Authors: Mona Simpson
Every Tuesday night, Marion Werth led a group of Racine women in a club to build their family trees, placing names and pictures in little oval circles of cardboard cutouts. One of the women embroidered hers. Each of them did it her own way, some with felt and
sequins and all manner of millinery ornament, others with colored construction paper and scraps and scissors. One nun I knew—Sister Mary Bede—meticulously scripted hers in tiny letters on a single piece of eight-by-eleven paper. It was just like her. Tidy, not wasting. My grandmother’s friend Jen represented each relative with a different dried flower. The men got spikier plants, mostly thistles and cacti. She pressed them all behind glass, the flowers and names and labels—birth dates, death dates and some handwritten descriptions, like “such bright red hair they all said” or “never married. Funny” or “he drank and the wife ran around, it wasn’t so good.” She pestered my grandmother to join, but my grandmother wouldn’t budge. “Uchh, I know who they are already. There’s no one fancy. What do you think, you’re going to find a queen or a duke in there, Jen?” My grandmother sat down at the kitchen table every night for an hour and answered letters from her relatives, but in a different way. The club women each wanted something. My grandmother’s letters mostly contained Wisconsin weather. Sometimes she would mention the name of a bird she’d seen.
The club women traced and traced, through the mail. They all hoped for some tie to the Revolution or at least to some great family, with a coat of arms or its own tartan plaid. So far, none of them had found much. When I flew home last time, my second Christmas in medical school, I saw posters stapled on the nicked old telephone poles announcing a public library exhibit of the Family-Trees-In-Progress.
I’d never liked Marion Werth that much—she didn’t like me—but I’d always respected her. She was famous in Racine for her organization and her cheerfulness. Her plump hands and long freckled fingers and always elegantly filed and polished nails. Her fingers, in particular, expressed an exquisite febrile sensibility. They were creamy-colored and very nimble. She was our career woman. In a town that size, people were famous for preposterous things. Everyone knew about Katie Maguire’s jelly donuts. Or Dolly Henahan’s handmade silk felt on Styrofoam Christmas tree balls. If you were fat and neat you would be known for that, but not if you were just neat or just fat.
I stopped halfway through my letter. I never thought much of the mail. It seemed to take too long and I didn’t have the patience. I was like that then. I couldn’t wait the normal time and then I ended up waiting forever.
There had to be a better way, I figured. Faster. And so I called an old boyfriend. I was still young enough that, when in doubt, I’d call an old boyfriend. My mother used to tell me how someday we’d own a house. We’d buy it for almost nothing, she said, because it would be a fixer-upper, and all her admirers would come around, and when I was a little older, my boyfriends too, and instead of taking us out to fattening meals, they’d drop over and do something useful, like paint a wall or fix wiring.
This was the guy I’d been with in college. I used to call him The Prosecution. He worked for the Justice Department now. I always thought if I were a lawyer I’d be defense. I feel too guilty myself to be that sure.
“I don’t have much access,” Paul said. “He wouldn’t show up on my file unless he had a federal felony conviction.” That seemed above even my father’s abilities. But he typed the name in anyway, while I waited. I was kind of surprised he remembered it without my saying.
“Nope,” he said.
“Good.”
“You’re right, good.”
“I guess good.”
“You’re still nuts.” Then he suggested the FBI.
I didn’t want to call then. Not right away. I am not exactly an unarrested person. I have a record somewhere, they pressed my thumbs in ink, marked them on a paper form, took my unhappy picture. And this was not for anything hip, like drugs or a protest march either. It’s something old I’m not proud of. That’s when you’re glad how big and sloppy a country this is. When you are part of the mess. When it is you wrong, you want history to lose its beads and forget. And you can calm some knowing it will. My record is in some colorless file cabinet somewhere. It might be as hard to find as my father.
And from what little I knew about him, I didn’t guess my father would be pleased to see FBI men at his door either. He could’ve been a petty criminal, something of a gigolo. My mother once said he’d run off with a department head’s wife. Or was it the daughter? He might have been almost anything then. Not good, I thought. But not unforgivable either.
I didn’t want to call, but it came down to boredom and studying one day and there I was still safe at my desk, the book glaring, picking off a dry geranium opening the whole astringent garden of smell. I
was supposed to go to a party later and I didn’t really want to and I shouldn’t have, I was so behind, but I thought I really had to, I said I would, people would be mad if I didn’t. It would be all the same people. In classes, we hated each other, every day. But then at parties everybody got drunk and told all kinds of things. At the last party, a forty-year-old woman came up to the guy I was standing next to and said, “I really have problems with you, and now I’m going to tell you why.” The parties began in one apartment and then rumors started that everyone was going to another apartment on the East Side. And from there the party would divide and congregate again downtown. I never made it past the second move. I probably didn’t stay long enough.
I left before midnight so I could take the subway. I only had two real friends in New York, Timothy and Emily, and neither was from school. Emily was from before. She’d moved to New York after I did and she’d just started working at the Metropolitan Museum. Her father knew somebody there.
Three afternoons a week, I worked at the hospital, for Dr. Chase. Mornings I had classes and the rest of the time I studied or meant to. Memorized. Did you ever want a letter in the mail or a phone call or a stranger at the door, anonymous flowers—some touch from the outside to change your life? If you haven’t, try reading Robbins’s
Pathology.
I called information.
“What city, please?” the operator said.
I didn’t know where the FBI was. Everywhere you didn’t want them. “Washington, D.C.,” I said.
“We have a local listing, ma’am.”
I got a nice-sounding woman and I told her what I knew.
“You don’t know me but I’m looking for my father who’s been sort of missing for a long time. The last time I saw him was 1970. You probably can’t help me but I wanted to call because I hoped at least you might be able to tell me what to try.”
She laughed a laugh, not funny. “I’m the wrong person to talk to. I looked for my father for five years and even with my job I couldn’t find him. I gave up. But usually, we usually tell people to call the Salvation Army.”
“The Salvation Army? Why? What do they do?”
“They run shelters all over the country. Lot of men on their own end up there.”
In college, I’d bought a desk from the Salvation Army. It had cost ninety dollars and was the nicest thing I owned. Three men worked tying it down to the top of my car. When they were through, I had to climb in the open window. They’d roped the doors shut. I remembered their faces, nude, capped with wool hats. A roundness poured into their features when they realized the mistake. Their noses seemed too big then. They looked to their hands. They seemed used to trying and getting it wrong. I bellied in as fast as I could to show them it was okay. No problem.
“I don’t think my father would be there,” I said. “He was a college professor and kind of a gigolo. He did things like run off with the department head’s wife or something, but I can’t see him that down and out.”
“No, doesn’t seem likely, huh? I don’t know what to tell you.”
She talked more. She had never seen her father. He’d left when she was six months old.
“Did you look in phone books for him?” I’d never said that I’d done that, to anybody.
This woman could snort without its being derisive. “That’s the first thing you do.” Everything about her voice was soft.
“Oh.” I thought of sights: the Grand Canyon, monuments, space. I’d never seen those places. I pictured Mount Rushmore, a handkerchief of moths turning around Lincoln’s sandstone face. A person could be anywhere in this country. A nation full of privacies, jangling.
“I tried everything. And with my job you know, even then, I couldn’t. But my father wasn’t born here.”
“Mine either,” I said.
“I didn’t have much to go on.”
“Where’s yours from?”
“He’s from Jamaica. Negril Beach.” She said that as if it were a sorrow. “But he left my mother when I was six months old. He worked for the railroad then, I don’t know, maybe he was a porter or something. Once I even called the railroad union but they didn’t have anything.”
“No?”
“No.”
“That’s the kind of job I guess you might not keep forever.” I was just talking. I talked too much then. I guess I’d meant how the railroad lines dwindled in our lifetimes from something that started
grand, with tablecloths and chandeliers, observation cars for the night sky. Now the trains went practically like buses. It was less an idea than just something to say.
“He’s Jamaican,” she repeated, as if that explained something. “I imagine he was a porter or a conductor. Or maybe a cook.”
I thought of the white gloves and brass shined buttons and I knew she had pictured them too until it was worn out for her, and she could get no more from it. “Are you married?”
“I’m a widow.”
“Do you have any kids?”
She paused as if I were asking too much and I was, I knew I was, but then she said, “One son. I have one son. Look, I’d like to find him too because my mother’s dead and there’s nobody else there, but, I’ve been through a lot of therapy and after that it doesn’t seem so important anymore. When somebody does that to you, it makes you feel worthless. When they leave you. And when you understand that you’re not worthless, then it doesn’t matter so much anymore.”
“I know,” I said and I sort of did know too. “I mean our fathers are probably not swell guys.”
“No, I don’t think so. They’re not.” Her voice lifted a little.
I took the phone and moved off my chair. I sat on the floor. That felt better, my back against the heater.
“I don’t know what to tell you. It’s hard to find somebody. I even called people with his same name in the phone book.”
I stopped. That had never happened to me. I never found the same name.
“Did you learn anything?”
“Nothing. I don’t know what to tell you. I suggest you go to a therapist. I gave up. But it took me five years. And a lot of therapy. Lot of hard work with a therapist.”
“Is it an unusual name?”
“No, it’s a common name.”
She told me. Though I’d given her no reason to, not really. Her name was Venise King. She didn’t ask me my name at all, and I hadn’t told her, so even calling the FBI there would be no record, unless they kept track through the phones. And I doubted that. To do that would cost too much money.
She was black. Her father had been a porter or a conductor or maybe a cook. He’d worked on the trains. Was I somehow pulling
rank when I said I didn’t think mine would end up at the Salvation Army? Or did she pity me my scrap of vanity?
But mine was not a common name. I felt guilty and relieved, as if we’d both opened our folded lottery papers at the same time and hers was the one with the X.
H
ER FATHER
might have had reasons. My family was not even disadvantaged. My mother’s family was regular middle class, upright, self-supporting, with savings in the bank and a cellar full of canned goods. She grew up with matching sweater sets and a red ukulele. I’d always been told my father’s family was royal over there, one of the nine richest in Egypt. I was poor but that was because my mother bought too many dresses.
My father had never been in any war, either ours or over there. According to the encyclopedia, they had military coups every couple of years during the fifties and sixties. But none of the upheavals seemed to deprive my father of anything but money or even once, that we knew of, to see him into uniform. We escaped the world’s public trouble. But then, far away from everything in Wisconsin, we made our own.
Once I met a man who was Indian and had grown up in boarding schools. People were too busy to raise their own children, he said. They were building the new nation. But I doubted that my father saw himself as any part of the New Egypt.
And my mother paid no attention to public life whatsoever. She had never even learned to read the newspaper, except for her horoscope. It was a habit she could not sustain like so many others. We felt far away from the people sitting at the table making up rules.
My grandmother had a working sense of community. The way she saw it, we made the fabric of the many. “Just be glad you aren’t—” my grandmother used to say, filling in the blank to give the necessary relief, the way she’d match a purse to a dress.
There were fathers and daughters whose separation meant honest tragedy. For a long time I tried to believe we were that. But we were not. “He walked out on his own two feet,” my grandmother used to say.
T
HAT SAME WEEK
I had to fly home to see my mother. I was really mad. I hadn’t been speaking to her exactly and then she called and said that word. Cancer. It wasn’t the first time. Of course she was crying. It took nothing to set my mother crying. Crying was nearer her natural state than repose. Something had to trigger her to stop.
She’d called me late on Wednesday and it was a holiday weekend, so the flight cost a fortune. Nine hundred dollars. I was mad at myself for minding but I couldn’t help remembering all those other times flights were in the paper, a hundred and thirty-nine dollars each way. Poverty doesn’t make squalor but it does let you see it in yourself.
She was going to have to have her insides cut out and she wouldn’t get her period anymore. “They say after, your hair goes gray and I don’t know, you just age,” she said. She was going to need chemotherapy and radiation, she told me. That sounded really bad. A full hysterectomy. “I just don’t want it,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll even feel like a woman anymore, honey.”