For only a brief part of the four-and-a-half-hour trip back to Manhattan, I slept or pretended to after negotiating a long perusal of The Monadnockian. Even within the confines of the back seat, doors locked and windows shut, we had to share it across our laps while Geneva maintained a possessive grip on her half of the book.
“What do you think I’m going to do with it?” I asked. “Tear it to shreds? Throw it out the window?”
“All I know is that you want it back, probably more than ever now. I’m just taking natural precautions.” She then asked, “What are you looking for, exactly?”
“Same thing you are,” I lied. “To match up tonight’s acquaintances with the teenagers they once were.”
“I bet it’s that state senator,” she said. “He was certainly on a mission.”
I asked why she said that, wondering nervously how transparent our interaction had been—the welcome note, the musical chairs, the dancing, our disappearance and reappearance. I’d hoped all was explained when Armstrong had stood, tapped a water glass with a knife, and announced the creation of the June Winter Maritch Memorial Scholarship, to be awarded to a graduating senior who planned to enter the field of education.
“I didn’t see him deep in conversation with anyone else all night,” she added. “Odd for a politician.”
“We had things to discuss.”
“Such as?”
“The scholarship. He wanted my blessing.”
“What’s not to like about a scholarship in memory of your mother?”
“Nothing,” I said.
I went straight to his photograph, as much to see what my mother had written as to inspect the young man he’d been. Like every male senior, he was wearing a tie and jacket. But his photo was different, showing a maturely handsome face and a smile suggesting a dignified future. “Ambition: the law,” his entry read. My mother had written nothing, not one stroke of a blue, red, or green pen. My first reaction was surprise, but my second was Of course; she was being careful.
Earlier, between bathroom and function room, I’d asked him if paternity had been confirmed, or was it just a guess due to my being born nine months after they’d rendezvoused.
“Your mother knew. I believed her.”
I didn’t ask the how and what of that, didn’t want to picture my mother colluding and swabbing my inner cheek or diaper. Somehow that tipped the scale toward the expanding belief that my mother wanted me to be the child of Peter Armstrong. Which one of them was asking for proof of paternity? Wouldn’t most married women live the lie that their own husbands had impregnated them?
“What about Holly?” I’d asked him. “Any claims there?”
“No. Definitely not. Your mother wanted your father to have his own child.”
His own child? Had that been what he actually said? I didn’t like his mentioning my father at all, let alone as backup inseminator.
Why was I even harping on Holly? She was undeniably her father’s daughter, bearing a keen resemblance to two of his sisters. I’d always enjoyed that—those two aunts being no beauties and eventually crotchety housemates we didn’t like to visit.
Geneva had fished out reading glasses for a closer study of Armstrong’s photo and didn’t seem surprised by the lack of editorial comment. “Guess he didn’t come to reunions,” she said.
I leafed ahead for the sake of appearances to Ritchie Perry. I asked if she’d caught the last name of either Dave or Donna, and she said, “No. And I couldn’t have been less interested.”
With no more tablemates to research, I moved forward to the group pictures of teams and clubs. First came a full-page photo of the yearbook staff, and sure enough, there was Peter Armstrong in a plaid short-sleeved shirt, posing at a manual typewriter. Next page: the class officers. And there indeed was class president Duddy McKean surrounded by a female vice president, second vice president, secretary, and treasurer.
Geneva yawned and patted the page as if to say, I’ve had enough; let’s put it away now. I said, “I’m not through.”
I guessed that she let me continue unsupervised because I was respectfully studying rather than vandalizing the book. Another few pages forward, I came to a double spread labeled “We voted!” Here were the seniors deemed best looking, most athletic, best dressed, smartest, class clown, and most likely to succeed—Peter Armstrong, unsurprisingly, next to a tall, bespectacled girl named Martha-Ann Roberts, both grinning and holding briefcases aloft in posed triumph.
I went back to the As and his formal head-and-shoulders shot. With my phone’s flashlight illuminating it, I saw a penciled dot, very faint. Then another. Five in all. Dances? Cocktails? Hand jobs? How would I ever know? Did other people get dots? I didn’t check every page but leafed ahead, about halfway through the alphabet, seeing none. I’d failed to ask Armstrong if their assignations had happened at a reunion, too stunned and offended earlier to discuss brass tacks. And even fainter: two letters and five digits. It looked like a phone number, old-school, which I had no appetite to memorize.
Geneva, whose head had been lolling against the back seat and whose breathing had gotten noisy, suddenly asked, “Think you’ll see him again?”
“Why would I?”
“He gave you his card, didn’t he?”
He had. “Maybe.”
“At one point in my life, I would’ve said that he’s too old for you, but I’ve mellowed on that.”
I said, “Ugh,” for reasons she couldn’t know.
“I gave him my card, but he only had eyes for you. You wanna hear my theory?”
“No.”
“He had a crush on your mother, and you look like the young version of her.”
“That’s no theory. He announced that as soon as he sat down—that everyone had had a crush on her. Now go back to sleep.”
“When you’re through poring over that, put it back in my briefcase.”
I didn’t answer. I found Gloria Hink, hair teased up to the frame of her photo, and—thanks to “Pep squad” under “Activities”—a Roseanne who surely had been our tablemate.
I closed the book. If Armstrong was right, life and paternity as I knew it was a lie. And my mother’s fixation on the class of 1968 had gone from silliness to sin. I remembered my father’s irritation over the subject of reunions and his unwillingness to attend. He couldn’t have known, or irritation would have given way to fury or divorce. And if he had known all along that he wasn’t my biological father, didn’t that make him all the more noble and devoted a dad?
I owed Peter Armstrong nothing. I was shaken and deeply sorry I’d heard this possible weighty truth. Why couldn’t he have fathered an out-of-wedlock child who’d been put up for adoption and would now be thrilled to find a respectable, elegant, seemingly prosperous elected official as her birth father? At least, at least, this Armstrong hadn’t told me of photos, report cards, and locks of hair slipped to him over the years.
Oh, wait. Locks of hair? When did DNA tests start confirming parenthood? I Googled “DNA testing began when?” and learned that it was possible, that tests were around to tell the tale by the time I was born.
Thanks a lot, Peter Armstrong, candidate for most likely to upend someone’s life in an instant.
Your alleged love child never wants to see you again.