Then She Found Me (4 page)

“How old was he?”

“Twenty-nine,” said Bernice, “but he looked twenty-two.”

“I can’t believe someone twenty-nine years old, running for public office, would seduce a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer, practically on the spot.”

“You’re very naive. You don’t understand the way it was. Politicians did whatever they felt like doing, especially bachelor politicians.”

“Where did you go for your trysts?” I asked.

“Charlestown. An apartment of someone he trusted.”

“Was he your first?”

“Of course!”

“How long did it last?”

“Weeks, months.” Bernice looked away, then added: “For me, a lifetime.”

I smiled, thinking that for all her drama she was a terrible actress. I asked if they had managed to be together often.

“Whenever we could. His schedule was impossible.”

“Was he good?” I asked in a low voice.

Bernice smiled indulgently. “Terrible, by today’s standards. All business. And his back always hurt.”

“Was he right- or left-handed?”

“Right.”

“Was he circumcised?” I asked.

“If you’re trying to trip me up, you won’t.”

“Why weren’t you angry? Didn’t you want to ruin his career after he abandoned you?”

Bernice closed her eyes and shook her head,
rattled
her head vigorously. One toad-sized clip-on earring flew off her earlobe.

I thought: This person is my mother.

“There’s so much I want to know about you,” she said chummily, her revelation behind her. We were eating our meal, the entire list of eight appetizers. Bernice had ordered for us and told the waiter we must not be disturbed.

I asked what she wanted to know about me.

“Why, for example, would anyone want to teach a dead language in a public high school? Don’t most Radcliffe graduates with your inclinations become college professors in the romance languages?”

I told her I loved Latin. That it was fun. Once you knew the rules, it was so logical.

She leaned closer across the table. “Am I hearing something
real
now, something”—she made a cluster of her fingertips and touched her head and then her chest—“something about April … that she likes rules and logic? Am I hearing something significant about her?”

I helped myself to one steamed dumpling and one pan-fried dumpling. After a moment I said, “I’m not good at that kind of question with someone I don’t know.”

She said quickly, “I understand perfectly. You have a hard time with intimacy. What should we talk about that won’t take me in too close? Your job?”

“I don’t mind—”

“Say something in Latin. I had four years of it at Girls’ Latin and all I remember is ‘
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.’”

I said, with feeling,
“Semper ego auditor tantum?”

“Much call for Latin teachers?” she asked, unmoved.

I told her, no matter. It was mandated in our curriculum. And I was tenured.
Tenere:
to hold.

“I hated it,” said Bernice proudly. “Who wants to learn a dead language when there’s Spanish and French and Russian and Japanese around? With a billion people on earth speaking Mandarin Chinese?”

“There’d be no French and Spanish without Latin,” I answered. “And do you remember how beautiful Latin poetry is? Catullus? ‘Let us live and love, nor give a damn what sour old men say. The sun that sets may rise again, but when our light has sunk into the earth it is gone forever.’ You find that dead?”

Bernice sat back against her chair, blotted her mouth, and checked the napkin for signs of color. She was disappointed. I hadn’t done enough.

“I know it’s not a glamorous job,” I offered, “but it’s very satisfying to teach something no one cares about.”

She looked at my clothes: a long-sleeved cotton jersey,
which I owned in black, purple, celery, and white, my blue drop-waist Indian cotton jumper. Tonight, for dress-up, I had added a Guatemalan shawl.

“Your look,” she said. “What would you call it? Collegiate? Primitive?”

“Not to your taste?”

She smiled diplomatically. “We have all the time in the world,” she said.

A
s far as I was concerned, my real parents were Trade and Julius Epner of Providence, Rhode Island, who had adopted me in 1952 and named me April. I was their only child for seven years until a baby brother temporarily diluted the power of my office. I forgave them for that act of disloyalty; I forgave them for everything because they died two years apart—my mother just last year—too young and before I was prepared. Widowhood at sixty-four made Trude a teller of pretty autobiographical tales, uncontradicted by Julius’s dour editing. Her stories were eulogies to him: their meeting by chance, their wedding, their finding a little daughter more perfect than their own flesh and blood could have fashioned, considering. Trude started talking right after my father’s funeral, the first night we sat
shiva
. The upstairs neighbors came the first night, and a contingent of my grown childhood friends arrived and left in a clump the second. Then the rabbi, the
cantor, the cantor’s wife, the widow of the old rabbi, one fellow retiree from the shoe store my father had managed, one temple elder none of us knew. Trude didn’t comment on the poor attendance, but shortened our memorial week to three nights.

Afterward, we still went into the living room after the dishes were done, wore our mourning clothes, put out the leftover pastries. Trude talked, and my brother and I let her, circled by the empty folding chairs the funeral director didn’t take away for four more days.

They had met on a train from Providence to Boston. Trude was headed to Filene’s Basement and Julius to Fen way Park. Instead, they spent the afternoon together in the Public Garden, whispering in the German they hadn’t spoken aloud for the months they’d been lodgers in the States. Neither asked the questions Americans loved so much—how mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters had been killed and how they, miraculously, had survived; instead they exchanged the facts. She was twenty-five, Viennese; he, twenty-nine, from Munich. Their fathers had both been furriers. He had a brother in Palestine, and she had no one she knew of. Neither had been religious or married. Belsen and Auschwitz.

At dinnertime Trude called Providence and said she’d be late. They had supper at Woolworth’s, speaking English at the counter, and toasted each other with glasses of bright green punch. It was for both the first meal away from their American sponsors, who heaped unsolicited second helpings of dull kosher food on to their refugee plates. Both ordered BLTs.

They took a late train back to Providence after cavorting to South Station like furloughed G.I.’s in a Hollywood musical. Slumping cozily against each other in the last car, Trude and Julius kissed.

Julius knew that night he’d marry Trude; he hoped he’d have the willpower to keep from proposing on the spot. When the train pulled into Providence, Trude gave him her phone number and took his for insurance. They embraced with the intensity and joy of lovers reunited.

Trude told the Solomons about Julius at breakfast. Adele wrinkled her brow with the effort of placing these people, the Wallachs. She had not tried to contact other families who had taken in displaced persons; Trude’s Americanization, she had thought, would not be served by inducing friendships with hollow-eyed shells of men unsuited to her joie de vivre.

But Julius Epner sounded promising.

“Tell me,” Adele prompted. Trude smiled sleepily and cupped both hands around her coffee cup.

“He’s very lovely,” she said. “Big, big blue eyes that stick out a little. Very kind eyes. High forehead with this … this hair!” Trude laughed and outlined a wiry bush above her own head.

Adele and Sy Solomon exchanged prayerful looks. “Will he be calling you?” Adele asked.

Trude answered yes as if any other possibility were too ridiculous to consider.

Trude said she might never be able to give him a baby. “In the camp I never menstruated. None of us did. I picture my insides shrunk away. Now sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.” Julius instantly adopted Trude’s dilemma as his own. If she couldn’t have children—so be it. Perhaps it was not realistic, asking their bodies to reproduce and bring forth healthy children. It would be a miracle, actually, for Trude’s thin little body and tender bones to bear his child. And it was selfish of him to want children at the expense of her health. They had each other to love, and
wasn’t that already more than he expected from such a life?

“The English doctors said you were all right?” he would ask from time to time. “They looked at you and said you were all right?”

This is a wonderful man, thought Trude. A mature man I can discuss menstruation with. I was a girl before the war; I dated boys. We talked about music and films and about our girlfriends and boyfriends.

“I was a silly girl,” she often said to Julius. “I cared about two or three things: that I was taken out on dates by handsome boys, that I had pretty clothes to wear, and that I was at least as pretty as my sisters.”

“You were a young girl. That’s what young girls think about.”

“I’m different now,” she’d say.

“Meaning I’m not a handsome boy?”

She’d wag her head back and forth as if considering the question, then reassure him playfully about being so very handsome indeed. But to herself she’d think: Look what it took to make me no longer vain and spoiled.

She wanted to believe that if she were still in Vienna, if the war had never happened, she’d have grown up, stopped worrying about whether her many shoes matched her many outfits, and would have loved a slightly gawky man like Julius Epner.

Trude worked behind the counter at the Solomons’ bakery on Prairie Avenue. They eased her into a full-time schedule as her stamina increased. Customers loved Trude, or the very idea of Trude, and her brave allusions to Viennese confections.

Old men and women pushed tips into her hand, pleading when she refused, “Please, for your relatives, then. Perhaps someone who needs it.” “Such a salesgirl!” they’d
say loud enough for the bosses to hear. “I bought out the store!” Adele Solomon, sales up, put an empty baking powder tin, labeled “Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,” next to the cash register to assuage those bent on charity. Trude felt the clang of every coin.

Sometimes a group of children would come in and buy a single cookie. Trude knew from the way they pushed up to the counter and stared that they had heard about the blue numbers and had come to see the refugee. And so many customers noticed the tiny peppercorn of a diamond Julius had given her when they became engaged that Trude saw how Americans needed her in an odd way; how they watched her, would always watch her, to analyze her nimble survivor’s fingers for clues about her life.

At their wedding, guests seemed bewildered by the music and the dancing. The rabbi of the Providence synagogue spoke obliquely of their past and reverently about their children’s children. Just before Julius, grinning, stomped on the symbolic wineglass, guests rose to say the prayer for the dead.

The bride and groom kissed exuberantly at the end of the ceremony. They giggled and held hands, the only two present who didn’t adopt a mood of soulful celebration, which everyone including the bandleader seemed to think fit the occasion. It was as if the leading roles had been miscast: Julius Epner and Trude Weiss were supposed to be married in a manner befitting a solemn love born of tragedy, yet there they were, two kids in love, dancing as if they hoped the sighing guests would vaporize and a Murphy bed would drop from the function-room walls.

Friends gave them presents instead of cash as if to say, Our silver trays and appliances will remind you that we Jews in America can have possessions without fear of losing them to greedy neighbors when we flee our homes
and are next sent to death camps. Trude wrote notes in her meticulous European hand thanking guests for their thoughtful selections. Then she and Julius returned as many as could be traced to area stores and opened a savings account that would pay for the birth of a baby.

Their apartment was a barely renovated attic with a clothesline bisecting the one long room. They ate on a maple drop-leaf table, slightly warped from years on the Wallachs’ porch. Trude washed dishes in the small bathroom basin; Julius dried each plate and fork and cup and walked it to the unpainted shelves. They considered the worn room-size Persian rug ugly and old-fashioned, though years later Trude would wish they hadn’t given it away. Their bed was large and new with an Old World eiderdown; the only wall it fit against was designated as kitchen so that the big bed, freestanding, appeared to be the centerpiece of newly married life. They didn’t entertain or dance to Julius’s bachelor radio because they didn’t want to disturb their landlord downstairs. They drank strong coffee, washed dishes, took walks, alternated Friday suppers at the Solomons’ and Wallachs’. Every month they waited for Trude’s period to fail to arrive.

Just after their first anniversary, they saw a doctor, who said to relax. Trude asked scornfully how her eggs and Julius’s seed knew whether she was relaxed when they had relations.