“Emma, what are they talking about? How could someone blackmail you for having mono all those years ago? I mean, it’s not something anyone would be ashamed of, even if we did call it the ‘kissing dis-ease.’ ”
Emma seemed engrossed in the folds of Belmont’s coat. “Why do you suppose they have this statue here?”
This was not the best time for an art history lesson.
“Emma! You asked me to come, you show me a very real and very threatening blackmail note—”
“All right, I know. I’d just rather not think about it.
Any of it. To start with, I didn’t have mono, I had a baby.”
“What!”
“Well, I miscarried, but I was pregnant. That’s why I dropped out of school.”
“Oh, Emma, I’m so sorry. I wish I had known. It must have been terrible for you.”
Emma nodded and two perfectly round tears oozed 25
from the corners of her eyes and slowly made their way down her smooth cheeks.
“Still, this happens all the time. It’s not something to be blackmailed about,” Faith persisted.
“It’s—it’s a little more complicated than that.” Faith was not surprised. She decided to sit back herself and let Emma tell her story. She didn’t expect a torrent of words, but perhaps this method would in-duce a steady trickle.
Emma tucked her thick hair behind one ear. A large square-cut emerald flanked by equally impressive dia-monds on her ring finger flashed in the thin winter light.
“It was a pretty crazy time. I mean, life was always a little hyper around my house, but I was used to it. I was pretty caught up in my dancing.” Faith remembered. Emma had studied ballet since she was a small child, snaring an occasional part in The Nutcracker.
She’d been talented. “But that spring, things got really insane. It’s hard to talk about it, Faith. I’ve tried not to even think about it. That’s why the card was such a shock. I’ve been pretending nothing ever happened, or that it was all a book I read, not my life.” Faith nodded. If you could manage it, this didn’t sound like a bad idea. Her problem would be in the blotting-out department.
“I was supposed to spend the night at a friend’s after a party, but I didn’t feel well and went home. Nobody heard me come in. My mother and Jason were quarrel-ing. I stopped outside the library door. It was so unusual. I don’t think I had ever heard them fight—not with each other. Mother was constantly screaming about one thing or another, but Jason never responded, which would make Mother rave on. I think he got a 26
kick out of it. Anyway, that night he was shouting, too.
‘She’s your bastard; you take care of her,’ I heard Jason say. ‘Why should your little by-blow get anything from me, and certainly not the same amount as my own daughter!’ ”
Emma stopped. Faith knew where they were going now. She knew why Emma wanted it to be someone else’s life.
“I had no idea what they were talking about. At first I thought my mother must have had another child and given it up. Then Mother started in. She didn’t raise her voice, but I could hear every word. It was ten times scarier hearing her talk this way. A dead kind of voice.
‘You told me it didn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You told me that Emma would be like your own child. What happened, happened. I should have known your precious genes would mean more than common decency.
You’ve never been good to her. But this is it, Jason.
You either make her equal to Lucy in your will or I’m leaving.’ I heard something break. Poppy has always liked to throw things, and when I went in, I saw pieces of glass on the floor in front of the fireplace.” Faith was openmouthed and immobilized. She couldn’t even reach for her friend’s hand. The trickle of words had become a torrent. She saw it all as Emma described it. The hall in their town house, thickly carpeted with Oriental runners. Emma’s footsteps muffled. The voices from the library, Jason Morris’s private domain. Then the crash of crystal on the marble surrounding the large fireplace.
“What did you do? Did you confront them? Oh, Emma, I can’t believe this!” She grabbed her friend’s hand now and squeezed hard.
“I wasn’t thinking. I couldn’t think. I just walked in 27
and looked at them. They stared at me as if they couldn’t believe that I was there; then Mother said,
‘You were supposed to be at the Auchinclosses’. I remember thinking what a stupid thing it was to say. I mean, I’ve just learned that my father isn’t my father and she’s blaming me for not being somewhere else.
“Jason just looked at me and left the room. He couldn’t handle it. I told my mother that I didn’t care anything about any money. I only wanted to know the truth. Who was my father? She didn’t want to tell me, said it didn’t matter, that he was long gone and I couldn’t see him. It was really strange. Finally I went to bed and stayed there. After two days, she cracked. I wasn’t eating and wouldn’t get up. She’d come in and yell or cry. I didn’t see anyone else. Lucy was in college, thank God.”
“Who was it?” Faith asked gently.
“Nathan Fox.”
“Nathan Fox!” Faith said. Her voice was too loud and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Nathan Fox!” she said more softly. How to offer condolences in a situation like this? Emma’s father has been murdered, but presumably he had not been much of a presence in Emma’s life, since she’d only found out about him when she was seventeen and since he hadn’t exactly been accessible. She blurted out what was foremost in her mind, “The Nathan Fox, the one who was just—
that is, the one who wrote Use This Book to Wipe Your—”
“Yes, yes,” Emma said, cutting her off a tad impatiently. What other Nathan Fox was there?
“I was furious at Mother for never having told me, and things in my life that hadn’t made sense before suddenly did. You know Jason had always favored 28
Lucy, and I thought it was because I was a disappointment to him. I never did that well in school and I was, you know, shy. He likes women like my mother, like Lucy. Women with personalities.”
That’s an interesting way to put it, thought Faith.
“Emma, you have more personality—and a better one—in your pinkie finger than either of them.” As Faith hastened to reassure Emma, her thoughts were racing in several directions. What a thing to do to a child! And how devastating to discover your father was not your father! She felt a cold fury at Poppy’s total lack of responsibility. At the same time, a voice was saying, Poppy Morris and Nathan Fox! So the photograph had not been misleading. Handsome and, by all accounts, extremely charismatic, he wasn’t just coming for the food and witty conversation at the Morrises’.
But it was the blackmail note that dominated. “We know everything,” it stated. Emma’s pregnancy.
Emma’s parentage. And what else? Faith knew right away. Knew what she’d have done herself. Obviously, Emma would not have been satisfied simply to know her father’s name.
“So, you got out of bed and tried to find him?” Emma nodded. “I got out of bed and ran away.
Mother swore that she didn’t know where he was. That she hadn’t heard from him since he went underground.
I did get it out of her that he knew about me, though.
They named me Emma after Emma Goldman—and all those years I had assumed it was Emma Woodhouse.
Mother has a weakness for Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice meets Bonfire of the Vanities.” Faith had forgotten Emma’s sense of humor—it was as unexpected as the rest of her.
29
“Where did you go?” Faith was beginning to think they should get some lunch. She was getting hungry, and they still had a great deal of ground to cover. The bench was also getting hard.
“I didn’t know any radicals, or Communists, or even socialists. Not personally. But I figured there would have to be some in the Village, so I took the subway downtown and started going from one bookstore to the next. Bookstores with the right titles in the window.
Nobody seemed to think it was strange that I was trying to find out about Fox. I met a woman, the owner of Better Read Than Dead, who told me that someone named Todd Hartley knew everything there was to know about Fox. She gave me his address. He was living in a collective with a bunch of other people. One of them had money and had rented a huge loft in SoHo.
Todd and the rest of them took me in right away. I thought it was perfect. Nobody had ever paid much attention to me at home, except to make sure my teeth got straightened and I didn’t put on weight. The comrades—that’s what they were called—wanted to hear what I had to say. They were all such dears and so serious.”
“Would you mind if I sat here?” A young mother with a stroller, infant asleep, answered her own question by plopping down next to them. “I’m exhausted.
She only sleeps in motion. I’ve pushed her through every museum, and, when the weather was better, from here to Battery Park and back.”
This was news to Faith. She assumed normal babies knew enough to go to sleep in their cribs. An innate reflex. You put them in, they closed their eyes, and voilà.
This baby didn’t look like something out of a Stephen King novel, yet clearly she was an aberration, torment-30
ing her mother. The woman’s hair needed a trim and her lipstick was crooked. The baby, on the other hand, looked great. She had softly curling dark hair and her tiny lips pursed in a perfect little O. However, the poor woman’s problem was not of great interest to Faith.
Children were something that happened to other people.
Obviously, they couldn’t continue their conversation.
“Let’s grab some dogs from Sabrett’s and walk through the park,” she suggested.
“I’m supposed to be having lunch with people important to Michael. I’m already dreadfully late,” Emma said desperately. “Except you haven’t told me what to do yet.”
“Call them and cancel,” Faith advised. “This is more important.”
Leaving the young mother, who was nodding off herself while the baby tried to eat her toes, they went in search of a phone. Faith called Josie, too.
Outside in the sunshine, deceptively warm, Emma picked up the threads. The Sabrett’s hot dog had satisfied Faith’s physical hunger; now she was longing for the rest of Emma’s story.
“Anyway, they were so nice to me, you can’t imagine. Trotskyists. You know, you’re not supposed to say Trotskyites, they don’t like that. They were all getting ready to go into factories to mobilize the working classes. They said the movement in the sixties and seventies had concentrated too much on students and the antiwar movement. Todd used to stand up and shout,
‘If every student broke a pencil, what would you have?
Splinters! If every worker shut down his machine, what would you have? Revolution!’ It was one of his 31
favorite quotes from Daddy—Nathan Fox, I mean. It was wonderful to learn all about him.” If this represented Fox’s rhetoric, Faith had to wonder about the man’s intellect, but perhaps you had to have been there. So much depended on context: hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in front of the Capitol building, for example. Nursery rhymes de-claimed would have sounded portentous and inspired.
“Todd had dropped out of NYU to work full-time in the movement, and he was collecting Nathan Fox’s speeches into a book. He promised he’d help me find Fox. He’d met him once someplace in Minnesota the year before. He wouldn’t tell me where Daddy was then, but he said he’d let Fox know I wanted to see him. Todd thought it was pretty cool that I was Fox’s daughter. He made me feel proud. I’d never felt anything like that about Jason, even when I thought I was his daughter. All the comrades had adopted Russian names as nicknames. While they were waiting to go into the factories, one girl, Olga, was teaching herself to set type. She had a little printing press. They would write all these pamphlets and go to some factories in New Jersey and pass them out at the gates. I used to fold and staple.”
“I think they’d been setting type by computer for quite a while by then,” Faith observed, acutely aware that while she was going to various cotillions, Emma had been experiencing a very different sort of life that spring. Certainly one less boring, although folding and stapling might have become somewhat repe-titious.
“Well, nobody told Olga.” Emma pulled her mink closer as they walked briskly across the park toward the West Side. There wasn’t any snow on the ground, 32
although flurries were predicted. The trees looked cheerless, their branches gray spikes against the leaden winter sky. “I got pregnant with Todd. It seemed like the thing to do—sleep with him, I mean.
The comrades were all terribly chummy that way.
They explained to me that sex was merely a physical act and monogamy was a bourgeois institution, though Todd didn’t want me to sleep with anyone else, fortunately. I’d graduated from folding and stapling to working on a little article about Emma Goldman for a pamphlet when Poppy found me. She told everybody how old I really was, and Todd was pretty scared. I’d said I was twenty-one.”
“And they believed you!” Faith said incredulously.
Emma didn’t look twenty-one now. A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped past them. An elderly couple was bundled up in lap robes, clearly enjoying the ride.
“They look so happy,” Emma said wistfully. “It must be nice to have normal parents. They look like somebody’s parents, don’t they?”
Faith steered her back to the conversation. “And when Poppy got you home, you found out you were pregnant.”
“Yes. She’d been very nice to me until then. I think she felt guilty; plus, she was truly worried about what had happened to me. But you know my mother. She’s so used to people doing whatever she says that she totally freaked when I said I wasn’t going to have an abortion. I was going to keep the baby. I mean, she’d had me out of wedlock, although technically she was in it, but you know what I mean?”
Faith did. What better way to get back at your mother—and Jason—than first to get pregnant and next plan to raise the baby yourself? She also had a 33
sneaking suspicion that Emma may have wanted to have someone she could well and truly call her own.
“She told me we were going to Dr. Bernardo for a checkup, just to make sure I was all right. You know who he is, right?”
Dr. Bernardo had been taking care of inconvenient problems for New York ladies in Poppy’s circle for years, and Faith had indeed heard of him.
“When I got to his office, it turned out she’d scheduled an abortion, so of course we had a huge scene, but I did go home again. The comrades hadn’t exactly been into solidarity after Poppy had talked to them. I called them, told them what had happened, but they were sort of ‘See you later,’ and I didn’t have anyplace else to go.”
Again, Faith told her, “I wish I had known.”
“I wish you had, too. Poppy yelled at me all the way back to Sutton Place and half the night. It worked. I’d finally fallen asleep, and when I woke up, I realized I’d lost the baby.”
Years later, there was no mistaking the grief in Emma’s voice.
“I was in pretty bad shape after that and couldn’t go back to school. They got a tutor for me and things calmed down. It was hard to stay mad at Mother. You know how she can be so . . . well, Poppyish. I still felt betrayed, but I caved. Let her take care of me. The one thing I insisted on was going to boarding school for senior year. I just couldn’t go back with all of you and pretend nothing had happened.”
“Come to work with me and I’ll make you the best hot chocolate in the city.” It was getting too cold for much more walking. Faith had on one of those Norma Kamali OMO sleeping-bag coats, which made you 34
look like an army-surplus number. Normally, it verged on too much warmth; today, it might as well have been mosquito netting.
“I’m sorry,” Emma said regretfully. “I said I’d join them for dessert. You know Michael’s running for the House next year, and these ladies are very important to his fund-raisin
g campaign. He was very insistent that I go. There was a Post-it on the mirror to remind me this morning.” She stopped speaking and flushed slightly.
“Sometimes I mean to go to these things, then forget until it’s too late. I can’t blow this off when he’s made such a big deal out of it. But I can’t leave until you tell me what to do,” she said imploringly.
Faith was surprised. It was the second time Emma had said this. It seemed so clear.
“You haven’t committed a crime or done anything anyone could remotely blackmail you over. I suggest you and Michael take the note to the police and let them deal with it. They can help you figure out who might be doing this. There can’t be too many choices.
Who would have known both about Fox being your father and the fact that you got pregnant?”
“But I can’t do that.” Emma stood absolutely still on the path, as rooted as the massive oaks to either side.
“Michael would find out.”
“Michael doesn’t know!” Faith gasped.
“Of course not. It really didn’t have anything to do with him, and the Stansteads might have been funny about it.”
Given the reputation of the Stanstead family—they considered William F. Buckley a flaming, and traitor-ous, liberal—Faith could understand that Emma might not want her parentage known to her in-laws, or the early pregnancy. But her husband? Wasn’t marriage 35
supposed to be about sharing—you’re your husband’s best friend and all that? It was one of the reasons Faith had ruled out matrimony so far. She preferred her best friends. They were easier to talk to and made her laugh.
“Emma, this is not a secret you can keep from your husband. He wouldn’t want you to. Blackmail is very, very serious.” Faith thought of Michael Stanstead’s concerned face. Emma had to tell him and together they could decide what to do next. She couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be anything but supportive of his wife and upset at what she had gone through at such an early age. She told Emma about Michael coming into the kitchen.
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