Then She Found Me (21 page)

I waited for Bernice’s explanation.

“Do I have your permission?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

Bernice rearranged her features and said with a regal serenity, “April is my daughter.”

Tracy clearly did not see what the fuss was about. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you had a daughter. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Do you have more kids?”

Bernice said no, just this one daughter.

“Look,” said Tracy. “There’s Alan Dershowitz.”

Bernice didn’t bother to look.
She
was more interesting than Alan Dershowitz any day. Her mother-daughter story was a showstopper. What had gone wrong? She looked perplexed.

“Go say hello,” I said to Tracy. “I’m sure he’ll know who you are.”

“Do you think that’s his wife?”

“Go.”

Tracy waved and walked away.

I asked Bernice if anything was wrong.

She shook her head and smiled a martyred smile.

“You’re not used to people taking the news so casually?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said, ‘April’s my daughter!’ and Tracy yawned and said, ‘Oh, look, there’s Alan Dershowitz.’”

“She’s a fluff-head. I don’t set much store by what Tracy Corcoran says or doesn’t say.”

“Good.” A waitress walked by with a tray of canapés. I took a tiny red potato stuffed with caviar. I could tell the waitress recognized Bernice by the way she lingered a few seconds after the transaction was completed.

“Where’s the goddamn champagne?” Bernice asked me.

I pointed. Cash bar.

“C’mon,” she said unhappily. There were dozens of people in line for a drink. Bernice stared straight ahead, in no mood to work the crowd. I stood next to her, our shoulders touching at identical heights.

“I started to tell you that I really appreciate your decision about Freddie.”

She turned her face and blinked. “So you’ve decided to believe me?”

“I believed you,” I lied.

“You don’t trust me.”

“That’s changing,” I said.

“You’re still holding back,” she said.

“That’s just me,” I said.

“That’s your
parents
and the job they did with you.”

“They’re Freddie’s parents, too. And obviously you don’t find him so inscrutable.”

Bernice yelped, “Inscrutable! I love it! Did you hear what you said?” The people around us watched and listened. Bernice laughed and leaned on me as if I had said
something unbearably amusing. “He was inscrutable all right!” She looked around, pretending to see her audience for the first time. She clapped her mouth shut, hooked her arm around mine, and played the naughty celebrity buttoning her own lip.

I said nothing as we inched toward the glasses of champagne, Bernice basking in her own incorrigibility. Later, in front of a grouping of western Massachusetts realists, I said, “It embarrasses me when you make a scene.”

She didn’t answer but studied the paintings with uncharacteristic attention. She moved along the wall until there were no more and said suddenly, “How’s Dwight?”

“Fine.”

“Things are still going well?”

“Yes.”

“You never made the big announcement, but I assume you’ve been sleeping with each other for some time and that’s going well?”

“If I say yes, do I have to expound on it?”

“Do you know why I’m asking?”

“You always ask.”

“But do you see how this relates to me?”

“Not exactly.”

“Your loving him. It’s good for me.”

“Oh?”

“It shows me what you’re capable of. It gives me hope.”

“Hope about what?”

She touched her temple with two fingers. “I’m an observer. I see what’s happening to us and you do, too.”

“What?” I asked.

“Love,” she said. “It’s softening you. Love—and its physical components of course—expand one’s capacity for loving in general. I’m reaping the benefits. Dwight is good for you, for all of us! I see that now, and I’m not jealous.”

“He’s very fond of you.”

She smiled maternally, then moved the knot of my shawl to a more fashionable perch on my shoulders.

And he shouldn’t be jealous of me, either, she said. Even though she borrowed me for these nights out. Even though she was my only living blood relative. Even though we were best friends.

D
wight and I were asleep at my place when the phone rang and startled us awake. We flailed in the dark, both reaching in odd directions for the sound. I answered.

“April?” said a woman’s voice.

“Yes?” Night panic made my heart pound. It was 2:12 on my digital clock radio.

“I know what you’re up to,” said the voice.

I slammed down the phone. Dwight moved his legs over mine. The phone rang again. Sitting up now, blinking myopically, Dwight said, “Don’t answer it.” After a few rings I did. What if I had misunderstood the first time? What if this was the hospital calling about his parents?

“Who is it?” I said as I answered.

“Bernice Graves’s real daughter,” came the response, “so fuck off.”

“Excuse me?” I said. I shrugged at Dwight who was saying, “Hang up the phone. Hang
up
the phone.”

“Gabrielle Kerouac,” said the caller, “Bernice Graves’s daughter.”

“Is it obscene?” Dwight asked. “Is it?”

“What do you want?”

“Leave her alone. Just get the fuck away from her,” said the voice.

Who, though? Who was doing this; who wanted to fight me for Bernice?

“Don’t you dare call here again,” I said and hung up.

Dwight said I damn well could call Bernice at 2:15
A.M.
over something this important. Maybe this was a dangerous person.

“What if it’s true?” I asked. “What if it’s all been a mistake?” Was it possible—had Bernice enlisted the real daughter to call me and say there had been an embarrassing error; sorry for the trouble … she’d send two complimentary tickets to her show?

“What’s her number?” He pushed the buttons and handed me the telephone. She answered after three rings in her hoarse smoker’s rasp.

“Bernice. It’s me.”

“You’re up late,” she said.

“I just got a threatening phone call.” There was a rustle as if she were switching ears and settling in. “From a Gabrielle—I think she said Kerouac.”

“Oh, fuck,” Bernice muttered.

“She said she was your real daughter.”

“Let me get a cigarette,” said Bernice.

She was gone for longer than it would have taken to light one from her night-table pack. I yelled her name into the receiver.

“All
right
,” she called back. She returned. I heard the
click of her lighter and the sound of her inhaling and exhaling theatrically.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.

“I’m not happy about this,” she said.

“Just tell me.”

More rustling and inhaling. “She’s a liar,” said Bernice finally.

“Who is she?”

“A nut case.”

“How does she know about me and you?”

Another silence.

What an outrage: Bernice Graves of “Bernice G!”—the woman who made her living stepping on the heels of other people’s sentences—at a loss for words.

“Bernice?”

“She found me after that show last summer where I blurted out that I’d had an illegitimate daughter. She came to the station and wouldn’t leave until I had seen her. She thought she was the one.”

“She said her name was Gabrielle.”

“Her name is
not
Gabrielle. It’s Sandra Schneider. She calls herself Gabrielle now because she’s convinced that she’s the one.”

“Could she be?”

“No! She is not my daughter. It’s not even close. Her birth date is wrong. Nothing about her is right. I talked to her for a while and then Security had to escort her off the grounds. Of course she’s not taking no for an answer.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“To what end? Naturally there would have been some feedback. I was bound to hear from some pretenders; a million-five people watch the show. Believe me. You are my daughter. This Saguna is not.”

“Saguna?”

“That’s the name she gave herself. It means something in some spiritual language. She hates Sandra.”

“Where did she get Kerouac?”

Bernice didn’t answer.

I asked again.

“She’s crazy! I don’t know where she gets things.”

“She got the Gabrielle part right,” I said.

“I told you I talked to her. My baby’s name slipped out. I always referred to you as Gabrielle. She jumped on it like it was her long-lost identity.”

I looked at Dwight, who was following every syllable. I said evenly, “Did you tell this person that your baby’s father was Jack Kerouac?”

“Probably! I was trying to get rid of her. I was saying the first thing that came into my head.”

I twirled my finger next to my temple as a bulletin for Dwight: cuckoo. “Why do you have to lie about that all the time?” I asked her.

“I wouldn’t dream of doing it again, I assure you,” she said icily.

“It makes me wonder what else you’re lying about—Jack Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Jack Flynn …”

“I was amusing myself! I didn’t walk around announcing publicly that I had had an affair with a famous man, now dead. I don’t know what made me tell you that story, except self-preservation. It wasn’t a case of lying all over again after facing the truth with you. She came along first.”

I said I didn’t understand. Self-preservation?

“You know,” she said. “What I needed to say at that very moment. I trust my instincts. Some call it lying. I see it as a superior intelligence programming your mouth. Things come out which might not make sense at face value, but which your brain directs you to say. ‘Jack Kerouac’ was one of those things. I didn’t fight it.”

“That’s juvenile,” I said. “A lie is a lie.”

“This Kerouac thing—that was me being outrageous. I didn’t have to give this perfect stranger the time of day. ‘Kerouac’ came out. I had just seen some clips about some commemorative park they were dedicating in Lowell. It just came out. So naturally, when I talked to you, the same name was on the tip of my tongue.”

Dwight was gesturing: wrap it up; this isn’t getting anywhere. I nodded and said to Bernice, “I’m too tired to make sense of this tonight.”

“Let’s just forget she ever called,” Bernice said.

“She has my number. She’s bound to call again.”

“And you’ll be prepared! Tell her I’ve hired a lawyer and we’re going after her for harassment. Take your phone off the hook tonight.” She sounded confident again, hung up before I said anything more.

Dwight fell back to sleep. I couldn’t clear my mind of this three-named pretender. I sneaked out of bed so Dwight could uncurl in his sleep to the diagonal length of the mattress, sat at the kitchen table with a cup of reheated coffee. Bernice was lying to me; she knew more about this Sandra than she could have gleaned from a quick lobby interview. Maybe Sandra was the real child, but she wasn’t right for Bernice’s purposes. Maybe I was somebody else’s baby. Maybe she liked me best after shopping around among newspaper clippings and contestants in her television sweepstakes: adopted baby girls, born April 1952. You could be my daughter! Send pix and vitae!

Win a birth mother for life.

Dear Sonia,

I would very much appreciate your confidence in the matter I’m about to raise. I really need to talk to someone who knows Bernice well and has known her for some time. If you think you could meet with me and at the same time not violate your loyalty to her, please call me. I don’t mean to sound mysterious at all. I just need to ask some questions about her life.

Yours sincerely,

April Epner

Sonia called me the afternoon she received the note. “Darling,” she said, “don’t forget I brought you two together. The least I can do is give you a shoulder to cry on.”

“I need to ask you some questions. That’s all, really.”

“Anything,” said Sonia.

I said there was something I had to ask her first: Would she feel it was her duty to report back to Bernice?

“Absolutely not. I consider your confidence sancrosanct. You’re the daughter of my oldest and dearest friend.”