The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  That was the moment, way past the moment, when I could have refused to work on the book. Without incriminating anyone, without disclosing a family secret, I should have explained that The Vixen wasn’t my kind of novel. With all due respect, I hadn’t gone into publishing to work on commercial fiction based on recent events. There was no need to say—in fact it was as if I’d forgotten—that I’d gone into publishing because it was the only job I could get. Nor was there any reason to add that I felt the novel was beneath me, that it horrified me to imagine how my parents and Uncle Maddie would react if they knew what I was doing.

  I said nothing. I didn’t protest. In those days, declining to work on a book about the Rosenbergs’ guilt might have seemed suspicious, not that I imagined Warren reporting me to the authorities. I should have had the courage of my convictions and said no because it was wrong to devote myself to refining this grotesque insult to the Rosenbergs’ memory.

  Saying that might have gotten me fired. But that wasn’t my fear. Not entirely.

  I complied out of laziness, passivity, and because agreeing is always easier than refusing. I had complicated feelings about Warren. I was embarrassed by my abject desire to earn his respect. My longing to be admitted into the club of men like Warren Landry, to grow up to be a man like Warren, was in conflict with my uncertainty about who he was underneath that glossy hair, those magnificent suits, all that charm and charisma.

  “Too bad,” Warren said. “About the girls and the scotch. We’ll fix the girlfriend-and-scotch problem. I mean, the lack of girlfriend and the no-scotch problem. Meanwhile, not a soul. Can you swear to that? Scout’s honor?”

  I hadn’t been allowed to join the Boy Scouts. Too military, too fascist. My parents didn’t want me wearing a uniform of any kind. The Boy Scouts weren’t Hitler Youth, but my parents were unrelenting.

  My father had been in the navy, at Okinawa. I found an old photo album with a faded shot of Dad standing with a group of men, looking down at a tangle of corpses in Japanese uniforms. No matter how I begged, how often I asked, he would never talk about the war. I’d stopped asking. It was his past, his history. He could keep it to himself. Did he and Mom ever talk about it? I assumed they did.

  I held up my hand. “Scout’s honor.”

  “So I’ll wait to hear from you about this,” Warren said. “Great chatting with you.”

  “Me too,” I said, nonsensically. Me too? I was waiting to hear from me too? It was great for me chatting with me too? After Warren’s footsteps faded down the hall, I went to the men’s room and looked in the mirror to see what someone this awkward—this embarrassing—looked like.

  Chapter 2

  I brought the manuscript home and hid it under my bed, though my parents never entered my room without knocking, not even when my mother—lately, my father—needed to vacuum. I had no reason to put off reading the book until they were asleep, but it seemed right. I felt like a kid smuggling porn into the family sanctum.

  Esther Rosenstein appeared on the first page.

  The prosecutor sensed her presence from all the way down the corridor, overpowering the usual prison smells—disinfectant, sweat—with the crazed perfume of estrous animal passion.

  Estrous animal passion? I read on:

  Most of the prisoners hid in their cells, curled up in their bunks, but Esther wound her arms around the bars like the serpent in the Garden of Eden and positioned her body in a way that best displayed her ample, shapely breasts. Let the lawyer come to her. She had plenty to tell him. How the Communists were right, how Russia had a better system than our sham democracy.

  It got worse in places, presumably the places that Warren wanted me to improve. Esther was a “raven-haired beauty” with “Elizabeth Taylor–violet eyes.”

  You will see to it that our names are kept bright and unsullied by lies.

  I dropped the manuscript on the floor and fell back against the pillows.

  After a while, I drifted into the living room to compare what I’d read to my mother’s bookshelf shrine to Ethel. A half dozen photos floated in store-bought frames. If a stranger walked in, we would have hidden them, but no strangers ever walked in.

  Here was Ethel and Julius’s last kiss. Ethel’s back was twisted away, her face hidden, her lips smashed against her husband’s. Her arm was bare, one hand clutching her white purse. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, Julius’s eyes were shut. How did he embrace his wife wearing handcuffs? Did she slip inside the loop of his arms? They kissed as if they were alone in the world, as if no flashbulbs were popping, as if no one were shouting their names, as if they would never kiss again.

  When my mother put up this photo, Dad said, “In front of the reporters! The warden and the guard went nuts. They stuck a table between them. A table! After that, new rules. No physical contact without a fence.”

  “How do you know that?” said Mom.

  “The store’s five minutes from the courts,” said Dad. “Lawyers and cops come in.”

  The next photo showed the Rosenbergs separated by a fence, slumped inside a police van. The time for kisses was over. They didn’t look at each other. The seasons had changed. Someone had brought Ethel a pretty velvet coat with a fur collar.

  Beside this was her mug shot. At thirty-four, she looked like a perky teen dressed for a date. She wore a shiny white shirtwaist dress with cap sleeves and a pleated skirt, white sandals, white gloves with ruffled cuffs. Bright lipstick defined her Betty Boop lips. She had an Old World Jewish body: squat, no waist, wide hips. A studio portrait, except for the harsh light and the letter board: FBI-NYC. On the measuring stick, she reached five one. She’d been told not to move. Look into the camera, don’t blink, don’t flinch. Whatever you do, don’t smile.

  In front of this photo were three more intimate ones. Two of Ethel at the beach, in an unflattering bathing suit. Rings of makeup made her eyes look sunken and feral. In one she was very young, beaming beside young Julius in snazzy black trunks. In the other she cradled a child in her lap.

  It wasn’t like looking at a photo of a woman in a bathing suit. Ethel wasn’t pretty or sexy. She was Ethel, and she was dead.

  In the last photo, cut from my mother’s high school graduation yearbook, the same yearbook in which the photo on Mom’s onyx ring appeared, Ethel held a modest bouquet: six roses. Beaming into the future. Always a smile for the neighbors, the little mouth with that big voice belting out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Didn’t that prove she loved her country?

  I couldn’t tell Warren Landry that the vixen once lived upstairs from my mother, nor could I tell my mother about the book. It would be easy—necessary—to keep The Vixen a secret, though I would have to lie to the people I loved and respected most.

  * * *

  This was the height of the Cold War, the Red Scare. The world awaited the outbreak of nuclear conflict between the US and Russia. People behaved as if a real war were being fought around us, as if missiles were aimed at our living rooms. Sooner or later, the bomb would fall. Soviet agents were everywhere, masquerading as ordinary Americans until they were exposed, jailed or deported. The secret war played out in the beauty salon, the schoolroom, the church social, and the garage. Anyone could be accused. Anyone’s life could be destroyed. Everyone was paranoid. Everyone was afraid.

  Some of Ethel’s relatives didn’t attend her funeral. A few changed their names. The papers reported on the tragic struggle over who would adopt their two sons. Some relatives feared the consequences. Guilt by association was guilt.

  Meanwhile, my own private war had broken out between my conscience and my ambition, my passivity and my wanting to do the right thing. I was being asked to edit a book of lies about a woman who could no longer defend herself, if she ever could. My family would have been horrified.

  I wanted to keep my job. I wanted to be the hero who saved Landry, Landry and Bartlett from bankruptcy. I wanted to be promoted. I didn’t want to take a stand. Most of all, I didn’t want to be forced to make a deci
sion.

  Maybe I was panicking needlessly. Maybe The Vixen got better as it went along. Plenty of authors start out too strong, thinking the reader has to be grabbed and shaken into paying attention. Surely I could persuade the writer to tone down the beginning.

  Lying in bed, in my parents’ house, I planned my first conversation with Anya Partridge. Working it out had a lulling effect, but for the first time since college, I couldn’t sleep. Neither fully awake nor tired, I read on:

  As he strode into the courtroom for the arraignment, Jake Crain felt every eye on him. It wasn’t just his chiseled features, his thick dark hair, the cut of his costly suit. People were angling to see what a legal genius looked like.

  Crain was the state’s star prosecutor. He had convicted the killer of the three schoolteachers, a millionaire embezzler, a copycat kidnapper who tried to re-create the Lindbergh baby case. He got them the maximum sentences. He was fearless and focused on making sure that these villains no longer endangered innocent American lives. But could he do his job when he so wanted to save—to take in his arms—the irresistible woman on trial?

  Well, that wasn’t quite so bad. Perhaps our hero, Jake, could be turned into a more compassionate soul, less volatile, less inclined to torment the Rosenbergs/Rosensteins and less stirred by an unhealthy attraction to Ethel/Esther.

  This trial would be his greatest challenge. Esther Rosenstein had been charged with treason and conspiracy. It was a capital case. Crain could not allow the jury to be moved by this beautiful Mata Hari’s two little sons, children she’d neglected as she seduced patriotic American males into helping her and her husband destroy our democratic system. President Eisenhower called Esther the unrepentant one. He’d said that she was stronger than the husband.

  A fellow lawyer had warned Crain not to look directly at Esther. She was Circe: one look and he’d turn to stone—or, more likely, jelly. Men were powerless against her.

  Circe? The writer must have meant Medusa. I’d make a note to correct that. I would tell Anya about the witches in folktales who could turn you to stone.

  In my fantasy Anya was suitably impressed.

  Crain ignored his colleague. That first time he’d seen Esther, in her cell, pressed against the bars, their eyes had locked, and they’d known that they were equally matched. Was that lawyer-speak for overwhelming passion? Jake would have to wait, be vigilant, stay professional, and find out.

  I’d cut the word overwhelming. I sighed and turned the page.

  Now he saw Esther, across the courtroom, behind the table at which she sat beside her lawyer, Joseph Frank.

  Frank was a pissant that, with one flick of his fingers, Jake could spin out of the courthouse. Esther was the force he would need to contend with as he struggled to defend our way of life.

  Esther stared at Jake with her lidded, smoky eyes. His eyes devoured her glossy hair, her white neck, the fur-collared velvet coat that strained to contain her breasts. He tried not to look at her like a man, but like a lawyer trying to understand why such a handsome specimen would commit capital treason.

  I’d change his eyes devoured to he saw. I opened the manuscript at random and read an extremely peculiar scene in which Esther mumbles prayers before an altar, hidden in a kitchen cupboard, in which she keeps the pelt of a dead fox.

  It was Esther’s spirit creature, the magic object she consulted in uncertain times.

  Enough. I let the manuscript drop. I fell asleep and dreamed yet another transparent dream: Our house was on fire. I was across town and couldn’t find my way home. Someone was inside the house, but I didn’t know who. Then my parents and I were inside the burning house, even as I watched the fire from a distance. Waking, I smelled smoke, but it was part of the dream, and I went back to sleep.

  * * *

  The next morning I woke up and knew I had to move out of my parents’ apartment. I had to escape my mother’s photos of Ethel. I couldn’t work on The Vixen there. I couldn’t think about the novel without picturing Ethel’s sweet graduation portrait—and the photo of my mother on the flip side of her onyx ring. Everything seemed like a sign: Time to go.

  I asked around at the office. The elevator operator knew someone whose cousin was renting out a studio apartment on East 29th Street and First Avenue, across from Bellevue Hospital. Across from the morgue. On the phone the cousin told me why I didn’t want to live there. The apartment was old, noisy, dark. The neighborhood was hell. He didn’t want to waste our time, taking me to see it. When I heard how much he was asking, I told him it sounded perfect.

  All night I heard howling ambulances, even though my bedroom was at the back of the building, facing a brick wall. On the street there were screaming, sobbing people who’d come to the morgue to identify the bodies of loved ones. Despite the obvious drawbacks, I liked it there. I could afford it on my salary with minimal help from my parents. It was mine. It was home.

  My parents were sad when I moved out, or so they said. They’d gotten used to my absence before. It was time for me to leave the nest, or so they told themselves. Now that I have grown children, I understand that such feelings can be mixed.

  I loved them, but I needed to go. I had my own life in the city.

  My apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up. I could hear the cockroaches scatter when I turned the key in the lock. My parents bought me a mattress, and I purchased some kitchen things from the Goodwill, enough to make coffee and toast. Back then you could still salvage decent furniture left on the sidewalk for the garbage trucks. The apartment was my refuge, my sanctuary. It was where I could hibernate and pore over Anya Partridge’s novel and try to decide what to do.

  After what seemed like a decent interval, I told Warren that I would work on the book. He seemed to think I’d already agreed, which, I supposed, I had.

  I said that I would have more specific comments to make to him and the writer after I’d read it again. Meanwhile I persuaded myself that I could make it less awful. I could improve it. Another editor—one whose mother hadn’t known Ethel—wouldn’t have cared enough to bother.

  Warren had told me we could alter the characters’ names. If the writer agreed. I told myself that would help. I rehearsed how I would overcome Anya’s hesitations and persuade her to make the changes I wanted.

  Meanwhile I kept track of the slush pile. Every so often I’d find a book that was not all that much worse than The Vixen. Why was Anya Partridge’s novel better than the books I rejected? I knew why: unlike I, Barbarian and The Igloo Lover, The Vixen was expected to make money. Warren had ticked off the reasons: it was timely, it was provocative, it was a page-turner, and it had just enough sex so that readers could be titillated without worrying that they might be reading—or, worse, caught reading—a dirty book.

  Chapter 3

  In the midst of my moral crisis, my uncle Madison Putnam called and invited me to lunch at his favorite French restaurant, Le Vieux Moulin, on East 53rd Street.

  Like many people, I was afraid of Uncle Maddie. He could be snobbish, mean, and dismissive. My mother said he was that kind of guy: you felt as if he were poking you in the ribs, even when he was nowhere near you. My father—his brother—steered clear of Maddie at family celebrations. But it was hard to avoid him because from the minute he showed up, he’d start trailing us around, asking how long we thought the “festivities” would last and how soon he and Aunt Cheryl could get the hell out without hurting everyone’s feelings and making the family hate him more than they already did. I didn’t think our family hated him. I thought they wanted him to like them.

  Even though I was scared of him, I was always disappointed and vaguely insulted when he left our family parties early. I wanted him there as a buffer between me and my father’s boisterous relatives, the great-aunts who pinched my cheek till it hurt, the great-uncles who slipped back into Yiddish when they drank, the second cousins in their blue suits, the wives with scarlet nails, turquoise eyelids, tangerine hair, a flock of exotic parrots stuffed into sparkly
dresses. I wanted to follow my uncle out of those wedding venues and banquet halls, not so much my actual uncle as what he represented, who he was. I wanted to accompany him back to the world he was rushing off to rejoin. It didn’t occur to me that I was already in the process of leaving those jolly family parties, nor did I realize that once I left, I could never get back in. My relatives saw me differently. They seemed different when I saw them.

  I had a lot to thank my uncle for. I believed he was on my side. He’d gotten me my job at Landry, Landry and Bartlett. His dazzling career as a critic and public intellectual had shown my parents that one could be rich, successful, and widely respected without becoming a doctor or lawyer.

  Aunt Cheryl came from money. Years ago, they’d had a formal wedding at her parents’ Sutton Place townhouse. Even so, we wondered: How did Uncle Maddie manage to live as lavishly as his wealthy friends and the famous writers he published? How did he afford his palatial Upper West Side apartment on his salary as the editor of a monthly journal, even with his lecture fees and the help of the magazine’s donors? How did he summer in the Hamptons, support a succession of girlfriends, and pay for the costly home for the disabled, in Western Massachusetts, where my cousin Frank had lived since early childhood? The family never mentioned Frank, and I’d never met him.

  I hadn’t seen my uncle for more than a year before I went to work for Warren. Whatever Uncle Maddie did to get me my job hadn’t required my input. There hadn’t been an interview, or even an application. When I’d called to thank Uncle Maddie, our conversation was brief and polite.