Then She Found Me (25 page)

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Pretty much.”

“How should I read your staying with her tonight. Positively?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a reason you’re being so cryptic? Is she standing there?”

“Pretty close,” I said.

“But you’re okay? You reached some kind of understanding?”

“Sort of.”

“Did you tell her about us?” he asked.

“Soon,” I said. “If not tonight, soon.”

Dwight said okay, good; I could tell him everything tomorrow. He said good night. He loved me.

“Me, too,” I said.

The faucet stopped running in the bathroom. Bernice yelled, “Say it, for chrissake. Tell the man you love him. What’re you afraid of?”

Bernice actually had a vanity table, at which she actually brushed her hair from the roots outward for at least ten minutes. I said I felt as if I had wandered onto the set of “The Loretta Young Show.” She also put on cotton gloves after massaging in two coats of hand cream. I asked if she did that when she had male guests. “Absolutely not,” she answered with a worried look, as if the very question undermined my own social-sexual judgment.

“What do you sleep in at home?” she asked.

“A nightgown. Or a T-shirt in the summer.”

“What about when Dwight’s there?”

“Flannel,” I said. “Winter and summer. He loves it. The scratchier the better.”

Bernice appraised me through half-closed lids. “You’re full of shit,” she said. “The longer I know you, the worse you get.”

“Your influence,” I said.

“My
genes
,” she said proudly.

When the lights were out she asked contentedly, “Do you think we’re going to be okay now that you understand me better?”

I felt a flash of the old anger. “Could you restate that so it doesn’t leave the impression that you’re the center and object of all experience?”

“Did I say the wrong thing again?” she asked, her voice hard.

It felt late. I was tired and talked out. I wasn’t going to reorient Bernice from the center of her universe simply by rewording her sentences. “No,” I said. “You didn’t.”

“Do you think we’re going to be all right now?” she repeated.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think we’re great,” said Bernice. “I think we’re untouchable.”

She got up when I did at 6:15 and made me breakfast in her white silk robe. Frozen blueberry waffles. When I said I had to stop off at my apartment for a change of clothes, she protested. Absolutely unnecessary; certainly
something
in her closet would be appropriate for a day of teaching.

Her closet was a small mirrored and carpeted room of racks, shelves, and wire baskets. “It has to look right with navy flats,” she announced, which meant she had silently
assessed my shoes the night before. She pulled out a fluffy knit in fuchsia. “Angora,” she said. “The color looks marvelous on us.”

“Too dressy,” I said.

“Try it on.”

She arranged the cowl neck just so and added a chain belt from her vast collection. She turned me this way and that in front of the mirror and pronounced me “gorgeous.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Your students will go gaga.”

I ran my hands down the front of my thighs to my knees, checking the length.

“Perfect. In fact, it looks better on you than it does on me. You keep it.”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“I’ve got my own clothes. I don’t need a makeover.”

“Would I do that?” she asked innocently.

I looked back at the mirror. I had seen her in this outfit before, had thought it typically Bernice with its excess of angora fluff and drapes at the neck.

It looked good on me. It felt good, too. I wouldn’t have thought so, but it did.

“Come tonight for dinner,” she said. “Bring Dwight.”

I said no, thanks. Dwight and I needed a night together.

“You’re right,” said Bernice.

“He’s been really wonderful,” I said, choking up on the words. “He’s the one who insisted I talk to you until we got to the bottom of things.”

A look passed over her face, a moment of confusion, as if she had forgotten the night before or hadn’t realized there was pain and anger leading up to it. “You could have asked me anything at any time,” she said. “You didn’t
have to wait for Sonia to traumatize you before coming to me. “You didn’t have to consult Dwight. And even though I feel as if I’ve sat through a grueling week of congressional testimony, everything is on the record now, and that’s good.”

“Veritas vos liberabit?”

“Truth?” she asked unhappily. “Something about truth?”

“The truth shall make you free.”

“Oh, please,” said Bernice.

I said there was one thing—Sonia.

“She’s supposed to be my friend. I think she betrayed some confidences.”

“She helped me a lot. You should thank her instead of blaming her.”

Bernice thought about it with her lips set, then said sarcastically,
“Everyone
helped you. Everyone is just so noble I can barely stomach it.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“So is your campaign over? Are you going to stop seeking truth and interviewing my friends behind my back? Or do you and Dwight have a longer agenda.”

“We’ll talk,” I said.

“Not that I have anything more to tell you. You know everything there is to tell.”

“What about Jack Remuzzi?” I asked, already picturing Dwight’s assault on the phone book.

“What
about
Jack Remuzzi?”

“What if I went looking for him?”

I saw a straightening of her shoulders and a lifting of her head into her public pose as if she were rehearsing their reunion. She raised her eyebrows as if signaling: Well, if it’s what you want, I’m certainly not going to stand in your way.

“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“Oh, God. Forever.”

“At the divorce?”

“Oh,” she said. “Let me think for a second.”

“When was that?”

“The divorce?”

“Approximately. I don’t need the exact date.”

She looked at her nails critically; she twisted her rings into their most advantageous positions.

“Did you get divorced?” I asked.

Bernice challenged me with her eyes, daring me to speak a word of criticism, and said, “Actually, not.”

I
am sitting in the green-room at the station watching Bernice lean toward my biological father and ask him, live, if he’s thought about her at all over the last thirty-six years. She tells the audience, twice, “You are seeing our actual reunion. We arranged this appearance by telephone after a researcher tracked Mr. Remuzzi down two weeks ago, but this is unrehearsed. What you are witnessing is the real thing.”

I am hiding here where I can’t be reached with cameras or microphones or graphics on the screen that announce, “April Epner, their daughter.” I want to see it live, but I want to be safe. After this taping I will decide whether to go out and meet Jack Remuzzi. If I agree, Bernice will introduce us; I will be, for the first time since I was six months old, in the presence of both my mother and my father. The city of Quincy has given me the day off.

At fifty-four, he is not handsome, but he is a little
charming. His face is rounder, softer, than mine or Bernice’s. His hair is wiry gray, trained to lie crisp and flat; he has sideburns that are a centimeter longer than current fashion. Bernice wants to make him look good—for me, for her show, and for her own vanity. “So, Jack …” she says and her voice trails off. She waits for him to speak and, meanwhile, stares like a psychiatrist. The cameramen play psychiatrist, too. Every blink and twitch is reported. Jack Remuzzi’s face, his pale lips, the pores on his skin, fill the monitor. We are supposed to think that his discomfort proves Bernice’s point. I want to tell them to pull back, to restore some of his privacy.

He has a slow, teasing smile that saves him on close-up. He uses it as a reply when her questions are too precious.

“Did you ever get to college?” Bernice is asking.

“I was drafted in ’fifty-three, and I took some courses courtesy of Uncle Sam when I got out.”

“Tell me about your career,” she says. “A quick résumé.”

“What I do now?”

“Whatever you think our audience would like to know.”

“I’m a golf pro at the Ponemah Country Club in southern New Hampshire,” he says.

“For those who don’t know what a golf pro does …” she prompts.

“Everyone knows what a golf pro does.”

“You do a lot of travel, on tours?”

“None,” says Jack.

Bernice blinks, apparently confused. “What about those golf tournaments people watch on television?”

“That’s the big time,” says Jack. “I’m the small time. I give lessons and run the pro shop at the club.”

Bernice moves quickly on. He lives in Nashua; got out of Taxachusetts—heh, heh, heh—fifteen years ago. What
else? He smiles self-consciously—imagine a guy like me getting the third degree on TV.

“What are your regrets?” she asks at the beginning of the next segment.

Jack Remuzzi is not a natural confessor; he cannot play his emotions like Bernice. He shrugs, grins foolishly. This is TV; he knows he’s supposed to say the obvious and wring something out of it: I gave my baby away and not a day goes by when I don’t pray to God to return her to me. Instead he says, “I suppose I regret the way things turned out.”

“Can you be more specific?” she asks confidently.

“Maybe I thought I had all the time in the world to find another girl, get married, have more kids. And then you wake up one morning and you’re fifty-one, fifty-two, and you realize maybe you had your shot at it and you screwed it up and you’re not getting another ….”

“So you’re saying you have real regrets?” she asks.

“Sure I do.”

“You know that I’ve found our daughter,” she says quietly.

“Yes,” says Jack.

“I’m not going to cheapen my show by bringing her on and taping a reunion,” says Bernice, who has pleaded with me for weeks to make an appearance. “Our daughter is a private person, a sensitive and keenly intelligent woman. Our daughter went to Radcliffe,” she says to the audience, and bobs her head like a keynote speaker expecting applause. They applaud. “She’s fluent in Latin and Greek, the two most expressive and difficult languages on earth. After graduating with honors from Radcliffe, she received her master’s degree from Wellesley College.”

“No kidding!” says Jack.

“How does that make you feel?”

“Jeez,” he says. The camera moves in in search of anguish. “I’m smarter than I thought.” He laughs and the audience laughs with him. I smile at the face on the TV screen. He’s just an ordinary man with a chance to be on a talk show. He reminds me of homeroomfuls of Quincy High School boys whose letter sweaters delay their ordinariness until graduation. He seems nice.

Bernice wants him to cry on her show, like people do for Oprah. “What does Jack Remuzzi really feel when he sees men walking down the street with their daughters … when he goes to a wedding where a buddy walks his daughter down the aisle … when he passes a card shop around Father’s Day? Does he smile like this”—she mimics his goofy joviality—“or does he hurt inside?”

He looks around unhappily. “Yeah. It hurts.”

She lets that answer hover in the air before asking, “What went wrong, Jack?”

“Huh?” he asks.

“Other kids make it. We weren’t babies. Some marriages last, not many, but some that start that young survive.” She looks into the camera and says soulfully, “We’ll be right back with more of this extraordinary and very personal show.”

Because the commercials will be cut in later, the cameras continue to roll. The monitor fills up with Bernice doing vulnerable. “Jack,” she says, addressing him, then pausing as if his name sounds odd in her own voice. She explains her supposed pensiveness: “It’s been a long time…. Anyway. Your answer to the question ‘what went wrong?’”

“You know,” he says. “I was a kid. I didn’t have any business getting married right out of high school.”

“Weren’t you doing the
honorable
thing?” Bernice asks. “Giving our child a name.”

“I guess so,” says Jack.

“Did you really have a choice? We lived two blocks apart. Our lives were intertwined.”

“Do you want me to give you a straight answer?” asked Jack.

“Of course I do.” She includes the audience with a sweep of her hands. “We all do.”

“Getting married wasn’t a big romantic thing; it was what you did when you got someone pregnant and you were eighteen and you had half a conscience.”

“You’re saying—because I want to understand this—it wasn’t even a
little
bit romantic? There weren’t elements of adventure, of conspiracy, of passion …?”

“Okay,” says Jack. “Sure.”

“But those have been superseded in your memory by your doing the honorable thing. That’s what you’re saying?”

“Look—how can I say this? Times were different then, in the early fifties. We didn’t have the so-called sexual revolution and we didn’t have the Pill. And when you’re eighteen, a normal, red-blooded guy—”

“You want it every night and if you’re a good Catholic, marriage is the way to go?”