Out on the sidewalk, the crowd was thinner, scurry-ing into waiting cars or flagging down taxis. The woman in the mustard-colored parka, hood up now, was heading for the bus stop. Faith walked rapidly until they were side by side.
“Did you know Nathan Fox well?” Faith asked. It was the right thing to say.
“Better than anyone,” the woman answered, her face revealing the aching need she had to talk to someone —
anyone—about him. It almost wasn’t necessary to re-cite her story, but Faith did it anyway.
“My name is Karen Brown and I’m considering writing a book about his life. I’ve been doing some work in graduate school on the sixties and got interested in him.”
“I was a student when we met—a long, long time ago.” Suddenly, the woman seemed tired.
“Would you like some lunch?” Faith asked. “There’s a coffee shop on the next block that’s not too bad.”
“Yes, yes, I would. I don’t have to be home yet.”
They walked quickly, without speaking. The snow had stopped, leaving a thin, crusty layer on the ice that had built up at the curbs and around the traffic lights.
It was grimy; the soot on the top looked like a sprinkling of black pepper. The cold wind brought tears to Faith’s eyes and stung her cheeks. The woman didn’t have to be home yet, but she did have to be home sometime. A husband? Kids? She’d find out soon.
The coffee shop was tropical in comparison to the weather outside, and Faith led the way to a booth at the rear, far from the opening door. The windows were outlined with colored lights and garlands proclaiming MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY HANUKKAH, and HAPPY
NEW YEAR had been looped uncertainly behind the counter. A plastic poinsettia stood next to the cash register. Each table sported spiky evergreens, with smaller versions of the poinsettia shoved in the glass vases normally reserved for limpid carnations. But the attempt managed to impart the same air of holiday festivity that was filling every corner of the city with a vengeance as the countdown to Christmas continued.
After sitting for a moment, contemplating the decor and thinking how best to begin the conversation, Faith realized it was one of those places where you ordered at the counter and served yourself.
“Come on, let’s get some coffee right away and order.”
It wasn’t long before they were settled in. The woman—Faith realized she didn’t know her name—
had ordered pastrami—clearly not a maven. Coffee shops were not the place for pastrami. Katz’s was, the Carnegie Deli was.
Faith took a sip of coffee, enjoying the feeling of the
hot liquid traveling down her throat, past her rib cage, restoring her circulation. She held the paper cup in both hands for warmth—a blue-and-white cup with Aegean decorations, Greek keys on top and bottom.
“We’re Happy to Serve You.” All New York coffee shop paper cups looked like this. How did it start? A supplier in Athens?
“Sad that the only ones left are his cousins,” Faith commented. It was an opener.
The woman nodded vigorously and put her thick sandwich down. Under her parka—the button had urged people to continue to boycott lettuce—she’d par-tially covered the turtleneck with a loopy beige cro-cheted vest. She tossed her braid, almost long enough to sit on, back over her shoulder and started talking intently.
“When he was in college, first his mother died, then his father. Sophomore year. The year we met. He took it very hard, and later he used to say how much he regretted they never knew what a famous son they had.
‘Lorraine,’ he’d say—oh, I’m sorry. I haven’t introduced myself, Karen.” She looked genuinely stricken.
Faith instantly quelled the impulse to look over her shoulder for “Karen” and instead said, “It was pretty cold outside, not the place for introductions.” The woman smiled. She’d taken her glasses off, which had steamed up when they entered the restaurant, and was wiping them with a tissue. She must have been, if not beautiful, at least pretty when she was younger. Even now with a good haircut, losing the gray, a little makeup, new clothes . . . It would be a big job.
“I’m Lorraine Fuchs.”
“Fuchs?” Faith was surprised.
Lorraine blushed. She was a lot better-looking with some color in her face.
“ ‘The wife of his heart.’ That’s what he always said.
Of course, we never believed in the bourgeois institution of marriage, created solely by men to ensure that property would be transferred to a legitimate male heir and to further subjugate and humiliate women.” This is going to be heavy going, Faith realized dis-mally. But “wife of his heart”—that was sweet.
“I’m so pleased that someone, especially a woman, is writing an account of Nathan’s life, and I’m happy to help in any way I can. I’ve been with him since the day we met.”
“You mean you went underground with him?”
“Of course. He needed me. Maybe I’d better start from the beginning.”
“That would be wonderful. You’re the only person I’ve interviewed so far, and it certainly seems you’ve been the closest.”
Again, it was the right thing to say. Obviously, Nathan Fox was Lorraine Fuchs’s entire reason for being—or so Faith thought.
“We met at City College. He was in my poly sci class and knew more than the professor. They were always having these big fights.” She sighed blissfully.
“Nathan started to offer his own course. He was living in a tiny apartment on Morton Street. The rest is history. We became his cadre. I don’t know why people always say the fifties were dull. Believe me, there was never a dull moment for us!”
“So you all stayed together as a social-action group?”
“Yes. For a while, we were in the Socialist Workers party, but that didn’t work out. Nathan felt the party
wasn’t sufficiently committed to the working class. We formed a faction and published a paper, but eventually we left. Then Nathan wrote the first book and started giving talks all over the country. He was one of the first to speak out against the war in Vietnam,” she related proudly. “You’ve probably seen him in the documen-taries. There was no one who had as powerful an effect on a crowd as Nathan.”
Faith hadn’t seen Fox in action, but she planned to soon. She’d heard about his charisma, though. The peculiarly mesmerizing, yet galvanizing, effect he’d had on great masses of people.
“Of course, my parents disapproved terribly. I’m an only child,” she said apologetically, as if her mother and father’s failure to produce a sibling were somehow her fault. “They thought Nathan was using me. That’s what my father used to say. They didn’t understand that even without Nathan, I would have chosen the life I led.” She began to eat her potato chips, one at a time.
She had long, slender fingers unadorned by any rings.
“They never cut me off. They weren’t like that, and my mother always made a nice meal for us when we’d visit, but Nathan said it made him uncomfortable to be there, even if the pot roast was good. He always had his little jokes. He told them their phone was probably tapped and to be careful. My father was pretty upset at that. It was the last time Nathan went with me to the house. Harvey was a baby, so it would have been around 1964.”
“Harvey?”
“Harvey’s my son.”
Faith swallowed hard. A piece of her pita pocket lodged in her throat and she reached for her coffee. Not only did Emma have two—what would Irwin and Mar-90
sha be, first cousins once removed? Second cousins? It was one of those things she’d never been able to keep straight—but a half brother around her own age!
“So, Arthur Quinn was wrong.” And where was Harvey? Why hadn’t he been at his father’s service?
