A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

  “They’re not sad,” I said, hugging her. “Considering my advanced age and all.”

  “It is a bit of a miracle,” said Caroline, who was only twenty-four. “But with your beautiful face, it’s only a bit of a miracle.”

  “But what about all our fun?” Marianne asked me when our office had cleared out. “What about eating, drinking, loving, laughing, breathing, crying, and repeat?”

  “We can still have fun,” I said, taking my eyes off my ring to look at her. “We can still laugh, breath, cry, repeat. Also, why are we crying?”

  “Because we are only young once.”

  “Are we still young?”

  “Young enough,” she said, patting her cheeks.

  “Then let’s just keep on with this wild youth of ours. The city hasn’t shut its doors to us just because I have a diamond on my finger.”

  “We cannot keep on.” She dropped the files in her hand on her desk. “Our fun revolves around us working here and then going out, drinking too much and hinting at the possibility of sex with our tinkling laughs, shiny hair, and French verbs.”

  “What if I just hint at the sex and don’t actually follow through on it?”

  “You joke now. Trust me, it will be the working here part that will get tougher. Eventually, I’ll walk down the hall alone, ready to interpret for the Commission on Human Rights, for John Humphrey or René Cassin or Eleanor Roosevelt herself, and I’ll say, ‘There went another perfectly good mind.’”

  “Only perfectly good?”

  “I’d say ‘brilliant,’ but I’m mad at you, so I’ve downgraded you to good. And once you leave here, it will shrink anyway, so there.”

  I did not want my mind to shrink. I wanted to translate what would become the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. I wanted to travel to Paris in December of ’48 for the General Assembly meeting. But I also very much wanted to marry Tom Edgeworth.

  When I turned thirty, my parents had given up on me ever getting married. I told them I wanted to experience the world, not marriage. That maybe I’d just become a man’s mistress or second wife. That for now, I was wedded to my work. But then Tom Edgeworth and his long legs and good heart swung in. And suddenly, I wanted to be a wife. His wife. Not because he had platinum cuff links or didn’t mind eating blood sausage while sitting in a pool of his own sweat, but because I loved him and I felt deeply that he’d always let me be, in his words, “Rina with her little languages.”

  I hadn’t been wrong. What I had been wrong about was who I was allowed to speak them to, once I became a mother. No longer was I speaking French to Paul-Henri Spaak, president of the UN General Assembly, or even to my multilingual friends. Instead, I was speaking them to babies who could not answer back. My mind no longer fizzed with intellectual rigor; it bubbled with boredom in French, Italian, German, and English.

  I missed having my mind hurt from overuse by Friday evening. Tom had been quite wrong: nothing about my world had been little, especially not the languages.

  CHAPTER 12

  On the last Friday in April, just as New York comfortably settled into spring, Tom did the most un-Tom-like thing he’d ever done.

  After I had put the boys to bed, done the dishes, and scrubbed down the kitchen, he gestured for me to have a drink with him in the sitting room. I took off my gingham apron, smoothed my hair, and smiled at him like the loving wife I was.

  “I think you might need a break,” he said before I’d even sat down.

  “A break?” I said, too surprised to sit.

  He gestured to the chair. “You look just like you did when you found out you were pregnant again.”

  “I feel a bit like that,” I said. I sank down in the chair he’d pointed to. Tom handed me his Manhattan.

  “Have that. Or take a moment and make yourself one.”

  I paused. I knew Tom was tired from his day at the hospital, but I seemed to recall that he’d once been perfectly capable of making me a drink after a long day at work. Not suggest that I do it myself.

  “I’ll just have yours,” I said pleasantly.

  He gripped the arms of the Noguchi chair he was sitting in, as if he were steeling himself. “I know that before Gerrit was born we decided it would be best for you to spend as much time with the children as possible,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, remembering that conversation as well as my wedding vows. It was another kind of vow, one so many women around the world made when their stomachs started to swell.

  “Which is what nature intended,” Tom continued.

  “Yes,” I replied, the drink suddenly tasting sour. I wondered if nature also intended for mothers to suffer from nervous breakdowns or start brushing their teeth with gin to take the edge off.

  “I know some of your friends, like Carrie, have employed help,” he continued, still gripping the chair, as if to stop himself being ejected from it.

  “Carrie does have a nanny,” I said, desperate for the alcohol to start working its magic.

  “Right,” said Tom, frowning. Memories of his own dozen childhood nannies were flooding back like a phalanx of buttoned-up ghosts, I was sure. “As you know, I certainly don’t think that way of life is for us, but I have spoken to my mother, and to Jilly, and we’ve decided that you might benefit from a vacation.”

  “A vacation,” I repeated.

  “What’s that face?” said Tom, taking in my reaction.

  “I think I’m just in shock, is all.”

  “Well, that isn’t all, so pull yourself together, Mrs. Edgeworth.”

  He stood up, then helped me to my feet. I watched as he went to the sideboard and opened the top drawer. He took out some papers and came back.

  “I bought you a plane ticket to Los Angeles,” he said, placing it in my hand. “I thought you might go for a few days. Five, to be exact. Stay with my sister and Kip. She’s excited to see you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said looking up from the ticket. “My vacation is to stay with Arabella and Kip? In Los Angeles? For five days?”

  “That’s right,” said Tom, looking proud of himself.

  I thought by “vacation” he might have meant somewhere like Geneva, to see my family. Or Paris, where they might meet me. Was Los Angeles with his sister’s family a vacation? I glanced again at Tom, so pleased with his surprise, and told myself that perhaps it was. I had never been away from the children for five days. Fifteen months ago, pregnant with Peter, I had come down with such bad food poisoning they thought I would have to stay at Lenox Hill overnight. I was really looking forward to it. A night spent vomiting in a hospital sounded like a vacation, but in the end, it was decided that since Dr. Tom Edgeworth was my husband, I could recover at home. And that way I wouldn’t have to leave baby Gerrit. Wasn’t that terrific?

  But now I was headed to Los Angeles. Alone. For five days without my children.

  “That sounds wonderful,” I said genuinely.

  “Good. Life should be wonderful,” he said, smiling. I smiled back.

  He looked at my empty glass.

  “Go on,” he said. “Fix yourself another.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Ten thousand feet, the pilot had said when he came over the speaker. We had been soaring through clouds as we left the East Coast, but now that we were closer to the west, the weather had changed for the better. The Dutch really should have built New York in a place with more sunshine.

  I looked down at the mountains below, the tiny airplane window affording me a giant, scrolling panorama. A river the color of dark mustard cut through earth. There were patterns forged by human activity that nature could wipe away in seconds. I had forgotten how big the world was. Even America seemed dauntingly enormous. The closest thing I’d seen to this landscape in a long time had been the peaks and valleys in a bowl of meringue I was mixing.

  The man next to me was older, near my father’s age, but I couldn’t stop glancing at him. I never sat next to men anymore who weren’t my husband, or on increasingly rare occas
ions, my husband’s friends. Mine had become a world of women. Women’s bodies and women’s conversations. Except for that day in the park with Lee Coldwell. His phone number was in my dress pocket, just as it had been every day since I’d met him. I had no intention of calling it, but I liked to touch the piece of paper, to recall the interaction. I would probably keep transferring it from dress pocket to dress pocket until it was illegible, the paper worn too thin to read. It would eventually disintegrate, and the day where I was declared the perfect woman for the job would vanish with it.

  With my forehead against the window, I thought about the night before. I had been awake again, roaming our hallway, going to the window seat, looking out at that slice of the island directly in front of our building. I had forgotten about states like Colorado and Nevada. I had forgotten that the world extended past New York.

  I’d forgotten that freedom was the most glamorous thing anyone could possess.

  I’d spent summers in Switzerland as a child and then one summer in Florence while still in school, Mussolini’s Italy of 1936, simultaneously electrified by its charm and horrified by its descent into fascism. Then the war had closed us Americans inside our own country—except for the men who’d fought for us. Tom hadn’t been one of them. Money and medical school had kept him off the battlefield and on Park Avenue.

  I settled back in the wide airplane seat and briefly shut my eyes. I wondered what my boys were doing without me. Were they happy with Jilly? Were they crying? I fell asleep thinking about their faces, imagining them contorted with grief because I’d left them. I didn’t wake up until the plane started to descend through the clouds into Los Angeles.

  After we’d landed, I clacked down the metal stairs, bathed in the dry Californian heat. Inside the airport, I immediately heard someone call “Yoo-hoo!” an aristocratic yodel that without a doubt belonged to Arabella Edgeworth Rowe. Tall and athletic, Arabella was older than Tom by two years, but even in her mid-forties, she was the picture of health. She had ruddy cheeks; thick brown hair that just brushed her shoulders, styled, but not too styled; a perpetual tan that never turned to wrinkles; brownish eyes with a dash of green; and straight broad shoulders built up by all the swimming she’d done over the years. Her mother loved to tell stories about Arabella in her youth and how concerned the Edgeworths had been that she spent all her time in the swimming pool as a teenager instead of at parties meeting boys from good families.

  “I always said,” her mother would crow, “who will you meet in the swimming pool? A lobster? Do you really want to be Mrs. Arabella Lobster?”

  I always wanted to remind Amelia that the swimming pools in Manhattan, especially the private ones where Arabella was swimming, were crustacean-free, but Tom would shoot me a look when Amelia reached that part of the story.

  Amelia’s worries changed when Arabella turned seventeen and had never dated or shown interest in boys. Amelia’s concern was no longer about lobsters, it was that her daughter was going to become Mrs. Arabella Lesbian.

  “She was so … sporty,” she’d whisper. “So uninterested in the things a girl her age should be interested in. Sports and jazz music and God knows what else, that’s all she liked. ‘Is she taking drugs?’ I asked myself. I thought no, because of all that swimming. Can one even swim while high on cocaine? Or is that why she’s so good?”

  That was usually where Tom would pause the story and say, “Arabella was ingesting neither cocaine nor a woman’s labia,” and his mother would let out a scream. Then he’d pipe up about how all the medical research had shown that one could not catch homosexuality in a swimming pool.

  His mother would wave him off, muttering, “Such a crude son, spouting nonsense,” and keep on all the heart palpitations her daughter’s athletic abilities had caused her.

  Arabella went to Stanford for college, spurning her mother’s alma mater, Bryn Mawr, with a cool, “It’s not for me, mother,” and William Edgeworth paid the bill because they were actually quite thrilled she was going to college and not indulging in other illicit activities too awful to name.

  At Stanford, Arabella remained a fish, but it turned out there were men who liked that about her, even men from the right families. She met her husband, Kip Rowe, in the swimming pool. He was on Stanford’s men’s team and nearly made the Olympic roster for the Berlin Games. At their wedding in Santa Monica, they served lobster as the main course.

  “In the end, it was for the best that he missed those Olympics,” Arabella always said about her husband’s near star status. “Hitler and all. Really put a damper on sport.”

  “Yes,” I’d said many times, nodding agreeably. “Nazis and swimming just don’t mix.”

  “Quite right,” she’d say, either not noticing my sarcasm or choosing to ignore it.

  As the people around me pulled at their suitcases and peeled off their sweaters, I gave Arabella a long hug. She was wearing wide-legged white pants and a light blue blouse tucked into the high waist, a perfect style for her tall frame.

  “Look at you without a child hanging on you like a howler monkey,” she said, pushing my shoulders back and examining me in my gray traveling suit and sensible black shoes.

  “Indeed,” I said, smiling. Arabella and Kip had four children, all swimmers, their daughter Bettina the strongest of them. Even if it had been a few years, Arabella knew something about how easily small children could morph into howler monkeys. Bettina, I remembered her saying, had been an especially difficult baby. But now she was the pride of the family.

  “If she doesn’t make it to the Olympics and experience the glory her father missed, I’ll stab her,” Arabella had lamented to me once over bottles of champagne in New York. Three very expensive ones, if I remembered correctly.

  “But I thought it was for the best? Kip missing out on the Olympics. Hitler and all that,” I’d said.

  “Of course, it was for the best, but he’s still shaken up about it. He cried once when we went to watch Bettina in the high school national championship down in Florida. Tears on his face. And in public,” she’d whispered. “So, like I said, I’ll stab my daughter if she’s not draped in the American flag in Melbourne in 1956.”

  After that conversation, I’d written to Bettina, encouraging her to double down on her swim practices. I was very fond of the girl and didn’t want to see her cut apart with gardening shears or whatever else Arabella could find.

  “Shall we drive off then?” asked Arabella when I had collected my suitcase. We both knew she was far more capable of carrying it than I was.

  “I have to take care of women’s things first, I’m afraid,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. Arabella was not one for beating around the bush or being embarrassed about bodily functions.

  “Oh, lord, are you still doing that?” she said, looking down at my breasts, which after a six-hour plane ride were enormous.

  “For now,” I said. “Tom thought it best that I keep up with it while in California. I went eighteen months with Gerrit. And it’s only been twelve with Peter.”

  “I went about twelve minutes with Bettina and look at how well she’s turned out.” She pulled my suitcase toward her. “Go on then. I’ll wait. How long does it take with that travel contraption?”

  “Thirty minutes or so. Forty if I really want to do a thorough job.”

  “Please don’t bother,” she said, and I headed to the bathroom to fight with the glass and latex breast pump that Tom had shown me how to use before I’d left.

  “I feel like a cow. And not a prize one,” I’d said miserably as he’d pushed it on my left breast, prodding and poking at me.

  “Yes, but all the studies show that—”

  “I know about the studies,” I’d said, trying not to let my emotion escalate. Ever since I had abandoned the injured Gerrit, I’d tried to be the epitome of maternal diligence and patience.

  The contraption took me forty-five minutes to use in the airport restroom, and when I found Arabella half asleep on a plastic chair,
she looked at my chest again and said, “Well, that’s surprising. I thought after all that time you wouldn’t even have breasts left.”

  We began walking to her car, picking up a porter along the way to carry my suitcase. When she handed it to him, she shook out her arm. “Rina, we have cement in California. You did not have to import your own.”

  “It’s just clothes and gifts and odds and ends,” I said, embarrassed. “I haven’t had many occasions to wear nice things these past couple years. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “There is actually quite the soiree tonight,” she said, jumping behind the wheel of her silver Jaguar. “Some Hollywood people. A friend of ours in the industry invited us. I’m in no mood for that kind of thing, but Kip will take you. He pretends not to care about celebrities, but he’s dying to get a look at Ingrid Bergman, who’s rumored to be attending.”

  “Is she?” I said excitedly. “I’d love to go.” I smiled as the airport disappeared behind us. The only hint of glamour I’d experienced these past few years was at medical galas and staid cocktail parties with the right people.

  Arabella and Kip’s Spanish-style house in Venice Beach had a sweeping view of the water and was just a few feet from the boardwalk.

  “I’ve been told that we should live somewhere more fashionable, the Hollywood Hills or Beverly Hills, but you know me, Mrs. Lobster, I just have to be near the water. And Mr. Lobster quite likes it, too. So much life in this part of town.”

  “Did someone say my name?” A smiling Kip greeted us from the doorway.

  “Rina, you’re here and looking so well,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. He had to lean over to do so. Everyone in the Edgeworth universe was exceedingly tall except for me. “I’m so glad you could come for a visit,” he said warmly, ushering me inside. I followed, his sun-bleached hair and tan legs leading the way. Kip Rowe always looked as if he had just returned from a vacation.

  “How was your swim, darling?” Arabella asked, catching up to him.