The Body In The Big Apple (2 page)

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
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 bypassed 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
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
greeting. It had been typed on a word processor, impossible to trace.

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 invaded her sleek chignon. Unlike her daughter, however, Poppy was never out of touch. She'd been in
touch with—and in charge of—an elite segment of New York society since she'd come out. During the sixties and early seventies, Poppy was credited with initiating “radical chic.” You were as likely to be sitting next to Bobby Seale as Henry Kissinger at one of her dinner parties. Now Bobby was promoting his new book,
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 precision. 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 untarnished reputation with the faculty. Because kids never tell. She'd been at the party, too, Emma had men
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 disease.'”

Emma seemed engrossed in the folds of Belmont's coat. “Why do you suppose they have this statue here?”

This was not the best time for an art history lesson.

“Emma! You asked me to come, you show me a very real and very threatening blackmail note—”

“All right, I know. I'd just rather not think about it. Any of it. To start with, I didn't have mono, I had a baby.”

“What!”

“Well, I miscarried, but I was pregnant. That's why I dropped out of school.”

“Oh, Emma, I'm so sorry. I wish I had known. It must have been terrible for you.”

Emma nodded and two perfectly round tears oozed
from the corners of her eyes and slowly made their way down her smooth cheeks.

“Still, this happens all the time. It's not something to be blackmailed about,” Faith persisted.

“It's—it's a little more complicated than that.”

Faith was not surprised. She decided to sit back herself and let Emma tell her story. She didn't expect a torrent of words, but perhaps this method would induce a steady trickle.

Emma tucked her thick hair behind one ear. A large square-cut emerald flanked by equally impressive diamonds 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 quarreling. I stopped outside the library door. It was so unusual. I don't think I had ever heard them fight—not with each other. Mother was constantly screaming about one thing or another, but Jason never responded, which would make Mother rave on. I think he got a
kick out of it. Anyway, that night he was shouting, too. ‘She's your bastard; you take care of her,' I heard Jason say. ‘Why should your little by-blow get anything from me, and certainly not the same amount as my own daughter!'”

Emma stopped. Faith knew where they were going now. She knew why Emma wanted it to be someone else's life.

“I had no idea what they were talking about. At first I thought my mother must have had another child and given it up. Then Mother started in. She didn't raise her voice, but I could hear every word. It was ten times scarier hearing her talk this way. A dead kind of voice. ‘You told me it didn't matter,' she said. ‘You told me that Emma would be like your own child. What happened, happened. I should have known your precious genes would mean more than common decency. You've never been good to her. But this is it, Jason. You either make her equal to Lucy in your will or I'm leaving.' I heard something break. Poppy has always liked to throw things, and when I went in, I saw pieces of glass on the floor in front of the fireplace.”

Faith was openmouthed and immobilized. She couldn't even reach for her friend's hand. The trickle of words had become a torrent. She saw it all as Emma described it. The hall in their town house, thickly carpeted with Oriental runners. Emma's footsteps muffled. The voices from the library, Jason Morris's private domain. Then the crash of crystal on the marble surrounding the large fireplace.

“What did you do? Did you confront them? Oh, Emma, I can't believe this!” She grabbed her friend's hand now and squeezed hard.

“I wasn't thinking. I couldn't think. I just walked in
and looked at them. They stared at me as if they couldn't believe that I was there; then Mother said, ‘You were supposed to be at the Auchinclosses'. I remember thinking what a stupid thing it was to say. I mean, I've just learned that my father isn't my father and she's blaming me for not being somewhere else.

“Jason just looked at me and left the room. He couldn't handle it. I told my mother that I didn't care anything about any money. I only wanted to know the truth. Who was my father? She didn't want to tell me, said it didn't matter, that he was long gone and I couldn't see him. It was really strange. Finally I went to bed and stayed there. After two days, she cracked. I wasn't eating and wouldn't get up. She'd come in and yell or cry. I didn't see anyone else. Lucy was in college, thank God.”

“Who was it?” Faith asked gently.

“Nathan Fox.”

“Nathan Fox!” Faith said. Her voice was too loud and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Nathan Fox!” she said more softly. How to offer condolences in a situation like this? Emma's father has been murdered, but presumably he had not been much of a presence in Emma's life, since she'd only found out about him when she was seventeen and since he hadn't exactly been accessible. She blurted out what was foremost in her mind, “
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
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.”