A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

  “Look,” said Arabella, interrupting me. “You’re a disaster, Rina. That’s quite obvious. I didn’t want to believe my brother when he said you were acting irresponsibly. You know I’ve always liked you. Even when my mother wanted to have a hit man bump you off when Tom proposed, I stood up for you.”

  I didn’t say anything, unsure whether Arabella was kidding.

  “But you’re exhibiting extremely manic behavior, just as Tom said. When you were here in the afternoon you were meek little Rina, scared of her own shadow. And then at night, you’re a wild drunk, the life of the party, until you spill your drink on an Oscar-winning actress and then all hell breaks loose.”

  “That’s completely untrue. I was—”

  “Kip told me everything,” she interrupted again. “And it’s classic manic behavior. I was a psychology major at Stanford, I know all about it. What you exhibited last night was excessive involvement in pleasurable behavior.”

  “Kip didn’t even see me,” I said quietly, in the voice Arabella had just called meek. “He left me by myself. He was busy speaking to some utter—”

  “I did nothing of the sort,” said Kip, scoffing. “I was with you until you were too intoxicated to be around and not lose face. That’s when I left you.”

  “I know I drank too much, and I’m sorry,” I said, ignoring the bald-faced lie. “I’m just not very good at being alone at parti—”

  “Just stop, Rina,” said Arabella. “I don’t want to hear any more. Have you always been this way? A manic alcoholic? Were we just not seeing it? And how exactly did you work at the United Nations with so many highs and lows? Isn’t it all about being peaceful over there?”

  “Peacekeeping,” Kip interjected.

  “Same idea,” said Arabella, waving him off.

  I looked at them both. Tall and proud, having grown up in a world molded around their desires. Arabella Rowe hadn’t worked a day in her life except in the swimming pool. The rest of the world called that kind of effort leisure.

  I took a deep breath and swallowed the bile back down. I pressed my fingers into the bruises on my hips and stared at the Rowes.

  “I was very good at my job,” I said loudly.

  “You have a new one now,” Arabella snapped back, as if her brother were feeding her lines via sibling ESP. “How about you try to be good at that one?”

  “Let’s just hope it doesn’t make the papers,” said Kip, picking up the glass milk bottle and pouring a drop in his coffee. “And if it does, let’s pray that for Tom’s sake they use your maiden name.”

  “Why on earth would they use that when they could use Edgeworth?” Arabella said.

  “I’m going to pack,” I muttered, heading upstairs. “I’m sorry that I caused such a commotion. It was not done on purpose. I’m sorry I embarrassed you and Tom.”

  When I got back to the guest room, I closed the door behind me and imagined myself sprinkling gin on a Hollywood darling. So what if I had? The world was still turning. I wanted to get away from a society where a few drops of gin on a starlet’s dress were akin to the Hindenburg disaster. I looked at the beautiful room, the ocean view. No one ever took chances in the Edgeworth family. Arabella’s biggest rebellion had been swimming. It was all so conventional, so safe. So she’d chosen backstroke over necking with boys from Collegiate. What a revolutionary.

  I filled my suitcase and walked out the front door without saying goodbye. When I got to the airport, I went straight to a pay phone and inserted dozens of quarters. I didn’t need to look at the paper in my pocket for the number. I spoke to the operator, and she patched me through. The phone rang six times and then a man’s voice answered.

  “Lee Coldwell?”

  “Yes,” he said, his tone hinting of recognition.

  “This is Katharina Edgeworth. I’d like to help you.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The deli was on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and West Eighty-seventh. I was to wait outside. There would be a pyramid of canned herring in one window, a display of smoked fish in the other, and a drawing of six sturgeon on the storefront. If there were no sturgeon, it was the wrong deli. At noon sharp, Lee Coldwell would pull up in a blue Pontiac with a small dent in the passenger door. I was to smile and wave, as if I were greeting my husband, quickly open the door, and get inside. We would start driving, and then he would tell me “what was what.”

  It had all sounded so simple when I’d called from Los Angeles, despite the distance and my jitters. I had hung up the heavy receiver of the pay phone feeling less like the failure that all the Edgeworths thought I was, and more like someone dependable. Even a bit important.

  I spent the flight back to New York marveling that I hadn’t let the piece of paper with Lee Coldwell’s phone number on it disintegrate completely and had even summoned up enough of my old courage to use it in time. When the stewardess straightened her blue hat and came down the aisle to inform us that we were approaching Idlewild, I finally forced myself to reflect on my time in California. I thought about the disaster at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And about facing my husband in the aftermath.

  I was ready to see my boys again. I hadn’t missed them desperately, as Tom was so sure I would, but I did want to be with them again, to hold them again. They, at least, would still love me despite the Bergman fiasco.

  I knew the look Tom would give me as soon as I walked into the apartment: exhausted disappointment, his expression du jour. Without having to utter a word, his face would say, “You, Katharina Edgeworth, are a woman who behaved like the town drunk in front of the who’s who of Hollywood only a few weeks after nearly letting her son get run over in Central Park, then fleeing the scene like a bank robber. You should be stripped of the Edgeworth name and all benefits that come with it—the Iberian ham at Christmas, the twice-yearly invitation to the Vanderbilts’ in Old Westbury, and certainly that flawless Cartier diamond on your left hand.”

  As the plane bounced across air pockets, my stomach turned sour, the sound of the ice cubes clinking in my glass of Coca-Cola making me feel sicker. But when I saw the lights of the sprawling metropolis below me, of incomparable Manhattan, I felt a rush of excitement. Perhaps my meeting with Coldwell would amount to nothing. FBI men like him probably asked ordinary citizens for small favors all the time. Informants, that’s what we were called. In fact, I knew they did with at least some regularity because there was a big fuss in the papers a few months back about an informant in the Labor Youth League. He had reported to the FBI for nine straight years. And Joseph McCarthy, the man of the hour, had last year paraded FBI witnesses in Congress who were informing on communist cells in General Electric plants. The Times made these men out to be heroes. And who would say no when asked? Two wars within a decade had injected us all with a shot of patriotism. Even though the horrors were behind us now, I certainly still felt that charge of love for my country. Becoming acquainted with the workings of other governments at the UN had not changed that. But it wasn’t why I’d said yes to Lee. He surely thought that was the case, and I would let him think it. He wouldn’t understand that what I wanted was a day with a “to do” on my calendar. Something besides wiping children’s bottoms with a gentle but effective touch or reading Pat the Bunny so many times I was ready to shoot said bunny.

  When I got home, Tom hadn’t expressed exhausted disappointment as I’d predicted. Instead, he’d been livid. The Ingrid Bergman disaster had not only made the California papers, but in Daily Variety they’d run a photo along with a surprisingly long article, stating that Bergman had “feared for her life as a woman lunged at her.” Toward the bottom they’d speculated that I was most likely a “deranged fan.” The only plus, Tom had said, recounting Arabella’s distraught phone call, was that in the photo you couldn’t see my face because it was pressed into the floor. They’d also repeatedly called me “the drunk guest,” instead of Mrs. Tom Edgeworth. The drunk guest. As if I’d been the sole alcohol-fueled reveler surrounded by good Christians sipping chamomil
e tea. What was the solution? Tom had shouted. What were we to do? When had I become an irresponsible alcoholic—not just a negligent mother, but a public embarrassment? He could see it in my face, he’d said. The traces of my behavior. I looked puffy, my expression vacant. Where was the love of his life?

  “I’ll see a doctor,” I’d replied, crying, holding the boys to me, relishing their toddler smells and laughs, even their cries. At that moment I forgot that Gerrit seemed to be vying for the title of America’s worst-behaved toddler.

  As I’d kissed them, Gerrit had hugged me, his little arms soft and comforting around my neck. He’d kissed my cheek, and then said, “Mama ’bandoned baby Gerrit.”

  I’d looked up at Tom, horrified. “I’m gone for seventy-two hours and he learns the word abandoned? Where did he hear that?”

  “I don’t know!” Tom had snapped, his shirt creased and in need of a wash. “It’s most likely instinctual.”

  “Oh, of course it is,” I’d said, hugging Gerrit with all the love I had left in me. I had done many things, but I had not abandoned my children. I’d practically been wearing them like a straitjacket since they were born.

  Tom just stood there, watching me as if I were a chemistry experiment that might turn green, froth over, and explode.

  “I’ll get help,” I declared, standing up. And I meant it. I knew I did need help. I wasn’t a deserter and I wasn’t an alcoholic, I just found that gin on the rocks was good company when the boys were asleep. I also knew what I needed didn’t involve a doctor, or even a plan to dry out. The first step to my rehabilitation was following through on my promise to meet with Lee Coldwell. A medical appointment was just a good excuse to be alone.

  “The doctor can see me at noon tomorrow,” I’d told Tom the next morning. “Could Jilly watch the boys?”

  She could, Tom had replied without bothering to call his mother. She could stay a few hours if need be. Yes, I’d said. The appointment would include not just a physical examination, a poking about at my puffiness, but a thoroughgoing mental assessment as well.

  Tom had recommended a doctor with Lenox Hill hospital rights, but I’d found one on my own, I told him. A woman. I would be more comfortable with a woman, I’d said, my voice cracking. He hadn’t pressed.

  The day of the meeting, hours after Tom had left for work, and after I’d finished polishing silverware for guests that would never come, I’d taken off my apron and rubber gloves, climbed into Gerrit’s bed as he napped, and held him to me, laying him on my chest just as I did the morning he’d been born. I’d put my face and nose against his neck and kissed his soft, chubby cheeks. My breathing was slow, my pulse lowered. Then I did the same with a sleeping baby Peter. In that moment, they felt like everything to me again, because in a few hours, they wouldn’t be.

  * * *

  Six sturgeon. I counted them again on the sign as my watch read 11:56. At noon precisely, I saw a blue car emerge from behind a green and white city bus and change lanes. It was a Pontiac Chieftain with whitewall tires, and in the passenger side door, there was a dent the size of a fist. When the car was fifteen feet from me, I plastered a smile onto my face and started to walk toward it with an air of confidence. When it stopped, I reached out and opened the door. It creaked slightly at the hinge, heavier than I expected. In one swift motion, I stepped in, gathering the skirt of my Balmain dress and pulling the door shut behind me. Relieved, I glanced at Coldwell and let my body sink into the padded upholstery. I looked in the rearview mirror to see if my hair was still all right, and then stopped abruptly. We were not alone. A light-skinned Negro man was sitting in the backseat. Somehow, I hadn’t spotted him from the curb, too focused on the passenger door and its dent. He did not acknowledge me.

  “You made it,” Coldwell finally said, after we’d turned left on West Eighty-seventh, his eyes on the street. The city outside was loud with midday traffic, but inside the car the only sound was my pounding heart.

  “I’m glad you decided to come,” Coldwell added flatly as he turned right on Riverside, picking up speed.

  The man in the backseat was looking out the window at the gray water of the Hudson, not at me. He had a stocky frame, good posture, and was wearing a navy-blue suit with a knit tie and a white dress shirt, nicely cut and fitted. I should have been paying attention to where Coldwell was heading, asked him questions, but I kept staring. Finally, the man turned his head away from the river and glanced at my reflection in the mirror. A chill raced up my spine.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Edgeworth,” he said quietly. His voice was low, with a distinctive rasp.

  “Oh, right,” said Coldwell, swerving to miss a large pothole on Riverside. “Excuse my manners. They seem to have departed a few years ago.” He cleared his throat. “Mrs. Edgeworth, meet Turner Wells. Turner, you know all about Mrs. Edgeworth.”

  “Hello,” I said quietly.

  Turner Wells. I repeated the name in my head a few times. It felt like one that had been carefully inscribed on birth certificates for generations. But “all about Mrs. Edgeworth”? The way Coldwell said it made me feel laid bare, like a little girl playing spy or assassin with her brothers who is then assigned the job of making cold-cut sandwiches and iced tea for the boys.

  “Turner here is embedded with the Civil Rights Congress—a heavily Negro organization. They’re communists shrouded as some civil rights legal aid group. They defended and funded CPUSA during the Smith Act trials in ’forty-nine. Heard of them before? Mostly Negro and Jewish lawyers, though they’ve even gotten a damn Vanderbilt involved. Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Poor fool. Those Reds allegedly don’t care about money, but I’m sure they’re happy to strip him of his gold coins. That ring any bells?”

  “A few,” I said, raising my eyebrows at his description. I had read about the CRC in the papers over the years. I knew they were a legal defense group with chiefly lawyers among the top ranks, both Negro and white. And that they defended both Negroes and whites too, particularly Negroes on trial for controversial or most likely bogus charges, or white and Negro communists who had been caught, well, being communists. I remembered the Smith Act trials most clearly.

  “They’ve got a big presence in Harlem. That’s where Turner spends most of his time. But he’s agreed to help us today.”

  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t yet understand what any of this had to do with Jacob.

  “None of this is to be repeated,” he said, not even glancing my way. “But you don’t seem like a person who needs to be reminded.”

  “None of this will be repeated,” I replied. I didn’t have the courage to ask for further explanation.

  Coldwell rolled down his window. “Nice day,” he said as we slid into standstill traffic around 110th Street.

  “Might be nicer if we made Mrs. Edgeworth less nervous,” said Wells from the backseat.

  I met his gaze in the mirror.

  “Oh,” said Coldwell, sounding surprised. He glanced over at me. “Are you nervous?”

  “A bit,” I lied.

  “So, Turner here, he’s agreed to help us. And the woman I mentioned before, the one who is running classified government documents up from Washington to New York for Gornev every few weeks—remember?”

  “I do,” I said evenly. He might as well have asked me if I remembered my own name.

  “As I said, we’ve been watching her, and we’re almost sure that she’s about to sail to Russia this summer. From what we’ve been able to put together, she’s going in July and is preparing for that trip now, staying in New York, and going to Washington less. So, in a perfect world, I’d like Gornev to take one look at you, confirm that you’re in the party, and take you on for that work. He runs her, so he’s the one to replace her. She’s an attractive woman, you’re an attractive woman. In my head it all makes sense, but I recognize that the odds are bad. Nearly impossible.”

  I let his words sink in, too anxious to be flattered by his compliment. “I thought the point of today was for Jacob
and I to have a conversation. To get reacquainted. Isn’t it a bit ambitious to start scheming about the nearly impossible?” My body thrummed with nerves. I felt like Coldwell was either making up his plan on the fly, or he was offering me a crumb when he really wanted me to eat an entire cake.

  “I dream big,” he replied, his eyes on the road. “But also, I had an idea. Not a terrible one, but we will see.”

  Coldwell reached down for his Lucky Strikes and tried to light one while maneuvering the Pontiac. When he’d succeeded in lighting the cigarette, he blew out the match and held it until it was cool. Then he put it in his pocket. I couldn’t help but enjoy watching his ritual.

  “Here’s the thing,” Coldwell said, his dark eyes focused in front of him. “The odds of this whole thing working out are extremely slim. Razor-blade slim. But that’s how we operate. So, if this first conversation you’re to have with Gornev goes well, and maybe your friendship with him reignites quickly, I’d like the next phase to happen fast. But like you said, you’re not a communist, you have no history of communist activity—besides unknowingly sleeping with one in college—and you’ve married into a family of green-chasing capitalists. Some of these things are easily managed. We can give you a history in the party. Have our people on the inside pretend they’ve known you for years. Have you attend a few meetings. But your marriage, not so much.”

  “Marriages are a hard thing to manipulate,” I replied.

  “So I’ve heard.” He sped up as soon as traffic started moving and cut in front of an old Buick. “Though it’s convenient that your husband is a doctor. Big heart, all equal under the Hippocratic oath and all that.”

  “And all that,” I repeated, letting my eyes flick back up to the rearview.

  “Mrs. Edgeworth,” Coldwell said, letting his hand that held the cigarette dangle out the window. “After our telephone call, I couldn’t sleep. You’re not the only one in Manhattan who has trouble with that,” he added, glancing at me. “And I thought: What if you were already doing the thing that he needs doing? What if you were—or Jacob believed you were—moving sensitive documents from Washington to New York for a communist group?” He paused as he passed a slower car. “Which brought me to Turner here. American Reds. And not just any group, but the CRC. Like I said, they claim to simply fight for equality in the courtroom, and that the Russians just happen to be supportive of them, but aren’t actually involved. But they are involved. When they gave the CRC money to support the legal fund during the Smith Act trials, Jacob was involved, we’re certain. Then they awarded Paul Robeson the Stalin Peace Prize like he was some martyr in Leningrad. Had W. E. B. Du Bois present it to him, of all people. And I’m sure you remember the We Charge Genocide disaster at the UN in New York and Paris?”