The Two-Family House(64)

“What’s this?” Judith asked him. He motioned for her to open it. Inside was a photograph of a young man, faded and bent in the upper left corner. It was Judith’s father, probably twenty-five years earlier. He was standing in front of the same stone arch where they had just met. “This is you. How old were you?”

“I was eighteen. It was my first year at college.”

“You went to college here?” Judith’s hand was shaking. Her father already knew the campus. It was possible he had already eaten in this coffee shop a hundred times. She put the photograph down on the table. “I remembered you took some math courses after high school, but you never told me you went to college here.”

“Just for a little while. I never finished. When my father died, I left to help Abe with the business.”

“Uncle Abe asked you to quit school?” Judith was surprised.

“No, he didn’t want me to leave school. But my mother worried that it would be too hard for him to run the company alone. They argued about it.”

“You majored in mathematics?”

“Yes, but I had to leave in the middle of my sophomore year.”

“Is that why…” Judith hesitated as the waitress approached their table and put two cups down. Judith put both of her hands around the steaming cup of tea. She was shivering.

When the waitress left, her father raised his eyebrow. “Why what?”

“Why you’re always so angry.” It dawned on her all at once. “You never wanted to work in the box business.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she tried to take them back. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

The waitress reappeared and set down their plates. Her father picked up half of his chicken salad sandwich and took a bite. Why isn’t he yelling? She repeated her apology. “I’m sorry.”

Instead of answering, he just chewed and swallowed. “I can’t believe this place is still here,” he said. “They always had the best chicken salad.” He proceeded to polish off the first half of his sandwich with a gusto Judith couldn’t remember ever seeing before. He usually only picked at his food. “You’re right about the business.” He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin from his lap. “I wanted to be a mathematician.”

Judith was utterly confused. She barely recognized the man sitting across from her. The man who carried around old photographs and liked chicken salad sandwiches. The man who wanted to be a mathematician and wasn’t angry at his daughter. The man who wanted to have lunch with her.

She took a sip of her tea and stared at her plate. Yellow cheese had congealed along the edges of the toasted bread. Her appetite was gone.

“Why are you telling me this?” Judith asked her father.

“I was going through some of my old things, and I found the photograph. It made me realize I never told you that I went to school here.”

She had so many questions. “Is that why you made me go here? Because you wanted me to go to the same school you went to?”

Her father’s face took on a familiar irritated expression. “Look, Judith, I don’t want to rehash that old argument. City College is a damn good school, even if it isn’t Bryn Mawr or Barnard. When you told us you wanted to go away we were just about to move. We were building the business. We had no idea what we’d be able to afford—”

Painful memories came back to her in a torrent. “Do you know you never even congratulated me for getting into college? Not even for being named valedictorian of my class?” Her face grew hot and she began to cry. She tried to hold back her tears, to spare herself the embarrassment of crying in front of her father in the coffee shop booth. She felt ridiculous. But she couldn’t stop.

Her father said nothing. He turned to the briefcase that was still next to him on the seat of the booth, opened it again and fished out a second envelope. Was it another photo? Another piece of his past that he suddenly wanted to share? He handed it across the table to Judith. But this time the envelope was sealed. It was a letter, addressed to her, from Radcliffe College.

She stopped crying. “Where did you get this?”

“It came in the mail yesterday. Your mother hasn’t seen it.”

But I told them to mail all correspondence to my adviser. Judith had decided to take an extra year at City College in order to continue her studies, but now she was ready for the next phase of her education. Five years had taught her a few things—this time around she was prepared. She had applied for scholarships, housing stipends and work-study jobs, all to secure her financial independence. She wasn’t going to ask her parents if she could go away to graduate school—she was going to tell them. She would work two extra jobs if she had to, but there was no way she was going to be discouraged this time. She had it all planned. Except the part about Radcliffe mailing her letter to the wrong address.

Her father interrupted her thoughts. “Don’t you want to open it?”

“I don’t want you to be angry.”

“How can I be angry when I don’t even know what it says?”

His casual manner only confused her more. She opened the envelope. “Read it,” her father urged. So she took a sip of cold tea and began:

“‘We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to Radcliffe College as a candidate for the degree of Master of Arts.…’” She skimmed the rest of the first page and then scanned the second. “This says I’ve been accepted as a Mary B. Greenough Scholar.”