Then She Found Me (10 page)

“Tall—six feet five or so. Gangly.”

“What’s his mouth like?” she asked.

Dwight’s mouth? “A regular mouth. Teeth. A big face; bony.”

“What color eyes?”

“Why?” I asked.

“What color?”

“Bluish, I think. Or hazel. And glasses.”

“Good-looking?”

“God, no. Just the opposite.”

Bernice paused in her questioning. After a few moments she said, “So what you’re saying is, he’s not conventionally good-looking, but he has his attractive qualities.”

“Not at all,” I said. “He’s the librarian—the one Anne-Marie joked about when I asked if she’d run off and married anyone.”

“Not good-looking, then?”

“He’s just a friend. And when you see him in person—”

“I’ve never been attracted to conventionally handsome men, either. I’ve always been drawn to personalities first. Their looks are secondary.”

She was lying, of course, but she believed it. If I had challenged her, she would have argued her thesis until I was sold. At that moment, Bernice was rewriting her sexual history, inventing attractions to homely men of character.

“Is he outright ugly?” she asked.

“Some people might find him ugly.”

“Some people are jerks,” she said. “It’s what’s inside that counts.”

Thank you, Mother, I wanted to say; thank you for that kindergarten lesson in social relations.

“What do the other women at school think of this Dwight?”

“I’ve never discussed him with anyone at school. There hasn’t been any reason to discuss him with anyone. But I think, in general, he’s seen as geekish.”

“Why?” she asked indignantly. “Are they all married to male models?”

“No.”

“Would they be jealous if you became involved with him?”

I laughed. “I can safely say no one would be jealous.”

“Will I like him?” she asked.

I thought, Actually, no; politically, having given lip service to a beauty’s-only-skin-deep policy, she’d pretend to. I said, “He’s a fine person.”

“Of course he is,” she said warmly. “I can’t wait.”

I arrived before Dwight. Bernice wore all black, her pageboy covered by a turban of black jersey. People glanced at her, said something to their companions, and glanced back discreetly. Her escort was gray-haired, pink-faced, strongly perfumed. He was introduced as Ted Dichter, the man in her life. “Where’s yours?” she asked.

“Dwight’s meeting us.” I asked how Ted and Bernice knew each other.

“Through real estate,” said Ted.

“Buying or selling?” I asked. He laughed appreciatively as if I had exhibited a precociousness for real-estate jargon.

“Both,” said Bernice.

“I was a guest on the show,” said Ted.

“It hasn’t aired yet. You have to see it: Boston’s most eligible bachelors over fifty-five. We had a lawyer, a gynecologist,
a politician, a developer.” She prompted him, “Who else was there?”

“A professor, the colored guy.”

“That’s right. Is that five? Isn’t that a great premise?”

“Great,” I said.

Ted Dichter looked at Bernice with a coy smile. “And when it was over, she touched my hand and said, ‘Whoever the woman in your life is, she’s very lucky.’ As it turned out, there wasn’t a woman in my life, so I took the liberty of asking your mother to have dinner with me.”

“Why, just like Marlo and Phil!” I said to Bernice.

Bernice touched his arm to signal time out. Would he check on our reservation in the dining room? As soon as he walked away she said, “I think I’m going to marry him. He keeps asking me.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Almost a month.”

“Isn’t that a little soon?”

“He’s sixty-one, and at that age no one wants a long courtship.” She looked up. Her features were being assembled into a joyless smile of salutation. “Dwight?” she said.

He was there suddenly, in a gray banker’s suit and yellow bow tie, expressionless and still, as if reporting for duty. I stood up. “Bernice,” I said, “this is Dwight Willamee.”

She let her hand move up slowly from her thigh to shake his. “I’m so pleased,” she said.

“I never miss your show,” said Dwight with the faintest of smiles.

“You’re lying,” said Bernice. “You have to be. I know you’re at work at nine. You’re just flattering me, but I love it.”

“Mr. Willamee never lies,” I said. Bernice looked at me
knowingly as if I had slipped and called him by a private pet name.

“Hi, April,” said Dwight.

“You look nice,” I said.

“There’s Ted!” said Bernice. We looked up. He was motioning for us from the doorway.

As soon as we were seated and I had introduced the men, Ted said, “Did your mother tell you I’m trying to get her to say yes to marrying me?”

Bernice smiled prettily and studied the menu.

“Just this minute,” I said.

“How does that sit with you?”

“Well, I’ve only known you—”

“In theory, I mean. Any objections to her getting married?”

“Not at
all
,” I said.

“What about you, son?” asked Ted.

Dwight looked at me, all innocence, and said, “None whatsoever.”

Ted took Bernice’s hand in one of his and mine in the other. “I know it’s been just the two of you for such a long time, it might be hard for you to share her.”

I looked at her. No lies ever bothered her. With deliberateness I said, “Bernice and I have only known each other since September.”

Ted continued to smile as if he hadn’t heard me.

“I have no say in her decisions,” I said, taking my hand back.

“Your mother seems to think you do.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re a pretty girl.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re even prettier when you smile.” He heh-heh’d in Dwight’s direction. Dwight heh-heh’d back, deadpan.

“I told him you were a sourpuss,” Bernice explained.

“You’re the image of her,” said Ted.

“Around the eyes, maybe,” I said.

“So what do you think? Could you stand having a stepfather around the house?”

I looked quickly at Bernice, who returned a maternal stare that said, Speak when spoken to, April.

“You know I have my own apartment in Quincy?”

Ted smiled determinedly at Bernice: I’m doing my best; let me try again.

“Bernice told you the whole story, right?”

Ted said very solemnly, “Yes, she did, April.”

“So you know that her getting married wouldn’t change much, for me?”

“I know that’s how you see it.”

I looked at her quizzically: I’m trying to humor him, but you’re making this difficult. Help me out. I don’t want to say the wrong thing.

“She can be maddening,” Bernice said to Ted.

“I’m a little confused,” I said.

“I did tell him about our history,” said Bernice.

“I’d like to know what she told you,” I said.

Ted put down the roll he was breaking, and dusted his fingers on his napkin. I waited. “Bernice said, ‘April is angry over certain things in her childhood. She’s rebelling against me.’ She said you weren’t acknowledging her as your mother.” He glanced at Bernice, who looked as pleased as ever.

I saw the problem. Bernice had prepared him with a nicely ambiguous psychological profile of me, leaving out the salient details about my birth and adoption. Ted had assumed—and why not?—that my rebelliousness took the form of claiming some dead couple, imaginary or idealized, as my real parents. And now Ted, who had probably
read a book on step-parenting in preparation for tonight, was trying to make things right. I sighed as if caught in the act of abusing my long-suffering mother. O-kay. You’ve got me. She’s right. I’m a terrible person. I smiled a weak smile, which Ted took for an apology.

“Let’s change the subject!” Bernice said brightly.

Dwight coughed into his fist and raised his eyebrows at me.

“Let’s have champagne!” said Ted. He telegraphed his order to a waiter without actually speaking and without asking the price. He was happy now; he wanted to hear about me, about school, about his future stepdaughter.

“I teach Latin in Quincy. I’ve been there fourteen years.”

“Your mother’s very proud of that fact. I used to think it was only Catholic priests who knew Latin.”

I said, no, there were a few of us everywhere.

“Well, I think it’s just great to have a specialty that’s not a dime a dozen,” said Ted. He smiled broadly. We all did.

“What about you, Dwight?” Bernice said.

Dwight pushed his glasses up with his index finger. “I’m the librarian at April’s school,” he said.

“That’s fascinating,” she said.

Dwight laughed.

“It’s not?”

“Most people don’t have that reaction. Most don’t know what to say after I’ve said, ‘I’m a librarian.’”

“Most people are jerks,” said Bernice. “I’ve always greatly admired librarians. I think they’re unsung heroes, and I’ve never met one who wasn’t keenly intelligent.”

“Thank you,” said Dwight.

“Maybe you could do a show on librarians,” I said. “They could talk about their jobs, and about their filing systems, and since they’re all keenly intelligent, it should be fascinating.”

Bernice smiled sourly. She touched Dwight’s hand to signal they should ignore me, back up their conversation to the point before I interrupted.

“What do your parents do?” she asked.

“They’re retired.”

“And before that?” she asked lightly.

“My father worked for the city of Newton in the Department of Public Works and my mother worked in the library.”

“The library! So this is a family legacy?”

“She wasn’t a librarian. She just worked at the circulation desk.”

“But she passed on to you a love of books?”

Dwight looked at me; I could see he wanted to smile.

“And a keen intelligence,” I added.

“Where’d you go to college?” she asked.

“Harvard?” he said, and checked with me. I knew that inflection. It was the way I said, “Radcliffe?”—quietly. A small liberal arts college in Cambridge you might have heard of… ?

“You
did?”
I asked.

“April went to Radcliffe,” Bernice confided across the table to Ted.

“What year?” I asked.

“Seventy-one.”

“Seventy-four,” I said.

“You’re just finding this out?” asked Bernice.

“Which house?” I asked him.

“Adams.”

“Lowell.”

“How come you’re just finding this out now?” Bernice asked. “Hasn’t it come up in conversation before at school?”

“We talk about other things,” I said.

“I guess you do,” Bernice said unhappily.

“So how’d a Harvard man end up as a librarian?” asked Ted.

“Low lottery number.”

Ted squinted. “I don’t get it.”

“I would have been drafted without a deferment, so I went to graduate school to get my M.L.S.”

“But you must like it if you’re still a librarian,” said Bernice.

He shook his head. “Death by tenure.”

Bernice, nodding energetically, said, “But it’s hard to leave a place when you’ve been there a long time and you’ve made a lot of good friends?”

“No,” said Dwight. “I don’t have any friends there.”

She looked back and forth between us, waiting for one of us to crack the code. “Is that true?” she asked.

“I don’t mind,” said Dwight.

“Except April. Is what you’re saying?”

Dwight looked at me kindly, granting me license to paint more friendship onto the canvas than actually existed. Bernice would have her easy answer and we could move on. “Of course, except for me,” I said.

Bernice beamed. How nice it was to have a daughter with the right values, a daughter who befriended someone the other kids wouldn’t play with. I let her think that, and I let her boyfriend preen like the lucky family man he felt he was becoming tonight. I wanted to pass the test, if only because I wanted him to say later, “She may seem difficult to you, hon, but I find her delightful.”

I ate enthusiastically, the way a well-adjusted stepdaughter would; I shared a rack of lamb with Bernice and a Caesar salad with Ted. Dwight ordered a modest breast of chicken, as if making no assumptions about being anybody’s paid guest.

After dessert, after the flaming crepe for two, over
coffee, Ted sent a folded five-dollar bill to the pianist. Instantly, the music changed to “Blue Moon.” Across from each other, Bernice and Ted exchanged long looks. They clasped hands through the flowers, their arms drawing a line across the table, Dwight on one side, me on the other, wondering where to put our large free hands.

T
he phone woke me just after six the next morning. Something’s happened to Freddie, I thought, the only one I have left.

It was Bernice. What had I thought of Ted and did I like his looks?

Still disoriented I said, “Yes. I did. Yes. I think so.”

“Are you all right? You sound like you’re out of it.”

“I got nervous when I heard the phone ring at this hour.”

“Sorry. I needed to ask if you thought I should marry him.”

Even half asleep, I didn’t hesitate. Ted approved of Bernice, of her drama and her affectations—her
mishegas
, my parents would have said—even of her show. He actually loved her; I could see that over dinner. I thought Ted was someone with whom I could enter into a satisfying conspiracy:
take her and I’ll be nice forever. I’ll be her long-lost daughter and her maid of honor. Move to another city;
develop
another city—I’ll write faithfully. Get her angry and I’ll take your side. I will be so happy for you and so helpful that you will keep a picture of me in the family constellation on your desk and say proudly, “My stepdaughter, April.”