Then She Found Me (15 page)

“Sad news?” they repeated. Not sad news. “Did we say something wrong?”

“I thought you might think it was good news I was dating someone.”

“But we don’t even know him,” they said.

I said, “I’m thirty years old. I’m getting old for finding boyfriends.”

“Oh, that,” they said. “That’s what Americans think, that women are over the hill at thirty.”

I said, “I almost brought him along tonight. I wonder how you would have treated him.”

“We’re always cordial to guests in our home,” they said.

“I think I’m in love with this person,” I said. “It’s what I came home to tell you. And more important, he’s in love with me.”

Then it was time for their speech on my loyalty, my industriousness, my superior intelligence; their catalogue of April’s wonderful qualities that made her the best of everything. They believed it, too; they thought men fell in love with industriousness and neatness and tenure and safe driving. How could they worry about my staying single, about such a treasure lying unclaimed?

“It’s never made me popular,” I told them.

“Popular!” they spat. “Of what importance is
popular?”

“You never get over being unpopular,” I said. “It forms the way you look at things. At yourself. At men.”

“But who’s right now, sweetheart? Didn’t you just tell us that a young man is in love with you. What does your
popular
mean in this case?”

One by one we resumed eating. Trude asked what he did. A graduate student, I said. Still? they asked. At what age?

Twenty-eight, I said.

Twenty-eight? they repeated. “Young. Younger than you, April.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” I said.

“When did this come about?” my mother asked.

Since the summer, I said.

A signal passed between my parents then, one that said, Well, of course—it’s only been months and she’s calling it love. That’s what this is.

I said, “You and Daddy were engaged a few weeks after you met.”

“That was different,” said my father.

“He’d like to meet you sometime,” I said.

They nodded pleasantly.

“You could drive up and meet us for dinner.”

“What is he?” my father asked.

I knew what he was asking. “Catholic,” I said.

“Does he go to church?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My father made a noise, a grunt that meant, You know nothing.

“What’s the matter?” I asked angrily.

“What did you think we would say? You thought we’d be pleased you’re in love with a Catholic boy who’s a Pole?”

And Freddie said, “You knew they wouldn’t be happy, April.”

“They were worse than the Nazis,” said Trude. “They loved killing Jews. They’d point to Jews who passed as Gentiles to save their lives and say, ‘There’s one. Get her.’ When the war was over the Poles still had pogroms!”

Julius said, “Should I say I’m pleased when I’m not? That it makes me sick to my stomach that when my daughter finally falls in love it’s not only with a
shagitz
, not your regular Gentile, but a Pole. Is he blond and blue-eyed, too, for good measure?”

“He wasn’t there,” I said. “It wasn’t him. It’s not all Poles. And it’s my life anyway. Not yours, mine.”

Julius was on his feet suddenly, crouched, his hand raised and open flat. I burst into tears. He sat down and said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“What did I do that was so terrible?” I said.

“You should have known,” my mother said.

“What’d you expect, April?” said Freddie. “A
Pole
.”

“Nothing happened,” said my father. “I apologize.”

Bernice’s hand was over her mouth. She slid it off slowly and said, “Wow. A primal scene. What happened with this guy, Peter?”

“Nothing.”

“Because of them?”

“Because of me.”

She narrowed her eyes. “How often did he hit you?”

“Never,” I said.

“Just this one time? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It touched something off—”

“I don’t care what it touched off! You don’t slap your adult children around unless you’re a sickie. And you shouldn’t be apologizing for him!”

“He didn’t
hit
me.”

“And what did your mother do—what did your brother do—while this little drama was being performed? Applaud? Or did they apologize for him, too?”

“We all knew why,” I said. “The war.”

Bernice stubbed out her cigarette after a final, angry puff. “When are you allowed to say, ‘They were difficult people. My life was harder than it might have been if someone else had adopted me’?”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you can’t do anything about their being in the camps. You can’t erase that, no matter how good a daughter you are; no matter how Jewish your boyfriends might be.”

I fought the quivering that had started in my chin. I managed to say, “What if I am making excuses for them? I know what they went through. It doesn’t hurt anyone.”

“It’s not fair to you,” she said. “And it’s not fair to Dwight.”

Dwight? I said.

“This is what this is all about: falling in love with someone who’d make them turn over in their graves.
And
breaking the news to little Freddie who has a hot line to heaven, apparently.”

“I can handle Freddie,” I said.

“You’d better! Tell him there’s a man in your life—an upstanding, fine German-American man. That he’s highly intelligent and devoted to you; that you’re compatible, emotionally, intellectually, and temperamentally.”

I smiled. So much for gay Dwight.

“You have to confront these prejudices head on. Take a stand. Don’t let him play Daddy. Who’s he going to choose—his dead parents or you? Force his hand.”

“That’s not the way I do things,” I said.

Ordinarily she would have said, “That’s right! And look how far that’s gotten you!” But tonight she could feel my adoption unraveling and her stock rising. All she had to do was be nice, be the sympathetic one and wait. The key was being in Dwight’s camp. With great restraint she said, “You’re right. The important thing is to work on your relationship with Dwight and not let ancient history erode what you two have together.” She smiled the smile of a wise and loving confidante, a marvelously judicious one.

I said yes, that was pretty much the way I had decided to handle it.

“I’ll have you all to dinner!” Bernice cried. “You, Dwight, Freddie. It would be on neutral ground. We could all relax and get to know each other.”

Maybe sometime, I said. I was going to take it one step at a time. Dwight and I hadn’t even had one date.

“Your brother wouldn’t have to know who I was. I could just be a friend who was having a dinner party. We could have a girl here for him. A gorgeous shiksa.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

Bernice put one index finger to her chin and held it there primly. After a few moments she said, “I’m coming on too strong. I’m asking you to do something for my own selfish reasons. I want your happiness so badly that I’m trying to direct everything.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You meant well.”

“I do. I really do,” Bernice said earnestly.

“You’ll meet Freddie one of these days. And you’ll like him in spite of his being a prick. He’s very charming.”

“Good. I want to meet him. And I want to see more of Dwight. I think he and I have a lot in common. We both—” She stopped, changed her mind; said instead, “Where is he taking you Saturday night?”

W
e took his car because mine was unreliable and the drive was six hours, round trip. I read to Dwight from the guidebook in my lap: “There are no living Shakers at Hancock Shaker Village, but visitors sometimes get confused.” It was Saturday morning. We were driving west on the Massachusetts Turnpike in his white Honda Civic.

“Why is that?” he asked.

I read further. “The re-creation of this nineteenth-century Shaker village is so authentic that the staff purposely does not wear the full Shaker dress in an attempt to keep the confusion to a minimum.”

“Don’t you get carsick doing that?” he said.

I put my finger in the book to mark my page, lowered the seat back a few inches, and closed my eyes.

“Are you okay?”

I smiled, didn’t answer.

“You’re not having second thoughts about this trip?”

“I seem to recall it was my idea.”

He smiled. “You mean you don’t catch sight of me out of the corner of your eye and say to yourself, Ye gods! What am I doing in a car driving across the state with Dwight Willamee?”

I looked over, noticed how his complexion was healthier in sunlight than it appeared under the fluorescent lights of the library. His skin looked pink, softened by a careful shave and a hot washcloth. In a moment, eyes back on the road, I said, “I know exactly what I’m doing here.”

Dwight had called me the night before to get directions to my apartment. We had talked about Bernice; he told me he had taped her show and watched it.

I had asked him what he thought.

“Painful,” he said.

“Which one was it?”

“Pet owners.”

“Oh, God.”

“Who comes up with her show ideas?” he had asked.

“She takes credit for the good ones.”

“What’s her idea of a good one?”

“Eligible men. That’s how she meets them all. Of course there’s some other pretense for their being on—they cook or they’ve sailed solo around the world.”

“Sort of her own dating service.”

“Exactly. And everybody at the station knows it.”

“You have to laugh about this, you know. If you see her through the eyes of a television critic, you’ll be annoyed all the time.”

“I
am
annoyed! You wouldn’t believe the stuff she thinks of. She carries around a notebook to scribble ideas in, then hands her notes to her production assistant when she gets a bunch saved up. She’ll write something ridiculous down
like ‘Shetland ponies,’ but then some nice woman approaches her at a restaurant and says she has a book coming out on Shakers or Quakers that sounds really interesting, and she writes it down on a napkin and crumples it as soon as the woman walks away.”

“It was probably on Shakers,” Dwight had said.

“The ones who don’t have sex. They just recruit members for the community and adopt orphans.”

“Shakers.”

“They’re extinct, except one woman in Maine.”

He had asked if I remembered the author’s name. I hadn’t; a woman, though, the scholarly type. Bernice would have booked her if she had been male, surely. Dwight had said, no matter. In a few months he’d check
Books in Print
.

“Do you have a thing for Shakers?” I had asked.

“I guess I do, sort of an inverse voyeurism one could have only for people who don’t believe in sex.”

Dwight liked sex, he was saying. He was a sexual being. He couldn’t imagine a life devoted to no sex; it was so peculiar to him that he was going to go out and buy a book and try to fathom how people lived that way.

“Have you ever been to the Shaker Village in the Berkshires?” I had asked carefully.

In the car, I studied his profile when I thought he wouldn’t notice. Without taking his eyes off the road he said, “Now you’re really making me nervous.”

I waited awhile, turning to appreciate the October foliage bordering the farms on my right. Finally I said, “You’re not nervous. You’re good at this—better than you let on. I think you know what you’re doing.”

“Is that bad?” he asked slowly.

“No.”

“I didn’t deliberately hide anything or mean to suggest that I’d never talked to a woman or never sat in a car with a woman.” He smiled. “Tell me I wasn’t
that
pathetic.”

“I see you differently, that’s all. It’s hard to remember old impressions. Now I see … other things.”

He grinned, didn’t answer right away. Finally he said, “And your favorite fairy tales all had frog princes in them.”

I laughed and said his self-image needed work; for example, how long would it have taken him to ask me out if I hadn’t asked first?

“It depends. I’d like to think I’m not totally devoid of social grace. On the other hand—”

“We could have kept on passing notes for years.”

“You could be right, pal,” Dwight said. He took one hand off the steering wheel to pat my knee. I caught the hand as he withdrew it. We looked at each other, the first eye contact acknowledging these were our hands and our nerve endings. A few hundred yards later, his hands back on the wheel, he said, “Maybe we can still do dinner tonight. If you’re not too tired.”

“I won’t be,” I said.

“Herbs were very, very important to the Shakers,” said our guide. “Dandelion extract was used as a diuretic and to purify the liver.” Dwight and I began making faces. We were only on the third stop of the tour. The Poultry House, the Brick Dwelling House, the famed Round Stone Barn, the Sisters’ House and the Brethren’s Shop, the Ministry Wash House and the Meeting House, were still ahead. The Good Room
in
the Meeting House for souvenirs; the demonstration of Shaker music and dance.

“Whaddya say?” I asked. We were straggling behind the group, uncommitted.

Dwight consulted his visitors’ map, then his watch.
“We could slip away”—he read: “to the attractive lunch-room, furnished with reproduction Shaker chairs and tables, offering sandwiches, soups, beverages, and Shaker rosewater ice cream.”