Strange Fits of Passion (14 page)

They brought a cake, and I had a present for her I had made, a doll of yarn and bits of cloth. We sang to her, and I fed her broken pieces of the cake. All around her, they were saying, Give a kiss to your Mummy. This is your Mummy, Caroline. I wanted everyone to leave us, but I knew they wouldn't, couldn't.

You will ask me, Was it worth it? And I will answer, How can it be worth it to be in hell and set yourself free, and then lose your daughter into the bargain?

And then I will answer, I didn't have a choice.

It was the first week of December, and the magazine was having a party for the editor, who was leaving. It had been almost a year since I'd visited the office. I said to Harrold, Do you think I should go?

He thought awhile and said, Why not? Let's show off the baby.

I bought a dress for the party, a black dress with a high neck and a long skirt, and I put Caroline into a red velvet dress my mother had sent her for the holidays. I wore my hair up, pinned it up with rhinestone combs, and when I held Caroline, and we looked at ourselves in the mirror, I thought: You would never know.

Harrold had said that I should bring Caroline to the office at five, when the party would begin. At a quarter to, I put her in the baby basket and drove to midtown where the office was. When I got to the nineteenth floor, Harrold was finishing up some business, but he came out of his office and smiled at me. Smiled at me. He put a proprietary arm around my shoulder, then took the baby from my arms. People came out of cubicles and offices to greet me. Harrold and Caroline and I walked around the office in a kind of luminous cocoon, and I knew how we must have appeared—a proud husband with his radiant wife and daughter. We were smiling, laughing, making easy jokes about my having traded deadlines for diapers, and Caroline was smiling with us. I thought—I remember thinking—Well, this is partially true. We
might
have been this couple.

It seemed there were a lot of people in the office, mostly familiar faces, some I didn't know. Then we all meandered into the dining room or near it, where there was a bar, and you came up to us. Harrold introduced you, and you shook my hand. I was struck first by your height—you must be five ten or eleven?—and then by your dress. It was khaki, I remember, a shirtwaist, belted, and I recall thinking that it was the sort of dress a woman ought to wear on a safari, in a Land-Rover, in the bush of Africa. It suited you. You held the baby, and Harrold went off to get us drinks.

I wonder now: Did you see anything? Did you know?

Did we chat? Briefly, possibly, about the baby, but then you moved away, and a man I'd never seen before came over to me to say hello. He said his name was Mark. He was tall and thin, with light-blue eyes and blond hair. He wore gold-rimmed glasses. I thought he was attractive. We began to talk. He said he knew Harrold, admired my husband's work, and knew that I had once worked for the magazine as well. I was still high from the illusion Harrold and I had created, and perhaps I was laughing—I think I might have touched Mark on the sleeve in the middle of a joke or a story—when Harrold came around the corner with the drinks. He'd been moving through the crowd, smiling easily, accepting compliments on his daughter, but when he saw me standing there with Mark, he stopped. I wasn't looking at him, but I could feel him staring at me. I turned, against my better judgment, to see him, to call him over.

He was standing motionless, with a drink in each hand. He had on a blue blazer that day; his tie was dark stripes, I remember, loosened at the collar. His eyes were deep circles, fixed on me. He came forward, ignored Mark. He handed me my drink. He said, Get the baby. I want you to hold the baby.

Mark seemed to take the hint and drifted off, or perhaps he saw someone else to talk to, and when he was gone, Harrold said to me, I leave you for a minute, and already you're after some guy.

I didn't say anything. I knew better than to speak. I knew exactly what to do: to hold the baby and to talk only to women until Harrold took me home, and perhaps, if I was lucky, he might forget about what he'd seen or thought he had seen.

I was not lucky. Men came up to me and talked to me and sometimes kissed me; it was only natural. I hadn't seen them in almost a year. They were friends—not even friends, just acquaintances—but Harrold chose not to see that. Each man who came to me, I wanted to say to him, You are sealing my fate, but of course, I couldn't. I waited for half an hour, then I said to Harrold, I'd better go. He said, Do that.

I excused myself, said to anyone who asked that the baby had to go to bed. I drove home, took the baby up to the apartment, changed my clothes. I nursed Caroline, put her to bed for the night in her crib in her room. I made myself a drink; I was frightened. I knew that Harrold was angry, would drink too much, and would come home in a mood as black as his eyes had been. I had another drink, and I thought: Where the hell can I go now?

It was after midnight when he came. He was drunk, stumbling. His features were blurry, and I thought he might have been sick. His tie was missing, and his shirt was rumpled. I knew then that he'd been with another woman. I turned away. I was frightened, but I was filled with rage. I walked down the hallway to the bedroom and shut the door.

I waited.

He burst through the door like a large figure in a childhood nightmare. He said, Don't you ever shut a door in my face again!

It was the only thing I remember him saying.

He threw me against the wall. I put my hands out to protect my face. Perhaps I screamed; I heard Caroline begin to cry in her crib. I prayed that she would be silent, because I was afraid that he might harm her. I didn't cry out again. I put my hands out to protect my face, but he swatted them away like mosquitoes.

He was a machine, a machine of rage and fury. He had never been so frenzied. He didn't seem to care anymore where he hit me, that the bruises would be visible. Instinctively, I let my body go limp. I could not fight him, but I knew it was important to stay conscious if I could. His hands came down upon me, then he stumbled, missed, jammed his hand into the wall. He cursed, held his fingers, and I scooted out from under him. I ran to Caroline's room, swiftly scooped her from her crib, then locked us both in the bathroom.

He came to the bathroom door, shook the knob once as if he would tear it from the door. I didn't move. I waited. I sat on the tile floor and tried to get my blouse open so that I could nurse Caroline. I wanted to keep her quiet. She fell back asleep while I held her there.

I don't know how long I was in the bathroom, but I didn't hear him again. I didn't know if he had gone away or had fallen asleep or had passed out in the hallway. Or if he was sitting in a chair, waiting for me to open the door.

I sat cross-legged for what seemed like hours. When I moved finally, I felt a bolt of pain in my knee, but I knew I had to stand up. I opened the door, could not see him. Tentatively, I limped out into the hallway. He wasn't there. I walked into Caroline's room and put her in her crib. I inched down to my own bedroom, looked in on the bed. He was lying there, half undressed, his shirt still on, his pants and blazer on the floor. He had passed out, was lying on his stomach; he was snoring.

I have never been so quiet or so cautious or so quick. I picked up my duffel bag from the bottom of the closet, put a few things in it, went to the baby's room, packed the bag with her clothes. I walked back into the bedroom, removed Harrold's wallet from his pants pocket, took the cash there. I didn't even count it. I put on my coat and scarf and gloves, slung the duffel bag and my purse over my shoulder, wrapped Caroline in a blanket, and was out the door like a fox with her prey. I couldn't chance waking Caroline to put her in her snowsuit. I would do that in the car.

I took the elevator to the street, ran with my bundles to the car. The baby basket was in the back seat. I'd forgotten to bring it in. I put Caroline in her snowsuit. She woke up and began to cry, but when I started the engine, she was soothed.

The car was nearly out of gas, so I drove uptown to a gas station. I said to the attendant there, Do you have a map?

He said, A map of what?

I said, Anywhere.

He said, Let me look.

I sat in the car and waited. The city was still, unmoving. He came back and said to me, All I got is New England.

I said, Fine; I'll take it.

I turned on the overhead light, shook open the map, and spread it over the dashboard. I let my eye drift until I found a dot that I thought would be safe. I folded the map, switched off the light. I turned the key in the ignition.

I rolled down the window. I took my wedding band from my finger and threw it into the night. I didn't hear it land.

It was four o'clock in the morning, and I was headed north and east.

So how's old Ed Hargreaves? Keeping the magazine together, is he?

Exactly. Exactly.

And Mark Stein. What's he up to now? Taken over Harrold's territory, no doubt.

God, this is an awful business, isn't it? Terrible story, terrible. I was flabbergasted when I heard. I had no idea, none. Absolutely nothing.

I was at the magazine until the first of December, as you know. Maureen English had left the previous year. I knew them pretty well. Well, I
thought
I knew them well. Just goes to show, doesn't it?

She was quiet. But awfully good, awfully good. I thought she would really go places, make a name for herself, until she got that motion sickness. Shame, really. She said the doctors had tried everything with her, she couldn't shake it, something to do with the structure of her inner ear. So I put her on rewrites. God, she was fast. Give Maureen English a file, she'd have the story back to you before the day was out.

She was very attractive. You've met her. You could see right away someone was going to snap her up. I don't think I realized for quite a while that it was Harrold, though. They were cool in the office, very cool. I thought she had a bit of class, actually. You could see that. I don't mean from her background. I didn't really know much about her background, although she was obviously Irish. She was Maureen Cowan, by the way, when she first came. No, I mean the way she carried herself, kept to herself, wouldn't toot her own horn kind of thing. They met in my office, by the way.

Yes, they did. Let me think now. I was in the office. He'd come in. He had a beef with me about a headline, I think. I can't remember now. Something. And it was her first day of work. That's right. And she came in to ask a question. She was very nervous that day, very nervous. I remember she kept fingering these beads she was wearing. Looking down at her feet. I could see Harrold looking at her, smiling, but I didn't think much about it at the time. She'd have caught anyone's eye; it didn't strike me at the time as particularly meaningful. Though as I understand it now, they started seeing each other pretty soon after that.

Now Harrold. He did some great pieces for us then. Those were great days at the magazine. We had Joe Ward, and Alex Weisinger, and Barbara Spindell. Great days. I miss them sometimes. Publishing is a different business. I got out of magazines because the late nights were driving my wife crazy, but the pace is different here. You don't get that adrenaline high; you know what I mean. Books have a different evolution: You see the writers a lot less, hardly at all sometimes. And you've got to love a story. You're working on it for months, for years in some cases. Anyway, enough of this; you want to know about Harrold.

Let's see. He came to the magazine in '64, I think. He'd been working for
The Boston Globe
out of school, then wanted to get into magazines, into New York. He came at a good time. There was a bit of a vacuum—a lot of old blood leaving, retiring. I'd been there a year or two myself; I'd come over from the
Times.
So when he signed on, he was able to move up rather quickly. I had him out reporting almost at once. He was a great reporter. Very aggressive in the field. Wouldn't quit till he got the story. He'd hound them to death, or charm them. I think his size helped, actually. He was very impressive physically. You must have met him. About six four, I think; two hundred pounds, anyway, but not fat, just well-muscled. Played for Yale, I'm pretty sure. But he wasn't a blowhard like some guys from the Ivy League you meet. Kept to himself most of the time. And those eyes. Black as coal. They could pin you to the wall, make you squirm. I saw him do it a couple of times. Pretty impressive.

Harrold English was a real pro. We weren't what you would call friends, but we had some lunches. You know the kind of thing; you get to really talking after the second martini. He said once that he'd had a bit of an unhappy childhood, despite the money. His mother died when he was a kid, and he never got along with his father. Bit of a son of a bitch, from what I gather. They weren't close. I never heard about any other family.

I liked his writing style. It was clean, straightforward, not too much of the "I," and I liked that. You could feel his intelligence in the piece, but he didn't let it get in the way. He wasn't one of those let-me-show-you-my-dazzling-virtuosity kind of writers. Just straight. Always got his facts right. The fact checkers loved his pieces.

Maureen, she had a different style. I'd say more feminine, except that would probably get me in trouble. Her rhythms were different, more fluid. I liked her writing, but you had to push her a bit to dig a little deeper for the story. She had a hard time asking the really tough questions. One time she came in to see me and said she didn't want to write only about trends anymore; I'd had her on Trends. I was a little bit taken aback, but I could see her point, so I moved her over to National. She was very good there, detached in a way, but good. Until she couldn't travel anymore.

I think it was a good six months before I knew they were seeing each other. When I heard about it, I have to tell you, I wasn't too happy about it. I've seen these office romances, and they always lead to trouble. You have a fight at home, what are you supposed to do at the office? But Maureen and Harrold, like I said, they were cool. If you didn't know, you'd never have known, if you know what I mean.