A Family Affair

EMILY BERNARD spent much of her adult life resenting her father’s mistress— going so far as to plot revenge. Then, after decades of bitterness, she realized it was time to do what she never dreamed she could: FORGIVE.

I don’t understand why he would buy it for her.” My mother sat at the kitchen table while my brothers and I orbited her chair. She kept track of our family finances and had come across a curious receipt. My father had purchased a plane ticket for one of his patients, Jeanette Currie. “It doesn’t make any sense,” my mother said, as much to herself as to us.

“You worry too much, Mom!” I teased. My mother was a fretful person, supervisor of details and predictor of all that could go wrong. I just wanted to change the subject.

It was December 1988 at my parents’ home in Nashville. I was on winter break from college, and my older brother, James, was back from New York to spend Christmas with us. My younger brother, Warren, was a high school senior. As siblings, we had our differences, but we always snapped together like magnets around our mother, whom we uniformly adored. I wanted her to relax and join our reunion, cracking inside jokes the four of us had honed over many years. I was sure my father would eventually explain the ticket.

What I didn’t know then was that for several years he had been building a secret life, with Jeanette Currie at its center.

My father was an ob-gyn; he met Jeanette when she was a 24-year-old intern in hispractice. She was married and training to become a medical assistant. After she left the position, my father—30 years older than Jeanette—became her doctor. My mother, who managed the office, was taken by the younger woman’s kooky wit. “She’s quite a character,” my mother said of her; Jeanette was what we Southerners describe as colorful, and my mother loved a character. She didn’t have a clue about the role this one would play in our lives.