A marriage certificate from Pusan, February 1952, with his name on it and a woman’s name I have never heard spoken in my life. Underneath that, a second document in Korean and English, and it took a translator at the university three weeks to tell me what I’d already worked out from the dates: a death record. She was twenty-three. Nine months of marriage. There was also a photograph, one, of a young man in uniform who I recognized as my father only by the ears, standing next to a woman who is laughing at whoever’s holding the camera.
He came home in 1954, met my mother in ’56, married her in ’58, and had four children and a body shop and a life, and he put a locker in a hallway and told a group of small kids that he’d know. That’s the whole system. Sixty years of security on a threat he never once had to enforce, because he’d calibrated it exactly right for the kind of children he was raising, and we grew up and got old and still didn’t touch it.
My sister thinks Mom knew. She’s got no evidence beyond a thing our mother said in 1997 about how Dad had had a hard time over there, said in a particular way, and forty years of that woman never asking a question about it. My brother thinks she didn’t. We’ve been arguing about it since February and neither of us can win and I’ve started to suspect that’s going to be permanent.
The dress is in acid-free paper now. I paid a woman in Cleveland to do that properly, and I don’t have a good reason, and none of my siblings asked me to. In September I found her family — she had a nephew, he’s seventy-nine, he lives outside Daejeon, and his granddaughter emailed me back in careful English within nine hours. They knew about my father. They’d known his name since 1952. And the first thing she wrote to me, before anything else, was: Our family has wondered for a very long time whether he had a good life.
