Then She Found Me (16 page)

“Or we could leave.”

“That bad?”

“Do you like it?”

“A bit attenuated,” he said. “I like the House of the Seven Gables—type tour, up the back stairs and down the front. Buy a postcard and leave.”

“Shorter might have helped,” I said.

He put his arm around my shoulder to confide, “Full frontal nudity wouldn’t help this place.”

The tour group turned a corner. We held back, retraced our footsteps, admired the famed Round Stone Barn from a distance, and drove to Pittsfield for lunch.

It was four o’clock and we were in Northampton, only one hour closer to Boston than we had been. We drank cappuccino at a sidewalk café next to a bookstore on Main Street. Up the hill, if you leaned far enough toward traffic, you could see the gates of Smith College.

Dwight said, “Total anonymity. Not one person who knows us.”

I lowered my voice. “Except that the ghost of every Quincy High School student who went to Smith over the last fourteen years is dancing before my eyes.”

He moved his chair closer. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve heard there are people out there, adults like us, who don’t whisper in public and don’t travel two hours out of town for dates.”

“Obviously not high school teachers.”

“Or not paranoid high school teachers.” He shook his head: what a life.

Why do you do it? I asked. You’re obviously unhappy.
Why don’t you get out now? Quit before you’re burned out.

Dwight rolled his eyes as if to say, too late for that.

“You could get a job at a real library. Or a
college
library. What about Widener? Or do something else entirely.”

“I look periodically. I get the
Chronicle of Higher Ed.;
I get a listing from Columbia every two months. I sneak out for interviews when things come up, but the good ones are mostly outside the area.” He cocked his head toward the brown awning two doors down. “Bookshop” was painted discreetly on the scalloped edges. “That’s what I’d really like to do—a bookstore with readings and signings. Maybe classes.”

Why not? I asked. Why not do it?

“Money.”

I hesitated, taking a sip of coffee, then said, “You help your parents?”

He nodded.

“What about your sisters?”

“They visit, but they have their own lives.”

“And you don’t?”

“You know what I mean—kids, husbands, in-laws, dogs.”

I did know what he meant: lives without spouses or children didn’t count; didn’t register on the meter of meaningfulness.

“Do they encourage your … getting out socially?”

He laughed. “They know.”

“You told them about me?”

He nodded.

“That’s flattering.”

He mimicked my words.

“It’s not?”

“They’d heard your name in passing before.”

Before? I thought. When before?

Dwight said, “You’ll meet them. My mother will do her cream of mushroom soup over pork chops for you.” His arms were folded on the table. He smiled, slid his elbows closer to me.

“What?”

“Think they’d mind if we went up to my room after dessert and made out?” he asked as if it were a reasonable and commonly debated point of etiquette.

I rubbed his sleeve above his wrist, just a touch with my fingertips. It was a great bump of a hairy wristbone with enormous appeal.

He drove me home to Quincy, even though I said the Green Line and then the Red Line took me practically to my door. “Nonsense,” he said.

We were parked in a visitor’s space. “Should I invite you in?”

“Uh-oh,” said Dwight. “Here it is. The awkward moment.”

“Are your parents expecting you?”

“I’m thirty-nine years old,” said Dwight. “A backward thirty-nine-year-old, true. But I assume you have a telephone.”

“It’s after eleven. Maybe we should just say good night.”

“Fine,” he said quickly. “I understand.”

“What do you understand?” I reached for his hand and held it firmly.

He smiled and said, “Nothing. I forget.”

“Good.”

“Maybe we can do this again sometime.”

I laughed and said, “Is that right?”

“Next Saturday?”

“That long?”

“When?”

“Do you go out on weekdays?”

“Sure.”

“Thursday, for dinner? Here.”

“That’s right—you owe me a dinner.”

“Okay,” I said.

His face came closer and we kissed. We checked with each other and smiled. He kissed me again, the definitive one. Soft and expert; effortless. Everything in the right place. A talent.

B
ernice did not call to interrogate me about my date. My phone was not ringing when I came in Saturday; no tries on Sunday, no messages on Monday.

Anne-Marie, on the other hand, was waiting.

“I’ve already seen him this morning,” she announced smartly, “so you don’t have to keep avoiding me.” She summoned me by flexing her index finger. I walked to her desk. “You won’t believe this but he was standing by his mailbox, leaning one shoulder against the wall reading something and I looked over and I swear to God for a second I thought he looked cute.”

“C’mon.”

“I swear to God. Of course I didn’t say anything. He doesn’t know I know anything.”

I walked over to the mailboxes, pictured Dwight leaning into the wall, glanced tenderly at his name.

“You got it bad,” said Anne-Marie.

*  *  *

Dwight came to my homeroom just as the bell was ringing to signal the beginning of first period. He stood just inside the door as the students filed out. A few of the confident boys patted him in that patronizing way they egged on the nerds with girlfriends. Kevin Caruso, not usually ill-behaved, called out, “Miss Epner, your boyfriend’s here.”

“Mr. Willamee,” I said pleasantly.

He nodded his professional nod to the students still straggling by. “Move along,” Dwight said two or three times until the room was clear.

“Hi,” I said.

He winked. “Come for lunch?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve got some ideas,” he said.

“About what?”

“Jack Flynn.”

I made a face.

“Not good?” asked Dwight.

“What kind of ideas?”

“Phonebooks.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Boston. South Shore. West suburban. North. Lots of John Flynns listed. Those are the logical places to start.”

I put an imaginary receiver to my ear. “Hello, you don’t know me but did you inadvertently impregnate Bernice Graverman in nineteen fifty-one?”

“Nah. We’re smoother than that.”

“I’m not doing it,” I said. “I don’t even care about Jack Flynn.”

Dwight smiled and said, “I know. Just like you don’t care about Bernice.”

“I didn’t go looking for her.”

I looked up at the clock above the door. The minute hand clicked another notch and a buzzer sounded. “I’ve got a class,” I said.

“We won’t do anything drastic at lunch. We’ll just discuss it. I can’t turn back now that I’m in my Sherlock Holmes mode.”

“Maybe,” I said.

The kids in Latin II had heard. There was a cued tittering as I strode in and over to the desk. “How’s Mr. Willamee?” said Jennifer Platt smartly.

“Why?”

When she didn’t answer I asked, “Just trying to make a federal case out of one teacher passing another in the hall?” That’s all I said. That’s all we teachers ever said about our personal life and the most we ever said when teased.

I couldn’t concentrate very well during class. I felt a nagging annoyance with Dwight for coming to my homeroom and exposing us. People didn’t do that. Students sniffed out faculty romances with fewer clues than Dwight was supplying. I settled down at some point. One of my C students was struggling with a translation, stumped by a gerund; the others were getting restless with his pace. Then the loudspeaker went on: Anne-Marie asking blandly enough if Mr. Willamee could come to the main office—a routine announcement any day but today. My class erupted, oohing in one crescendo as if they’d rehearsed.

I smiled cynically, the way you do in these situations. I said wearily, when I heard the refrain of “Goin’ to the Chapel” being sung from the back of the room, “That’s enough.”

They still made noises. I said, “Do you think this is very civilized?” The A students stopped as I made eye
contact with each one. The creeps got louder. Alison Chin said, “Shut up, you guys.” They directed some jeers at her, and faded out.

I didn’t look up, but leafed ahead with a mission in Caesar’s
Commentaries on the Gallic War
. I announced that they had just earned themselves double the homework assignment, which I would be collecting at the beginning of class the next day. I picked up my books and left the room seconds before the bell rang.

Dwight thought I took the teasing too seriously.

“Did you have to come to my homeroom?” I asked.

“I assumed I’d be welcome in your homeroom, April.”

“I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Good. It’s character-building. Besides, they like you. They’re doing it affectionately.” He smiled. “They probably like the fact that you’re being swept off your feet.”

“I’m too crotchety to be swept off my feet.”

“That hasn’t been my experience.”

“I’ll never hear the end of it. Neither will you.”

He grinned. “I can take it.”

“You don’t have classrooms full of them.”

“You just want a boyfriend everyone likes that you don’t have to apologize for.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“You don’t like the students knowing because Mr. Willamee is a dork and you don’t want to be known as a dorkette. You don’t want anyone to know.”

“Look,” I said. “Give me your tie clip. I’ll wear it. Do people still do that? I’ll do it.”

“Only a dork would wear a tie clip,” said Dwight. “And only a dorkette would think it was cool to parade it around school.”

We were sitting at a table in the library. I squeezed his thigh under the table, a reckless gesture for school. He tried to pry me off after a polite few seconds, but I caught him by the bony fingers and held on. I smiled and said, “Do you take it back?”

“Yes. Uncle.”

“Good.” I let go. Then, “We’re still on for Thursday?”

He prodded his glasses up and said, “Are you kidding?” He stared the way people stare just before they are moved to declarations; I stared back, a convert at the altar of bony sockets and hollows.

One of us—me, probably—brought up Jack Flynn to break the hold we had stared ourselves into. Dwight said he’d looked the name up in the Boston directory first and in the others he had in the library. He said he could make the calls for me. It was research, after all, and he had enough distance on the subject to handle it with professional objectivity. He would say he was a researcher looking for the Jack Flynn who lived and worked in Boston in 1951, perhaps much longer, and would be approximately fifty-five to sixty-five years old now.

I said it wouldn’t work. If he was the least bit suspicious or had ever been in trouble, he’d deny it. Dwight said no; one makes it clear from the first that it is family business and confidential.

Imagine, I said: fifty-five or sixty years old. The Jack Flynn who picked Bernice up at Jordan Marsh, the one who was young and dashing with a freckled back….

He might still be dashing with a freckled back, Dwight pointed out.

No, I said. You’ll never find him. He was a slippery character then and he still will be. He’s not going to be found unless he wants to be. And from what Bernice says, he could have seduced young women all over Boston. He
may have been hunted down a dozen times by his illegitimate children.

“Do I have your permission to try?” asked Dwight.

I thought of Julius. Dwight would never meet Julius. All of this would be unthinkable if he were alive. “It would be one thing if I were curious, or if I had any feelings toward this man,” I began.

“How can you not?” Dwight asked.

“He’s nothing to me.”

Dwight shook his head.

“You’re curious, not me. You said it yourself—it’s a puzzle for you and you like puzzles. It’s a way to extend the Bernice puzzle. You’ve met her, so that’s no longer shrouded in mystery. So on to the next clue.”

Dwight listened carefully and said, “There’s probably a good deal of truth in what you say—”

“You’re bored. This gives you a nice research project.”

“What do you think Bernice would say about my making some preliminary inquiries?” he asked.

“She claims to hate him,” I said.

“But she’s so vain. She’d want him to see that she turned out to have her own TV show, that she made good and is svelte and everything else she tries to project over the airways.”

That was true. Bernice believed people enjoyed looking at her and listening to her. Jack Flynn could be a guest on her show! “I haven’t seen this man in thirty-six years and three months,” she might say quietly as her introduction. First she’d rerun the clip from her illegitimate-daughter confession. Then a dissolve to Jack Flynn, age sixty, watching Bernice’s taped declaration. Bernice would touch his arm or take his hand in her on-air-empathetic way. A tight shot of her face as she repeated, “I have not seen this man in thirty-six years and three months. Can you guess who he is?”