She never called her family in Korea, and they never called her. I imagined that something deeply horrible had happened to her when she was young, some nameless pain, something brutal, that a malicious man had taught her fear and sadness and she had had to leave her life and family because of it.
* * *
Years later, when the three of us came on Memorial Day for the summer-long stay with my father, he had the houselady prepare the apartment above the garage for us. Whenever we first opened its door at the top of the creaky narrow stairs we smelled the fresh veneers of pine oil and bleach and lemon balm. The pine floors were shimmering and dangerously slick. Mitt would dash past us to the king-sized mattress in the center of the open space and tumble on the neatly sheeted bed. The bed was my parents’ old one; my father bought himself a twin the first year we moved into the new house. The rest of the stuff in the apartment had come with the property: there was an old leather sofa; a chest of drawers; a metal office desk; my first stereo, the all-in-one kind, still working; and someone’s nod to a kitchen, thrown together next to the bathroom in the far corner, featuring a dorm-style refrigerator, a half-sized two-burner stove, and the single cabinet above it.
Mitt and Lelia loved that place. Lelia especially liked the tiny secret room that was tucked behind a false panel in the closet. The room, barely six by eight, featured a single-paned window in the shape of a face that swung out to a discreet view of my father’s exquisitely landscaped garden of cut stones and flowers. She wrote back in that room during the summer, slipping in at sunrise before I left for Purchase, and was able to complete a handful of workable poems by the time we departed on Labor Day, when she had to go back to teaching.
Mitt liked the room, too, for its pitched ceiling that he could almost reach if he tippy-toed, and I could see he felt himself bigger in there as he stamped about in my father’s musty cordovans like some thundering giant, sweeping at the air, though he only ventured in during the late afternoons when enough light could angle inside and warmly lamp every crag and corner nook. He got locked in once for a few hours, the panel becoming stuck somehow, and we heard his wails all the way from the kitchen in the big house.
“Spooky,” Mitt pronounced that night, fearful and unashamed as he lay between us in our bed, clutching his mother’s thigh.
Mitt slept with us those summers until my father bought him his own canvas army cot. That’s what the boy wanted. He liked the camouflaging pattern of the thick fabric and sometimes tipped the thing on its side and shot rubber-tipped arrows at me and Lelia from behind its cover. We had to shoot them back before he would agree to go to bed.
When he was an infant we waited until he was asleep and then delicately placed him atop our two pillows, which we arranged on the floor next to the bed. We lay still a few minutes until we could hear his breathing deepen and become rhythmic. That’s when we made love. It was warm up there in the summer and we didn’t have to strip or do anything sudden. We moved as mutely and as deftly as we could bear, muffling ourselves in one another’s hair and neck so as not to wake him, but then, too, of course, so we could hear the sound of his sleeping, his breathing, ours, that strange conspiring. Afterward, we lay quiet again, to make certain of his slumber, and then lifted him back between our hips into the bed, so heavy and alive with our mixed scent.
“Hey,” Lelia whispered to me one night that first summer, “the woman, in the house, what do you think she does at night?”
“I don’t know,” I said, stroking her arm, Mitt’s.
“I mean, does she have any friends or relatives?”
I didn’t know.
She then said, “There’s no one else besides your father?”
“I don’t think she has anyone here. They’re all in Korea.”
“Has she ever gone back to visit?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she sends them money instead.”
“God,” Lelia answered. “How awful.” She brushed back the damp downy hair from Mitt’s forehead. “She must be so lonely.”
“Does she seem lonely?” I asked.
She thought about it for a moment. “I guess not. She doesn’t seem like she’s anything. I keep looking for something, but even when she’s with your father there’s nothing in her face. She’s been here since you were young, right?”
I nodded.
“You think they’re friends?” she asked.
“I doubt it.”
“Lovers?”
I had to answer, “Maybe.”
“So what’s her name?” Lelia asked after a moment.
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
I told her that I didn’t know. That I had never known.
“What’s that you call her, then?” she said. “I thought that was her name. Your father calls her that, too.”
“It’s not her name,” I told her. “It’s not her name. It’s just a form of address.”
It was the truth. Lelia had great trouble accepting this stunning ignorance of mine. That summer, when it seemed she was thinking about it, she would stare in wonderment at me as if I had a gaping hole blown through my head. I couldn’t blame her. Americans live on a first-name basis. She didn’t understand that there weren’t moments in our language — the rigorous, regimental one of family and servants — when the woman’s name could have naturally come out. Or why it wasn’t important. At breakfast and lunch and dinner my father and I called her “Ah-juh-ma,” literally aunt, but more akin to “ma’am,” the customary address to an unrelated Korean woman. But in our context the title bore much less deference. I never heard my father speak her name in all the years she was with us.
But then he never even called my mother by her name, nor did she ever in my presence speak his. She was always and only “spouse” or “wife” or “Mother”; he was “husband” or “Father” or “Henry’s father.” And to this day, when someone asks what my parents’ names were, I have to pause for a moment, I have to rehear them not from the memory of my own voice, my own calling to them, but through the staticky voices of their old friends phoning from the other end of the world.
“I can’t believe this,” Lelia cried, her long Scottish face all screwed up in the moonlight. “You’ve known her since you were a kid! She practically raised you.”
“I don’t know who raised me,” I said to her.
“Well, she must have had something to do with it!” She nearly woke up Mitt.
She whispered, “What do you think cooking and cleaning and ironing is? That’s what she does all day, if you haven’t noticed. Your father depends so much on her. I’m sure you did, too, when you were young.”
“Of course I did,” I answered. “But what do you want, what do you want me to say?”
“There’s nothing you have to say. I just wonder, that’s all. This woman has given twenty years of her life to you and your father and it still seems like she could be anyone to you. It doesn’t seem to matter who she is. Right? If your father switched her now with someone else, probably nothing would be different.”
She paused. She brought up her knees so they were even with her hips. She pulled Mitt to her chest.
“Careful,” I said. “You’ll wake him.”
“It scares me,” she said. “I just think about you and me. What I am…”
“Don’t be crazy,” I said.
“I am not being crazy,” she replied carefully. Mitt started to whimper. I slung my arm over her belly. She didn’t move. This was the way, the very slow way, that our conversations were spoiling.