Blessing in Disguise (50 page)

She found her reading glasses and slipped them on, sinking into a deep-buttoned chair. As she shuffled through the pages, the words jittering and blurring before her eyes, one paragraph seemed to leap out at her.

My Dearest Margaret,

I’ve thought long and hard about what you said the other day when you were seeing me off at the airport. And I still want more than anything for us to be together, out in the open. But at the same time, I have to admit you’re probably right. I can only imagine what it must have cost you to say it. I care about Cordelia too. But I’ve always seen her as strong, not really needing me, or anyone. It took you to make me see how deeply wounded she would be, and how so many others would be hurt as well, if the truth about you and me were to come out. ...

Cordelia dropped the piece of paper as if she’d been scalded. And now tears were welling, hot, burning her eyes and inside the bridge of her nose. She was shaking her head, a hand clapped over her mouth, as if by denying them she could make those words go away.

It couldn’t be. Gene. Margaret. He never. He wouldn’t have. So many years. All that time, not loving
her.
She would have known.
She would have known.

The letters had to be fake. Yes, that was it. Of course. Win had suggested it to her the other day, but she hadn’t really known what to think. Now she felt sure.

Gene could never have written these.

He’d loved her, not Margaret.

Hadn’t he?

But then she was remembering that awful day when Gene had called her from Margaret’s house, sounding not at all like himself—shaken, distraught, hysterical almost.

“Cordelia, I’ve killed a man. I was trying to ... He had a gun. I had to stop ... God help me ... it was an accident.”

And while her own heart had raced with panic, she’d calmed him, saying, “Of course. Of
course
it was an accident. Now. Tell me
exactly
what happened.” After she’d gotten the whole story out of him, which left her weak with shock, she’d had to sink down on the nearest chair to keep from collapsing. Then pulling herself together, she’d found herself speaking with remarkable calm. “Listen to me carefully. You didn’t arrive at Margaret’s until just a few minutes ago. It’s very important, Gene, that you tell it right when the authorities get there. Margaret phoned to tell you she’d found her husband dead, a suicide, and you drove right over. Now. Call your friend at the FBI, Pat Mulhaney; he’ll help you. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you the police must be kept out of this.”

“I ... Cordelia, I can’t go on like this. ... You have to know ...”

But she’d stopped him, searing the words before they could leave his mouth, as if cauterizing a wound.

“I know everything I need to know,” she’d said. “You were only doing what any courageous person would have. Why let people distort it, make it into something it isn’t? You let Mulhaney take care of it, Gene, and it’ll be as if it never happened.”

As if it never happened.

Was that what the past had become for her, a thing she’d rewritten to suit herself? Even her own memories—were they reinvented as well? When she thought of Gene, was she merely remembering a love that had been polished so many times that its original shape was scarcely distinguishable?

Cordelia, as she rose from her chair, felt like the world’s oldest human being. Every bone and muscle protested the effort it took just to walk the dozen steps to the door, open it, step through. How she was going to make it to the elevator, through the lobby, and then across the street to the park, she couldn’t begin to imagine.

But somehow, by some miracle—or maybe it was the curse of being Cordelia Truscott—she was doing it. Putting one foot in front of her, then the other. Galvanizing her will and forcing her body to move as she would have a reluctant child dragging its feet.

She would keep her appointment with Nola Emory if it killed her.

Cordelia glanced around her at the cigarette butts, crumpled paper napkins, aluminum pop-tops littering the ground beneath the park bench on which she sat, waiting for Nola. Years ago, had the park been this filthy? Back then she’d thought Manhattan a fairyland, exciting, sparkling, delicious. Going home to Blessing after Gene died, at first it had seemed like squeezing into a pair of old shoes she’d long since outgrown. Her ailing mother, the ancient elms with their beards of Spanish moss, her school chums now middle-aged ladies with teased hair and pink frosted nails, even the humidity, all like some huge sweaty hand pressing down on her, compressing her into something too small.

But there had been compensations. Her old friend Iris. And Stanton Hughes, with whom Cordelia had shared a microscope in biology—he’d offered her a seat on Latham University’s prestigious board, of which he was chairman. And soon after Mother died, when she’d learned from Iris about the black “granny” midwives who were being hounded out of business by the AMA, how she’d leaped on that! Working every day, even on weekends, sending letters, making calls, scouting for teachers, doctors, nurses, anyone willing to donate time to the certification program she’d gotten the local health authorities to agree on.

And there was her garden.

Back home, she thought, the first of the narcissi would soon be pushing up through the rich, black soil—green spears that looked sturdy enough but soon would bow beneath the weight of their blossoms. Gabe would be preparing the seed beds in the greenhouse, and spraying the fruit trees with dormant oil to keep away the scale.

She felt a sharp ache of longing. She wanted to be back in Blessing, with Gabe, away from all this, from Grace and Nola Emory and even Win, who lately had been pushing her to let him file for an injunction to stop publication.

She’d gone along in the beginning—
urged
him—sensing that Win wanted what she did, to put an end to this ugliness. But getting involved with complaints that would be publicly aired, affidavits, depositions, sordid courtrooms—wouldn’t that make it all still more unbearable?

Even if she sat on her hands and did absolutely nothing, her life was
never
going to return to normal. It was as if the people who’d mocked Columbus had been right all along, and she’d just sailed off the edge of the world.

Cordelia shivered in her gray cashmere coat, watching a young woman jog past, a girl in sweat pants and a nylon parka who had made her feel suddenly far older than fifty-nine—an old lady in the park, her precious memories all that was left.

And now even those had been threatened.

She thought back to that tense time when Eugene had been lobbying relentlessly for his civil-rights bill—cornering his congressional colleagues in their offices and homes, at parties, even on the street, badgering them to support his bill. And all the hate mail, vicious phone calls, old friends snubbing her. Visiting her family in Georgia, and being hounded by the Klan. But she would have gone through it all again, every awful, frightening minute, if that could have spared her the ordeal of meeting Nola Emory.

The library—that’s what she had to think of now. Wasn’t that what had kept her at Win’s long after she felt she’d overstayed her welcome? Let’s see, it had been almost two weeks now. Tramping all over the city, putting on her best clothes and visiting with every old fan of Gene’s who would agree to see her. Some, of course, wouldn’t give her the time of day; but Hammond Wentworth, who clearly hadn’t forgotten all Gene had done for him back when Ham was heading the parks department, came through with a hundred thousand.

But none of the rejections she’d met could come close to the agony of reading that letter. Forged or not, its words echoed in her mind like the relentless pounding of the jackhammer being wielded by a construction worker on the street not far from where she sat.

“Mrs. Truscott?”

Cordelia started, and looked up into a pair of green eyes that seemed to be studying her carefully, dispassionately, the way a doctor might examine someone for signs of illness. As if all that mattered was a correct diagnosis, not how the patient felt.

But, no, she saw, after a moment, that the woman standing before her, dressed in a simple black coat with a bright-red scarf tucked about her neck, was simply holding a tight rein on her emotions. The hand she offered was trembling slightly.

She looks like him.

Why hadn’t she noticed the resemblance when she’d seen Nola on television?

She realized it wasn’t so much a duplication of Gene’s features as something about her self-possession, the erect way she held herself, despite the anxiety she had to be feeling.
Just like Gene
...

“May I sit down?” she heard Nola Emory asking, but she sounded far away, like one of the mothers she could hear in the distance calling out to their children.

Cordelia moved over an inch or so to make more room.

“Ten minutes,” she said with what she hoped was a firm, businesslike tone. Her heart felt huge, swollen.

“It won’t take long. I just want to talk to you.”

“Whatever
for?”

She watched the blood leave Nola’s face. “The library. I’m here about the library.”

Cordelia’s heart lurched. This woman, Margaret’s daughter—what could she know about Eugene’s library? What could she want with it?

Cordelia thought of the design she’d picked out of all those portfolios—with virtually no hesitation—knowing the committee would go along. And, though taking their sweet time in doing so, they finally had. She could see it in her mind, half a dozen drawings mounted on thick cardboard. The soaring lines and windowed expanses, the majestic shape of the thing. As if the architects had taken her formless fantasy and, through some kind of telepathy, made it real.

“The library is none of your concern,” she told Nola crisply.

“I’m afraid you’re wrong about that.” As Nola turned slightly to watch a bicyclist whirr past, Cordelia could see a pulse fluttering in the graceful column of her neck. “You see, it’s mine—I designed it.”

Now she was looking straight at Cordelia with those unwavering eyes, and Cordelia felt the shock of her words as if she had been struck by a taxi.

“You?
Are you saying that ...”

“I’m with Maguire, Chang & Foster. When I heard about the competition ...” Nola shrugged, but her tension was evident in the tightness of her shoulders. “You see, it was—
is
—important to me that it be wonderful. Right for
him,
not just the people who’ll be using it. Not one of those pretentious mausoleum-looking things. He ...” She straightened. “My father would have hated that.”

That word,
father,
pierced Cordelia.

“Don’t,”
she cried, her eyes filling with tears, the bare trees and winding stone pathways all blending into a gray soup. “You have no right.”

“Look at me,” Nola commanded. “For God’s sake, Mrs. Truscott,
look at me.”

It was the richness of Nola’s voice, the power in it, that finally made her look. What she saw made her want to shrink away, cringe as if from a too-bright light. She saw ...

Gene, rising to speak to the Senate floor, the fire in his eyes, the fervent conviction radiating from every inch of his long, loose-limbed body.

“I’m his daughter,” Nola said, but her voice was soft, not fiery or righteous. “You
know
it, even if you can’t or won’t admit it. Are you so afraid of the truth? Will hiding from it—as I did for too long—really be good for you in the long run?” Color rose in Nola’s cheeks now, and her eyes glittered.

Cordelia wanted to run ... far away ... someplace where Nola’s words couldn’t reach her. But some force kept her rooted to the bench.

“What makes you think you could possibly know what’s good for me?” Cordelia snapped. “You haven’t the faintest idea of who or what I am.”

“I know that he loved you.” Nola dropped her voice, now like some kind of soothing balm against a stinging wound.

“If you really
were
his—and I’m not saying I believe that—then how would it be possible for him to have loved me?” Cordelia recoiled from her own words. How could she be revealing herself to this woman she didn’t even know, bare doubts she’d scarcely been able to admit to herself?

“Nothing is ever that simple,” Nola said.

“I don’t—” Cordelia, on the verge of arguing that, no. Gene would
not
have betrayed her, instead found herself unable to go on.

She was feeling once again the pain of that letter, how for an instant it had been as if she were hearing Gene’s voice speaking those dreadful words. ...

It’s true,
spoke a voice from some deep place inside her.
She is his child.

“He loved me,” she echoed softly. “I
do
know that. Even if ... if he might have wavered. That could have been partly my fault, I suppose. I was the one who didn’t want to move to Washington. In another two years, I kept saying, he might not get re-elected. And then, when he became a senator ...” She stared at a black woman pushing a baby stroller in which a white, golden-haired infant sat, feeling her lips knit themselves into a cold smile. “Well, by then we were used to the arrangement. It suited us, in a way. ...

“Oh, I suppose there were moments when things seemed ... not quite right. Times I phoned him late at night and he wasn’t there. But then I’d put it right out of my head.”

Cordelia buried her face in her hands, feeling all the fear, worry, hurt that she’d kept locked inside herself come forth in a boiling rush. But she wouldn’t,
couldn’t,
let herself cry, not now, not in front of Nola Emory. She strained to withstand the shivering that was gripping her. If only Gabe were here, holding her, steadying her.

She felt a light pressure against her shoulder, and caught the musky scent of Nola’s perfume as she leaned close. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this isn’t easy for you.”

Cordelia shook her head.

“It’s not easy for me, either,” Nola went on. “For weeks I refused to take Grace’s calls. I never wanted any part of this. But when she shoved it right in front of my face, I realized I couldn’t go through a whole life of telling lies.”