by Marlowe Benn
“In strict confidence, of course. It was largely boilerplate.” He coughed and said in a dry voice, as if reciting fine print, “Her estate would go to her children first, should she have any, then to her husband, should she have one, then to her surviving siblings in equal shares. Should they all predecease her, it would go to their children in equal shares.”
“Any other provisions? For you, for example?”
“The grasping family lawyer, you mean? Yes, there was a sum designated for me, five thousand dollars, I believe. She stipulated the same for a particular college friend, for a few women she was close to in the party back then, and for her old nanny, who has since died. She hadn’t amended the document in years.”
“I’m sorry, but I had to ask.”
“What’s this about?”
Julia answered with another question. “You said the other evening that you and she were once lovers. What about in the past year or so? Were you still close?”
“As I told you, we saw each other fairly regularly since she moved back to New York and especially since she moved into the basement flat. It was easy to entice her out for a decent meal and good whiskey now and then, and she knew she could count on me when she needed to vent some steam. That flat was a prison, you know, with Chester and Nolda looming overhead. I was glad to offer a shoulder to rage against and to assure her that at least one social registry male didn’t think she was poisonous. So, yes, we did become friends again. I like to think she was as pleased about it as I was.” He nodded toward an empty bench ahead and asked if she wanted to sit.
Julia considered what she had to ask next and said she’d rather walk. It would be easier to concentrate on his answers. “Russell, I’m afraid this is very personal. I hate to ask such a thing, but it’s vital.”
He stiffened. “What?”
“Were you and Naomi still lovers?” When he did not answer, Julia turned to face him and asked the precise question. “Did you and she have sex last summer?”
“No.” Sharp as a slap.
Did she believe him? So much suggested he was the baby’s father, and yet he declared it impossible. Unless Julia could trust him, he was a viable, even foremost, candidate for Naomi’s killer.
“I gather from the outrageous question that you’ve somehow learned her secret,” he said.
It might be madness, but yes. She did trust him. For now. It was enough to proceed. “I know she was pregnant.”
Russell stepped off the path to let a pair of schoolgirls pass. His face darkened. “What on earth possesses you to go marauding through Naomi’s private life like this? Do you think it’s some kind of game? I’m sorry, Julia, but I thought better of you.”
“I’m sorry too, Russell, but I need you to trust me, just as I must trust you. Please. This gives me no pleasure either. A great deal is at stake.” More than he could dream of.
He studied her for an excruciating length of time. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you can tell me about her pregnancy, for a start.”
His glare lingered. At last, with a disgusted shake of his head, he resumed walking. “She called it her last and greatest surprise, although I doubt it would have been either. Chester would have called it a stunt, in that way he has of ridiculing everything she did.”
“Were you surprised? Jealous?”
A faint color glowed above Russell’s white collar. “Surprised, of course. Jealous, though? Not in the way you’re insinuating. Our relationship hadn’t been physical in some time, and it was never truly monogamous. Naomi believed women are entitled to the same freedoms of intimacy as men. She believed nature endows women to experience sensual pleasure as much as men. She wasn’t wanton about it but not ashamed either.”
The same freedoms of intimacy. So simple, so reasonable. If women and men enjoyed the same right to exercise a say in public affairs, shouldn’t they be equally free to express and receive affections as they chose, including those most intimate? The principle was a cornerstone of the life that Julia strove for too. It was fair and just, and also woefully far from the custom of the land. Julia forced herself to concentrate on the matter at hand. “I realize this is another atrocious question, but it’s important. If you weren’t the baby’s father, can you think who might be?”
He coughed in rough astonishment. “No. She refused to tell me. She’d hardly countenance the question, in fact.”
“You must have some idea, though.”
“I gathered only that it was a brief and unhappy encounter. When I tried to ask, she was furious, whether at me or herself or someone else I couldn’t tell. The less said about it, the better, I quickly realized. I could only suspect the chap was someone she met in Albany last summer, just as I assumed an imprudent amount of alcohol was involved. I do know she had no intention to involve the fellow in her plans.”
“Plans? Was it deliberate? Did she intend to become pregnant?” Julia had a friend in London with a two-year-old brother, evidence of her mother’s sudden desire for another child before it was too late, a determination her friend termed “certifiably deranged.” Spinsters with such a desire would face almost insurmountable hurdles from family, friends, church, and state. No wonder they invariably surrendered to a childless fate. Did Naomi hope to become a pioneering exception?
“Good Lord, no. She said the pregnancy was utterly unwelcome, the worst thing that could happen.”
“An accident, then. Was it unusual that she took no precautions?”
Russell’s jaw worked as he struggled for civility and composure. Julia grieved for what this interview was costing her in his regard, but it was a sacrifice she had to accept. “Quite unusual. She insisted on precautions. ‘To keep the sexes equal,’ she said. She had her own, ah, device—and believed every woman should have one, married or not. I can’t think why she didn’t use it. Perhaps it failed. Of course I couldn’t ask. The issue seemed rather academic after the fact, not to mention judgmental.”
“How did you first learn of all this?”
He expelled a great breath. “She was agitated about something last summer. In hindsight I realize it must have been that disastrous encounter, though at the time I had no idea what the problem was. At first she wouldn’t discuss it, but about six weeks ago she confided that she was expecting. We had some mighty long talks about it, or rather, I listened as she argued with herself, back and forth, about how to proceed.”
There was no need to elaborate. They both understood that options were few for women in Naomi’s situation. All of them difficult, none of them happy.
“And then one morning she telephoned and asked to see me at once. I canceled a meeting and met her here at the park. We must have walked five miles as she laid out her decision.” He glanced around. “On this very path, in fact. She was shaking, I remember, as much from nervousness as from excitement. She told me she’d decided to accept the child as a kind of gift. A blessing from disaster, she said.”
“She intended to have the baby?”
“Yes, and to raise it herself, alone.”
A pioneer indeed. “That was a brave decision.”
“It was Naomi in a nutshell. She wanted to make an example of herself, show the world that women could raise children on their own, without either the financial support or respectability bestowed by marriage. It was time, she declared, to break the patriarchal grip on motherhood.”
Julia could admire the breathtaking courage of it, but such a thing would spell disaster for any political ambitions. “Wouldn’t that jeopardize her work? What about her hopes of running for senator in ’26?”
They continued in silence for several paces. “I suppose you learned about that from her Union friends,” Russell said. “Naomi would’ve admired your tenacity but resented like hell being the subject of it. But yes, that was paramount in her mind. Reconciling a baby to that ambition was no small challenge, as you might imagine.”
“Even staunch radicals might not vote for a Hester with infant Pearl in
full view.” Julia thought of Philip’s fierce old aunt Lillian, urging on La Follette and his bold reforms.
Russell smiled. “So I thought too. That conversation took another few miles. I finally persuaded her the only way she could hope to run a serious campaign for the Senate—that is, address any issue other than what everyone would call her promiscuity—would be to marry.”
Ah. “You?”
His smile broadened. “I have my faults, to be sure, but there were worse candidates. We even laughed about it later, the nature of my ‘proposal.’ It was the political expediency that convinced her. We agreed to say we were secretly married last spring.”
“Quite a compromise, given her views on the subject.”
“Don’t think I didn’t tease her about it. ‘A good launch,’ I said, ‘for a career in politics.’ Not only the compromise but the pretense. That’s all it was, of course. It would have been absurd—pointless and hypocritical—to harbor any romantic illusions of a conventional marriage. Oh, she was shrewd in her terms, all right, but in the end she agreed it could work. We both felt ready to devote our attentions to her child. Impending middle age, I suppose. We were planning to announce both the marriage and the child next month, once she felt confident the pregnancy was sound. By then it would have started to show.”
“You were prepared for the usual snickers?”
“Of course, though I had an answer ready to quiet them. A friend of mine in Boston, a judge, owed me a favor. He signed a wedding license for us and dated it last April. I still have it, though I doubt I could bear to look at it now. I even convinced her to take my mother’s emerald wedding ring, to wear once the baby became obvious, and a few other family baubles. So legally we were married for, what, six months. I suppose that makes me a widower now. Technically.” His soft words disappeared in a long pause. “I trust you’ll never repeat this? In the end it was only a scheme that never came to fruition.”
They veered onto a new path lined with plump hydrangeas fading to silver and mauve. “You must have been devastated to learn of her death,” Julia said to escape a haunting vision of that beautiful old ring hidden in Naomi’s bedroom.
“I was eating breakfast when Chester telephoned. My God, what a day that was. And then the next day when he and Perry said she’d committed suicide, I could barely stay in my seat for wanting to rage at something, someone. Having to fathom such a thing and then discuss only how to hide it from the world. Every bone in my body hurt. I wanted it to be a vicious lie, an unspeakable hoax. How could she do such a thing? She’d been happier those last few days than I’d seen her in years. I couldn’t imagine a more awful irony. After all she was giving up to make a new life for herself and that child. How far she’d come in accepting, even welcoming, that pregnancy. It was awful, Julia. You can’t imagine the sick fury and guilt and grief I felt when the family only wanted to tidy over her death, render it sad but oh so tasteful.”
She could imagine. The memory of Gerald’s parents’ picture-perfect decorum, the engraved notice of his “passing” they’d sent to important associates, still stirred the bile in her throat. Russell rolled his head in a great, bone-creaking circle. “There’s always some devil of doubt to whisper your worst fears in your ear. I thought she’d suffered second thoughts, decided she couldn’t go through with the charade after all. Maybe the prospect of life shackled to me made the bargain too onerous for her. At least Dr. Perry’s news put those fears to rest. Though it was small consolation.”
This was the moment she’d been waiting for. Julia stilled to replay every inflection of what she’d just heard. Was his sorrow genuine? She heard again the fears and grief he could never dispel. Yes. He did not know.
She turned. “Naomi didn’t take her own life, Russell, but neither did she suffer a fatal illness.” The truth’s cruelty grew tenfold. “She died from an abortion.”
Russell swiveled away. “Jesus God.” His voice spiked in an explosion of shock. “She changed her mind? Without telling me? I can hardly believe it.” He covered his eyes as the next thought dawned. “But that shouldn’t kill her. Not these days.”
Julia couldn’t bring herself to repeat the grisly word Alice had used. Butcher. “It seems she died from a hemorrhage, likely an infection too. It was very badly done, probably quite cheaply.”
“Damn her pride! She knew I’d help with whatever she thought best. I’ve told her a thousand times I’d give her the shirt off my back if she’d take it. No questions asked, ever. But money—Chester’s restriction of it, I mean—was a kind of weapon for her. She used his meanness to get back at him. The more he cut her off, the more drama she made of her poverty. They were like demons, each with their teeth in the other’s hide, refusing to let go or admit they were bloodied. It was madness, but I never thought it would kill her.”
As painful as it was for him to think Naomi had changed her mind about marrying him and having the child, the suggestion that she’d been treated maliciously would be worse. Julia said nothing of Alice’s assertions. They walked on in agonized silence.
At last he spoke. “How do you know this?”
“Alice Clintock told us yesterday. Glennis and I went downstairs to talk to her”—a bold elision—“and found her injured, barely conscious. After that family meeting the night before, someone tried to strangle her.”
“What?” Pigeons scattered in a swoosh of mottled feathers.
“She wasn’t badly hurt. But obviously someone wants to frighten her.”
“Someone angry about the new will?”
“Perhaps. Or about putting the pills in Naomi’s mouth.”
“So it was her. I thought as much.”
“She said Naomi would approve of the ruse, to call attention to Chester’s abuses.”
Russell made no reply.
“We think Alice was attacked that evening, not long after she ran out of the room. The apartment door and windows were bolted from the inside when we found her, which means her attacker got in through the basement.”
“And you suspect me?”
“I thought very hard about you, yes. And her brother.”
“This is too foul to contemplate,” Russell said. “It’s true Chester saw red wherever Naomi was concerned, and he can bluster with the best of them, but I can’t believe he’d actually attack any woman like that, for any reason.”
“Who then has access to the house and knows about the key in the pantry?”
“It’s never been a secret. I’ve known where it was since we were boys. Certainly the family and staff know. And we were all there. You and Glennis disappeared, but the rest of us remained for some time. We all left the room at various times, I guess. Any of us could have slipped downstairs without being noticed. But what a thought. I can’t believe it. I know these people, Julia. They fight with words, not physical violence.”
A commotion ahead suspended their conversation. They entered a plaza filled with several throngs, each milling around a different person orating from a platform to cheers or catcalls. “Candidates,” Russell explained. “Every lunch hour they’re here, preaching to anyone who’ll listen.”
They circled the edge of the restless mass. Each speaker had a megaphone. How could anyone sort out one shouting voice from the next? The political hopefuls stood beneath placards announcing, in much patriotic swagger, their names and party affiliations. A few boasted simple slogans: “Clem’s your friend.” “Curtis won’t hurt us.” She recalled Willard Wright’s curdling disdain for democracy, for its trust that the larger the aggregate of fools, the better the chance of collective wisdom.
The crowd thinned at one spot. At first Julia thought the platform there was unoccupied, but then a small poster bobbed above the hats of a dozen or so milling people. She recognized Fern Gillespie, one of the women at Naomi’s Equal Rights Union. She held a megaphone with one hand and a placard with the other, pumping it up and down to the cadence of her cry. “ERA Now!” it proclaimed, the same as her repeated shout.
One of the watchers cupped his hands to his mouth and called out a vulgar epithet. Her chant did not falter. Another man imitated the way her squat body rocked as she poked her arm in the air for each thin-pitched “Now!” His fellows jeered with laughter, and a few joined in the mockery. Miss Gillespie kept her gaze fastened on the distant treetops. Her energy was clearly flagging, and the placard wobbled badly. She fumbled to switch hands, clutching the megaphone against her ribs under one arm while she transferred the placard pole to her other hand. It was a clumsy gesture, and the small crowd hooted its amusement.
“What’s for supper, Mother?” one shouted.
“Leaflets again!” another complained in a pantomime of fork-fisted disgust.
“Who’s minding the kiddies?” the first man demanded.
Miss Gillespie ignored them. Three women in brown coats, heavy for the fine day’s warmth, stood close by and doggedly applauded. No one else seemed to be paying her any attention, more entertained by the antics of the men.
“ERA?” Julia asked.
“Equal Rights Amendment.” Russell gave a short, cheerless laugh. “If you’d known Naomi, you wouldn’t have to ask. With the Nineteenth Amendment passed, this is their next big push. A constitutional amendment to give women full equal rights under the law.”
Julia recalled that Vivian Winterjay had mentioned it the evening of the gala. “I try to glance at a newspaper when I can,” she said, “but that was the first I’d heard of it.”
“Editors judge it a waste of ink, by and large. There’s not a ghost of a chance it will go anywhere, but I suppose the WPA’s in it for the long run, considering the sixty, seventy years it took to get the vote.” He stopped. “Let’s not go any closer. I don’t want them to recognize me.”
Such a blessing a good hat brim was. The shelter of one’s own private shadow. “Fern Gillespie knows you?”
“Chewed me out once when I went to the Union to meet Naomi. Thought I was interfering, distracting her from her God Almighty work.”