Then She Found Me (24 page)

Sandra took her coat and her knapsack. I turned her toward the door; she took the small, resistant steps of a demonstrator trained in nonviolent protest. She planted herself at the threshold and said, “You don’t have my address, though.”

“I’ll get it from Bernice’s lawyer,” I said, and shoved.

“Liar,” I heard from the other side. “Fucking asshole.”

“Is she gone, darling?” Bernice called from the bedroom.

I didn’t return to her room. I put the corn chips back in their cellophane bag. I threw the melted Velveeta with chili peppers down the disposal and washed out the red bowl. Bernice appeared and said, “I was calling you.”

I said I couldn’t hear her with the water running. What had she wanted?

“You’re acting strange,” she said. Hiding in the kitchen instead of reporting what had happened. Usually I was loaded for bear.

“That’s a quaint expression,” I said.

“How’d you get rid of Saguna?” she asked, emphasizing each syllable with derision: Sa-goon-a.

“Bodily.”

“No!” she said with delight. “C’mon!”

I sponged the lip of the black porcelain sink and fiddled with her gearshift of a faucet until the water stopped. It was time to sit and talk. If I were Trude, I thought, I’d take my apron off now and fold it conscientiously. “Sit down,” I said.

Bernice did, intertwining her fingers to feign obedience. I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down on its squeaky black patent-leather seat.

“This is a switch,” said Bernice, “me playing guest and you designing the format.”

I paused a moment. “This is serious,” I began. “Please don’t interrupt until I’m finished.” She sat up straighter, crimping her lips.

“I did some research,” I said slowly, “and I believe I know the circumstances surrounding my adoption.”

Bernice nodded, still neutral: Go on. I’m listening. No nervous squint to her brown eyes.

“I know that you were married—probably to Jack
Flynn—and that you had a daughter whom you gave up for adoption when she was approximately six months old.” I stopped there. Bernice’s face didn’t change.

“
Were
you married?” I asked gently.

She looked at me then, measuring my tone and expression. What did April want? Would a lie or the truth work best here?

“Please don’t make up any stories,” I said.

“Is this a test?” she asked.

“I already know the truth. I just want it confirmed.”

“Who told you?”

“Sonia,” I said.

“Sonia told you that I was married—”

“Just tell me.”

She looked around. “I need a cigarette,” she said.

“Afterward.”

“Is that so? In my house you tell me when I can have a cigarette?” She stood up. I caught her by the wrist and said, “Please.” She sat down again with much indignation and smoothing of her clothes.

“Tell me everything,” I said.

“His name was Jackie Remuzzi. He looked like us, like you and me. We could have been brother and sister. His father was Italian and his mother Irish, and my parents wouldn’t let him in the house. We sneaked around—the usual story. He was a good kid. A cute kid. Went to Brighton High School, didn’t get into Latin.”

I asked how they met.

“We were neighbors—how’s that for exotic? I played with one of his sisters. He was a year older and had a letter sweater from Brighton. He drove us places, complaining all the way. And then he started to notice me when I was about fifteen. His sister was our cover: ‘Bye, Ma. Goin’ to Brigham’s with Frannie!’ ‘Bye, Ma. Goin’ to Cleveland
Circle with Frannie!’ Frannie was a good kid, and she thought it was romantic to be our front. Jack would bring along a friend of his for her, and we’d get together like that about once a week.”

“So this was an actual romance,” I said. “You dated for a long time.”

“Of course it was a romance! Nice girls didn’t go all the way with their boyfriends for sex. It had to be for love, and it had to be forever.”

“Where’d you do it?” I asked.

Bernice frowned. “Didn’t you sneak around in high school? Couldn’t you at least imagine where two kids would do it, or where your students do it now? Are you that unromantic?”

“In his car?” I asked.

She smiled. “We finally did it in my house when my parents took a day trip to Lake Winnipesaukee and I convinced them I had cramps and would be better off at home.” She smiled grimly. “‘Lake Winnipesaukee’ had a special connotation after that. It became our code word for ‘You can come over, the coast is clear.’”

“And you got pregnant.”

“Either graduation or prom night, if you can believe I’d do anything that unoriginal.”

“Did your parents make you get married?” I asked.

Bernice discharged a hoot of derisive laughter. “They didn’t even know who it was at first. I told them I had been cajoled into sex by an executive at Jordan Marsh—”

I groaned. The first of the Jordan Marsh paternity lies.

“I was a scared kid. Jack wasn’t exactly Mr. Maturity. I told my mother and she said, ‘Take a hot bath. As hot as you can stand.’ As batootzed as she was, it was good to enlist her because she loved a crisis. She wailed and carried on, but she also needed to have secrets from my father and this was a knockout. It was his punishment for sitting
there at the dinner table and not talking to us except to bark out his orders. It was a great marriage: he’d scowl and go to bed early; she sat by the telephone and waited for the party line to hang up so she could gossip to her friends. And that’s where she began. She called her friends and told them her daughter’s cockamamie plan—to leave high school and go study in California! To get a college degree before she even got her diploma! She wouldn’t allow it, she told them. She let them argue. Education was important; California was the place for ambitious young people. Jews ran the studios; Bernice was a stunning girl.

“‘But there are colleges in Boston,’ Mama complained. ‘People come from all over the world to go to school in Boston.’ She pretended to let her friends and sisters talk her into it. I listened, and I took notes. She was a genius. ‘I called you for sympathy and all I get is arguments,’ she would say. She
wept
. ‘Are you going to buy her a plane ticket when she’s out there, homesick, and wants her mama?’

“She arranged everything. She found a home in Chestnut Hill that took Jewish girls. I had to go in September, even though I was only three months pregnant, because that’s when students leave for school. My parents put me in a taxi with my collegiate-looking luggage; I carried a new tennis racket just for the send-off. ‘What time is your flight?’ the driver asked me as we pulled away. ‘You’re taking me to Chestnut Hill,’ I said. A few minutes later I added that I was going to college in California, skipping my senior year in high school because of my excellent grades; that I hadn’t even packed a winter coat.

“I got to Chestnut Hill and I changed my mind. I never even got out of the taxi. I said I was homesick. The cabby drove me back to Oak Square and I called Frannie from a phone booth. Jackie picked me up when he came home from work. He said he’d marry me.”

Bernice asked if she had earned a cigarette yet. I said okay. She smoked jerkily, not with her usual elegance. “Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?” she asked. “Me and the boy down the block. Both families blaming the other kid,
refusing
to talk to each other; my parents threatening to throw Jack in jail. For what? For embarrassing them?” She blew out a stream of smoke and said, “Ugly. Ugly and ordinary.”

“Did you have a wedding?” I asked.

“We did everything on our own—the blood tests and marriage licenses. And we were married at Boston College by a Leo G. Carroll look-alike after I signed the papers saying I’d raise you in the Catholic church. Even Frannie had abandoned ship by then. Our witnesses were two friends of Jack’s we had once gone parking with. I don’t think we ever saw them again.” She sat back in her chair. “And the rest you know.”

“No I don’t,” I said.

She smiled, refusing to be cornered. “Maybe I should just stand here and deliver the eulogy at my own funeral. Nail my own coffin shut, as far as you and I are concerned.”

I said there she went again, worrying about herself instead of me. Why couldn’t she just come
out
with it instead of—

“Maybe
if you didn’t disapprove of every word I ever said to you,” she snapped. “Or of everything I’ve ever done. Or if I thought you would understand.”

I put my forearms and palms flat on the kitchen table—a teacher’s garnering of strength, flesh fortified by desk blotter. “Did you love him?” I asked.

Bernice closed her eyes. A few moments later, she covered her face with her hands. I watched carefully, expecting her to peek through her fingers for my reaction. When she put her hands down, her eyes were teary and
her makeup had smudged. This was new: not looking for the tally light and setting her lips aquiver, but fighting for control of features that were used to obeying. “I think I did,” she said.

“You left him, though.”

“Why do you want to hear this? Are you such a masochist?”

“Because when you left him, you left me, too.”

She stared at me for a long time with a look that dropped the corners of her mouth beyond retrieval and made her look old.

“I need you to tell me,” I said.

She stood up and walked down the hallway in her stocking feet, occasionally touching the wall with her fingertips as if for balance. A minute later, I followed. She was under her satin comforter, curled on her side, still fully dressed. I called her name from the doorway.

She moaned, “What?”

I said, almost in apology, “It happened before I was born. I don’t remember any of it. I was too young to know what was happening.”

“But now you know,” she said into her pillow. “You know what I did and you know what I live with.”

I moved closer. After a pause by the side of her bed, I sat down. “Was it just that you couldn’t cope?” I asked.

Bernice seized the question, sat up, and put a pillow on her crossed legs. “I couldn’t! I wasn’t any good at it, and I had no help. I thought it was a mistake, that I should’ve stayed at the home and signed the papers …”

“And not married him?”

“He was a slob,” said Bernice. “Do you know what I mean when I say ‘slob’? In everything he did.”

“He didn’t love you?” I asked.

She opened her mouth as if to answer faithfully: Yes.
No. At first—in his own way. We were young. Instead, as if too weary, she said, “I didn’t even care.”

“But you left me with him.”

Bernice covered her ears, then slid her hands upward to pull her hair in frustration. “Not
him
. He had family around—more than mine anyway. His mother raised a bunch of kids, and I thought you’d be with them.”

“But you were wrong.”

She flounced back down flat on the mattress. “Goyim,” she said bitterly.

“What about your parents? They didn’t want me either.”

“That’s right! And I never forgave them!” she said. “I didn’t go to my father’s funeral and I didn’t sit
shiva
for him. Because of
you
. Was that covered in the history of Bernice Graverman that Sonia came up with? Or did you just get the parts that make me look bad?”

I said after a few moments, “I’m the one who looks bad. Not you.”

Bernice perked up. “What do you mean,
you?”

“Aren’t you saying I was a pretty sorry baby, a lousy baby who set world records for being unwanted by the highest number of blood relatives?”

“No! It wasn’t you at all—it was us. You were good! And a pretty baby. We were no good at it! We thought it was for the best. Like schmucks, we thought it was for the best.” She touched my hair, smoothed it, and tucked it behind my ears. “We were all wrong,” she said. “And then it was too late.”

I let her do it. I let her stroke my hair and murmur endearments. It was new to me, and soothing, Bernice cooing nonsense. There must have been moments like this before she gave me away, I thought, moments when even a miserable seventeen-year-old stands over her sleeping baby with a full heart, and the baby knows.

S
he said, “I don’t want you driving home in this emotional state. It would be just the kind of poetic justice I’ve done shows about: you finally accept me for what I am and then you’re killed in a car accident.” I agreed to sleep over and to share the queen-size bed, borrowing one of Bernice’s ridiculous nightgowns. “Don’t you have anything with sleeves?” I asked.

“Peignoirs have sleeves,” she said.

I wore peach nylon with beige lace trim, her only piece of opaque lingerie. After walking around the bedroom in her black bikini underpants and running bra to show off her fit body, she put on a monogrammed white silk robe. I told her I liked the prizefighter look: now I knew what glamorous television personalities wore to sleep-over parties.

“You must be feeling better,” she said sourly.

I called Dwight when she was in the bathroom and told him where I was. He asked if we had talked. I told him that Saguna had shown up, but I had sent her packing; that Bernice had gotten down to the truth as best as she was able.