Drifting House Read online

  “This is a time to be alone,” he said. “You know what day it is for me today.”

  She didn’t push further. He opened the door and left in the cool wind.

  His mother pinched Mark’s cheeks, hard. “You need to follow him. He’ll listen to you.”

  He pretended not to hear her.

  She said, “Make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy like walk off the rim.”

  “Why would he want to do that?”

  She didn’t answer, so he draped on his cape and crept after his father from a distance. He was discreet the way his mother told him to be, but it wouldn’t have mattered—his father didn’t notice anything. His father sat on a bench gleaming with dampness and counted the number of stars out loud to himself. When a couple walking by stared at him as if he were crazy, Mark felt protective. He looked comfortable, no longer intently studying people, no longer ill at ease. He could not imagine his father as a kid playing soccer or having kid friends in North Korea, the land of missiles and rogue leaders in newspapers. His father got up and pulled wide the elastic band of his sports sock and withdrew a bill. He walked to a small shopping center and into a bakery, and a few minutes later appeared with a white box. Mark followed several yards behind. They walked. Away from the stores and restaurants, away from the streetlights, away from the motel, away from what seemed everything he had ever known. He wondered if they were going to walk all night. There were so many stars that he wanted badly to name all the constellations out loud and impress his father. He missed his father.

  His father walked, beaming a flashlight ahead of him, and Mark tiptoed behind him, to the rim. They were standing on forty layers of limestone, sandstone, and shale. It felt like they were at the edge of the world. His father leaned against the flimsy wire fence and kicked a stone over the crumbly ledge. They both leaned forward, son behind the father, listening for the sound of the stone, but there was only the wind. It was a long way down and he was sure that every year there were accidents, the kind that couldn’t be undone. Mark was afraid, seeing his father at such a vulnerable place, the cake box pressed to his chest and one foot raised ­knee-high as if to climb the fence. He prepared to tackle his father like a common athlete and endanger his velvet cape if necessary, anything to stop him from doing the awful thing. His father stepped forward; Mark squatted a few yards back, about to spring into NFL action, but his father sat in the dirt and opened the box. Inside there was a scalloped cake that he studded with candles. Mark realized that it was past dinnertime; his mother would have a lukewarm but delicious dinner waiting for them.

  “Happy birthday to you,” his father sang, his hands over the candlelit cake as if it were a cozy fireplace.

  Mark was weak with relief. His father was a reasonable man, a man who knew not to test the gravitational laws of the universe. He knew to go only when it was his time. It was the father he knew, using inscrutable ways of getting at something, but still Mark cried, his knuckle in his mouth so that the crying was happening in some other dimension and time, because he was a boy and boys did not cry.

  Soon everything was quiet and he was no longer shaking. He and his father watched the emptiness of the canyon below, and the sky above that was a dense blanket of stars. It was the kind of silence that allowed the voices of the wind to be heard as they moved above, across, along the bottom of the canyon, where the bones of explorers must be buried. It was enough to make him want to write a poem, though poetry was for girls.

  Only when his father cut a slice of cake, a frosted masterpiece the size of a ­travel-size chessboard, and lobbed it over the rim as if feeding the canyon, only then did Mark find the courage to speak.

  “Don’t waste cake!” he said. “Think of the poor kids in North Korea. Think of me.”

  His father smiled. The most awful smile Mark had ever witnessed.

  “That was for Big Uncle who you never met,” he said. “It’s his birthday today.”

  Mark wondered if his father threw away a cake every year. He said, “You scared me, Appa.”

  “Never be scared of me,” he said. He had the blank look of someone not present, and this made Mark angry at the past that kept taking his father away from him.

  Mark vowed that he would never allow anything bad to happen to himself; he would hurtle into the present, straight into a large ­two-story house, and live in the same neighborhood into his ­white-whiskered age, install his parents as his neighbors, and raise a litter of gifted children with Chanhee. There would be no dis­asters or loss, nothing unplanned. He was carefully navigating the future when his father surprised him with a ­hug—if you could call it a hug. It was more like a slow-motion tackle that squeezed out the thin stream of air in Mark’s windpipe and left him breathless, and with a longing he did not understand. He was overwhelmed.

  “Mani sarang handa,” his father said. I love you so much.

  His arms enfolded Mark like warm bathwater, and stayed tight around his neck and shoulders. “Appa, I can’t breathe,” he said, but his father did not let go.

  THE PASTOR’S SON

  MY MOTHER’S LAST wish was to have my father marry a childhood friend of hers: Hyeseon Min. Hyeseon had lived with her parents in Seoul her entire life, supported herself by giving piano lessons to rich children, and, as we learned later, read romance novels and the Bible with equal interest. Love wasn’t mentioned; sex wasn’t imagined. At that time, everyone, even I, naively believed that Hyeseon desired a kind of insurance in her old ­age—nothing more, because that was what she promised my mother.

  But when we left California and its memories in December, and arrived for the wedding in Seoul, Hyeseon had blushed as she gripped my father’s hands to her like a ­twenty-year-old. It was embarrassing for my sisters and me, and mortifying for my father to endure. Instead of the promised quiet family gathering, Hyeseon’s tribe had opted for a typical Korean ceremony and hired a flashy wedding hall for several hundred acquaintances. Our recently widowed father was forced to ride a mechanized Venetian gondola to the altar; a fog machine blew smoke into his face, and we endured two wedding ceremonies: a ­Western-style ceremony followed by a private Korean pyebaek, where nine dates and chestnuts were tossed into the skirt of Hyeseon’s hanbok, which meant that she would have nine children.

  “Pastor Ryu, tonight’s the night,” said one man to my father with a wink, as Hyeseon lurched around with a tiara perched on her perm.

  I watched my father, his muscular body barely contained in the funereal black suit and his white pastor’s collar that he had worn for fifteen years, the span of my life at the time. He made a stately matron blush to her fingertips, then ­bear-hugged her stolid husband, and I was surprised as I always was by his charisma. How easily it fooled people.

  He was the only parent I had left and I wanted to believe that the marriage would save him. And I had almost convinced myself, right up until New Mother finished waving at guests like a celebrity, and hitched her froth of pink and white and entered the hired sedan.

  As soon as he drove past the hotel entrance, my father stopped and flung his corsage in her face.

  He said, “All your lies about a small family wedding were heard straight in heaven.”

  New Mother touched her cheek with the rose petals as if my father had stroked her. Her fingers dreamily scaled up and down the dashboard as if it were a piano.

  My oldest sister covered my eyes, but I wasn’t a child anymore, so I pulled away from her. I said, “Abeoji, we’re holding up a parade of cars.”

  My father turned to the backseat and grabbed my arm so tight, the skin bubbled up around his fingers. “Son, I’d rather not hear from you right now,” he said.

  One of my older sisters scrambled out of the car, her hands to her throat in an asthma flare–up. In her rush she tore her silk dress on her heel, but leaning outside against the car window, her aspirator in her mouth, she didn’t care. Only then I realized that my life was changed forever. I wouldn’t live in the same time zone as my frie
nds in America, I could never go to the record store and have long, meaningless conversations with the salesclerk about the reason why everyone should buy a copy of the new Culture Club CD, and my two older sisters would soon rejoin their ­good-hearted, steady Jewish husbands in Jersey City, and leave me alone in Korea with my father and the stranger I was supposed to call New Mother.

  “My doctor,” New Mother said, “says it may not be too late to have children.”

  She was fifty.

  My father’s head fell against the wheel as if he were exhausted. The horn blared long; New Mother didn’t flinch. Her eyes were luminous; her wide gummy smile ardent with worship. I found myself sympathizing with New Mother in spite of myself.

  Six months into the marriage my life had changed. I had come into school in the middle of the term and hadn’t made a single friend. They treated me like a foreigner, saying I spoke Korean like a fourth grader, even getting angry when I answered questions in English class. They said I showed off about my life overseas because I talked about myself too much. No one talked much to me or to a Japanese girl who cried each time a student told her that her country had colonized Korea. I pretended I didn’t care. Instead I spent all my time running and studying Korean comic books, dreaming about blowing up everyone at my new school, trying not to think about my mother.

  Home was no better. One Saturday at noon, the day of my father’s sixtieth birthday celebration, I found him asleep in his white briefs, sprawled underneath our last family portrait taken before my mother died. The picture was one of the only reminders of the dozen American cities of my childhood. Like many Koreans living overseas at the time, we had scraped by, living without the health insurance we couldn’t afford, without security, and after my mother’s hospital bills came in, we lost the little we had. Bankrupt and determined to honor my mother’s last wishes, my father decided that marrying her childhood friend in Seoul had become his only option.

  The marriage had only made him worse. The sixtieth birthday was a day as celebrated as weddings, but my father, who had spent his entire church life guarding his reputation, was now flat on the floor. He had a mane of ageless black hair swept to his street fighter’s shoulders (much later, I realized it was dyed), a face marked by time and travel and adversity, the weary smile of Job. During the postwar years, he had been a shoe shiner, a hustler, a whaler, and then a kkangpae, that part of his life still evident in the speckled ­orange-and-white carp and goblins tattooed across the barrel of his chest and swimming up his spine. And after these many lives, when he had no one and nowhere to go, he had turned to God. He who had once shaken chapels and made the figure on the wooden cross weep, attracted disillusioned millionaires, exiled Korean divorcées, dancers, and Christian zealots across America’s prairie lands and its desert communities, this man who had once been so mighty behind the pulpit, whose rod and staff I ­worshipped, feared, and hated, had become so weak, so human in scale, he reminded me of myself.

  “Son.” His voice struck me like a fist. He rocked to his side and held an empty soju bottle to his eye. “Where is my heaven?”

  “Abeoji.” I backed away. “Drinking like you do, you’ll lose your way to heaven.”

  He hooked my ankle with his foot and tripped me, then laughed when I fell.

  “Adeul–ah.” His head sagged. He stared at the bottles surrounding him as if they were a message from God. “Funny how I keep talking and talking but no one seems to answer. I can’t sleep because I can’t see her…She was my Ruth, my Esther, my Mary.”

  He stood up, his head nearly touching the ceiling, a permanent dampness above us, as if the basement ­home—more a cave than a ­home—had been a sponge for cycles of wet monsoon summers. He wobbled over to New Mother’s potted begonia, adjusted himself, then peed on the plant. The sound of the spraying was a stunted dribble, a waterfall in dry season.

  “She’s gone,” he said as he dried himself on a leaf. “Everyone’s gone.”

  “I’m here,” I said. “And New Mother’s making lunch.”

  “Everyone leaves me, eventually,” he said. He looked through me, his eyes dark and full with his absent family: my mother and his daughters; his mother, brothers, and sisters trapped north of the 38th parallel since 1953, when America and Russia carved up the country and left my father stranded in the south, where he had been volunteering, against his family’s wishes, in the joint U.S.-Korean forces.

  He wanted my sympathy, but I was young, angry at him, angry at God, in a country that didn’t feel like mine, living with a man I thought I didn’t love. I wanted to be part of a house where the father wasn’t king and his kids the subjects, to be a boy whose stomach wasn’t always knotted up, afraid each word he said was the wrong word. I wanted to be like my American friends, to be Gary, who called his professor father “Dad” and so naturally, so democratically, argued with him about who should be the next U.S. president. I wanted my mother, who was gone forever, no matter what they told me at church.

  “Abeoji,” I said. “Let’s be objective here. No one made you remarry.”

  He looked at me as if he couldn’t understand what I was saying. But the ardor of his gaze, that vast and lonely seeking, couldn’t immobilize me anymore; it no longer impressed me how he would hit his children, then after, pull out strands of his own hair and butt his head against the walls until he bled, angry at his sins. So I walked away from him only a little afraid, because I was no longer the boy who confused his father with God.

  It was past one before we sat as a family for lunch. We could see the feet of passersby through a barred window. New Mother had upgraded this subterranean life of ours with a lace tablecloth and silver candlesticks arranged over the piano bench; she had insisted on a grand piano, which meant in this space, there was no dining table or even a low saang. All the while my real mother gazed down at the new us.

  I blessed the food, my sisters overseas. Before I finished, my father uttered “Amen,” then slurped kelp soup from one of New Mother’s flowery china bowls. With his chopsticks halfway to his mouth, he fell asleep, dropping a cube of steaming tofu into his lap.

  New Mother poked her finger deep into his ear. “That’s what you get for drinking the night long!” she said, as if he hadn’t done the same thing throughout their short marriage.

  She wiped his mouth with a napkin. One hundred percent linen, she proudly informed us. New Mother had brought these things, and more, into the marriage. Most of all, she had brought with her a faith in new beginnings. While we ate, her feet tapped staccato notes, her fingers waltzed across the table, her head danced left and right as she tried to convince ­us—even Mother’s portrait, it ­seemed—that all was well. She turned her heavy breasts in my direction. There were too many teeth in her smile and her green pantsuit was a size too small, so I saw more than I wanted to. God, my father liked to say, had punished New Mother with her face.

  She said, “Jingyu, did you make nice friends yet?”

  “School’s one long vocabulary lesson,” I said. I missed America, the two dark, ­chain-smoking, antisocial friends I’d make in every city we moved to when my father grew restless, the anonymity.

  “You should set yourself to memorizing a hundred new words a day.” She clapped her hands, straining to be helpful. “I’ll make you memory cards! In my student days, our hakwon teachers beat us unless we learned three hundred each day.”

  “I don’t want to learn.” I picked the black beans out of my rice, which she frowned at. “I want to go home.”

  “Home, home….” my father said. “Even Odysseus longed for home.” He hacked up a globule of phlegm, spit it into the linen napkin, and folded it up.

  New Mother blinked. Her pointy nose flared, but she focused on me as if nothing had happened. “Jingyu, women like men who have good posture; it makes you look taller. And you should smile more ­often—we’ll get that tooth fixed one of these days.”

  My father had knocked out that tooth when I was eleven, but that was a family secr
et.

  “Leave my son alone,” my father said. His voice rattled the chopsticks. “He’s not from your bloodline anyways. Old women like you get to a certain age and think too much. Only God knows what moves in the heart.”

  “He spends half his waking hours hiding in his room, sleeping and reading his mother’s old Bible. If you took interest in anyone but ­yourself—”

  “I am interested.” His voice was clipped, dangerous. “Just not interested in you.”

  She flashed a large, unnatural smile that made her look more wounded than cheerful. “It’s my money,” she said. “Don’t forget.”

  “Can’t we just eat like other families?” I said.

  “Is this a family?” He turned toward me, his hands gripping the bench by both sides. “Where is my family?”

  In the late afternoon at my father’s hwanggap, the guests parted like the Red Sea as he made his way down the hotel’s ballroom, a playground for the rich that he had insisted on renting. He contemplated his guests with a studied pastor’s modesty. As the emcee lauded my father’s piety with limp anecdotes, my father timed his entrance from behind the towering cylinders of nuts, dates, fruits, and rice cakes that would be wheeled out again the next day for the next hwanggap party.

  “Friends.” He leaned across the podium as soon as the emcee fell silent. The gaudy silk screen of swooping cranes and lotus flowers made his eyes blacker. He paused, lifting his head slowly as if fatigued, and I wondered if this time he wouldn’t be able to perform. Then he began.

  “What it means to be back after all these years away. Some of you I haven’t been privileged to see for twenty years, but none of you have forgotten Seoul’s prodigal son. No matter how far I strayed, the good Lord does not forsake His children; He did not let me know the darkness of being a sheep without a shepherd for longer than I can bear.” His voice broke, and his hands swept across his eyes, but he continued. He outstretched his hands and embraced the audience. “Jesus laid down his life for the sheep, so that we, the blind, would not be exiled from the Lord.”