A Woman of Intelligence Read online

  I nodded as Sam stepped into the elevator.

  Exhausted, I put the baby on the floor and leaned against the counter for a minute, trying to find my strength. I closed my eyes until I felt small hands pawing at my legs, then opened them again and picked up both children. I bathed us, fed us, dried tears, changed diapers, kissed bumped knees, scolded Gerrit, apologized for scolding Gerrit, dried more tears, and then let the boys watch hours of television—The Funny Bunny, The Adventures of Danny Dee, the evening news—before they fell asleep on top of me, a pile of puppies on my marital bed. The same was certainly not happening three floors down. Carrie was always playing educational games with Alice. Flash cards with Impressionist paintings, Greek poetry, Polynesian fruit. And she had her housekeeper, Mrs. Flores, to help her. She had certainly not made baked chicken with shaking hands, tears mixing into the marinade, muscles exhausted from carrying a baby for nearly an hour.

  I extracted my body from the pile and looked at the time. It was ten o’clock, and my bed was as it usually was, minus one husband. Tom Edgeworth. Chief of pediatric surgery at Lenox Hill. The nature of his work—surgeries were usually scheduled, after all—should have allowed him to make it home for dinner with his wife and children, but Tom Edgeworth was not choosing steak, potatoes, or family. He was choosing the hospital. It had run in operating debt for years, never saying no to the sick who could not pay, but it could no longer survive that way. They wanted to add an intensive care unit, and Tom wanted to be able to admit children to the intensive care unit. He wanted to help raise money for the hospital. And one day, he wanted to lead the whole place. So every night, his dinner was made and put into the refrigerator, not consumed until midnight.

  The hospital fed his soul, and also provided us with our sliver of a social life. The only dinners we didn’t eat at home were at the homes of potential hospital donors. Four-story town houses on Madison, apartments on Sixty-ninth Street with marble everything and a view of the park so sweeping you could count the pigeons. The inhabitants were the people Tom could convince to give generously. People he had known all his life. Those running Lenox Hill were fully aware that a man who was a surgeon, handsome, and an Edgeworth was a horse they wanted to bet on. Tom didn’t mind at all. He had one destination in mind for his future and it was not the operating room, not full-time anyway. The donations that Tom brought in, the relationships he cultivated, would not only help save the children, they would also propel him to the executive level. Chairman of surgery, hospital director. Hence the dinners, the conversations, the pleasantries, and political talk. For those dinners, in those palatial homes, we were allowed to stay well past midnight.

  Tonight, I was not going to make it to midnight.

  I managed to doze restlessly for a few hours, then, startled by a bad dream, woke up covered in a layer of sweat, my heart racing. I checked to make sure the boys were breathing, then wandered into the long hallway, which my husband called the gallery. I’d copied him when we’d first moved in three years ago, when I was pregnant with Gerrit, but I quickly realized that I sounded, and felt, ridiculous, so I returned to calling it the hallway. I, unlike him, had not been raised in the ivory towers of one of Manhattan’s best buildings, the San Remo on Central Park West. I’d grown up in a fourth-floor walk-up near Washington Square with pockets full of subway tokens, the competing smells of immigrant food wafting into the apartment windows, and the sounds of my upstairs, downstairs, and sideways neighbors screaming, making love, sneezing, wheezing. I’d even heard Mrs. Kuznetsov, our upstairs neighbor, die. She tripped on the hall carpet while carrying a large cooked ham and smashed her head against a side table. No one at the San Remo ever heard anyone die. And no resident of the San Remo would have dared die such an undignified death.

  I walked through our very dignified hall to the library, and my favorite spot in the apartment—a window seat barely long enough for me to sit sideways, but just right if I jutted my knees up like a bridge and craned my neck a bit. From that perch, there was an unrivaled view of the Central Park Zoo to be had. But even better, there was a perfect view of the sidewalk in front of it. I wouldn’t admit it to my husband, because I’d rhapsodized about the animals when we’d moved in, but I actually far preferred the life on the sidewalk to the sad creatures behind bars. I loved all the sidewalks in New York, but especially the ones by the park.

  Before becoming a mother, I’d had a job, but it felt as if I had all the time in the world to do what I liked best, observe. Now I had no job, and no time. So, whenever my children were safely asleep, I went to the window to observe the life swirling below. Don’t let it be said that Dr. Tom Edgeworth gave me nothing. My perch above the city came courtesy of a dwindling, but still very ample shipping fortune, of which Tom was a prime beneficiary. He was never home, but he was indisputably the provider of said home.

  I pressed my face to the glass until I could smell the cold, wiping away the tears that always seemed to fall when I sat at the window seat in the middle of the night.

  The hail was long over, but the night remained wet, dominated by a thin rain. Almost too thin to call a drizzle. As I looked down, I still had the sound of hail in my ears. That dreaded clicking. If I had been alone by the Met, I would have gone in when the hail started, or ducked into a coffee shop, a bookstore, any place where I could stay dry and watch the commotion from the inside out. But with small children, that was no longer a possibility. The books would have been thrown from their shelves, the coffee spilled. The baby would have howled, the toddler would have rampaged, my sanity would have fled. A woman with young children moves in a ring of chaos, inspiring murmurs, eye rolls, or grumbling reprimands when her circus troupe blows into public spaces. Where I used to spark smiles, maybe a hungry, carnal look from less subtle men, I now sparked dread.

  I hugged my knees and surveyed the people free to walk calmly at night in the rain. A brown-skinned man in a beautiful orange turban was crossing the street and another man, wearing a beige raincoat and hat, was standing across from my building. The hat dipped down unnaturally, the elements too much for it. A palm tree in the snow. The man was lighting a cigarette, which he managed to do with one stroke of a match despite the weather. He then flipped the brim of his hat slightly up, looked at the match for a moment, blew it out, and put it in his pocket. The only man in Manhattan who wouldn’t carelessly throw it onto the sidewalk. I watched him take a few satisfying puffs of his cigarette, until a woman with a red umbrella crossed his path. It was an unusually large umbrella, and she was a slight girl, so it looked more like a beach parasol. When her umbrella tilted back, I saw that she was laughing.

  As she laughed, my tears fell faster. I dug my fingers into the flesh around my hip bones, hard enough to bruise, enjoying a strange jolt from the pain, a reminder that I owned my body and could do with it what I willed. At least when the hands of children and the eyes of the world were off me. The bruises that would appear tomorrow would join other finger-sized bruises. The marks from my nights by the window.

  The girl with the red umbrella was alone. I was not. Even in this dark corner of the apartment, I wasn’t alone. I desperately missed being alone.

  “Never alone.” I hugged my knees tighter to my chest as I remembered Carrie’s words. My knees stopped short of where they used to, my thighs far from vertical. My breasts were too large to hug my legs in tight, the breasts of a nursing mother. “They’ll go away when all that is over,” Carrie had told me one afternoon. “Then they’ll look nothing like they did before.”

  The woman under the red umbrella was almost out of view, just a flash of red and her legs underneath. She looked like a woman who had the freedom to walk in the rain in the middle of the night, the time to carefully consider the color—if not the size—of her umbrella, and whose knees fit perfectly under her chin. She didn’t look anything like me.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Katharina Edgeworth, the woman who haunts the gallery in the dead of night. Even after all these years.”


  Tom walked over and kissed the top of my head. I’d haunted many other hallways before 820 Fifth.

  Tom was wearing the blue and yellow striped pajamas I’d given him two Christmases ago that, worn by someone who was six foot three, looked a bit like the Swedish flag. I hadn’t heard him come in.

  “You’re home. I didn’t realize,” I said, turning toward him. “What time is it?”

  “About five, I think,” he said, pointing outside. “It will be light out soon.”

  “I didn’t hear the door,” I said, turning my hips to make room on the window seat for him. He didn’t take it.

  “I came in an hour ago. I didn’t want to bother you. I saw the boys asleep on our bed, so I went to the guest room. I’m so tired I think I could have fallen asleep on the bathroom floor.”

  “I think that’s what you do when you’re drunk, not tired.”

  “That’s frowned upon in surgery. Now, after surgery, it’s very much applauded,” he said, smiling. Before we were married, he’d been described in the society section of the Times as having “the most electrifying smile in all of Manhattan.” It was true, even when he was exhausted. I’d asked him on one of our first dates if his teeth were real.

  “Nah, marble. Descendant of Michelangelo’s carved ’em. Did a pretty good job, don’t you think? You should see me tear through steaks, a side of ribs. Gravel,” he’d said, grinning as widely as he could. Tom Edgeworth had been a very easy man to fall in love with. I was just surprised that he’d fallen in love with me.

  “Would you like me to make you a drink?” I asked.

  “No, it’s too late, but thank you,” said Tom, stretching out his long arms. “I think gin would keep me up. And I very much need to be down. As in horizontal.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and gave it an affectionate rub.

  “Did you have an interesting day?”

  I let myself enjoy the weight of him against my body. The first purposeful touch from an adult that I’d had all day.

  “Sure, I did. Though the hail wasn’t the easiest to navigate with the boys.”

  “Did it hail today?” he asked, peering out the window, as if frozen golf balls might still be strewn around the park like a wintry Bethpage Black.

  “A bit.”

  “Well, tomorrow is Friday,” he said, taking a step back from the window. “Then we can spend the weekend together.”

  “You’re not working?”

  “Not for one minute,” he replied, his smile showing off his tired eyes.

  “How wonderful.”

  “And tomorrow, don’t forget,” he added, his expression brightening a bit. Tom Edgeworth loved issuing reminders. “Jilly is going to come watch the boys for a few hours. She said three o’clock, but maybe just telephone to jog her memory.”

  “Is she?” I asked, astonished. I remembered Tom mentioning some such arrangement a few weeks back when New York was still frozen over, but I had completely forgotten about it. Jilly, Tom’s parents’ longtime housekeeper, sometimes came to lend a hand with the boys when we were in a pinch. Tom called it a pinch. I called it something else. “That’s very kind of her,” I said, suddenly elated. “And a lovely coincidence, as Christine Allard—do you remember her? The French girl I used to work with?”

  “You worked with so many French girls,” he replied, leaning against the wall. “The exuberant one?”

  “You’re thinking of Marianne. Christine, well, she’s just lovely, intelligent … French.”

  “Fine then, the French one. Yes, I remember her,” he said, though he clearly did not.

  “There’s a van Eyck exhibit at the museum and it’s supposed to be divine. She’s been wanting me to see it with her and invited me to go tomorrow—or today I suppose—as she finishes early on Fridays like I used to. I said no, because of the boys of course, but I’ll call and tell her I can make it after all. I’m thrilled. I haven’t seen her in over a year and I haven’t had an afternoon out in ages. Really, it is awfully nice of Jilly to come.”

  Tom pushed off the wall, as if he’d just woken up again. “But the reason Jilly’s coming is because of the gala.”

  He looked at my face, clearly hoping for a sign of excitement. Or at least recollection. I didn’t have either.

  “The Medical Association gala at the Plaza. You forgot,” he said.

  The gala. An annual affair that got duller every year. Of course I’d forgotten.

  “Maybe I did,” I admitted. Or I’d conveniently pushed it into the dark recesses of my mind to grow cobwebs.

  “Well,” he said. “Luckily I’m here to remind you. Also, that you have a hair appointment at Jean-Pierre’s at four. That’s at Fifty-eighth and Madison, in case you’ve forgotten that, too. Your appointment is why Jilly is coming early. You’re having your hair … what is it that women do to their hair? Colored, curled, pulled up, let down, and brushed and such.”

  I touched my shoulder-length black hair, which wasn’t any of those things and certainly needed all of them. It was straight yet frizzy, more scarecrow than surgeon’s wife.

  “Perhaps they can paint your nails, too,” he added, looking down at my unvarnished nails. “That will be even more relaxing than pushing through tourists at the exhibit, won’t it? An afternoon of pampering?”

  I thought of the reds and greens of van Eyck’s paintings. The marble-like skin. I thought of the way my father, an art history professor, used to put little strips of paper between the pages of my secondhand edition of Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, marking paintings he thought I should learn about. He’d picked the Arnolfini Portrait, Portrait of a Man. Their greens and blues so deeply pigmented that I was convinced van Eyck’s eyes just worked differently than mine.

  “Equally relaxing,” I said, tears threatening again.

  “Good,” Tom said, reassured. “Then I’m off to bed. If I don’t see you in the morning—the official morning—then I’ll see you at seven tonight. Kiss the boys for me,” he added. He picked up my hand and pressed his lips to it. I wasn’t sure if the kiss was for me or if I was supposed to transfer it to the boys. I watched Tom’s tall form disappear down the hallway, then put my face against the window again. The mist had stopped. Of course it had. It was fine for the heavens to throw hail on unprepared mothers, but the powers that be would never allow it to rain on the day of the medical gala.

  CHAPTER 4

  I used to be the first one in the door at a party. If it started at eight, I was there at 7:59. I didn’t care about being fashionably late; all I cared about was having a grand old time. Especially after the war ended. Simply to be free and alive—knowing how many other people would now remain free and alive—felt like a party. It was a party to walk down the sidewalk, a party to see young men home again, a party to catch them looking at your bare shoulders, imagining what the rest of you looked like bare. It was an honor to feel full of life, and even better, life as a wild young thing.

  In 1945, I was working at City Hall, along with my roommates, Patricia and Ruby, recent Smith and Swarthmore College grads. Monday through Friday we tapped our heels up the building’s grand marble stairs, our skirts rubbing our hips with enough vroom to make it feel like we were walking arm in arm with the mayor. Then, eight hours later, when the clock struck five, we’d run straight back down those stairs to taste our freedom, and our dinner. At wobbly tables or chipped countertops we’d eat the cheapest, most filling food we could find, which usually meant something foreign and enormous. Paella for an army at Sevilla on Charles Street in the West Village, practically sitting on top of one another in our itchy stockings, sweating right onto the seat, or pierogi in the East Village, folded by the expert hands of Ukrainians and Poles. On paydays we’d have steak, still giddy from the end of meat rationing, grinning goodbye to endless macaroni and welcoming the return of marbled New York strip. We’d knock back two cheap beers, not wanting to spend our meager salaries on the gin martinis we actually craved. Instead, we’d find some
men to buy us real drinks. If we were in the mood for artists, we’d pretend to be sulky and profound at the Hotel Albert, but if our tongues were begging for expensive cocktails, and plenty of them, we’d go to the Hotel Astor in Times Square.

  Sometimes, we’d meet men who would sweep us off our feet and we wouldn’t be home for hours, or days, but sometimes it would all be a bust and we’d leave together and head back to our apartment on Mercer Street, crossing through Washington Square Park. If we were drunk enough when we left, we’d knock on the door of the Poetry Mender, an odd duck of a man who never slept. In his garret at 25 West Third he’d write poetry for fifteen cents a line and we’d tuck it in our skirt pockets, rush to the benches in Washington Square Park, stand on them, and compete for best drunken poetry reader. One of us would get a heel caught and fall down, all of us would inspire hungry whistles from virile young men, then we’d laugh until we cried happy, drunken tears. How long had it been since we hadn’t immediately felt guilt while feeling joy? We’d place the winning poem in the fence around Washington Square, to give the verse some visibility, then throw the rest in the trash and be on our way, running past the buildings and the remaining revelers to collapse into bed and sleep it off.

  We’d be up again Monday morning, zipping past the Woolworth Building in all her eight-hundred-foot crowned glory as we returned to work, feeling as tall and important as that majestic pile of terra-cotta.

  Patricia, Ruby, and I were together the day after the war ended. When we read the morning papers together, I circled the Times headline and held it in front of their faces: “All City ‘Let’s Go.’” So we went. We hopped through the city as if it had just been erected yesterday, because that’s how it felt. New York City was officially reborn on August 15, 1945.