud amazed shrill voice. Already, she was so different from her mother. She was an enthusiast. “Is he really a detective? Wait a minute, Mo-om!”

The toilet flushed, they scuffled, Helen saying, wait, let me finish, Jane, and then they came back holding hands, double silence of concentration playing over their foreheads.

“You don’t even know if he’s dead or alive or if he has a red couch or a blue couch?” Jane said.

“No. I mean I’m not sure. I think he’s alive.”

“Atassi,” Stevie told Jane. “That was her name.”

“You could call yourself Mayan Atassi Stevenson,” Helen said.

“See if you like the guy first,” Jane said.

“Yeah. I don’t know what he’ll be like. I’m not expecting a swell guy necessarily. He’s probably not a swell guy.”

“But he might be, though, Mayan. There must be something of you in him, right? He might be anything.”

“A swell guy, Mom? A swell guy if he left his daughter?”

“We don’t know everything,” Helen said.

“I have to meet him,” the child said, “I just have to meet him.”

“So what about you?” I tickled her and made her shriek louder in a star of points. “How’s the third-grade boy scene? How’s Trip?”

“We broke up. It was meaningless to go steady with Trip, what did it mean, we sat together on the bus and that’s
nothing
!”

“Okay, so Trip’s history, who’s in.”

“Well.”

“Come on, out with it, is this a new commitment to second-grade spelling or what?”

“Well, he’s a third-grader. Trevor. But I don’t think he likes me. All the guys in third grade like me except one. And that’s the one I like.”

It was so common. Maybe it had nothing to do with him being gone.

I
SAID GOOD-BYE
at the windy airport. The Briggses stood together in new coats. Helen and Stevie and Jane were leaving too. “We’re so glad you kids are all successful, doing so well in your lives,” Mrs. Briggs called. I watched Emily, in her jacket, bounding up the tarmac. Tad ran after her with an armload of newspapers. I was supposed to be leaving too, but I decided to stay a little longer.

Even having the family I did, I was a snob. For all the Briggses’ parties and decency, I couldn’t help but prefer my own. I couldn’t quite take any other family seriously.

I
DROVE THROUGH A LANE OF TREES
. They were plane trees, fisted, rare, trees I wouldn’t have guessed possible in the Midwest. I knew from Stevie: there is not one continent without pine. And so many species have been mixed and transplanted from the last piratical century of expansion and conquest. Stevie had a Ph.D. in trees.

I was driving to see the lawyer Pat Briggs had mentioned. The lawyer was a man without children. I knew, everyone knew, that he and his wife had had a child who died years ago. The wife had taken the girl to the Twin Cities for treatment before she died and she stayed there for two years, after. Then she came back and that was all I’d ever heard about it. Jackson Fen wick was the richest lawyer in Bay City. He worked in a wooden office downtown, but this was his vacation and he’d asked me to drive out to his house. This was a district, forty miles south from where I’d lived, that I’d never seen. It was a neighborhood of big old houses that looked blinded and closed for long winters. At the end of his lane, you came to a plateau. A thicket of dry winter rosebushes still kept you from the approach to the house. I parked my grandmother’s car and got out. From here you could see down the hill and many hills, ridged in the distance. This was a way hardly anybody in Wisconsin lived.

How could this man have accepted my grandmother’s money?

A woman met me at the door. I’d expected a maid, from the movies, but it was Mrs. Fenwick and she had a kind, oval face, her hair just bunned back, some gray running in it. She was dressed all in suede, suede jeans and a suede shirt and suede loafers, and she moved noiselessly on the bare floors. She had many small teeth and an inwardly moving smile.

“Jackson’s in the study, I’ll bring you on out there,” she said. A fire broke and whispered in the living room as we passed. The room admitted filtered, goldish light. I felt right away all that was wrong with the Briggses’ house.

Jackson Fenwick sat, feet up, reading at a mahogany desk. From the opposite bookshelf came the low murmur of a football game on a small, cube-shaped television.

“Ouch, oh no, come on, get him down, get him, hold him, oh no.” Jackson Fenwick turned the game off. “Have a seat,” he said to me. He exhaled. “They’re not on top today,” he said. His wife slipped out, closing the wood door behind her. On one side, the wall opened to windows revealing an empty garden.

“You know, there is a box sitting around somewhere, in the Briggses’ basement maybe, with those records” was the first thing Jackson Fenwick said.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Pat and Merl tried, pretty thoroughly I think.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe it got thrown out somehow.”

“I doubt it. They’re not really a family that throws things out.”

One knee bent and he caught it with his arms. “That’s for sure true.”

“Do you remember much?”

“I’m searching back a long ways here, you understand. I looked into it when the Briggses brought your grandma in and she asked me to find him in view of you. There were two colleges involved,” he said. “And one was I think in Montana.”

“When was this, do you remember?”

“Oh, 1970 maybe, ’72. Remember I’m pulling this out of some cobwebs. And that was the last contact that anybody had had. Now I did have a name—and I believe it’s somewhere in my notes in that box—of a guy who was probably as close to a friend as anybody your father ever had in the world. And I believe I talked to that guy—again I’m pulling a lot of stuff out of the hat—but I believe I actually talked to the guy.”

“And did he have any idea where my father was?”

“Well, it wouldn’t’ve surprised me. I got the feeling that he did but he wasn’t going to tell me. I think he was pretty suspicious.” I could understand somebody being suspicious of Jackson Fenwick. The way he talked. The guy was never just a guy but the best friend your father ever had.
In the world
. Maybe if I called, I was thinking. Or found the man, drove to where he lived, spent a day with him, took a walk. This friend—there were so many questions—

Just then, Mrs. Fenwick carried in a tray of tea with a plate of what smelled like warm gingerbread. She asked me if I wanted lemon or milk as she poured. Then she served us each the gingerbread, spooning whipped cream from a silver bowl so cold tiny beads of water formed on the outside.

“Mmph,” Jackson Fenwick said. “Where’d you get this recipe, honey?”

I noticed her hands had spots like large freckles on the tops of them. This was something my mother worried about. She used lemon juice and the insides of vitamin E tablets to bleach them.

Her long neck bent, as if from the weight of her head, and she said, “Piro’s?”

“In Chicago.”

“Yes.”

“You know what she does? We go somewhere and find something we really like, a superior pasta, or this, this was the best gingerbread I’ve ever had, she’ll go the next morning to the kitchen and knock and have the chef show her how he does it.”

Mrs. Fenwick stood a moment looking out the window to the still winter garden, her hands fallow on the front of her apron. Her profile was strong and settled. Then she turned back to us and smiled. She was a woman in whom even a smile contained elements of sadness.

“Beatrice doesn’t like winter. Where she comes from, it doesn’t get this cold.” Outside, there were lemon trees, bare, and a large fig.

She closed the door behind her again and Jackson Fenwick said, hands basketed, “I am a lucky man.”

I liked him kind of. I wanted him to like me. So I told him a little about my life. I was a way I thought he’d want a young woman to be. I told him that I was from here and that now I was in New York City in school to be a doctor. I told him I was pretty alone. I told him that I’d hired a detective and that he had checked credit and driving records and was now trying to do a search with immigration.

“I think your father traveled under a foreign passport,” he volunteered.

“Did you ever come across a social security number?” I said.

“Your father used a number of aliases, if I recall,” he said, almost as if I were to blame. “I think he had more than one social security number.”

Aliases. For some reason that made me think of my father, benign, in prison. In the institutional mirror, a little black-and-white picture of himself, with a wavy border.

This guy wasn’t at all charmed. None of what I said was working. He acted like I was responsible for being the unwanted kid of a man like my dad.

“Did Pat tell you, I don’t know if Pat told you, but Marion Werth
at the Racine Library unearthed something about him. See, your grandma had her on the case, too. She’d done some work on family trees, some such thing, but nothing like this before, I’m pretty sure of that. And Miss Werth dug up something pretty bad, I think. Something about getting some poor old ladies arrested. And when your grandmother heard about that, that was when we all stopped.”

He looked at me while he said that as if I inherited all this.

“I see.”

“In fact, you might try and get in touch with Marion Werth. She was in on all this. Maybe she’s got that box.”

“God, we don’t know anything,” I said. “He could even be in Egypt. See, it’s weird that he’s not turning up on any of these computer checks.”

“By the way, I came to think there was a distinct possibility,” Fenwick said, his hands straight now, the fingers touching only at their tips, “that he was dead.”

The garden out the window looked still and old. A blue bird fluttered and beat its wings on the tilted birdbath pooled with brown water and old leaves. Somewhere a woman was cooking in the kitchen, using superior ingredients, reading handwritten recipes. This was nothing like love.

“Um, what made you think that?”

“Well, I had a feeling he might’ve conned the wrong people. He was mixed up with some Middle Eastern oil people. There was some educational program he was supposed to be putting together for them.”

All of a sudden, I wanted to go.

Mrs. Fenwick came to the door to offer us more. “Mayan, anything? Jackson? Would you like your warm-up?”

“I sure would, honey,” Jackson Fenwick said, swinging his legs off the desk and standing. I bolted up and streaked in an angle to the door. “Bye, thanks,” I said, from a distance. I opened the heavy front door and let it drop back into its locks. Then I ran on the stone steps to my car.

I had heard once before that he’d taught in the West. My mother told me somebody had said so. That was years ago. And just this last week, in boredom, I’d paged through the architecture books in the Briggses’ library and found a note I’d written two summers earlier on the inside cover. It said Idaho and the names of seven colleges, with
the phone numbers of their personnel offices. I guess I’d kept it as a partial record, for when I would be more thorough later on. I never felt I’d checked a place completely. You couldn’t do enough.