My father vanished in the middle of May 1968, a month before my 15th birthday. He disappeared on a weekday, already gone hours, towards the Colorado-Nebraska border, probably to Julesburg or Sterling by the time my sister and I were looking out the living room window, watching for his return. I was thinking that surely he would arrive back home at any time, and I assumed that my sister thought likewise. We did not know where he disappeared to, and it surprises me even now, thirty years later, that I have written with such surety about a conjecture. On the May day he disappeared, there was no conjecture, and that is a fact. I used to think each of us, my sister, my mother, and I had constructed our own elaborate, private scenario about where my father had gone. I believed that he had gone to Madrid or somewhere in Andalucia, that he was smoking at a curbside bodega, drinking weak Spanish beer from a small, brown bottle and eating cold tapas of skewered melons and ham. I heard him conversing in what I thought was flawless Spanish (really gutter Ladino he had grown up speaking), the Spanish motif I superimposed on his flight indicative of my own fantasies about his family in its heyday in Spain. My mother thought that he was dead. My sister, it turns out, fabricated nothing at all--his disappearance all but scarred over by her own version of childhood. Collectively we tried other more practical destinations--his brother's house in California, The Sands in Las Vegas where he liked to stay, his sister's in New York, but nothing answered us so definitively as his silence.

He had gone away before, of course, on solitary junkets to Las Vegas my mother euphemistically referred to as business trips, and we would carry his small suitcase into the lobby of Stapelton Airport and stand near him while he filled out traveler's insurance forms laid out on round, white tables provided by Mutual of Omaha. He folded the forms into a long, narrow white envelope with red letters that, once sealed, was inserted into a slot in the round table, shaped not unlike the discs of Quizzac. Each time my father went away I wondered if anyone ever retrieved those envelopes, or if they sat in a sealed heap in the narrow chute under the table, the only unanswerable question, "Will he survive?"

The silence in the house during his previous gambling junkets was not nearly so unbearable as when he disappeared, though the residual hostility of his going to Las Vegas and my mother staying home was palpable in the sound of slamming--doors slamming, her hot iron slamming down on the ironing board, the hard bristles of her brush slamming down on her pink scalp.

The first night the driveway remained empty, the strong May light began to dim in the thin cracks between the concrete driveway slabs. It was replaced by the yellow porch light that mingled with the streetlight on the corner of Hudson and cast its helpful but cheerless beam onto all that emptiness. There were no rituals that night--no scent of Dial soap coming from the bathroom sink as my father washed his hands for dinner; no "Mama Mia, apple pie and coffee," the punchline of a frayed joke about immigrant language acquisition, a joke on him and all our relatives, really, that he told every evening as he sat down for supper; no clap of his slippers on the steps to the basement as he descended after dinner with the sports section from the Denver Post and his soft pack of Camels; no Mission Impossible on TV.

It was not easy to hide a disappeared father. In our neighborhood, on streets lined with family, friends, and cousins from both sides of my mother's family, fathers were not conspicuously absent. While they let Japanese gardeners mow their lawns and older children tend their barbecues, all fathers, nonetheless, were present and accounted for in 1968. No father in the neighborhood was young enough to be drafted to serve in Vietnam, and none was so foolish as to enlist. No traveling salesmen lined our middle class streets. Even Mr. Atkins, the United Airlines pilot two doors east, had arrival times anticipated by the whole neighborhood.

My father drove a chartreuse Chevy panel truck, as big as a small car ferry on wheels. It was not easily missed. His longest trips to Las Vegas three times a year never spilled over to the workweek. His truck had never been in the shop for longer than a few days. So after a week, our house was marked as one only partially full.

My mother tried on the veil of widow but it did not suit her. Like a novice actor in a costume room, she reached for the most devastating black, and cast herself in the most difficult role. Because there were no facts to hold on to, no police reports, nothing from the Highway Patrol, no letters on the kitchen table or on the bedroom dresser, nothing from any of his friends, she had to make do with what her mind conjured up, and so she became a character in her own unwitting fiction. My mother was 46, seething, beautiful, unfulfilled, unexpressed, with unknowable ambition, torn between the demands of constricting modernity, motherhood, and religious orthodoxy. She considered most seriously the possibility of his death, and early during his disappearance replaced her daily afternoon visits to her mother's cramped apartment on Holly Street with visits to the county morgue. The men who ran the morgue were puzzled by the derivation of our surname, and so every afternoon she would uncover the stiff, grim toes of black men or Hispanics or gaze at the stiffened, fine-boned cheeks of the few French men unclaimed by family or unidentifiable because of unspeakable mutilations.

The morgue became a fact of her new routine, a destination, a route integrated into the grid of Denver streets around which she piloted her white Chevy station wagon, but even she, a woman skilled, even gifted in self-loathing and punishment, could not endure the ritual- whether fact or fiction--of the morgue. As abruptly as my father disappeared, her visits to the morgue ended. She replaced them with incessant pacing from the kitchen to the living room window, stopping often to run her right hand across the dust-free surface of the blonde sideboard.

Each day my father was gone continued like the one before- waking to the reminder of his absence, eating breakfast, catching the school bus, staring listlessly out the window at the hot, flat light on the asphalt playground, coming back home to my mother's pursed lips as she sat leafing through the phone book. I continued on, the docile audience, now witness to my mother's drama, unable to articulate or accept my own place in it.

Night after night no phone calls came for or from my father. Dinners were disastrous. Meat loaf appeared almost magically in the middle of the table as an amorphous pile of baked flesh and gristle because my mother forgot to add the matzah meal that bound it all together like cement. The beans had a thin scum of black scraped from the bottom of the pot. My mother's forearm sported a burn the size of a silver dollar from where she leaned against the stove element, forgetting it was turned on.

Each day my father was missing brought a promise, a lie, and the fact of spring. The privet hedge on the side of the house leafed out, the junipers in front begged to be trimmed, John Yakamoto and his lawn mowing crew arrived punctually every Thursday at 7 a.m., pulling into the empty driveway as they did every week, assuming my father had already left for work, as he had every week since they began mowing the yard in 1960. All of those late spring and summer mornings filled with the sound of their motors and the cool precision of their handiwork. My father's absence became a cocoon around the rituals of our week--school, Hebrew school, after school softball, and all the hired help still arriving--the Yakamotos on Thursday, Mary Geitling the cleaning lady every Wednesday morning. Each of us carried on not as if nothing had happened, but with a private, revised script we had composed to explain away what we could not know, each plot without a sense of origin or outcome.

Two weeks into my father's disappearance the bill paying ritual began without him. All of the orange and tan molded plastic tepees from the St. Labre Indian School that he collected in the bill drawer were scooped unceremoniously into the trash, nestled on top of a glob of top deckle, the haute of our cuisine. My mother sat at the table looking at neat stacks of bills, her palms pressed to her forehead, the full impact of my father's disappearance like a masked stranger tapping at the window. It was not a time when women of my mother's education and class were applauded for launching careers outside of the home. It was not a time when the deed to the house, the titles to the car and truck, the portfolio, were in both partners' names. Partner, in the larger world of financial parlance, was a misnomer. It was a time in the life of my family not unlike the fictional future in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, when a life could shut down simply by freezing access to a bank account. My mother discovered when she went to pay the bills that there was no bank account, that my father had taken all liquid assets with him.

Until that time I was not privy to my parents' finances; I knew my father had lost his business accounts at Stapleton Airport and the Tally Ho Lounge and the coffee shop at the Twilight Golf Course, but we continued on in our home, surrounded by day help with the austere management of my mother. The last family vacation had been four years earlier, the only visit we made to my father's family in New York. I knew nothing of the facts: how many different accounts it took to keep the house going, how much income, how much projection, how much credit, how much hope.

If you are younger than 30, you must understand that credit was not free flowing as tapwater in 1968, that people of my parents' background, the children of immigrants who only trusted the freedom of cash, did not seek credit, and even if they had, would not have been awarded it. Knowing this, you might understand the awe and suspicion with which my mother regarded my father's Mastercard, and the paradoxical horror she felt when she discovered the night she replaced him at the kitchen table to pay bills, a long list of frivolous charges that pinpointed his exact route out of our lives. He was not alone, the billing statement suggested, and he was sinking us deeply into debt. The figures on the billing statement could not tell her who he was with, because figures only tell a partial kind of truth. Like Quizzac, they neither asked nor answered why.

Why would my mother have waited for two weeks to discover there was no money in their bank account? My mother was trained as a bookkeeper and kept my father's books more accurately and meticulously than my father's paid accountant. Could it be that she didn't think to look? She ran the household accounts with cash, though to this day I don't know where she kept it. She knew how much money she needed for the month, so why go looking elsewhere? But why, if you were totally dependent on your husband's income, wouldn't you check to see that you were still solvent? Perhaps a better why might be why a grieving woman would run first thing to the bank.

Like those old islands of Red Chinese in the undulating sea of my childhood imagination, my mind fixated on odd facets of my mother's motivations. Surely the subject of motivation should be put to my father, but it was my father who was absent and my mother's reactions that I watched. How can I turn the tables and see into his mind, except through fiction? I can no more interview him in the grave than I could have interrupted the rote narrative of his past--dates and lists of airstrips and towns visited during the war, his heated rant against Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohen, Red baiting, and his clan identification with "the pink dentist" Irving Peress--to insist he account for his absence.

Page    1    2    3    4    Next page

Back to Volume 4, Issue 2