‘You told me it didn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You told me that Emma would be like your own child. What happened, happened. I should have known your precious genes would mean more than common decency.
You’ve never been good to her. But this is it, Jason.
You either make her equal to Lucy in your will or I’m leaving.’ I heard something break. Poppy has always liked to throw things, and when I went in, I saw pieces of glass on the floor in front of the fireplace.” Faith was openmouthed and immobilized. She couldn’t even reach for her friend’s hand. The trickle of words had become a torrent. She saw it all as Emma described it. The hall in their town house, thickly carpeted with Oriental runners. Emma’s footsteps muffled. The voices from the library, Jason Morris’s private domain. Then the crash of crystal on the marble surrounding the large fireplace.
“What did you do? Did you confront them? Oh, Emma, I can’t believe this!” She grabbed her friend’s hand now and squeezed hard.
“I wasn’t thinking. I couldn’t think. I just walked in
and looked at them. They stared at me as if they couldn’t believe that I was there; then Mother said,
‘You were supposed to be at the Auchinclosses’. I remember thinking what a stupid thing it was to say. I mean, I’ve just learned that my father isn’t my father and she’s blaming me for not being somewhere else.
“Jason just looked at me and left the room. He couldn’t handle it. I told my mother that I didn’t care anything about any money. I only wanted to know the truth. Who was my father? She didn’t want to tell me, said it didn’t matter, that he was long gone and I couldn’t see him. It was really strange. Finally I went to bed and stayed there. After two days, she cracked. I wasn’t eating and wouldn’t get up. She’d come in and yell or cry. I didn’t see anyone else. Lucy was in college, thank God.”
“Who was it?” Faith asked gently.
“Nathan Fox.”
“Nathan Fox!” Faith said. Her voice was too loud and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Nathan Fox!” she said more softly. How to offer condolences in a situation like this? Emma’s father has been murdered, but presumably he had not been much of a presence in Emma’s life, since she’d only found out about him when she was seventeen and since he hadn’t exactly been accessible. She blurted out what was foremost in her mind, “
that is, the one who wrote
“Yes, yes,” Emma said, cutting her off a tad impatiently. What other Nathan Fox was there?
“I was furious at Mother for never having told me, and things in my life that hadn’t made sense before suddenly did. You know Jason had always favored
Lucy, and I thought it was because I was a disappointment to him. I never did that well in school and I was, you know, shy. He likes women like my mother, like Lucy. Women with personalities.”
That’s an interesting way to put it, thought Faith.
“Emma, you have more personality—and a better one—in your pinkie finger than either of them.” As Faith hastened to reassure Emma, her thoughts were racing in several directions. What a thing to do to a child! And how devastating to discover your father was not your father! She felt a cold fury at Poppy’s total lack of responsibility. At the same time, a voice was saying, Poppy Morris and Nathan Fox! So the photograph had not been misleading. Handsome and, by all accounts, extremely charismatic, he wasn’t just coming for the food and witty conversation at the Morrises’.
But it was the blackmail note that dominated. “We know everything,” it stated. Emma’s pregnancy.
Emma’s parentage. And what else? Faith knew right away. Knew what she’d have done herself. Obviously, Emma would not have been satisfied simply to know her father’s name.
“So, you got out of bed and tried to find him?” Emma nodded. “I got out of bed and ran away.
Mother swore that she didn’t know where he was. That she hadn’t heard from him since he went underground.
I did get it out of her that he knew about me, though.
They named me Emma after Emma Goldman—and all those years I had assumed it was Emma Woodhouse.
Mother has a weakness for Jane Austen.
“Where did you go?” Faith was beginning to think they should get some lunch. She was getting hungry, and they still had a great deal of ground to cover. The bench was also getting hard.
“I didn’t know any radicals, or Communists, or even socialists. Not personally. But I figured there would have to be some in the Village, so I took the subway downtown and started going from one bookstore to the next. Bookstores with the right titles in the window.
Nobody seemed to think it was strange that I was trying to find out about Fox. I met a woman, the owner of Better Read Than Dead, who told me that someone named Todd Hartley knew everything there was to know about Fox. She gave me his address. He was living in a collective with a bunch of other people. One of them had money and had rented a huge loft in SoHo.
Todd and the rest of them took me in right away. I thought it was perfect. Nobody had ever paid much attention to me at home, except to make sure my teeth got straightened and I didn’t put on weight. The comrades—that’s what they were called—wanted to hear what I had to say. They were all such dears and so serious.”
“Would you mind if I sat here?” A young mother with a stroller, infant asleep, answered her own question by plopping down next to them. “I’m exhausted.
She only sleeps in motion. I’ve pushed her through every museum, and, when the weather was better, from here to Battery Park and back.”
This was news to Faith. She assumed normal babies knew enough to go to sleep in their cribs. An innate reflex. You put them in, they closed their eyes, and voila.
This baby didn’t look like something out of a Stephen King novel, yet clearly she was an aberration, torment- 30
ing her mother. The woman’s hair needed a trim and her lipstick was crooked. The baby, on the other hand, looked great. She had softly curling dark hair and her tiny lips pursed in a perfect little O. However, the poor woman’s problem was not of great interest to Faith.
Children were something that happened to other people.
Obviously, they couldn’t continue their conversation.
“Let’s grab some dogs from Sabrett’s and walk through the park,” she suggested.
“I’m supposed to be having lunch with people important to Michael. I’m already dreadfully late,” Emma said desperately. “Except you haven’t told me what to do yet.”
“Call them and cancel,” Faith advised. “This is more important.”
Leaving the young mother, who was nodding off herself while the baby tried to eat her toes, they went in search of a phone. Faith called Josie, too.
Outside in the sunshine, deceptively warm, Emma picked up the threads. The Sabrett’s hot dog had satisfied Faith’s physical hunger; now she was longing for the rest of Emma’s story.
“Anyway, they were so nice to me, you can’t imagine. Trotskyists. You know, you’re not supposed to say Trotskyites, they don’t like that. They were all getting ready to go into factories to mobilize the working classes. They said the movement in the sixties and seventies had concentrated too much on students and the antiwar movement. Todd used to stand up and shout,
‘If every student broke a pencil, what would you have?
Splinters! If every worker shut down his machine, what would you have? Revolution!’ It was one of his
