The Question of the Absentee Father Read online

  “But your father knowing you were different when you were four would not translate into his knowing how you speak now,” Ms. Washburn argued. “He hasn’t spoken to you in more than twenty-five years. How does his question prove that the man on the phone wasn’t your father?”

  “He did not have to have conversations with me to know about my progress,” I suggested. I turned toward my mother. “You wrote to my father periodically for all the years he has been away. You did until you no longer had a working address for him, which was after I was ‘diagnosed’ with an autism spectrum ‘disorder.’ I assume in all that time my name came up in your letters. Did you speak to him on the phone as well?”

  “Early on,” Mother said. “Since he moved out of Seattle I haven’t had an address or a phone number and I haven’t been able to find one.”

  “But when you were in contact, you told him about me, didn’t you?”

  “Of course. He’s your father.”

  “And I imagine that my style of speech, particularly when I was younger, was something that came up when the doctors and school administrators were trying to classify me,” I continued.

  “I didn’t leave anything out,” Mother said.

  “Then he would know, if not exactly what my conversational style is, at least that there was an issue,” I said. “He might note that I do not speak like most people, but he would certainly know why that is the case. The man on the phone was not my father.”

  Ms. Washburn stood up and began walking slowly around the room. This is not a practice designed to elevate the heart rate, like my circuits around the Questions Answered office, but is more a device Ms. Washburn uses to help her think.

  “But I don’t understand,” she began. “What possible reason would the man on the phone have to try and put himself across as your father? And why would your uncle Arthur call him and not your father when that’s what he said he would do?”

  “How is Arthur?” Mother asked.

  “Coarse and bad-tempered,” I said. Mother nodded. I looked at Ms. Washburn, who was holding her hands out in front of her as if searching for something casually. “To answer your question, I have no idea why my uncle would direct my query to someone other than my father, but he clearly did, and he did so knowingly because he would have recognized my father’s voice on the telephone.”

  “Do you want me to call Arthur?” Mother asked.

  I had actually considered the idea but I shook my head negatively. “I don’t believe he would give you my father’s address either. He specifically said he felt my father did not want you to have it, but now that the man on the phone has been proven not to be my father there is no way to be sure that is his true intention. In any event, if Arthur was willing only to contact my father—or the man pretending to be my father—on my behalf, I see no reason he would do anything other than that for you.”

  “I could confront him with the lie he told,” Mother suggested. “I’ve known Arthur a long time and you don’t, which is my fault, Samuel. I apologize.”

  That struck me as unnecessary. “My life is no more enriched to know of him than it was before today,” I said. “There is no need for an apology. But I think letting the man in California, if that’s where he was, know that we are aware he is pretending to be someone other than himself would be a strategic error. Let’s not give up the one advantage we have here. Ms. Washburn and I can use other methods to find Reuben Hoenig.”

  “Like what?” Ms. Washburn had not stopped walking around the room. She had touched nothing but had examined everything here, although her eyes did not seem to be registering what she saw and had seen before. She was thinking.

  “We can begin with George Kaplan,” I said. “Tracing him would be a major step forward in answering the question.”

  “George Kaplan?” Mother said, looking up at Ms. Washburn. “What about George Kaplan?”

  Ms. Washburn explained, in a great deal of detail, how she had traced my father’s employment records to Reseda, California, after he had left Seattle, Washington, and how the name George Kaplan had appeared on a transfer record at the same time, although no such person had been listed on employee records before that date.

  “Why do you ask about the name like that?” Ms. Washburn asked Mother. “Do you recognize it?”

  “George Kaplan is a name in the movie North by Northwest,” Mother said. “He’s a fictional man made up by the spies. He doesn’t exist, but everybody thinks he does and that’s why Cary Grant gets chased all over the country.”

  I had not seen the film. “Is he a major character in the motion picture?” I asked. “Is there something about his personality that could be significant in our search for my father?”

  Mother shook her head. “He’s not in the movie at all. He has no real personality. They talk about him until it’s discovered he was made up.”

  Ms. Washburn’s eyes registered concern. “He doesn’t exist?” Perhaps she was trying to determine Reuben Hoenig’s motivation for using the name, but I had another issue that was confounding me.

  “If he is not a character on the screen, why do you remember his name so well?” I asked Mother.

  “I must have seen it fifty times,” Mother said. “North by Northwest is your father’s favorite movie.”

  “Would you care to listen to an album by the Beatles?” I asked Ms. Washburn.

  Because we had no new information to help answer Mother’s question, and because dinner was still scheduled for almost an hour in the future, I had asked Ms. Washburn if she would stay and help me do further research while Mother cooked. Mother had invited Ms. Washburn to stay for dinner. I felt the extra work would make up for the time we had lost leaving the Questions Answered office early. I did pay Ms. Washburn for a full day, after all.

  Ms. Washburn had agreed, so now we were in my attic apartment where my computer equipment would help us with our research. It was the first time Ms. Washburn had been there.

  She looked around the room, which is fairly large but with a pitched ceiling, for a while, smiling in an odd fashion when she passed my collection of vintage corkscrews, a remnant of a previous special interest of mine that I now found only mildly interesting. She asked no questions initially but seemed to be taking great care to memorize the space and its contents.

  “Sure,” she said. I did not ask her for a preference, as she had not indicated one, and selected Help!, from the motion picture of the same name. It was my joke; I felt we could use all the assistance we could get at this moment. “Do you only listen to the Beatles, Samuel? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention another musician.”

  “The Beatles are one of my most long-standing special interests,” I said, “but I have music from many other artists. Would you prefer to listen to another type of music?”

  “No, this is fine.” She walked to the far end of the room near my bed and spent twelve seconds looking at the nightstand. Then she walked back to the area where my desk and three flat-screen computer monitors were assembled. “What are we working on specifically?”

  “George Kaplan. If the name is taken from the Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest, as my mother suggested, there is a very good chance my father did choose to call himself by that name.” I sat down in my usual spot behind the desk and realized I had only one chair in the room. Mother has had some issues with her knees and does not climb the stairs to my apartment, so there had never been a need for another seat until now. I stood up.

  “What’s wrong?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “There is only one chair. You should take it,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s not necessary.”

  “I would not be comfortable sitting if you could not,” I told her. I probably would have been comfortable, but it is not polite to say so.

  Ms. Washburn reached into the bag she carries and took out her laptop computer. She walked across th
e apartment and sat down on the edge of my bed. “I’ll work here,” she said. She opened the laptop and started to boot it up.

  For a moment I considered protesting, thinking it would be more polite for me to give up my seat, but Ms. Washburn looked quite comfortable where she was and I was certainly used to the position I had taken. I sat down at my desk again.

  “If you look for George Kaplan in the North Hollywood area, I’ll research the number that called your phone,” Ms. Washburn said. “Let’s see if we can find out who is pretending to be your father, and maybe why.”

  I agreed to the plan, although I did not immediately turn to my computer screen. Seeing Ms. Washburn on the edge of my bed was very odd; it was certainly not what I was used to seeing when I looked in that direction. I tried to analyze why the difference was significant but could not find a likely cause.

  “Is that okay?” she asked, presumably because I had not answered or begun seeing to the task at hand.

  “Certainly.” I turned toward my desk to find any records of a George Kaplan in the North Hollywood, California, area. I began with a more general search and found surprisingly few men by that name, although there were numerous others scattered all over the country. One was a man of 108 years, grandson of a slave, who lived in Indiana. After that most of the references were to the character in North by Northwest.

  When I narrowed the search to the Southern California area the search became more promising. There were no George Kaplans listed in area phone directories, but that was not unusual. Many people now go without a landline phone entirely, and cellular phones are not listed in directories.

  There was, however, a business called Kaplan Enterprises which listed as its proprietor a “G. Kaplan.” The business was located in North Hollywood.

  By itself that was certainly not positive confirmation of any of the theories I had been forming: First, that my father was using the name George Kaplan instead of his own, and second, that the G. Kaplan who owned an as-yet-unspecified business in the area in question was named George. There was no definitive connection between the two.

  The last employment record I had for my father was with Mendoza Communications, which operated radio stations in the region. Given his history of leaving jobs, it was not an enormous leap of logic to postulate that he had also put Mendoza Communications behind him. Indeed, given the age my father must have been by now, it was far from certain that he had not retired.

  Looking into Kaplan Enterprises, it appeared to be a concern that bought blocks of advertising time on television and radio channels and then sold them—at a profit—to advertisers based on the best time slots and highest viewership statistics. It was a legitimate, or at least legal, business that I would imagine held some uncertainty in that it bought a product at what would normally be considered retail price and then attempted to sell it for a higher cost to the end user.

  That would seem to be in sync with the business George Kaplan (and in Seattle, Reuben Hoenig) had been involved with, but it did not provide conclusive evidence. The proof was accumulating, but it was all circumstantial.

  “I’m not really finding much with the phone number,” Ms. Washburn reported from my left. I did not turn my head to look although there was nothing of particular interest on my screen. “It might be a burner phone or just not listed. But the number itself does show up on a few sites that talk about annoying sales calls. They report that number as calling randomly and trying to sell something without being clear about what.”

  I shared with her my findings on the dealings of Kaplan Enterprises. I kept looking at my screen and searching on various sites for George Kaplan, but found only the same few references.

  “It sounds like that George Kaplan could be the head of the business and might be your father based on what we found in the Mendoza payroll records,” Ms. Washburn said.

  “I would say it’s possible but we have not proven it yet,” I responded.

  There was a pause and I imagined I could feel Ms. Washburn’s gaze on the back of my neck. “Samuel, why aren’t you looking at me?” she asked.

  I did not turn my head. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. You’re staring at your screen like it holds the meaning of life but you’re not hitting any keys. You’re going out of your way not to look at me when you talk. So what’s going on? Are you uncomfortable having me up here in your room?”

  I found it was not difficult, after all, to turn and face Ms. Washburn, who had pushed herself onto my bed and was propping her head on one hand while lying almost prone, her laptop computer in front of her eyes. That was slightly disturbing, as the blanket had been displaced in spots, but I faced her and said, “I am not uncomfortable. And this is my apartment.”

  Ms. Washburn nodded. “My mistake,” she said.

  “It is an understandable one.”

  She sat up and leaned toward the foot of the bed. “You’re sure you’re not uncomfortable? You can’t be used to having anyone but yourself up here.”

  “We are working,” I said. “The location of our research is not a relevant variable.”

  “Of course. About the cell phone. Do you think it’s worth pursuing? It seems like whoever uses it is just cold-calling people about some vague business proposition. We could call back on my phone. Whoever the man is behind this, if he is George Kaplan or not, wouldn’t recognize the number and might pick up thinking it’s a potential client.”

  “That is a very good idea,” I said. “Please get out your cellular phone.”

  Ms. Washburn did, and I read her the number of the last incoming call at the Questions Answered office. I had already placed my iPhone on my desk, just to the left of my keyboard, because I have a concern about losing it and want to be certain I can glance down and see it whenever I am working. When I am somewhere other than my attic apartment or the Questions Answered office, I will carry the iPhone in the left hip pocket of my trousers and tap it regularly to ensure its continued presence in a known location. I have misplaced items in the past and find it very upsetting.

  Ms. Washburn tapped the digits into her cellular phone. We waited for a response as the number rang six times.

  Then Ms. Washburn’s eyes widened slightly and I heard a voice on the other end of the conversation, although I could not hear what was being said. I was momentarily frustrated that there was no extension to Ms. Washburn’s cellular phone allowing me to listen in.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice slightly nervous. I did not know why she would feel that way until a moment later she said, “I’m calling because there was a call on this phone and I didn’t recognize the number.” She was pretending to be a potential client of Kaplan Enterprises.

  Ms. Washburn listened for eighteen seconds, which is a long time for one person to speak uninterrupted. She made a point of establishing eye contact with me and nodded; yes, this was the same man I had spoken to earlier today who had claimed to be my father.

  “Well, what would I be buying?” she asked the man, and there was a response of twelve seconds this time.

  It was very disappointing not to hear what the man was saying. I stood and walked to the bed. I stood next to Ms. Washburn, who was still sitting at the foot, leaning slightly back. She was listening closely, then looked up and gestured that I should sit next to her so she could tilt the phone into a position that would allow us both to hear.

  I sat very carefully, doing my best not to interfere with the laptop computer, but I could not lean in close enough to clearly hear both ends of the conversation. Ms. Washburn’s eyebrows dropped a bit, a sign that she was thinking.

  “Do you mind if I put you on speakerphone?” she asked the man. “My husband is here and I’d like him to hear about your proposal.”

  For a moment I wondered if Simon Taylor, Ms. Washburn’s ex-husband, had entered the room, but that was an absurd thought and lasted less than one secon
d. I realized then that I was being cast in the role of Ms. Washburn’s husband and had no time to think about it. If I was to speak to the man using Kaplan Enterprises’s cellular phone, would have to modulate my voice, something that is not easy for me. I did not want him to recognize my voice from our earlier conversation, during which he had tried to convince me he was Reuben Hoenig.

  “Thank you,” she said, which I assumed meant the man had agreed to her request.

  She touched the screen of her cellular phone and I heard the same gruff voice, trying this time to sound friendly, say, “Are we all here now?” It was a ridiculous question, since he was the only participant in the conversation present in his location.

  I decided not to try a wildly different voice from my own because it would probably sound false, so I simply mumbled, “Yes.”

  Ms. Washburn nodded, understanding my reluctance to speak loudly. “We’re here,” she told the man. “I’m sorry; I don’t think I got your name.” This was an expression. Ms. Washburn was not suggesting she should now own the man’s name and use it for herself.

  “I’m George Kaplan,” he said. “I own the business. And what is your name, honey?”

  The idea that this person, whose name was probably not George Kaplan, was presumptuous enough to address a woman he had not met with an expression of endearment was somehow irritating to me. Ms. Washburn looked at me and responded to what must have been my facial expression with her right hand, palm down, pushed in a downward motion and shaking her head, indicating I should not be offended by “George Kaplan’s” presumed familiarity with her.

  “I’m Patricia Longbow,” she said. “You can call me Patty.” I must have looked surprised because Ms. Washburn stifled a small laugh.