Body in the Big Apple ff-10

by Katherine Hall Page

  Faith turned around, as much to stretch her neck as to see how many people were behind her. A middle-aged woman stood against the wall, her eyes locked on the speaker, hanging upon every word. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Faith would have liked to stare longer. Not only was someone besides Poppy exhibit-ing signs of loss, but the woman was hard to catego-81

  rize. She was wearing a drab mustard-colored parka, which she’d unzipped, revealing a white cotton turtleneck. Her hair, light brown with as much again of gray, was parted in the middle and worn in a long braid, snaking down across her shoulder toward the waistband of whatever was completing her uninspired outfit. There was some sort of button pinned to the jacket. Faith could not read the slogan from this distance, but she was sure it expressed solidarity with someone—or something like whales or redwoods. It wasn’t hard to imagine her in the sixties, fist raised, hair blowing in the wind, finding answers in Fox’s di-atribes—and maybe more. Emma, and Richard Morgan, had spoken of Fox’s women. Faith had a hunch that the lady in brown was one.

  The man who had read the lines from Ecclesiastes at the start of the service stood up again and addressed the group.

  “Aside from his cousins Marsha and Irwin”—he nodded toward two elderly people sitting close together in the front row—“Nathan Fox leaves no survivors but his words. As his agent and friend, I watched his words transform a generation. Nathan was cruelly, barbarically struck down in an act we cannot compre-hend, but he is not dead. Not while his words live.” This looked to be the finale and Faith tuned back in.

  “No survivors.” Well, she knew that wasn’t true. She looked at the back of Poppy’s head. Besides the two of them, who else in the room knew that Arthur Quinn’s words were false? Knew the whole story, knew enough to blackmail Emma?

  “He was a skinny kid when he came to me with the first book. How could I not take him on, even when he called me a parasite?” He paused for the laugh, which 82

  came. “Yeah, I told him, I’m a parasite, but an honor-able one.” More laughter. “He liked that.” Quinn stopped again, seeing that Nate Fox in his mind’s eye, or assuming that was what people would think. A sensitive parasite.

  His voice grew louder as he continued his speech.

  “How could I not do everything to spread those words?

  He wrote with passion, conviction, and a monumental sense of injustice. There’s been a great deal of talk these last days about Nathan Fox’s life underground—

  a wasted life. But Nate loved being on the run. He was on the run all his life—from the establishment, and maybe from himself. Certainly”—he smiled with studied ruefulness and a twinkle in his eye—“from every woman who tried to keep up with him.” During the laugh that followed, Faith darted a glance at the woman in the rear. Her cheeks were flushed and her mouth was closed in a tight line.

  “How shall we mourn Nathan Fox? Not at all. He wrote to me once that he had no regrets, and how many men can say that?”

  And how many should? Faith said to herself. No regrets. They’d entered the chapel to Mozart; was “My Way” going to see them out?

  “How shall we honor Nathan Fox’s memory? By reading his books and making his thoughts a part of us—living his words and by our acts, he will be with us always. He has left us this gift—and there is another yet to come. The last letters I had from him spoke of

  ‘the big one.’ A book that was to be published only after his death ‘far in the future, Artie,’ he wrote, advising me not to count on the ‘shekels’ for a ‘long, long time.’ Inutterably sad words now. So, I watch the mail.

  It may come tomorrow, next week, next year. It will be 83

  his monument, one, to quote him again, ‘That will blow the fuckin’ lid off.’ This, ladies and gentlemen, was Nathan Fox’s purpose in life. May he rest in peace, but not too much. He’ll get bored.” The music, Mozart again after all, started immediately, and everybody rose at once, cramped or moved by Arthur Quinn’s startling eulogy. It had been a performance and people immediately surrounded him, waiting to pump his hand. Faith wanted to see him, too.

  When Emma had first asked her to go to the service, Faith had already realized that Arthur Quinn was someone she needed to see. The relationship between author and agent is complex—a business agreement, but of a personal nature. An agent holds an author’s ego, as well as an author’s advance, in his or her hands.

  Agents find themselves functioning as critics, confi-dants, shrinks, and sometimes friends. What was the bond between Quinn and Fox? Faith guessed from the interviews she read that it was strong. Quinn’s words at the service confirmed the impression. Did he know about Emma? Forget about the “no survivors” rhetoric.

  Quinn had better hope that Fox’s words survived—and stayed in print. She almost laughed out loud. Clever, clever man—essentially putting Fox’s posthumous book out for bid at the man’s funeral. She imagined what Richard would have to say about Fox’s speech, then realized she couldn’t tell him she’d been at the service.

  Quinn was still mobbed by well-wishers. Faith had worked out her approach. She would pose as a graduate student contemplating a book on the radical movement as typified by Fox. Quinn, she hoped, would be interested in the book as well as the subject matter. But 84

  she wanted to talk to him alone and could make an appointment by phone. She’d hoped to at least introduce herself today. She’d picked a nom de plume, Karen Brown—something easy for someone like Quinn to forget and far removed from Faith Sibley. It was unlikely their paths would cross, except perhaps at an event she was catering, but she was usually out of sight in the kitchen. She looked at the number of people between Quinn and her. It would take too long to wait.

  No, what “Karen Brown” needed to do now was find out who the woman in the rear was—and how much she knew about Nathan Fox’s life above and under ground.

  It wasn’t hard at all. Following at a discreet distance, Faith wormed her way out of the chapel behind the woman, who stopped only when Quinn reached out for her hand over the shoulder of someone who looked like or was Norman Mailer. “I’ll call you,” he promised, and gave a sad smile. Faith couldn’t see the woman’s face or note her response, but her shoulders relaxed visibly and perhaps her lips, which had tight-ened at Quinn’s throwaway reference to Fox’s love life, did as well.

  Passing into the front room, Faith saw the two Fox cousins standing to one side with an air of patient waiting. There must be a gathering somewhere, she realized, and someone must be taking them. A postmortem on the service. She could hear the voices, congratulatory, self-congratulatory, and the whispered asides, the sotto voce digs. She envisioned drinks gulped, some spilled, and the platters of shrimp, finger sandwiches rapidly depleted. Poppy and her crowd would be there—but it wouldn’t be at the Morrises’.

  “Well, of course we haven’t actually seen Nathan for 85

  many years,” his cousin Irwin was explaining to someone. “Marsha might know better than I. I’m in the dry-cleaning business and don’t have much time for reading.”

  What was the question?

  “No,” Marsha said firmly, “Nathan Fox never wrote a novel.” She looked at Irwin. Can we get out of here?

  was written all over her face. Her questioner persisted and she replied edgily, “Yes, I would know. We’re family.”

  Faith couldn’t hear the rest, but presumably Fox’s cousin was continuing to reiterate her statement. And what need did cousin Nate have for made-up lives when he was so busy working on his own?

  Out on the sidewalk, the crowd was thinner, scurry-ing into waiting cars or flagging down taxis. The woman in the mustard-colored parka, hood up now, was heading for the bus stop. Faith walked rapidly until they were side by side.

  “Did you know Nathan Fox well?” Faith asked. It was the right thing to say.

  “Better than anyone,” the woman answered, her face revealing the aching need she had to talk to someone—

  anyone—about him. It almost wasn’t n
ecessary to re-cite her story, but Faith did it anyway.

  “My name is Karen Brown and I’m considering writing a book about his life. I’ve been doing some work in graduate school on the sixties and got interested in him.”

  “I was a student when we met—a long, long time ago.” Suddenly, the woman seemed tired.

  “Would you like some lunch?” Faith asked. “There’s a coffee shop on the next block that’s not too bad.”

  “Yes, yes, I would. I don’t have to be home yet.” 86

  They walked quickly, without speaking. The snow had stopped, leaving a thin, crusty layer on the ice that had built up at the curbs and around the traffic lights.

  It was grimy; the soot on the top looked like a sprinkling of black pepper. The cold wind brought tears to Faith’s eyes and stung her cheeks. The woman didn’t have to be home yet, but she did have to be home sometime. A husband? Kids? She’d find out soon.

  The coffee shop was tropical in comparison to the weather outside, and Faith led the way to a booth at the rear, far from the opening door. The windows were outlined with colored lights and garlands proclaiming MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY HANUKKAH, and HAPPY

  NEW YEAR had been looped uncertainly behind the counter. A plastic poinsettia stood next to the cash register. Each table sported spiky evergreens, with smaller versions of the poinsettia shoved in the glass vases normally reserved for limpid carnations. But the attempt managed to impart the same air of holiday festivity that was filling every corner of the city with a vengeance as the countdown to Christmas continued.

  After sitting for a moment, contemplating the decor and thinking how best to begin the conversation, Faith realized it was one of those places where you ordered at the counter and served yourself.

  “Come on, let’s get some coffee right away and order.”

  It wasn’t long before they were settled in. The woman—Faith realized she didn’t know her name—

  had ordered pastrami—clearly not a maven. Coffee shops were not the place for pastrami. Katz’s was, the Carnegie Deli was.

  Faith took a sip of coffee, enjoying the feeling of the 87

  hot liquid traveling down her throat, past her rib cage, restoring her circulation. She held the paper cup in both hands for warmth—a blue-and-white cup with Aegean decorations, Greek keys on top and bottom.

  “We’re Happy to Serve You.” All New York coffee shop paper cups looked like this. How did it start? A supplier in Athens?

  “Sad that the only ones left are his cousins,” Faith commented. It was an opener.

  The woman nodded vigorously and put her thick sandwich down. Under her parka—the button had urged people to continue to boycott lettuce—she’d par-tially covered the turtleneck with a loopy beige cro-cheted vest. She tossed her braid, almost long enough to sit on, back over her shoulder and started talking intently.

  “When he was in college, first his mother died, then his father. Sophomore year. The year we met. He took it very hard, and later he used to say how much he regretted they never knew what a famous son they had.

  ‘Lorraine,’ he’d say—oh, I’m sorry. I haven’t introduced myself, Karen.” She looked genuinely stricken.

  Faith instantly quelled the impulse to look over her shoulder for “Karen” and instead said, “It was pretty cold outside, not the place for introductions.” The woman smiled. She’d taken her glasses off, which had steamed up when they entered the restaurant, and was wiping them with a tissue. She must have been, if not beautiful, at least pretty when she was younger. Even now with a good haircut, losing the gray, a little makeup, new clothes . . . It would be a big job.

  “I’m Lorraine Fuchs.”

  “Fuchs?” Faith was surprised.

  88

  Lorraine blushed. She was a lot better-looking with some color in her face.

  “ ‘The wife of his heart.’ That’s what he always said.

  Of course, we never believed in the bourgeois institution of marriage, created solely by men to ensure that property would be transferred to a legitimate male heir and to further subjugate and humiliate women.” This is going to be heavy going, Faith realized dis-mally. But “wife of his heart”—that was sweet.

  “I’m so pleased that someone, especially a woman, is writing an account of Nathan’s life, and I’m happy to help in any way I can. I’ve been with him since the day we met.”

  “You mean you went underground with him?”

  “Of course. He needed me. Maybe I’d better start from the beginning.”

  “That would be wonderful. You’re the only person I’ve interviewed so far, and it certainly seems you’ve been the closest.”

  Again, it was the right thing to say. Obviously, Nathan Fox was Lorraine Fuchs’s entire reason for being—or so Faith thought.

  “We met at City College. He was in my poly sci class and knew more than the professor. They were always having these big fights.” She sighed blissfully.

  “Nathan started to offer his own course. He was living in a tiny apartment on Morton Street. The rest is history. We became his cadre. I don’t know why people always say the fifties were dull. Believe me, there was never a dull moment for us!”

  “So you all stayed together as a social-action group?”

  “Yes. For a while, we were in the Socialist Workers party, but that didn’t work out. Nathan felt the party 89

  wasn’t sufficiently committed to the working class. We formed a faction and published a paper, but eventually we left. Then Nathan wrote the first book and started giving talks all over the country. He was one of the first to speak out against the war in Vietnam,” she related proudly. “You’ve probably seen him in the documen-taries. There was no one who had as powerful an effect on a crowd as Nathan.”

  Faith hadn’t seen Fox in action, but she planned to soon. She’d heard about his charisma, though. The peculiarly mesmerizing, yet galvanizing, effect he’d had on great masses of people.

  “Of course, my parents disapproved terribly. I’m an only child,” she said apologetically, as if her mother and father’s failure to produce a sibling were somehow her fault. “They thought Nathan was using me. That’s what my father used to say. They didn’t understand that even without Nathan, I would have chosen the life I led.” She began to eat her potato chips, one at a time.

  She had long, slender fingers unadorned by any rings.

  “They never cut me off. They weren’t like that, and my mother always made a nice meal for us when we’d visit, but Nathan said it made him uncomfortable to be there, even if the pot roast was good. He always had his little jokes. He told them their phone was probably tapped and to be careful. My father was pretty upset at that. It was the last time Nathan went with me to the house. Harvey was a baby, so it would have been around 1964.”

  “Harvey?”

  “Harvey’s my son.”

  Faith swallowed hard. A piece of her pita pocket lodged in her throat and she reached for her coffee. Not only did Emma have two—what would Irwin and Mar-90

  sha be, first cousins once removed? Second cousins? It was one of those things she’d never been able to keep straight—but a half brother around her own age!

  “So, Arthur Quinn was wrong.” And where was Harvey? Why hadn’t he been at his father’s service?

  “Harvey isn’t Nathan’s child, although Nathan was the only father figure he ever knew. Nathan worried that any child of his would be persecuted by the police, the foot soldiers of the ruling class. We made a decision not to have any children. I’m not proud of what I’m going to tell you next, but things happen in life.” And how, Faith thought.

  “I left Nathan briefly at one point. I needed to get my head together. He’d become very well known. The first book had been published and he was traveling in pretty high circles. I felt excluded and wrongly assumed it meant he didn’t love me. He tried to reason with me, and deep inside I knew I was the only woman for him. My jealousy was an indication of my own weakness and lack of commitment to
our goals. But I went out to California for a while and lived in a collective in San Francisco. Somehow, I got pregnant.” Somehow? Surely Lorraine wasn’t that naïve, although Faith had quickly realized that Naïveté could be Lorraine’s middle name.

  “It was very difficult to get a safe abortion in those days—women had not won the right to choose, a right imperiled now. But thank goodness I didn’t. Then I wouldn’t have my Harvey. I’d have nobody now.”

  “What does your son do?”

  “At the moment, he’s seeking employment.” Lorraine managed to sound proud. “He’s an expert mechanic, so good that many of the employees and even the bosses where he’s worked get envious of his skills.” 91

  Mouths off and gets fired was Faith’s hasty analysis.

  She was beginning to feel very, very sorry for Lorraine Fuchs.

  “We live in Brooklyn. My mother passed away recently and my father has been gone for some years now. I inherited the house. I know I’ll eventually have to sell it and give the money away, but it’s been wonderful having our own place. We’ve moved so often. I grew up there,” she added wistfully. “And it’s good for Harvey to have a real home. I mean to come to. He’s got an apartment with some friends. They grow up so fast.”

  Before Lorraine could go off on a Harvey and mother-hood tangent, Faith slipped in a question.

  “Had you been living with Nathan Fox in the city?” It would have been cramped in the studio apartment with the three of them.

  “No, he was working on a very important book and wanted to be completely alone. Of course, I knew where he was. He got sick once and called me to take care of him, which I was only too happy to do, but that was just one of two times I was ever there. The second was the day before he died. When he said good-bye, how could I have known it would be forever? You’ll have to excuse me.” Tears were streaming down her face. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with another tissue.