What I got from Claudette over the next eight years I find hard to describe without sounding like a person who sold something. I did not sell anything. But I learned. I learned which fork, and that you could ask for a different table, and that people in that world said "summer" as a verb. I learned to sit in a chair as if I owned it. She took me to the Brooks Brothers at Easton for my first interview suit and stood behind me in the three-way mirror with her hands on my shoulders and said, "You'll go far in navy." She paid a third of my law school tuition, the third that the scholarships did not cover, writing the checks directly to the university so that I would never have to see the numbers She introduced me to people. She introduced me to Malcolm Wendt's wife at a symphony luncheon, which is how I came to have a second interview at Ruhl Benning when nobody from Linden had ever had a first.
And somewhere in those eight years, without ever deciding to, I began keeping my two lives separate, the way you keep two kinds of food from touching on a plate. I stopped telling my father about the luncheons. I stopped telling Claudette about Weber Road. When people at law school asked what my father did, I said logistics. I said supply chain. I let them think whatever they thought. I learned to drop my voice half a step and lose the flat Ohio a from words like bag and that, and when my father called me on the phone and said, "Hey kiddo, you eat yet," I would step out into the hallway to answer, because I did not want the people in my study group to hear the way I talked when I talked to him.
I'm not proud of any of this. I'm telling you so you understand what I was carrying into that lobby, under the navy suit and the quarter inch of cuff. I had spent eight years building a bridge between two worlds and standing on it alone, and on that Monday morning in November my father walked out onto the bridge in a pair of pleated trousers and six-button lapels, in front of every person I had ever wanted to impress, and I felt it sway.
That was why I said it. Not because I didn't love him. Because I was afraid that whatever it was that people saw in him, they would now see in me.
I left Claudette's house a little after two. She walked me to the front door, which she did not usually do; usually Marta did. In the front hall, under the portrait of my grandfather, a florid man with a pipe whom I had never met, she stopped me with her hand on my arm.
"Elaine."
"Yes?"
She seemed to be looking for something to say. Her fingers on my arm were thin and cold, and I could feel the hard edge of her rings through the wool of my sleeve. "Your father," she said. "I don't believe he'll hold it against you. He isn't a man who holds things. I always found that very irritating about him."
"You don't know him," I said. "You've met him twice."
She let go of my arm.