Paper Daughter (2 page)

In the couple of days since the water disaster, I'd put off looking in here, and now I took a step back from the mess of stuff hanging down, laid out, and stacked up on all sides. Where was I ever going to start?

I leafed through a file folder of utility and phone bills, each marked with the date Dad had paid them. The ones on the bottom were still damp, so I turned the pile over and spread it out. Then I did the same with a couple of other files that were also in need of additional drying.

Oh, Dad, do we really need to keep all this?
I thought, as though he might actually answer.

Sometimes it still didn't seem quite real that he was gone, any more than it had the night we heard.

It had been a Friday. I'd stayed late with rest of the journalism club, getting out the school newspaper, and afterward we'd gone for ice cream. Racing the evening chill, I'd hurried into the house calling ahead, "Mom! I'm home, and..."

My words had trailed off when I caught sight of her standing by a living-room window, talking on her cell phone. It was how
still
she stood that stopped me. How motionless her body and how quiet her face.

"I see," she said. "No, I understand."

I watched, then moved closer. "What's wrong?" I whispered. I asked, "Is it Dad?" although I already knew because of how Mom was looking at me.

After the call she held me for a long time, so tight, before telling me
what
and
when,
and she kept holding me while I tried to understand.

But then, and even now, what I couldn't quite fit my mind around was the time gap between Dad's dying, which had been in the afternoon, and my learning of it that night. For those few hours, even though he'd been physically dead, he continued to be alive to me because I didn't know any different. And so, I sometimes thought, if I'd never found out otherwise...

But of course, I had.

Earlier that day two policemen had come to tell Mom what had happened. Even before notifying her, they called the news agency bureau where Dad worked, and it was his boss who had identified Dad's body and who was talking to Mom when I got home.

The next morning, I'd searched through the newspaper to learn more, but I didn't. I had to hunt even to find the story at all, bypassing headlines about an airline strike, school budgets, a drive-by shooting. Finally, on an inside page with other late-breaking news, I'd found just one paragraph. "Respected journalist Steven Chen was the victim..."

Blinking back the tears that always welled up when I remembered that night, I pulled a dry clipping off the line.
Maybe,
I thought,
I should start a keeper pile.
I decided to put things we'd definitely want to save in one place, where they couldn't get thrown away by accident.

Such as this clipping, an article not by Dad but about him: a story about the last big journalism award he'd gotten. Of all the awards he'd received, it was the most important to him, and Mom and I had gone to the banquet where he'd received it. He'd worn a tux, and we'd worn new dresses.

The picture above the story showed the three of us, and even without reading the caption, people would know we were a family—it was the way we stood with no space between us and how similar we looked, Dad and me especially. A Chinese family, they might think, not realizing that our China-born ancestors on both sides were more generations back than we knew.

Now, looking at our smiles in that press photo, I remembered how proud I'd been listening to the presenter's speech. "Steven Chen is a reporter's reporter," she'd said. "He writes the truth honestly, without omission or slant."

Mainly because of that award, the news agency that Dad wrote for had offered him a transfer to New York and a national/international beat. He surprised everyone by choosing to come here instead, to cover regional business news. He didn't give much of a reason—just, "The Northwest is growing in importance. It's a good spot for a newshound."

And since neither Mom nor I had wanted to move to New York, we hadn't asked for more. Though after he got killed, Mom, over breakfast one day, had suddenly exclaimed, "Who'd have thought Manhattan might be safer than Seattle?"

I hadn't answered her then, but I did now, aloud, in the glue-smelling, paper-webbed, memory-tangled lonely mess of a garage. "No one. No one!" No one would have thought it, and what happened wasn't right, and I didn't know what to do with this clipping or with all the stuff that was still wet, or with the way I felt...

How I wished I had someone to talk to and work with. A brother or a sister. Perhaps a big family. Aunts to chatter and keep everyone fed and uncles to string more drying wires and help with bundling cardboard for recycling.

Or even a friend. If Bett and Aimee weren't fifty miles away in the San Juan Islands, I might have called them to come over. But they were.

So I put the award banquet story safely back on the line, and then found and rearranged several items that were still damp.

***

It was Thursday by the time all the things we'd taken up from Dad's office were completely dry. I was mentally dividing the garage into areas for a preliminary sort when Mom came out to tell me she was on her way to work.

"I hate leaving you with all this," she said.

"I've got a plan. And the work will keep my mind off starting at the
Herald
next week. I'm ready to admit I'm getting ner vous."

"Not too late to change your mind. Whoever's running the intern program probably chose alternates."

"No," I said. "I want to do it. I just want to do it
well.
If I don't, I'll embarrass myself, you, and the teachers who wrote me recommendations."

"Maggie!" she exclaimed. Sudden, laughing exasperation made her sound like her old self. "You'll do fine! You're your father's daughter. You've got printer's ink in your veins!"

I held my breath, waiting for the wipeout I was sure would follow when Mom's mirth collapsed atop memories. But this time it didn't. She gave me a hug. "You'll do yourself, me, and your teachers proud. Which reminds me. Did you call your father's prep school?"

For a moment I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I remembered the letter saying he wasn't on its alumni list. Even though Dad hadn't kept up with associations there, Mom wanted the school to know he'd died.

"Not yet," I said. "I'll do it today. I promise."

***

Once Mom was gone, I began a rough triage, identifying papers as
toss, keep,
or
decide later.

At first I worked quickly, but pretty soon my scanning became reading. I stopped to study the draft of one of Dad's columns. His published articles had always been so smooth and seemed so effortless that the draft surprised me, with its arrows and inserted words and cross-outs over cross-outs.

Then I began reading his reporter's notebooks, which I went through as I picked them up. Some were from twenty years earlier, others quite recent, and the images they brought to mind made me feel a bittersweet ache. And a swelling pride, too. This was the dad I knew, but more, also. Someone connected to the world in a thousand ways and able, through his writing, to let others know what that was like.

Dad hadn't recorded just what he saw as he went after a story; he also got the sound and smell and feel, sometimes even the taste of it. Quoted words got a context and often a reminder of how they were said. "Shouted over the scream of machinery..." "Whispered, as her eyes searched the deserted street..."

I smiled at the way, in between notes such as those, he'd jotted down personal reminders like "Pick up the turkey"—that would have been Thanksgiving two years past—and research questions: "Federal law in effect when? Any changes?"

And he'd tracked ongoing projects: the effects of a factory closure, tourism trends, a business forecast. In a notebook so new the last pages were blank, he'd written, "Progress on family project, finally? Possible search will end right here! Give mail a week, then fly CA."

It sounded like a story he'd worked on for a good while, but I didn't recall him mentioning it. Often, at dinner, he did talk about his work.

I thought he must have received whatever he was looking for, since I was pretty sure he hadn't made any recent trips to California.

I flipped to the next page, but the only thing on it was a note. "The trouble with small deceits is that the poet was right: they do become tangled webs. And you can't foresee who will become ensnared in them or who will be hurt if you tear back through to the truth."

I felt guilty reading thoughts that Dad had obviously written only for himself. It was crossing a line of privacy I'd never have crossed when he was alive. But I told myself that maybe he'd have wanted me to read his notes now. They were probably the last things I'd ever learn directly from him. Things and ideas that maybe he'd intended to tell me about one day.

Or explain. Obviously Dad was thinking about some lie someone had told when he wrote that last entry. I thought there was probably a story there I'd have enjoyed hearing.

I didn't take a break till noon, when I put a frozen lunch in the microwave and set about keeping my promise to call Dad's school.

Intending to get the number from the school's website, I turned on the computer Mom kept in the kitchen, and while it was starting up, I brought in the mail.

A postcard from the national headquarters of Dad's college fraternity fell out. It was a form for reporting address changes, but someone had written on it, "No Steven Chen in our records."

This was absurd, I thought. How could two places Dad had been a part of both have lost track of him?

The microwave beeped that my lunch was done, but I ignored it and called the prep school instead. A recorded message said that the office was closed for summer maintenance, but in case of emergencies...

So I called Columbia University and asked to be connected to Dad's fraternity house.

"We have no listing for that," a campus operator told me.

"But you must," I said. "My dad was a member."

"Are you sure you have the fraternity name right? My own kid calls himself a Delt, when really the proper designation is—"

"I think I do," I said, "but I could check. Is there someone who would look up my father's records for me?"

She referred me to an online website where I meandered around, followed outside links, and never did learn anything. The only reason I gave it any time at all was that the fraternity mix-up, coming on top of the letter from the prep school, created a puzzle that nagged at me.

Finally I dug through sympathy cards looking for one from a Bill Ames, who'd written that he was a college friend of Dad's and had seen the obituary. Using his return address to get a home phone number, I called and heard my call being forwarded to his cell.

When he answered, I explained the trouble I was having connecting with Dad's old fraternity. "I thought perhaps you might have been in it with him."

He didn't reply, so I said, "You did go to Columbia with my father?"

"Certainly," he said. "Though after we got our degrees, I didn't stay on for graduate work the way he did, going into journalism."

"But the fraternity?" I said.

"We weren't in one. The two of us worked together on a cafeteria steam line."

"Maybe you're thinking of another friend," I said. "I don't think Dad had a job while he was in college."

"Sure he did. Work-study, like me. Plus, Steven held down outside jobs. He had to, being on his own."

I disconnected, aware of a gnawing anxiousness, even though I knew Mr. Ames must have confused my dad with someone else.

Dad's parents hadn't been rich, but they'd had enough money to put him through one of the priciest prep schools in the country and then through an Ivy League university.

Dad hadn't been comfortable talking about how well off they'd been—probably, I'd always thought, because he didn't want me thinking money was what counted. But Mom had told me how his parents, who'd died while Dad was in college, had set aside enough for his schooling and then left the rest to the natural history museum where they'd served as directors.

She liked to tell that part because the same museum had once funded some of her own parents' research, and she always said, with a coincidence like that, how could she and Dad
not
have ended up together?

So, no, there was no way my dad had had to work his way through school.

I knew that, yet I made one more call.

This time I telephoned the museum to ask about my grandparents. The man in charge of the museum's foundation was very nice on the phone. And very certain.

"Yes, the Chens were active with the museum for many years," he told me. "But," he went on, "they died in the 1970s, quite elderly and without any children or grandchildren." He knew that positively.

No children. No grandchildren.
I thought of another possibility. "Perhaps there was some other couple by the name of Chen on your board of directors?"

"Possibly, before my time," he said, but then, after checking, he told me, "No. I've looked all the way back to when the museum was built."

I hung up, feeling as though I'd been yanked upside down and that everything that should be steady and familiar was now swinging by, blurry and weird.

Arms crossed tightly, I fought for control. A turmoil of questions and answers raced across my mind.

Why?
Why would my father, who'd always said a person was only as good as his or her word, have lied about his parents and about how he'd been brought up?

I couldn't come up with an explanation that would make his lie be all right. In fact, I couldn't think of one that I could even believe.

He made up a story because he was ashamed of the truth? I couldn't imagine it.

Because he wanted a background that would help him fit in with the business world he wrote about? That seemed even less like him.

Again, I tried to tell myself I'd stumbled onto a trail of mistakes. The prep school, Columbia, Mr. Ames, the museum man—I wanted so much for them all to be wrong.