I KNEW THAT SOONER OR LATER I’d have to get around to making that trip to my father’s apartment in Amsterdam and begin the task anointed to me by my four younger sisters who, still heartbroken, angry and distraught by our father’s suicide, refused the macabre undertaking of sorting through his belongings before turning the flat over to the realtor.

   I arrived in Amsterdam on the most un-Dutch of days, warm, sunny and a sky bluer than any sky I’d ever seen during the dozens of trips I’d made to Holland since my father moved there with his new wife more than twenty years ago.

   That I hadn’t spoken to my father in a decade made the trip even more difficult. When I stepped into his apartment, nothing suggested my father had ever lived there, and except for a set of dishes I had recognized from my childhood—a wedding gift from my father’s first marriage to my mother back in 1992—whoever lived in that apartment was a stranger to me.  

   The door squeaked closed and I threw my topcoat over the back of the sofa and sat down in a tufted, oversized armchair that faced the window overlooking the canal below. I imagined this was my father’s favorite chair as he’d always had a favorite chair and loved looking out windows observing scenes of ordinary life.

   There was a smaller armchair on the other side of a round coffee table in front of an adjacent window where I imagined Emilia sat. A dainty woman with bright green eyes, Emilia was my father’s Finnish third wife who had died a few years back in a freak accident on a boat she had been vacationing on with some friends off the coast of Mallorca.

   I had only met Emilia once and took an instant liking to her. She seemed to me, at the time, to be the kind of woman who understood my father with all of his quirks and imperfections, loving him for who he was, unlike his former lovers who seemed to be attracted to a man they merely perceived and desired him to be.

   I stood up and walked around the apartment for a few minutes, browsing like a curious window shopper or one who strolls leisurely and contemplatively through the galleries of an art museum, taking in every nuance. Looking about the place, I found it rather disconcerting to observe the stark absence of photographs. My father was always one who took pride in showing off his children’s portraits in heavy pewter frames that occupied the tops of the antique highboys we used to have at home.

   But not one such highboy was to be found here. In fact, all of my father’s clothes—a sparse but utilitarian wardrobe—were kept in a walk-in closet in his small, minimally appointed bedroom. Everything was folded, stacked and arranged meticulously in rectangular wicker baskets on shelves lined with gently fragrant paper. The entire apartment reflected my father’s eclectic taste and the fact that he loved nothing more than visiting museums, art galleries and high-end shops.

   My father enjoyed long days out shopping for clothes and accessories for me and my sisters when we were younger. When we eventually all moved away, he’d delight in furnishing and accessorizing our homes, hiring interior designers, decorators and craftsmen to create for each of his children a warm, welcoming and loving home. I suppose it was his way of feeling part of our lives, looking over and protecting us, his presence felt in all of our homes and perhaps that is what kept us close, even after he had become distant and withdrawn.

When we were children, my father loved taking us to museums, if only for the opportunity of spending a few hours in our company. And while me and my sisters would stroll about the giant halls and galleries under the spell of the great masters and contemporary geniuses, my father rarely glanced at a single piece of art. It was us who he observed, quietly, reservedly, watching our every reaction to what we were observing; watching our playful interactions, taking pleasure as we walked in the museum cafeteria line choosing cakes and sandwiches or selecting postcards and trinkets in the gift shops. These were the things that gave my father his greatest pleasure, being with us, present, but at the same time removed and in his own little world where conversation wasn’t required, questions weren’t asked or answered, but where he could feel close to his children.

   I had been in my father’s apartment for nearly an hour, moving from room to room. I fidgeted with the sofa, whose cushions I moved to see if it was a sleeper (it was) and glided my hand over the smooth wooden credenza in the hall that led to my father’s study. There, I plopped down in an old wine leather Chesterfield behind his desk and then on the matching two-seater that stood in front of the room’s only window that looked out onto a courtyard of small well looked after gardens.

   I sat everywhere one could sit in that apartment, on every chair, bed, sofa and stool that my father had sat upon in all the years he lived in that apartment, but still I felt no connection to the place or to the man I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years. Stranger still, I wasn’t even able to conjure up an image of him sitting there on that sofa or walking on the faded rug in the hallway that he had certainly walked upon thousands of times. And I wondered, cautiously, if perhaps my father had never really lived there at all and that maybe I had stumbled accidentally into the wrong apartment.

   I set my overnight bag on the floor beside the sofa in the frunchroom, walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge to finally find a telltale sign that my father had indeed lived in that place. The fridge was filled with meticulously arranged blue glass bottles of Solan de Cabras, a brand of Spanish mineral water being the only bottled water he ever drank since leaving Spain in 2007 after having lived there for fifteen years. There were perfect rows of cartons of soy milk and six neatly stacked boxes of Yakult (well beyond their 45-day expiry date); and with the exception of a jar of minced garlic in oil, those were the only items in the fridge.

   My original intention was to begin clearing the closets, thinking that would be a fairly quick, efficient and straightforward way to start. Instead, I spent the next thirty minutes going from room to room opening each drawer, quickly glancing inside and then closing them. Next, I went to into my father’s study and sat down behind his antique desk, certain if he had left a note or anything he wanted anyone to find it would be there.

   I opened the top drawer slowly and quietly, feeling a tinge of the mischievous guilt a child would feel rummaging through his father’s desk looking for coins, girly magazines or the hidden stock of After Eight mints my father would always stash away in his desk when we were kids. But there was no note, no will, no instructions, no mints, nothing to suggest the man who sat at this desk was in any sort of emotional distress or contemplating taking his own life.

    So, I sat there until long after sunset when the last glimmer of the day slowly began wafting through the sheer white curtains. I reached over and switched on the banker’s lamp that sat on my father’s desk. That’s when I noticed it. How could I have overlooked such an awkwardly placed thing that had been sitting on a bookshelf right in front of my face for the past hour?

   It was definitely old, an antique, I presumed, and I’m fairly sure I’d never seen it before. It was a small metal lunchbox with a rusting handle and a caricature of a young cowboy and an Indian girl standing near a covered wagon beneath the words Howdy Doody. A quick Google search revealed this to have been a children’s television show of the same name dating as far back as the late 1940s. I also saw quite a few hits for sites that had the very same vintage lunchbox for sale, some selling for upwards of twelve to fifteen hundred dollars in mint condition. Now, while my father was a lot of things and wore a lot of hats, he was certainly not a collector, and a simple browse around his living quarters would immediately confirm that.

   There was something peculiar about this lunchbox, or rather its placement. Sure, it was out of its element sitting on a bookshelf wedged between novels by Franz Kafka and David Leavitt, it looked as if it were placed there deliberately in direct visual alignment with whoever was sitting behind the desk.

   I closed the top drawer, stood up and walked over to the bookshelf, removed the lunchbox and sat down on the two-seater, setting the lunchbox down on the coffee table in front of me. On closer inspection, I imagined the lunchbox had seen better days and probably wouldn’t fetch the big money some of the vintage ones I saw online would as it was well worn, dented and much of the paint had either faded or peeled away over the years.

   I picked it up again and felt something moving inside so I gave it a little shake and it seemed as though there were some papers—bank notes perhaps—rattling around within; a pretty good hiding place to conceal some cash, I thought to myself. I set the lunchbox down again and proceeded to flip the small metal latch with my fingernail and slowly opened the top. Inside, were a dozen or so newspaper clippings which, at first glance, seemed to be nothing more than supermarket coupons and engagement notices.

   As I flipped through the clippings, I noticed a running theme, the story of a young, unnamed school-aged boy who had been killed in a tragic accident when a classmate accidentally struck him on the head with his metal lunchbox. The articles—from Skokie Life, Skokie News and The Morton Grove Press, from May 18th 1970—were all about the tragic death of the young boy and the devastating impact it had on the small community of the Jewish parochial school where the boys attended.

   I was intrigued by the articles and saddened reading the story of the young boy who died. At the same time, I wondered why my father would have kept these articles stored in a lunchbox or had even kept them at all. I immediately surmised it was something my father may have been writing about, as he often resorted to obscure news stories for the inspiration behind his fiction and this story certainly qualified as the type of offbeat fodder he would use to inspire his creative musings.

   Just as I was re-folding the newspaper clippings to return them to the lunchbox, I noticed a yellowing envelope wedged into the inside top of the box. Unable to free the envelope with my fingers, I stood up and walked over to my father’s desk, taking the letter opener that was lying atop a leather-bound diary and sitting back down on the sofa un-lodging the envelope.

   The envelope was addressed to my father in care of his London-based literary agent, Jos Cohen. With my curiosity piqued, I opened the envelope and what I read on the matching monogrammed stationary note shook me to my very core. The letter, dated only months ago, was from a woman named Rachel Schifrin, who was, according to the letter, the older sister of the boy who was struck and killed with the lunchbox more than fifty years ago.

   After nearly a lifetime trying to ascertain the identity of the boy who accidentally took her brother’s life, Rachel had recently discovered that it was my father who, on that fateful day, while innocently and, albeit carelessly, swung his lunchbox hitting her brother just above his right temple. She went on to explain that her brother lingered in a coma for nearly a month before he passed away, just three days before his seventh birthday.

   The letter explained how she had hired a lawyer and private investigator and after nearly ten years of litigation was able to obtain the official police report, revealing every detail including the names of the two young classmates.  Rachel’s letter was to the point and there was nothing that suggested animosity, though the purpose of Rachel sending my father the lunchbox and newspaper clippings were ambiguous at best.

   But it was how Rachel chose to end her short note that, in the most perplexing way, was as cryptic as it was disturbing, signing off with what I later found to be the lyrics from the Howdy Doody Show’s opening theme song:

 

Let's give a rousing cheer, 
‘Cause Howdy Doody's here, 
It's time to start the show,

So kids let's go.