A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

  One Saturday morning she came into our apartment holding a large, rolled-up piece of paper like she was an architect.

  “Hello, Amelia,” I said as she rushed right past me.

  “Where is my depressed child?” she asked, looking under the dining room table as if Tom had morphed into a dachshund. “Where is that boy?”

  “He’s in the library. May I ask what you’re holding?” I asked, waddling after her.

  “It’s a letter.”

  “Large letter.”

  “Large problem,” she replied without turning to look at me.

  The letter was from a little girl who had been Tom’s first surgery patient at Lenox Hill. She was a year old at the time, but now was starting to write, and Amelia had gotten her to write Tom an enormous letter, which included a drawing of Tom cutting a child into sixteen pieces and sewing her back together good as new. It was somewhat macabre, but very effective.

  “See, Tom,” said Amelia, pointing to the drawing. “You saved this girl, and now she is clearly going to be the next Hieronymus Bosch. You have saved countless lives. Including this one. Look at what this child can do now! There’s real talent there. Or at least imagination. Is she still taking drugs? For her affliction? Don’t answer that. The point is, feeling sorry for yourself will do nothing but make the world a worse place. So change out of your pajamas, take a shower, and return to work.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Tom, staring at the drawing.

  “Today,” said Amelia. “My car is downstairs, I’ll take you there myself.”

  “You’re driving?” said Tom, looking up at her, love and appreciation in his bloodshot eyes. “Just take me straight to the ER then, when I go into cardiac arrest.”

  In the two weeks leading up to Gerrit’s birth, Tom found himself again, but after he became a father, his worry about something happening to his son seemed to reach an abnormally high level, even for a doctor. His anxiety emerged in strange ways, one of them his conviction that the baby should never leave my side. In fact, if I could just shove him back into my body, that would be ideal. “There is no one better equipped to take care of a child, to love a child, than their mother.” I was to breastfeed Gerrit “on demand.” I was to be attached to him, even when Tom was home to relieve me. “Reread Dr. Spock’s book,” Tom would say. “Revolutionary,” he declared. But the person who needed to reread it was Tom. After the death of those girls, he set out to prove to every person at Lenox Hill—patients, administrators, drunks in the ER—that he was as talented as a mortal could be, and that his ascendancy at the hospital had nothing to do with his parents’ donations.

  “Enough with the money, Mother,” he’d even said. “I’ll wring it out of other people.”

  He set about working, and wringing, and I started my life with my child, Gerrit and Mama, joined together in our snow globe that was that winter in New York.

  I propped myself up to look out the window. How many times had Gerrit and I pawed at our windows during the first few months of his life? “You can’t go outside,” Tom had said. “It’s too cold, and the Chinese recommend against it. They’re very smart about these things.” The guest room window also had a view of the park. If we ever had any guests, I’m sure they would have appreciated it. My parents and brothers had visited when Peter was born, but that was over a year ago now. We’d had no one else since. Large apartments were civilized. They gave you space, room to think, Tom had said when we’d bought the place, and I didn’t know any better, never having lived in one. I’d agreed, excited for the life laid out before me. But now I knew better: large apartments were lonely apartments.

  CHAPTER 16

  I woke with a start. It was 1:15 in the morning. How had I let myself fall asleep?

  I tiptoed into the hallway, to my favorite window seat. The black and white striped cushion conjured up beach chairs in Nice or Deauville or some other grand place, and I pulled my legs up, letting my dress drop down so that it barely covered my upper thighs. Most nights when I sat by the window, I contemplated all the things I used to do that I could not do anymore, the throbbing world below that I no longer felt a part of. It was a world of girls fetching sandwiches and sodas, the laughter of friends around them and the jingle of lipsticks and subway tokens in their purses. A world of men who went after money during the day and looked for women to spend it on at night.

  But tonight I wasn’t mourning that life. Tonight I was thinking about guilt, the feeling that had been eating at me like a parasite, since well before I met Lee Coldwell. Guilt that I wasn’t grateful enough for the existence I had, that I wasn’t well adjusted enough to being a wife and mother. Guilt about my difficulty raising two perfectly healthy children. Tom felt no such guilt, even when he saw me crying because Katharina West was so long gone she seemed never to have existed. I needed to feel less guilt.

  It had gone well with Jacob, I knew it had. So well that I hoped Coldwell would want me to see Jacob again. Or maybe Coldwell would have decided he needed nothing more from me. Either way, I’d had today.

  Outside, a group of young people were walking down the sidewalk together, like a small parade. One girl wore a light blue duster coat that was swinging around her, reflecting her joy. A young man to her right, in a camel blazer, was singing loudly and another behind them was drinking out of a champagne bottle. I heard someone curse at them. The boys laughed louder, and they stumbled on, the drunkest of them taking a minute to get his feet under him. When the group had made it across Sixty-third Street, the sidewalk below me looked lonely again, with only one man left standing.

  He had on a gray felt hat and a navy-blue overcoat. He was looking down at the concrete, his hands in his pockets. Who stopped to contemplate the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue in the middle of the night? But when he slowly lifted his head and looked at the building—at my building—I sucked in my breath, and held it.

  Turner Wells was outside my window at nearly two o’clock in the morning, watching me.

  I peered down at him, finally exhaling, shock and curiosity getting the better of me. Our eyes met. The nerves in my hands woke up, alerted my arms, my shoulders, my breasts, my legs. I gripped the windowsill, stopping short of pressing my face to the glass. After a moment, he touched the rim of his hat. I was sure I saw a faint smile before he turned and walked on, uptown.

  When he was out of sight, I tiptoed into the hallway, my heart racing. How long had Turner Wells been lingering outside my building? Had he been there when Tom looked out at the park from the living-room window? Unlikely. That had been three hours before.

  I thought of Turner Wells’s gaze on me earlier. In the blue Pontiac. While we walked down Amsterdam Avenue. I thought of Jacob’s eyes on me. The way he had lit up like a paper lantern when he’d spotted me outside the restaurant. How he had looked in his uncle’s restaurant when I’d said “dessert.” I had not felt seen by men since before my pregnancies. The change was electrifying, like taking a long, hot bath after years of lukewarm showers. I put my hand on my heart, relishing how hard it was beating.

  At 1:45, I gathered my purse from the living room. The elevator would ding if I called it. Instead, I crept down six flights of the service stairs. In the lobby, Eduardo, the night doorman, looked up at me and nodded discreetly as I slipped out the front door.

  It was a cold night and I could have used a coat, but I blended in better in only my dress. I looked as if I’d been out to a party, like the inebriated coeds, and was just heading home. Instead, I went to the phone booth on the corner of Sixty-third and Madison. I folded the glass door open, picked up the receiver and dropped coins into the telephone. I hadn’t placed a call at two a.m. from a phone booth since my UN years.

  The phone rang once. “Coldwell.”

  “It’s Katharina Edgeworth.”

  “I know.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I have a proposition for you.”

  “All right.”

  “I’d like you to attend a party meeting. On
e with a few CRC members. Today is May twelfth. The meeting is this Saturday. It’s in a real hole of an apartment on 102nd and Third Avenue. Turner Wells attends that meeting. They change location every week, to keep, well, us, off their trail, but he moves with the same group. Some CRC members stay away from formal meetings, since they’re still trying to fight that communist label, but not all of them. Including Turner. He’ll bring you.”

  “But I can’t get away on Saturday.”

  “Impossible?”

  “Difficult.”

  “In my world, anything that isn’t impossible is possible.”

  “Not in mine.”

  I heard what I thought was the sound of a match being lit.

  “Mrs. Edgeworth, tomorrow I’ll have a box of books delivered to your apartment, but they’ll come disguised as a shopping parcel. Something nice. I’ll be sure they arrive while your husband is at the hospital. The books, I’m sure you have assumed, will be communist literature. Things you would have already read if you were in the party.”

  “That sounds fine,” I said, as if it were normal for Lenin’s collected works to be delivered via a Bendel’s bundle.

  “Read them and then get rid of them,” he suggested.

  “All right.”

  “For the meeting, what if you brought your children?”

  “Mr. Coldwell,” I said slowly. “There is no faster route to Tom Edgeworth beheading me than bringing his children to a Communist Party meeting.”

  “I’ll leave it to you, then,” he said, his voice sounding tired.

  “Just like you left it to me today,” I said, not able to let that electric shock from the afternoon go. “I had to come up with my link to Turner Wells in two minutes since you all didn’t provide me with one.”

  I explained how I had improvised and Coldwell didn’t respond. “Fuck,” he said finally.

  “Is that FBI speak for ‘sorry about the oversight’?”

  “It is. And it won’t happen again. Make the meeting if you can. Call me on Friday to let me know if it’s resolved. If I don’t answer, try this number directly,” he said reading off a phone number. “It’s for Turner Wells.”

  I reached into my purse and scrawled it down with a green crayon.

  “And if Gornev contacts you before that, of course let us—”

  “Mr. Coldwell?” I interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  “I need a doctor’s bill to be sent to my house.”

  “A what?”

  “A doctor’s bill from a female doctor’s medical office. A reputable one with rich patients. And she has to be on the Upper West Side. That’s where I said I was today. Could you have that done?”

  “I could have that done,” he said. I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was amused or irritated.

  “Thank you. And thank you for sending Mr. Wells to check on me from the sidewalk. It wasn’t necessary.”

  “I didn’t send Mr. Wells to check on you,” he said.

  “I see.” If Coldwell hadn’t sent him, I didn’t know why he’d come, but I knew immediately what I wanted the answer to be. That he’d come just to see me, as Coldwell had that day in the park. In a city of millions, me.

  We both sat on the line in silence as I spun my wedding band nervously on my finger.

  “Mrs. Edgeworth?” Coldwell’s voice said, snapping me out of my surprise.

  “Mr. Coldwell.”

  “Perhaps simple housewives are not so simple after all.”

  “Perhaps none of us are.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Before I fell asleep that night, I put my rings on the dish resting on my dresser and picked up the picture of me in my Christian Dior wedding dress so cinched at the waist that there was barely enough room to drink a glass of champagne. I would not even be able to put the sleeves over my arms now, having weighed twenty-five pounds fewer that day. I looked decent enough in my current state, but lately the picture inspired more sadness than joy. It reminded me that I was a different woman now. Even with a few personal concerns about our future, I had been a very happy bride on my wedding day, surrounded by love and marrying my favorite human being at the Plaza Hotel. The venue didn’t much matter to me, but it had been incredibly fun.

  Despite Amelia Edgeworth being quite convinced that I was about to bring ruin on the family, our wedding plans had started off very well. News of our engagement had been given a quarter page in The New York Times, much to Amelia’s great relief, and that seemed to set us on a lucky path.

  “If it had been only a sixth or an eighth she would have just buried herself alive,” Arabella, in town for the Red Cross benefit, had joked afterward.

  “Luckily, Rina went to all those good schools and we could gloss over her family background,” said Amelia, carefully cutting out the announcement. “And thankfully they didn’t mention her early years attending PS 666 or wherever it was, Rina.”

  “That’s the one,” I said, smiling. “I had my horns sawed off right before I met Tom. Really got in the way of wearing hats. Devil worship is not a milliner’s dream.”

  Kip and Arabella laughed, and Amelia said, “What a humorous bunch you all think you are,” and took her clipping to one of the apartment’s twelve other rooms to tuck it away.

  “Where are you two getting married?” Arabella asked, pouring us all drinks.

  “We’re not quite sure yet,” I said, accepting the gin and tonic with thanks. “Honestly, I was thinking we’d just do City Hall since I have such fond memories there. With your family connections, and my history, I thought we could even get the mayor to marry us in his chambers. I’d love that,” I said, smiling at Tom.

  “Rina,” said Arabella, practically spitting gin on the floor. “Can you stop being such a rebel for one minute? Mother is finally ready to embrace you, and you want to get married at the laundromat. Why don’t you just wrap a bedsheet around yourself and hold some wilting dandelions while you’re at it?”

  “Arabella!” Tom shouted. “You’re clearly drunk. Please stop speaking like this before you truly embarrass yourself. Though I think we’re past that.”

  “I’ll do one better and leave,” she said, standing up. “Let’s go to the Plaza, Kip. If Mother won’t get her wish to have Tom married there, the least I can do is throw some money their way.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tom when we were alone again. “Money does not buy manners.”

  “She did hear me say City Hall, right? And of all the places that need money thrown at them right now, I think the Plaza is very low on the list.”

  “She has a good heart,” said Tom. “But sometimes her mouth betrays her.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” I said, finishing my drink in three gulps.

  That Saturday morning, I slept in, not even hearing Tom leave for the hospital. When I finally got out of bed, I saw that there was a large package on my dresser. I opened it. It was perfectly crisp D. Porthault bedsheets in bridal white. On top of them, lying on a piece of tissue paper, were some quickly wilting dandelions. I looked at the note placed on top from Tom. “Voilà. Your wedding dress. When a bride is as beautiful as you, she can get away with anything.” I laughed and told myself once and for all that I was marrying Tom, not his mother or his sister. And that getting married could really be fun if I just let go of what Arabella had called my rebellion. Of course, I saw a wedding at the Plaza as all too much. But if that too much made people happy, then maybe it would make me happy, too.

  A week later, we were back at the Edgeworths’ for Sunday breakfast. When Amelia sauntered out, she sat next to me and said, “Sorry about my daughter. I believe it was the gin talking.”

  “Indeed,” said Arabella, sitting next to her mother. “City Hall sounds very adventurous. You’ll have to advise me how to dress of course, but I think it’s very modern of you. I’m sure it will be quite fun.”

  And because I was so shocked to receive an apology from both Amelia and Arabella, I responded, “You know, I’ve consid
ered it and I really would like to get married at the Plaza after all. It sounds like a dream. It’s so generous of your family to offer.”

  Amelia was on the telephone before I finished speaking. An hour later, a package from the hotel arrived with the menu options. Amelia ran toward me, waving it, and pulled me down onto the couch, pointing to the drink list first.

  “We’ll serve Dom Perignon as the main champagne and Pommery & Greno as the rosé. Though perhaps we should get some Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin for the drunks. Your international crowd must lap it up and I don’t need them drinking down bottles at eighteen dollars each. Filet mignon for one of the mains, though is that just overdone at this point?” she asked, looking at Arabella, who shrugged and went back to her chess game. “Now, guinea hens,” said Amelia pointing to the menu. “That would be surprising…”

  “One does not need surprises at a wedding,” Arabella piped up.

  “Fair point, darling. What about Philadelphia capon … truffled, that’s good … Blue Point oysters, filet of herring, hearts of artichoke with vinaigrette, canapé of caviar à la Russe, aiguillette of bass…”

  Amelia took a pen from the side table and starting marking the menu as I watched. After being beaten in chess by his sister, Tom came over and plucked the menu from his mother’s hands.

  “Mother, you’ve circled every item on the menu, including mushrooms on toast.”

  “Tom!” she protested, trying to take it back from him. “Don’t discriminate against fungus. Rina is French, she likes that kind of thing.”

  “She’s Swiss,” said Tom, rolling her eyes. “You’ve also circled nuts and raisins. Will a bird be in attendance?”

  “Now there’s an idea, Tom,” she said, tapping her pen on the menu. “I wonder if the Plaza allows peacocks? Oh, let’s be honest, for the right price they allow anything. Just ask your father.”