It was on the tip of Faith’s tongue to ask why their infertility was necessarily Emma’s “fault,” but this was not the time. Of course Michael would need heirs—a bunch of little Stansteads to cluster round for the family Christmas card sent to constituents. Oddly enough, politicians still seemed to think that the way to win the hearts and minds of the electorate was by sending these yearly missives with wife or husband, progeny, and dog posed in front of a fireplace. Cards most vot-ers promptly tossed out.
“I’m sure you’ll get pregnant; you did before.” Faith blurted the words out, then realized that what she had meant to sound reassuring hadn’t quite come off that way.
Emma didn’t seem to notice. “That’s true, but it’s why I feel so guilty. It’s like this is a kind of judgment on me for all of that.”
“Oh, Emma, come on! You were pushed into a terrible situation. None of it was your fault.” Emma was staring out the window. New York was in a deep freeze. Records were being shattered. On the corner, a man and his wife from Maine had set up a Christmas tree lot, as they did each year, she’d been told. The whole neighborhood had adopted them, greeting them as the first harbingers of the season, their reappearance each Christmas something you could count on—a grown-up city dweller’s version of believing in Santa. They offered the couple showers, a bed when the temperature dipped below zero. The gaily trimmed tree they’d set up on the roof of the di-lapidated camper they lived in for these few weeks was a welcome sight against the dreary morning sky.
“Look,” Faith said, “let’s take one thing at a time.
Your doctor is probably right. God knows, you’ve been
under enough stress lately. Why don’t you show me the card and tell me all about it.
Emma dug the card out of her bag. It was from the same series. A Victorian child with blond ringlets was holding a huge present. “Season’s Greetings” was printed on the large red bow. Inside, the greeting was grim:
What do you think Michael’s chances of getting elected will be when people find out he’s married to a murderer?
Obviously, this was yet another item on Emma Stanstead’s “Things I May Not Have Mentioned” list.
A major item.
“Don’t tell me,” Faith began as Emma started to sob.
“You were in Fox’s apartment the day he was murdered.”
“I was there, but I didn’t kill him!” she shrieked.
“Of course you didn’t!” Faith grabbed a box of tissues and moved Emma over to the couch. Faith hadn’t imagined Emma could ever make a noise like the one that had just issued from her mouth. She’d finally flipped out.
Emma began to shake. Just shake, soundlessly now.
Faith threw the down comforter from her bed around Emma’s shoulders and went to get her a cup of fresh coffee. Emma held it tightly, slowly moving it to her mouth, taking small sips. Faith felt as if there should be a dog sled nearby.
“He wasn’t dead. I didn’t see that, thank God, but I could have. If the killer had come sooner.” She closed
her eyes and drank again. Her pain, moving in waves from beneath the quilt, was searing.
“You went to his apartment at three, the way you always did, right? And left when?”
Emma opened her eyes, looking directly at Faith. “I only stayed an hour. I’ve felt so guilty ever since. I had to be back uptown for a cocktail party. A cocktail party! If I had stayed longer, my father might still be alive.”
“Or you might be dead, too,” Faith said briskly. She was beginning to understand why hysterical people get slapped across the face. Anything to bring them back.
Since she’d seen Emma that first night in the kitchen, Faith had had the same impulse. Anything to ground her in what passed for reality—and what seemed to work best was the verbal equivalent of a slap.
Emma came to—for the moment. She sat up straighter.
“I never thought of that.” She put the cup down on the low table in front of the couch.
“But it wasn’t likely,” Faith pointed out. “Whoever is blackmailing you knows you were at your father’s apartment that day, which means he or she saw you.
Saw you leave and then went in. Don’t you see? The killer
“That’s a relief—I think,” Emma said, kicking off her shoes and curling up on the couch with the quilt pulled over her. She was looking a whole lot better.
“Someone was watching, yet how would they know you’d be there? It couldn’t have been a coincidence.
Someone has to have been watching you for a while.” Someone knew Emma’s schedule, her every move.
Faith didn’t give voice to the rest of her speculations. Emma had all she could take for now. But suppose someone, say Lucy, knew or had found out about Emma’s real parentage and either knew or supposed that Emma was seeing Fox. Easy enough to follow her.
New Yorkers are street-smart, but in a heads-down sort of way. You don’t make eye contact. And Emma, whose thoughts tended to be very far away from the immediate, would not have been paying attention to what was going on around her anyway—like someone following her. And New York is a big, crowded city.
Following someone, particularly Emma, would not have been hard.
“Did your father seem any different from usual? Ap-prehensive?”
“No, if anything, he was extremely cheerful. Maybe he’d finished that big book, the one you were asking about the other day. I remembered after I talked to you that I hadn’t heard any typing that day. And there weren’t any papers on the table. Usually, it was pretty messy. When I gave him the bialys, he said they would be a perfect celebration.”
“So, the two of you clinked breadstuff and made merry?”
This continuing picture of Nathan Fox the doting father was far removed from Nathan Fox the flaming radical.
“I didn’t eat anything. I wasn’t hungry. Besides, I wanted him to have them. I’d brought some cream cheese. I made him a glass of tea. He’d taught me how.
He drank his tea in a glass. He said his father always did.” Emma said in wonderment—at the custom and maybe a little at her startling culinary accomplishment.
Nathan Fox, Norman Fuchs, wasn’t disguised as an
old Jewish man. He was an old Jewish man, Faith thought.
“Did you ask him what he was celebrating?” Emma looked downcast. “No, at the time, I kind of thought it was because I was there. I’d missed the week before.”
“And I’m sure that’s what he meant.” Maybe, Faith thought, qualifying to herself. “What did you talk about?”
“Daddy always liked to hear what I’d been doing.
Where I’d gone. Who I’d seen. He knew quite a lot of people. Michael and I had been to the opening of ‘The Age of Napoleon’ at the Met’s Costume Institute the night before. It really is a wonderful show. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should go. I told him about dancing with my Michael by the Temple of Dendur. It was a lovely evening, although terribly crowded. Anyway, that got us talking about Napoleon. Daddy was very big on him and planned to write a book about whether he’d subverted the goals of the French Revolution or not, which of course he’ll never do now—
Dad, not Napoleon. Although, I suppose both. Daddy was always quoting him, history was ‘a set of lies
