A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

  “Katharina, it’s you,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry to have woken you,” I said as he took my hand and helped me to my feet. “I should have left when I saw you sleeping, but the door was open, so I thought you were expecting me.”

  “I’m always expecting you,” he said. “Now that I’ve met you again, I keep looking for you on the street, when I come out of restaurants, but I hadn’t seen you again, so I thought I’d send you, Katharina West Edgeworth, a message. Bit long, your name, isn’t it?”

  “This from a Ukrainian,” I said, releasing his hand. “Your middle name is Vladislav.”

  He started to laugh. “How do you remember that?”

  “I remember everything from the Columbia days,” I said, my smile inching higher. I pointed to the half dozen books on his shelf. Three of them were in German. “The days of you translating Goethe, Bertolt Brecht.” I grinned, seeing his worn copy of Die Dreigroschenoper.

  He reached for my hand again. I thought he was going to pat it in his affectionate way, but he held on to it. I didn’t pull it away.

  “Anyway, I don’t think fate is kind enough to keep bringing people together, so I’m glad you sent a message.”

  Despite his warm touch, Jacob seemed a very different man from the one he’d been three weeks ago. He was much thinner, his shoulder bones pressing against the fabric of his shirt. His face was white, and his eyes were rimmed with red. He looked sick, and not just with a common cold. Even his hand felt limper. Only his voice sounded the same.

  He let my hand go. “I’ve found that people are more fearful of open doors than closed ones,” he said.

  “In this town, that’s probably true.”

  “This town,” he repeated, clearing his throat. It sounded like there was a bear trapped in his lungs. “It attracts the best and the brightest and the worst of the worst. The criminals, the saints, the beauties, and the gargoyles. And they all deserve it. They all deserve a slice of New York, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” I said earnestly.

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to love New York so much,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Wall Street,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s no good.”

  “The street or the activities?”

  “All of it. They should just plow it down and make it a skating pond.”

  “Now, there’s an idea.”

  “But there is so much in New York that is good,” he said, his voice rising like a skyscraper. “There’s so much energy here, I never just feel like walking, I want to be running, bouncing. Everyone deserves to live a life that they love so much that they want to bounce through it.”

  Jacob may have looked like the blood was draining out of him, but his brain, his nature, never stopped leaping.

  “Which is why,” he said, pausing, “I am an equalist. No, let’s just say it as it is, shall we? I’m a communist.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I replied.

  “Turner Wells told you.”

  “He did.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  Jacob raised his eyebrows and sat down. As he did, he winced. “I’ve been sick,” he said, closing his eyes. “Which I’m sure is obvious. But I’m getting better now.”

  “I’m glad.”

  He looked at my face, put his hand on my cheek, let it slide slowly down my neck, my arm, then rested it on my knee.

  “Are you sure you’re married?”

  “Very married.”

  I thought of Carrie’s threat. Very married for now, anyway.

  “Is that any fun, very married?” he asked. It seemed an honest question.

  “It has its merits.”

  He laughed, which turned into a wheeze. “Timing is a strange thing, isn’t it, Katharina? Beautiful Katharina.”

  “That is most certainly true. About timing. The rest of it, I don’t know.”

  “I’m not lying about the beautiful part, Katharina. I never lie,” he said, moving closer to me.

  “That is certainly not true.”

  “Okay. It’s not. But I only lie for a good cause.”

  He put his head back on the couch, as if it had just gotten too heavy to keep upright. “I should have told you when we were at Columbia. Maybe we could have gone through all this together.”

  “What is all this?”

  He sat up again and smiled. “It’s a lonely life sometimes, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not the word I’d use to describe my days. Lonely sounds appealing.”

  “Maybe it would all have been simpler if you had married me.” He put his hand back on my knee.

  “Maybe,” I said, smiling, thinking that though nothing about Jacob was ever simple, perhaps marriage would have been. “But instead you’re married to … the KGB?”

  “Maybe,” he said, laughing heartily. I’d forgotten how few things in the world felt as good as a full, true laugh produced by Jacob Gornev. “Turner said you’re as good as they come. I told him I knew that already. But you, with him, I have to say that came as a surprise,” Jacob remarked.

  “My love life,” I said frankly, “has been a surprise.”

  “A letdown?” he suggested.

  “No. A surprise.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “Even though it might not look that way, given all of Tom’s money, I did marry for love.”

  “And is it enough?”

  I shook my head no. “It was. Things have changed. Now it might not be.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “We had children. I became Katharina Edgeworth, mother. All those little languages of mine reduced to a mere parlor trick. ‘Katharina can speak German! Katharina can speak French! Go ahead, darling, speak to the ambassador’s wife.’”

  “Does he call them little languages?”

  “He does.”

  “Said like a true monolingual,” Jacob said, sinking farther into the couch.

  “He is that.”

  “But Turner Wells doesn’t think that way.”

  “No.”

  “Because Turner Wells has that quality.”

  “Which quality?”

  “Of seeing the light through the trees,” Jacob said, smiling.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “More than anyone else in America, the Negro will benefit from a classless, stateless society, one without color lines. Turner Wells sees that. Even if it takes time to get there, he knows it’s an outcome worth fighting for.”

  “I know. It’s why I was attracted to the party in the first place,” I offered.

  “No. You weren’t at first. You were attracted to Turner Wells.”

  I looked right at Jacob and waited for him to continue. He didn’t.

  “I suppose that I was.”

  “I suppose that you’re in love with him.”

  Married women like me were not allowed to fall in love with anyone else. We couldn’t even look at another man. Our sexuality was supposed to die as soon as we heard our child’s first cry. But that wasn’t what had happened to me. I thought of myself in the guest bedroom at night. I was not thinking about my children. I was not thinking about Tom. I was lying on my back imagining Turner Wells.

  “I could be,” I said evenly. I looked at the ground but didn’t let go of Jacob’s hand. “But as I said: Marriage is a surprise. So is Turner Wells. So are you.”

  I almost added Ava Newman to that list, but I realized that Jacob might not know that we’d spent time together.

  “Katharina,” Jacob said softly, but his words turned to coughing. He smiled at me, the mood breaking.

  “I don’t know about your husband. But I like Turner Wells,” he said once he’d regained his voice.

  I thought about Carrie, how she could right now be in the process of ripping apart my marriage with her well-timed observations. Did I care? I did. But not enough to stop what I was doing.

  Jacob leaned in
, his mouth close to mine, and smiled. He placed his finger on my lips and sat back.

  “Cards on the table, then. What did Turner Wells tell you about me?”

  “He said that you’re practically running the Communist Party in Manhattan. That there are people above you, but that on the ground, you do it all. And that everyone knows you and everyone likes you.”

  Jacob stood and went to close his front door.

  “And?” he said, coming back to the couch.

  “And that you have important ties to Moscow.”

  “What kind?”

  “He didn’t say.” I had to get Jacob to trust me, but I also needed him to keep trusting Turner Wells.

  “He didn’t?” Jacob looked at me with a hungry, passionate expression that even time and illness could not alter. “He didn’t tell you who I’m working with at the KGB?”

  “He did not.” Jacob started coughing, deeply. He cleared his throat and coughed again until he was blue in the face.

  “Does he know that Ava is going to Moscow?”

  “He mentioned that.”

  “Did he mention why?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to know why?” he asked between coughs.

  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  “I know you like her,” he said. “I know you’ve seen her. So I’ll tell you why. I want her to go to Moscow because the FBI is tailing her. I’ve been under FBI surveillance for months now, but with her it’s new. And she’s American, so it’s too risky. She’ll be safer in Russia than anywhere else. I need her to get the hell out of New York. I think I have a month to do it, maybe two. If she’s not gone by July…” He started coughing again and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He sat next to me and drained it. “What’s this stuff even good for?” He went back to the kitchen and came out with two drinks. Real drinks this time.

  “Take this, Katharina,” he said, handing me one. “We need to have a long conversation.”

  CHAPTER 27

  I had been waiting for Ava to contact me, but on a day that loomed large in my mind, I realized how much I wanted her verve, and her guts, by my side.

  For the past two years, on May 26, I had gone to Turtle Bay and stood in front of the United Nations buildings. It was the anniversary of my first day working at the UN, the day I walked off that bus at Lake Success, passed those flags, and said, “Hello. Bonjour!” to a brand-new life. A better life. I’d performed this ritual in 1952, ’53, and was getting ready to do so again today. Only this time, I was finally considering signing up for a tour to enter the General Assembly Building, that beautiful piece of modernist architecture I never got to see. I was gone by ’52 when it opened, so I had only ever known the General Assembly to meet in Queens.

  Some people felt the Holy Spirit in churches; I felt it in front of iconic buildings. I nearly had my soul come out of my ears the first time I was in Bryant Park and saw the American Radiator Building up close. Those dramatic black bricks piled up with gold leaf molded by the hands of men. The same thing happened when I got to know the New York Public Library as an adult. The Waldorf Astoria. Rockefeller Center. And the Woolworth Building. I knew I’d have the same reaction when I went inside the General Assembly. That more than any other building in New York, it would feel like my church.

  After asking Jilly if she wouldn’t mind watching the boys for two hours, I picked up the phone again and called Ava Newman. She was home.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” I said as she breathed hello into the phone.

  “Of course. Need something stolen?”

  “No, more like a shot of courage. There’s something I want to do, have wanted to do for two years, but never felt like I could. Until now. With the right company, that is.”

  “Well! This sounds exciting. What should I wear? Or not wear?”

  “Wear your most international outfit,” I said. “Can you meet me outside of the United Nations headquarters on Forty-second Street?”

  “Thirty minutes?” said Ava excitedly.

  “I’ll be there,” I replied. “Wearing a beret.”

  “Should I ask why?” she said, laughing.

  “If I can build up the courage to go inside the General Assembly Building, I’ll explain everything.”

  “Listen, Rina, you’ve called the right person,” she said, hanging up.

  Ava was standing right outside the United Nations entrance in a powder blue dress embroidered like an Indian sari. Her look did not scream CPUSA.

  “The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell!” Ava bellowed as I approached her.

  “Dag Hammarskjöld. UN secretary-general,” I said, smiling.

  “Good speech,” she said, turning to stare at the building.

  “Good man,” I replied.

  “What an impressive pile of concrete,” she said as we took in all 380 feet of the building, the shining Secretariat Building towering above it.

  “Limestone.”

  “Just like the Great Pyramid. How international. Now, let’s go in, and you can explain to me why you haven’t set foot in here before. Nice beret, by the way.”

  I repositioned it on my head and held my breath until we were through the bas-relief doors and the security check. I felt like I could finally exhale when we walked past the building’s row of fifty-foot-tall windows, had climbed the stairs, and were about to be led inside the General Assembly Hall.

  “I thought maybe I’d just feel too much, that I wouldn’t quite be able to take it because I loved my work so much. I liked the person I was at the UN so much. I knew that the me visiting this building that I never got to call my own wouldn’t measure up to the me I’d been before. So I never came.”

  “But you’re here now,” she said as we walked through the double doors, at the back of our tour group of fifteen. “Do you finally think you measure up? I think you do.”

  I walked into the Hall and stopped. It was so much better than it looked in the papers, better even than on television, with its towering ceiling, the raised speaker’s rostrum, and the green marble podium, positioned below wooden paneling and the beautiful UN seal.

  “If my soul escapes, maybe you could catch it for me,” I whispered.

  “Sure thing,” she said, looking up at the ceiling as we walked down the center aisle.

  “Look,” I said, nodding. “That’s his desk. Dag Hammarskjöld’s.”

  “Not bad, not bad at all,” she said. She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. Maybe Ava was more than the Miss America of communists. Maybe she was simply the best among them.

  “You must have really felt like something, someone working here,” she whispered as we sat down in two of the 1,800 chairs to listen to the tour guide. “I really mean that.”

  “I did.” I nodded, trying not to choke on my own words. “I wasn’t in Manhattan for most of it. This building wasn’t finished until the fall of ’fifty-two. The Secretariat Building opened in January ’fifty-one, but we didn’t leave Lake Success till May, so I only worked there about six months. All that time at the UN, and right when I could have walked to work instead of commuting an hour each way to and from Long Island, I had to leave.”

  “That’s utter garbage, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said, smiling, half listening to our guide, mostly noting the steadiness of my heart. I’d been right. This was the right year to finally walk inside.

  “But look at you now. You’re glowing. A heart in port.”

  “That’s a good way to put it.”

  “I hope you find yourself back here one day,” she said as they escorted us out of the grand room. “Working here, that is.”

  I looked back to see the secretary-general’s desk one last time.

  “Do you read the help wanted section of the papers?” Ava said as we followed the tour group toward the building’s exit.

  “The help wanted section? Not since I graduated from Columbia.”

  “You should
. You know, if you ever need some motivation to keep going with work, our work in particular. Or if you ever decide to come back here.”

  “Why is that?”

  “‘Help wanted female. Receptionist. Under 30 desired. Help wanted female. Secretary. Age up to 28 years. Pleasant disposition. Help wanted male. Engineer. Help wanted male. Physician.’ No age limit, no pleasant disposition needed, no shorthand required. When you read the help wanted section, you realize that to men we’re human, smiling typewriters that conveniently double as a source of their perverse fantasies.”

  “Did you just say perverse fantasies?”

  “I did.”

  “The thing is,” I said as we walked across the plaza to admire the Secretariat Building, “it wasn’t just the work. It was the life. The life I had in here, the life I had outside. The friendships. There was a girl who worked with me, and, I suppose, I’d just never had a friend like her. She left a gaping hole in my heart when I left that building forever.”

  “She was…”

  “She was and is Marianne Fontaine. A French girl. An American French girl. I adored her like you can only adore someone who is not related to you. Together, we inhaled everything about postwar New York. And then I had children and she dropped me like a bad habit.”

  I had tried to see Marianne many times. But she always had excuses, and after a few of them, her message came in loud and clear. A partner in crime meant a partner in crime. Not a partner in peekaboo, bath time, and nervous breakdowns.

  “Being a woman is complicated. And I think it’s especially complicated right now. More than it was during the war. Sometimes people—women—get angry when we don’t make the same life decisions they do,” Ava said thoughtfully, interrupting my thoughts. “They want us to, because they want us to enforce that they’re doing the right thing. They want us to serve as confirmation for their decisions. In Marianne’s case, that was not getting married, not having kids, and living an intellectual life, right?”

  “That’s exactly right. Plus a gallon of fun on top of all that intellectual rigor.”

  We sat on a nearby bench and turned our attention back to the General Assembly Building.

  “You lived that way too, maybe you thought you always would,” said Ava, “but then you changed your mind. Maybe she assumed that you’d want her to change her mind, too.”