“Sure,” she said. “We figured.”
I offered my hand. “Daphne,” I said rather needlessly.
“I know. Hence the jockeying for the seat next to you. You got my note?”
“Upon arrival.”
Now seated, napkin in place on his lap, he leaned in my direction, and said quietly, “We must talk.”
Across the table, Dave said, “Congratulations on the landslide. You had my vote. Both our votes.”
“For what?” asked Geneva.
“Dog catcher,” Armstrong said with a wry smile. “Hasn’t that news made its way to New York City?”
“He’s joking!” said Barbara. “Peter’s our new state senator.”
“Senator?” I repeated. “Wow. That’s big. That’s like . . . next stop White House.”
“Not U.S. senator. State senator. In Concord.”
Did Geneva’s first question really have to be “Is there a Mrs. Armstrong?”
“Not at the present time.”
“Divorced?”
“Actually, never married.”
“Broke a lotta hearts, though,” said Donna.
“Peter was class president,” said Barbara.
“Actually, I wasn’t,” he said. “I ran but I lost.”
“Remind me who won,” said Mimi.
“Someone named Duddy,” said Geneva. “An Irish last name?”
Shouldn’t one of us explain why she knew that? Not Geneva, who rose and said she was getting another drink. Anyone else? Her treat.
I said I’d have another Tickled Pink, an order echoed by two others, inspiring Ritchie to rise and offer his help. When she was out of earshot and wouldn’t hear me drastically underplaying her relationship to The Monadnockian, I said, “My mother left her yearbook to me. Geneva’s fascinated with it . . . We’re neighbors . . . She lives on my floor.”
Since Peter’s arrival, several classmates had left their own tables to say hello and offer congratulations. During a break from well-wishers, I asked him, “Did you have my mother for English?”
“I did. And I worked on the yearbook. I had her when she was still Miss Winter.”
Amplifying needlessly, I said, “It was her first job right out of college.”
“We all had a crush on her. She was the youngest teacher in the entire school, at least while we were there.”
“And quite the looker,” added Dave. “If it’s okay to say that to someone’s daughter.”
Could there have been a more awkward moment for Barbara to have said, “And, boy, you sure look a lot like her. A dead ringer.”
Geneva and Ritchie were back, managing three drinks apiece, beyond the orders requested. She took her seat and asked me what she’d missed.
I said in a well-modulated voice, “Everyone remembers my mother. Quite vividly.”
“I think she was faculty before your father was principal,” said Donna.
“I was at their wedding,” said Peter.
What did he just say?
“Teacher’s pet!” said one of the women.
“Not as an invited guest. I worked at the club where the reception was held, as a busboy.”
“Were you the teacher’s pet?” Geneva asked.
I noted his political skill when he replied, “She certainly wrote some very nice college recommendations for me.”
“Got him into Dartmouth,” said Mimi.
“Since when do applicants get to see what their teachers write about them?” asked Geneva.
“Maybe when letters do a great deal for a shy senior’s self-esteem,” he said.
“I’m curious as to why you asked to be at our table,” said Geneva.
His reaction was an eloquent tilt of his head, easily translated as Our? What our? I asked to sit with Daphne. You are the extraneous plus-one. “Because I look forward to speaking with Miss Maritch.” He didn’t add “privately” or “one on one” but did add, “I never had the chance to express my condolences.”
That would be the sum of it then. He merely wanted to snag me for his formal expression of sympathy. Had he been one of the handful of grads who’d come to her funeral? Why not ask? I did.
“I most certainly would have, but I was out of the country. I didn’t hear about her passing until I returned.”
“Do state senators travel a lot, like on those junkets we’re always reading about?” asked Geneva.
He ignored the question as waiters were bringing our entrees—breast of chicken with rice and broccolini, apparently obliging Geneva to note, “Broccolini! I wouldn’t have expected that!”
“Maybe you were expecting canned peas up here in the boonies,” said Donna.
“Or Tater Tots,” said her husband.
“Who knows what I was expecting? It just came out. You know what my problem is?”
I said, “I think they do.”
“My big mouth. I warned Daphne about it the first time we met. I don’t have a filter. Very bad. But you know where this comes from?”
The whole table waited, no one looking the least sympathetic.
“Hollywood!”
“Hollywood?” Roseanne repeated. “From watching movies?”
“No. From working there. The majority of people I dealt with weren’t what you’d call diplomatic. In fact, a majority were assholes. And proud of it.”
“Oh, right. You make documentaries,” said Ritchie.
Would anyone ask the logical follow-up question—What documentaries?—so she’d have to name her prize-winning, if not only, film? Would they even know what matzo was?
There was no music playing, though a deejay had staked some territory behind a table and was fiddling with switches and knobs. I said, “There’s dancing?”—a disingenuous question since the yearbook had many references to partners, the desirable and the not so much.
“Any minute now,” Peter said. Lucky for him, the music started. I didn’t recognize the song, but apparently it was a sentimental favorite: “Three Stars Will Shine Tonight,” the theme from Dr. Kildare, one of the women explained.
Peter crossed his knife and fork on his plate, removed the napkin from his lap, and said, “I feel it’s my duty to break the ice. Daphne?”
I took a sip from my second Tickled Pink, and said, “Why not?”
It’s hard to describe what makes a man a good slow dancer. At ease but leading, hands not roving, cheek not docked and unwelcome on the near stranger’s. Smells nice.
I said, “Your constituents are staring.”
“Let ’em.”
“Maybe they think you brought a date.”
“It’s only a dance,” he said. “And I’m famous within this particular constituency for escorting the unescorted.” Something of a dip followed, which caused several onlookers to clap.
“I hope you’re just being a charming politician.”
“As opposed to what?”
“Flirting.”
There was a longer pause than I expected. When he finally spoke, his tone was newly formal. “Dancing aside, it would be most inappropriate, in fact, unseemly, for me to flirt with June’s daughter.”
Not Mrs. Maritch, not Miss Winter. June.
“I don’t think I want to know what you’re about to tell me.”
“You’ve already guessed,” he said.
9
Hence the Note
Though I wanted to know none of this, I couldn’t help asking, “When and for how long?”
By this time, Senator Armstrong and I were outside the function hall, coatless in the cold. He’d offered me his suit jacket, which I batted away. The adulterer!
“I promise you nothing happened when I was a student,” he said.
“When? Graduation night? Spring break from Dartmouth?”
“You’re really angry,” he said. “But I hope someday you’ll understand—”
“Understand what?” And this in my old, furious, wronged-wife voice: “That you fucked your English teacher—oh, and I forgot—your yearbook adv
isor.”
“After,” he said. “Well after. I’ve already said that.”
“‘Well after’ is worse! ‘Well after’ means she was married. To my father, by the way.”
We were both shivering. Armstrong said, “Come inside. I know where we can speak in private.”
Clearly, he knew every square foot of the Pickering Knights of Columbus Hall. I followed him grudgingly past the unmanned reception table, the abandoned coat check, around the corner to the handicapped bathroom. I said, “You’re kidding.”
“No, listen. I’ve thought ahead. I knew we’d be speaking in private. If we’re interrupted, I’ll explain that we’re discussing the June Maritch Memorial Scholarship, which I’m initiating with this year’s graduating class in honor of our fiftieth.”
That gave me a moment’s pause—did he mean that? I’d appreciate a scholarship in my mother’s name, which was about time. But as the door locked behind us, I snapped back to affronted, demanding, “What’s left to discuss? Is this when you tell me it wasn’t just sex? That it was a great love?”
“Daphne, please—”
“Who started it?”
“It was mutual. We both always acknowledged that.”
We both . . . when? During quickies in handicapped toilet stalls every five years? “How long did this love affair go on?”
He closed his eyes as if steeling himself for the attack that was sure to follow the truthful answer. “A long time.”
“Until . . . ?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Why do I have to know this? It can’t do anything but make me posthumously furious at my mother. It’s not like she was unhappily married! My father is a wonderful man. I’m sure they loved each other. He would’ve moved to New York years ago, a lifelong dream, but stayed here because of her.”
What was that pained look I was getting? Grief over my mother’s death? Shame? Guilt? Pity for my father? Regret for spilling the ugly beans? I asked again, “Why tell me this? You get it off your chest and I’m stuck with a sickening secret. Anything else you’d like to unburden yourself about?”
“I was afraid of this. I didn’t even know if you’d grant me a private audience. But you’re a mature woman. You have a good head on your shoulders. I thought it was time for you to know the truth.”
“The truth that my mother was an adulterer? Thanks. I needed that like a fucking hole in the head.”
“Not that,” he said.
“There’s more?”
“I thought you would draw the obvious conclusion.” He was looking at me with undue tenderness, which made me retreat a step.
“I seem to have miscalculated,” he said. “I should’ve tracked you down, come to New York, met with you privately.”
“So you could take me to lunch and regale me with the good times you and my mother had in the sack?”
He cranked a paper towel from the dispenser and blew his nose. “I never married. I never had a family I could call my own.”
Looking back, a psychologist would characterize these five minutes as denial of the textbook kind.
Then I got it. Tonight’s meeting wasn’t about an extramarital affair. It was to announce that he, Peter D. Armstrong, believed he had impregnated my mother and the fruit of that insemination was Daphne Elaine Maritch.
10
What Are You Looking For, Exactly?
For only a brief part of the four-and-a-half-hour trip back to Manhattan, I slept or pretended to after negotiating a long perusal of The Monadnockian. Even within the confines of the back seat, doors locked and windows shut, we had to share it across our laps while Geneva maintained a possessive grip on her half of the book.
“What do you think I’m going to do with it?” I asked. “Tear it to shreds? Throw it out the window?”
“All I know is that you want it back, probably more than ever now. I’m just taking natural precautions.” She then asked, “What are you looking for, exactly?”
“Same thing you are,” I lied. “To match up tonight’s acquaintances with the teenagers they once were.”
“I bet it’s that state senator,” she said. “He was certainly on a mission.”
I asked why she said that, wondering nervously how transparent our interaction had been—the welcome note, the musical chairs, the dancing, our disappearance and reappearance. I’d hoped all was explained when Armstrong had stood, tapped a water glass with a knife, and announced the creation of the June Winter Maritch Memorial Scholarship, to be awarded to a graduating senior who planned to enter the field of education.
“I didn’t see him deep in conversation with anyone else all night,” she added. “Odd for a politician.”
“We had things to discuss.”
“Such as?”
“The scholarship. He wanted my blessing.”
“What’s not to like about a scholarship in memory of your mother?”
“Nothing,” I said.
I went straight to his photograph, as much to see what my mother had written as to inspect the young man he’d been. Like every male senior, he was wearing a tie and jacket. But his photo was different, showing a maturely handsome face and a smile suggesting a dignified future. “Ambition: the law,” his entry read. My mother had written nothing, not one stroke of a blue, red, or green pen. My first reaction was surprise, but my second was Of course; she was being careful.
Earlier, between bathroom and function room, I’d asked him if paternity had been confirmed, or was it just a guess due to my being born nine months after they’d rendezvoused.
“Your mother knew. I believed her.”
I didn’t ask the how and what of that, didn’t want to picture my mother colluding and swabbing my inner cheek or diaper. Somehow that tipped the scale toward the expanding belief that my mother wanted me to be the child of Peter Armstrong. Which one of them was asking for proof of paternity? Wouldn’t most married women live the lie that their own husbands had impregnated them?
“What about Holly?” I’d asked him. “Any claims there?”
“No. Definitely not. Your mother wanted your father to have his own child.”
His own child? Had that been what he actually said? I didn’t like his mentioning my father at all, let alone as backup inseminator.
Why was I even harping on Holly? She was undeniably her father’s daughter, bearing a keen resemblance to two of his sisters. I’d always enjoyed that—those two aunts being no beauties and eventually crotchety housemates we didn’t like to visit.
Geneva had fished out reading glasses for a closer study of Armstrong’s photo and didn’t seem surprised by the lack of editorial comment. “Guess he didn’t come to reunions,” she said.
I leafed ahead for the sake of appearances to Ritchie Perry. I asked if she’d caught the last name of either Dave or Donna, and she said, “No. And I couldn’t have been less interested.”
With no more tablemates to research, I moved forward to the group pictures of teams and clubs. First came a full-page photo of the yearbook staff, and sure enough, there was Peter Armstrong in a plaid short-sleeved shirt, posing at a manual typewriter. Next page: the class officers. And there indeed was class president Duddy McKean surrounded by a female vice president, second vice president, secretary, and treasurer.
Geneva yawned and patted the page as if to say, I’ve had enough; let’s put it away now. I said, “I’m not through.”
I guessed that she let me continue unsupervised because I was respectfully studying rather than vandalizing the book. Another few pages forward, I came to a double spread labeled “We voted!” Here were the seniors deemed best looking, most athletic, best dressed, smartest, class clown, and most likely to succeed—Peter Armstrong, unsurprisingly, next to a tall, bespectacled girl named Martha-Ann Roberts, both grinning and holding briefcases aloft in posed triumph.
I went back to the As and his formal head-and-shoulders shot. With my phone’s flashlight illuminating it, I saw a penciled dot, very faint
. Then another. Five in all. Dances? Cocktails? Hand jobs? How would I ever know? Did other people get dots? I didn’t check every page but leafed ahead, about halfway through the alphabet, seeing none. I’d failed to ask Armstrong if their assignations had happened at a reunion, too stunned and offended earlier to discuss brass tacks. And even fainter: two letters and five digits. It looked like a phone number, old-school, which I had no appetite to memorize.
Geneva, whose head had been lolling against the back seat and whose breathing had gotten noisy, suddenly asked, “Think you’ll see him again?”
“Why would I?”
“He gave you his card, didn’t he?”
He had. “Maybe.”
“At one point in my life, I would’ve said that he’s too old for you, but I’ve mellowed on that.”
I said, “Ugh,” for reasons she couldn’t know.
“I gave him my card, but he only had eyes for you. You wanna hear my theory?”
“No.”
“He had a crush on your mother, and you look like the young version of her.”
“That’s no theory. He announced that as soon as he sat down—that everyone had had a crush on her. Now go back to sleep.”
“When you’re through poring over that, put it back in my briefcase.”
I didn’t answer. I found Gloria Hink, hair teased up to the frame of her photo, and—thanks to “Pep squad” under “Activities”—a Roseanne who surely had been our tablemate.
I closed the book. If Armstrong was right, life and paternity as I knew it was a lie. And my mother’s fixation on the class of 1968 had gone from silliness to sin. I remembered my father’s irritation over the subject of reunions and his unwillingness to attend. He couldn’t have known, or irritation would have given way to fury or divorce. And if he had known all along that he wasn’t my biological father, didn’t that make him all the more noble and devoted a dad?
I owed Peter Armstrong nothing. I was shaken and deeply sorry I’d heard this possible weighty truth. Why couldn’t he have fathered an out-of-wedlock child who’d been put up for adoption and would now be thrilled to find a respectable, elegant, seemingly prosperous elected official as her birth father? At least, at least, this Armstrong hadn’t told me of photos, report cards, and locks of hair slipped to him over the years.
Good Riddance Page 6
