Bandit (3 page)

I
know my dad feels a hole where his father should be. Everyone in his family knew his father except him. His first letter to me starts with “You probably know that if my father had lived, my life would have turned out much differently.” On the surface I know he means they would have moved to Australia. But there is more to it. I don’t think he really knows how well I understand this.

I’ve seen a few photos of him when he was a child. One I remember hanging in a frame with other photos—he was a child and someone was holding him; a man, possibly his stepfather, was standing with his mother and siblings in front of a house and landscape. He had a serious face but a tree trunk had aligned just perfectly behind him so it looked like it was growing straight out of his head. My sister and I used to look at this and laugh about it. I’d look
closely at this small black-and-white photo, sad and stiff, but laugh at it.

One photo I own—it is a new and glossy reprint of a photo and I’m not sure how I came to have it. Probably I stole it from a photo album at some point. Dad’s family is all clustered around his father’s fresh grave. They must be in Germany, at the camp where Dad was born. His oldest sister is standing, looking down at the grave, next to a wooden cross at the head of the grave, a small photo of his father’s face nailed to the center. His two brothers kneel at the foot of the grave, looking with sad, small faces at whoever was taking the photo. Worn faces, especially for children. His other sister, next to them, is looking into the camera, brows knitted, hands pressed in prayer. She looks serious and intelligent. And then, in the middle, his mother, kneeling in black, holding Dad. His mother looks directly into the camera, chin down, mouth open a little as if she was just saying something. She is pretty and tough, with high, wide cheekbones like mine. Dad is just a baby, wrapped all in black. He is looking somewhere else entirely. His face is neutral. Pudgy cheeks bulging downward. He is the only one there who doesn’t understand.

The background is just gray, vague hills. Ghostly gray blankness. I keep the photo facedown in a folder with the letters he has written to me. It confronts me. Who would have taken this photo of a family in their most private and serious moment of grief, not posing but mourning next to their father’s grave? And is this what I am doing now in writing about my family?

My dad’s father’s name was Kazimierz and he was a farmer, famous for breaking horses in the river Strypa. His parents were killed in Poland in 1941. Before he died he received news that his four brothers had been executed for treason. He died from a heart attack on his thirty-sixth birthday in March, 1948, when my dad was two years old.

Aren’t we together on this, Dad, together on missing our dads, and what it has done to you and me? You left an unknowable self behind, with us, your cover story, your dupes, and I kept following. And I’m still following, somehow more than ever, in love with this trouble, this difficult family, in love with my troubled mom and sister and you too, maybe most of all you, the unknowable one.

F
rom the window of the cab our beachfront hotel approached like a dream, as wrong as a dream, and I felt sickly overwhelmed with the luxury of the fantastic palm trees and clean arched doorways. This could not be right. I hung my mouth open a while in joy and suspicion as we left the cab, for him to see. He made a goofy roundabout pointing sweep to the door and said “Lezz go,” goofily, like he did. Thinking about it now, the hotel was probably nothing special, maybe even cheap, but I couldn’t have known.

This was the longest period of time we spent alone together as father and daughter. I was nine or ten and he’d brought me to Cancun, an unlikely place to take a child on a summer vacation for no particular reason. He had a habit of taking vacations with just me or just my sister, never both of us together, and never with Mom, even when they were married.
I imagine we never went anywhere all together as a family because Mom and Dad usually hated each other, but I didn’t get why my sister and I couldn’t go somewhere together. Now, reasoning it out, I run through a spectrum of guesses: on the practical end, there is cost and scheduling logistics, and on the other end, the darker end, there is purposeful isolation.

During the day he would leave me. I’d wake up and find a key and a note atop some money:
Have fun! Wear sunscreen!
I’d put on my nubby yellow bathing suit and take myself to the beach or the small intensely chlorinated pool and try hard to have a fun vacation as instructed.

What was he doing? Was there somewhere nearby to gamble? There must have been. Or was there a woman he met? He’d return in the evening and take me to eat somewhere nearby. He always ordered a hamburger and a Coke for me without looking at the menu, even though I hated hamburgers and Coke. Mom wouldn’t let me drink soda, and it seemed important to him to break her rules.

“Hahmm-borrr-gaysa,”
he’d say to the waiter, childishly drawing out the words and gesturing coarsely as if the waiter were near-blind and deaf, “and
Coca-Colé
!” he’d finish, pronouncing the “cola” part with a silly “Olé!” paired with an insulting bottle-drinking mime. He was condescending to waiters everywhere like big shots often are, but especially here. “This is the only word you need to know,” he told me from across the dark booth.
“Hamburguesa.”
I tamped down my disgust with obliging laughs, since clearly this show was for me. I did not recognize his gold chain and ring. I watched
him carefully, waiting for a time when we’d say real things to each other.

I didn’t tell him that I liked my days there, on the beach, alone like a grown-up. But anxious. I knew the untethered feeling I liked was not right for me yet. If he asked, I would have told him about my days lying on a blue towel, just lying there for hours, burning pink in the sun, listening while two Mexican teenage girls talked next to me, oblivious to my eavesdropping, alternating between Spanish and English. They talked about how wonderful it would be to be born a
gringa,
the kind of house they’d live in, what their boyfriends would look like, and how their daddies would spoil them with cars and clothes and fantastic birthday parties.

One of the days he didn’t leave, he waited for me to wake up and took me to a Mayan ruin site. Before the tour we foreigners drew in automatically to giant steep steps of a pyramid and began to climb. It was so soaking hot, and I felt so young and small. The other tourists seemed to have such trouble climbing. I bounded up the old blocks, turning to the wide mush of treetops below and smiling. Dad down below. I waved to him but he wasn’t looking.

We were herded up for the tour and kids my age and even older were already whining. I couldn’t imagine complaining even half as much as my peers did. It frightened me, the way they said what they wanted.
Hungry
and
tired
and
thirsty
and
bored
and
ugh, Dad, can we go
? At the edge of the cenote nearby a tour guide described how the Mayans would sacrifice young women here by tossing them in; “girls about your age,”
he said and pointed at me. The group of tourists around us chuckled uncomfortably but I straightened up.

I rested on a boulder carved into a snake’s head, wearing the only hat I owned as a child, a black-and-neon tropical-print baseball hat I am certain came from a Wendy’s Kids’ Meal. I feel there was a photograph taken of this that I remember seeing, and I wonder if it still exists somewhere. I remember resting on the snake’s head and I remember the photograph of myself resting on it equally. I liked this day, seeing these things that seemed so important, Dad mostly hanging back in the wet shade of the jungle edge, not climbing things. He had brought me here and I loved it. I felt the secret urge children have to become lost and stay overnight somewhere good, like a museum or mall, as a way of being there privately, directly. I circled the pyramid hoping to find a cave where I could curl up, so I could sleep and stay inside this old magic, like a good sacrifice, just right for something serious. But it was hot and we had to go. Dad seemed tired, suspicious of it all, not especially interested in learning too much from the guide or in looking too hard at the ruins. I was happy, though, and he was pleased with that. He seemed to want to let me have my happiness without necessarily sharing in it or talking about it. Perhaps it’s easy to dismiss children’s happinesses because they seem so uninformed.

On the way back, our tour van had to stop for gas. Children my age but much skinnier came to the windows with their hands out, pleading and keeping steady eye contact. Some tourists in the van gave them coins. The kids who
received coins immediately pocketed them and outstretched their hands again, empty. I looked at my dad. He laughed dismissively. “They’re just bums. They can work like the rest of us.”

And then, back to the days like before, which now seemed even longer. I grew tired of the pretty beach. The tourists were loud, desperate in their drinking and blaring radios. I sat alone in the hotel room for a few days as the vacation shrunk to the end. The room was yellow and clean and there was a small TV I would flip through endlessly. I had done a poor job of having fun. My sister would have known, implicitly, what to do. She was
made
of beaches and loud radios and virgin strawberry daiquiris and laughing at Dad’s jokes and hamming it up for his camera. I imagined her there in the room with me: her correct joy and acceptance of this neon fun. She would not have let me lie there in my bathing suit and watch TV in Cancun. She would have pulled me out of the hotel’s corridors where I wandered aimlessly, cold hallways tiled brown, the smell of chlorine from the pool trapped forever both night and day. Without her I walked from the room through the hotel and back to the room again with the twenty-dollar bill he had given me for food, not sure what to do with it.

H
ow is it that I am my father’s daughter? Something feels fraudulent about our blood bond. Before my sister and I were born there was an irrevocable fraudulence Dad carried out against my mom, and I can’t help but assign significance to this.

Dad steered Mom through the broad doors of the restaurant at the Hazel Park racetrack for their first date. The old host lit up, welcomed him by name, and seated them by the wide windows. The waiters knew him too, and he tipped outrageously. Mom wore a baggy white hippie smock embroidered with lines of tiny red flowers (a dress, she said, like “a loose interpretation of a baseball”) and her wild, black curly hair down in a loose cloud. Dad wore a gold-button sports jacket, creased slacks, and hard-shined shoes, slick hair, a near Robert De Niro. They’d met while working in a tool-and-die shop in
Romeo, Michigan, in 1977. Mom had been placed there by a temp agency and had been working there only a few weeks.

After only a couple months of dating Dad took Mom on an elaborate vacation to South America to see Machu Picchu. He’d first suggested Mexico, but Mom said she didn’t like Mexico. It made her nervous.

The trip was impulsive and strange, something my mom would have loved. And he seemed so rich. He’d told her, I imagine in his shy way, without eye contact, that if he ever were to marry someone, it would be her. Mom felt adored, scooped up in his big gestures, bound by the certainty of them. I have seen some of the photographs from this trip. They both look excited, free, and wild, in jeans and thin T-shirts, laughing, almost childish against the ancient monuments and green vistas. He directed this trip out of sheer confidence, ever calm, bullying through the language barrier, tossing my mom indulgences along the way, like the king of the parade.

“I didn’t know,” Mom tells me at the end of this story, “that he cashed in a life insurance policy to take me on this trip. He was dead broke. By the end of it he’d run out of money and we roamed Lima aimlessly, subsisting on street vendors’ hot dogs and fruit he’d steal from the market stands.”

I have to stop her. “Wait. Did you know he was stealing fruit? Were you stealing it with him? You must have realized he was broke?”

“No, I didn’t know. He’d make me wait somewhere while he went to get lunch or dinner. I only realized later when I found out about the life insurance policy.”

“And how did you find that out?”

“Oh, his wife told me when I met her.”

His wife. Dad had a wife when he started dating Mom. We sit on the couch in silence for a moment with the facts. Dad in Peru stealing fruit from a stand like a child for his girlfriend, his wife and child hidden from her, the stealing hidden,
everything
hidden. For Mom there was only the fruit and the vacation and this fun man. What great lengths he’d gone to for her. The incredible energy expended in lying and hiding and stealing his own life insurance policy away from his family to give to my mom. He looks so relaxed in the photos. Not a trace of strain.

Soon after the trip she discovered she was pregnant with my sister.

Mom’s pregnancy started to show at the tool-and-die shop, drawing hostile looks from the bitter receptionist with the beehive hairdo. Mom noticed the looks, and turned to her in the break room directly, as Mom would if something needed to be sorted out.

“Darlin’,” the receptionist said before Mom even opened her mouth, “he didn’t tell you he’s married, did he.”

Mom laughed but said nothing. The receptionist just clucked and shook her head in pity. Mom didn’t like pity. She would have ignored it. How he told her he’d marry her if he was ever inclined to marry, it just didn’t seem like something someone already married could come up with, not in good conscience. It was so sweet. He was
so
generous, so affectionate.

The idea began to itch her. She did think it was odd that she had never been to his house, didn’t have his phone number, and had only vague indications of where he lived. That night she asked him plainly if he was married, and he said no. He acted genuinely confused by the question, suggesting that the receptionist was just a jealous cow because he wouldn’t flirt with her. His answer was exactly right. She felt happy with that. And besides, there was a baby to consider now. She let it go. Soon, she moved into an apartment with him and quit working. My sister was coming to change things.

For her first doctor’s visit, Dad gave her his insurance card and the name of the clinic to visit while he was at work. She handed over the card to the receptionist, who pulled a file, opened it, then paused. The receptionist looked at Mom, then to the file, then to Mom, and so on, glancing at the nurses near her to spread her discomfort around to them too. An indignant look hardened her face. Mom was puzzled. “Is everything OK?” she finally asked.

“Yes but … I’m sorry, ma’am … but you are not Mrs. Brodak.”

Mom smiled politely. “Well, not officially yet, but I’m on his insurance now so you have to honor that …”

“No, I mean …” The nurses now looked on with worry. “Mrs. Brodak and her daughter are regular patients of this clinic. They were just in last Wednesday.
You
are not Mrs. Brodak.”

It was then, she told me, that it should have ended. It wasn’t too late. “Everything,” she told me, “could have been
avoided if I had just gone back to my parents instead of him the moment I left that clinic.” I nod, imagining how much better that would have been for her, skipping past the idea that this “everything” she could have avoided would have included me. “It’s like all I could do was make mistakes,” she said.

She felt very small. This is a version of Mom I didn’t know. She seemed so weak in this story, so fooled by him, that it starts to seem all a little unbelievable. Was Dad really this powerful? Or was Mom simply weaker then, a naïve child?

She turned and left the clinic as the nurses chattered in a sharp hush behind her. But maybe there was an error. Her thoughts turned to her baby.

The moment he stepped through the door that evening she told him the story of the insurance card at the clinic, and demanded to know who the real Mrs. Brodak was. He softened his shoulders and toddled gently to her, engulfing her with a hug and caressing her as she cried. His softness and confident denial stunned her into silence. He told her the woman was just a friend he’d let use his card, that he was just doing someone a favor out of kindness, and he was certainly not married. He laughed about it, prodding and rousing her into laughing with him as he smoothed her face.

He could turn you like that. He just wouldn’t let your bad mood win. He’d steal your mad words and repeat them until they were funny, poke at your folded arms until they opened, grin mocking your pout until you smiled, as long as it took. He’d pull what you really wanted out of you—affection—and cover you with it until the offense was smothered out.

Thoughts began to itch her again, harsher now, when she was alone. Things seemed wrong. A few days later she called the county clerk’s office to inquire about some marriage records. The clerk on the other end delivered the news plainly, as she probably always did. He’d been married for just a few years. He had a daughter, age four.

See, this is how my dad starts as my dad—stolen away from another family.

Mom packed her small suitcases and moved to her parents’ house that same day, and that, again, should’ve been the end of it. She stayed in her room. The road to her parents’ house north of Rochester, Michigan, had not been paved yet, and there were still fields surrounding them, overgrown lilac bushes, honeysuckle, wild rhubarb, where now there are neighbors’ neat lawns.

She thought about his tenderness. Long periods of separation between their dates felt zipped shut by his total adoration when they were together. Honest, steady light in his eyes when he told her he loved her. He’d sweep her up for a small dance around the kitchen suddenly. All these things he’d practiced with his real wife. She gave birth to my sister, quietly.

But he wouldn’t leave her alone. He found her there and would come whenever he could, tossing pebbles at her window in the night like a teen until her father chased him off, or leaving bouquets on the doorstep with long love letters. The bounty of his insistence must have been convincing: the dozens and dozens of roses, the gifts, jewelry, the long letters pleading for forgiveness, praising her virtues, promising to
leave his wife, “and poetry,” Mom said. “You should have seen the poetry he wrote to me. I almost wish I hadn’t thrown it all away.”

First she wanted to meet the real Mrs. Brodak. Mom looked up their number in the phone book, called to introduce herself, and extended an invitation to meet, which Mrs. Brodak accepted, stiffly.

It was a muggy summer. Dad’s wife appeared at the screen door and stood without knocking. In a thick blue dress with her waist tied tightly, she said nothing when Mom opened the door. “Would you like to hold the baby?” Mom asked.

My sister was placed in her lap like a bomb. Nothing could be done but politely talk, with hard grief in their chests softening their voices. The real Mrs. Brodak was scared too. “How did you meet?” she asked Dad’s wife.

They met in high school. After returning from Vietnam, he married her impulsively. She never had time to think, she said. Baby, work, no time to think. How life works: hurrying along through the tough moments until the hurrying hardens and fossilizes, then that becomes the past, all there was, the hurrying. She asked Mom what was going to happen now.

“Now,” Mom said, “we leave Joe Brodak. We don’t let our babies know him. He’s not a good person.” She leaned to her, with hands out. They lightly embraced and nodded, tearfully. Mom would have wanted to help Mrs. Brodak. Mom would not have been able to help.

Mom also, somehow, would have felt a little triumphant. She would have felt like she won him. Whatever there was
to win. Mom wouldn’t have wanted to quit like that, despite what she said to Mrs. Brodak. She had a baby now, and no real career prospects, having ditched her student teaching and not quite finished her certification after graduating with her BA in special education. Her parents looked on with reserved worry. After Dad’s wife left, Mom joined them in the kitchen, where they had been listening to the exchange carefully. They sipped coffee, looked out at the birdfeeder. At a loss, her mother urged her to go back to him. “It is better to be married,” she said. “You have to just deal with it.”

She turned to him, resolved to trust him. Mom isn’t sure exactly when he finally got divorced from his first wife; he only said it was “taken care of.” With her daughter, my half-sister, the real Mrs. Brodak moved to California, where she died of cancer a couple of years later.

This looks bad, I know. I would not have made the choice to return to him, I think. Most people wouldn’t. But what do any of us know.

In the basement of the Romeo courthouse my dad married my mom, with his sister, Helena, as a witness. The dress she wore, an off-white peasant dress with low shoulders and small pouf sleeves, I wore at ten years old as a hippie Halloween costume, ha.

She didn’t tell me then it was her wedding dress, just said it was an old thing. Too shy in our new neighborhood to trick-or-treat, I stood like a grown-up at our door in the dress, baggy and so wide-necked it barely stayed on my shoulders, while I passed out candy to kids my age. The night ended fast
when I leaned down obliviously in front of a group of boys to pick up a dropped single-wrap Twizzler, my whole bare front visible in the huge tent of dress, down to my day-of-the-week underwear. I didn’t know those boys but now they knew me. I hurried through that fifth-grade year tacked with the nickname “Moundy.”

I asked Mom what Dad wore at the wedding, since I had never seen any pictures. “One of those corny polo shirts he had,” she laughed.

A small dinner party was held at a nearby golf course restaurant. Mom met her mother-in-law there, and many other Brodaks, who all regarded her warily, as a homewrecker.

Soon after the wedding, I was born, during a year of relative happiness in their relationship. Perhaps, my mom thought, their rocky start was over, and with some commitment to discarding the past, there would be no more problems. She threw her wild energy into this life now: these children, and him,
her
husband now. She enacted a vigorous and healthy routine: reading, games, walks to the park, dancing, art, and helping the elderly lady upstairs with her housework. She made a point of holding me as often as possible. She said I was an easy baby, calm, happy, affectionate. “You hardly ever cried,” she told me. “It was easy to be with you. Your sister was harder. She was two when you were born, so that’s a hard time to get a sister. She hated the affection you got. She’d steal your toys but you’d just busy yourself with your toes or whatever was there. You two didn’t get along.”

Still, she attended us with pure devotion. She baked homemade bread and wrote folk songs for us, singing them softly to us with her acoustic Gibson at bedtime. The songs were always minor key, lament-low, about horses and freedom and the ocean. In the dark, I’d cry sometimes in their hold, chilled in their sweetness.

I know this is not so uncommon, a man with a second family. If it ever does come up among friends or acquaintances, there is almost always someone who has experienced this or knows someone who has. It is a thing that happens. Men have affairs, and the affairs become relationships, marriages even, decades long. I know the affair starts just for some new fun, for sex, to be wanted again, some other need the man thinks could be fulfilled without having to fully or officially leave his wife. And then, I don’t know, maybe he really loves the second woman, or the child that comes along, more children, more bonds. More devotion? More love? Is it possible to love two families at once? I don’t believe, not even a little, that it is possible. Maybe his shame shapes this “solution”—to secretly keep both families, support both, out of an honest sense of guilt or duty. I think Dad was just too proud to admit he’d done anything wrong. He doesn’t mention wrongdoings or apologize. I think he didn’t want to back out of his affair with my mom because he couldn’t figure a way out without looking diminished, in a position of
error,
a position he could not abide.