Authors: Mona Simpson
A light random snow began to fall and it stuck to the road like a thin soft veil of decoration just enough to make the wheels feel light, as if we were skating, about to take off. I’d call Marion Werth in California.
He might be dead.
I was not ready for him to be dead, even though I couldn’t see him, even though I never heard him, even though I didn’t know where he was.
I didn’t believe I’d find him, not really. If I needed him I knew he’d never answer. I couldn’t imagine his rescue, any salvation, except from myself and hard work and good habits and all the everyday things we all know, but I was not ready for him to be dead, forever, buried nowhere I could find and touch the ground, before I saw him and he recognized me as his child.
Father had become the name for a rock, a stark gray cliff in the Colorados, the echoing forever unanswered.
Still, he could not be dead.
My grandmother’s heavy Oldsmobile flew over the narrow roads, sleek with snow. Briggses’ house was empty when I got home, save Dorothy, who sat at the kitchen table with rubber boots on over her shoes, hands folded, work done, ready to be picked up to go home. I waited there with her, until the twin milky lights cornered in the room and she ran outside to her nephew’s truck.
I lay belly down on Emily’s bed, talking on her Princess phone. I tracked down Marion Werth in California. It didn’t take too long. Four calls. Research, it occurred to me, was the same, whether you were searching out an old friend’s phone number, a jacket seen in a magazine, or a doctor for the person nearest you.
I found Marion Werth in Fruitvale, California, picking up her phone after the second ring in the same lilt-upending voice she’d always had. “Hel-lowoh.”
She thrilled hearing it was me calling from Wisconsin. I could see her in her house, sitting on a chair, her nails filed into curves, the discreet pink of a seashell’s insides. Her talking voice had always had an upswing breathless quality. “Well you can imagine it didn’t give us any pleasure to hurt people we loved or even to worry them but they
seem to be settling down some now. My family. We’ve started some regular correspondence. Tell me, what does it look like right now?”
“What?”
“Racine,” she said. “Is it snowing? Does it have that real winter smell?”
“Yeah, sort of. It’s a windy day. Dark. Snowy. You know what that’s like.”
“Yes I do.”
I thought of all the men on the way to my father. Marion Werth was from my own life. This was different.
She told me about the farm. Sort of midwestern, she said. It had a big porch they were painting blue. They’d already sent away for seeds of lilies of the valley, bleeding hearts, lilac bushes and gooseberries. The kitchen was huge and it had an old Wedgewood stove with a pancake griddle. They’d painted the kitchen walls apple green with white trim. She was sitting at a little table they’d found at a thrift store. It was very clean now.
Now
, she said. They’d had to get down together on their knees and scrub every tile in the kitchen and bathroom with toothbrushes and Ajax, and I could see them, their differences erased by the common midwestern horror of dirt, at unkempt oldness, lack of pride, sagging forgetfulness in a home. They’d painted the radiator a bright silver and found a piece of marble at a flea market to rest on top of that.
The farm was a small date farm, between Petaluma and Santa Rosa. They had dates, two cherry orchards and a field of artichokes. In summer, most farmers set up stands on the road tourists drove to the Napa Valley. Callie worked modernizing the farm all day and he’d enrolled in the agriculture school at Davis. She drove into Santa Rosa to the hat and glove shop. Tonight, Callie had found fresh cherries at ninety-nine cents a pound, “Can you imagine, Bing cherries in January?” so she’d made a pie, “In fact the pastry recipe your grandmother gave me once years ago with the cider vinegar in it. And no butter. It uses corn oil.” I’d always liked the first sour bite of cherry pie. It sat right now cooling on the ledge, they’d go out and eat it soon and watch fireflies in the dark. They had eucalyptus trees in their backyard and date palms.
She sounded more for herself than she’d ever been. I was glad. It had been worth a call to hear that. I almost didn’t want to ask her about the box.
But I couldn’t not. I was that far in. I put the box and its questions in places they didn’t belong. I was beyond etiquette.
But I didn’t want her to think I was calling only about the box. There were too many people I’d lost like that. It was like a carousel. I didn’t have time enough, it seemed, to just have friends. My years for play would come later. My mother had always promised me that. Too much of what I did had a point. And it wasn’t even my own. I felt like I was chasing the world to find a grave. All this had been set for me by my parents.
So I just said it. “Marion, do you remember anything about a box of papers that were records of my grandmother’s and Jackson Fenwick’s?”
She paused a minute, thinking, I supposed. I just waited for her to tally up her memory and tell me she’d never seen the thing. But then she told me, of course she remembered the box, very well. When they’d driven out west they’d taken only her Volkswagen bug, they’d gone camping all of August in Glacier National Park so they’d traveled light, but that she’d put the box and other valuables, for safekeeping, in the basement at the convent.
“So you know about that. I wasn’t sure, Ann, if they told you they were doing that.”
“They didn’t tell me. But, I finally found out. See, I’m looking for my dad myself now. I’ve hired a detective and all.”
“Have you!” she said. “Oh my goodness.” She sounded funny and I wondered if I’d offended her somehow, or if she dispproved.
“You know, we may just do that ourselves. Callie is adopted and he’s always wanted to meet his real mother. Complicated lives we all have. Tell me what you find, won’t you?”
“Maybe the nuns threw that box out,” I said.
“Oh, heavens no. The nuns never throw anything out. They haven’t lost a button since 1949 in the fire.”
The nuns’ fire in 1949—something we all knew about that was as big as the war in Racine, killing half a generation of teachers and nurses and more than thirty cats.
I
KNOCKED EIGHT TIMES
on the huge wood front door before a nun I didn’t know whispered in long robes to admit me. She left me sitting on a bare bench in the hall. I’d asked to see Sister Mary Bede.
All our lives, nuns were a part of the inside clockwork of things.
When I went to their school they lived in the convent behind and when I came without a lunch, they made me a sandwich. They’d take me into the huge dry kitchen and get out bread from an ordinary breadbox, lunch meat. Even nuns, they were women.
In first and second grade, we had made altars in school. Little shrines we held on our laps on the bus. I made them secretly at home too. But all the things I wanted for my altar were lost, thrown away, because my mother was such a romantic. The ring, wedged in river sludge at the bottom of the river in New York City, a place I had never been then, the pictures lost in some shoe box in the attic.
Sister Mary Bede, in new eyeglasses, came down the hall, her face lit in amused pleasure. I was so glad to see her. I wanted to stand in the hallway and talk but then she told me it was suppertime there and she had to get back, so I followed the unsteady beam of her flashlight down the steps which she descended terribly slowly, jagged, with each step a hand grasp worthy of life on the old wood banister. I imagined all of their time was accounted for, the way they accounted for children’s time when they taught. We scratched with light over one hundred boxes, old skis, big restaurant-sized food supplies, rickety bookshelves of Catechism readers until we finally hit the neat tied tarp covering Marion Werth’s goods and we found mine, carefully labeled.
Sister Mary Bede probably knew what I was doing but she didn’t ask anything. We went slowly back up the stairs and it was only at the door that she stalled me.
“I remember your class,” she said, her old face hanging close to me, her eyes bright and the rest all gone. “I still have a picture.” From the folds of her habit she withdrew a black-and-white picture of our class. I was in the front row, my hair pulled tightly back, my legs apart, my face with an expression of astonishment. We all looked like foreign children, it was that long ago. She was the second-grade nun and then, years later, she came to teach us Latin.
“Thank you, Sister.” This was the woman who taught me how to write cursive. We had thick pencils and first for a long time we drew circles, then oblong loops, just to loosen our wrists for the new writing. She must have been middle-aged, then. Age was a way we never even thought about nuns. She filled the classroom ledge with jars of cocoons and wasp nests and the blue and speckled eggs of different birds.
“I’ll say a novena for you,” she said. “Whatever you find.”
I was halfway down to the car when the door opened and she stood outside. “You know, your grandma’s Gish slipped last night. She’s under, she doesn’t hear a thing anymore.”
I’d been up to the hospital once since I’d been back. Gish’s hand had been like the softest almost wet paper. She didn’t recognize me. I’d paced the room by the windows, watching the traffic down on Van Buren Street.
“Maybe wait a little before you leave.”
I nodded. I knew that from my grandmother when she got to be this age. You waited then for people to die. Your friends, their husbands. Death was a ceremony, a marker in the days.
I didn’t drive back to Briggses’. I went to Boss’s. He was still open. I had the box in my arms and I stuttered back and forth three times in the street changing my mind. My throat was sore and swelled up on the inside. It felt like the opening for air was the size of a dime.
I sat at the stool by the window. Bruce Nadel gave me a knife and I slit the box, opened the two flaps. It wasn’t the box I’d expected. It was a new office-looking box but none of that mattered anymore now. What is real is real and there is nothing like it.
I took out the papers one at a time and held them. They were about my family, typewritten by someone I didn’t know, someone prim and bored probably, sitting in an office. I read them and lay them down carefully, on a white scallop-edge place mat. This was a bible in which I was almost a character. There were names to follow, dates, addresses, places. Bruce Nadel behind the counter served me coffee which I swilled fast and too hot because I thought it might open my throat. His chili smelled burned, from the bottom of the pot, but I ate it anyway, stuffing it down my mouth, it tasted cardboard.
None of this mattered now. I had new names to call from the file, more recent than the detective found, fifteen years after Dorothy Widmer. I had a civil servant who worked for the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Madison. I had a man in Nevada, a whole college where my father taught in Montana. Now I felt I was hugely close. The whole known period of my life seemed about to be over.
I sat scribbling notes on the dry place mat.
I skipped over things I knew, racing to the end. The last page was a copy, paid for—the record of the check was there, too, Jackson Fenwick’s letter enclosing the $7.50 duplicating fee—of my parents’ marriage certificate. It said both their names, their addresses in Wisconsin. The dates of their birth, that they were white. I hadn’t considered
until just then that Arab was still white. He was listed as Egyptian, she as American. Leila was his mother’s name. Then the rest was all official, the clerk’s name, signatures from two witnesses who were called Thomas and Marjorie Miller. Where it said number of past marriages, the groom’s side said none, the bride’s side said none. Both their ages were twenty-four. It happened in Dane County, Wisconsin, on June 14, 1956.
For a certain kind of person, there is almost nothing more moving than the marriage certificate of their parents.
B
RUCE
N
ADEL HAD HIS APRON ON
and the sound of his sweeping came near now. “Closed,” he said, waving an arm, to a man in front trying the metal push bar on the door. He began to put all the stools except mine up on top of the counter so he could do the floor. He let me sit there, with my box, and he took a cream pie out of the refrigerated case. Only one piece was cut from it. It was banana. He just gave me the tin and a fork.
It seemed I sat there hours. Bruce Nadel swept the whole store, then washed the cases, ripped the tops off the newspapers and threw the rest away in big green plastic garbage bags, clearing the racks for the morning delivery. Then he took the garbage out back and came through to mop.
Why in a tobacco shop? This was the place where my mother first decided she wanted to give me away. Decisions had to be made someplace, no not made, because they were worked over many places, in time, but there was one place and a moment when they were realized and acknowledged and then it was as if they were written on the metal stools, in the old magazine racks themselves, on Bruce Nadel’s high, pure forehead, Bruce Nadel who was still the same. I wondered where it was, earlier, that my father had known he was going to leave me. It could have been here too. Before he left Racine, he must have come to Boss’s. Every man did.
Then Bruce Nadel was done and I was done, too. He took the pie tin, washed it out and dried it and then we both walked outside. He locked the heavy metal crunching locks in the door.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Oh, was nothing. Nice to have the company. I s’pose a lot of things in your life came out in that store.”
“Do you remember my father at all, Mr. Nadel?”
“I don’t myself, no. But my brother’s wife took a course from him over at Saint Norbert’s. She said he told them if they were going to learn one thing in his course and no more, he’d be happy if he could just teach them to read the international page in the
New York Times
every day and really understand it, you know. And she learned that. She’s read it every day now since. She made me first start carrying the daily. And that was, let’s see, well you—must be over thirty years now.”