The View from Mount Joy (26 page)

She took another bite, managing the multidextrous task of chewing and smiling at the same time.

We went downtown, to the Café di Napoli, an Italian restaurant with a run-down charm. We split a plate of eggplant parmigiana and a bigger plate of spaghetti and meatballs.

“Once Darva and I skipped school to see a matinee of
The Godfather,
” I said after we had pushed away our plates. “Then we ate here. It was a very Italian kind of day.”

Surprising me, Jenny reached across the table and took my hand. “I bet you two had a lot of fun.”

Surprising myself, I teared up. Jeez, I was going to bawl in front of this woman whom, more than anything, I wanted to impress.

“Sorry,” I said, opening my eyes wide, as if to air-dry my eyeballs. “Sometimes…” I blinked, the air-dry method not working so well.

“I know,” said Jenny, and in solidarity, her own eyes welled up. “I still have a hard time with my divorce—even though it’s been more than a year since it was final.”

“So you…you’ve been living in New York by yourself since then?”

Jenny nodded and finished the wine in her glass. When I asked her if she wanted to order more, she held her palm toward me and waved it.

“I’m
full.
”

“How about some coffee?”

“Coffee’d be good.”

Our waitress, who had treated us as if we were malnourished children, scolding us to eat more and use more butter on our bread, now tried to get us to order dessert.

“You gotta have something sweet when you’re celebrating,” she said, handing us menus.

Jenny and I looked at each other and laughed.

“But we’re not celebrating anything,” I said.

The waitress smiled, nodding slightly.

“Oh yes you are.”

Of course, Jenny said later, she was right; we were celebrating the beginning of
us.

We did allow the waitress to bring us a cannoli to split, but it sat there like a dessert cigar on the plate, untouched as we told more of our stories.

Jenny had met her husband outside the Eastman School of Music, where she had studied the flute.

“Is he a musician too?” I asked.

“Eric?” she asked. “God, no. He’s a stockbroker. He’d come to hear a concert his sister was in. Melanie plays the cello.

“Anyway, it was snowing, and I was going to the same concert, and running, because I was late, and the heel of my boot—I was wearing these fancy high-heeled boots, of all the dumb things—gets stuck in the street grate and my foot slides right out of my boot and I go flying in the sleet and snow and fall onto the sidewalk hard enough that I ripped two big holes in the knees of my tights. Anyway, Eric picked me up. Literally. He told me to put my arms around his neck and I did, and he picked me up right there in the street and brought me into the concert hall. Then he ran back out and got my boot.”

She sighed and smiled, and poked at the cannoli with her fork.

“And that, as they say, was that. We started dating and after I graduated, I moved to Manhattan to be near him. We got married three years later…and after seven years we got divorced.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, because I could hear in her voice how it still pained her.

“Don’t be,” she said. “I mean, it’s a shock when the person you love doesn’t love you back the same way, but as more time goes by, I realize he wasn’t so hot. Of course, I thought he was for the longest time; I mean, that’s why you marry someone, right? You wouldn’t marry someone you didn’t think was the most amazing person in the world—” She put down her fork and folded her hands in her lap. “I’m babbling.”

“No you’re not,” I said, and reached across the table, coaxing her hands off her lap and into mine. “What did you do for work out there?” I asked, sensing that while she had a lot to say about her ex-husband, she didn’t necessarily want to say it now.

“Oh Joe,” she said, and as she straightened up, she let go of my hands to flick back her thick dark hair. “I got work playing almost right away. Studio work, mostly jazz, although some classical—I played on Ryer Tilden’s first album and then Donita Belmonte’s.”

“My mom loves Donita Belmonte.”

“Well, Mrs. A.’s always had excellent musical taste, as I recall. Then I got in this little combo—the Winds in the Willows. I know, kinda corny, but we had so much fun playing together and we got a lot of engagements. But here’s the funny thing—the happier I got in my career, the more Eric seemed to resent it. I know it’s a classic story, but really, who thinks her own husband is going to be jealous of her work, her happiness?” Jenny shook her head. “It was
incomprehensible
to me. So the more he pouted about me having this gig or that, the more I tried to please him, as if I was the one at fault, you know? Then I was hired to play in the orchestra for the show
Susie Loves Harold.
There I am, playing eight shows a week on Broadway and doing some work in the daytime with the Winds, and…well, that’s when I think he started his first affair. At least, that’s the first time I found out about an affair he was having. For all I know, it had been going on long before I caught him at it.”

“Give me his address and I’ll go break his face,” I said, in an okay imitation of Marlon Brando as the Godfather.

“Oh, you’ve got better things to do,” she said, finally sawing off a chunk of the cannoli with the side of her fork. When she was done, she blotted the powdered sugar on her lips with a napkin and said, “Better things to do with me. That is, if you want to.”

A squad of cheerleaders somersaulted into my chest, shouting,
Score one for the home team!

Jenny had two sisters and two brothers, and I met them all at Thanksgiving, along with two in-laws, two nieces, and one nephew. Her parents hosted the dinner, a noisy affair with people shouting over one another to be heard, but it was all good-natured, except when a brother who was of one political persuasion began arguing with a sister who was of another.

Fortunately this argument came just as we were finishing our pumpkin pie and were all ready to leave the table anyway.

Jenny met my family at one of my mother’s Tuesday night dinners, which was considerably quieter than her family’s but, I hoped, just as entertaining.

My mother was delighted to host a favorite student—“Really, Jenny, I remember feeling
giddy
the first time I heard you play”—and even more delighted to see that we were, as she called it, an item.

Flora was shy, clinging to my arm as if it was a vine and she was Tarzan, but when she heard Jenny was a musician, she whispered in my ear, asking if I thought she should play the piano for her.

“I bet she’d really like that,” I whispered back, and very solemnly, with the proud, straight-backed posture she inherited from her mother, Flora walked to the piano, pretended to flip back the tails of her tuxedo, sat down, and played “Clouds.” Emboldened by our applause, she proceeded to play “The Circle Song.”

“Maman
loved
Joni Mitchell,” she explained, looking over her shoulder.

Like an old pro, she played enough but not too much, taking a deep bow after “Both Sides Now” and trying modestly to suppress the smile that wanted to pop off her face.

“That was really lovely,” said Jenny. “Just
lovely.
”

“
Merci,
” said Flora, deciding, I guess, that the wall would remain up.

“Il n’y a pas de quoi,
” answered Jenny, telling her it was no big deal.

“
Vous parlez français?
” asked Flora, surprised.

“
Un peu,
” said Jenny. “If you went to Ole Bull High at a certain time and you were a girl, you took French, because we had the coolest teacher ever, Mme. Dumont.”

“That was my mom’s French teacher!” said Flora.

“I know,” said Jenny with a kind smile. “And you know what teacher you and I have in common?”

Flora nodded. “Grand-mère.”

“That’s right: Mrs. A. Although she’s Mrs. R. now.”

“I told her she could keep her own name,” said Len, “but she was taken by the shimmering beauty of the name Rusk.”

“Shimmering beauty,” said my mother with a laugh.

Shimmering beauty,
I thought, looking at my date.

“So where are you living now, Jenny?” asked Linda.

“For now, with my sister. She lives in a duplex near Lake Hiawatha.”

“Carole and I lived together when she and Joe moved to Minneapolis,” said my aunt Beth, “until the man with the shimmeringly beautiful name took her away.”

“We like women who live with their sisters,” said my mother.

If a poll had been taken among the adults, Jenny’s approval rating would be through the roof. But it was Flora I was most concerned about; I wanted desperately for my daughter to like this new woman in my life.

Daughter.
Saying, even thinking that word was still a surprise, like a handful of Pop Rocks going off in my mouth. It actually had been one of the easiest decisions of my life.

“I don’t want to be Flora’s
guardian,
” I said in my lawyer’s office, “I want to be her
father.
”

“It’s not like you haven’t been,” said Gary Conroy, my old defense partner from Granite Creek who’d gone to Minneapolis for law school and stayed. He handled all my store—and now that I had more of it—business. “I mean, she’s lived with you since she was a baby.”

It was true, but I had let the uncrossed boundaries of my relationship with Darva define the geography of my relationship to Flora, too. I was
mon
Joe, and even if I had changed her diapers; helped her with her homework; played Mousetrap and Operation and Old Maid and a million other games; built enough structures out of LEGO blocks and Lincoln Logs to populate a major metropolis; read
Goodnight Moon
and all the Curious George, Dr. Seuss, and Winnie the Pooh books a gazillion times; brought her to work and given her little chores (her reward being permission to go wild with the price gun); and brought her to the dentist and doctor—sometimes with Darva and sometimes without—even though I had done everything a dad does, I had never thought of myself as Papa. But now I did. Now I had to.

Flora had burst into tears when I told her I was completing the paperwork to officially become her father.

“Flora,” I said, taking the girl on my lap, “I thought you’d like this.”

“I do!”

“Then why are you crying, honey?”

“I don’t like paperwork!”

This struck me as funny, but I didn’t show it on my face, instead busying myself by smoothing her dark curls with my palm. “What do you mean?”

“Paper is so…papery! What if it gets thrown away? What if it burns up? What if someone rips it up? Then you won’t be my papa and then I won’t have a mom or a dad!”

“Someone could rip up all the paper in the world—all the licenses, all the certificates, all the documents, all the legal briefs—and I would still be your dad.”

The sigh Flora exhaled had more air than I thought her lungs capable of holding.

“I’m glad,” she said, hugging me, and then she asked, “What’s a legal brief?”

She continued calling me
mon
Joe, and then, occasionally, shyly, Papa, but to both of us, it sounded unfinished, and she settled on Papa
mon
Joe, which I thought perfectly described what I was to her, even though it did sound like the name of a Caribbean restaurant.

On that Tuesday night at my mother’s, I could see Flora was intrigued with Jenny, but when we sat on the couch together, she planted herself as close to me as she could without sitting on my lap. I knew she was calculating how much time this new woman might take away from her, how much affection. But as the months passed, the math that Flora had figured out was all about addition; nothing was taken away from her. In fact, Jenny added to her life, my life, our life, and when we sat together on the couch it was to Jenny’s side Flora was drawn.

A year after she had come into the store to pick up milk and bread for her mother (“Okay,” she later admitted, “I wasn’t out of milk
or
bread. I was just hoping to see you”), Jenny and I got married.

It was the kind of no-hassle, no-fuss affair I can’t recommend highly enough. The bride wore corduroys and a red sweater textured with lint balls. The groom wore blue flannel (a shirt, not a suit) and jeans. For all we knew, we were dressed only for the simple chore of picking Flora up after school, the day before Thanksgiving vacation was about to start.

A lazy snowfall had started when Flora climbed into the backseat, slamming the door behind her, and when I turned to greet her, I saw her stick her tongue out at a boy crossing the street.

“Is that your boyfriend?” I teased, even as I thought:
Don’t tell me it’s starting already!

“
Boyfriend?
” said Flora, spitting out the word. “That’s Tyler Renfield. That’s the new kid I told you about—the grossest boy in the class.”

“What makes him so gross?” asked Jenny, watching the boy pull a stocking cap out of his jacket pocket and tug it over his red hair.

Flora tsked loudly, as if asking,
Isn’t it obvious?

“Well, first of all, he’s a big show-off. If he’s not called on during math, he throws a little fit, and then he says back where he used to live, he went to a private school with only boys in it and he says he wishes he could go back to it, because all-boy classes are just naturally smarter, and then he plays the saxophone in band, and the way he plays—I’m not kidding—sounds like a really bad baby crying.”

Jenny laughed into the collar of her pea coat.

“And today when Miss March asked what people were doing over Thanksgiving, he raised his hand and blurted out—even before Miss Marsh called on him—that his mom and dad and little brother are going to Hawaii ‘for a little Honolulu getaway.’ Isn’t that show-offy
and
stupid, saying ‘a little Honolulu getaway’?”

As I pulled into the street, I was about to respond, but Flora wasn’t done talking yet.

“He said, ‘My parents like to do things spontaneous,’ and then Miss Marsh corrected him—ha!—and said ‘do things
spontaneously.
’