Any Bitter Thing (34 page)

“Hey, Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, pausing not at all from his keyboard, which was getting quite a beating. He typed sixty-five words a minute and possessed superior peripheral vision, which is the sort of thing he thought to tell people about himself.

“I hear you’re the people guy,” I said, raising my voice over the morning announcements crackling through the intercom.

“That’s me.” He lifted one finger from the keyboard. “What can I do ya for?” Which is really how he talked, like an old-timer sitting on the dusty porch of a general store.

“I’d like to locate a relative,” I said. “Family reunion coming up.”

He shoved a pad of paper toward me. “Name, birth date, place of birth, Social Security number if you have it, and I’ll be with you shortly.”

“Be with me
now
, Wally,” I said. “It’s shaping up to be a long day.”

Sighing, he stopped, but did not remove his fingers from the keyboard. He’d had his hair clipped in the quasi-military style the other boys favored, but on Wally it looked less hipster than regulation, as if he were under orders from Uncle Sam.

“What’s the name?

“Michael Murphy.” I couldn’t help thinking that Father Mike would have liked a kid like Wally, who stoutly bore the consequences of marching to his differently beating drum.

“If it was Jebediah Swartzkoff I might be able to help you,” he said. “There’s probably ninety thousand Michael Murphys.”

“Born on the same day?”

“You’d be surprised.”

I wrote a few notes on the pad, making an effort to steady my hand.

“Prince Edward Island?” Wally said. “I went there once. It’s really, really green.”

“He became a citizen at age sixteen,” I said, recalling the story Father Mike trotted out every July Fourth—his sister, my mother, weeping over the Pledge of Allegiance as she stood in the Franklin County courthouse. “But I don’t have a Social Security number.”

Wally shrugged. “Nobody ever does.”

“Should I wait?”

“I’m not that much of a genius.” He checked his watch. “There’s only six more minutes of homeroom. If you get me out of English I can do it first period.”

“I can wait.”

“Till fifth period? That’s my study hall. If you could get me out of P.E., second period . . .”

“I can wait till fifth period, Wally.”

“All-righty. Don’t hold your breath, though. He’s not a John Smith, but close.”

“Well, I appreciate the effort.”

He snapped up the paper and studied it. “No problemo. We had a family reunion once.” He smiled, and it came to me that he’d had his teeth fixed over the summer. That one gray eye-tooth, which had been knocked literally dead by someone like Glen Seavey, now sparkled like the others.

The morning moved like a fast-acting salve, beginning with two parent meetings and a transcript review, and as the fifth-period bell rang Andrea Harmon stalked into my office, her raccoon eyeliner shiny-wet and poised to spill. She melted into a chair with the poignancy of a dying swan.

“Dumped,” she said. “Dumped like a month-old pork chop.” She dug into her purse and extracted a matted wad of Kleenex with which she endeavored to mop her eyes. “All of a sudden, like
overnight
, he’s in love with Julie Dufresne. Little Miss School Spirit herself.” She gave me one of her tree-felling stares. “I suppose you’re happy now. I suppose you’re going to get all I-told-you-so.”

“Here,” I said, and she allowed me to cup her face and wipe the delicate, blackened skin beneath her eyes, a task made easier by a steady flow of tears. This child who never cried turned out to be a real gusher. She sat there, face red and buckling, for
a full ten minutes while I handed her tissue after tissue, marveling at the sometimes unfathomable sources of genuine grief.

Finally, she pulled herself together, lifted her tear-gummed face. “He wouldn’t wash,” she said. “He’d get all sweaty on purpose, disgusting sweaty, playing pick-up ball or working out on that stupid rowing machine in his parents’ garage, and then he’d pick me up and ride me around somewhere and pull over and ask me to—you know—just to see if I’d still do it.” A few clots of mascara clung to her cried-out lashes. “He said I was boring.” She struggled mightily for composure, her face a
KEEP OUT
sign made of skin and bone. I offered her another tissue but she refused it.

“There’s something I’d like to tell you, Andrea,” I said.

“What,” she said morosely. She crammed a wad of tissue into her purse.

“When I came to your house that time. You remember? Your mother said something to me that I know you heard.”

She eyed me calmly. “When you were a kid, that thing that happened.”

“Except,” I said, “that thing didn’t happen. I wasn’t abused or molested or hurt.”

She looked surprised, and I realized I must have been speaking louder than I intended to, so I lowered my voice. “My uncle didn’t hurt me, Andrea. He was a normal, nice man with a child to raise.” I paused a moment to really see her, this young woman whose sole source of genuine, unfettered affection came from a six-pound dog. “But what I want to say to you, the thing I want you to know, is this: If he
hadn’t
been a normal, nice man, if he
had
done what people accused him of, if he
had
hurt me, I would have let him.” I leaned closer. “If my uncle, a man I loved, had done any of those things, I would not have protested. I would not have said no. I would have allowed it, Andrea, I would have
embraced
it, because he was all I had.” I touched her hand, and she
let me hold it. “It was just dumb luck that my uncle was a good man. Because I would have loved a bad man just as much.”

She looked away. “Are you comparing Glen to a pervert?”

“Andrea,” I said. “I’m comparing you to me.”

Sometimes in this business you say exactly the right thing, accidentally, at exactly the right time. She took my full measure with what I can only describe as tenderness. “Thank you,” she said, her throat husky from crying. “People say all this stuff about me, you know?”

I still had her hand. She squeezed mine—faintly enough to deny it if she had to—before hauling up her things and heading back to class.

I don’t know how long I sat there with my face in my hands. After composing myself, I went to the computer lab and stood at the door, wiping my damp palms on my skirt. “Mrs. Mitchell,” Wally stage-whispered. “I found your guy.”

“Don’t ask him how,” said Jenny Morton, an anorexic freshman at the adjoining terminal. “You could both get arrested.” A few heads lifted, including the shaved head of Ben Wilkes, a substitute Ed Tech who had a game of solitaire on his monitor.

Wally handed me a slip of lime-green paper. “Totally legit,” he said, lowering his voice. “Don’t listen to her.”

On the front of the paper, in a left-slanting hand, Wally had written
Michael and Frances Murphy; 24332 Oriole Street; Conlin, Ohio.
On the reverse, a phone number.

“This can’t be right,” I said.

With the patience of an iguana, Wally opened his notebook and showed me the checkmarks he’d made next to Michael Murphy’s unique and vital statistics. “Don’t even think about paying me,” he said. “I sort of consider myself as a public servant.”

I could barely hear him over the rushing in my head. “Thanks,” I said. “My family will be thrilled.”

Then Jenny chimed in. “I could’ve done it in half the time.”

“As
if,”
Wally scoffed. I left them there, undersupervised and bickering, and it wasn’t until I returned to my office and put the paper down and stared at it until my ears stopped thumping that I realized Wally Tibbetts and Jenny Morton were in love. Two overlooked creatures for whom, it would appear, love had not been designed, were in love anyway.

I creased the paper into quarters, but it began to unfold itself, like a live, waking creature. I picked up the phone and put it down again. He had been the keeper of my dreams. My knight, my shield, my sanctuary. Also, he had erased my parents. Like the men who killed St. Bart, he skinned my parents beyond recognition and replaced them in my world. Every seed pushed into the earth, every pancake burned and re-tried, every bottle of Moxie drunk on the back steps in summer, every comfort and kindness left less of them and more of him. Then he, in turn, vanished into a vast and secret nowhere in which existed a person named Frances and an Ohio address.

Filled with a yearning that preceded my conscious memory, I realized it was my parents, those fine, forgotten people who had loved me first, that I wished I could call.

I needed my husband. “I’m leaving,” I said to Jane. “Tell Rick I’m taking another day.”

“I’d be thrilled to,” Jane said. “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

I left the building as if escaping a fire with nothing but the clothes on my back.

Drew was taking pictures of babies. He didn’t trade much in babies, refusing to invest in bunting or pastel backdrops or stuffed rabbits in gingham overalls. Nevertheless, he got a few requests every month, which he fulfilled by cramming them all
into a single day. The pain was more intense that way, he liked to say, but he preferred it to protracted torture.

The eleven o’clock client—a pale, ovoid, bald, blue-eyed girl who looked to be about six months old and only distantly acquainted with the concept of sitting up—was propped on a rippling drapery of black velvet. Drew loved to turn babies into art; this one looked like an ostrich egg in a sixteenth-century still life.

“‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war,’” he said grimly, as the camera whirred and the baby stared him down, “‘testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.’” The mothers, generally speaking, liked their babies to appear thrilled and cherished. Drew favored expressions of suspicion or downright disbelief, which he was getting in spades from this baby by reciting portions of the Gettysburg Address in a Rod Steiger baritone.

“Don’t you have a rattle or something?” said the mother, who was sitting near the wall, a kitten-motif diaper bag laid across her lap. “I’ve got her shaky-bunny in my bag.”

“Are you kidding?” Drew said, clicking away, “this kid’s a natural.”

Which made the mother smile despite herself, but I could see that Drew was not going to sell a single print of an art baby in black draping to a woman who had picked out a diaper bag adorned with pink cats.

“I could sing,” said the mother. “She’d laugh her head off.”.

“‘We are met on a great battlefield of that war,’” Drew intoned. “‘We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final’—Hey, Lizzy.” Something in the uptick of his voice, the surprise or pleasure of seeing me, made the baby smile. Me, too.

“Look! Look!” the mother said, pointing wildly. “Oh, shoot. You missed it.”

Drew put down his camera and picked up the baby, who gazed at him moony-eyed, as if he were Abraham Lincoln in the
flesh. “There you go,” he said, handing her back. “I’ll call when the proofs are ready.”

The mother stood up, clutching the baby, uncertain. “But you didn’t get any of her smiling. I kind of wanted to see her smiling.” She frowned at her baby, who had so easily switched allegiance.

“Trust me,” Drew said. “I know what I’m doing. You’ll be stunned.”

She would be. Mariette had a portrait of Paulie at six months, his face emerging from a severe darkness that made him look like a baby vampire staring down the dawn. It was warped and beautiful, and except for Charlie we all agreed it captured Paulie’s bloodthirsty insistence on being adored.

As the mother slumped out the door, another mother was pulling into the driveway in a minivan thrumming with children.

“What are you doing home?” Drew asked, kissing me on the cheek.

“I wanted to see you.”

He checked his watch. “I’m booked till five. I squeezed in my postponements from Friday.”

“I figured. It’s okay. I think I’ll just take a nap.”

The side door tumbled open, expelling a trio of baying children and their mother, who was reciting a long list of apologies in advance.

“Mrs. Case?” Drew asked.

“Yes,” she sighed, as if she really wanted to say no but knew there was no point in lying.

“Who’ve we got here?” he asked, as I sidled out of the office and closed the door, sitting just outside in a square of sunlight that melted in through the kitchen windows. After a moment, Mr. Peachy padded in, glad to see me. He stamped all over my lap, then collapsed in a heap.

“‘Fourscore and seven years ago,’” came Drew’s voice from the other side. I had often imagined him at work but had never witnessed him with a client. I realized then how truly misplaced he was, and how heroically he’d figured out how to endure.

I sat through two more exchanges of vehicles in our driveway, unable to leave the sound of my husband’s voice and the things I was learning, marveling at the myriad ways he managed to find a way around the obstacle of his own unwillingness. Listening to his dramatic monologues and the occasional suggestions from befuddled mothers, I recognized that he was turning the whole enterprise into a private joke. And another thing: he had a great memory. As babies came and went, he recited most of the Bill of Rights, a three-stanza poem in an Irish accent, and the introduction from the owner’s manual that had come with our microwave oven. His miniature clients fell silent under this twisted spell.