A Woman of Intelligence Read online

  “She has a lovely face,” Mrs. Morgan said reflectively, “but the hips. Too wide to reel in a boy like Tom. Van Asletson hips. Her aunt Marjorie has them too. Marjorie Delaney now. Married again. Third time. At least she found someone who doesn’t mind a bottom the size of a sea vessel.”

  “I’m not acquainted with her,” I whispered, shifting my weight in my gray silk column dress designed by Hubert de Givenchy himself. It was probably meant for women to sashay rather than sweat in. I watched my husband at the podium, nestled comfortably among the Grand Ballroom’s white and gold columns, still holding everyone’s attention.

  “Don’t lose any sleep over that.” Mrs. Morgan reached for her glass of wine and polished the remainder of it off. “Little Charlotte is a pretty girl,” she continued, still in a loud whisper, “but I dare say that her right eye seems sadder than the other, as if only that side of her face can see the misery in the world. And then there’s the drunk uncle on the Cheverly side. Her mother’s people. Miles, was it? Or Easton? Something that sounds more like a direction than a name. Rumor has it that he put a firecracker in Mrs. Wooton’s alligator purse at the Fourth of July picnic in 1952 at the Chasesford estate in Tuxedo Park and it nearly blew off her nose. Singed her eyebrows. They fell on the ground like caterpillars tumbling from an oak. So, you can see why Tom’s mother wasn’t having this match.”

  Mrs. Morgan was drawing a glare from across the table from the Baxters, prominent donors to the hospital, but she didn’t seem to care. And why should she? She had more money than all of us combined. Especially since her husband, George, had died in a mountaineering accident, which was code for tumbling off the balcony of the Negresco hotel in Nice after drinking ten martinis with a young Miss So-and-So who most likely robbed him, then pushed him off, “but we’ll never know, will we,” the papers mused. Morgan money had silenced any further speculation.

  I was happy for the distraction. Tom’s words, at least the ones directed my way, had rattled me. And I was already plenty rattled.

  Mrs. Morgan kept speaking through Tom’s standing ovation, and then through the voice of Tom’s successor at the podium, the hospital’s leading heart surgeon. The Baxters kept glaring, and I tried to focus on words other than “my loving wife, Katharina.”

  Not “my brilliant wife, Katharina.” Or “my gorgeous wife, Katharina.” He used to say both quite often. Instead, he emphasized how much I loved him. He did not say how much he loved me. He did not say “thank you” or “I love you.” He’d said I was a loving wife.

  When we’d first become entangled—and if Tom’s mother, Amelia, thought that Charlotte van Asletson came from a questionable family, then she certainly thought of me as a tramp that darling Tom had picked up at the bus depot—Tom had enjoyed what most men enjoy, trying to remove my clothing. But when we came up for air, it was clearly not just that he was after. It was also the complete opposite of Amelia Edgeworth.

  “I don’t want someone from my world,” he’d said. “The last thing I need is someone who wants to become Amelia Edgeworth, who believes that if one doesn’t have at least seven figures in the bank then happiness is just unattainable. I want someone who loves books more than bank accounts, people more than properties. Who will love me, our family. A hands-on woman, and not just in that way,” he added, laughing at my raised eyebrows. “Someone intelligent, someone beautiful, and someone who puts being a devoted wife and mother above all else. Amelia Edgeworth did not, and I will not let my children relive my youth.”

  I was intoxicated by Tom, and with his vision of me as different from the women he’d known, and desirable precisely because I was different. Above all else did suggest that being a devoted wife and mother came first for Tom, but there were still many fascinating things—like working, socializing with friends, exploring the greatest city on earth—that would come in a close second, third, and fourth.

  “I have two wild brothers. Twins. They made my childhood wonderful. I want a house full of cooing children,” I said. But I was the youngest child by six years. I didn’t know then that the cooing would be screaming and that “above all else” meant that the future Katharina Edgeworth would have to bury herself. That the only interpreting I would do was trying to learn my sons’ different cries.

  “Good,” Tom had whispered into my neck, pulling down my cashmere dress. “Let’s practice making all these wild boys.”

  And we had practiced, upside down, backward, in French, German, Italian, English, and animal.

  Tom and I first met at a party thrown by the French consul general in the early spring of 1948. Marianne and I had befriended his social secretary, and we were squeezed onto lists for events that needed sparkly young women.

  “Please tell me you speak English,” Tom said as he sat next to me on a leather couch. “I just spent thirty minutes saying, ‘Oui, merci, non, merci.’”

  “You’re technically in France, you should be speaking French,” I said, taking in all six feet three inches of him and the perfectly tailored gray suit that showed off his muscular form.

  “Aha! You do speak English,” he said, grinning at me, and what a grin it was.

  “Only when pressed,” I replied coolly.

  “Then let me take it upon myself to do the pressing,” said Tom, handing me one of the martinis he was holding.

  We were engaged six months after we met. He proposed with a Band-Aid, wrapping it around my finger with care.

  “I was going to buy you a ring, but then I decided that it would be far more fun to do that together, because I’ve learned over these few months that everything is far more amusing with you at my side. And I want you to have something you really love. So here,” he said, opening a box of Band-Aids, “is my other promise.” He undid the Band-Aid and wrapped it around my ring finger. “Katharina West, I promise to always take care of you, to heal you of all that ails you, and to stick to you like a—”

  “Like a Band-Aid?”

  “Exactly,” he said, making sure it was wrapped perfectly. He leaned over and kissed my hand. A week later, the Band-Aid was replaced with a tasteful diamond ring from Cartier. He slipped it on my finger in his bachelor’s apartment on Lexington and we were married four months later. As soon as we said I do, it was time to become more than two.

  CHAPTER 6

  My vision for my life had been that of an international woman of something. Perhaps a translator like my aunt Hanna. Maybe something that allowed me to keep one foot in New York and one foot in Europe. A diplomat, if I really shot straight for the stars and didn’t miss. When I was at the United Nations, that goal felt far more possible than it had at City Hall. On my desk, on day one, I found a headset, a typewriter, language dictionaries, a heavy black telephone, and piles of documents. One of them was the United Nations Charter. On that humid day, I sat down in my dark red Traina-Norell dress, took off my pristine white gloves—an ensemble bought at Macy’s with half of my last City Hall paycheck—and read dozens of pages. The section that stuck with me then, and that I reread almost every week that I worked there, was Article 8: “The United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs.”

  I wanted to work in New York, I always knew it was where my heart beat the fastest, but with my family in Europe, my vision was changing, and the UN seemed to make it possible. During my childhood, my mother, who spoke to me in different languages at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, said with frequency, “A woman with many languages can always find many jobs.” It was an incantation in the thirties, when people were desperate for work, but for me, it finally came true in the forties.

  Marriage and children did not fall into my grand plan. At Vassar for my bachelor of arts and Columbia for graduate school, I was focused on bettering my mind. At City Hall, I was focused on exploring my freedom. And at the United Nations, I was focused on experiencing the world, which often meant dating—or simply
sleeping with—men from all over the globe: Argentina, Luxembourg, Mexico, Haiti, and even one visiting Greek official whom Marianne was bored with by lunch, so I became his dinner plans instead. I was well aware that I was supposed to want to get married, but it really did seem a waste when one worked at the United Nations. My mother had married right after university in Zurich and she’d always counseled me to wait until I was older. “I don’t regret it, because I love your father,” she’d explained. “But remove him from the equation and I would have done things very differently.”

  “Will you ever get married?” I asked Marianne one June afternoon, after she told me about the new delegate from India who had offered her a ride on his elephant for her birthday.

  “And I think what he meant by elephant was—”

  “Yes, thank you, I do get the reference.”

  “Well then, the answer is no. I will not. Nothing makes women more boring than marriage and children. And you? Please just shake your head in agreement.”

  I nodded my head yes, then shook my head no. “I think if I fell in love, and I mean, drunk in love, I would. Why not? My parents are still married. They’ve always seemed happy.”

  “Your father is an art historian. He’s clearly a romantic. You are not a romantic, Rina. And thank God for that. Romantics make tiresome drinking companions.”

  “But I’m still a woman in 1946,” I said, sitting on my desk.

  She leaned in closer to me and jabbed at the UN Charter document. “How about you be your own woman in 1946?”

  “How about it?” I said, laughing.

  That evening, I grabbed her hand as soon as the clock struck five and said, “The champagne and caviar is on me.”

  “Liar,” she said, pulling off her cardigan. “All we can afford are beer and chicken eggs.”

  “Well, that sounds pretty good, too.”

  The next day, it was like the goddesses of the world had been listening to us. Bloated from too much beer and chicken eggs, Marianne and I were both at the General Assembly in Queens for the meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Bodil Begtrup from the Danish delegation, and chairwoman of the new commission, stood up, smoothed her skirt, surveyed the very male-dominated room, and said, “I’ll ask you, of all the rights you have, which do you think are too many for women? What is too much?”

  Marianne and I looked at each other for a second, grinned, and then, sitting elbow to elbow in our shared booth, I translated it into French. That night, we did have champagne and caviar, splitting the bill between us, two working women who, in that moment, were quite sure they could conquer the world.

  But two years later, it happened. Love.

  “Oh, if I’d only known you’d fall head over heels for that tall, handsome, rich man, I would have had the consul general throw him right out with the garbage,” Marianne said when I’d confided in her that I was utterly gaga for Tom.

  “Do you think the consul general takes out his own garbage?” I said, lighting a cigarette.

  “If you ask nicely.”

  I thought nothing would change after I got married. I was breathtakingly naïve for a woman who had experienced a lot more of the world than the average American. I forgot that—particularly at my advanced age of thirty-two—what was supposed to follow immediately after marriage, was children.

  Tom Edgeworth loved children. Wanted an army of them. But my body had other plans. A gritting of teeth occurred. Months of “It will happen for us. It must. I’m going to be a pediatric surgeon.” And then, “How can it not happen for us? I am a pediatric surgeon.” The children he interacted with every day, none of them his, became a source of anguish. “How sad for Tom,” his mother would say. “Nature isn’t fair. Tom would be the best father.” We went to doctors, we stopped going to doctors. We went to a Chinese herbalist, a voodoo practitioner, then back to the doctors.

  After nine unsuccessful months, I overheard Amelia tell Tom, “She’s thirty-two years old, after all. It’s like trying to make a mummy a mummy.”

  Tom had not answered.

  After that unfortunate night, Tom and I sat with the windows open, enjoying the smell of fall in the air. He’d put his drink gently on the table and suggested I quit my job at the United Nations. As a married couple we had new priorities. And soon, it would be a new year: 1950.

  “I just translated as the Russian delegate stormed out of the Human Rights Commission meeting. And then there’s everything that’s happening in Korea. The situation is becoming dire. But you don’t want me to help interpret all that. You want me to stay home and knit,” I’d said, finishing my drink and promptly picking up his.

  After we’d married, I had told Tom that I worried about losing all of my goals for my career, my general ambition. I had always worked for two reasons: for my own fulfillment, and to put food on my table. But one of those reasons had evaporated when I married Tom. I was very afraid the other one would, too.

  “Ambitions change, Rina,” he had said. “I think you’ll see that when you’re a wife and mother. You’ll have other priorities, other things that inspire you, and nourish your soul. But if you’re still devoted to peace, love, and—”

  “Peace and security.”

  “Fine, peace and security. If you still need that, then I’m sure we can find a way to make it happen. Being an Edgeworth might not hurt your ambitions. It could actually help you.”

  The man did have a point.

  “Besides,” said Tom, “I did not say knit, I said relax. Stop taking the train for two hours a day. Your paycheck isn’t needed anymore. Perhaps you can just go back when the children are older.”

  “It is still needed to me,” I’d said, standing abruptly, my hand shaking the ice in the drink. I’d felt so flush with my UN salary compared with what I was making at City Hall. Suddenly, it had been reduced to silly girl money.

  “Just think about it,” he’d said. I’d thought about it for about thirty seconds, and the next day I gave Tom a firm no. “When I get pregnant,” I’d promised. “Then they’ll make me leave anyway. Despite all their talk of equality, I’ve never seen a woman bouncing a baby on her knee in the General Assembly.”

  Tom had agreed to my compromise, and finally, he made a far better suggestion.

  “It’s been a year of this trying, this baby obsession” he said, defeat in his voice. We were fanning around a New Year’s Eve party at the Waldorf Astoria in the waning hours of 1949. “You’ve seen every doctor worth his salt, and plenty not worth a grain, so let’s just stop trying with so much intensity for a while. I think we’d both be happier.”

  I let my head fall on his chest, and whispered “thank you.” Then I picked up the nearest glass of champagne. “I’ll drink to that.” For once Tom didn’t say, “Not too much. Champagne may be a false friend to fertility.” Instead, he said, “To us. We’re only two, but a good two. And one of us has enough personality for three.”

  “Which one?” I asked, winking.

  Our marriage got so much better after that. We were still trying, of course. Tom wasn’t about to give up sex with purpose. He was still deeply involved in the comings and goings of my menstrual cycle, but he was deeply involved in other things, too. He even took up cooking.

  “My father didn’t even know where the kitchen was. I want to cook for you when I can,” he’d said when I saw him brandishing our best cutting knife.

  “But what if you burn your hands?” I asked seriously.

  “What if I do? Shall I cover them in mineral wool? Wear glass jars on them instead of mittens?”

  “I mean, perhaps?”

  He wasn’t half bad in the kitchen, but going out together was even more fun. We explored our city like we had when we were dating. The theater, drinks with friends, sometimes his, sometimes mine, though rarely mixing them together. I still went out with Marianne, and while I could not accept offers of Eiffel Towers in pants, I no longer wanted to. When Tom let himself have fun, he was one of the best people to have by you
r side. We got a box at the opera for the season. We went to see Jackie Robinson play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, even bringing William and Amelia with us. “Are you sure you’d like to come?” I’d asked in utter shock, to which she’d answered, “I’m an elitist, Rina. Not a racist.” And I’d smiled from ear to ear as she’d cheered Robinson on as the Dodgers trounced the Cincinnati Reds five to one.

  “Now, that Jackie is the elite. And those Midwesterners are still quite awful at everything, I see,” Amelia had said as their driver came to pick us up.

  After baseball, Tom suggested golf. That year we went to see Louise Suggs win the New York Weathervane and Skip Alexander win the Empire State Open. We met people who had nothing to do with Lenox Hill and did the ultimate in leisure, alternating drinking and golfing at Saint Andrew’s. We even took an extended vacation, Tom’s first in two years. We went to see elephants in Kenya and Tom didn’t work for two full weeks, though he did cap off the trip with four days performing surgeries in a rural hospital.

  “These children need me more than the children in New York,” he’d said as he returned to our villa with tired, bloodshot eyes.

  “Shall we stay?” I’d asked, fully believing that we could be happy there. We could be happy anywhere, as long as we were together.

  “New York calls,” he’d said. “She always does.”

  And she did.

  But it was a wonderful New York. We had separate careers, separate friends, but we mixed so well together in the second year of marriage. Perhaps not his sperm and my eggs, but us. And I’d gotten married for us, not for babies. If I had to be completely honest, having children didn’t interest me past the fact that biologically, it did seem to be the correct thing to do, and it was the world’s constant refrain for women, especially as we crept into the 1950s. I’ll like my own baby, I told myself. All women did. And wasn’t I like all women?