I opened this last notebook at the first page. I read:
I have decided this marriage must end.
For an instant I thought I had found the right place, first try. Then I saw the date for the entry:
December 1930.
The writing blurred. I began to turn pages in a frantic way. I came to the last entry:
January 1931.
After that, the pages were blank.
I dropped the notebook. I rummaged through the others, first one, then another. This made me anxious, confused. In the end, when I was certain, I rearranged the notebooks in a stack. I saw, as I might have guessed, that Constance was the one who did the cheating.
Her story stopped too soon. She abandoned it, very soon after I entered its pages.
I was angry then. If I could not hear Frank Gerhard’s voice, I would have liked to read his name. Instead, Constance’s last journal concerned my christening.
For a moment, I hated those journals. I wanted to throw every one of them on the fire and watch them burn. I almost did so. Then I paused. I still held that last notebook in my hands. It was open at the final entry.
There, I read something that shocked me to the heart. I stared down at a sequence of words. Words became sentences; sentences, paragraphs; paragraphs made sense. There, on those pages, was a solution to a mystery, and an explanation of my past.
I read the last, brief journal then. There were not so many pages. When I had finished, I understood why Constance had given me this present. I understood the letter she had enclosed.
At last all the pieces of the puzzle fell obligingly into place. I knew what had happened in 1930, at the time of my christening; I knew what had happened twenty years before that, in 1910. A death and a birth: it was all spelled out. There before me at last was the name of the victim, the identity of the murderer, the nature of the crime.
I had missed certain clues, in my earlier reading. In some ways I had been hoodwinked; in others, I had been willfully blind. Were you quicker than I was? I wonder. Perhaps you were. All I can tell you is that I read with surprise, with remorse, and—finally—with a sense of release.
Constance had me hooked, yes—but by the time I finished reading, I knew: I was hooked for the last time.
From the journals
New York,
December 18, 1930
I
HAVE DECIDED THIS
marriage must end.
Acland had his child today. When the cable came, the words made Constance itch. I don’t want distance anymore. The Atlantic is too wide, after all. Acland—I want you close. Acland—I have decided to come and claim you.
Montague knows, I think. Such a frown when I said I must go to England! He was not fooled by talk of christenings. I hoped he might forbid me to go. I will be truthful, Acland—I did. He is so very controlled! He even takes the lovers in his stride—which disappointed me, a little. He keeps to that bargain of his, you see. And so I did wonder—what would he do, my husband, if I broke the rules? Ordinary lovers are one thing; you are quite another. Montague knows that. He believes you killed my father.
Do you know he has never said he loves me? Not once. Not even
—
in extremis. Don’t you find that extraordinary? I do. We have been married all these years, and I am still not sure. Sometimes I think he cares for me; sometimes I think he is indifferent. Once or twice, I have sensed, a tiredness and even a disgust. I’ll be honest. That alarmed me.
So, you see, I shall come to England, Acland—but I am not quite sure: who am I coming for? I think it is you. I am almost certain it is you. But it might be my husband.
This is your fault, Acland. I’m not sure now how faithful you are to me. Sometimes, now, when I draw my little circle of glass for us, you won’t come. You leave me all alone in there
—
and that makes me shake. It makes my head ache. It makes the traffic say horrible things. It distorts all the patterns in the sky. I don’t like it.
I wish I had a child. There was one
—
did I tell you, Acland? I had it scraped out. I said it was wicked, but Constance said it wasn’t. She said I’d know for sure then whether Montague cared. We both looked in his eyes. She said he hurt. I said he didn’t. After that, the doctors said no more children would grow. I minded. Yes. I minded for a while. That little baby haunted me. I don’t know what they do with them, dead babies, but it came into my dreams at night. Its eyes wouldn’t open. It was worse than my father.
I minded. But today, I don’t mind. Today you have a child for me. A girl. Does she look like you? Does she look like me? I shall like to be her godmother—I shall insist on it. Godmother is better than mother, don’t you think? It sounds more powerful.
Today
—
do you know what I did today, while your baby was being born? I made a room. A room that was silver and black and red. I always wanted a room like that. Today I made it. It is perfect. Every single thing in it is in the right place. Half an inch to the right with one thing, and you’d spoil it. That was what I did today.
Acland—you are there? You are listening? Speak up. Speak up. Your voice is so quiet sometimes. It’s such an ordinary voice. I hate it to be like that. Speak up. Shout. Shout louder. Acland, please, Constance can’t hear you.
That afternoon, when Stern looked into his wife’s sitting room—the room she had just completed decorating; it was red and silver and black—Constance was writing.
She sat at her writing table, head bent; her fountain pen scratched. She gave no sign of hearing Stern enter. When he spoke her name she gave a start. She covered with her hand the page on which she wrote. As Stern approached she closed the black cover of the notebook in a hasty, furtive way.
Stern was faintly irritated by this pantomime. It had been performed before. It was designed, he suspected, to awaken his interest in these notebooks. In the early days of their marriage, the existence of these books (diaries, journals, whatever they were) had been more carefully protected. But time had passed; the notebooks had been, first, revealed (as if by mistake), then flaunted. Once they had been locked away; now, from time to time one would be left out, as if Constance had forgotten it. Stern understood the reason for this: His wife wished him to spy on her, as she spied on him. Accordingly, he was careful. He never touched these notebooks.
“My dear.” He leaned forward. He placed a light kiss on her hair. “Don’t look so anxious. I respect your privacy.”
This annoyed Constance. She made a wry face, attempting to disguise her displeasure.
“How moral you are. I can never resist other people’s secrets. I used to be a great reader of other people’s letters, you know.”
“I can imagine.”
He looked around this new room of his wife’s. The walls glowed. Lamps were lit, such daylight as there was almost obscured. A coromandel screen—a fine one—hedged off a corner. The lacquered walls glowed a dull red; Stern, for some reason he could not define, found this color, though subtle, confining. The room was overcrowded, he thought—as were most of the rooms his wife designed. He found it … fortified.
“The room is a success? It pleases you?”
He had not meant to make the remark a question. The fact that he did seemed to irritate Constance more. She was very thin-skinned about criticism.
“I like it. It suits … me.”
Her tone was defiant. Stern looked out the window: a winter dusk; snow was falling. He turned back to his wife, who was now fiddling with pens, paper, envelopes, as if impatient he should leave.
Constance’s head was bent. The lamp on the table made a circle about her. In its light, her black hair shone. It was cut in an angular way, across her forehead, flaring out in a wedge shape either side of her delicate jaw. It gave her an Egyptian look, a look much admired, much copied. Stern, who could see that the effect was beautiful, missed the old hairstyle. He had preferred the suggestivity of that long and abundant hair, which, when the pins and combs were removed, could tumble about bared shoulders. This, he knew, was the Edwardian in him. His tastes were old-fashioned.
Constance fiddled with one of the many bracelets she wore. She smoothed the skirt of her dress. Stern’s gaze seemed to make her uncomfortable. The dress, made for her by one of her French designer friends, was a dramatic, an electric blue—a color few women could wear. Its skirt was short, the cut of the shoulders somewhat mannish. Stern, able to see that the effect was elegant, disliked the dress. He still could not accustom himself to high heels, bared legs, the seams of stockings, the assertiveness of a painted face. He felt a moment’s regret for the fashions of the past, for clothes that revealed less and promised more. He was, he thought, growing old.
“You’re going out?” Constance put her notebook in a drawer.
“My dear, yes. That was what I came in to say. Not for long. An hour or so. You remember the South African I mentioned—the one from De Beers? He’s staying at the Plaza. Just passing through. I have to see him.”
“Oh, there’s always someone you have to see.” She made another face. She rose. “You know what I wish sometimes? I wish you had lost all your money last year—like other people. I wish you had gone
phut!
in the crash. Then we could have gone away, just the two of us, and lived somewhere very simply.”
“My dear. You would dislike that very much, I think. I apologize for not going
phut,
as you put it. I was always prudent, as you know.”
“Oh, prudence. I hate prudence—”
“I did make some losses, in any case. Everyone did.”
“Did you, Montague?” She gave him an odd, fixed look. “I can’t imagine that somehow. Making gains, yes. Losses—no.”
“We all make them occasionally, Constance.”
Something in the way Stern said this seemed to disconcert her. She gave a toss of her head.
“Maybe so. Maybe so. Well, if you’re going, go—I don’t want to make you late. For your South African.”
“I’ll be back around seven, Constance.”
“Fine. Fine.” She sat down again at her writing table. “We should leave for the party at eight—you hadn’t forgotten?”
“No. I shall be back in good time.”
“I’m sure you will. You were always punctual.” She consulted her small wristwatch. “Two hours, for your South African? He must be important. On a Saturday too.”
“It may not take so long. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
“Oh, don’t rush on my account. I have plenty to do. You must give him your full attention.”
Stern went out. He ignored the edge in her voice. He closed the door. He paused. As he had expected, Constance at once picked up the telephone.
A small click as she raised the receiver. She spoke in lowered tones; Stern did not stay to eavesdrop. He knew who it was she would be calling—his wife, that self-appointed spy in the house of love. She would be calling the latest firm of private investigators.
Outside the house—which was located close to the apartment building on Fifth Avenue where I later lived with Constance—Stern paused. To reach the Plaza Hotel, and a nonexistent appointment with a South African useful to him the previous year but now safely in Johannesburg, Stern would have turned left and walked south. Instead, glancing up and down the avenue, he turned right and headed north.
He walked at a leisurely pace. The sidewalks were crowded; people had begun their Christmas shopping. Women with shopping bags, and children in tow, pushed past. The sidewalks were slushy. Dirty snow lay in the gutters. It made him think of Scotland, and of his honeymoon, thirteen years before.
Shall we walk to the wilderness?
Stern braced himself, turned his face to the cold wind blowing down Fifth. He had the sensation, though alone, that his wife walked with him.
The apartment he visited was some ten minutes’ walk away. Located on Park Avenue, on the fifth floor of a new building, it was the apartment he spoke of to me shortly before he died; the same apartment I would visit all those years later, in my search for Constance. It had been purchased by Stern in a false name, through one of his companies. Stern had been careful to make the trail that connected the apartment to him a devious one, but one it was not impossible to disentangle.
The investigators his wife employed would have traced the connections by now, he knew; they had had over a year in which to do so. They had followed him to the apartment from the first, of course. Considerate to their needs, he had selected one whose windows overlooked the avenue. With the lights left on and the shades raised, the man who followed him—who always took up his position on the far side of Park—had an excellent view.
Stern had become fond of these investigators. These spies reassured him of Constance’s jealousy; their presence reaffirmed the possibility of her love.
Stern, considerate to these hard-working men, did not hurry. The man usually fell into step behind him around the junction of Park and Seventy-second. Only when the man assigned for that day did so, at precisely this place, did Stern quicken his pace.
The apartment had been purchased in the name Rothstein. The porter greeted him by this name, as he always did. Stern took the elevator to the fifth floor. He let himself in. He switched on the lights in the living room, which overlooked Park Avenue, and moved once or twice in front of the window. When he was sure he had given the watcher sufficient encouragement, he sat down, out of sight.
The woman he awaited would be punctual; he paid her, among other things, to be so. There would be, as there always was, fifteen minutes of solitude before she arrived. On this, from the first, Stern insisted.
When Stern first bought this apartment, he had for several months left it unfurnished. He relished its emptiness and its anonymity. In those days, when the deception first began, an empty apartment had been enough; he had felt no need for furnishings, or for the woman. To begin with, his visits there had been brief, intermittent; then, as the weeks passed, more frequent. In this apartment Stern sought release that he could not always find at work, in his office building on Wall Street. He certainly could not find it at home. Here, in empty rooms, he did.