Then She Found Me (6 page)

“Well,” I said, “there was this man—my supervisor when I was student teaching—”

“What was his name?”

“Willis.”

“How old was he?”

I shrugged. “Forty?”

“And you were …?”

“Twenty.”

She listened to my accounting and said, “Why, this is fascinating!” And: “It makes perfect sense. You were looking for your father.”

I shook my head as she explained her theory:
abandoned,
looking for male validation. One didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see it.

“I never felt that way.”

“Consciously,” she snapped.

“Ever.”

She signaled for the waiter, a handsome young man with the presence of a moonlighting graduate student. She asked him about desserts; what he, off the record, would tell two reckless women to share. He held up a tanned finger, smiled, and returned with a slice of something runny and chocolate.

“You’re a genius,” Bernice told him.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

She said no, why?

“You seemed to.”

Bernice looked at me evenly. “I make my living talking to strangers. If I can do it with millions watching me, I can certainly handle a waiter.” She picked up a fork, poised it over the cake, and said, “You were talking about being in love with your principal.”

“My supervisor.”

“Tell me everything,” she said.

Not much to tell: supervisor confesses on his student teacher’s last day that he has these feelings of a personal nature. Student teacher is surprised, mostly flattered. Feels tenderness for pudgy red-haired bachelor whose upper lip and brow perspire when she is in the same room. They date for the summer. She realizes by August that flattery only goes so far. She doesn’t take the job offered at his school, and that’s the end of it.

“I never saw him again. I took another year of Latin courses so I could teach secondary.”

“Where?”

“Wellesley.”

“Escaping from the hard, cruel world of men and romance!”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly—”

“Never to return?” Bernice asked with her eyebrows arched.

Later after coffee and small talk about the station she asked, “And that’s it?”

“What?”

“I mean after Willis. Anyone else?”

Of course she had to ask. It was the way she measured the intimacy between us—by how much we told each other. I asked how comfortable she would have been if her mother had asked her these kinds of questions.

“Understand something, April. Sex to me is …glorious. And fun. Not something you hide from your mother. When I talk about it or ask you about it, I’m asking you in the same spirit I might ask how you enjoyed a meal or a movie you shared with a man. I wouldn’t talk to my mother about these things because she would get upset. You’re right. She’s from the old school.”

I asked her if she was saying her mother
would
—present tense—get upset? Her mother was still alive? I had a
grandmother?

“I’m barely fifty,” said Bernice stiffly. “It’s hardly an earth-shattering piece of news that my mother’s still living.”

“It is if you’ve never had a grandmother, if you’ve never even seen a picture of one of your grandparents.”

Bernice frowned. “I know what you’re saying, but she’s not what you’re looking for, believe me. She didn’t want anything to do with a grandchild conceived out of wedlock. And that’s her big tragedy in life—not that she didn’t keep you, but that her only child could make such an embarrassing mistake in the first place.”

I hesitated a few moments, then asked her what had happened when she came home pregnant with me at seventeen. Bernice closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose. “I thought of taking my own life to punish her,” she said. She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Does that give you an idea of how she carried on? I had to be the one, at seventeen, to make all the decisions, to say, ‘Ma, it’s not the end of the world. I’ll go away. I’ll have the baby. We’ll arrange for it to be adopted by a nice family and then I’ll come home and you can forget it ever happened.’

“She fell apart. She went screaming to my father, who was a son of a bitch and needed to be handled. I always led up to things gradually with him, about dates or a bad grade—small potatoes in comparison, but he still needed handling. But, no. My mother had to drop the bomb and see it explode on my head. I hated her for that, for the whole way she added insult to injury. I wasn’t just pregnant! I was destroyed! I had been tricked by the oldest trick in the book—and then he walks away and I’m left at my parents’ door …at my parents’
mercy,
which of
course is a joke. I laugh when I read these articles about parents who rallied around their daughter after getting over the initial shock; how it
strengthened
the family. Not the Gravermans! It ruined the Gravermans. We all hated each other after that.” Bernice dropped her chin slightly to signal the end of her soliloquy.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What for?”

“That you had to go through that with your parents.”

“Thanks,” said Bernice.

“I didn’t know you had a mother, and I certainly didn’t know you were feuding all these years.”

“She’d have forgiven me a long time ago if I’d gotten married and had children. That would have wiped everything clean. I would have been a good daughter who made a little mistake. Now I’m a daughter who gave her no
naches,
if you know what that means—nothing to be proud about. It’s ludicrous! As if seeing me in a nice house in Newton married to some schmuck of an accountant son-in-law is her goal. Of course the irony here is that her bubby friends beg me for tickets to my show. They get their housewife daughters to take them and it’s the highlight of their year. I’m a celebrity to everyone but my own mother. She still worries about what people think; that they remember I dropped out of sight for five or six months in nineteen fifty-two and they’re still gossiping behind her back. I know there are people who have a feeling for their flesh and blood and can’t stand the thought of giving their own grandchild away. But that never occurred to my parents. They’d be the last people in the world to have said, ‘Who cares what the neighbors think? We raise our own!’”

I asked if she considered keeping me.

“How could I have kept you?”

People do it, I said. Run away?

“I was seventeen. I’d never had any responsibility. I had no money.” Bernice forced a cynical laugh. “You’ve seen too many soap operas where the pretty young waitress from out of town works two shifts to support her illegitimate baby—while the bighearted landlady back at the rooming house watches the baby. That wasn’t the life I had planned for myself. Or you.

Or you
. Added as an afterthought. She was telling me her story, but didn’t have the grace to embroider a little feeling for the baby who turned out to be me.

“How do you think I feel when you tell me about this stuff?” I asked.

Bernice looked puzzled.

“About how I ruined your life, your family life; how all of you hate each other because of me; how I was as unwanted as I could possibly have been?”

“Should I lie to you?” asked Bernice. “I could do that, and tell you whatever you want to hear.”

“I don’t want to hear how you’ve never recovered from the tragedy of having me. How am I supposed to react? Should I say I’m sorry? ‘Forgive me for getting conceived’?”

Bernice picked up her wineglass and receded farther into her chair. She stared directly into my eyes. When it began to feel like a contest, I looked away. “You hate me,” she said quietly.

I
went with her to Brighton on a Sunday afternoon to meet my widowed grandmother. Bernice and I had known each other for a month. “What have you told her?” I asked as she rang the buzzer.

“Not the whole story.”

“She knows you found me?”

Bernice rummaged through her purse, but stopped to scowl at my question. “Let me do the talking,” she said. She returned to her search and came up with a key attached to a rhinestone diaper pin.

“Shouldn’t we knock first?” I asked when we reached the apartment door.

“She can’t hear with the television on,” said Bernice.

My new grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table giving herself a manicure. The room smelled of nail polish remover and cigarettes. She had champagne-blond hair that looked newly cut and teased to its full one-inch
height. She was wearing a black sweat suit that spelled “Rodeo Drive” in chrome studs across her bosom. Of course this would be what Bernice’s mother looked like; what Bernice would look like in twenty years; and, I realized, who I might be in forty years.

“Ma,” Bernice said, “I brought someone for you to meet.”

The old woman rose from the table, not taking her eyes off my face, and shook my hand. “You’re her,” she said. I looked to Bernice for permission to answer.

“Of course she is,” said Bernice.

I readied myself for her embrace and her tears. Instead she shrugged and went back to the table. “I don’t know what purpose this serves,” she said to her daughter.

“You don’t know what purpose this
serves?”
Bernice answered derisively. “Well, can you imagine any possible reason I might have for bringing you the daughter I gave away, my only child, your grandchild; that there’s a
movement
in this country of lost mothers finding their lost children?”

“Don’t get crazy,” said the old woman, “and don’t make me say things that will hurt this young lady’s feelings.” She turned to me with a newly pleasant smile. “What about your life? They gave you to a nice couple?”

“Yes.”

“Jewish? They were supposed to try.”

“Refugees,” said Bernice.

Her mother squinted at her unhappily—a signal, apparently, that she hadn’t heard properly.

“Refugees,” Bernice repeated louder. “From Hitler.”

Her mother looked at me and back at her daughter. “They gave her to refugees? From Europe?”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

Bernice rolled her eyes. “I’m talking about opportunities.”

“They gave me opportunities.”

Bernice faced me squarely and put her hands on my shoulders. Before she spoke she glanced at her mother as if making certain she had the floor. “With the stroke of a pen I had the power to make you the first Jewish president of the United States or a classical pianist or an Olympic ice skater,” Bernice began. “It was a seller’s market even back then, and I could say, ‘I want her to go to a family with means, a family who values education and travel, who will give her piano lessons and surround her with music. I want a Jewish family—not too young, not too old. I want her to learn languages and to take ballet. Material things are less important to me than the …the intangibles.’” Bernice’s voice turned snappish. “And that’s what they retained, ‘the intangibles.’ I was probably the only sap who went on in that vein, about the things money couldn’t buy being so important to me. I gave them carte blanche to give you to two war-torn refugees who were rich in
intangibles.”

“Your instincts were good,” I said quietly.

Bernice looked at me wearily. “I know. Your marvelous-parents-and-happy-childhood speech. I’ve heard it.”

“Would you be happier if I had had a lousy life? So you could rescue me?”

Bernice considered my question for longer than it should have taken.

“That has some appeal, doesn’t it—the abused orphan rescued by her glamorous mother?” I asked.

Her face brightened. She dropped her hands and sat down in a kitchen chair. “Glamorous? Do you really think so?”

I could see her mentally taking her pocket mirror from its suede sheath and studying her face with new objectivity: My daughter thinks I’m glamorous. Am I really?

Bernice smiled and leaned back against the padded
plastic as if we were embarking on an expansive and cozy topic. “Tell me what you imagined I’d be like,” she said.

I shook my head, not understanding.

“As a child—you know—when you knew you were adopted. Didn’t you wonder about your real mother?”

She looked confident that I would say flattering things about her. She believed so thoroughly in her own excellence that she could not conceive of answers other than ones that would conclude with me saying, “And you are my dream mother, so beautiful, so celebrated, so well dressed, so hip.”

“I really didn’t think about it,” I said. “My parents were who they were, and I didn’t sit around thinking about it.”

“You were so contented, then?”

“I was not the kind of kid who sat around daydreaming about things that weren’t going to happen.”

Bernice turned to her mother. “Doesn’t every kid imagine she’s the lost-long daughter of a movie star? Isn’t that typical of some stage?”

Mrs. Graverman said, “Maybe she didn’t have much imagination.”

“Or maybe she’s not telling us the whole story.”

I wasn’t going to say it here in Dora Graverman’s kitchen: I hated having refugee parents. I was embarrassed by my parents, by their accents and their disdain for easy American lives. Friends would ask, “Where were you born?” meaning “Are you a foreigner, too?” and I would answer, “Here,” ignoring the complications surrounding my birth. Their mothers had short hair, permed into waves and curlicues, and perfect eyebrows that were darkened with pencil into velvet arches. Trude had long hair pulled tightly away from her face into a bun, exposing the gray. I wanted a young American mother who wore pedal pushers and sleeveless blouses. I asked them to speak English at home when we had visitors. It was awful to have a friend
ask what language they were speaking and for me to answer “German” and then to explain, when my friends’ eyes popped out, that there was German and there was German, that my parents had been, well, prisoners during the war,
definitely
on the side of the Americans, in any case.