Then She Found Me (26 page)

Jack scolds her with a look.

“No?”

“You know why we got married. We got married for one reason and that was because you were pregnant. And that’s what guys did if they wanted to do the right thing.”

Bernice searches her clipboard for another question. I wonder if she will ultimately cut his treatise on teenage marriage, since it bleaches out any romance from their history. I feel her reaching for a big question to restore her control.

“Tell us about that day,” she says quietly.

“What day?” He cups his hand behind his left ear.

“The day you made the phone call and gave our daughter away.”

“It wasn’t me,” says Jack. “My mother called the priest, and the priest called Catholic Charities, and one thing led to another.”

“Go on, if you can,” says Bernice.

“I was staying with a buddy at Revere Beach over Labor Day, and my mother was taking care of the baby for three, four days—”

Bernice interrupts. “Wait. Let’s go back to that time. You are eighteen years—”

“Nineteen.”

“Your wife is not there.” She nods herself along, does not remind the audience who the wife was, as if that part of the story needn’t be illuminated. “So you’re getting in one more summer fling—a little dancing, a little football on the beach, a little girl-watching? No place for a baby, right?”

“You had already disappeared,” he says.

Bernice continues: “Meanwhile, back in Brighton, Grandma’s changing diapers and getting up in the middle of the night with this grandchild she didn’t ask for. Thinking, I did this for enough years with my own six; who needs this at, what, forty-five years old?”

“Something like that,” says Jack.

“And your sisters say, ‘Why should I sit home and baby-sit when he gets to go out and have a good time?’”

“You were the baby’s mother. You talk as if you did everything right and I was the heavy.”

Bernice folds her hands on her lap as if exercising restraint in the face of such bald insensitivity. Certainly her audience knows her better than to believe him. After a
pointed silence she says, “Do you think that’s fair? You know I was not coping at that period in my life.”

“Oh, excuse me,” says Jack. “I must’ve forgot.”

Bernice glares at him. He makes a face.

I smile, and realize I am rooting for him.

The audience gets its turn. It seems that Jack as irresponsible teenage father doesn’t bother them as much as Bernice’s letting him give her baby away. Women stand up and say, “I was seventeen when I had my first child, and it wasn’t easy, and I would rather have been out dancing, too, but I didn’t … I never could have … How could you …?” They frown and squint into the lights, demanding to get the chronology straight. He
asked
you if it was all right? He had to get your signature to do this? “You
let
him do this? No postpartum-depression arguments. No walk-a-mile-in-her-shoes defenses. The audience hates what Bernice did. Nothing softens them—not Jack saying “None of you knew my mother,” not Bernice saying “She grew up to be smart and happy and successful, didn’t she?”

The house lights go down; it is time for Bernice’s solo act. She turns to Jack and says, “Before we close, I have a question for you.”

He is serious now and steady. He sits up straighter in his upholstered armchair.

Bernice points at the camera and looks directly at me. “If you could say one thing to our daughter, if you thought she was sitting close by, seeing you for the first time, hearing all this”—she gestures to the villains in the audience—“what would you say?”

He finds the right camera and, unwittingly, looks directly at me. His smile is apologetic; I brace myself for some queer, embarrassed words. Instead, he signals me
with a quick tilt of his head toward Bernice: She’s something, huh?

Then he speaks. Everyone listening hears the words, hears him say he has always loved me and has never for one minute forgotten me. His only child.

But it is her show. The camera returns to her face; tears choke her sign-off. Jack disappears from the screen.

T
here is a knock at the door of the greenroom. I think: one of Bernice’s gofers coming to fetch me for the party. I unlock it to find Jack Remuzzi outside.

“Yes?” I say as stiffly as if he were a door-to-door salesman without credentials.

“April?”

I nod.

“I’m your father,” he says.

“I know. I saw you.” I gesture toward the monitor.

He puts out his hand, the good sportsman, and I shake it.

“How was I?” he asks.

“Good. Quite good.”

“Can I come in for a sec?”

I open the door wider and he walks past me. He is shorter than he looked sitting down, maybe five-eight. The makeup gives his face an opaque coppery color. He
has loosened his tie, and I can see where the color ends abruptly at his neck.

“Where’s Bernice?” I ask.

He waves in the direction of the set—doing whatever she does to end the show, he means. That stuff she does. “She told me you were here, right in the building, watching the whole thing. I wanted to come back and meet you first, without those people of hers around.” He steps back. “Let me get a good look at you.”

I stand obediently, holding my chin up.

“You do look like her, but not as much as she claims. You’re prettier than her.”

Good try, I think.

“You don’t mind my saying that, do you?”

“No.”

“It happens to be the truth.”

“Thank you.”

He looks around the greenroom as if its props might suggest topics for conversation. He says, “A Latin teacher, is that right?”

“In Quincy,” I say.

“And you went to Radcliffe?”

I nod. We both smile and fall into silence. I am waiting; Jack is trying hard to say whatever should come next. He laughs nervously. “What’d you think of the show?”

“What did you think?”

“She put me in the hot seat with those questions of hers.”

“Passionate pursuit of the obvious,” I murmur.

Jack smiles tentatively. “Kind of phony questions, you mean?”

“Phony’s a good word.”

“Do people actually like this stuff, listening to what’s running through some strange guy’s mind?”

“Enough,” I say. “Millions.”

“They like sticking their nose into other people’s business?”

“Are you surprised?”

“Sure I’m surprised. I don’t know what women watch at nine o’clock in the morning.”

“You never watched her show in all these years?”

“No,” says Jack quietly.

“Not even when you knew you were going on?”

“What can I say? I didn’t.”

“Because of bad memories?”

“Sure, bad memories. Who needs to be reminded of things?”

“I’m surprised you agreed to do it at all.”

“You think I shouldn’t have?”

“She wanted me on. I refused.”

“She pressured me. I didn’t feel I had a choice.”

“What kind of pressure?”

Jack catches sight of his face in the mirror and ducks to get the full effect. He wipes his cheek with his fingertips and whistles softly. “Gripes,” he says. “I look orange.”

“How did she pressure you?” I ask again.

“She kind of implied that it would be the only way I’d get to see you. Like she had the key, like she had you in her back pocket.”

“That isn’t true at all.”

“I get that feeling now,” says Jack.

“So you didn’t really want to do this?”

“Are you kidding? See Bernice for the first time in thirty-five years on the air? Tell the whole world I gave my baby away?” His voice chokes unexpectedly on the last words. He continues with difficulty: “Get up in front of my whole family? People I work with …”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was using me for lever-age.”

Jack waves away the notion that I should be sorry.

“Don’t,” he says, grimacing, as if the words are causing physical pain.

“I’m not at all like her,” I say.

His face begins to crumble. There is allegiance to him in my voice that surprises both of us:
And if I’m not like her, I must be more like
…

It is more than Jack Remuzzi can bear. He shades his eyes with a shaking hand and turns away.

“A reception for April Epner,” it is being called, and the station is paying. There are deli sandwiches and champagne, potato salad and coleslaw, a watermelon basket filled with melon balls, and a platter of two-inch éclairs. Staff people from “Bernice G!” and strangers from Promotion are the guests.

Jack Remuzzi and I enter together to inexplicable applause. Bernice brightens and sweeps over to us. “Well?” she asks him. “Not bad, huh?”

He is composed, but not up to this. “She’s a lovely young woman,” he says.

Bernice carries a glass of champagne in one hand and an empty paper plate in the other, but encircles my neck with her arms all the same for an approximation of a hug.
I let her do this
, my look says to Jack.

Bernice shifts to stand next to Jack as if posing for a snapshot. She asks what I think.

“What do you mean?”

“Here we are, your parents. All your genes in one room; a complete set.”

Bernice is smiling expectantly. Jack looks mortified.

“You’re embarrassing him,” I say.

Bernice peers at Jack to see if I’m right. “Sorry!” she says. And to me: “He’s still shell-shocked.”

I ask Jack, “Is this new? Is it possible she’s always been like this?”

Bernice loves the question, smiles confidently waiting for his answer.

He looks at me squarely, dolefully. “Always,” he answers.

A gofer delivers two plates with a polite sample of each buffet dish. I accept one; Jack refuses his with a shake of his head. “Go on,” says Bernice. “We thought everyone would be starved.”

“I can’t,” says Jack. He says he wants to talk to her privately, and I step back.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Is there somewhere we can go?”

Bernice leans closer, inviting him to whisper in her ear. Jack glances at me and I nod. I can’t hear the words, but I know the content. He is telling her that he has changed his mind, withdrawing his permission to air the interview.

Bernice’s head jerks upright. “That’s not your decision,” she snaps.

“I think it is,” says Jack.

“You gave your permission.”

“Under duress,” he says, a phrase I have supplied.

Bernice looks at me and I raise my eyebrows innocently: Beats me. I can’t hear a word he’s saying.

There is a moment’s lag where her eyes remain on me while she’s speaking to Jack. “What do you object to, specifically?”

“All of it,” he answers.

She puts her plate and champagne glass down on the buffet table so she can press her fingertips to her temples. “Am I missing something here? Did we or did we not tape a fabulous show?”

“I think I looked like a horse’s ass.”

“I wept!” she cried. “How often do you think I end a show in tears?”

“I don’t care,” Jack says.

Bernice takes a long breath as if employing a relaxation technique. “Look,” she says, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. This is the kind of stuff you win Emmys for. This is the kind of stuff that gets you into syndication.”

“This is the kind of stuff that makes your relatives puke when they see you making a goddamn fool of yourself.”

Bernice’s staff members are glancing our way, and the word spreads: trouble in paradise.

Jack lowers his voice and says, “I’m spoiling April’s party. I’m gonna take off.”

“You don’t have to,” I say.

“Which one is your boss?” he asks Bernice.

“Why?”

“Who do I talk to to go over your head?”

She pokes her breastbone. “I make my own creative decisions.”

“Her producer’s the black woman in the red dress,” I say.

“My, my,” says Bernice. “Aren’t we the helpful daughter?”

“I’ll talk to you soon,” Jack says to me, and touches my shoulder.

Bernice and I resume eating. I tell her it’s a lovely party; so nice of her staff to do this for me.

“Particularly since the taping might be a total loss,” she says.

I remind Bernice that the studio audience was hostile toward her. Who needs that kind of exposure?

“Haven’t you ever heard of editing?”

“But you can’t air the show without his permission, can you?”

“There are ways.”

“Just as there were ways to get him
on
the show?”

Bernice assesses this question and decides it’s a telling one. “I guess I don’t have to inquire as to what you thought of your father.”

“He seems pretty straightforward,” I say.

She laughs a dry laugh. “How diplomatic.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Do you mean ‘pretty straightforward’ as in ‘uncomplicated’? I think I’d agree with you there.”

“It was a compliment.”

Bernice sets her lips primly and says, “I see.”

“What do you see?”

“You connected with him on some level. With very little effort on his part, as far as I can tell. He shows up, gives you a pat on the head, and wins you over, just like that. I strategize for months on how best to approach you and to present myself—”