“I love teaching,” I said, staring out at the brightly colored tide of dancing youth. “There aren’t many schools left where you can assignMadame Bovaryto an eleventh grader and she’ll come back after Christmas break to tell you she readA Sentimental Educationfor fun. When they readDavid Copperfield, they read the whole thing. They readThe Return of the Native. The AP girls readAnna KareninaandMoby-Dicklast semester.Moby-Dick!”
“I hate to tell you, but everyone readMoby-Dickwhen I was in high school, and I didn’t go to any fancy private girls’ school on the Upper East Side.”
“Times change. Soon no one will believe the wonders I’ve seen, smart kids reading big books and writing papers without AI.”
“I don’t believe they write their own papers,” Eddie said.
“Jonathan wants me to retire, but I won’t do it, not as long as girls get drunk at weddings and talk aboutMadame Bovary.”
“You’re fifty-three,” he said. “You’re too young to retire. For heaven’s sake, I’m too young to retire.”
We took up our cake and champagne and walked the room’s perimeter until we found a velvet banquette tucked in the far back corner, our own wedding island. There we settled in.
“This cake is better than the last cake,” I said. Eddie said hehadn’t eaten any of the last cake, and I said in that case he would have to take my word.
“I take your word on everything,” he said.
The champagne was better at the Plaza, too, but there was no need to harp on it.
“So are you going to tell me?” I leaned back into the banquette and pushed off my shoes, which had grown less comfortable over the course of the evening. Like Kathy Schultenover, I was a tiny bit drunk.
“Which part?”
“Let’s say all of it, but why don’t you start with my mother. I think we should get her out of the way.”
Eddie looked across the room and smiled at the extraordinary flowers, the candlelight, the dancing groomsmen. “Your mother would have loved this. Wedding crashing was exactly her style. In the years that I knew her, your mother was extremely game, extremely pretty, and extremely angry at your father. She was also good at her job. We worked on a couple of books together. I was still a junior editor, but she was a full-fledged publicist. Publicists mature more quickly than editors. We’d go out to lunch sometimes. She had a hard time going out after work.”
“Single mother, two kids.” Once again I remembered to humble myself in the face of all my mother had held aloft.
Eddie nodded. “I liked her kids. On the weekends, I’d take her and the two daughters to a sandwich shop between Harvard Square and Central Square called Uncle Bunny’s. Editorial made more money than publicity, and they paid the men more anyway, and I had no dependents, so by comparison I was rich.”
There we were, the four of us taking the commuter rail in from Winchester and then taking the T to Harvard Square andwalking up Mass Ave. to Uncle Bunny’s. I held Eddie’s hand the whole way. “Raspberry-lime rickeys.”
“That’s right, and your mother got egg salad. Uncle Bunny’s made the best egg salad sandwiches. So there we were, coworkers, pals. A couple of times we met up with my friends, the Hotallings. Polly had grown up in Boston and liked to come in to see her parents. Once, when you and your sister were with your father for the night, your mother and I went out to dinner with the Hotallings like two couples. We went for Turkish food and all of us had too much to drink, except for Polly, who was pregnant with Alex at the time. Skip was being difficult. He had it in his head that the best way to deal with our situation was for him to belittle me in front of Polly, in case she had a good imagination, which, by the way, she didn’t have.”
Skip Hotalling had told me my mother had some funny ideas. “Do you want to tell me about the situation?”
“With Skip?”
“That’s who we’re talking about, right?” Because, come to think of it, Skip was the natural progression from my mother. I emptied my glass of champagne.
Eddie looked alarmed. “You mean your mother didn’t tell you any of it?”
“I wasnine.”
“I know how old you were, but she must have, later on.”
“There was no later on. We didn’t talk about you. I don’t think my mother ever said your name again.”
Eddie sat with this for a minute “Wait here, will you?” Then he left the banquette and was swallowed by the dancing crowd. A singer in a silver catsuit strutted out in front of the orchestra and I knew that everything was about to change. No more Lerner andLoewe. She opened her set with “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and all the aunts and uncles and grandparents turned and left the floor as if dismissed. My god, how sad my mother must have been to have lost Eddie Triplett to Skip Hotalling, having already lost Buddy Zabriskie to the sea. Unlike Polly, my mother had an impeccable imagination.
When Eddie came back he was carrying an open bottle of champagne. “I tried to pay for it, but the bartender wouldn’t let me.” He filled our glasses again. “First, let me say, your mother is a prince. That’s the only word I have because calling her a princess sparks the wrong connotation. She was good to keep all of this to herself.” He looked over at the stage. “Isn’t that very loud?”
I nodded. “She is. Did you really think I knew?”
“I thought you must have known some of it.” He shook his head. “This is strange. It’s been decades since I came out to anyone.”
“So you’re out.”
