Good Riddance(19)

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 advisor.”

“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.





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