four

Ms. Washburn has a standing invitation to accompany me to lunch at my mother’s house. Since on most days she is the one to drive me home in the afternoon, she is often present anyway, and besides she and Mother have formed a bond I don’t entirely understand but which appears to be quite amiable.

Today, however, I think Ms. Washburn saw the afternoon meal as an opportunity to ask the questions of Mother that I—either because it would not occur to me or because it is difficult with one’s parent—would not easily ask.

If that sentiment had been voiced I would have disagreed, although it was possible there were some areas I would not have considered independently. Sometimes I do not consider emotional aspects of an issue that another person would believe to be obvious.

We had told Mother of our slow progress in locating my father, and I had returned the letter to her, confessing my borrowing it without asking first. Mother had said simply that she assumed I would need the letter to aid in answering the question and had not concerned herself with it being missing.

Now Ms. Washburn, eating a tuna sandwich at our kitchen table, wiped her mouth with a napkin and looked at Mother. “I think I need a better sense of your husband, Vivian. Samuel and I have been trying to figure out what his state of mind might be. I don’t know if that will help narrow down his location, but it might give us some sign of what we can do that will.”

“Samuel should know about his father anyway,” my mother said without looking in my direction. It is not often she speaks about me without acknowledging my presence in the room. I wondered if she was actually somewhat irritated with me for entering her bedroom to borrow the letter from my father.

Ms. Washburn nodded. “There shouldn’t be that kind of gap in his background; you’re right. What can you tell us?”

Mother sat back; she had taken only two bites from her own tuna sandwich. Ms. Washburn would tell me later she thought Mother might be worried about my father and therefore eating less heartily than usual. “I met Reuben at a dance my friend Joanne talked me into going to at a synagogue. I don’t know what it was about him, but he just had this swagger about him that I thought was interesting. But he was very quiet and shy when we started to talk. He loved old movies and so did I, so we bonded on that.”

This thread of conversation did not seem to be leading to any information that would give me some idea of how to find my father in or near North Hollywood, California. But through many previous questions I had discovered that the key information sometimes reveals itself in unexpected areas, so I ate some of the turkey sandwich Mother had made for me and listened to Ms. Washburn carefully direct my mother through her recollection.

“Did you date for a long time before you were married?” she asked.

Mother, whose line of sight seemed to be directed at the molding over the kitchen door, shook her head. “Three months,” she answered. “Reuben wanted to be married soon and I was head over heels for him. My parents objected until they met him and then they were thrilled.”

I had met my mother’s parents only once, when I was twelve years old and not yet “diagnosed” with Asperger’s Syndrome. They had flown in from their home in Hollywood, Florida, and visited with Mother and me for three days on their way to Colorado to see my mother’s sister, Aunt Jane. I was going through what Mother would have described as a “difficult phase,” and from what I could recall of them, it was hard to imagine her parents being thrilled about anything. Mostly what I could recall was looks of disapproval for me and Mother. Years later when Mother informed me that her mother, then her father had died, I had not felt anything out of the ordinary; I had barely known them.

“Reuben just had a way of charming you, making you believe in him,” Mother went on. “He’s a kind soul; he really wants to help everyone he knows. But sometimes he’s less than careful about the way he goes about doing it, and that can lead to trouble.”

That seemed to be a signal. “What kind of trouble, Mother?” I asked.

My mother continued to look at the top of the doorway with a look she would no doubt have described as “out into space.” She was thinking about my father and their early life together, it seemed obvious, and she was smiling. It would seem natural for a woman whose husband had left her with a small “special needs” child to resent that man and harbor unpleasant feelings for him. Mother appeared instead to have clung tightly to her regard for my father and was apparently trying to convince Ms. Washburn, if not both of us, that he was actually a man driven to what he’d done by his strong desire to help his family, which seemed unlikely.

“He never got into anything with the police, Samuel,” she said with a slight hint of rebuke in her voice. “I told you that.”

“You told me he hadn’t gone to jail,” I corrected. “That didn’t mean he’d never been arrested or charged with a crime. I wanted to make the point clear.”

“You made it clear,” she replied with a tone I could not identify. Then Mother said to Ms. Washburn, “Reuben was so anxious to be successful, so much in a hurry to show me I was right to believe in him, that he rushed into things without thinking sometimes. Once he was going to start a company with a friend of his to film people’s weddings just at the time video was starting but was expensive. Reuben just didn’t want to wait for the price to come down. He thought he could convince people film was better.”

It occurred to me that my father had impulse control issues but I decided saying that would be counterproductive in this conversation. Mother was trying strenuously to paint a positive portrait of my father. If I were to illuminate his faults, she would spend more time contradicting me than giving Ms. Washburn information that might eventually become useful. I resolved not to ask another question nor to make another comment and to give Ms. Washburn the lead. She does well under such circumstances.

“Does he have any relatives, Vivian?” Ms. Washburn asked. “Someone he might have been in contact with all these years?”

Mother shook her head. “When he left and I didn’t hear from him for such a long time, I tried calling his brother, who was the only one left. Arthur lived in Chicago in those days, and he said he hadn’t heard from Reuben either. He promised to get in touch if Reuben called or wrote, but he never did.”

I had never known I had an uncle named Arthur in Chicago, but my plan remained the same. I listened.

“Was he close to his brother?” Ms. Washburn asked.

“No. Arthur was a lot older; he’d be close to eighty now. But they sort of grew up in two different families. Arthur is really Reuben’s half brother. Their father divorced Arthur’s mother and married Reuben’s three years before Reuben was born. I never met either of his parents or his stepmother.”

Ms. Washburn’s tone became gentler, indicating she knew she was approaching a sensitive subject and wanted to be sure she said nothing to upset Mother. I felt my hands, under the table now that I had finished my turkey sandwich, ball into fists at the thought that this could be difficult. I do not respond well to emotional scenes.

“Vivian, Samuel told me some of what he read in Reuben’s letter to you. A couple of times he says this might be the last time you hear from him. Do you know why that would be?”

Mother looked at me quickly, then at Ms. Washburn. Her face showed some stress at the corners of her eyes and mouth. “Isn’t it obvious?” she asked. “Clearly, Reuben is dying.”