father who had denied my existence. When I was a kid, from time to time I had asked Mom about him, but she’d told me almost nothing. Had gotten huffy whenever I inquired. How could she tell me what she didn’t know? she’d say. And so, by the time I was in my early teens, I had grown to hate the mysterious Francis Oh. Had decided he wasn’t the only one who could play the rejection game. “Fuck you ,” I’d tell him, standing in front of the bathroom mirror—borrowing my own face because I had no idea what his looked like. It was around that time that my friend Brian and I went to the movies to see that movie The Manchurian Candidate . I had sat there squirming, I remember. Imagining that every one of those Chinese brainwashers in Frank Sinatra’s flashbacks was Francis Oh. It had freaked me out to the point that I got up, ran up the aisle and out to the men’s room, and puked up my popcorn and soda. By the time I went back in, I had missed a good fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie. “You okay?” Brian whispered. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” I had snapped back. A few days later, I hit upon the idea of being rid of my Chinese surname. I would take my mother’s and my grandparents’ name instead—become Orion Valerio instead of Orion Oh. Rather than telling my mother, I walked down to city hall one day after school and asked in some office about how to do it. But the process was complicated and costly, and I gave up on the idea. Instead, whenever anyone asked about him, I’d say my father died. Had gotten killed in a car accident when my mother was pregnant. I liked telling people that. Killing off the father who wanted no part of me. After a while, I almost came to believe my own lie.
But decades later, after I had become a father myself and was facing the fact that my mother’s life was slipping away, I broached the subject with her again. And this time, she was more forthcoming than she’d ever been. . . .
She looks terrible. Her hair’s matted against the pillow and she’s not wearing her false teeth. But she’s having one of her better days. They extracted a liter of fluid from her cancerous lung this morning, and she’s breathing easier. “He was a regular at the movie house where I worked as an usherette my senior year in high school,” she says. “A college student studying mathematics—a lonely young man who always came to the show by himself. He liked gangster movies and started teasing me about the love stories I told him I preferred. Kidding me about how ‘sappy’ they were. And then one day, out of the blue, he brought me a bouquet of daisies.” He was something of a mystery, she says; it had been part of his appeal. “My parents were strict and the nuns at the girls’ school where I went were advocating chastity so stridently that I gave in to his advances as a form of rebellion.” Their affair had been brief, she says, and she’d known nothing about birth control. “Nowadays, the drugstores put condoms right out on the counter, but it was different back then. I thought it was something the man took care of, but I had no idea how.” She says it was only after she became pregnant with me that Francis told her he was married. “Unhappily, he said, but he wouldn’t leave his wife because it would bring dishonor to his family.”
She begins to cough. Points to the cup of ice chips on her tray table. I put some on the little plastic spoon and feed them to her. She sucks on them, smiles weakly, and continues. “He tried to convince me to end my pregnancy or put you up for adoption, but I refused. I knew I wanted you despite what was to come. I already loved you, Orion.” He saw her one more time after he learned she was pregnant, she says. “And then after that, he just disappeared. Stopped coming to the movies. Withdrew from his college. I tried to contact him there—borrowed my friend’s car and drove over there. But the woman in the registrar’s office
But decades later, after I had become a father myself and was facing the fact that my mother’s life was slipping away, I broached the subject with her again. And this time, she was more forthcoming than she’d ever been. . . .
She looks terrible. Her hair’s matted against the pillow and she’s not wearing her false teeth. But she’s having one of her better days. They extracted a liter of fluid from her cancerous lung this morning, and she’s breathing easier. “He was a regular at the movie house where I worked as an usherette my senior year in high school,” she says. “A college student studying mathematics—a lonely young man who always came to the show by himself. He liked gangster movies and started teasing me about the love stories I told him I preferred. Kidding me about how ‘sappy’ they were. And then one day, out of the blue, he brought me a bouquet of daisies.” He was something of a mystery, she says; it had been part of his appeal. “My parents were strict and the nuns at the girls’ school where I went were advocating chastity so stridently that I gave in to his advances as a form of rebellion.” Their affair had been brief, she says, and she’d known nothing about birth control. “Nowadays, the drugstores put condoms right out on the counter, but it was different back then. I thought it was something the man took care of, but I had no idea how.” She says it was only after she became pregnant with me that Francis told her he was married. “Unhappily, he said, but he wouldn’t leave his wife because it would bring dishonor to his family.”
She begins to cough. Points to the cup of ice chips on her tray table. I put some on the little plastic spoon and feed them to her. She sucks on them, smiles weakly, and continues. “He tried to convince me to end my pregnancy or put you up for adoption, but I refused. I knew I wanted you despite what was to come. I already loved you, Orion.” He saw her one more time after he learned she was pregnant, she says. “And then after that, he just disappeared. Stopped coming to the movies. Withdrew from his college. I tried to contact him there—borrowed my friend’s car and drove over there. But the woman in the registrar’s office
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