A Woman of Intelligence Read online

  “One of everything sounds perfect,” I said, smiling. Suddenly I didn’t care if Amelia thought I was Canadian, I was getting married to Tom. At the Plaza! And with surprising guinea hens! I was beginning to like the idea, even if it came with a side of Amelia Edgeworth.

  “Now what about flowers, Rina?” she said, looking at me. “In a hotel of seventeen hundred chandeliers, you really don’t need much. I’m envisioning something sophisticated, Carolina blues. We really can’t do white or pink because of your advanced ages. It wouldn’t strike the right note. Tom will be thirty-eight years old. There are men who are grandfathers at that age.”

  “This isn’t Plymouth Rock for heaven’s sake. Thirty-eight is a perfectly modern age. And a fine age for a groom … or a bride,” he said, catching my eye.

  “I’m a youthful thirty-one,” I reminded them before Amelia changed all the flowers to wilting cacti.

  I let Amelia plan everything, down to my dress. And when I let it all go, I did have a wonderful time. A bride—me!—in Dior. Christian himself sent me a note, in French, of course.

  The dress was exquisite, but the best part of the actual wedding day was being surrounded by everyone I loved. My family came from Switzerland, including my aunt Hanna. Friends from Vassar and Columbia were there; Ruby and Patricia, who lived in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., respectively, came into town; even my friends from the United Nations came—including Marianne Fontaine, who had threatened to boycott on principle, but finally gave in to the promise of endless champagne.

  Tom and I were married in the Terrace Room under Charles Winston chandeliers, surrounded by orchids and bouvardia. The reverend from St. Thomas Church did the honor, and I carried a bouquet of white stephanotis, bright and virginal.

  “Let me guess, that witch mother said they’d turn scarlet in your hands,” Marianne had joked when I’d gone through the plans with her the week before the wedding.

  “Actually no, but now that you say it, they just might.”

  “Oh, enough. Stop listening to those who want to force women to ignore the presence of their own vaginas.”

  I laughed and covered my ears.

  “We did have fun, didn’t we?” she said, pulling my hands back down. “How sad it has to end.”

  But as I got ready to marry Tom that day, a tiny slice of sadness managed to crawl inside the Plaza’s best suite, where I was getting dressed.

  “I brought you a gift,” Marianne said, watching the hairdresser wave my hair just one more time. I had asked her to be my maid of honor, but she’d refused, and the role of bouquet holder in a very nice dress had instead gone to Arabella Rowe.

  “You didn’t have to,” I said, catching her eye in the mirror.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Rina, of course I did. Don’t worry, I brought you and Tom a boring gift. It’s some sort of Swedish vase. All the rage right now. But I brought you a real gift. Would you like to open it now?”

  “Of course,” I said, grinning.

  It was the French edition of Simone de Beauvoir’s just released sensation The Second Sex, or Le Deuxième Sexe, and it was inscribed to me from the author.

  “How on earth did you get this?” I asked, fighting back tears.

  “A bit of United Nations string pulling. Did I pull the right string?” she asked, watching me.

  I nodded a very genuine yes.

  “I just want you to remember the incredible woman that you are. Just you. Not Mrs. anyone but you.”

  Another nod, and more pushing back of tears.

  It had been the right string, but it wasn’t the right string for the day.

  I knew that after I married Tom Edgeworth, his family, his career would always take precedence over mine. I’d never be able to pick up and move to Geneva for a few years so that I could work at the United Nations office there and see my family every Sunday instead of his. And when I got pregnant, I would have to leave my pass, my key, my everything for some new interpreter to have. I would have to dial Fieldstone 7-1100 for the last time and say that Katharina West, now Edgeworth, was thankful for her time but had left the building.

  I smiled at my reflection in the mirror, letting Marianne’s face blur behind me. I reminded myself that I was living a dream, a fairy tale. This was the American woman’s best bet. Marry a millionaire, a handsome and kind one at that. A doctor, for children. Just six months prior, my brother Timo had lost his job when the architecture firm he worked for closed their Geneva office. It was quite a mess for him and his three children, and his wife ended up taking a job in the evenings in a restaurant until he found something again. I had grown up during the Depression. Economic stability, and then some, was not lost on me as a big check in the plus column. I needed more than that, of course I did, but Tom knew about the more. He knew me. He was compassionate. We would find our way together.

  I silenced my worries and gulped down a glass of champagne with Marianne and Arabella, who shockingly got along just fine. But when I was ready to make my way to the altar, holding my father’s arm, that small itch of doubt returned. Just being near him made me want to jump on an airplane and go to Europe for a long, long spell.

  My wonderful father, whom I now saw so seldom, was born in Lausanne, the son of a mid-level executive at a sugar refining plant in Brooklyn. He moved to New York when he was seven years old. But despite being born to pragmatists, Swiss ones at that, he was always a self-described dreamer. Unlike his father, he’d obtained a Ph.D. in art history from Harvard. “I skipped the sugar part, just held on to the refined,” he’d joked, sticking his nose up into the air and laughing. In truth, there was nothing snobbish about Sebastian West. He just found the magic in life through paint on canvas, and up until the war, he taught others to do the same at Hunter College.

  The dark-haired Wests had been the Westens until the authorities at Ellis Island hacked off the two last letters, taking the name from German to WASP. At the end of 1946, my family had gone to live in Geneva so that my father could teach art history at a very prestigious boarding school in Rolle that paid him twice what he’d been making at Hunter. My mother, desperate to go back, had spurred the move. “I’m becoming too American,” she’d said. My twin brothers and their wives had gone with them, thrilled for a new adventure, to immerse themselves in Europe now that Europe was safe again. It had always seemed possible that I would join them. But now they knew I wouldn’t. Who could ever ask Tom to abandon the hospital, the sick children? I was sacrificing my old family for my new family.

  Seeing my parents and brothers, speaking to them, smelling them, I remembered my desire to not only be near them, but to travel the world like they did. To experience art and literature and life like they did. We were a family who used a pile of books as a coffee table and had puzzles with dozens of pieces missing. A family that didn’t have cocktail hour, just cocktails. A family who spoke many languages and ate a shocking amount of beige food. Northern Europeans have really perfected the art of beige cuisine. Cheese fondue. Beige. Rösti. Beige. Bündner Nusstorte. Beige.

  Was I really ready to start my own family? Would they even like beige food?

  I had expressed that concern to my mother when she’d arrived in New York a week before the wedding, and she’d said, “Katharina, don’t be scared to lose us by making your own family. I’ll always be here for you, even if I can’t be here for you.” But in that moment, it didn’t feel like enough. My stomach began to retaliate, the flight response growing. I told my father to stop for a moment, so that before the doors opened, before I saw people like Mayor O’Dwyer in the audience, I could look for Tom. I knew he didn’t think of me as the second sex. He saw me as his equal. And that was enough to have confidence in our future. In my life as Mrs. Tom Edgeworth.

  As I made my way down the aisle, I kept my gaze trained on his, and anxiety left me with every step. After we’d said our vows, Tom leaned over and whispered, “I lovely smart love you.” With those five words, all the remaining doubt melted away. Who wouldn�
�t want to marry that man?

  At the end of the reception, as it was nearing two o’clock in the morning, Amelia pulled me aside and kissed me on the cheek. Shockingly, her lips were not ice-cold.

  “What a party,” she said, smiling.

  “It’s better than a party. It’s an event.”

  “It is that.” We looked at the crowd together and she waved to the mayor. “Oh, before you retire upstairs, be sure to take a picture with the peacock, will you, Rina?” she asked, winking at me.

  “I will, of course,” I said, grinning. “That will be the feather in the cap of a perfect day.”

  “You’re welcome dear,” she said, leaving me with my champagne and mushrooms on toast.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Hello, dear. How are you? We haven’t spoken since the incident, have we?” Amelia Edgeworth’s voice seeped through the line somehow much more loudly than anyone else’s ever did on our telephone.

  “We haven’t,” I said, not knowing if she was referring to the incident in the park with Gerrit, the incident with the gin and Ingrid Bergman, or the incident the night before, when I told Jilly bald-faced lies.

  “It could have been worse, I suppose,” she said breezily. “You could have shot her.”

  So it was Bergman. I was sure Amelia had heard the story from Arabella multiple times, and by this point it was probably inflated to hot-air-balloon proportions.

  “I wasn’t carrying a gun,” I replied, wishing I hadn’t picked up the phone. But I had no choice; it could have been Jacob Gornev. “All I had with me was a handbag.”

  “And a drink.”

  “Yes, and a drink,” I responded. Amelia loved a good verbal shot.

  “Arabella and Kip, well, they’ve been practically upside down with shock since the incident, and Tom—”

  “And Tom what?” I interrupted.

  “And Tom is gravely disappointed, but not dramatically so,” she said defensively. “But oh, what a mess, Katharina. It’s a royal disaster. It really would be so funny if it didn’t involve someone associated with my family. If it were one of those dreadful Kavanaughs on the ground floor of our building—the ones with beady yellow eyes and an abundance of stenches—well, then I’d be lapping this up like soft ice cream.”

  “Associated with” her family. As if I came in every week to iron their money and dust off Arabella’s trophies. As if I wasn’t a mother to two of her grandsons.

  “As I told Arabella, I’m just as embarrassed as a person can be,” I said. “And terribly sorry, too. I hope all of you will forgive me for my misstep, my stupidity, eventually.”

  “Well…” Amelia’s voice had softened. She loved it when people groveled. It was probably why she let her husband sleep with half of New York City’s chorus girls. A grovel and a bauble from William Edgeworth, and all was set right. “Will you be coming to the apartment for drinks on Sunday?”

  “Did Tom say we would be available?”

  “Of course. He would never turn down his mother.”

  “Then, I’ll be there, yes. With pleasure.”

  “Bring the boys, will you? My little potatoes. Too bad they didn’t get more of your color. You’ve got that lovely island tan.”

  That was how Amelia described anyone who wasn’t the color of chewing gum, as if we had all paddled to Ellis Island via Cozumel.

  “The potatoes will be in tow,” I said. “Good afternoon, Amelia. Thanks for the lovely chat.”

  “Was it?” she said, before I could hang up. “A lovely chat? I’m ever so glad you feel that way. You know, I for one don’t blame you for drinking,” Amelia continued, like a good functioning society lady alcoholic. “If I’d had no help with Arabella and Tom, I would have pitched myself off the Singer Building when Arabella was two weeks old. Popped on my mink, then popped myself right off. I think this mandated pioneer woman way of raising your children, with your breasts exposed and your life of solitude—is excessive. But Tom’s the doctor, not me,” she said, sighing. “And you seem to be getting by, except for the Bergman situation. So he knows best, I suppose.”

  “I suppose,” I repeated quietly.

  “Chin up, dear. And lay off the gin. Try switching to wine. It has less bite. Till Sunday, then.”

  The line went dead. I glanced at the far right corner of the living room. Against the base of a Japanese lamp was a large Bonwit Teller bag. Ronald must have brought it up while I was on the telephone. Inside it was a parcel containing The Communist Manifesto, copies of The Daily Worker, and other party literature.

  I picked up the receiver and called Amelia Edgeworth right back.

  “Amelia. It’s Katharina again,” I said. “After I hung up, I realized something.”

  “And that is?”

  “That I’m very much in need of your help.”

  I knew there was only one person who walked the earth whom Tom did not lord it over, and that person was his mother. William was no use. Now that he spent every other afternoon twisted around some lover at the Plaza, Tom saw him as a man who had lost his backbone, no longer someone to take seriously. But his mother, he adored. It was why her absence when he was young had stung so much, and kept on stinging into adulthood. “Plus, she’s always been the brains,” he maintained. And he was right. So it was to Amelia Edgeworth that I’d made my appeal. I told her that I was lonely. That I was terrified that I might snap and that even the great Tom Edgeworth wouldn’t be able to put me back together. That I was desperate to get out of the house. That if I spent all my time with babies, my brain would turn into a head of cauliflower. And then I threatened divorce.

  “I’ll send Jilly over every few weeks.”

  “Every week.”

  “Very well.”

  “Shall we tell Tom or not?”

  “Not. And Katharina?”

  “Yes?”

  “You knock over another celebrity with a trough of gin in your hand, and it will be you receiving the divorce papers.”

  “Noted. I’ll be sure to only frequent parties with hobos and drunks from now on.”

  “You’re not as amusing as you think you are,” she said, and hung up the telephone.

  * * *

  When the phone rang in our apartment on Friday, Amelia was just calling to check in with her son. She wanted to make sure we were all still on for Sunday brunch, and would Tom mind also serving as her escort to a Red Cross dinner at Bemelmans on Saturday evening? It was extremely important, and William was “occupied.” Because I was listening from the phone in the bedroom, I heard Tom hesitate before responding. “Of course I can, Mother. I’m sure Katharina won’t mind.”

  This time, I certainly would not.

  When Jilly came to the apartment at six p.m., Tom was already out of the house. I had read the literature that Coldwell had sent me, dumped it in a bin in Central Park when I was playing with the boys in the morning, and was now dressed in some old clothes that I used for housework, covered up by a roomy beige raincoat. I didn’t wear a hat or gloves and looked a mess from head to toe, which Jilly would surely report back to Amelia. But I didn’t even mind; let Amelia Edgeworth judge. I was finally free.

  When I left the apartment at six o’clock, I could hear the boys screaming “Mama” until the elevator passed the fourth floor.

  “I’m surprised we don’t receive more noise complaints,” I said to Ronald as the elevator headed to the lobby.

  “I don’t think Sam passes up every message.”

  “You all,” I said as I exited the elevator, “are the best thing about 820.”

  As soon as I was on the sidewalk, I saw Carrie approaching the building, a bundle of flowers in one hand, Alice in the other.

  “Rina!” she called out, waving the flowers. “There you are. I haven’t seen you in ages.” I went up to her and gave her a hug, then leaned down and hugged Alice, too.

  When I stood again, I noticed she was eyeing me strangely and I remembered that I’d donned my best proletarian look—a plain white shirt, wi
th buttons down the front, and a pair of blue jeans, a bit stained with bleach and rolled at the cuff, and old penny loafers from my Columbia days.

  “Where are you off to? And where are the boys?” Her shock at seeing me alone was evident.

  “I’m actually having Tom’s parents’ housekeeper watch them for a bit. Jilly. I—I haven’t quite told Tom yet,” I stammered. “I need to see if it works out before I do. But Carrie, I was just so desperate to get out of the house, even for a little while.”

  “I think that’s wonderful, Rina. As much as we love our children, we must also love ourselves.”

  “Is it love ourselves? Or just not lose ourselves?”

  “Whatever it is,” she said breezily. “One needs to be alone occasionally.” She whispered the last line, as if she feared she might burst into flames or traumatize Alice for life with her words. “You aren’t angry about anything, are you? I called just yesterday and no one answered. I’m going to have to start shooting you notes via the mail drop.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Ever since I returned from California, I’ve been a bit overwhelmed.”

  “I’ve been dying to hear about your trip.” Carrie grabbed Alice’s hand tighter as the child tried to escape into the building. “Matt would never let me travel alone. He’d attach Alice to me with Scotch tape.”

  I wanted to tell her that it took me nearly letting Gerrit bleed out in a public park to make it happen.

  “Was it all very glamorous?”

  “Aspects of it certainly were. You know Tom’s sister, Arabella? She’s quite distinguished, but not quite the wild type. Though I did go to the Beverly Hills Hotel with her husband, Kip, and I did see Ingrid Bergman rather close up.”

  “Did you really?” said Carrie, grinning. “Now I’m terribly jealous and quite mad that you didn’t come pound on my door to tell me the second you came home.”

  “I don’t think we’re allowed to pound on doors at 820.”