Obviously, they couldn’t continue their conversation.
“Let’s grab some dogs from Sabrett’s and walk through the park,” she suggested.
“I’m supposed to be having lunch with people important to Michael. I’m already dreadfully late,” Emma said desperately. “Except you haven’t told me what to do yet.”
“Call them and cancel,” Faith advised. “This is more important.”
Leaving the young mother, who was nodding off herself while the baby tried to eat her toes, they went in search of a phone. Faith called Josie, too.
Outside in the sunshine, deceptively warm, Emma picked up the threads. The Sabrett’s hot dog had satisfied Faith’s physical hunger; now she was longing for the rest of Emma’s story.
“Anyway, they were so nice to me, you can’t imagine. Trotskyists. You know, you’re not supposed to say Trotskyites, they don’t like that. They were all getting ready to go into factories to mobilize the working classes. They said the movement in the sixties and seventies had concentrated too much on students and the antiwar movement. Todd used to stand up and shout,
‘If every student broke a pencil, what would you have?
Splinters! If every worker shut down his machine, what would you have? Revolution!’ It was one of his 31
favorite quotes from Daddy—Nathan Fox, I mean. It was wonderful to learn all about him.” If this represented Fox’s rhetoric, Faith had to wonder about the man’s intellect, but perhaps you had to have been there. So much depended on context: hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in front of the Capitol building, for example. Nursery rhymes de-claimed would have sounded portentous and inspired.
“Todd had dropped out of NYU to work full-time in the movement, and he was collecting Nathan Fox’s speeches into a book. He promised he’d help me find Fox. He’d met him once someplace in Minnesota the year before. He wouldn’t tell me where Daddy was then, but he said he’d let Fox know I wanted to see him. Todd thought it was pretty cool that I was Fox’s daughter. He made me feel proud. I’d never felt anything like that about Jason, even when I thought I was his daughter. All the comrades had adopted Russian names as nicknames. While they were waiting to go into the factories, one girl, Olga, was teaching herself to set type. She had a little printing press. They would write all these pamphlets and go to some factories in New Jersey and pass them out at the gates. I used to fold and staple.”
“I think they’d been setting type by computer for quite a while by then,” Faith observed, acutely aware that while she was going to various cotillions, Emma had been experiencing a very different sort of life that spring. Certainly one less boring, although folding and stapling might have become somewhat repe-titious.
“Well, nobody told Olga.” Emma pulled her mink closer as they walked briskly across the park toward the West Side. There wasn’t any snow on the ground, 32
although flurries were predicted. The trees looked cheerless, their branches gray spikes against the leaden winter sky. “I got pregnant with Todd. It seemed like the thing to do—sleep with him, I mean.
The comrades were all terribly chummy that way.
They explained to me that sex was merely a physical act and monogamy was a bourgeois institution, though Todd didn’t want me to sleep with anyone else, fortunately. I’d graduated from folding and stapling to working on a little article about Emma Goldman for a pamphlet when Poppy found me. She told everybody how old I really was, and Todd was pretty scared. I’d said I was twenty-one.”
“And they believed you!” Faith said incredulously.
Emma didn’t look twenty-one now. A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped past them. An elderly couple was bundled up in lap robes, clearly enjoying the ride.
“They look so happy,” Emma said wistfully. “It must be nice to have normal parents. They look like somebody’s parents, don’t they?”
Faith steered her back to the conversation. “And when Poppy got you home, you found out you were pregnant.”
“Yes. She’d been very nice to me until then. I think she felt guilty; plus, she was truly worried about what had happened to me. But you know my mother. She’s so used to people doing whatever she says that she totally freaked when I said I wasn’t going to have an abortion. I was going to keep the baby. I mean, she’d had me out of wedlock, although technically she was in it, but you know what I mean?”
Faith did. What better way to get back at your mother—and Jason—than first to get pregnant and next plan to raise the baby yourself? She also had a 33
sneaking suspicion that Emma may have wanted to have someone she could well and truly call her own.
“She told me we were going to Dr. Bernardo for a checkup, just to make sure I was all right. You know who he is, right?”
Dr. Bernardo had been taking care of inconvenient problems for New York ladies in Poppy’s circle for years, and Faith had indeed heard of him.
“When I got to his office, it turned out she’d scheduled an abortion, so of course we had a huge scene, but I did go home again. The comrades hadn’t exactly been into solidarity after Poppy had talked to them. I called them, told them what had happened, but they were sort of ‘See you later,’ and I didn’t have anyplace else to go.”
Again, Faith told her, “I wish I had known.”
“I wish you had, too. Poppy yelled at me all the way back to Sutton Place and half the night. It worked. I’d finally fallen asleep, and when I woke up, I realized I’d lost the baby.”
Years later, there was no mistaking the grief in Emma’s voice.
“I was in pretty bad shape after that and couldn’t go back to school. They got a tutor for me and things calmed down. It was hard to stay mad at Mother. You know how she can be so . . . well, Poppyish. I still felt betrayed, but I caved. Let her take care of me. The one thing I insisted on was going to boarding school for senior year. I just couldn’t go back with all of you and pretend nothing had happened.”
“Come to work with me and I’ll make you the best hot chocolate in the city.” It was getting too cold for much more walking. Faith had on one of those Norma Kamali OMO sleeping-bag coats, which made you 34
look like an army-surplus number. Normally, it verged on too much warmth; today, it might as well have been mosquito netting.
“I’m sorry,” Emma said regretfully. “I said I’d join them for dessert. You know Michael’s running for the House next year, and these ladies are very important to his fund-raising campaign. He was very insistent that I go. There was a Post-it on the mirror to remind me this morning.” She stopped speaking and flushed slightly.
“Sometimes I mean to go to these things, then forget until it’s too late. I can’t blow this off when he’s made such a big deal out of it. But I can’t leave until you tell me what to do,” she said imploringly.
Faith was surprised. It was the second time Emma had said this. It seemed so clear.
“You haven’t committed a crime or done anything anyone could remotely blackmail you over. I suggest you and Michael take the note to the police and let them deal with it. They can help you figure out who might be doing this. There can’t be too many choices.
Who would have known both about Fox being your father and the fact that you got pregnant?”
“But I can’t do that.” Emma stood absolutely still on the path, as rooted as the massive oaks to either side.
“Michael would find out.”
“Michael doesn’t know!” Faith gasped.
“Of course not. It really didn’t have anything to do with him, and the Stansteads might have been funny about it.”