them involving a philandering husband or Emma herself in love with another, but blackmail! This didn’t happen to people Faith knew. This didn’t happen to people her age, for that matter. Blackmail was old guys caught with their pants down or hands in the till or whatever.
Faith took the card gingerly. She had some notion that they should be preserving prints for the police. She also felt a primal repulsion—who knew where it has been?
The card displayed a Currier & Ives sleigh scene,
greeting. It had been typed on a word processor, impossible to trace.
We know everything, and if you don’t want Michael to know, get ten thousand dollars in unmarked bills and wait to hear from us. Keep quiet or you’ll be headlines, too.
P.S. Remember your “mono”?
It could not have been an accident that the blackmailers had left the card’s original bright red “Merry Christmas” greeting showing. There were no signatures.
After she had turned the card over to Faith, Emma’s anxiety had abated. She was leaning back on the bench, her face turned toward the sun streaming in from the park through the wall of glass. Faith was again struck by Emma’s beauty. She looked like a model for one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Jane Morris—an ancestress?—in an outfit by Donna Karan.
Like the Emma of old, this Emma was more than slightly fey. Sentences trailed off into some region known only to Emma herself. One classmate had described carrying on a conversation with her as “walking into a maze without a ball of yarn.” Faith had never been troubled by Emma’s sudden flights. She always came back, and anyway, it was a wonder she wasn’t worse, given her family. Given Poppy.
Pamela Morris, “Poppy,” had been a similar beauty at her daughter’s age, and even now, in her early fifties, she was stunning. Her hair was a darker red than Emma’s, and if art was helping nature, it was doing a very good job indeed. Not a single wisp of gray in-vaded her sleek chignon. Unlike her daughter, however, Poppy was never out of touch. She’d been in
touch with—and in charge of—an elite segment of New York society since she’d come out. During the sixties and early seventies, Poppy was credited with initiating “radical chic.” You were as likely to be sitting next to Bobby Seale as Henry Kissinger at one of her dinner parties. Now Bobby was promoting his new book,
Having Poppy for a mother meant never having to say you were sorry, because she didn’t have time to hear your apology, or even notice if you’d erred.
Larger than life, she sucked all the air from a room, to the delight of her adoring, reticent husband, who viewed her as his own personal exotic pet. He was content to sit back and watch the show. Faith could barely recall what Jason Morris looked like—or did to pay all Poppy’s bills. There were several buildings and large parts of others named for his family. Faith had always assumed he was in the world of finance—certainly not a mere broker, but perhaps a brokerage.
Emma had an older sister, Lucy, or rather Lucretia, named by Poppy for Lucretia Mott during Poppy’s intense Betty Friedan/Germaine Greer feminist period.
Faith and her own sister, Hope, privately joked that Lucy would more aptly have been named for that other Lucretia—Borgia. Lucy Morris was a classic bully, adept at finding closely guarded chinks in one’s armor, then thrusting her lance in with deadly preci-sion. Emma was, of course, easy prey—too easy, and Lucy turned her attention to her schoolmates, where she used her position as a leader to make many a girl’s life a living hell, all the while maintaining an untar-nished reputation with the faculty. Because kids never tell. She’d been at the party, too, Emma had men-24
tioned, and Faith was glad she’d avoided her fellow alum.
At present, Lucy was studying for the bar. Poppy continued to give unabashedly elaborate parties, still daring, but now mixing new money with old and adding a liberal dash of celebrities—and liberals—to Knickerbocker society. Jason was still paying the bills.
“Remember your ‘mono’?” the card said. Faith remembered Emma’s mono. It had been close to the end of junior year, and Emma had had to be tutored at home. But it wasn’t something to keep from your husband. It wasn’t worth ten thousand dollars. And what did “headlines, too” mean? Michael was in the news a lot; maybe that was it.
“Emma, what are they talking about? How could someone blackmail you for having mono all those years ago? I mean, it’s not something anyone would be ashamed of, even if we did call it the ‘kissing dis-ease.’ ”
Emma seemed engrossed in the folds of Belmont’s coat. “Why do you suppose they have this statue here?”
This was not the best time for an art history lesson.
“Emma! You asked me to come, you show me a very real and very threatening blackmail note—”
“All right, I know. I’d just rather not think about it.
Any of it. To start with, I didn’t have mono, I had a baby.”
“What!”
“Well, I miscarried, but I was pregnant. That’s why I dropped out of school.”
“Oh, Emma, I’m so sorry. I wish I had known. It must have been terrible for you.”
Emma nodded and two perfectly round tears oozed
from the corners of her eyes and slowly made their way down her smooth cheeks.
“Still, this happens all the time. It’s not something to be blackmailed about,” Faith persisted.
“It’s—it’s a little more complicated than that.” Faith was not surprised. She decided to sit back herself and let Emma tell her story. She didn’t expect a torrent of words, but perhaps this method would in-duce a steady trickle.
Emma tucked her thick hair behind one ear. A large square-cut emerald flanked by equally impressive dia- monds on her ring finger flashed in the thin winter light.
“It was a pretty crazy time. I mean, life was always a little hyper around my house, but I was used to it. I was pretty caught up in my dancing.” Faith remembered. Emma had studied ballet since she was a small child, snaring an occasional part in
She’d been talented. “But that spring, things got really insane. It’s hard to talk about it, Faith. I’ve tried not to even think about it. That’s why the card was such a shock. I’ve been pretending nothing ever happened, or that it was all a book I read, not my life.” Faith nodded. If you could manage it, this didn’t sound like a bad idea. Her problem would be in the blotting-out department.
“I was supposed to spend the night at a friend’s after a party, but I didn’t feel well and went home. Nobody heard me come in. My mother and Jason were quarrel-ing. I stopped outside the library door. It was so unusual. I don’t think I had ever heard them fight—not with each other. Mother was constantly screaming about one thing or another, but Jason never responded, which would make Mother rave on. I think he got a
kick out of it. Anyway, that night he was shouting, too.
‘She’s your bastard; you take care of her,’ I heard Jason say. ‘Why should your little by-blow get anything from me, and certainly not the same amount as my own daughter!’ ”
Emma stopped. Faith knew where they were going now. She knew why Emma wanted it to be someone else’s life.
“I had no idea what they were talking about. At first I thought my mother must have had another child and given it up. Then Mother started in. She didn’t raise her voice, but I could hear every word. It was ten times scarier hearing her talk this way. A dead kind of voice.
