Then She Found Me (7 page)

If I said Trude and Julius were a trial as parents, Bernice would make me her informer, brainwash me, turn me against them, plant her flag in my captured head.

Bernice took a cigarette from her mother’s pack on the kitchen table. She lit it by leaning into a burner on the stove.

Her mother asked me, “Are you married?”

“No.”

“You go to business?”

“I’m a teacher,” I said.

“So they sent her to college,” Dora said to Bernice.

“Everyone sends their kids to college,” said Bernice.

“Maybe if she had an unhappy childhood or they weren’t good people …” Bernice’s mother shrugged.

“What are you shrugging?” Bernice demanded, mimicking and exaggerating the shrug. “What? That I should walk away from her and send her back where she came from?”

“She thinks the other one, the refugee, was her mother,” said the old woman quietly.

“I’m not looking to mother her. I’m only seventeen years older than she is. I thought we could salvage some kind of relationship. But there’s obviously too much hostility there. I am what I am, and she doesn’t like it.”

Dora Graverman said to me, “Look. She did what girls did in those days when they got into trouble. They went away and had their babies and came home when they were skinny again. It wasn’t anything personal. Jewish girls didn’t have babies at seventeen and keep them.”

“I didn’t say she should have.”

“Ma! She’s saying just the opposite—she’s saying, ‘Go fuck yourself, Bernice. I don’t want you and I don’t need you.’ She’s
glad
I wasn’t her mother.”

Dora turned to me for confirmation. “So what do you want with her?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You came here. You met me.”

“She’s got no grandparents,” said Bernice. “They were all wiped out.”

“Gotteniu,”
murmured Mrs. Graverman.

“She never knew them,” Bernice said flatly.

“You seem to be a very nice young lady.”

“Of course she is.”

“And you seem intelligent.”

“She went to Radcliffe,” said Bernice. “And she teaches classical languages.”

“A boyfriend?” asked my new grandmother.

I told her no.

A
nne-Marie, the school secretary, was twenty-five and had a mouth. She wore leotard-like clothes year-round, and earrings that looked like Calder mobiles. Senior boys with high self-esteem asked her out.

She was the one who screened Bernice’s phone calls to me, ruling that nine out of ten were not urgent medical or psychic emergencies. Bernice insisted it was ridiculous that I couldn’t be pulled from my classroom on demand or, preferably, reached directly with a twentieth-century Centrex system, which the rest of the world had managed to install thirty years before. She also wanted to know, as I answered one of these calls in the main office, who this battle-ax was who screened my personal calls.

“Anne-Marie.”

“What is she?” Bernice asked.

I hesitated, then said, “She’s just doing her job.”

“Which is what?”

“Secretary,” I said.

Bernice thought over this affront. “Is this secretary a friend of yours?”

I said, “I can’t really talk here.”

“I get it. She’s right there. What you’re trying to say is, this woman is a problem, but she’s been there for a hundred years and the union won’t let you get rid of her.”

I laughed and said, “Anne-Mane is the sex symbol of Quincy High School. Ask anyone.”

I was standing by Anne-Mane’s desk. She smirked and said, “Yuh, right.”

“Sex symbol?” asked Bernice. “Is that code for ‘she fucks the principal’?”

“Do you want me to ask?”

“No. Is she married?”

I asked Anne-Marie, “Have you married since the last time we talked?”

“Yuh, right. I married Dwight Willamee.”

I laughed.

“Who?” Bernice asked.

“It was a joke,” I said.

“Do I know this person?”

“Our librarian,” I said. Anne-Marie poked the bridge of her nose, pushing up imaginary glasses. Repeatedly. A tic of Mr. Willamee’s. I laughed again.

“It’s rude to exclude a person from the conversation,” Bernice complained. “Rude and annoying.”

“Oh, we’re rude, all right,” I said.

“Who are you talking to?” asked Anne-Marie.

Bernice, I mouthed.

“Tell her to call you at home, please.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked Bernice.

“Does she know who I am?”

“Do you know who this is?” I repeated to Anne-Marie.

“Bernice Graves. No one else calls you here.”

I said to Bernice, “She’s most contrite. She didn’t know who she was talking to.”

Unhappily, Bernice asked, “No one else calls you there? Ever?”

“I’ve gotta go. I’ve got fifteen minutes to eat.”

“You’re a slave,” she said and hung up.

I gave the receiver back to Anne-Marie, who checked first to see if any students were in the office. It was empty. She gave the phone the finger.

I ended up eating my sandwich standing up in the office, telling Anne-Marie why Bernice was calling me every day.

“Did she tell you who the father was?”

I said evenly, “John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Anne-Marie didn’t consider it for more than a second; she whistled. “Seriously demented.”

“That’s her story.”

“He’s big with the crazies, you know—JFK, Christ, and the CIA. My aunt works at Bridgewater State, and those are the big three there.”

“She doesn’t believe it. It’s an act she worked up to impress me.”

“Does she think you bought it?”

I said no, she couldn’t. She’d have to think I was a moron to believe that. I certainly didn’t
act
like I believed her; at least I didn’t think I acted like I believed her….

“She thinks you bought it! She thinks you’re looking at yourself in the mirror this minute and saying,
‘That’s
where I got such white teeth.’”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “She knows I know.”

Anne-Marie shrugged. She liked to use her dancer’s shoulders. “Go look it up. Maybe it could be true.”

“You can’t look this kind of thing up. You think there’s a footnote in a history book that says, ‘Conceived illegitimate child, nineteen fifty-one.
See
Epner, April’?”

“How do I know?” said Anne-Marie. She stabbed at the bridge of her nose again, repeatedly, pantomime for “Go see the librarian.”

I said okay.

I had seventh period free. There were no JFK biographies on the shelf—it seemed they were all displayed in a glass case outside the principal’s office to commemorate Citizenship Day—so I waved to Mr. Willamee for help. He came out from behind the circulation desk, extremely tall and thin with long feet in tan suede bucks and a sad skeleton’s face. Elbows that stayed close to his body when he walked left an unfortunately effeminate impression. Someone should do something about that, I thought; there wasn’t a wise guy in school who could resist imitating Dwight Willamee when his back was turned.

He asked what I was researching about Kennedy, as if it were a delicate but necessary question.

“The dates he was a congressman—when he first ran, actually.”

Mr. Willamee brought me the J-K volume of the
World Book
and said, “It’s all here. Everything you need to know.” I thanked him and sat down at a library table to study the photographs. Could the genes of Bernice Graverman and Jack Kennedy have produced a child who looked like me? Could I be half sister to Caroline and John Junior? Cousin to those Joes and Kathleens and Patricks?

Mr. Willamee approached the table with another book. “Would you be interested in
Profiles in Courage?”

“I think I have what I need. Thanks.”

Mr. Willamee looked disappointed to be of no further bibliotechnic help. The library was deserted. I wanted to say something reassuring—that I had obtained exactly, but
exactly,
the right information in no time at all…. Silly for me to ask for a biography when I should have known
to go straight to the encyclopedia. Mr. Willamee said it was his job to know where to look things up; his first love was research, after all.

I felt uneasy accepting his help, using his time. I shouldn’t have let Anne-Marie make fun of him in the middle of the office. He could have been outside the door on his way to collect his mail. I had encouraged her, and he might have heard me laughing—a colleague, a mature teacher of Latin, someone who always said hello and gave an impression of perfect respect. So I told him as he stood there awkwardly, poised to unlock the display of biographies if needed, overtending to his only patron—
confided
in him that a woman had come to me, the woman who had given birth to me and given me up for adoption; that in the course of our reunion she had told me that the man who was, who she
said
was, my biological father was … President Kennedy.

Mr. Willamee didn’t laugh. He asked calmly, “And what year were you born?”

I told him—1952. April 1, 1952. He smiled faintly.

“What?” I prompted.

“April. Your name.”

“Charming, isn’t it?”

He looked at the biographical data, skimming the column with a bony middle finger.

“I know it
is
possible,” I said before he pronounced the obvious—that technically, historically, medically, any which way, it certainly was possible.

Mr. Willamee listened. He stabbed at the bridge of his glasses and asked, “Is she a credible person?”

I said I didn’t know yet.

“I mean—is she sane and rational? Not schizophrenic or …impaired?”

“It’s Bernice Graves,” I whispered. “From TV. She has a show called ‘Bernice G!’ A local talk show.”

Mr. Willamee grinned slowly and shook his head in disbelief. He said, “‘My time with you is precious’—that one?”

“What?”

“That’s her tag line. She closes the show that way. My mother watches.”

Encouraged, I continued: “She told me Kennedy came into Jordan Marsh where she was working and they started talking. She found out he was running for the Democratic primary in her district, and one thing led to another—”

Mr. Willamee’s eyes and fingers drifted back to the
World Book
. “Primary?” he repeated.

“Something like that.”

He studied the page for confirmation. “He was in his second term in ’fifty-one.” He pointed to the date.

“No kidding!”

“Of course, he did have a reputation with women,” said Mr. Willamee, “and one that has since been documented.” He waited politely for my response. Oh, God, I thought. Please don’t let me laugh in his face. Mr. Willamee closed the book, his finger marking the page. “If you wouldn’t mind, I could work on it. I’m not that busy.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

I thought it was unnecessary, but his offer made me sad. I wanted to show the generous side of my character, the side that didn’t make fun of homely people, especially those with no friends and nothing better to do. Mr. Willamee looked up as two students entered the library holding hands; he blushed as if he had been caught doing something flagrantly outside his job description.

Good
. Let them see Mr. Willamee having a pleasant conversation with another teacher. Let them see there are people in this school who treat him with respect. “Thank you very much, Dwight,” I said. I raised my voice. “So I’ll check back with you on this …when?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Or whenever it’s convenient.”

I turned at the door and called, “Nice talking with you, Dwight.” I checked my audience, two stupid seniors all in black, and added, “As always.”

I saw Mr. Willamee again that week, this time out of school. He was grocery shopping at a Quincy supermarket with a tall woman in surgical stockings, his mother, I presumed—she had the graying version of his Vaseline-colored hair. The appearance of two generations of Willamees made me realize he had an age, a birthday. His mother looked about Trude’s age, maybe sixty. Was he forty, then? Younger?

He was pushing the cart, commenting agreeably on her choices, looking happy as if food shopping was a favored activity. I stayed back, pacing my own cart one aisle behind them. At one turn, before I retreated, I saw Mrs. Willamee offer him a four-pack of applesauce. He protested, laughing, and she put it back on the shelf with a shrug. I was relieved. Snack-packs of applesauce for his lunch box would have been sadder than I wanted to know about.