“How many times have you known such things—before?” my grandmother asked.
“This is the first time, really,” my mother said. “That’s why I know.”
Lydia and my grandmother instinctively looked at me, perhaps to ascertain if I’d understood my mother correctly: that the time “before,” when she’d had her “fling,” which had led to me, was not a time when my mother had enjoyed any special feelings toward whoever my father was. But I had another idea. I was thinking that maybe this was my father, that maybe this was the first man she’d met on the train, and he’d heard about me, and he was curious about me and wanted to see me—and something very important had kept him away for the last six years. There had, after all, been a war back when I’d been born, in 1942.
But as another example of how wrong my Aunt Martha was, my mother seemed to see what I was imagining, immediately, because she said, “Please understand, Johnny, that this man has no relationship whatsoever to the man who is your father—this is a man I saw for the first time today, and I like him. That’s all: I just like him, and I think you’ll like him, too.”
“Okay,” I said, but I couldn’t look at her. I remember keeping my eyes on Lydia’s hands, gripping her wheelchair—and on my grandmother’s hands, toying with her brooch.
“What does he do, Tabitha?” my grandmother asked. That was a Wheelwright thing to ask. In my
grandmother’s opinion, what one “did” was related to where one’s family “came from”—she always hoped it was from England, and in the seventeenth century. And the short list of things that my grandmother approved of “doing” was no less specific than seventeenth-century England.
“Dramatics,” my mother said. “He’s a sort of actor—but not really.”
“An unemployed actor?” my grandmother asked. (I think now that an employed actor would have been unsuitable enough.)
“No, he’s not looking for employment as an actor—he’s strictly an amateur actor,” my mother said. And I thought of those people in the train stations who handled puppets—I meant street performers, although at six years old I hadn’t the vocabulary to suggest this. “He teaches acting, and putting on plays,” my mother said.
“A director?” my grandmother asked, more hopefully.
“Not exactly,” my mother said, and she frowned. “He was on his way to Gravesend for an interview.”
“I can’t imagine there’s much opportunity for theater here!” my grandmother said.
“He had an interview at the academy,” my mother said. “It’s a teaching job—the history of drama, or something. And the boys have their own theatrical productions—you know, Martha and I used to go to them. It was so funny how they had to dress up as girls!”
That was the funniest part of those productions, in my memory; I’d had no idea that directing such performances was anyone’s job.
“So he’s a teacher?” my grandmother asked. This was borderline acceptable to Harriet Wheelwright—although my grandmother was a shrewd enough businesswoman to know that the dollars and cents of teaching (even at as prestigious a prep school as Gravesend Academy) were not exactly in her league.
“Yes!” my mother said in an exhausted voice. “He’s a teacher. He’s been teaching dramatics in a private school in Boston. Before that, he went to Harvard—Class of Forty-five.”
“Goodness gracious!” my grandmother said. “Why didn’t you begin with Harvard?”
“It’s not important to him,” my mother said.
But Harvard ’45 was important enough to my grandmother to calm her troubled hands; they left her brooch alone, and returned to rest in her lap. After a polite pause, Lydia inched her wheelchair forward and picked up the little silver bell and shook it for the maids to come clear—the very bell that had summoned Lydia so often (only yesterday, it seemed). And the bell had the effect of releasing us all from the paralyzing tension we had just survived—but for only an instant. My grandmother had forgotten to ask: What is the man’s name? For in her view, we Wheelwrights were not out of the woods without knowing the name of the potential new member of the family. God forbid, he was a Cohen, or a Calamari, or a Meany! Up went my grandmother’s hands to her brooch again.
“His name is Daniel Needham,” my mother said. Whew! With what relief—down came my grandmother’s hands! Needham was a fine old name, a founding fathers sort of name, a name you could trace back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony—if not exactly to Gravesend itself. And Daniel was as Daniel as Daniel Webster, which was as good a name as a Wheelwright could wish for.
“But he’s called Dan,” my mother added, bringing a slight frown to my grandmother’s countenance. She had never gone along with making Tabitha a Tabby, and if she’d had a Daniel she wouldn’t have made him a Dan. But Harriet Wheelwright was fair-minded enough, and smart enough, to yield in the case of a small difference of opinion.
“So, have you made a date?” my grandmother asked.
“Not exactly,” my mother said. “But I know I’ll see him again.”
“But you haven’t made any plans?” my grandmother asked. Vagueness annoyed her. “If he doesn’t get the job at the academy,” my grandmother said, “you may never see him again!”
“But I know I’ll see him again!” my mother repeated.
“You can be such a know-it-all, Tabitha Wheelwright,” my grandmother said crossly. “I don’t know why young people find it such a burden to plan ahead.” And to this notion, as to almost everything my grandmother said, Lydia wisely nodded her head—the explanation for her silence was that my grandmother was expressing exactly what Lydia would have expressed, only seconds before Lydia could have done so.
Then the doorbell rang.
Both Lydia and my grandmother stared at me, as if only my friends would be uncouth enough to make a call after dinner, uninvited.
“Heavens, who is that?” Grandmother asked, and she and Lydia both took a pointed and overly long look at their wristwatches—although it was not even eight o’clock on a balmy spring evening; there was still some light in the sky.