Body in the Big Apple

KATHERINE

HALL PAGE

BODY

in the

BIG APPLE

To my mother,

Alice M. Page,

with love and joy

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

—HENRI BERGSON

Prologue

Memories are our waking dreams.

Certain scenes recalled fill our minds with the immediacy of the present, though the event is long past.

We hear words and are convinced we are remembering what was actually said. We see a room in exact detail.

The particular drapes at a window—the fall of the fabric, the texture of the cloth. The flowers in a vase, their fragrance tenacious. The taste of a perfectly ripe pear, its juice sticky and sweet. Not the vague recollection of someone, but his very presence. Warm skin—in need of a shave, the feel of the slight bristle against the caress of a cheek.

Yet other memories can be revived only obliquely.

These tend to move persistently out of reach, slipping further and further away as we struggle to remember them. Tantalizing. How old was I? Which house was it?

Who was that person? They retreat until it is only the face and the place in the photograph we are holding in our hands and not real memories at all.

Ephemeral, fleeting—perhaps dreams have the advantage over memories. Certainly bad dreams do.

Even our worst nightmares diminish over time. But the waking terror of a vivid recollection is with us for life.

It comes unbidden, not merely an uninvited guest, but an unwanted one. We’re in the shower, driving, reading, talking, and suddenly these scenes push everything to one side, and, hostages, we can only watch helplessly, forced back into the past. The voices are too loud to ignore. The words repeat over and over again.

This tale is that kind of memory.

—Faith Sibley Fairchild, 1999

One

“Is there a back way out of this apartment?” the young woman asked anxiously. The caterer turned in surprise.

It was a line she had heard only in the movies. “There’s a service door past the maid’s room,” she answered, indicating the direction with a wave of her hand, still clutching the pastry tube she was using to pipe florets of dilled mayonnaise onto timbales of smoked salmon mousse.

The woman’s next line, although equally surprising, was not from a script.

“Is that you, Faith? Faith Sibley?” It was.

Faith put the tube down and focused on the person in front of her. Startlingly large deep blue eyes, chin-length burnished red-gold hair, skin like veritable alabaster. It was a measure of the kind of concentration that Faith brought to her work not to have recognized Emma Morris, now Emma Stanstead, immediately.

They’d spent most of their school years together, in school and out.

“Emma!” Faith flung her arms around her friend, mindful of Emma’s black Ralph Lauren evening suit and the dark mink over one arm. “Emma! It’s been ages.” Emma hugged her back. No air kisses, just a good, hard hug. Air kisses—on both cheeks if it was a really, really close friend or celeb—the greeting of the eighties.

“But what are you doing in the kitchen?” Emma asked.

Faith would have thought her white jacket, checked trousers, and toque supplied the answer, yet Emma, while not stupid, had tended to approach life at a slower, more gentle pace than that of her fellow classmates.

“I’m a caterer now, with my own company, Have Faith. Surprisingly, I’ve gotten only a few calls from people looking for an ‘escort’ service—or God. Most of the calls are to do parties like this, and things have been going amazingly well.” Faith stopped. She was gushing; plus, she was getting absolutely no response at all from her audience. Emma was listening with the air of a woman who is sure the ringing phone is going to be her doctor with news of a fatal diagnosis. Faith surreptitiously rapped her knuckles on the table for the continued prosperity of her fledgling business—and for her friend’s well-being.

Her impression was confirmed by Emma’s reply.

“That sounds like fun. The food was lovely. Some little shrimp things?” Emma’s voice trailed off and she looked in the direction of the exit. The earlier note of fear in her voice was back—full force.

“Are you okay? What’s wrong?” Faith asked, putting her hand on Emma’s arm and pulling her away from the kitchen bustle and over toward the windows.

Outside, the stars were obliterated by the lights of New York City, several million watts, brighter than usual at this holiday time of year. It was bitterly cold and those below on the sidewalk walked quickly, heads bent.

Emma seemed momentarily transfixed by the view—or some other view in her mind’s eye. She looked very much the same as she had when they were in high school together six years earlier—extremely beautiful and not much older. So far as Faith could tell, the only changes were that she was a bit more slender, had cut her hair—and was terrified.

She released her grasp and faced her friend, repeating the question more forcefully. “Emma, do you need some help? What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? What could be wrong?” Emma said.

Faith’s query had dropped a penny in the slot, and Emma began to move. She shrugged on her fur and pulled gloves from a pocket, dropping a Christmas card she’d been holding in the process. Faith bent down to retrieve it for her, but Emma swooped—all but knocking Faith over—grabbed the card, and was out the door in an instant. Since she was Emma and had been raised properly, “Thank you so much. Lovely to see you” floated back.

Faith stood staring after her, puzzled. Emma’s perfume lingered, at odds with the fragrance wafting from the tray of bite-size wild mushroom quiches one of Faith’s assistants was transferring to a serving dish.

“Put some of the crab cakes with those and they’ll be ready to go,” Faith instructed, focus back. Emma receded.

Except Emma was back, and once more Faith was startled.

“Could you meet me tomorrow? At the Met. Inside the front entrance at noon?” she whispered in Faith’s ear.

“Tomorrow?” Faith found she had lowered her voice in response to Emma’s tone. Then noting the desperate look on Emma’s face, she said, “I’ll be there.” Emma nodded and vanished. This time, apparently, for good.

Focus now totally shot to hell, Faith tried to think what could be going on with Emma. They’d lost touch when Emma transferred to boarding school for her senior year, and then they’d ended up at colleges far apart, seeing each other sporadically when home.

Faith had been invited to Emma’s wedding when she’d married Michael Stanstead, a lawyer—two, or was it three years ago?—but Faith had been in Europe at the time.

Granted, it was a stressful time of year—as was life in the Big Apple at any season, particularly in the circles Emma traveled in—money had married money, and Stanstead was involved in politics, too. But the fear on Emma’s face hadn’t been that of someone worried about finishing her Christmas shopping or getting her cards out. It wasn’t a “What am I going to wear to the United Nations Association benefit next week?” look or “Did I send our contribution to Covenant House?”

It was fright, as in “I’m scared.”

“You can go, Howard. The two of us can finish up. As usual, you were magnificent.” Faith blessed her lucky stars often; in this case, for delivering Howard, the perfect bartender/waiter. He was attractive, but not so arresting as to divert attention from the food. Bright and funny, maybe the best thing about Howard was that he didn’t want to be an actor. Or a writer. Or a composer.

Or anything else except what he was.

It was after nine. Tonight, Faith could afford to take her time. She didn’t have another job, or she would have been long gone. This one had been described initially as “cocktails for a few business friends with a few nibbles.” “A few” had become a crowd. The “nibbles” heartier. Howard reported that—as often happened—this was dinner for many of the guests—the “juniors,” he called them. Faith was glad she’d prepared plenty of food—filling food.

She’d known from the host’s choices that sashimi and white wine were out. These guys still ate red meat—

and they were mostly guys with a few trophy wives or girlfriends scattered about the room like tinsel on a tree. She was cynical enough to know that the host would have asked some guests to bring arm candy and some not.

“A good party?” Josie, her full-time assistant, was looking for some strokes.

“A very good party—and I should know.” Faith smiled.

She’d been to enough of them over the years. Born twenty-three—almost twenty-four—years ago to the Reverend Lawrence Sibley and his wife, Jane, née Lennox, a real estate attorney, Faith had grown up in Manhattan with her sister, Hope, one year younger.

Children’s parties and the delights of Rumpelmayer’s had given way to increasingly less innocent pleasures, culminating in New York’s club scene and parties, endless parties. Wasn’t that what the eighties were all about?

Unlike Hope, whose career aspirations had been 7

well defined by age ten, when she’d asked for a sub-scription to the Wall Street Journal for Christmas, Faith hadn’t had a clue about her future for many years. It had been pleasant to consider the world her oyster and contemplate any number of possibilities for a while. Then one morning early in the fall after she’d graduated from college, she’d awakened—late—and realized she was very, very bored. The unexamined life was not worth living, she knew from her father’s ser-mons—and Plato—so she’d lain back and thought. She could get married. There were several possibilities in that department, but she wasn’t in love—and she wasn’t that bored. She could get a job. Her mother had taken to leaving the Times on the kitchen table, open at the Help Wanted section. It made sense, but what kind of job? She could go back to school. Most of her friends seemed to find it necessary to add more initials to their names, yet Faith did not feel called in that direction.

It had not escaped her notice that lately she’d been paying more attention at parties and restaurants to the food—the way it was served and the way the table was set—than to her companions. And all with a highly critical eye. She’d always loved to cook and had taken as many courses as she could get away with in her college’s famed culinary arts department while still earning a B.A. in English. She’d sat up in bed, the previous night’s dinner still before her eyes. I could do that, she’d thought, and much better.

She’d traded her social life for an apprenticeship with one of the city’s top catering firms and courses at the New School in how to run your own small business. Her family had watched with bemusement and some skepticism. Then, when Faith had announced she 8

was dipping into the modest trust fund left by her grandfather to launch Have Faith, she’d encountered some resistance.

“Have you considered the rate of failure for such ventures?” her mother had asked, pulling a computer printout from her Prada purse at lunch at Le Bernardin.

The restaurant—new, hot, and specializing in seafood—was Faith’s current favorite. She’d known her mother’s spur-of-the-moment invitation had been as calculated as her own acceptance. She’d reached into her own purse—Longchamps—and pulled out the numbers she had crunched. Her mother had been surprised—and impressed. By the time the coffee had arrived—strong and black—Jane Sibley had seemed close if not to approval, then to acquiescence. But still she’d wavered. Faith could legally use the money as she wished, yet she had wanted her parents’ blessing.

Then she’d hurled her last spear.

“It’s because having a daughter who’s a cook doesn’t give you the same reflected glory that having one who’s cornering the market does, right?”

“Good heavens, no. The other way around these days. And what a mean thing to say, dear. I won’t repeat it to your father.”

“Then what is it? You want me to get married? You want grandchildren?”

“Oh, you silly, I’m worried you’re going to lose all your money, of course.”

“Well, I’m not. Trust me,” Faith had heard echoes of earlier talking-tos from mother—conversations about things like curfews.

Her mother had reached over to pat her hand. “I do.” And that was that.

Faith’s aunt, Charity Sibley, had been enthusiastic 9

about the idea from the beginning. Stretching far back into the highest branches of the tree, the Sibleys had named the first three females in a family, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith was convinced that the reason she had merely one sibling was her mother’s aversion to the name Charity and her awareness that it was a tradition Lawrence wouldn’t have even fleetingly thought to break.

Charity Sibley was a natural ally for Faith, having started her own extremely successful ad agency when she was only a few years older than Faith was now.

“Such a hot field,” she’d said, congratulating her niece. “After Black Monday in ’87, everyone moaned and groaned about all the money they’d lost—serving spritzers instead of a glass of wine. All those boring purées and coulis—cheap, but not very filling. Happily, things are back to normal now and entertaining is entertaining. You can do my Christmas party. Lots of fun food and music. I don’t want any sad faces.” She’d been alluding not to junk bonds, but to her decision to sell her business and her apartment at the San Remo, overlooking Central Park on the West Side. She’d already purchased a rambling old house with acres of land in Mendham, New Jersey—a decision that had shocked and saddened her many New York friends. “Jersey!” one had exclaimed on Chat’s answering machine. “Why not Forest Lawn!” Chat had stuck to her decision, smilingly confident that anyone who really wanted to see her—and her pool, tennis court, whirlpool, sauna, and other amenities—

would manage to find a way to cross the Hudson River.

“I always get lost in New Jersey” had been Faith’s sole comment.

10

“I’ll give you a map,” Chat had replied.

That settled, there was no question that favorite aunt and favorite niece would continue to see as much of each other as before.

Have Faith had edged into the highly competitive New York catering market in early fall and quickly established itself by word of mouth, lip-smacking mouths. Before, in many circles, snaring Faith Sibley as a guest had been considered a coup. Faith was not yet swamped by business, but the future looked promising. On the strength of the tide, she’d moved into her own place—a studio on West Fifty-sixth Street, but a studio with a doorman in a prewar building with an enormous, beautifully landscaped inner courtyard.

Not that home, a spacious apartment on the East Side, was bad. Jane Sibley had married Lawrence, the son and grandson of men of the cloth, with the proviso that he find a calling on her own turf in Manhattan.

God knew, there were as many lost souls on the island as anywhere else. She had hoped to maintain a mod-icum of privacy this way—privacy unavailable in the village-type parsonage of Lawrence’s youthful dreams. Watching her struggle to keep the blinds drawn, as well as their father’s only occasionally rea-sonable hours, had convinced both Faith and Hope to avoid men without button-down collars and Windsor knots.

Nesting into her studio, Faith didn’t miss the larger baths and reliable heat across town. She was on her own at last. She had also recently signed a lease for a new, expanded location for the business. Grown-up papers to sign. Grown-up fees to a lawyer.

Yes, it had definitely been the right decision and she had never been so happy, she reflected. There had been 11

plenty of glitches and near catastrophes, but tonight’s catering job had been a piece of gâteau. They were almost finished packing up. This had been one of the better kitchens to work in, recently remodeled and, from the sparkling appearance of the appliances, plus the absence of anything save champagne, orange juice, caviar, and DoveBars in the refrigerator/freezer, one seldom used.

Josie had gone down to the van with the first load.

Faith gave a last look around to make sure they weren’t leaving anything. The table was bare again, except for today’s paper. Idly, she pulled it over. She hadn’t had time to read it yet. Hadn’t, in fact, read the paper for days. There was no escaping today’s lead. The headline was unusually sensational—and large—for the Times. As well it might be.

Underground Radical Leader Nathan Fox Dead Apparent Homicide, Say Police

She sat down and began to read the article, wondering at the same time why she felt so shocked, so stunned. According to the paper, he’d gone underground in 1970. She’d only been three years old. He’d had a tremendous effect on another generation, but not much on hers. Still, she felt shaken. She looked up as Josie came back.

“Did you hear about Nathan Fox?”

“Where have you been? It’s been the only thing on the news all day. Never mind. I know where you’ve been.” Josie laughed. “It is pretty amazing. All these years they haven’t been able to find him, and now he turns up dead in an apartment on the Lower East Side.”

12

Faith read out loud, “ ‘Police say there were no signs of forced entry at the apartment off Grand Street that Fox rented under the name Norman Fuchs two years ago. They speculate his assailant or assailants might have been known to him, but burglary has not been ruled out as a motive. A source, requesting anonymity, close to the investigation revealed that the book-filled apartment had been completely ran-sacked.’ ” She paused. “They must have thought he had something valuable. I wonder what they were looking for?”

“Not the money from Chase Manhattan Bank. He was a much better talker than doer. Remember? He and two others were going to rob the bank and distribute the money to the truly needy or whatever, but as soon as they passed the note to the teller, they were caught.

Didn’t get so much as a roll of pennies. I didn’t hear how he got away exactly.”

Faith, who had been scanning the newsprint, answered, “The article says there was a fourth accomplice waiting in a car. Fox managed to get away from the bank’s security guards before the police arrived. He knocked one of them out, which added assault and bat-tery to his charge.”

“He was armed, but he didn’t shoot. They should have given him credit for that.”

“How do you know so much about all this?” Faith asked. Heretofore, any conversations about politics with Josie had consisted in wondering what Mayor-Elect David Dinkins would serve at his inaugural at Gracie Mansion compared to his flamboyant predeces-sor, Ed Koch. Josie was even more dedicated to food than Faith. She’d grown up in Virginia, raised by a grandmother who was apparently famous over several 13

counties for her fried chicken. Josie had come to New York several years ago and started working at any food-related job she could get, taking as many courses—and covering as many cuisines—as she could squeeze in. She was all set to open Josie’s as soon as she had the money—and the perfect location.

Dream, nothing, she’d told Faith. Josie’s was fact. Future fact, but fact.

“I told you. There’s been nothing else on the news all day. Every time I turned on the radio, there was some piece of the story—or some guy talking in one of those serious ‘This is nothing but a test’ voices about how it’s the end of an era.”

Faith knew what Josie meant about the voice, which was intended to be reassuring, yet managed instead to imply the button had just been pushed and everyone was doomed.

She had turned to a profile of Fox on an inside page and was studying his photograph, taken shortly before he disappeared.

“Not bad-looking,” she commented. “No, make that definitely acceptable, and this looks like a lousy picture.” He had the regulation long, flowing locks of the sixties and wire-rimmed granny glasses, but behind the frames, his eyes were bright and intelligent. He had a full, sensual mouth curved in a slightly mocking smile.

She could almost see him shrugging. Like, What’s the big deal? She wondered where the picture had been taken, what the context had been. Suddenly she felt sorry for the man. All those years on the run. Granted, he had tried to rob a bank, a big bank, but he hadn’t killed anybody, and now he’d been killed. An “apparent homicide.” Why did they always say that? He’d been shot and the weapon was missing. There was 14

nothing apparent about it at all. Murder. He’d been murdered. In broad daylight. The medical examiner es-timated the time of death as 4:00 P.M. She gave a slight shudder. She liked the Lower East Side, and the blintzes at the Grand Dairy restaurant were the best in the city. Grand Street would mean something else for a while now. Something other than long-ago pushcarts and present-day discounts—and the blintzes.

“ ‘The end of the sixties at the end of the eighties’—

that’s what the commentators having been saying all day. His death is supposed to be some kind of significant event, like it was planned as a big period for the decade. John Lennon in 1980; Nate Fox in ’89. I don’t think junkies are into this kind of political, philosoph-ical shit—and you know that’s what it’s going to turn out to be. Junkies looking for something to hock.” Faith laughed and agreed. Nobody she knew could puncture a balloon like Josie. “Every obit this year has had ‘Swan Song for the Eighties’—first it was Lucy, then Olivier, then Irving Berlin. I thought when Diana Vreeland died in August, that would be it. But they trotted it out again for Bette Davis.” Josie was putting on her coat, but Faith was still lost in the article. She’d have to pick up a paper on her way home. How had he stayed hidden all these years? Obviously, he must have had a network of friends, people sympathetic to his ideas. Family? But the FBI would have been keeping a close eye on any relatives.

She skipped to the end, where they always listed survivors. “No survivors.” Nobody? It was an amazing thought. No siblings, parents dead. Never married, or if so, divorced. She began to construct his life rapidly.

Where had he grown up? Born in Newark, New Jersey, the article said. Newark before the ’68 riots.

15

Newark, home of Jewish intellectuals and an up-wardly mobile middle class. Weequahic High School.

Philip Roth country.

There were many facets to Faith Sibley’s personality, some in direct contradiction to others. She was both open-minded and given to snap judgments; label-conscious and down-to-earth; somewhat self-centered and overly generous. The one dominant trait for which there was no antiphony was her curiosity. There had never been a time when she hadn’t wanted to know everything about everybody. Curiosity and an exceed-ingly active imagination. She was the original “Why?” child, and Jane had almost been driven mad by her daughter’s questions. Faith’s father, Lawrence, had greeted her inquisitiveness with joy. An infant episte-mologist. He’d answered at great length, in excruciat-ing detail. Faith had soon learned to engage in interior monologues, and she was doing this now. What if Fox’s death was tied to the movement and not a random act of urban violence? Why not the FBI itself? A bust gone wrong? But if you’d known Fox was Fox, he’d have been worth more alive than dead. There was a large reward for his capture.

“Come on, boss, I want to go home and take a long soak in a hot tub with lots of bubbles.” Faith stood up and carefully placed the paper back exactly as she’d found it. It hadn’t appeared that anyone in this household had read it, either. It was probably the maid’s paper; the Times and Wall Street Journal would be left at the front door each morning by the doorman and read on the way to work—or with white gloves to keep the nasty, smudgy type from one’s manicured hands by wife or mistress left in bed. Nathan Fox’s death wouldn’t affect the market. Therefore, it 16

would have been of only passing interest, good for a crack or two about radicals, hippies, phases outgrown or merely transformed. One of Faith’s recent dates had entertained her for an hour with his elaborate theory that Yuppies, whose “death” was celebrated in the ’87

crash, were the flip side of the coin from hippies.

“Same sense of entitlement, self-interest, self-righteousness, same segment of the population. Graz-ing and arugula versus macrobiotics and grass. Coke versus acid. Different taste in clothes, yet same awareness and disdain for deviations. What, no beads? What, no Rolex? See what I mean?” Faith had, and it made sense. There weren’t any hippies anymore, only “aging hippies,” and that was a pejorative. Nate Fox was fifty-six, an aging radical. She tried to imagine how he must have looked at the time of his death. Significantly different, or he wouldn’t have been able to hide in plain sight. Maybe the FBI had lost interest in him. There were bigger fish in the sea. Maybe they’d stopped looking.

“Ah, I’d hoped you might still be here.” It was the host, rubbing his hands together after pushing through the kitchen door, followed by two other men, almost indistinguishable from himself. They looked to be in their early thirties in well-cut dark suits with well-cut dark hair, and their clean-shaven faces were slightly flushed—but not too flushed—as evidence of a good time. One of them was smoking a cigar.

“Wonderful job, Faith. It all went off rather splen-didly, don’t you think?”

While not above giving herself a pat on the back, Faith wasn’t sure how to reply. A “Yes” was terribly self-congratulatory; a “No” unthinkable.

17

“People seemed to have a good time.”

“Yes, they did, and I thank you. We have something coming up in February for some out-of-town clients.

I’ll call you with the date next week.” He took a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator, confirming Faith’s suspicion that he hadn’t expected her to still be there at all.

She handed him three glasses from the cupboard behind her. “I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out. I’m glad you were pleased with tonight.” One of the men, who looked vaguely familiar, took the cigar from his mouth, tapped some ash in the sink, and said, “Have you got a card? A good caterer is worth her weight in gold these days. Business all right?”

“I can’t complain.” Faith found herself relaxing under his gaze. He was either genuinely interested or awfully good at faking it. She handed him a card.

“My name is Michael Stanstead, by the way,” he said, tucking her card into his wallet.

Of course he looked familiar. Assemblyman Michael Stanstead. Stanstead Associates law firm Michael Stanstead. Society page Michael Stanstead.

Husband of Emma, Michael Stanstead.

“I’m a friend of your wife’s. Emma and I were at school together,” Faith said. A firm believer in convey-ing minimal information, especially to someone’s nearest and dearest, Faith didn’t mention their encounter in the kitchen.

The change in Stanstead was immediate. His smile vanished and his brow furrowed. The host patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll be better tomorrow.”

“Emma wasn’t feeling well and left the party early,” 18

Michael told Faith. “It’s probably just this flu that’s been going around, but . . .” He paused. “Well, I am worried about Emma. Very worried.”

That makes two of us, Faith thought.

19

Two

Emma Stanstead was not in disguise, as her cryptic, surreptitious words the night before had suggested.

Dark glasses. Garbo hat. Nor was she on time. It was terribly busy for Faith at work. Only the memory of Emma’s frightened face and Faith’s own curiosity had torn her from her vol-au-vents. She was on the point of returning to them when Emma rushed up, starting her apologies from a few feet away.

“These stupid, stupid meetings. They go on and on.

Nothing gets accomplished, except a few people get to hear themselves talk. I wish they’d just call me up and tell me what they want me to do. It would be so much simpler.” Her Ferragamo heels clicked on the museum’s stone floor, punctuating her words. “Let’s go sit in the courtyard in the new American Wing. It’s so peaceful there. Oh, unless you want lunch?” Faith didn’t. The food at the Museum Restaurant had always been nondescript. Now that they’d remodeled and done away with the wonderful fountain in the middle, replacing it with a kind of sunken pit for din-20

ers, she preferred Sabrett’s hot dogs with everything on them from one of the vendors on Fifth Avenue in front of the main entrance. Progress. New York was always acting in haste and being forced to repent at leisure.

Think of Penn Station.

The Engelhard Court in the new wing was filled with plants and an assortment of statuary. Emma by-passed a bench opposite a protective panther and her cubs, selecting instead one beneath towering fronds and art collector/financier August Belmont’s fixed gaze. He had been immortalized in bronze wearing a long fur-lined overcoat, and Faith realized she was feeling slightly chilled. The entire city had entered a state of deep freeze, temperatures plummeting at night to the very low teens. It had put to rest the frightening talk the previous summer about global warming, though. Or maybe it was all part of what the future would bring—fiery summers, frigid winters. Some kind of judgment.

Emma seemed to be having trouble beginning. She sighed heavily, opened her purse, took out a handkerchief, and blew her nose. After her tirade about meetings, she hadn’t said much as they walked through the museum. Her steps did slow as they passed the famous Christmas tree decorated each year with the Met’s collection of intricately carved eighteenth-century Neapolitan crèche figures. She’d murmured, “Remember?” And Faith did. As little girls, the appearance of the tree had marked the beginning of the holiday season for them and they haunted the museum until it appeared like magic. Each had a favorite ornament. Emma’s was an angel with rainbow wings and trailing silken gold robes; Faith’s one of the three kings, in royal robes astride a magnificent white 21

horse. Emma’s single word had reminded Faith how much time they had spent together and how much they had shared.

It was time for Emma to start sharing now. With one job tonight and two on Saturday, Faith couldn’t sit around watching her friend get a cold.

“Okay, what’s going on? Much as I love seeing you—and it’s ridiculous that we’ve been so out of touch—I do have—”

“I’m being blackmailed, Faith,” Emma said quietly, handing her an envelope. It looked like the one she’d been holding at the party. “One of the other guests found this in the hall last night and gave it to me. He must have thought I’d dropped it. Of course, I’d never seen it before.”

Emma being blackmailed! Faith had rehearsed a number of scenarios for this tell-all rendezvous, most of 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, Central Park in Winter, one of those cards charities send in the mail as a “gift.” You don’t ask for them, don’t want them, yet it seems a shame to throw them away. Except you can’t use them unless you send a donation; otherwise, you’d feel too guilty—or cheap. Inside the card a message had been pasted over the 22

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 23

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, Barbeque’n with Bobby, and Henry—well, Henry was still keeping secrets, or looked as if he was.

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 25

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 The Nutcracker.

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 26

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.

‘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 27

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, “The Nathan Fox, the one who was just—

that is, the one who wrote Use This Book to Wipe Your—”

“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 28

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. Pride and Prejudice meets Bonfire of the Vanities.” Faith had forgotten Emma’s sense of humor—it was as unexpected as the rest of her.

29

“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 voilà.

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 31

favorite quotes from Daddy—Nathan Fox, I mean. It was wonderful to learn all about him.” If this represented Fox’s rhetoric, Faith had to wonder about the man’s intellect, but perhaps you had to have been there. So much depended on context: hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in front of the Capitol building, for example. Nursery rhymes de-claimed would have sounded portentous and inspired.

“Todd had dropped out of NYU to work full-time in the movement, and he was collecting Nathan Fox’s speeches into a book. He promised he’d help me find Fox. He’d met him once someplace in Minnesota the year before. He wouldn’t tell me where Daddy was then, but he said he’d let Fox know I wanted to see him. Todd thought it was pretty cool that I was Fox’s daughter. He made me feel proud. I’d never felt anything like that about Jason, even when I thought I was his daughter. All the comrades had adopted Russian names as nicknames. While they were waiting to go into the factories, one girl, Olga, was teaching herself to set type. She had a little printing press. They would write all these pamphlets and go to some factories in New Jersey and pass them out at the gates. I used to fold and staple.”

“I think they’d been setting type by computer for quite a while by then,” Faith observed, acutely aware that while she was going to various cotillions, Emma had been experiencing a very different sort of life that spring. Certainly one less boring, although folding and stapling might have become somewhat repe-titious.

“Well, nobody told Olga.” Emma pulled her mink closer as they walked briskly across the park toward the West Side. There wasn’t any snow on the ground, 32

although flurries were predicted. The trees looked cheerless, their branches gray spikes against the leaden winter sky. “I got pregnant with Todd. It seemed like the thing to do—sleep with him, I mean.

The comrades were all terribly chummy that way.

They explained to me that sex was merely a physical act and monogamy was a bourgeois institution, though Todd didn’t want me to sleep with anyone else, fortunately. I’d graduated from folding and stapling to working on a little article about Emma Goldman for a pamphlet when Poppy found me. She told everybody how old I really was, and Todd was pretty scared. I’d said I was twenty-one.”

“And they believed you!” Faith said incredulously.

Emma didn’t look twenty-one now. A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped past them. An elderly couple was bundled up in lap robes, clearly enjoying the ride.

“They look so happy,” Emma said wistfully. “It must be nice to have normal parents. They look like somebody’s parents, don’t they?”

Faith steered her back to the conversation. “And when Poppy got you home, you found out you were pregnant.”

“Yes. She’d been very nice to me until then. I think she felt guilty; plus, she was truly worried about what had happened to me. But you know my mother. She’s so used to people doing whatever she says that she totally freaked when I said I wasn’t going to have an abortion. I was going to keep the baby. I mean, she’d had me out of wedlock, although technically she was in it, but you know what I mean?”

Faith did. What better way to get back at your mother—and Jason—than first to get pregnant and next plan to raise the baby yourself? She also had a 33

sneaking suspicion that Emma may have wanted to have someone she could well and truly call her own.

“She told me we were going to Dr. Bernardo for a checkup, just to make sure I was all right. You know who he is, right?”

Dr. Bernardo had been taking care of inconvenient problems for New York ladies in Poppy’s circle for years, and Faith had indeed heard of him.

“When I got to his office, it turned out she’d scheduled an abortion, so of course we had a huge scene, but I did go home again. The comrades hadn’t exactly been into solidarity after Poppy had talked to them. I called them, told them what had happened, but they were sort of ‘See you later,’ and I didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

Again, Faith told her, “I wish I had known.”

“I wish you had, too. Poppy yelled at me all the way back to Sutton Place and half the night. It worked. I’d finally fallen asleep, and when I woke up, I realized I’d lost the baby.”

Years later, there was no mistaking the grief in Emma’s voice.

“I was in pretty bad shape after that and couldn’t go back to school. They got a tutor for me and things calmed down. It was hard to stay mad at Mother. You know how she can be so . . . well, Poppyish. I still felt betrayed, but I caved. Let her take care of me. The one thing I insisted on was going to boarding school for senior year. I just couldn’t go back with all of you and pretend nothing had happened.”

“Come to work with me and I’ll make you the best hot chocolate in the city.” It was getting too cold for much more walking. Faith had on one of those Norma Kamali OMO sleeping-bag coats, which made you 34

look like an army-surplus number. Normally, it verged on too much warmth; today, it might as well have been mosquito netting.

“I’m sorry,” Emma said regretfully. “I said I’d join them for dessert. You know Michael’s running for the House next year, and these ladies are very important to his fund-raising campaign. He was very insistent that I go. There was a Post-it on the mirror to remind me this morning.” She stopped speaking and flushed slightly.

“Sometimes I mean to go to these things, then forget until it’s too late. I can’t blow this off when he’s made such a big deal out of it. But I can’t leave until you tell me what to do,” she said imploringly.

Faith was surprised. It was the second time Emma had said this. It seemed so clear.

“You haven’t committed a crime or done anything anyone could remotely blackmail you over. I suggest you and Michael take the note to the police and let them deal with it. They can help you figure out who might be doing this. There can’t be too many choices.

Who would have known both about Fox being your father and the fact that you got pregnant?”

“But I can’t do that.” Emma stood absolutely still on the path, as rooted as the massive oaks to either side.

“Michael would find out.”

“Michael doesn’t know!” Faith gasped.

“Of course not. It really didn’t have anything to do with him, and the Stansteads might have been funny about it.”

Given the reputation of the Stanstead family—they considered William F. Buckley a flaming, and traitor-ous, liberal—Faith could understand that Emma might not want her parentage known to her in-laws, or the early pregnancy. But her husband? Wasn’t marriage 35

supposed to be about sharing—you’re your husband’s best friend and all that? It was one of the reasons Faith had ruled out matrimony so far. She preferred her best friends. They were easier to talk to and made her laugh.

“Emma, this is not a secret you can keep from your husband. He wouldn’t want you to. Blackmail is very, very serious.” Faith thought of Michael Stanstead’s concerned face. Emma had to tell him and together they could decide what to do next. She couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be anything but supportive of his wife and upset at what she had gone through at such an early age. She told Emma about Michael coming into the kitchen.

“He is so sweet.” Emma appeared to be swayed, but then she stiffened. “You don’t understand, Faith. It can never come out that Nathan Fox was my father. It would completely destroy Michael’s political chances.

He’d be the laughingstock of the party—that he didn’t know his wife’s father was one of the most notorious radicals of the century. And it’s even worse now that Daddy’s dead, don’t you see?”

Unfortunately, Emma made sense. She would be headlines and the tabloids would effectively destroy Stanstead’s chances—for the next election anyway.

“Our Man for the Nineties”—thirty-year-old Assemblyman Michael Stanstead was being touted as the brightest young star in the New York Republican firmament. He would be running for Congress in a favorable district, and after some time in the House, who knows where he might end up.

“I feel so much better. I think it was meant that you were there last night. But I must dash.” Emma gave Faith a quick hug and a smile crossed her face, fears al-36

layed. A slight shadow: “You do promise not to tell anyone? Oh, I’m being silly. Of course I know that you wouldn’t.”

Faith was glad that Emma, having spilled her guts, now considered her blackmail problem solved, and she hated to spoil things. But blackmailers tended to follow up on threats.

“What are you going to do about the note?” Emma had her hand up for a cab. She turned around.

“Absolutely nothing at the moment.” A taxi pulled up to the curb and Emma waved good-bye.

Faith crossed the street to the bus stop. Business was good, but not cab versus bus fare good enough yet. As she waited, she realized she was exhausted—and worried. She’d have to try to get Emma to tell her husband.

There was no other way. Faith couldn’t go to the police herself and betray Emma’s trust. She wished she could talk about the situation with her sister, Hope. Hope moved in Young Republican circles and might have picked up something about Michael that would help convince Emma—that his position was so secure, nothing short of an intrigue with farm animals would hinder his campaign, for instance. Faith also admitted that she was dying to tell somebody about Poppy and Nathan Fox. She wished she wasn’t so good at keeping secrets.

The bus came and, mercifully, she got a seat. It was crowded with holiday shoppers, bags making the aisle difficult to negotiate. An elegant elderly woman was occupying two seats with aplomb—one for herself and one for an enormous Steiff giraffe, the head craning out of the FAO Schwarz bag. The sight of the incongruous pair was causing the whole bus to smile. It was still early enough in the shopping season for New 37

Yorkers to feel the holiday spirit. Outside, the whole city was decked out in its finest. Faith was sorry she wasn’t walking. Each shop window rivaled the next in glittering offerings. If you can’t get it here, you can’t get it anywhere—that’s what the song lyric should say.

The bus stopped, and through the open door, she could hear the Salvation Army Band’s rendition of “Good King Wenceslas.” The man next to her was humming along, and at her look of pleasure, he began to sing in a surprisingly strong tenor:

“Good King Wenceslas looked out, On the Feast of Stephen,

When the snow lay round about,

Deep, and crisp, and even;

Brightly shone the moon that night, Though the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight,

Gathering winter fu-oo-el.”

“That’s as far as I go by heart,” he said apologetically.

“Me, too,” Faith said. “It’s something about

‘ “Hither, page” ’ and ‘ “Bring me flesh, and bring me wine.” ’ I’m a caterer, so I tend to remember the food details. I can do all the verses of the ‘Wassail Song.’ ”

“A caterer. That must be hard work, especially at this time of year,” he said. Faith was mildly impressed.

Usually, she heard inanities like “That must be fun” or

“How do you stay so thin?” He wasn’t bad-looking—

and he had to have terrific circulation. The only con-cession to the weather he’d made was a muffler on top of his tweed sports jacket. She looked at his hands. No gloves. No wedding ring.

38

“It is a busy time, thank goodness. I’ve only been in business since the fall, and it’s been going well.”

“Great. Well, this is my stop.” He dug in his pocket.

“Want to trade cards? I might suddenly remember the rest of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and wouldn’t know how to find you.”

“True.” Faith laughed as she fished a business card from her purse. “Or you may need a caterer.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Take care.” She watched him out the window before the bus pulled away. Not bad-looking at all. “Richard Morgan,” his card read. The address wasn’t far from her apartment. What does Richard Morgan do? she wondered. It wasn’t anything on The Street. Financiers didn’t wear tweed jackets. A professor? The bus started with a lurch and he was lost to sight. Without the distraction of carol singing, Faith’s thoughts re-verted once more to the problem at hand. The major problem at hand.

Emma, Emma, Emma. Presumably, she was now at her luncheon, breathlessly apologizing for her lateness as the crème brûlée was served, only to be politely nibbled or politely refused by the ladies present. Eating dessert in public was a no-no. Bingeing on Mallomars at midnight and throwing up was not. Much as everyone exclaimed over Barbara Bush’s inner beauty and lack of pretension, it was Nancy Reagan’s size-four red suits that set the standard. This was a crowd that didn’t need the Duchess of Windsor’s maxim—“You can’t be too rich or too thin”—embroidered on any of their pillows as a reminder.

It was difficult, almost impossible, to imagine Emma Stanstead as an increasingly high-profile politician’s wife. Yes, she had the beauty and grace—and 39

figure. Yet, she was quite shy. Growing up with Poppy—and Lucy—Emma preferred candlelight to limelight. When they had traveled in the same circles during adolescence and occasionally later, Faith recalled the change that would come over her friend when she was thrust into uncomfortable social situa-tions. More often than not, Emma would say the first thing that came into her head, and it was often the last thing that would have come into anyone else’s. At ease only with her most intimate friends, she would certainly find the campaign trail and the glare of publicity torture. Emma as a politician’s wife is almost as ludi-crous an idea as my being married to a minister, Faith said to herself as she reached up and swiftly pressed the strip for her stop.

There were moments over the next several days when Faith wondered if she was cut out for the two jobs totally occupying her life—professional caterer and am-ateur but increasingly expert worrier. She’d leave a message on Emma’s machine, one sufficiently circum-spect so as not to raise any suspicions on Michael’s part, then turn to yet another tray of chocolate mousse cakes or yet another pork loin stuffed with winter fruits—the two most popular dishes of the season. She fretted over not being able to leave as many messages as she wanted—one every hour—and she fretted over Emma’s not calling back. She knew Mrs. Stanstead was alive and kicking—although since it was Emma, Faith amended it to “alive and meandering”—because there had been a picture of her in the paper attending the premiere of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer at the Metropolitan Opera House.

“Is there a particular reason you’re so jumpy, or does 40

being in business for yourself do this to a person?” Josie asked after Faith made a mad and fruitless dash for the phone. It was yet another liquor supplier wanting their business.

Faith had thought she was presenting a markedly calm exterior to the world around her and was surprised at Josie’s words.

“Jumpy? I’m not jumpy. Okay, maybe I’m a little strung out. But if we weren’t getting steadily busier, I’d be even worse. I mean, I haven’t particularly noticed anything myself, but if you say so . . .” She stopped. Josie was right. She was jumpy—and inco-herent. Damn Emma’s soap-opera life. And would it hurt her to call?

The phone rang. Josie answered, “Have Faith, taking care of all your catering needs. Josie Wells speaking.”

She looked at Faith and raised an eyebrow. “No, she’s not particularly busy. She’s right here.” As Faith walked over to the phone, Josie covered the receiver. “Someone with guilt to spare. ‘Please don’t bother her if she’s busy. Are you absolutely sure I’m not interrupting her work?’ ”

It was Emma.

“Emma! How are you? What’s been happening?”

“I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. It was sweet of you to leave all those messages, but I’m almost never home; then when I am, it’s to get ready to go to another party or opening or some other stupid thing. I shouldn’t say that. Some of them aren’t, but then most of them are. I don’t know how Mother has done it all these years. And anyone who doesn’t think Brooke Astor has energy to spare . . . well, I’d like a little of it, that’s all.”

41

Emma did sound exhausted, yet Faith was not interested in her friend’s social schedule.

“But what’s going on? You know, the issue we discussed late last week.”

Josie was busy layering phyllo dough, but her hearing was excellent.

“Not a thing to worry about anymore. I would have called you as soon as everything was settled, but it’s so hard to find a phone, and then there’s always someone waiting right next to you.”

Faith wanted to scream into the phone, “Get to the point!” but, mercifully, Emma kept talking and returned to the matter at hand.

“We can forget all about it. It’s such a relief.” Faith was confused. “You mean it was a hoax? A bad joke?”

“Oh, no, it was real enough, but I gave them their money. Too complicated about where to put it and when.”

“You gave them the money!” It hadn’t occurred to Faith that Emma would simply pay them off. First of all, where does one lay hands on that kind of dough so quickly, and second, didn’t Emma realize they would simply keep asking for more?

“It was the only way. Michael was beginning to notice that something was bothering me. I was even having trouble sleeping.”

Trouble sleeping! Faith thought about the previous few nights, when she’d been tossing herself, exhausted from work, yet worried about her friend. It had been impossible to put it out of her mind. Every newspaper in the city screamed headlines about Fox’s murder and now the magazines were coming out with their in-depth analyses, complete with cover photos.

42

“I’m not sure that was the best way to go,” Faith said as evenly and calmly as she could manage. “These events have a way of repeating themselves. You know, as in coming back for more.”

Emma got the message. “Of course I thought of that,” she reassured Faith. “I enclosed a very stern note and told them it was simply too much and this was the end. That should do it, and I haven’t heard a peep out of them since. No nasty cards. No calls. Now all I have to do is think about what to get my dearest Michael for Christmas.”

Ten thousand dollars poorer, Emma might want to head for Crazy Eddie’s, Faith thought. It was so typically Emma to do what she had done. And who knew—maybe these were ethical, or one-shot, blackmailers. Faith sighed. She did want to hear all about it, though. How had they contacted Emma and where had she made the drop? And again, how had she come up with a bundle like that so easily? She couldn’t exactly have asked her husband for it—tips for the doorman, the mailman, the maid. Just as she was trying to think how to phrase her queries in a form intelligible to Emma, but Greek to Josie, Emma said, “Oops, sorry, have to run. Lunch soon? I will call. I promise.

Couldn’t have done it without your help!” Big help, Faith thought somewhat despondently.

She hadn’t even figured out who was blackmailing Emma. Didn’t even have a list. Probably her evil sister.

Faith brightened at the thought. It made sense and it was fun to consider. Lucy, the girl you loved to hate.

Lucy had been at college when all this was happening, but it was possible she’d have heard about the pregnancy. Emma had made a scene in Dr. Bernardo’s office, and that was the kind of gossip that got around.

43

Faith was surprised she hadn’t heard about it at the time herself. Lucy had also been at the party and could have dropped the card in the hall where it was certain to be found. The blackmailer had to be someone who’d known that Emma would be there.

She turned back to her work. She was chopping apples for the pork loin. It wasn’t for a party—or rather, not one that she was catering fully. The hostess had ordered it cooked as a full main course. Josie would deliver it with instructions for reheating late in the afternoon. It was a good dish, and when the meat was sliced, the apple and prune stuffing made a tasty little circle in the middle of the juicy meat. [See the recipe on page 280.] She served it with two side dishes: red cab-bage, more apples, with a hint of onion and new potatoes that had been quartered and steamed, then sautéed in butter until brown and crispy on the outside. A city tired of cuisine minceur had been tucking into this comfort food with a ferocity. She paused and asked Josie,

“Why is it New Yorkers always do everything in extremes? Fads, fashions, foibles—we’re so intense.” Josie answered promptly, “That’s easy. You put way too many people in one place and they have to start moving fast just to keep from getting stepped on, bumped around. The rest of the world has opinions, too, but they’re operating at play and New York is fast forward.”

Made sense to Faith. They worked in companion-able silence until the phone rang again. It was Hope.

“I’m in like, maybe love,” she announced joyously.

“And who might the lucky object of your affections be this time?” Faith asked, crooking the phone between her chin and shoulder while she continued to work. It could be a long conversation.

44

For a sophisticated New Yorker, Hope Sibley was extremely naïve when it came to men, Faith had always found. In high school, her sister had gravitated toward the misunderstood loners, the unrecognized geniuses, the substance abusers. A budding Dr. Joyce Brothers, she was always on the phone saying “Uh-huh” and nodding so constantly that Faith had begun to envision her sister as one of those rear-window car ornaments, heads bobbing around like crazy on a spring.

This phase had passed, yet still Hope often failed to vet a new beau with the same thoroughness, obsessive at times, that she turned on a potential stock option.

Never one to intrude in her sibling’s life, and therefore ensuring a lifetime of closeness, Faith had felt compelled to have a little chat with Hope after observing her last heartthrob stuffing his pockets with the host’s expensive cigars at a party Have Faith catered in early November. She’d been discreetly hidden from his notice, gazing through a slight opening in the kitchen door. “So tacky, sweetheart,” she’d told Hope. “So not you.”

Now Hope had found someone new. “Who is it and what does he do?” In a city where you were what you did, Faith tried to make a point of remembering to at least ask for a name first.

“His name is Phelps Grant and he’s a commodities broker. I met him at a party last weekend. We started talking and things just clicked, Fay.” For years, Faith had been vowing to tell Hope how much she disliked the nickname, but for years she’d been putting it off.

“Phelps—prep school, right? You don’t do that to your kid unless you’re very sure he’s going to be surrounded by Bancrofts and Chadwicks.” 45

“Choate, if you must know. Anyway, he can’t help his name, and I like it. Very traditional. We played squash together on Sunday and had brunch afterward.

We’re going out again Friday.”

Faith wanted to ask, “Why not Saturday?” The prime spot. But she didn’t wanted to rain on Hope’s parade. Maybe Phelps had a prior commitment—passing around the drinks tray for Mater. Or maybe he was seeing another woman.

“He looks like Tom Cruise. Very hunky.” Once Hope was out of her missionary period, appearance mattered a great deal, and Faith hadn’t seen her with a homely short guy in years. Tall, with thick brown hair and deep green eyes that were the envy of her blue-eyed sister, Hope turned plenty of heads.

When both sisters went out together, the effect was more than doubled. Faith was as fair as her sister was dark, but their faces were just similar enough to proclaim a family connection. Fortunately, their mother, Jane, had never considered dressing them alike. Not even the same style in two colors.

“I ran into Emma Stanstead the other night at a job on the East Side.” Faith threw out the line, hoping for some kind of bite.

“Her husband’s going to be president someday.

We’ll have a friend in the White House, although it’s hard to imagine Emma there. But he’s a very smart cookie. He’ll get all sorts of people to keep her on track. She’ll just have to smile and produce a few kids, of course.”

Faith hadn’t thought of this, yet political dynasties meant offspring, and Michael Stanstead seemed like a dynastic kind of guy. Most of the Michael Stansteads of the world were.

46

“Emma didn’t look pregnant. In fact, she’s thinner than she was the last time I saw her, but she’s still beautiful.”

“I see them in the paper all the time. Where have you been? They’re one of New York’s golden couples.” In a kitchen of one sort or another, Faith thought, answering Hope’s question silently.

“So, he really is being put forward by the party as a serious contender for future presidency?”

“Absolutely. That’s all I’ve been hearing, and he wouldn’t be bad.”

Faith and her sister studiously avoided discussing politics, but each was aware that in many elections they were canceling out each other’s votes.

“Get a date and have dinner with us next week.

I’m dying for you to meet Phelps.” Hope tried to sound plaintive. She knew it was a busy time for her sister.

“I’ll try. I did meet a cute guy on the bus the other day. He was singing carols.”

“On the bus! Are you crazy?”

“Not all of us can afford cabs, sweetheart.”

“You know very well I didn’t mean that. I take the bus sometimes myself. I mean getting involved with a total stranger—a stranger who’s singing to himself.”

“I’ll be careful.” Faith was smiling. There were any number of men who’d be happy to get her call, yet the idea of someone new was appealing. For months, she’d been telling her friends—and herself—that she was too busy to get involved with anyone, but New York during the holidays was so romantic. She pictured the older couple in the horse-drawn carriage that had passed by when Emma and she were in the park. Nice to take one of those carriages under a starry winter sky after a 47

long, leisurely meal at one of those bistros on the East Side with a fireplace.

“So, you’ll let me know when?”

She hadn’t been listening to her sister. She hadn’t been dicing apples, either.

“I’ll try. If we can’t get together before then, bring him to Chat’s party.”

“But you’ll be working.”

“And socializing. I plan to do both. It’s the last one she’s giving in the apartment. I’m really going to miss that view.”

Chat’s apartment in one of the San Remo towers on Central Park West had been a fixture in the Sibley girls’ childhood—and adulthood. They’d watched every New Year’s and Fourth of July fireworks from Chat’s windows high above the city and every Macy’s Thanksgiving parade from one of Chat’s neighbors’

windows in an apartment closer to earth. It was a rit-ual.

“Got to go. Call me,” Hope said before hanging up.

Faith put the phone down.

“Phelps,” Josie said, having eavesdropped expertly, as usual. “Sounds like money. Think he’d be interested in investing in a restaurant?”

“Not unless you have plans to franchise in all fifty states, I’d imagine,” Faith said wryly.

Josie had gone to deliver the order and Faith was about to leave when the phone rang. She debated letting the machine pick up, but she shut the door and crossed the room instead. It was Emma. And she was frantic.

“I just got another Christmas card!” 48

Three

“Where are you? Are you home?” Faith asked tersely.

Of course Emma had received another demand. It wasn’t a question of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

This was Imelda’s whole closet. She had to make Emma realize what a dangerous game she was playing.

“Yes, I’m at the apartment.” Emma was speaking quickly, breathlessly. “The card was in the newspaper.

The doorman leaves it on the mat, and usually Michael gets it first thing, but he left for Albany early this morning. I left the back way when I went out and didn’t think about the paper. Then when I came home, there it was. I picked it up and the card dropped out.”

“I’ll be right there. Are you sure you don’t want to call the police while you’re waiting for me? I’ll be there with you,” Faith pleaded.

Emma’s voice lost its tremulous quality. “I’m sure.

And I’m also sure I don’t want to stay here one minute more. Meet me at Rockefeller Center. At the café.

That’s halfway for both of us. I’m leaving as soon as I hang up.”

49

Faith agreed and headed for Fifth Avenue. Emma was safe inside her apartment, but Faith could understand how frightening the large, empty, silent rooms were at the moment. The bustle—and anonymity—of the city’s crowded sidewalks would be infinitely preferable.

It didn’t take Faith long to get to Rockefeller Center.

Strange to think it had been open pastureland until the early 1800s. Now herds still gathered, but human herds intent on snaring tickets for a Letterman taping, the sight of the tree, a blowout at the Rainbow Room, or some very expensive shopping. She pushed her way through the crowds gathered around the Channel Gardens, those huge raised beds running from Fifth to the ice-skating rink. Tourists were posing for pictures next to the wire angels sounding their horns, poised in the masses of greenery. This whole business with Emma is definitely putting a damper on my Yuletide spirit, Faith thought sadly. Normally, it was her favorite time of the year. She looked straight ahead at the towering seventy-foot Norway spruce rising toward the winter sky, the GE Building behind it. Oddly, the tree seemed to grow smaller as she moved down the promenade and the view widened to include the incongruous forest of skyscrapers to either side, the rink below. Garlands of lights hung from the tree’s boughs, tossing flickering colors over the skaters and Manship’s huge statue of Prometheus, the gold leaf thinning in places, the fountain beneath stilled until spring. She turned to go down the stairs to the American Festival Cafe, still gazing at the tree. The ultimate Christmas tree, befit-ting the city that was, in Faith’s opinion, the planet’s shiniest ornament at any time of year.

Despite the urgency of the situation, she couldn’t 50

stop herself from watching the skaters for a minute. As usual, they were all ages, all shapes, all sizes. Stumbling, laughing beginners, ankles wobbling. Serene-faced experts gracefully gliding in perfect time to the

“Skater’s Waltz.” Around and around they went. If she hadn’t been meeting Emma, Faith would have joined them.

But she was meeting Emma, and surprisingly, Emma was inside already, a pot of steaming tea and two cups on the table in front of her.

“They’re bringing some scones and tea sandwiches.

I thought you might be hungry.”

Emma was paler than Faith had ever seen her. The faint sprinkling of freckles across her nose had emerged and her hair was more red than gold, in con-trast to the flat white of her skin.

Faith took off her coat, hat, and gloves, then sat down, extending her hand across the table. “Let me see the card.”

Emma had it ready in her lap and silently gave it to Faith. Once more Faith had a vague feeling that she shouldn’t be touching it. That it should be dusted for prints. She shook her head. The whole situation was insane, and the way Emma and Faith herself were handling it was even crazier. What did they know about crime?

It was another card from the same pack, a Currier & Ives snow-covered barn this time, and like the first missive, it got right to the point. But this one was scarier. Much scarier.

You see we know where you live. We’re getting closer.

We have very expensive tastes and we’ll be needing some more cash. Don’t worry. W

.

e’ll be in touch

51

“When is Michael getting back?” It was abundantly clear why Emma didn’t want to stay in the apartment alone now. There was no mistaking the threat implied by underlining the word touch.

“Tonight. He just has time to change before we have to go to some fund-raiser.”

The waiter came with the rest of the order and fussed about with the scones and sandwiches. The delay was maddening. Finally, he left, but not until both women had thanked him profusely and falsely.

“You do see that they’ll just keep upping the ante.

Blackmailers don’t stop, especially when they get what they want. This could go on for the rest of your life—

or until you run out of money. And how did you come up with that much cash so fast?”

Emma looked down at her untouched plate. “Well, I do have rather a lot.” She sounded apologetic. If giving into these demands was some sort of perverse rich girl’s guilt over her assets, Faith could think of any number of better recipients for her largesse. “Poppy was worried that Jason would figure out a way to cut me off without her finding out, so she set up a trust for me out of her own money. It’s supposed to be a secret.” Emma looked even more mortified, if that was possible.

“Don’t worry. I’m not sure I would even recognize your stepfather if I saw him, let alone tell him anything at all. You know that.”

Emma nodded absently, smiling slightly. “Then when I was twenty-one, I came into the money left by my grandparents. A good bit of it is real estate. They thought Poppy had enough—and so did she—so everything went to Lucy and me.”

Real estate. Nothing like putting your money into 52

land. Especially on the island of Manhattan. Faith dimly recalled hearing from her own mother, who could tell you the owner and price of virtually every building in the city, that Poppy had been born not with a silver spoon in her mouth, but a platinum one. By the time her two daughters were shoveling in the Pablum, the utensil had apparently become encrusted with dia-monds.

But back to the issue at hand. It was nice for Emma that she had such bushel baskets of money, yet there was no reason for her to watch it all get dumped out.

“Even so, you can’t keep paying,” Faith said firmly.

“And what about your safety? They were able to get into your building, past the doormen, and up to your floor!”

Tears came into Emma’s eyes and she poured the tea with an unsteady hand. “Yes, I’m scared. Terribly frightened, in fact, but I’d rather die than betray my husband, and that’s what it amounts to.” She offered Faith the cup.

Faith took it, noting that Emma had been worrying the cuticles on her thumbs. Reflexively, she began to pick at her own, then stopped in annoyance. There was really nothing she could say after Emma’s impassioned declaration, but Faith gave it a try. “You can’t live like this. It’s only going to get worse. Think about it! You have got to do something! ” Emma poured herself some tea, peered into the cup, and, despite the lack of tea leaves, announced her decision. “I’ll tell Michael everything when things calm down. After he’s elected next fall.” The matter dis-missed, she moved on. “You’ve seen the papers?” Faith had. She’d been buying all of them, even and especially the tabloids, since Thursday. Fox’s murder 53

was still all over the front pages and the press had been pulling up file photos from Nate’s radical salad days.

In one of today’s papers, there had been a large blowup of Fox leading chanting demonstrators in front of the Federal Building. A young woman linked to his arm, someone who could have been Emma’s twin, was obviously Poppy Morris. So far, however, there hadn’t been a word connecting either Poppy or Emma to Fox.

“I’m learning all sorts of things about my father from the articles,” Emma said wistfully. “Mother would never talk about him. But I’ve read all his books.”

If ever anyone wanted proof of filial devotion, here it was. Faith well knew that Emma’s favorite book had always been Charlotte’s Web, and even in adulthood, her reading, other than periodicals, tended toward idyl-lic—and usually bucolic—fiction. Family sagas with happy endings.

Faith had been learning things from the papers, too.

She’d wondered how Fox had gotten his books published without either revealing his whereabouts or im-plicating his publisher. An extensive interview in Sunday’s Times with Arthur Quinn, his longtime agent, had provided the answer. Quinn claimed not to have seen or talked with Fox since his disappearance. The manuscripts and various instructions would arrive in the mail with postmarks from several different South American countries and no return address. Quinn might get one a year, then nothing for two or three. As per Fox’s wishes, all the royalties went to charities that he would update from time to time.

Faith tried a new tack. “Your father would never have put up with blackmail, and think how upset he would have been to know he was the cause of so much 54

unhappiness for you.” It was the right button. Emma immediately burst into heartrending sobs that people at neighboring tables professed not to notice. It was New York City, after all. Besides, most of the café’s cus-tomers were weary shoppers close to tears themselves.

“Don’t you think I’ve thought of all this? There’s no choice but to wait and see what happens. I can’t tell Michael and I really can’t tell the police. Oh, I wish Daddy hadn’t died! He’d know what to do.” If Daddy hadn’t died—and it certainly wasn’t Daddy’s idea—Emma would be in only a slightly less awkward position. Faith sat up suddenly. There had been something in Emma’s tone that—

“You did find him, didn’t you!”

Emma took out a handkerchief trimmed with an inch of the kind of lace that took French nuns a year to create. She dabbed her eyes. Her nose didn’t get red when she cried, Faith had noted with some envy, but her whole face was pink now. Emma had never been a good liar.

“Todd took me to him. Before my mother found me and made me return home. My father was living someplace upstate. Neither he nor Todd told me the name of the town. For all our protection. Before that, he’d been out in Oregon, then Minnesota. He moved around a lot, of course. But if I hadn’t found him through Todd, I would have kept looking. I had to see my real father—

and he wanted to see me. It was his dream, he told me.”

“Did you know he’d moved into the city?” Emma nodded.

Faith blew at a strand of hair that had fallen into her eyes when the door to the frigid outside opened. One thing was clear. Whether it had occurred to Emma or not—and possibly not—if she went to the authorities 55

now, she could be charged. Concealing the whereabouts of a wanted felon was itself a crime. In any case, she’d certainly make the headlines. And no one would be happy. Not the Stansteads, not the party—

and, most especially, not Michael.

“He thought he would be safe enough after all this time, and he’d changed his name.”

Yeah, Faith thought, to Fuchs, German for Fox. She began to wonder just how clever a man Fox had been.

One would have thought that number one—or at most, number two—in the Instructions for Going Underground Manual read, “Do not assume a name resembling your own. Avoid the same initials.” So, Nathan Fox decided to become Norman Fuchs. Maybe he had luggage.

“ ‘All old Jewish men look alike,’ Daddy said. He’d grown a beard and cut his hair. It was very gray. I would never have recognized him from the old pictures. He was terribly good-looking back then, don’t you think?”

Outside the large windows, the skaters endlessly circled the rink, leaving sharp trails and occasionally trac-ing intricate figures in the ice. A group of schoolkids sent a spray of chips flying up against the glass as they came to a sudden stop before racing off again.

“Very good-looking. Handsome as all get-out, but Emma, weren’t you afraid someone would see the two of you together?”

“We never went outside. He never did go outside much anyway. He thought too much fresh air was bad for people,” Emma smiled reminiscently. “I used to bring him bialys. There’s a good place near where he lived. He liked to eat them when they were still warm.

His grandmother made the best ones, ones you could 56

really sink your teeth into, he said. That was my great-grandmother.”

Faith wasn’t sure she could stand the pathos. And it was true: Like a real bagel, it was hard to get a good bialy these days.

“I’d have brought him more food, but there were some weeks when I couldn’t come, and I didn’t want him to depend on it. So he stuck to his own shopping.

He went out to shop once or twice a week. Daddy didn’t care about what he ate.”

Faith knew there were people like this, but she preferred not to hear about them.

“I couldn’t call him. He didn’t have a phone. We arranged that he’d be home at three o’clock on Tuesdays. Not that he had other places to go, but this way, we’d be sure. If I could make it, fine; if not, fine.

Daddy was very nonjudgmental.”

Of his daughter, perhaps. Few others, apart from some of the working class, had escaped his scathing view of the world. Fox had once put the entire United States of America on trial in a mock version staged in Central Park. Since they didn’t have a permit, the trial ended before a verdict could be reached.

Emma was buttering a scone. We seem to be developing a pattern here, Faith observed to herself. Emma unburdens herself, feels better, perks up, and I inch closer to prematurely adding Nice ’n Easy to my shopping list.

“They didn’t name the amount of money they wanted in the note,” Emma pointed out. “And my name hasn’t been in any of the papers, or someone would have told me by now, so there really is nothing we can do at the moment.”

She took a bite, swallowed, and added, “The police 57

would certainly have been in touch with me already if they had been going to.” She laughed at her own il-logic—and perhaps the awkwardly dangling infinitive.

“Why are you so sure about that?” Faith asked suspiciously. Grammar or no grammar, she knew what Emma was hinting. She took a bite of the scone on her own plate and put it down. Too much baking powder.

“I always sent Daddy postcards when I was traveling and couldn’t get to see him. Besides, he did so miss leaving the country. He’d hitchhiked all over the world when he was younger.”

“And he saved them?”

“One was on the fridge the last time I was there.” Ignoring the homey image this conjured up—hammer and sickle refrigerator magnets?—Faith pressed.

“But how would the police have known who you were?

Granted, they could check up on people named Emma who’d left the country for those destinations near the postmarked dates, but it wouldn’t be easy.”

“They would have recognized Michael from our wedding picture,” Emma answered matter-of-factly.

Faith’s head began to reel as she envisioned the Spartan studio apartment described in the media filled with nothing but books, an ancient Underwood on a card table, a bed, and a file cabinet—envisioned the apartment complete with an eight-by-ten glossy of Emma and Michael, the bride and groom, in a silver frame from Tiffany’s.

But Emma was right. The police would have been onto her immediately. Fox’s murderer had taken the photo and the cards. Fox’s murderer. Emma’s blackmailer?

Emma stood up. She looked out at the tree and said 58

pensively, “I’m madly behind with my shopping. I’d better go to Saks.”

Faith pulled on her coat. “What about Todd? What happened to him? Don’t tell me you see him at three o’clock on Wednesdays.”

“Don’t be silly. I never saw him again after that, but I did get a card in the mail a couple of years ago from some real estate firm on Long Island. You know the kind. ‘If you’re thinking of buying a house, think of me.’ And it had his picture on it; otherwise, I would never even have read it. It was right after we got married, and he must have seen the announcement in the Times. Maybe he thought we wanted to move out of the city. City—that’s where he was—Garden City.” So, Todd Hartley had not assumed a blue collar—

and he knew what had happened to Fox’s daughter.

And that she’d been pregnant by him. Faith put his name on the list of potential blackmailers.

“Was there anybody else who knew who Fox was and knew you? Anyone else around when you went to see him the first time?”

“He was living with some woman. Daddy always had women,” Emma added ruefully. Faith was glad to see it. All this Daddy Fox worship was getting to be a bit much. “I didn’t meet her, though. I think he didn’t want her to know about me.”

Faith made a mental note of this woman. The list could use a few more names. At the moment, it consisted of Lucy Morris and Todd Hartley. Poppy Morris knew about her daughter’s pregnancy and parentage, but it strained credulity to think she would be blackmailing her own daughter. Still, Faith made another note to try to find out if Poppy was paying her Bergdorf’s bills on time. Some of the veteran sales 59

force who had been outfitting Jane Lennox Sibley’s family forever could be counted on to spill a few beans.

Jason Morris obviously knew about Nathan Fox and his wife’s affair, yet he may not have known about Emma’s pregnancy, although Emma had mentioned that Poppy was carrying on about it all over the house.

The only reason he’d have to blackmail his—what, stepdaughter?—would be pure spite. To get his hands on the money Poppy had set aside for Emma behind his back? Faith added Jason to the list. From what little she recalled, he’d never struck her as a terribly nice man, and at the moment, that was enough to fit the profile. Then there was Fox himself—he knew Emma was his daughter and she may have told him about the pregnancy during one of their parent-child bonding visits.

But Fox was already dead when the first card turned up. Even if he’d written it, he couldn’t have orches-trated the delivery of the money or composed the second from the grave. He’d been a vocal force when previously underground, but this time around was decidedly different. Whatever one’s beliefs concerning the hereafter, none included the postal service or even faxes.

“I know I have no right to ask you to do anything else, Faith, when you’ve been such an angel, but there is one more thing. A big favor.”

Emma was putting some money down on the table, over Faith’s protests that they split the bill. “Women aren’t good at this. No one ever has the right change or can figure out who owes what, so it’s easier for me to pay, and besides, I want it to be my treat.” Emma had interrupted herself to settle the question of the bill.

Faith put her coat on and waited to find out what this 60

favor might be. It could be anything from helping her find that perfect little something for sister Lucy—some desk models of guillotines, “conversation pieces” leapt to mind—to breaking into Fox-Fuch’s apartment to be sure the photo and cards were gone. This had already occurred to Faith. And if Emma had a key, it would even be somewhat legal.

“There, that should be right.” Faith looked at the money tucked next to the teapot. If everyone tipped the way Emma did, the waiter could go to Acapulco for Christmas and Easter.

Emma pulled on her long suede gloves and put one hand on Faith’s arm.

“Will you go to the service for me? Daddy’s service? Knowing that you’re there will be the next best thing to being there myself, and you can tell me all about it. I wish I could go, but I can’t. There could be pictures, and soon everybody would be asking why I went.”

“Of course I’ll go. The Times had said Quinn, his agent, would be arranging a memorial service soon.

Tell me once you know when it is, in case I miss the notice.” This was not a big favor. This was nothing.

The big favor that Faith had already taken on—in her mind anyway—was finding out who was blackmailing her old schoolmate.

And going to the memorial service would be the first step in her investigation.

Emma left and Faith made her way to the rest rooms.

There had been talk of placing public conveniences like the coin-operated kind in Paris at various locations throughout the city, but at present one had to grab at any opportunity or go into a department store, which 61

invariably cost much, much more than any pay toilet—

in Faith’s experience anyway. The last time she’d dashed into Bloomies, she’d come out with a Jil Sander jacket—it had been on sale—and a Mary McFadden scarf for her mother—it hadn’t. The cubi-cles on the streets in Paris had occasionally failed to open, trapping the occupant, and Faith had resolved either to avoid them until foolproof or always carry a very long book—something like Proust—that she’d been meaning to read for years.

Returning, she again noted a man with his face buried in the Wall Street Journal a few tables behind where they had been sitting. The few other men in the café at this hour were older with, presumably, spouses or were younger with families. She looked back at him. He was leaving. There was something familiar about him, yet it could just be that they’d been on the subway together, or he could have been at any number of dances and parties over the years. Parties. That was it. He’d been at the party she’d catered last week. He was with the host and Michael Stanstead when they came into the kitchen. He must not have been a close friend of Stanstead or he would have said something to Emma today. Unless he was so intent on his reading that he didn’t see her. Or unless he felt he’d be intrud-ing. His presence continued to disturb Faith. What was he doing alone at the café at this hour? The market had just closed.

She walked out into the bitter cold and took a soft wool cloche out of her pocket, pulling it down over her ears. The hat made her look like a Gatsby girl and filled her hair with static electricity, but it was warm.

She stood on Fifth Avenue, glancing back over her shoulder at the huge tree at Rockefeller Center. It was 62

even more dramatic as the day drew to a close, its lights glowing like jewels against the dark branches.

On the other side of Fifth stood Saks on one corner, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on the other. God and mam-mon. The front windows at Saks were filled each Christmas with ever-more-elaborate moving figures—

scenes from The Nutcracker, Dickens, the Arabian Nights—glimmering, glistening fantasies. Shoppers filed by in long lines behind the velvet ropes, funneled at the end of the oohs and aahs into the Palace of Goods.

Worshipers at other altars across the street—those dedicated to Saint Anthony, Saint John, Saint Theresa—also moved in lines, walking slowly up the nave to gaze back at the rose window and ahead toward the lady chapel. Today, Faith decided to join this crowd. She crossed, darting between two cabs, only one of which, miraculously, honked at her, and climbed the stairs into Saint Patrick’s marble interior.

Instantly, she knew she had picked the right place and she walked quietly up the side aisle toward the altar, banked with row upon row of brilliant red poinsettias.

The cathedral was filled with a golden glow—tiers of flickering votive candles and interior spots created sudden pools of light against the early dark. The smell of incense mixed with that of burning candle wax and hung in the warm air. She slipped into a row and took a seat on one of the hard wooden pews. She had yet to be in a church—and she’d been in a great many of them over the years—with comfortable seating. She’d mentioned this to her father a few times, commenting that penance of this sort seemed at odds with modern religion. “We don’t beat ourselves with sticks, wear hair shirts, or put pebbles in our shoes. Why do we 63

have to sit on such unforgiving surfaces?” Once, he’d told her that if the pews were too deeply cushioned, he’d put his parishioners to sleep. Another time, he’d answered that it was simply a matter of economics.

Something else was always more pressing—disaster victims, the homeless, the poor, the leaks in the church roof. He’d got her there, yet she continued to secretly hope for a bequest from some eccentric who would stipulate the money could be spent only for the better-ment of congregational buns.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, the altar blazed before her. It was truly beautiful. She didn’t like poinsettias, opting instead for amaryllis, cyclamen, clivia, and hydrangea during this festive season, yet she would have been the first one to protest the absence of the traditional plants from Saint Patrick’s. Protest. That brought her back to Nate Fox—

and Emma.

It was difficult to sort things out. This last conversation with Emma had made one thing clear, however.

She had adored her lost and found father. What’s more, he seemed to have cared for her, displaying the postcards, her wedding photo—though in that case, Faith was sure Fox also got a kick from the irony of conser-vative Michael Stanstead in full nuptial regalia posed next to, say, Fox’s autographed copy of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution.

Yet Fox, the devoted dad, had never tried to get in touch with Emma, although he certainly knew where she was all those years. Granted, he was on the lam, but if it had been his dream to see her, wouldn’t he have done something about it? Watched her incognito at the park with her nanny? Impersonated a waiter at her coming-out ball? Faith could think of all sorts of 64

soppy grade-B movie plots. Maybe he had had a deal with Poppy. Obviously, they’d decided it would be better for the child to believe Jason was her father. Only Jason didn’t love her. All those years of never pleasing him, never being what he wanted—and never knowing why. Emma had been physically abandoned by her real father, and the man she’d thought was her father had abandoned her emotionally and in a more tangible, economic way, although she wouldn’t have learned that until Jason’s death. Faith shuddered. She thought of her own father—and she was sure he was, since she had his clear blue eyes. Lawrence Sibley had been an impoverished divinity school student when Faith’s mother, Jane Lennox, had met him and been uncharacteristically swept off her feet. The two opposites had forged an indissoluble union. That’s a hard act to follow, Faith reflected as she heard the soft murmur of whispered prayers around her. No wonder I’m not married. Because when I am, it’s got to be for keeps.

Like Emma. Emma and Michael. In Emma’s mind, revealing to her husband what she was going through, had gone through, would be an act of betrayal, equal to something like adultery—a sin. Finally, in Michael, Emma had found a man who would not leave her.

Someone she could trust and she would literally die rather than destroy or even jeopardize that.

Once again, Faith was back at the beginning. There was only one thing to do. Find out who was blackmailing Emma. Put a stop to it—note to self: Have to work on this angle. Then Emma can live happily ever after and Michael will remain in blissful ignorance.

Faith stood up and walked toward the altar. She was starting to think like Emma, she realized with dismay.

65

Someday when things are so busy that I don’t even have a chance to catch my breath, I’ll look back at this time and regret I didn’t enjoy it more. This was Faith’s advice to herself after she checked the messages at work and found nothing urgent. No emergency calls from Gracie Mansion to whip up a quick mayoral dinner for two hundred. Not even a call for a dinner party for twelve. She did have a party to do the following night, and she decided to make another hors d’oeuvre, although there were already several selections. They’d prepared phyllo triangles stuffed with a proscuitto and ricotta mixture and others filled with diced mushrooms and smoked turkey. Then there was gravlax with plenty of dill and mustard sauce on rounds of thin dark rye and toasted brioche. She’d do some spiced nuts and put bowls of them next to the bowls of various kinds of olives she’d already planned. Before she got started, she decided to check the messages at her apartment.

Emma would be getting ready for her fund-raiser—

Faith had forgotten to ask her where it was—but there might have been further instructions from the blackmailers. Emma would leave some sort of message, Faith wanted to believe.

She punched in the code—and beep, “Faith, love, it’s Granny. I’m totally distraught and can’t understand why someone didn’t tell me sooner! I suppose they were trying to spare an old lady.”

Whatever it is, it must be bad. Faith felt a flicker of anxiety. When her grandmother started referring to herself this way, it meant she’d lost another friend or received some other devastating news. Normally, she made a point of ignoring the aging process, and she still had the legs to prove it worked.

“Altman’s is closing! B. Altman! They’re having a 66

gigantic sale and simply gutting the place. I can scarcely take it in. I’d like you and Hope to come to lunch with me at the Charleston Gardens. Remember all those times we used to go there before the ballet?

Humor an old lady and call me, dear.” Two mentions of

“old lady” in one message. Faith hated that Altman’s was closing, too, although she hadn’t been there in years. It had furnished her grandmother and mother’s trousseaux—and first apartments. When Hope and Faith were little girls, Altman’s was de rigeur for party dresses, white gloves, navy blue Sunday school coats, and, of course, Easter bonnets. She felt a sudden nos-talgia for the Charleston Gardens’ rendition of chicken à la king. (And which king was that? British, surely, not French.) The memory was complicated by an equally strong one of Hope losing her lunch in the final moments of Romeo and Juliet, when sister and grandmother took her tugs on their sleeves to mean requests for information—Hope had been a great one for questions like “Why can’t she climb down the balcony and leave?”—rather than the urgent need for the bathroom that it was. The image of mopping Hope up, as well as three ladies from a women’s club on Long Island who had been in the row in front of them, had stayed with Faith as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was the first time she’d ever seen what she later learned was called a “merry widow.” Yes, she’d have lunch with Granny and they could all mourn the passing of yet another treasured New York institution and bemoan the short-sightedness of the philistines responsible—but Faith would stick to the BLT.

Beep: “ ‘ “Hither, page, and stand by me,/If thou know’st it, telling,/Yonder peasant, who is he?/Where and what his dwelling?”/“Sire, he lives a good league 67

hence,/Underneath the mountain,/Right against the forest fence,/By Saint Agnes’ fountain.” ’ ” Richard Morgan! Things were looking up. “I can sing some more verses, too. If you’d like to hear them, meet me for dinner tonight. I know it’s short notice, but I thought I’d still be out of town. Give me a call. Five five five, eight nine four seven. I’ll even not sing, if you’d rather.”

The last message was from Hope. She was at work and had her work voice on. “Please let me know some times when you’re available for dinner, so we can arrange a date and place to meet. Best call me at work.

I won’t be home until late all week.” Hope got to the office well before dawn and seldom left until it was time to tumble into bed. It wasn’t until all the Michael Milken stuff came out, revealing, among other things, that, like many in the business, he rose at 4:00 A.M., sleeping only four to five hours a night, that Faith con-ceded her sister wasn’t seriously disturbed, simply seriously lacking perspective.

She shook her head and dialed Richard. He answered on the second ring.

“Hi, it’s Faith Sibley, and as it turns out, I am free, and trying to remember all those verses has been driving me crazy. Your call came just in time.”

“One so rarely has the opportunity to be of service.

I’m delighted. Now, what’s your pleasure?” That awkward moment had arrived. Where to eat?

And she had no idea how fat his wallet was. Did the absence of an overcoat mean good circulation or an un-healthy cash flow?

“I dunno. What do you want to do, Marty?” Faith had been brought up on black-and-white classic movies. Apparently, so had Richard.

68

“If I remind you of Ernest Borgnine, we may have a problem.”

Faith laughed. “Okay. What kind of food do you like to eat, and if you say everything, I’m hanging up.”

“Don’t do that! Let’s see, there’s wassail. No, how about I dare the impossible and choose for the caterer.

They make great margaritas at Santa Fe on West Sixty-ninth, and the food is pretty good, too.” Faith had been there a few times and liked it. The warm brick-colored walls and soft lighting were any girl’s best friends. “Done. Meet you there at eight?”

“Meet you there at eight. And Faith, I’m looking forward to moving on to the next topic.”

“Me, too. See you soon.” Frankly, at this point in her life, she wasn’t the least bit curious about the forest fence or Saint Agnes’s fountain. She already knew how it turned out.

Richard Morgan was a freelance journalist, and Faith now recalled seeing his byline in a wide variety of publications— The New Yorker, the Village Voice, The New Republic, as well as the Times. She was going to have to be very, very careful. But she brightened at her next thought. She’d be able to pump him for information.

First, it seemed that they needed to find out what each other thought about everything from Leona Helmsley’s trial—“Anyone who goes on record saying, ‘I don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes’ has to take her knocks,” said Richard—to Paul McCartney at forty-seven—“Can he still cut it?” “Flowers in the Dirt has some great moments, but it’s mixed,” said Faith.

Richard had been at Tiananmen Square and Faith listened spellbound as he described what it had been 69

like to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the students as the tanks rolled in.

“Enough about me,” he said.

It had been awhile since Faith had heard these words. Maybe he had a brother for Hope.

“Tell me about Faith Sibley. I want to know everything. All your secrets.” His grin was disarming.

There’s nothing like charm to extract information. He must be very good at what he does, Faith thought, beginning to realize writing wasn’t his only talent.

She gave him the Cliffs Notes version of her life to date. He smiled again at the vehemence with which she declared she would never, ever marry a man of the cloth.

“Good news for the rest of us.”

“Unless you’ve grown up as a PK—preacher’s kid—it’s hard to understand. We never gave the parish anything really juicy to comment on, like running away to join a cult or shaving our heads and piercing our noses. But there were plenty of annoying day-today remarks. ‘Isn’t she a little young for makeup?’

‘Did I hear the girls were going to Europe by themselves this summer?’ ‘Has Faith decided on a career yet, like Hope?’ You get the picture.”

“Yeah, might make a good article. Don’t worry,” Richard said, seeing Faith’s look of alarm, “another PK. I don’t take advantage of my friends—or try not to, anyway.”

If one of them was sitting on a story as big as the one she was, Faith was sure Richard’s scruples would vanish before you could say “Pulitzer Prize.” They were waiting for their main course—they’d both ordered a pork dish with green chili. It would make splitting the bill easier, but Faith wouldn’t be 70

able to find out how comfortable he was about sharing food. She firmly believed “Do you promise to share what’s on your plate?” should be worked into the traditional marriage vows. Forget sickness, health, love, honor, and especially obey. Most divorces could be avoided by a simple test. Order something you don’t particularly want in a restaurant and urge him to get something you adore. Ask for a taste and take careful notes. A cousin of Faith’s reported her fiancé’s reac-tion: “If you wanted it, why didn’t you order it?” Faith advised caution, was not heeded, and they were splitsville less than a year after the honeymoon. But tonight she was really in the mood for the pork. Maybe next time?

Inevitably, the conversation turned to food, which then led to travel. Richard had been all over the world and even expressed a desire to hop aboard a space shuttle should the chance arise. Faith was drawn to space travel in theory—the extraordinary sight of earth from far, far away, that big blue marble. Yet, lurking beneath her adventurous spirit was a tiny voice insistently whimpering, But what if you couldn’t get back?

For the moment, she wasn’t taking a number. She definitely did want to go to the Far East, and she listened intently—and enviously—as Richard described his journeys. The margaritas were drained and they ordered dark Dos Equis beer to go with the rest of dinner. Faith was feeling more relaxed than she had been all week.

“But you haven’t told me any secrets,” he said suddenly.

“You haven’t told me any, either,” she countered.

Two could play at this game.

“All right. I’m secretly writing a book that is going 71

to blow a certain southern town sky-high. A best-seller for sure.”

Faith looked at him scornfully. “Every other person in this city—and probably the rest of the country—is writing some kind of explosive book. That’s not a real secret.”

He leaned forward. He really was good-looking.

Deep brown eyes and lighter brown hair—wavy, not curly. He was thin, but not skinny; his chin and cheekbones well defined. Kate Hepburn’s cousin, without the voice.

“While I was doing a story on something else, I stumbled across a mystery. I met the principals and haven’t been able to stay away. It’s one of those situa-tions in life where nothing you could dream up as fiction could match the bizarre and byzantine nature of this reality.”

Faith was with him there. She found herself nodding. Nothing one could imagine . . .

“So what’s yours?”

She came to with a jolt.

“I stole a ceramic animal from the gift shop at the Museum of Natural History when I was nine years old, never told my parents, and kept it.” She didn’t add that she had felt so guilty, she was unable to look at the little lion. Too afraid of the questions that might arise if it was discovered in the trash, she had stashed it in a shoe box in her closet until two years ago, when she donated it to a local thrift shop as a collectible.

“So, keep your secrets. My nose for news, and experience with sources, tells me you’re a complicated woman and one extremely capable at keeping things hidden, Faith. And how did you end up with a name 72

like that? I’ve never met a Faith before. Funny, though, it seems to suit you.”

Faith told him the family story and they moved on to discuss an article about the eighties he was finishing up for the Times magazine section.

“This could get depressing,” Faith remarked. “I keep thinking of people like Mark Chapman and John Hinckley. And the Ayatollah putting a price on Salman Rushdie’s head. So much craziness.”

“The Challenger tragedy, the savings and loan cri-sis, Black Monday . . .”

Faith began to chant, “Nancy Reagan’s china, Beemers, ‘Whoever Dies with the Most Toys Wins,’

Malcolm Forbes’s two-million-dollar Moroccan birthday bash . . .”

“But there were also all those KILL YOUR TELEVISION

bumper stickers, and we weren’t involved in any major wars during the entire decade, although there’s still time.”

“Not much. I read a wonderful quote from that British novelist Angela Carter the other day commenting on the heavy pronouncements we’ve been reading almost all year: ‘The fin is coming early this siècle. ’ ” They both laughed.

“I’ll track it down and use it. It would make a terrific title.”

The only dessert Faith ever wanted at Tex-Mex places was flan. It was the perfect counterpoint to the spicy main dishes, and she recalled that Santa Fe’s was perfect—rich, creamy, yet not cloying. They both ordered coffee. Richard didn’t seem to be in any rush to get back to his article, and though Faith was tired, it was pleasant to linger. Besides, she realized, she’d been having such a good time, she’d forgotten to work 73