A Woman of Intelligence Read online

  “And how will you do that? By plucking me completely out of my life?”

  “No,” he said. “There would be no disruption to your life, I hope. No true disruption.”

  I looked down at my dress, where spots of sauce had fallen. No amount of laundering could bring it back now.

  “But as you have observed, Mr. Coldwell,” I said, moving my napkin to cover the stains. “I am a woman who is never alone.” I thought of Tom’s face if I told him Jilly would have to come over because the government needed me to do a spot of spy work.

  “Perhaps you could find a way to be alone, just a few times?”

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “That would be the hardest part. Harder even than Jacob believing I’m a communist.”

  “All that is down the line.”

  I stood up. “I still don’t understand why you’ve asked me,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed with the need to leave. “Surely Jacob was in love with other women over the past decade.”

  “He was,” Coldwell replied. “And I looked into a few. But none of them were staring out their windows at three o’clock in the morning, observing the world from a gilded cage, desperate to escape.”

  “Most people wouldn’t call 820 Fifth Avenue a cage.”

  “I think you would.”

  Coldwell put his hand in his jacket pocket, found a receipt, and wrote a phone number on it. He did not add his name. He pushed it across the table to me.

  “Call me when you decide,” he said. He reached into his wallet and put money on the table. It seemed like too much for what we’d eaten.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, folding the receipt in half.

  “Think about it quickly.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “Welcome home, Mrs. Edgeworth.” Sam’s voice slid through the air as he opened the taxi door for me.

  “Thank you, Sam,” I said. During my long cab ride home, the sun had begun to set. I had left my children in the park at noon, and I was coming home to them at eight p.m.

  When I passed Carrie’s floor in the elevator, I felt an urge to jump out and hide in her apartment instead of returning to my own. But no. I had created the day; I would see it to its end.

  The doors opened. The apartment felt more cavernous than usual, and it was dead quiet.

  Tom was in our bedroom, sitting on the large bed, papers in front of him, his horn-rimmed glasses on. He looked up at me as I stopped in the doorway.

  “Is Gerrit all right?” I asked, my voice already catching.

  “He needed stitches,” he said flatly. “In his knee. Five stitches. He fell on a piece of broken glass.” His tone was worse than flat. It was emotionless. Dead.

  “Did he?” I said. I leaned against the door frame. What glass? Tom hadn’t said anything about glass when he’d come to me holding Gerrit. “Did you take him to the hospital?”

  “No,” said Tom, whipping off his glasses and throwing them on the bed. “I sewed him up right here with dental floss.”

  I bit my lip. I would not cry in front of Tom again.

  “Did you take the baby with you to the hospital?” I asked, my voice so quiet I wasn’t sure if he could hear me.

  Tom sighed and moved to the edge of the bed.

  “No. Jilly came,” he said. “So that I didn’t have to. She’s still here. She’s in bed with him. I think they’re both sleeping now. Gerrit’s been asleep for an hour.”

  “Jilly doesn’t have to spend the night,” I said. “I need to feed the baby. I’ll go replace her now. Which room—”

  “You will do nothing of the sort,” Tom suddenly roared. He stood and walked toward me, looming.

  I froze.

  “I told myself that we would speak rationally about all this, but it’s not an option right now. I’m irate, Katharina!” he said, bringing his face even closer to mine. “What in God’s name possessed you? How could you stand there at a distance while your son cried and not go to him? Is there something wrong with you? Something I’m not seeing?”

  I shook my head no, silent tears escaping. “I thought it was just a scrape, Tom. If I had known he’d fallen on glass, I would have gone to him quicker. I didn’t know he would need stitches.” I needed to convince Tom, but I didn’t know if I could convince myself. All I knew, then and now, was that I’d felt completely unable to move.

  “That’s preposterous,” said Tom, practically laughing despite his anger. “Glass or not, you should have run to him when he fell. The moment he fell. And he should never have been that far away from you. He’s two years old. What are you going to have him do next? Jump on the subway? Ride over to Queens?”

  He spat out Gerrit’s age as if I didn’t know it. As if it were not me who had given birth to him, then spent months recovering from a traumatic labor. As if I hadn’t been the one who’d planned his first birthday party while pregnant, hired the caterers, plus the lady with the guitar from Westchester who sang “The Farmer in the Dell” in the original German.

  “I don’t know what happened, Tom,” I said, trying to pull my words together. “I’d had a very difficult day with them, and by the time Gerrit fell, I felt paralyzed.”

  “It wasn’t even a day! It was what, a few hours?” he yelled.

  “Even a few hours can paralyze you.”

  “With what?” he said, taking a step back, finally giving me room to breathe again.

  I looked at him blankly.

  “What paralyzed you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my hands covering my ears to block his words. “With motherhood, I suppose.”

  He pulled my arms down. “Last I checked, motherhood was not a disease.”

  But it was. It could be. I wanted to shout that he had no idea. He knew nothing of the hard side of parenting. It was like what Mrs. Morgan had said about Charlotte van Asletson and her eyes—she could only see misery from her right side. Tom Edgeworth could see only one side of motherhood.

  It was not something I could explain to him. Not now, perhaps not ever.

  “You do know I’ve had children die as I was operating on them? I’ve touched them as they breathed their last breath. But I tried as hard as I could to save them. I have never been paralyzed.”

  “We are not cut from the same cloth, Tom,” I said quietly. “I am a translator, not a surgeon.”

  “You’re not a translator anymore. You’re a mother,” he said, shouting out the last word. He sat back down on the bed and put his head in his hands. “When I brought Gerrit to you, you just stared at him as if he were a stranger’s child. As if you weren’t his mother at all. It was a sickening look, Katharina.”

  I felt like I might faint, my body unable to handle my frustration. “I am his mother!” I shouted. “And I love him desperately.” I started to cry, really cry, no longer caring if I did. “I just don’t have an explanation for what happened,” I said, lowering my voice slightly. “I didn’t have an explanation for you this morning, and I certainly don’t have one now.” Tom gave me his “please don’t embarrass us” expression. It was because Jilly was in the next room. I had no doubt he cared more about her opinion of him than mine in that moment.

  “I provide you with what you need, don’t I?” he asked, quietly. “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “All I ask is that you love me and love our boys. Is that too much of a request?”

  I did love them. And Tom. The person I had stopped loving was me. If I were at a party, I wouldn’t glance at me. I wouldn’t want to speak to me. I’d become a woman who faded into the background.

  Except this afternoon, when I was worthy of being followed.

  “Was this enough, then? This little pause of yours today?” Tom asked. “Your fleeing the scene? Do you feel better now that you’ve had your brush with irresponsibility?”

  “I don’t know, Tom,” I whispered.

  He was quiet. The entire city felt quiet, as if Fifth Avenue wasn’t thrumming with its usua
l energy right below our windows.

  “But I do know that I want to see my boys.” I started to walk back toward the bedrooms.

  “You will not wake them, Katharina,” he said, standing up. He moved quickly and reached for my arm, holding me back. “You will leave them be,” he said, gripping my biceps now. “Especially Gerrit. He’s finally asleep.”

  “I will see them,” I said, ripping away from Tom. “I’m their mother. Even when I’m a bad one.”

  He didn’t reply. But he didn’t reach for me again, either. A few moments later, I heard the elevator ding and close. He was leaving the building.

  The boys’ rooms were close to ours, but I turned and walked into the hall, where I collapsed on the window seat. I dried the remaining dampness from my face. I looked at my hands for any traces of makeup, but there were none. Had I even put on lipstick and rouge that morning? I had. I always did. My ridiculous attempts at presentability. If I’d known what the day would bring, I might have worn a helmet instead.

  I pressed my face against the cool glass of the window and looked down. There were still a few people walking past the zoo entrance. None of them were Lee Coldwell.

  I crept to Gerrit’s room first. He was fast asleep, his leg uncovered and propped on pillows, his knee wrapped in gauze. I woke up Jilly, thanked her, and watched her leave.

  I got into Gerrit’s bed and put my arms around him gingerly. I didn’t want to wake him, but I had to touch him. I remembered how I’d screamed. How I’d imagined my hand hitting his face. Tom was right. I didn’t deserve my children.

  “I’m so sorry, darling,” I whispered into his ear. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Tom and I barely spoke for two weeks. Two weeks in which I tended to Gerrit and Peter’s every need as if they were newborns. I held Gerrit in my arms more than I did Peter, even toddling around the city with all thirty pounds of him attached to my hip.

  As the teens of April turned into the twenties, I watched Tom walk into the elevator one Thursday morning. He looked straight ahead, straight through me: through my straining arms holding the baby, through the white Lise Charmel nightgown, hand-sewn in Lyon, which I’d picked because he’d admired it one weekend in a shop window. The doors closed and whisked him off to his important world as I stood there, a ghost in the home that he provided for me.

  I turned the volume on the TV up. The Army-McCarthy hearings had begun broadcasting on the twenty-second. The Geneva Convention was going to start in three days. Lee Coldwell certainly was not the only one who saw communism as a great threat to democracy. I looked at Senator McCarthy, his hair slicked back as he talked to his counsel, Roy Cohn. Was I one of them? Automatically on McCarthy’s side because the FBI thought I was the perfect person to spy on Jacob Gornev? I turned the volume down. It made no difference. I was at home, back in the role of the imperfect housewife, the flawed mother.

  I checked on Gerrit in his high chair, took off the white nightgown, pulled the baby to my chest, sat on a dining chair, and thought about when everything had changed. Had it really been so long ago that I’d been pulling Tom toward me instead of a baby?

  When we’d first started dating, Tom lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in a respectable but not very chic building at the corner of Lexington and Seventy-second. Though I would have gone home with him the night we met, it didn’t happen for a few weeks more. Weeks when I learned that Tom couldn’t speak French but could do practically everything else.

  “You’re a surgeon?” I asked on our first date at Le Pavillon across from the St. Regis, without argument the best French restaurant in town. “As in, you cut people apart and sew them back together?”

  “A bit better than how I found them.”

  “And you’re good at this little side hobby?” I asked, glopping béarnaise sauce onto my steak.

  “I get by,” he replied. “Haven’t had a patient complain yet. But that’s—”

  “Hard to do from six feet under?”

  “Exactly,” he said, smiling and gesturing to the waiter to please bring us another round of drinks.

  Tom, I realized quickly, was a man who always said please. He introduced himself to waiters, asked for their names, and chatted with them about where they were from. He reeked of wealth, from his cuff links, which were clearly platinum, to the way he carried himself, as if the sidewalks were raised just a few inches higher for him. Easy. Easy walking. Easy smile. Easy life. But it was also obvious that all that ease hadn’t expunged his soul.

  “Actually, I specialize in children’s surgery,” he admitted.

  I leaned over and pressed my fingers into his arm.

  “Ouch?”

  “Just making sure you’re real.”

  Three weeks later, we were in bed, and Tom very much proved that he was real. I’d had good sex before. Great sex. All those war years, feeling like the man you were bedding might be called to duty at any moment, so you better have a hell of a good time and give them something to remember as they slipped from this earth. There had been over twenty if I counted correctly, including Jacob Gornev, who was wild and wonderful, but Tom was the most generous lover I’d ever had. If I hadn’t had two orgasms before noon, he would look at himself in the mirror and declare, “Well, I’ve accomplished nothing.” Then we’d laugh and try to make sure he accomplished something.

  One afternoon, when I had convinced Tom to have German food at my favorite little restaurant near Washington Square, a dingy place that hadn’t upgraded a thing since the Great War, I thought about everything we’d done in the three months that we’d been dating. We’d seen Aida at the Center Theatre, Macbeth at the National Theatre, had soft drinks in Times Square, hard drinks at the Ritz on Madison, ten-cent cotton candy on Coney Island, kissed and kissed some more below the flags at Rockefeller Plaza, hid from the rain under the tracks of the Third Avenue El, and tumbled into bed, and kept on tumbling.

  “Do you have a diaphragm?” he’d asked the first time we’d had sex. “If not, a prophylactic is just fine. But of course, I am a doctor, so if you need a diaphragm…?”

  “I have it all,” I’d told Tom. I was thirty-one years old and had inherited the European view of sex as just another form of conversation.

  In that German restaurant, I looked at Tom as he wiped his brow and rolled up the sleeves of his oxford shirt.

  “Besides the sex, why do you like me?” I asked after a bite of New York’s best roulade.

  “I can’t answer that,” said Tom, sweating. It was the end of June and the restaurant didn’t have air-conditioning, or more than two working windows. “This is like eating the nectar of the gods in the seventh circle of hell. Is there a river of boiling blood and fire in the back?” he asked, opening one more button on his shirt.

  “There is, but that’s just to make the blutwurst. Shall we order a plate?”

  “If I faint, just throw water in my face and stomp on me until I come to, okay?” he croaked out.

  “You’re the doctor.”

  “Katharina West, why do I like you,” he said, sitting back, trying to take a deep breath. “I like you because you’re nothing like Daisy and Rose and Violet and all the other women my mother has tried to set me up with who were named after flowers yet have no roots, just petals that will wilt fast. Your petals are going to last, I can see that already, because you’re smart and quick and you make me laugh. I like you because you care about people, people who look like you, people who don’t look like you. Like me, you know that inside these gorgeous bodies,” he said, moving his hand from his head to waist and winking, “we are all just blood and guts.”

  “Who is the gorgeous one?”

  “You, of course, you. And staying on that subject, my favorite one, let me tell you more about your charms.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Lucky for me, you have a lot more than ears. You’re worldly, yet caring. You don’t just want to steam down to Argentina to tell everyone
you took a trip, you want to explore, meet, greet, and repeat. And in the country’s native language.” He watched as a bead of sweat hit the table and wiped it with his napkin.

  “Just shake out like a dog,” I said, grinning, and to my surprise, he did.

  “Think they’re going to kick us out soon?” I asked.

  “You kidding? There are four patrons in this restaurant.” He took an ice cube out of his glass and dropped it down the back of his shirt.

  “I’ll tell you this,” he said when I was done laughing. “My mother, who one day you will meet, though you should drink heavily first, has a long list of not-so-insignificant flaws. But she’s funny. She’ll make you laugh till your whole body hurts from it. And she’s smart. A lovely kind of smart. An intelligence that just seeps out of her, though she never tries to prove it to you. Somehow, I ignore all her flaws because of those two things. So I suppose I want a woman who is nothing like my mother in most ways, but who is funny and lovely smart. Does that make sense?”

  “It does.”

  “Also,” he said, placing his hands back on mine. “I don’t just like you. I happen to love you. Lovely smart love you.”

  Everyone at the UN was thrilled about my relationship with Tom, by my engagement ring, except Marianne.

  “Are you sure you can still lift your hand with that flawless diamond on it?” Caroline asked me when I first came to work wearing it. Caroline was Belgian, from Spa, and certainly knew her way around a diamond. “Of course, who even cares if you can’t, you’ll have servants to lift your hand for you. You lucky thing. I can’t believe I didn’t go to that party at the consulate with you both. You meet heirs to tycoons of industry, and I meet waiters at the Divan Parisien who slip me free Camembert and think it’s enough for me to go to bed with them. Now if I got that rock instead, I’d be in bed with all of them. Remind me to always go out with you, Rina.”

  “Your parents must be thrilled,” said Abena, one of the Ethiopian secretaries whom I’d grown close to.