When I was a junior in college, a small liberal arts school in the tiny town one town over from the even tinier town where I grew up, my friends and I lived in a college-owned house just off the main campus. I shared an upstairs bedroom and sitting room with Chris, a chemistry major who grew up on a dairy farm in rural Maryland. Two other friends shared a room downstairs. We were quiet, studious girls who’d lived together since freshman year, and the isolation of that house suited our late nights of work and quiet chats in the kitchen over tea.
One wet and chilly spring afternoon, I came home from class around four p.m., and Chris told me she was leaving for work at the call center on campus—a five-minute walk from the house. Thirty minutes later the house phone rang, and it was Chris’s boss asking where she was.
“She left for work half an hour ago.” I told him, confused. “She’s not there?”
Chris was never late for anything. She’d wake up for her eight a.m. chemistry lecture without an alarm clock, thanks to having grown up on a dairy farm. She was the most responsible woman in a house full of responsible women. She completed her homework days before it was due, did her laundry at the same time every Saturday morning, and rarely went to parties or to one of the local bars unless I dragged her with me.
Her boss called again thirty minutes later to say she was still not there. I made two frantic phone calls, my hands shaking: the first to my father and the next one (at his direction) to campus police.
Before hanging up, my father said, “Lock the doors. I’m on my way.”
In 1965 my father was drafted into the Army. A picture of him at his high school prom, just before he left for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, shows a striking boy with a wide, straight smile he’d inherited from his Czech father. In the photograph, it is clear he is uncomfortable in a white dinner jacket and awkward beside his date. Even now I have some difficulty imagining this young man, the baby of a family of four children and six years younger than my son is now, bused to a state he’d never been to and hearing rough language he’d never heard at St. Clement, the Catholic high school in Baltimore where the Sisters of St. Francis would never have tolerated such “depravity.” At the end of basic training, half his company was sent to Vietnam, and the half that included my father was sent to South Korea. My grandmother thanked God he wouldn’t be in the jungle with snakes, and my grandfather, a veteran of World War Two, thanked God too, though not because of the snakes.
When I think of my father’s personality, which deteriorated in more recent years due to his Fox News habit, I search for an old lock I can fit a key in. If you’d met my father, as had some of my friends over the years, you would have found him affable enough, smiling and polite, soft-spoken unless animated by politics or the price of gas. My children adored him, and in my own way I did, too. But there are no locks in my father’s childhood, which by his own account was ordinary and loving. His military service was nondescript. He served competently as a military policeman and met my mother when he was a soldier, and though their life as a young interracial couple raising two mixed-race children in rural America was not easy, their hardships don’t explain the isolation my father came to embrace.
Much of what followed my frenzied phone call to my father that night is a blur. I know that the young, inexperienced campus police officer, who arrived at the house before my father did, said stupidly, “We’re looking all over for her, even the empty sheds and dumpsters.” My other roommates told me later that I was hysterical by the time my father arrived, pacing the house and mumbling incoherently. I know he mediated all the questions from the inexperienced campus police officers about boyfriends and acquaintances, sitting me down in the kitchen with my other roommates and directing us to answer the questions he thought were pertinent. I know he checked Chris’s car himself, still parked in the lot behind the house. His face was impassive, and I studied it for answers I was sure he had. I know that after some period of time had passed, he wrapped his strong arm around my shoulders as we walked across campus to the dean’s office to call Chris’s parents.
My mother made and kept friends easily. She was the life of any party: beautiful and funny and animated. Although her closest friends, like herself, were Korean immigrants, she also had friends at the factory where she worked—women whose sons played baseball with my brother and whose daughters I’d listen to Michael Jackson and Rick Springfield with. My mother’s closest friends came to our home, where they’d play cards for hours and make eggrolls and kimchi. It seemed that my mother was always surrounded by people.
My father became a Maryland state trooper when he left the military, and though he talked about the other men he worked with, some of whom he admired and trusted, they did not come to our home to borrow tools or sit around our kitchen table drinking beer. He maintained none of his friends from childhood, though he mentioned them to us from time to time as characters in one of his funny stories.
I do not doubt my father’s work as a police officer changed him into a harder man than he would have been otherwise. When I was a child, he was my hero: tall and handsome in his uniform. His shoes, gun holster, and brass nameplate were always polished to a high shine. He was an attentive and present father who put our needs before his own. Exhausted by midnight shifts or the moonlighting security jobs he took to support us, he would shuttle me to dance class three times a week or hit fly balls to my brother for an hour after dinner. He cooked, cleaned, and supported our mother, who was also worn out from her job at a sewing factory. As a teenager, I rejected his rules and what I thought was a stubborn sense of rectitude. I tried my best to ignore the fears that drove many of his decisions, and I thought him unreasonable. Still, I sensed even then that he was more or less right about the company I kept and the decisions I made, a difficult truth to acknowledge when you’re seventeen.
My father was a state trooper for over two decades, serving in a variety of roles that ranged from narcotics investigator to airport security. In May of 1970, when I was three months old and my father had just graduated from the police academy, he donned full riot gear and traveled to the University of Maryland during the Vietnam War protests; I went to graduate school there twenty-three years later. In 1972, he guarded George Wallace at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland, just after Wallace had been shot by Arthur Bremer. All through grade school, my brother played baseball with two wild brothers whose no-good uncles had once tried to run over my father with their car. My father shot out their back window and a tire, and they went to jail for ten years. Albert, the youngest brother, would nod at my father at baseball games, where Albert’s son was the star pitcher and my brother was his steady catcher. It always reminded me of that old Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog cartoon where they clock in and out on their workdays, leaving their bloodthirsty and protective instincts behind them.
Over the years my father told us harrowing tales of bloody riots, car crashes, bar fights, domestic calls, gun accidents, suicides, gruesome canine mishaps, rape, and murder. My brother and I called these stories “the horror report.” To his recitation, he always added that if anything happened to us or our mother, he would go to jail for retributive murder.
At cards and in life, my father never bluffed.
Just as we reached the outside door of the administration building, Chris emerged from the same door. I crumpled to the sidewalk with my father’s hands still around my shoulders, and she knelt down beside me, her face close to mine, sure that something terrible had happened to me.
When all of us, campus safety in tow, trudged back to our campus house, my father stood behind me. Chris wouldn’t answer any of the officers’ questions about where she’d been, who she’d been with, or what she’d been doing. I was exhausted and frustrated, and I snapped at her, “Just tell them where you were, for Christ’s sake, so this can be over!”
After this went on for a little while, my father quietly but firmly said to the officers, “That’s enough.” They left, and then my father told me to get some rest and he left, too.
To this day I still marvel at the fact that these two grown men listened to my father—an off-duty policeman and a parent, a man who had nothing to do with the investigation or the paperwork they needed to file. My father was like that. He spoke, and people did what he told them to do.
Later that night, when our friends had gone to bed and we were at our desks, my back to hers, Chris told me where she’d been and why she didn’t want to tell campus safety. In the late 1990s, many LGBT groups met on college campuses furtively, in secret. Students, faculty, and staff were fearful of ridicule and reprisals from the campus community. She had told her boss a week beforehand not to put her on the schedule that night, but he’d forgotten. I didn’t know she’d been questioning her sexuality or that she’d been attending Allies meetings; she was my best friend, and I was hurt that she hadn’t confided in me. Over time we moved past this crisis, and our friendship deepened.
What continues to surprise me is that I’m sure my father somehow understood, before I did, what had happened that night. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He always saw things coming before the rest of us did, understood what people were hiding and why. Growing up, I learned that it was useless to lie to him. Tell him you were going to stay over at Cathy’s house, and he somehow knew you planned to go to the Bon Jovi concert in Philly with that boy who had long hair and a motorcycle. Tell him you were staying after school for debate club—a regular occurrence—and he knew you were headed over to Hardees to hang out with that girl he thought was under-parented and thus a bad influence on you. I knew he knew the truth about Chris because my father, a man who couldn’t abide unanswered questions, never asked about that night again. He continued to treat Chris as kindly as he always had, acting as though nothing had happened. I’d been oblivious when he’d understood everything.
Although it’s not a key that unlocks and lays bare the reasons for my father’s lack of close friendships in his adult life, I’ve wondered if this quality of “knowing” made him unlikeable. If he’d been a superhero, he would have been “Captain Perceptive,” which would have made him unbearable in a world filled with people who have at least one thing to hide. My father spoiled the magic. I’d often avoided my father at times in my life when I had something I wanted to keep from him: trouble at work, trouble with one of my children, trouble in my marriage. He knew that I didn’t like to talk on the phone and that I always tried to bring at least one of my children with me when I visited. He likely knew this was because I didn’t want him to sense my anxieties or to worry over my burdens, providing one of his grandchildren as distraction.
When my mother died four years ago, I worried about my father’s aloneness. I stopped broaching the idea of his moving closer to me when he made it very clear that he wanted to live out his days in his home, surrounded by his memories of my mother and their things. He talked on the phone most nights with his oldest sister, who lived nearby, and my brother and I texted and visited when our schedules al-lowed. He kept himself busy with the house and the lawn and with visits to my mother’s gravesite just down the road from their house. Trips to the hospital for treatment for stage-four prostate cancer, diagnosed the year my mother died, also organized his days.
Over the years I often pictured my-self at my father’s funeral, giving his eulogy. In my waking dream, I’m reaching for the right words, and the church is filled with people: his family and a handful of well-meaning neighbors who have known him for decades. Behind them, there are faceless forms filling out the remaining pews. In my waking dream, it seems, I could not bear the thought of a largely empty church, the consequence of either my father’s unwillingness to make friends or his inability to keep them.
At my father’s real funeral, attended by close family and a few of my brother’s and my oldest friends, I knew the gathered group hoped that I, the writer, would tell a story about him. But my father’s stories were legendary, and he often retold them to our family, so there wasn’t really any need. And I didn’t have to explain my father to casual acquaintances or friends he’d met at church, because he had none. I wonder now if I should have told the story of how my father once helped me find my missing friend.
Leona Sevick’s latest collection of poems is The Bamboo Wife. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia.