The Souvenir (4 page)

I wish we'd taken them up on their hospitality. We both could have used a shot of Sauza Gold just then. My father would have approved; it would have been the right medicine.

F
ROM THE MOMENT
we buried my father, I was gripped with a longing to see him again. To glimpse him on the other side, to see him in a dream. Perhaps I needed reassurance that he'd arrived safely, that he'd assumed new form, even that he was really gone. His departure had been so abrupt, so
final
.

I trailed after short, white-haired men in the supermarket. One Friday night at synagogue, I had to restrain myself from reaching out to caress the nape of the old gentleman sitting in front of me.

The pervasive strength of this desire was surprising. For most of my life, I had taken our differences for granted. Whereas my mother and I were cut from the same psychic cloth, my father and I were made of wholly different material. Or so I always thought.

When I was a kid, on summer visits to New York City, my mother and I used to make a beeline to the Metropolitan Museum. For my mother, who grew up poor, the Met had always been her own private dream mansion. She'd escape the hot tenement on East 11th Street and stroll through the galleries of Greek statues, a woman of leisure alone with classical beauty.

My father's appreciation for art could be summed up by his bringing home a generic Paris-in-the-rain painting from the 1950s equivalent of Wal-Mart, gloating, “It only cost ten bucks.” Mother listened to Beethoven string quartets or Verdi arias in the kitchen while she cooked pot roast. My father claimed to be tone deaf.

I never hesitated to confide in my mother. It was standard family policy to spare my father exposure to unpredictable circumstances
or raw emotion. “Let's not tell Dad,” my mother would say, or, “That would upset your father.” Better he be isolated than grapple with difficult feelings.

He was not dictatorial; he allowed his four children their own choices (and their own mistakes). As a teenager, I never had curfews. But when I tiptoed in at three in the morning, my father shuffled through the house in his checkered bathrobe to let me know he was aware of my comings and goings.

I was a child of the psychedelic revolution. I wanted, variously, to be a poet, a dancer, a performance artist, a filmmaker. My coming-of-age was informed by an enthusiastic embrace of hallucinogenic drugs, protests over the war in Vietnam, the draft resistance movement, the emergence of feminism, hitchhiking forays to Big Sur and the Haight.

Growing up in 1960s Los Angeles was rich with artistic mentors and friendly guides, so I resisted all my father's attempts to offer me instruction of any kind. What could he possibly have to teach me? He wanted to share with me the elegance of quadratic equations; I hated math and tightened up when he supervised my algebra. He wanted me to develop my rational mind. He couldn't fathom why his daughter talked to puppets or spent hours crawling around on the floor of a dance studio, creating performance art pieces few would ever see. No wonder he was always trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. My choices were outside the realm of his experience. He was never indifferent, but was sincerely baffled.

He offered more than once to pay for law school. “If you change your mind,” he would begin any conversation about my “career,” inevitably infuriating me.

My mother, on the other hand, was always eager to be invited on an escapade. She slept on a box spring with me in a New York City walk-up, shared my unheated room in wintry Wales, a double-seated
outhouse on an Oregon commune. I inherited her impulsive nature, a trait both endearing and frustrating to our respective husbands. Her vigor was such a contrast to my father's somber, more plodding tempo. Her bursts of enthusiasm and childlike delight always a contrast to his taciturn, dry wit.

From my perspective, Norman Steinman—who'd worked thirty-five years in his pharmacy—had excised both risk and introspection from his life. He left the house every morning for his store, filled prescriptions all day, returned at night to the dinner table, his columns of numbers, his bed. The unbuilt world did not call out to him—not the Sierras, not the Mojave, not the California coast. Sleeping in a tent was out of the question. His experiences in the war, whatever those had been, were all the adventure in the Great Outdoors he needed for a lifetime.

“Do you ever think about divorce?” I asked my mother during a spell when it seemed like every word she said irritated him. She looked at me in astonishment. “No,
never
,” she said emphatically. Her devotion to my grouchy father was a mystery.

M
ONTHS PASSED AND
my father refused to cooperate. He would not appear in a single dream. His obstinate absence struck me as unfair.

Others arrived and departed without invitation: childhood friends I hadn't thought about in decades; a tap-dancing uncle; Ruth's old boyfriend; neighbors; the janitor from work; the cashier at the neighborhood coffee shop. But my father, for some reason, stayed away.

He paid a dream visit to my mother in the very first week after his death. “He wore a dark suit,” she told me, her huge gray-blue eyes wide with astonishment, “and he was holding a hat in his hand. He had a nicely pressed handkerchief in his pocket.”

I tried to will him into appearing. I meditated on his image at
night before falling asleep, hoping to summon him, but he would not come. I gave up trying, and there were other unforeseen events to deal with. Just weeks after his death, my mother's cancer returned. Three years earlier, she'd had a rare and successful surgery to excise the tumor from her pancreas. Now, nine months after my father's death, my mother was gone. She was seventy-one. At first, I felt a semblance of relief—her physical suffering had been enormous. But she loved being alive. She did not want to die.

“It's a blessing Dad went first,” Ruth said grimly. He wouldn't have been able to bear seeing Mother in that kind of pain.

Again the four Steinman siblings and the extended family assembled in the same vault in the same mausoleum in the same cemetery in Hollywood for my mother's funeral. Once again, the relatives convened afterward in the condo. Once again, we ordered platters from the deli. Once again, the upstairs neighbor appeared with the boiled chickens and the pot of broth. Once again, rarely seen cousins told family stories. Why hadn't my father ever told me the names of his ten Russian uncles and aunts? It didn't matter that I was nearly forty years old: I still felt orphaned.

After my mother's death, the bulk of the disagreeable task of dismantling the condominium fell to Lloyd and me. The condo was in a development with the misleading name Fox Hills. After their four children had grown up and moved out of the house on Harter Avenue, my parents had been ready for a change. For years, my mother had dreamed of moving near the ocean. My father thought the new development, near a shopping center and the airport, was more practical. It was on the first floor, imperative for a heart patient. It was a rear unit, set back from the street, and didn't get much light. He either didn't notice or didn't care. My mother pined for the sun.

With each successive visit, the place felt gloomier. I grew increasingly glum emptying the contents of a kitchen drawer, my mother's
bureau, my father's closet. What to do with my mother's rolling pin, boxes of tiny kid gloves? My dad's diploma from pharmacy school, his cuff links, some army medals? Faced with a hodgepodge of family snapshots, I entered a trance, fingering each one. Basically, I was useless. Lloyd labored to pack it all up, exasperated by my inefficiency. I found his workmanlike approach heartless.

T
HE DREAM OF
my father did not occur until the following spring, after he'd been dead more than a year. Rain fell, splattering the windows of our upstairs apartment in a sharp staccato.

In the dream I was sick and the weather was lousy. I put on a heavy loden coat my father had given me as a gift. The weight of it made it difficult to breathe or move. Bundled up, I drove my car through the dark city in the pouring rain, trying to find a pharmacy that stocked the cure for what ailed me. I tried a Sav-on, a Thrifty Drug. At each one, the on-duty pharmacist shook his head. Moving on, I saw a pharmacy I'd never noticed before. A storefront, like a relic from the fifties. I ran inside. There behind the counter, wearing his priestly white smock, stood my father.

He was a small man, but in the dream he was huge. He was a gentle man but in the dream he raged. “You haven't visited in months,” he hissed. “You've been
ignoring
me.” Anger darkened his face. I tried to protest. I'd sat with his corpse in the Garden of Eden mortuary. I'd been to his funeral. I'd seen his pine coffin shoved into the wall. I was
sure
he was dead. None of these excuses placated him. He was livid. He exploded once again: “You've been
ignoring
me. You haven't been
listening
.” His rage broke against me like a wave.

Before dawn, I woke up terrified, listening to the sound of pounding rain.

T
WO WEEKS AFTER
the dream, Lloyd and I were finally close to finishing the seemingly interminable task of clearing out the condo. We taped some boxes shut and prepared to leave. Then I remembered the storage locker in the underground garage. We took the elevator down. An unmarked key on the key ring opened the padlock to the locker.

In the dim light, I identified a collection of odds and ends. A motley box of my old theater props, a spare soup pot, Grandma's everyday dishes, two frayed beach chairs, a bicycle missing a front tire. At the bottom was a rusted metal ammo box. I tried to pick it up, but it was too heavy. I tried to open it, but the hasp was stiff. We hauled the box toward the light and together pried it open. I had a vague memory of having seen this artifact once before. Inside the rusted box were stacks of yellowing airmail envelopes. These were all addressed to my mother in my father's handwriting. Hundreds of them. The faded dates on the envelopes spanned 1941 to 1945.

Under one bundle of letters was a manila envelope postmarked March 3, 1945, and stamped on the back with some kind of an official seal:

I opened it and found a slippery piece of white silk, folded in eighths. I held it up to the light. Pin pricks of daylight showed through the fragile fabric—tiny holes where the fine strands had given way. The orange-red disc in the center was faded. Brushed over the surface were Japanese characters, and speckled among them, faint drops of red-brown. Could they be blood? Spooked,
I quickly refolded it and put it back in the envelope, back in the box.

M
ONTHS LATER, AFTER
we finally sold the condo, I brought the ammo box and its contents home to my apartment. The letters, by their sheer quantity, were intimidating. They lay in their inelegant sarcophagus like a reproach. The abundance of them was alarming. When I occasionally plucked one out to read, it always had the same effect, detonating a landmine of longing for my father. The flag remained in its manila envelope buried under the piles of correspondence, too disturbing to contemplate.

However, as time wore on, a shift occurred. The contents of the metal box, which had initially frightened me, now began to draw me in. At odd moments, I'd pull the box out from the closet and read a few letters. I noted a cast of characters—“Dr. Orange,” Hal Rubin, Morrie Franklin, someone named Sam Wengrow. Who were they? I began to realize that the metal box contained a story, many stories. Tales of fear, bravery, and kindness, the mundane and the heroic intertwined.

I'd take out the flag and examine it, running my hands gently over its shimmery surface, folding it up and placing it back in its envelope. For months it didn't occur to me that the Japanese characters actually meant anything. They were just mute forms, swirling across the surface of the silk.

One day, on a seemingly mindless impulse, I searched through my Rolodex at work. My job then was at an underfunded city arts center, coordinating theater and dance programs. I found the telephone number of a Japanese performance artist named Rika Ohara.

I didn't explain to Rika why I needed to see her, but she agreed to come to my office anyway. She was a striking young woman. Her head was shaved, and her delicate features were not disguised by the loose-fitting slacks and oversized flannel shirt she wore. Her
thumb and forefinger were stained tobacco-yellow. She was one of the few who still rolled her own smokes.

We sat outside on a bench, shaded from the sweltering sun. I opened the envelope and gently pulled out the flag. “I found this with my father's things after he died,” I said. “He fought in the Philippines. He must have found this on a battlefield.” She looked at the flag but didn't say a word. “I'd like to know what these characters mean,” I said. She listened but she didn't answer right away.

I sat holding the flag on my lap as Rika plucked tobacco from a tin and placed it precisely on the crease of a cigarette paper. She daintily moistened the gummed edge, then formed it quickly into a smoke. She placed it in her mouth and lit up. Then she glanced up from her task and took the flag from me in her small fine hands.

She looked at it silently for what seemed like a long time. Whatever she was thinking, she didn't let on. Perhaps I should defend my interest in this ghoulish artifact, I thought. I didn't know how my father had come to have the flag. I refused to assume the obvious: that he'd taken it off a dead soldier. Yet I felt a rush of shame.

Finally, her fingertips still caressing the flag as if she were reading Braille, Rika turned to me and said, “This is a good-luck banner, given to a Japanese soldier when he goes into battle. Perhaps when he leaves for duty overseas. It says here: ‘To Yoshio Shimizu given to him in the Greater East Asia War—to be fought to the end. If you believe in it, you win.' That's what it says. The other characters on the flag are names.” She gingerly handed the flag back to me. Her cigarette had gone out. She calmly lit up.