The lost father by Simpson Mona

Author:Simpson, Mona
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fathers and daughters
Publisher: New York : Vintage Books
Published: 1993-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

The Lost Father

I DROVE THROUGH A LANE OF TREES. They were plane trees, fisted, rare, trees I wouldn't have guessed possible in the Midwest. I knew from Stevie: there is not one continent without pine. And so many species have been mixed and transplanted from the last piratical century of expansion and conquest. Stevie had a Ph.D. in trees.

I was driving to see the lawyer Pat Briggs had mentioned. The lawyer was a man without children. I knew, everyone knew, that he and his wife had had a child who died years ago. The wife had taken the girl to the Twin Cities for treatment before she died and she stayed there for two years, after. Then she came back and that was all I'd ever heard about it. Jackson Fenwick was the richest lawyer in Bay City. He worked in a wooden office downtown, but this was his vacation and he'd asked me to drive out to his house. This was a district, forty miles south from where I'd lived, that I'd never seen. It was a neighborhood of big old houses that looked blinded and closed for long winters. At the end of his lane, you came to a plateau. A thicket of dry winter rosebushes still kept you from the approach to the house. I parked my grandmother's car and got out. From here you could see down the hill and many hills, ridged in the distance. This was a way hardly anybody in Wisconsin lived.

How could this man have accepted my grandmother's money?

A woman met me at the door. I'd expected a maid, from the movies, but it was Mrs. Fenwick and she had a kind, oval face, her hair just bunned back, some gray running in it. She was dressed all in suede, suede jeans and a suede shirt and suede loafers, and she moved noiselessly on the bare floors. She had many small teeth and an inwardly moving smile.

"Jackson's in the study, I'll bring you on out there," she said. A fire broke and whispered in the living room as we passed. The room admitted filtered, goldish light. I felt right away all that was wrong with the Briggses' house.

Jackson Fenwick sat, feet up, reading at a mahogany desk. From the opposite bookshelf came the low murmur of a football game on a small, cube-shaped television.

"Ouch, oh no, come on, get him down, get him, hold him, oh no." Jackson Fenwick turned the game off. "Have a seat," he said to me. He exhaled. "They're not on top today," he said. His wife slipped out, closing the wood door behind her. On one side, the wall opened to windows revealing an empty garden.

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