Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,100

of turtleneck sweater, & brown suede shoes. I had saved this outfit for the day I would meet my father. I imagined that this was a very smart outfit. I had long hair then. Down to my shoulders. It was 1971. The day of our arrival, I panicked: I realized that I could hardly button the pants. In a week I had gained enough weight to make them tight. I squeezed & squeezed myself into them. I thought of my mother doing the same thing, years ago, before my father left. I strained the fabric, I forced myself into them, & finally the button went through the hole. I couldn’t breathe out. I felt trapped.

I wanted to tell her this. Instead I said, “There was my father, waiting down at the bottom of the gangplank with hundreds of other onlookers. I recognized him but he looked older.”

He looked at me & then away. He looked at me & then away.

He stood up from where he leaned against the railing.

At ten feet away I said his name. Arthur. I could not bring myself to call him Dad.

He looked at me again, & he did not smile.

I was close enough now for him to shake my hand, but he didn’t. He reached out and put one hand on my shoulder.

“My goodness,” he said.

•

“What was your father like? When you saw him again?” asked Yolanda.

“He was the same but different. We drove together from Southampton, where the ship had come in, to London. He was quiet, you know.”

He had an Aston Martin. I could not fit in it well. It was a two-hour drive to London, & we stopped once along the way for lunch. He sat across from me & ordered a prawn cocktail. Then he ordered steak and chips & I ordered the same.

“You look like Anna,” he said. “Almost exactly like Anna.”

My mother had always told me I looked like him, but I did not say that, I could not imagine saying that. Instead I said, “People used to tell us that.”

“I was so sorry to hear about her death,” said my father.

“She’s better off,” I said, which was & was not true.

“What are you going to do with yourself now?” asked my father.

“I’m not quite sure,” I said. “College. I don’t know.”

“Have you applied already? Have you gotten in?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where?”

I had applied to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Stanford, Amherst, and, as a backup, New York University. Of these, I had been admitted to Amherst and New York University.

“Amherst College,” I told my father.

“Amherst,” he said, looking off into the distance. “That’s in Maine?”

“Massachusetts,” I said.

“It’s very good?”

“It’s very good,” I said.

“Excellent,” he said. “Congratulations.”

I did not eat much of my lunch. I was starving but embarrassed. We were quiet for most of the rest of the trip.

“Would you like to take a detour through Maidenhead on the way into London?” he asked. “It’s a bit out of the way, but.”

“OK,” I said.

I vaguely remembered parts of it from a visit in my early childhood. I had gone with my parents to visit my Granny Conan. He pointed out to me the places that would have been important to my mother: her childhood home, Granny Conan’s home; a park she loved; his house, his favorite store, which still existed. The church they both went to with their parents.

I didn’t say anything, but I happened to know that it was at this church that they had met. At a dance. I had heard the story over & over again from my mother. My father had been the most handsome boy in the room. Her friend Lorraine had pointed him out to her specially. My mother hadn’t thought he could possibly notice her. But then he did, he did. He came walking over. He was wearing a beautiful suit. He had asked her to dance. Not her friend Lorraine, who was considered a beauty, & who had been sitting right next to her. Not Lorraine. My mother.

“There’s my school,” said my father. I could only see a glimpse of it from the road. The sign in front of it said St Piran’s, which was a name I knew from the tales my mother had told me about my father’s life. “I spent a number of terrible years there.”

“Did my mother?” I asked—for I realized suddenly that for all the time my mother spent describing my father’s childhood, she had never told me much about her own education. Or else I had