Then She Found Me (3 page)

I said I had not. I taught school every day.

“It made the papers, too. Jack Thomas’s column in the
Globe
and Norma Nathan’s in the
Herald.”

“I didn’t hear about it,” I said apologetically.

“It was the only time I ever let my audience see me cry.”

“You were on live?” I asked.

Bernice stared. Had I asked if she was on
live?

“What I meant was—”

“The show is taped,” said Bernice. “The moment was real. In that sense, it was very live. I thought about cutting it. I also thought about running it by our general manager and then I thought, This is as gutsy as it gets. This is raw emotion. I’ll take the consequences. I’ll turn my life upside down. I cried when I saw myself on tape. I cry every time I see it.”

“I can’t believe you had the nerve to say it,” said Sonia.

Bernice smiled bravely, gratefully.

“Would you have called her if you had seen it?” Sonia asked me.

I said I didn’t know. Maybe.

“But you knew you were adopted, correct? That there was a real mother out there somewhere searching for you?”

I said I’d always known, but hadn’t assumed anything about my real mother, had no reason to think she was either out there
or
searching.

“How could you not have called me after seeing something like that?” asked Bernice. “How could anyone not?” She turned to Sonia. “Is it me? Am I the crazy one? Look at us.”

“She wasn’t afraid to take the biggest risk of her life for you,” said Sonia.

“In what way?” I asked. Bernice waited prettily for Sonia’s explanation.

“Branding herself ‘unwed mother.’ Not knowing if the truth would cost her her job—”

“Painting a scarlet letter ‘A’ on my own chest, as it were,” Bernice interrupted.

I asked what
did
happen after the broadcast.

“The phone calls ran four to one congratulating me for having the guts to do what I did,” Bernice said. “Only two said, ‘Get this slut off the air.’”

Sonia, staunch ally, harrumphed.

“It’s the lunatics,” said Bernice. “They’re always threatening to go to the FCC and get you off the air. I had a married priest and nun on once—adorable—and I asked them a routine question about premarital sex. The switchboard blew up, literally.”

Bernice and Sonia commiserated. I was the forgotten player in their reunion drama. It was probably my fault for missing my cues, failing to respond in a way that would lead to my sitting before a camera in a wing chair with one of my hands clutched in two of Bernice’s. “Would you like to see the clip sometime?” asked Bernice.

I said, “Maybe sometime. Thanks.”

“She’s very … detached. I expected something different,” Bernice said to Sonia as if I weren’t there to hear.

“She’s in shock.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I know how I’d react if my real mother found me,” said Bernice.

“Which doesn’t make your set of reactions right, or hers wrong,” said Sonia psychiatrically.

“Are you sure I’m her?” I asked.

Bernice looked to Sonia.

“Of course,” said Bernice.

“Show her,” said Sonia.

Bernice reached into an enormous red leather pocketbook. She removed a business-size envelope and took out a newspaper clipping. Its edges had darkened to a pale coffee color, but it didn’t look too old or too used. It was me, April Epner, age three, crying on the swan boat, the 1955 picture I knew from my parents’ foyer. I took it from her warily, spooked to see our private memento in someone else’s hand.

“It’s me with my parents on the swan boat,” I said unsteadily.

“So you don’t deny that?”

I asked where she had gotten it. She repeated her question.

“Why would I deny it? My name’s on it.”

Bernice took the clipping back as if she’d better not trust me with so fragile a piece of crucial evidence. “I cut it out of the
Globe
in nineteen fifty-five.”

“I don’t understand what this proves,” I said.

“It shows how long I’ve known who my daughter is. It showed me where you’d be if I ever needed to get you. It says you lived in Providence and you were the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Epner.”

“But how did you know this little girl—me—was your daughter?”

“I knew your name.”

“How?” I asked.

“Against all odds,” she said. “A very obliging woman at the adoption agency took pity on me and divulged what might have cost her her job.” Bernice tossed her head. “Besides, look at them. You couldn’t possibly have come from them. I knew first of all that you had to be adopted. Second, you were three and a half. My daughter was exactly three and a half that same month. And you looked exactly like me in
my
baby pictures. Exactly. I showed this to my mother without saying a word and she almost fainted.”

“Your baby was born April first, nineteen fifty-two?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You should see the two of you in a mirror,” cooed Sonia. “This would be the coincidence to end all coincidences if you weren’t the daughter she gave up.”

“How come you didn’t do anything then?” I asked.

“I was twenty, twenty-one. I was still thinking I had done the right thing. And I was still expecting to marry someone and have children the right way. All this picture meant was that I knew where you were. Don’t forget—this happened in the fifties, way before people started meeting in church basements to help each other find their illegitimate children and vice versa.”

I asked if her timing was a coincidence. Had she known that my mother died recently? My father two years before?

“More or less,” she murmured.

“How?”

“Something they call a clipping service,” she said. “I’ve subscribed for a while, not that it gave me much of a return.”

I thought of the man and the sons on the sidelines at TV reunions. I asked, “What does your family think of your search for your long-lost daughter?”

“Family?” She looked at Sonia.

“Husband? Other children?”

“Only you,” she said.

“You’ve never married?”

“Why? Have you?”

I said no.

Bernice shook her arms so that her bracelets settled at her wrists. She smiled and said happily, “Another thing we have in common.”

We drank our coffee and refused refills. Bernice collected the three bits of paper that were our checks. “Thank you for the coffee,” I said.

She turned to Sonia. “Unbelievable. She’s thanking me for a lousy cup of diner coffee, as if I don’t even owe her that much. As if I have nothing to make up for.”

“She doesn’t want anything!” said Sonia. “She’s here as an emotional and an intellectual investment, not because you’re Bernice G. I told you she had integrity.”

“What about dinner?” Bernice asked me. “Would you feel compromised by the occasional dinner?”

I said I thought that would be okay.

“We’ll get acquainted.”

“Okay,” I said.

“How do you feel about this?” she asked.

How did I
feel
? A television question. Did other people in airport reunions and adoption-support groups cry at this point, or touch? I didn’t feel like doing either. “I guess I have some more questions,” I said.

From across the table Bernice put her fingertips to my lips to gently silence me. “Later,” she whispered. I leaned away so she couldn’t touch me again with any grace. She reached into the enormous red bag and took out a brown
leather book. “Let’s make a date!” she said. “This week? Thursday.”

Thursday was too soon. I said I couldn’t Thursday.

“Sunday night? Dinner? Imperial Teahouse?”

“Fine,” I said.

“You like Chinese food?”

“Love it.”

Bernice smiled maternally. She and Sonia looked pleased together. It made perfect sense, didn’t it? Any daughter of hers would have to love dim sum.

“You want to know who your father is, of course,” said Bernice.

Sonia did not speak up to silence her, but braced me by laying five creamy pink fingernails on my sleeve.

“Wait—” I said.

“A famous man, now dead,” said Bernice as if she had been savoring the phrase for thirty-six years and nine months.

“
I
want to know everything about you,” Bernice said as we were being seated at Sally Ling’s. “Start from your earliest memory. Or start with your life today and work backwards.”

I shrugged out of my coat and draped it on the empty chair next to me. I told Bernice I had expected to talk about her first, at least the part about my father.

She pushed away her place setting and leaned forward, arms folded, elbows on the table. Without preamble or protest, she recited her story. “I met him when I was sixteen. I worked in Stockings on the street floor of Jordan Marsh, a buyer in training. It was a more personal department in those days with a great deal of customer contact. Stockings came in boxes, not on racks like greeting cards. I spent my days folding back tissue paper, carefully splaying my fingers inside nylons to demonstrate color and
sheerness.” She paused. “Am I going into too much detail for you at this juncture?”

“Go on,” I said.

“I met Jack at my counter just before Mother’s Day. I recognized him as an educated man and spoke accordingly—”

“Jack who?”

“I’m getting to that. ‘Doesn’t this Schiaparelli have a lovely diaphanous quality?’ I asked. I saw the effect immediately. He started, then smiled his brilliant smile. For good measure, noticing his Harvard ring, I said, ‘I can’t wear my school ring because it snags the hosiery.’

“‘Where did you go to school?’ he asked.

“‘Girls’ Latin.’ I lowered my voice so the other salesgirl wouldn’t hear. ‘I’m going to be a senior. They think I’m staying on here full-time.’

“‘And where do you live?’

“‘Brighton,’ I told him. He grinned again and held out a tanned hand. ‘I hope to be your next congressman.’

“I said something like ‘You do?’

“‘I’m running in the Democratic primary. Maybe you could put in a good word for me with your neighbors.’ That’s
exactly
what he said.

“‘With pleasure,’ I said.

“He patted his pockets and found a parking ticket to write on. I offered him my Jordan Marsh ballpoint. He wrote my name and address…. Nothing!” Bernice smiled triumphantly.

“Nothing?” I repeated.

“No flinch at the ‘Graverman,’ no reneging on what I sensed was sexual rapport between us out of anti-Semitism. Nothing! He asked if I’d like to help out in the campaign. ‘Pretty girls are always needed,’ I think is what he said. I blushed, of course. I was totally inexperienced
and hadn’t learned how to accept compliments graciously. ‘If you think I can be of some help,’ I said.

“He wrote a phone number on my sales pad. I said I’d call his headquarters that night. He was a beanpole then, and not terribly smooth, but I sensed his greatness. I should have kept that sales slip. It would be worth a lot of money today. And did I mention the stockings? A Mother’s Day present for Rose.”

Bernice ended her story with a quivering, pained smile.

I laughed. For the first time in her presence, I laughed.

“How dare you,” she whispered.

“You’re saying my father was Jack
Kennedy?
”

She stared for a long time, then said, “I know it’s not what you were expecting to hear.”

“Do you have proof?” I asked.

“He knew about you, if that’s what you were wondering.”

“John Kennedy got you pregnant?”

“We were deeply in love.”

“Wasn’t he married?”

“He hadn’t even met her yet!”

“Why didn’t he marry
you?”

She patted her stiff bangs. “I loved him too much for that.”

“His career, you mean? You were being altruistic?”

“Of course. It would have been political suicide for him to marry me. He’d have been crucified because I was pregnant and it would have been worse that I was a Jew. Jack would have come to resent me, too. Ironically.”

“Why ‘ironically’?”

“Because if he had chosen me—us—he’d never have been elected. He’d be alive today.”

I asked if she was mentioned in any of the Kennedy biographies.

She stared at me again—it was my own schoolmarm’s
stare, refusing to answer a question of such sass and ill will. “What sells books?” she asked finally. “You tell me: Bernice Graverman or Marilyn Monroe?”

I wanted to tell her that she was either cruel or crazy and in either case insulting my intelligence. I considered “You are a sick woman,” or “You’re lying.” I settled on “I don’t look like him at all.”

“You don’t,” she agreed.

“Wasn’t he tall?”

Bernice reached for the glass ashtray and placed it in front of her with a petulant clink.

“You’re annoyed,” I said.

She shrugged.

“Did you expect me to believe you?”

“When you’re telling the truth, you don’t worry about being taken for a liar.”

“So you said to yourself, I’ll tell April I’m her mother and President Kennedy was her father, and then she’ll know. Period. That’ll impress the hell out of her. Something like that?”

Bernice poked a long red fingernail into an almost flat pack of cigarettes and found one more. She lit it with a silver lighter and exhaled gracefully toward the ceiling. “I’m not an analytic person,” she said. “I act first and live with the consequences.”