My Heart Father

Posted by Talia Carner in HandPrints Stories & Videos | 0 comments

© Talia Carner

As my friend was about to blow out the ninth candle on her birthday cake, the good luck one for next year, someone tapped my shoulder, and said that my mother was outside. I wanted to see the last candle blown out, since not blowing the good-luck one was bad luck, but I rushed out. My mother must have found a ride to the village outside Tel-Aviv where, since last year’s divorce, I’d lived with a family that wasn’t mine.

A warm Saturday morning, it was one of those winter days when the plaid woolen pants and bright red sweater– my party outfit until I outgrew all possible alterations– itched. In winter you either wore wool or caught pneumonia. There, in the bright sunlight, stood my mother beside a black Rover, and a man with a hat. She wore a flowing new skirt and was laughing, not as before when my father had caused her cry a lot. I buried my face in my mother’s skirt. Everything about her smelled like warm flowers. I lifted my head. The man looked at me with interest, his smile creating crescent-shaped creases that reached his gray eyes. He handed me a wooden box, and I thanked him politely. My mother was shopping for a new husband, and I wanted him to know that the deal included a good kid. His smile widened; he had the largest, kindest eyes.
“Open it,” he said, pointing to the box.

It was filled with an assortment of pencils, coloring pens, an eraser and a pencil sharpener, each tucked in its own little pocket. No one in school owned such a collection, and it wasn’t even my birthday!

I hated hugging people. I pretended to like hugging my birth father, whom I addressed only by his first name. Yet wrapping my arms around this stranger’s waist was easy. I inhaled his lemon after-shave that mingled with the smell of mothball in his tweed jacket. When I pulled away, he continued to examine my face, saying, “I told your mother I must meet you.”

She giggled, “He had me climb up to the attic to bring down the photo albums.”

I no longer wanted to return to the birthday party. I sat on the car hood, I was careful not to swing my legs and chip the paint. I must have been difficult to talk with, because in those post-divorce months I stuttered. I also wet my bed and had low grades in school.

The muffled hum of cars and trucks on the Tel-Aviv-Haifa Road reached us from across the field, but it did not drown the calm, rich voice of this man who addressed me as if I were an adult. We began talking then, and it was years before we stopped. He knew a lot of interesting things, such as how Coca Cola was concocted by a pharmacist, and how a pearl was created inside an oyster. And I had lots of questions to ask.

How could my mother resist his proposal of marriage? This forty-year-old bachelor had fallen in love with her, but I was also certain he wanted me for a daughter. Believing that my new father was a genie who popped into my life to save me, I began studying him during my weekend visits to my mother’s new home. I peeked at him in his sleep; spied on him when he got the morning paper; watched him while he sorted his stamp collection; and stood riveted while he clipped his toenails. All I caught was an ordinary man with eyes bathed in love.

I desperately wanted to come home, permanently; not waiting for the end of the school year. “Only four months,” my mother assured me. “By then, your room will be ready.”

The extra bedroom in my new father’s apartment was painted in every shade of pastel. The historical Tel-Aviv building was located on a divided, wide boulevard, shaded by huge sycamore trees bent with age and disease and flanked by two thoroughfares in which five bus lines made noise and puffed clouds of gray gas. The place looked cheerless and dark in the unrelenting rain the first time I visited, but I didn’t care. It was home and that was where I wanted to be. Summer was too far away.

One day after school, rather than take the bus back to the family that provided my food and shelter, I climbed onto the bus heading in the opposite direction. I had saved my allowance to pay for the ticket, and it didn’t occur to me to be afraid; I was going to see my new father at his law office.

The Tel-Aviv central station was a ten-block area crammed with shops, warehouses and small factories. Streets teemed with buses, vendors’ carts, beggars and shoppers— many people I could ask for directions. I began to walk. I didn’t get lost, and some hours after I had left school, my father’s secretary showed me in.

I fell into his arms. “I want to stay with you,” I sobbed.

He did not scold me, nor did he tell me that the police had been searching for me. Not until years later did he reveal that he had sat at his desk, staring at the phone, waiting for news of me. Instead, he took my hand.

“Let’s go home. Don’t you want to see Mommy?”

“She’ll send me back. Will you talk to her?”

He nodded, and we became one front.

One evening, several months after I had moved in, I hung about in the living room, observing my father on a ladder as he changed light bulbs in the chandelier. I gathered the courage to say the magic word. “May I call you ‘Daddy’?” I finally blurted.

“Of course.” From his height, his face lit by an inner glow. “You’re my daughter, aren’t you?”

“Abba.” I rolled the word off my tongue. “Daddy.” Then I skipped around his ladder, letting this sweet word scatter all around us, like marbles. “Abba. Abba. Abba.”

We developed little rituals, ours alone. In the mornings we walked together: I to my new school, and he to his office. Parting at the corner closest to school, I kissed him good-bye, hoping other kids would notice. In the evenings, he tucked me into bed and sat down for our “Question Corner.” I loved listening to his rich, educated language when he told me how, as a child in Leningrad, his mother had bought him one section of an orange for his birthday. I loved hearing how his two older sisters got rid of their pestering baby brother by kissing him until he escaped. Were there families where people kissed instead of yelling?

Eventually I stopped stuttering, and no longer wet my bed. And though the city school was more demanding than the rural one I had left, I soon rose close to the top of my class. My father rarely praised my high grades. He had expected nothing less; and soon, neither did I.

My sister, his first natural child, was born when I was fourteen. He must have been delighted, but by then I was oblivious to my home life. Boys, the telephone, and Elvis Presley vied for my attention. Yet my father and I continued our “Question Corner,” with talks about distant planets or the unique pregnancy of the male seahorse.
That was when he showed me his poetry notebooks: two full volumes he had written in his youth. The poems, in his small, neat handwriting, were beautiful, and I was permitted to keep the notebooks for a while.

I was sixteen when my heart father tried to adopt me, but my birth father, whom I rarely saw, refused to sign the papers. “Bureaucracy,” my heart father said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.” To this day, I cringe when asked for my maiden name. I lie.
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It’s decades later, and my sister hands me a piece of paper: Section; Lot; Aisle; Row; grave number.

The marble slab, among thousands of similarly impersonal ones, represents the small, unimportant life people live – except when they figure as large as my father had in mine. I am about to place flowers on the white stone when I realize that this is not the place to mourn his death.

I drive to the now-prosperous suburb, once that village, where fifty years ago I left a classmate’s birthday party. An eight-lane highway has long since claimed the field where I once sat on the hood of the Rover. It is here, in the second lane of the highway, at the spot where my little legs in itchy wool pants tried not to swing while talking to the man with kind, gray eyes, that I raise my arm to spread the flowers.

With trucks and cars speeding by, the grave for my memories of my father, for our shared life, rests under the asphalt.

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Editors Note: Talia’s new novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, was published by HarperCollins in June 2011.Talia Carner and her husband Ron, have four grown children. The couple lives in Bridgehampton, Long Island and in Manhattan, New York.

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