Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Uncle Morgie.

  SHE WOULD HAVE recognized him anyway, but he rose and came across the restaurant to meet her, both hands outstretched. Julie was shy, holding back, giving her hands where he would have kissed her if she’d been willing. He was big, but trim and muscular, a tennis player still, she thought, remembering one more thing about him. A blue-eyed blond, hair graying. His chin was cleft, and his cheeks dimpled when he smiled.

  It was a small, quiet restaurant on the far East Side with expensive space between tables. A half-dozen pink tea roses were at her place. The maître d’ centered the vase while Reynolds held her chair. A bottle of champagne was cooling. The whole scene made her uneasy. All she wanted was information about someone else.

  “I’ve had the fantasy this would happen someday.” Reynolds settled himself opposite her. “I hope you won’t mind if I say you are every bit as attractive as I expected?” The voice was velvet, deep, and the quick smile a sort of punctuation. But it made the compliment seem less sincere.

  “You do know that mother died a few years ago?” Julie said, wanting to divert his too intense attention.

  “I did know that, and that you were married to the columnist Geoffrey Hayes. I assumed it was that Geoffrey Hayes when I read Katherine’s obituary notice. I thought of calling you. Perhaps I should have. But I’ve always felt that if you wanted to see me, you would look me up. And now you have.” The flash smile again. Expensive teeth. Everything about him was expensive—his tailoring, his tan, his choice of restaurant and flowers.

  She could think of nothing to say. It seemed too gauche to mention Thomas Francis Mooney at once. “I remember the chess set you brought me.”

  “You were beating me too often at checkers. Have you children of your own?”

  She shook her head. “Jeff and I have recently decided on divorce.”

  “I wondered.” He indicated his own wedding band. The mark of where Julie had worn hers showed faintly.

  “And your family?” she groped.

  “My wife finally died. I say it that way because she was ill for so long. Even while I knew your mother …”

  Julie repressed a smile. It seemed corny even if true.

  “… And the girls are long since married. One lives in London and one in Baltimore. I haven’t remarried, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “Actually,” Julie said, “I was wondering if you knew my father.”

  He lifted his eyebrows, a reflex that caused his hairline to seem to shift downward. “And who was he?”

  Julie was taken aback.

  “That was facetious,” Reynolds said. “Don’t you think we should put such an earnest matter aside until we know each other better?”

  “All right.” She felt reproved, a little girl chastised. No, she protested to herself and turned matters around. He had no right to be facetious, superior, so smugly male. And the important thing was he seemed to have known her father.

  Reynolds signaled the waiter to open the wine. While he watched the man wrap the bottle in a napkin and begin to work on the cork, Julie watched Reynolds himself, ready to shift her eyes if he caught her at it. He’d be a hard man to work for, on top of every detail. Julie had worked for someone like that. But Reynolds would also be generous. No doubt he was with her mother.

  He caught her eyes. “Yes?” The eyebrows shot up again.

  She put a finger to her own hairline. “I remember how you used to pretend you were wearing a wig that kept slipping down on your forehead. You’d yank it back into place.”

  “You weren’t long catching on to that one. You gave it a yank yourself, and when it didn’t come off, the game was over. You were not an ordinary child, Julie. You were much too wise for your age, and much too quiet.”

  “Was I?” That image pleased her. Except that she had reversed the growing process. Instead of growing up, she’d grown down. Till now.

  Reynolds turned his attention to the wine. “For God’s sake, man,” he said to the waiter, who was still massaging the cork with his thumbs.

  Fortuitously, the cork popped.

  When the waiter had poured the wine and gone off, Reynolds said, “You know, Julie Anne, this meeting isn’t easy for me either.”

  She laughed and felt better. How knowing of him to make that admission. It changed the whole atmosphere. “Uncle Morgie,” she said.

  “That’s right!” he exclaimed as though the memory had just come fresh.

  They touched glasses and talked first about the apartment on Ninety-first Street. Neither of them knew if the building was still there. “A ridiculous rental. It would cost a fortune today,” he said. Then: “Your mother had a small inheritance, which I advised her on. Did you know that?”

  “I think I did,” Julie said. She seemed to remember.

  “It brought us a little closer than manager and clerk. By that time I thought I could take over the whole book business. Your mother bristled every time I called it a business. She was not the most practical person in the world. … She had a marvelous laugh, didn’t she?”

  Julie nodded. It was crazy sitting talking about her mother when it was her father she wanted to know about. But then she hadn’t known her mother very well either, as a lot of therapy had brought up.

  Reynolds lifted his glass. “To Katherine.”

  Julie drank with him.

  “And to her daughter. She must have been pleased with your marriage to Geoffrey Hayes.”

  Julie nodded. And after a second: “I used to think she’d arranged it.”

  “That she was in love with him herself?”

  “Ha!” His random leap surprised her.

  “She’d have wanted to marry both of you: am I right? A member of the wedding. She was a very romantic woman—and impulsive. But I’ll say this for her, she had courage.”

  “Oh, yes,” Julie said. “At the end of her life she said to me one day that she’d never had a holiday. She’d decided to take a trip. I didn’t even know she was ill. She died three months later in some small town I’d never heard of.”

  “Very courageous,” he murmured. “And a little selfish.”

  “Yeah,” Julie said. She wanted now to cut away from the subject.

  But Reynolds mused aloud, “How extraordinary—to go off and die alone.”

  Off the top of her head: “Maybe she wasn’t alone. How about that?”

  Reynolds said, “I think we’d better have the menu now.”

  “I was being facetious that time,” Julie said.

  “All the same.”

  THE DOVER SOLE had arrived that morning, flown in from England, and the white asparagus was very special. She left the ordering of lunch to him. She could not remember the last really good meal she’d had. She was not great on food, for having associated so long with a gourmet. She wondered if the new woman would do something about the pot belly into which Jeff’s navel was disappearing. Certainly not. That’s not what new women were about.

  “Hayes has to be a good deal older than you, Julie Anne. Am I right?”

  “But very young at heart.”

  Morgan made a noise suggestive of sympathy.

  It put her off. “Actually, Jeff has an old heart, but he enjoys his women young.”

  Morgan signaled the waiter with a snap of his fingers to pour more wine.

  Julie put the subject off as long as she could. As soon as the sole was served and she had said how good it was, she held back no longer. “Please tell me what you can about Thomas Francis Mooney. All my life mother was evasive about him. She made things up sometimes—like telling me he was an Irish diplomat. Or was he?”

  Reynolds drew a deep breath. He had hoped to get through lunch, she thought, before she brought the subject up again. “An exaggeration. He may have worked for an Irish diplomat.”

  “But did he? I could take it from there, don’t you see?”

  He laid his knife and fork down carefully. “Do you have a profession, Julie Anne?”

  “Just Juli
e—Julie Hayes. I’m a gossip columnist on the New York Daily.”

  Morgan Reynolds leaned back and laughed silently, a small breathy sound only. He touched his lips with his napkin. “I’d never have guessed it, not in a million years.”

  She shrugged. Anyone who read the Daily would have known. And anyone who read any paper recently should have known: he’d missed the rape and sodomy story. It was nice to know that someone had.

  “Not very diplomatic of me, but it doesn’t jibe at all with my notion of you. You’re much too much of a lady.”

  “I inherited the column—half of it—when Tony Alexander was murdered. Do you know who he was?”

  “I do. I remember the murder.”

  “I was working for Tony at the time. Jeff started his career as a legman for him. They were lifelong friends.”

  “I see.” Reynolds resumed eating. It was the kind of arrangement he could approve, she thought, Jeff’s getting her the same start as his own. “Do eat your luncheon, Julie. The fish isn’t half as good now as it was when it was served.”

  What took place then was like a charade—a pantomime, a conversation without words—a quick glance, a start as though to say something that then seemed unimportant and was abandoned, a resort to food, to the very dry white wine that came when the fish was served, the unfinished champagne taken off, the meeting of his eyes with hers, a rushed smile that pulled in the dimples. Ridiculous, a man like him having dimples. Did she like him? Not really. She distrusted the dimpled smile. And yet it was a variety of flirtation that was going on between them, each of them wanting the other’s approval. Why, on his part, she wasn’t sure. She wanted information, every morsel she could draw from him. She refused to admit to herself that he, too, might fabricate.

  She ate the last of the fish and the last stalk of asparagus, the combining of which had put her in low esteem with the waiter.

  She said how good the meal was and then, when Reynolds put down his silver, “Could we talk about my father, Morgan?”

  “Morgan,” he repeated. “Thank you. I wanted you to come to it on your own. I don’t suppose you remember the last time we saw each other? The day you started at Miss Page’s School?”

  Another evasion. She tried to prepare herself for disappointment and yet not to alienate him. “I do remember. You drove me there.” She had remembered being driven to the school that first day, but she had forgotten by whom until now. “I was ten years old, wasn’t I? I didn’t start with Miss Page until the sixth grade.”

  “It seemed wise to wait until my other daughters had graduated.” He said each word carefully.

  Other. The dining room did a strange little tilt before Julie’s eyes and then came upright again without making a sound. Everyone in the place seemed to have fallen silent. Including herself. She felt as though she had been struck dumb. She knew his eyes to be waiting hers, but she could not meet them. She wanted to and she knew she should—to see what there might be recognizable in them. There was something terribly wrong. Such revelation ought to have come in privacy, and not so abruptly. Everything in her rebelled at the idea, and slowly the numbness receded. But she mocked herself: now she wanted a parent of her own choosing. The mockery made her sane.

  Reynolds signaled the waiter to clear the table. “Leave the wine,” he said, and when the man was gone, he added a few drops to Julie’s glass, already almost full, and refilled his own. “I should have waited,” he said. “But how could I, considering what you want to know?”

  Julie brushed aside the menu and shook her head at mention of the dessert cart.

  “Later,” Reynolds said, and when the man had wheeled off, he asked, “is the idea so abhorrent to you that you can’t even speak?”

  If she had answered, it would have been to say yes.

  He knew it. “So you’d prefer I told you a romantic tale about Thomas Francis Mooney? Was that his name? I could do that for you, I suppose.”

  “No.” Julie finally spoke. “Mother told me enough of them.”

  “And nothing about Uncle Morgie.”

  “Not much.”

  “I thought she loved me. I thought we were very much in love,” he said as though reexamining that part of his life.

  Julie looked at him. Squarely now. His expression was wistful, regretful. And he wasn’t a very good actor, she decided. She was sure it was an act, whatever his motive might be. But then, she wanted it to be an act.

  “I was married to a woman totally dependent on me,” he went on. “There were two children. Katherine and I both understood, and there was never any question of my leaving Ellen. But when you were on the way, I agonized over it—”

  “Why not an abortion?” Julie interrupted.

  “I am a Roman Catholic. And at that point your mother had taken instruction, although I didn’t know it.”

  “No kidding,” Julie said, again brittle.

  Reynolds was offended. Or feigned it. “It would have been better if your mother had told you.”

  “Oh, yes.” Then she forced herself onto a different tack. “I’m sorry, Morgan. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  “I did propose an arrangement. It might not have worked and it would have taken time. But your mother arrived at an arrangement of her own—marriage to an Irishman considerably younger than herself. He was one of a small army of her admirers who headquartered at the bookstore—greedy as worms and just as impecunious. I have no compunction about saying what I thought was in the marriage for him: permanent resident status in this country.”

  “And then an annulment?” Julie prompted.

  “That did happen, I believe.”

  “Wasn’t there a time discrepancy in there somewhere? Or was I supposed to be born prematurely?”

  Reynolds seemed only then to become aware that she was angry.

  “It really is distasteful to you to think I might be your father.”

  “Well, yes,” Julie said, beyond further pretense. “I think my mother would have told me that—instead of making up the business of a ‘whereabouts unknown’ father.”

  “Your mother was a magnificent fabricator. She ought to have been a writer herself.”

  “Herself?”

  “Aren’t you a writer?”

  “Oh. I thought you meant him,” Julie said, disappointed.

  “He might have been. He might have been almost anything. Katherine thought I was jealous of him. She couldn’t believe the only thing I envied him was his freedom.”

  “And yet ten years later you were still around to enroll me in Miss Page’s School.”

  “It wouldn’t occur to you that you might have been the reason I was still around.”

  Julie said nothing.

  Reynolds made a gesture of vast impatience. “Since you don’t want to accept my account of your origins, perhaps you’ll succeed in tracking down the Irish absentee and get his version.”

  “I’d like to. I’d hoped today might be a beginning.”

  “So had I.”

  Julie was on her feet before he could scramble to his. She wanted to get away quickly. She laid her hand on his arm, a brief light touch. “Thank you very much, Morgan.”

  His quick smile turned on and held until she was gone. The dimples would stay in her mind forever.

  TEN

  WHY IN THE NAME of God would the man claim to be her father if he wasn’t? And a marriage of convenience between her mother and a young man without ties made sense of the annulment as nothing else had to date. How long did it take to get an annulment? Something Father Doyle at Saint Malachy’s could answer. But before there was an annulment, there had to have been a marriage, and before that, a marriage license. She could, in her mind’s eye, retrace her and Jeff’s trip downtown to the Marriage License Bureau. First, the blood tests three days in advance, the physician’s signature and then the long wait in line at the Bureau for the application form. On which she had written the name Thomas Francis Mooney as her father, and his birthplace, Ireland. It now gave
her the feeling of truth just to go over the scene in her mind. Very dangerous, the feeling of truth. It was a working rule of Jeff’s: that’s when you double-check your facts.

  IN THE MORNING she took the subway downtown to Worth Street and inquired what she had to do to see her parents’ marriage license. She was given a form on which to request a search and transcript of marriage. The clerk was annoyed that she had no date for the ceremony. Since Julie herself had been born in April, she said the marriage had occurred within a period eight to twelve months earlier.

  She wound up having to go directly to the County Clerk’s Office, and on her way she contrived a more aggressive stance: she offered her press card by way of identification, although no one asked for it, and stated as the purpose of the search her claim to an inheritance. Money, somehow, gave most things a quicker legitimacy.

  “No attorney?” the assistant wanted to know.

  “I thought I might pick up something for my column in the New York Daily if I came myself. What the City Keeps—you know, that sort of thing.”

  “They’re state records, ma’am,” the man said laconically. But he authorized the search. Before lunchtime Julie knew that her mother had married Thomas Francis Mooney a good ten months before she was born. So, she reasoned, the so-called marriage of convenience had occurred before she had been an inconvenience to any of them. It made a liar out of Morgan Reynolds. A lot of men denied paternities. He’d have done it, too, back then—in his legitimate life—no matter how chivalrous his pose today.