A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

  “Is that what this is?” I said, grabbing her hand and nearly knocking her over. “This is the dinner?”

  “Katharina? Are you quite all right? Of course this is the dinner. Didn’t Tom tell you?”

  “He just said a dinner, not the dinner.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t want to make you nervous.”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t know.”

  “Oh please, he knows. People like him are born knowing these things. I bet Tom’s first words were ‘Cocktails at five.’”

  She was probably right. I could imagine Amelia instructing the nannies not to teach him the word mama.

  “Anyway, isn’t this place just delightfully gaudy?” she said, grinning. “One inch away from bad taste, but a very important inch. The architect worked on the restoration of Versailles. Can’t you see it? The gilded sculptural decorations, the harmonious white and gold tones,” she said, nodding toward the far wall, “an homage to farming, science, the arts. And that rotunda when you came in? Those are thirty-two-and-a-half-foot-tall ceilings. There are also eight bedchambers—not bedrooms, mind you—a private garage for four cars, a roof garden, and a studiolo. Note the ‘olo,’ very important.”

  “What did you do, pay off the architect for a blueprint?” I asked, sipping the rose water Mrs. Morgan had handed to me. I put it down when I realized it was mostly flowers and gin.

  “And why not?” she said, winking. “I like to be educated.”

  “What I can’t understand, though,” I said, “is why they invited us.”

  “Easy,” she replied, her voice finally lowered. “They’re going to donate to the hospital. They wouldn’t invite Tom if it wasn’t the case.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “Of course. Everyone knows Tom is the hospital’s equivalent of the Salvation Army volunteer at Christmas. We might as well get him a bell and a red bucket.”

  “Is that a compliment or quite the opposite?”

  “A compliment, of course! I mean, Rina, it’s a miracle. That man of yours is a miracle. His father is an absolute dog—entertaining, but you’d think God had granted him double the genitals for the amount of philandering he does. And here comes Tom, the patron saint of sick children, with barely enough time to keep one woman happy.”

  She raised her eyebrows at me, and I raised mine right back.

  “I don’t see Maximillian,” I said quietly, taking in the room again.

  “Oh, no, dear, don’t be silly. The Millses only join during the last five minutes of cocktails, then they walk guests over to dinner.”

  “Have you been to the dinner before?”

  “Once, dear. They’re strange, but not stupid. They know that old money makes new money look greener. But the ghastly Jezebel was in attendance, Jezebel One that is, not Jezebel Two, and I got too drunk to remember what the house looked like. Don’t let me do that this time. And speaking of strange, there they are.”

  We looked at the door as Maximillian and Martina “Minkie” Mills entered wearing rather casual day clothes. They looked like they were going to a garden luncheon, not hosting the dinner.

  Maximillian, a distinguished fifty, tall as all Midwesterners seemed to be, with graying brown hair and expressionless blue eyes, was wearing a boxy brown suit, winged-tip two-tone shoes, and had on a rather loud floral tie of pinks, greens, and oranges. I looked again and noticed that it matched Minkie’s floral dress perfectly. Minkie, unlike her husband, was smiling. She walked her petite frame and unfashionably long blonde hair into the room and straight to Jim Mellon and Tom.

  “Good lord, who made their outfits? Judith Garden?” Mrs. Morgan whispered through her grin. “But straight to Jim and Tom. At least she understands the old money hierarchy. You can’t go to a female Morgan before a male Mellon.”

  “Which means she’s coming here next?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s my cue to leave you,” I said, winking at her and going to converse with a plant. Luckily, I was intercepted minutes later by Tom, who walked with me as the group went to the dining room.

  While anyone else hosting a dinner known as the dinner might have had cherry blossoms from Japan flown in to decorate the table or Hawaiian orchids shaped by expert hands on the big island, the Millses had one very long rustic table with nothing but place settings and daffodils on it. Tom was seated on my right, and Lavinia Reede, whom I realized I had met a few years back, was on my left.

  “Rina, it’s Vivi Reede, aren’t you looking well,” she purred as we took our seats.

  “And you look beautiful, as you did when we met. It was at the medical gala, wasn’t it? Two years ago?”

  “Indeed,” she answered. She must have been forty by now, but she looked not an hour over thirty.

  “I never see you around town. You never did join the Colony Club, did you? I remember us discussing it.”

  “Not yet,” I said, smiling. “The club I’m currently a part of has much younger attendees. As in babies. It doesn’t even require one to wear pants. It’s not very chic.”

  “You should consider Colony. I do enjoy your company. That depressed woman’s humor of yours is very droll,” she said, waving her free hand in my direction as the other clutched her cocktail.

  “I think I will when the boys are older,” I lied.

  “So no club, what do you get up to then? Are you just glued to the Army-McCarthy hearings like I am?”

  “I’ve tuned in here and there,” I replied, my heart starting to beat faster. I had been watching every night when the boys fell asleep, not sure how I felt about my own small role in what the liberal papers were calling McCarthy’s Salem witch trials.

  “Well, what do you make of it? You worked with Soviets at the United Nations, didn’t you? And Red China?”

  “I worked with people from all over,” I said, desperate to steer the conversation to Norway or Iceland—somewhere cold and uncontentious.

  Lavinia’s husband, seated on the other side of her, joined the conversation. “I always liked McCarthy, but now I’m not so sure. I think he’s making too much of a fuss. Communism. Very bad, of course. The devil’s work. But the army run amuck with communists? He should really start with the universities. Columbia, or so I hear from our Charles, is just a mess. He’s a sophomore there now. We said Princeton. Or even Brown. Bully for Brown. But no, he wanted to stay in the city. So Columbia it is. Very mixed school. Good families, but lots of rebels and bootstrappers, too. Not that there’s a thing wrong with bootstrapping,” he added quickly. “And how about you, do you think communism has infiltrated our lives? Are we being threatened?”

  “Excuse me?” I said, blinking in terror.

  “Communism. You know, the Reds. Do you think they’ve really painted the army crimson? Or at least magenta? That’s how McCarthy seems to see it. I always thought he had some sense in him, that he was a traditionalist like me, but I don’t like the way he’s been going after these lawyers like they just picked up a law degree at the local five-and-dime.”

  “That Fred Fisher he keeps trying to burn down went to Bowdoin College and Harvard Law,” said Lavinia, patting her husband’s hand. “Does that really scream communist to you?”

  “It does not. I don’t know,” I stumbled. “I’ve really only caught a bit of the hearings, what with the boys being so young; I don’t want to expose them to too much.”

  “Well,” said Lavinia, finishing her champagne, “it’s our civic duty to stay informed.”

  I was not going to let Vivi Reede write me off as a complete idiot. “In truth,” I said, finally finding my voice, “I’ve been more focused on the Geneva Conference. My family lives there, and what with my work at the UN…” And just like that, we’d moved on to Vietnam.

  As the dinner wrapped, I still hadn’t spoken to either Mills, and Tom had only spoken at length to Minkie, with just a one-word hello to her husband. Not surprisingly, he was again turning green. But when we went to yet another cavernous gilded room for dessert,
where there was a bluegrass band from Iowa plucking banjos in front of a priceless painting of Louis the Beloved, Minkie Mills walked straight across the room and took my arm. I was so nervous that I looked down to make sure it was still attached.

  “Mrs. Mills,” I said, finding my tongue. “It’s been such a lovely evening. I’m sorry that we’ve never met before this. I have great admiration for you and your family. Thank you for inviting Tom and me.”

  “Thank you, dear. I’m so glad you could come. Usually I dread these things a bit. We never intended to make them into such an event; it’s just that Maximillian is a bit of a loner, so we settled on having just one dinner a year, that way he could look at it like a holiday. Like Christmas, but without Jesus. I mean, he’s here, don’t get me wrong.” She stopped and looked at me. “Apologies, dear, I do tend to babble.”

  “You’re not babbling,” I said. “I like that approach to the dinner. Like a holiday.”

  “Thank you, dear,” she said, genuinely flattered. “It was I who made the guest list this year,” she added cheerfully, “that’s why this is the best one yet.”

  “Good guests,” I said honestly. “Mrs. Morgan is one of my favorite people in New York.”

  “Mine, too,” she said, grabbing a breadstick from the cheese tray and waving it around, “though I did just find her sitting by the edge of our swimming pool with her feet in the water.”

  “But that’s precisely why she’s one of my favorite people in New York,” I said, smiling.

  She laughed and ate half the breadstick. “I let her stay, don’t worry. Oh, and dear,” she said, smiling at me. “Maximillian is going to give two or three million to the hospital, so tell Tom to stop sweating.”

  She didn’t give me a chance to thank her, and I didn’t tell Tom to stop sweating. I was rather enjoying watching him, one of the most suave men in New York, become a nervous wreck among society. But when I told him in the cab home, he rolled down the window, stuck his head out, and actually screamed with glee, like a very vocal cat.

  When we got to our building, Sam brought me a bouquet of magenta roses. “Mrs. Edgeworth, from your hairdresser,” he said. “I didn’t bring them up, as I didn’t want to interrupt your family. Shall I bring them up now?”

  “They look really nice down here, Sam,” I said as Tom practically skipped to the elevator. “Why don’t you keep them? I’ll just take the card.”

  I looked at the card before joining Tom. The card was indeed from Jean-Pierre. I turned it over. On the back it said “TW telephone 2.”

  “She got the envelope,” Turner said as I stood in a glass telephone booth picking at a thread in my old blue jeans at precisely two in the morning.

  “You’re quite sure?”

  “I’m positive. And Rina?”

  “Yes?”

  “I hope you enjoyed your night out. You looked beautiful.”

  I hung up the phone, grinning. Suddenly, that unforgiving torture chamber of a dress was my very favorite.

  CHAPTER 24

  I woke up just three hours after I’d spoken with Turner, went to the hallway, and sat by the window. I wanted to replay the telephone call. The sound of Turner’s voice as he told me I looked beautiful. I wanted to sew the memory into my mind, so that it would always be there to return to. I let my forehead rest against the glass and looked down at the sidewalk on the other side of Fifth, tracing it with my finger, right to left, left to right, until I heard Tom’s voice bellow from the bedroom. “The baby’s awake!” he called out. I stood and rushed down the hall. But it was okay. The stitches of my memory were already in place.

  I fell back asleep with Peter, and when we woke up Tom was gone. With the baby on my hip, we looked in on Gerrit, who was still dreaming, and started making breakfast. An hour later, I was eating with the boys when the telephone rang. Sam had a note for me. I opened the card that he brought up on a silver tray. Not surprisingly, Ava Newman was requesting my company.

  I put the boys in front of the television and telephoned Turner.

  “Good morning,” he said. And something about the way he said it made me feel like we’d spent the night much closer to each other than we really had.

  “Good morning,” I said, smiling wider than I did most mornings. I told him about Ava’s note.

  “I’ll go, of course, yes?”

  “Of course,” he repeated.

  “Do I mention the envelope?”

  “I think you have to.”

  “So then I just tell her the truth. Max asked me to give it to her.”

  “In this line of work, the truth is rarely recommended, but here, I think it’s your best option. Try to get her talking, like you’re a concerned friend. Why is Max so worried about her? Why does he not want her to leave the country? And then maybe she’ll tell you more about what she’s been doing in Washington.”

  “So that I can replace her?”

  “Ideally. Sounds like her choices are Cuba or Russia. Either way, that leaves one seat on the D.C.-bound train open for you.”

  I looked at the boys. There was more food around Peter’s chair than there was on his plate. Gerrit had jumped down from his seat and was eating it happily. How a woman like me was going to get to Washington, I had no idea, but first, I had to worry about getting downtown.

  At noon, with the overpaid and extremely patient Sarah Beach at the house, I walked to the mailbox to drop off my note to Minkie Mills. As Sarah had kept Gerrit from Scotch-taping himself to my calf, I had scribbled out:

  Dear Minkie,

  With hosts as gracious as you and Maximillian, your dinner was in fact a holiday. Thank you for such a memorable evening. I enjoyed it tremendously, as did Tom. (As did Mrs. Morgan and her feet, but that goes without saying.)

  —Katharina Edgeworth

  I made sure my letter was safely off, then took the subway to Fifty-third Street, practically spinning in circles to see if I was being followed by the FBI, the KGB, or both. I didn’t see anyone, but just in case, I went north on foot when I should have been heading west, and then finally turned the right way when I was certain I was alone.

  Ava was standing out front of the Rivoli Theatre in a yellow dress. It was casual, but it still felt as bright and promising as a sunrise.

  “Rina,” she said affectionately. She put her hand softly on my shoulder. “Thanks for coming. I had such a nice time with you after the meeting, I thought we could do it again, but before midnight.”

  “I’m so glad you sent a note. It’s hard to get away, what with the boys,” I said, smiling. “My husband doesn’t like me to leave them too much. But sometimes I manage.”

  “I’m glad you managed today.”

  “I reminded him that I hadn’t been to the cinema in nearly three years,” I said, looking at the marquee.

  The first part was a lie; the second part was true. I had not been to the cinema since before Gerrit was born.

  “No cinema in three years? But they have the best air-conditioning! For that alone you have to get your husband to let you out more.”

  Were communists allowed to care so much about air-conditioning? I didn’t ask.

  At the ticket counter, I reached into my purse and insisted I pay the dollar forty for our admission fee.

  “Thank you,” she said as we waited for the cashier to make change. She opened her purse to show off a silver flask. “Ever see a movie drunk?”

  “Not in a long while,” I said, unable to suppress a grin.

  “Ever steal anything on your way in?” she said as the man ahead of us dropped his wallet on the ground. She rushed over, picked it up, and tapped him on the shoulder. He seemed exceedingly thankful, both that his wallet had been returned and that a woman with Ava Newman’s face was doing the honors.

  “You know,” she said as she joined me. “Not a car or anything. Something easy, like pickpocketing.”

  I pictured myself calling up Tom from prison. Oh, hello, dear, I’d say brightly. Just doing a short stint at Sing
Sing on some mucked-up charge. The police called it pickpocketing, I call it borrowing for an unspecified amount of time, like eternity. It would not go well.

  “I never have.”

  “Not even as a child?”

  “No. But my mother is the kind of woman who can melt your confidence in a glance. I wouldn’t have dared.” I paused. “Why do you ask? The wallet?”

  “The wallet,” she agreed, waiting a beat too long. “I think it’s a sign of a good … person,” she said, eyeing the crowd around us. The word communist was on her lips, I could tell. “You never wanted more than you had.”

  “I wasn’t exactly wanting.”

  “Still. My sisters and I weren’t wanting, but we stole all the time.”

  “Well, I have brothers. Their preferred crime was fistfights.”

  We entered the theater and headed upstairs. “Carnival Story. Sounds a bit ridiculous, but who cares? All I’ve watched lately are the Army-McCarthy hearings, and as theatrical as they are—may that man burn,” she whispered, “it does seem to raise my stress levels rather than lower them. Did you watch yesterday?”

  “I tuned in,” I said, which wasn’t a lie. Ever since the dinner, I was determined to watch at least a few minutes every evening.

  “That pig McCarthy daring the Eisenhower administration to indict him for receiving secret information? He doesn’t know squat about secret information. He thinks the hotbed of communism is Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. An army base! It’s laughable. He’s laughable. And I would laugh, if he wasn’t just evil walking.”

  “He is that,” I said in agreement. I was no fan of communism, but I was also no fan of McCarthy. And neither, it seemed of late, were most Americans. If he had lost Vivi Reede and her husband, a couple who had written check after check for Eisenhower, then he was going to lose everybody.

  “Jacob says I need to learn to relax, but I told him I’m not wired that way. I feed on…”

  I could tell Ava was about to say danger. Even in the dimly lit theater I could see the D dangling on her lips.