Then She Found Me Read Online Free Page B

won’t.”
    “Why weren’t you angry? Didn’t you want to ruin his career after he abandoned you?”
    Bernice closed her eyes and shook her head,
rattled
her head vigorously. One toad-sized clip-on earring flew off her earlobe.
    I thought: This person is my mother.
    “There’s so much I want to know about you,” she said chummily, her revelation behind her. We were eating our meal, the entire list of eight appetizers. Bernice had ordered for us and told the waiter we must not be disturbed.
    I asked what she wanted to know about me.
    “Why, for example, would anyone want to teach a dead language in a public high school? Don’t most Radcliffe graduates with your inclinations become college professors in the romance languages?”
    I told her I loved Latin. That it was fun. Once you knew the rules, it was so logical.
    She leaned closer across the table. “Am I hearing something
real
now, something”—she made a cluster of her fingertips and touched her head and then her chest—“something about April … that she likes rules and logic? Am I hearing something significant about her?”
    I helped myself to one steamed dumpling and one pan-fried dumpling. After a moment I said, “I’m not good at that kind of question with someone I don’t know.”
    She said quickly, “I understand perfectly. You have a hard time with intimacy. What should we talk about that won’t take me in too close? Your job?”
    “I don’t mind—”
    “Say something in Latin. I had four years of it at Girls’ Latin and all I remember is ‘
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.’”
    I said, with feeling,
“Semper ego auditor tantum?”
    “Much call for Latin teachers?” she asked, unmoved.
    I told her, no matter. It was mandated in our curriculum. And I was tenured.
Tenere:
to hold.
    “I hated it,” said Bernice proudly. “Who wants to learn a dead language when there’s Spanish and French and Russian and Japanese around? With a billion people on earth speaking Mandarin Chinese?”
    “There’d be no French and Spanish without Latin,” I answered. “And do you remember how beautiful Latin poetry is? Catullus? ‘Let us live and love, nor give a damn what sour old men say. The sun that sets may rise again, but when our light has sunk into the earth it is gone forever.’ You find that dead?”
    Bernice sat back against her chair, blotted her mouth, and checked the napkin for signs of color. She was disappointed. I hadn’t done enough.
    “I know it’s not a glamorous job,” I offered, “but it’s very satisfying to teach something no one cares about.”
    She looked at my clothes: a long-sleeved cotton jersey,which I owned in black, purple, celery, and white, my blue drop-waist Indian cotton jumper. Tonight, for dress-up, I had added a Guatemalan shawl.
    “Your look,” she said. “What would you call it? Collegiate? Primitive?”
    “Not to your taste?”
    She smiled diplomatically. “We have all the time in the world,” she said.

SIX

    A
s far as I was concerned, my real parents were Trade and Julius Epner of Providence, Rhode Island, who had adopted me in 1952 and named me April. I was their only child for seven years until a baby brother temporarily diluted the power of my office. I forgave them for that act of disloyalty; I forgave them for everything because they died two years apart—my mother just last year—too young and before I was prepared. Widowhood at sixty-four made Trude a teller of pretty autobiographical tales, uncontradicted by Julius’s dour editing. Her stories were eulogies to him: their meeting by chance, their wedding, their finding a little daughter more perfect than their own flesh and blood could have fashioned, considering. Trude started talking right after my father’s funeral, the first night we sat
shiva
. The upstairs neighbors came the first night, and a contingent of my grown childhood friends arrived and left in a clump the second. Then the rabbi, thecantor, the cantor’s wife,