Kate flew back to New York with her thoughts chasing each other through her head; their resolving themselves into an idea was less probable than their leaving her confused, sleepless, and haunted by demons. If she dozed for a moment, characters from the Foxx drama came to derange her with their preposterous acts and suggestions. Several of the airplane’s martinis in small bottles failed either to encourage sleep or to discourage the ghosts. But at least by the time she had landed, hungry (for who can eat airline food?) and exhausted, she had made up her mind to arrange a meeting with Anne Gringold as soon as possible.
One thing was sufficiently clear: Dorinda and Nellie, while not exactly lying to her, had doled out the truth with great care, allowing it slowly to contradict previous impressions. With Anne, the situation might be different, for Kate had read Anne’s memoir, and so would begin with a wider base on which to build her theories. And certainly it was theories, however imprecise, that she required. Such as, why would the secret about who Nellie’s father was, after the death of all the principals, be so appalling? These days, such revelations were hardly even startling, at least after the first all-over sense of wonder. Nellie would become of more interest to the world, which was hardly a fate avoided by most people. Emile and Gabrielle were dead and beyond injury. Emmanuel Foxx’s reputation might be strengthened in some quarters and reduced in others, but it would probably not make any fundamental difference to anyone’s opinion of his major novel or any of his other works.
But to those for whom discretion and secrecy were a way of life, the public rendition of one’s family scandals was to be avoided at any cost. And why shouldn’t Nellie have grown sick to death of being cultivated as Foxx’s granddaughter, let alone wish to be further bombarded by those who would now know that her relation to the great man was one generation closer?
Obviously, Anne was the next step for Kate, less in the hope of learning the story of Anne’s life or Anne’s secrets, if any, which were, after all, peripheral, than the substance and subject of the papers Gabrielle had left with her. After this observation (upon which Kate would soon look back with as much sense of irony and bemused good humor as she could muster) she went to sleep for ten hours and awakened to a large breakfast, a conversation with Reed in which she told him nothing and told him she had told him nothing being not yet ready to tell anyone anything.
Eventually, she reached Anne on the telephone. Yes, Anne would see her, two days hence, wherever she, Kate, liked. Kate suggested her own apartment, and Anne agreed. It occurred to Kate that she had seen none of this trio in her own domicile. Only Eleanor had received Kate in her home. For all Kate really knew, the other three might live in spaceships circling the globe. Anything, Kate was beginning to think, was possible with those three.
When Anne arrived for their interview, Kate’s first impression was what a diffuse lot, as far as looks went, the trio was. Anne had clearly run to fat, an unkind way to put it, Kate admonished herself. She was solid and evidently indifferent, in these days of devotion to the presentation of one’s face and body, to her appearance. Her demeanor was more open than that of either Dorinda or Nellie, but then it was, after all, Anne who had written the memoir, Anne about whom most was already known, Anne who had been, through her memoir, the first to speak to Kate.
Kate offered her a drink and to Kate’s pleasure she accepted a beer. Kate joined her in one, and when they had settled down with their glasses, Anne remarked on how pleasant it was to sit in this comfortable room on an ordinary afternoon and drink beer. “I feel quite a truant,” she said. “Perhaps I shall now find the courage to take off an afternoon and go to a ball game. Except that there aren’t many baseball games played on weekday afternoons anymore, are there?”
“Perhaps we can go together,” Kate said. “I haven’t been to a baseball game in donkey’s years, whatever they are; a long time anyway.” We are beginning very far from the subject, Kate thought, and yet we are not insincere. I would like to go to a ball game with Anne. “The Mets, of course,” Kate added. “All my brothers are or were Yankee fans, so there’s no question about that. My brothers and I share no opinions whatever, which is rather a comfort; one never has to consider giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
“It’s nice of you to begin with a personal revelation,” Anne said, “since so many will obviously be expected of me. Not that I mind,” she hastily added. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have brothers. Neither Nellie nor I has children, as I guess you know, and Dorinda has four sons, which is really going it a bit, Nellie and I feel.”
“I saw Nellie in Geneva just a few days ago,” Kate said. “But we never talked of her present life at all, just of the past. I had so many questions about the past I didn’t feel it right to ask about the present; anyway, I loathe people who keep asking questions.”
“Nellie has been married for years to a man who writes books on philosophy and theories of art, all in French, and all profound, and all close to incomprehensible, even, I understand, if you read French. They seem very happy. He can work anywhere, which is fortunate since Nellie tends to get moved around from time to time. Good beer.” Anne sat back in her comfortable chair, clearly relishing the leisure, the pleasure of not being at work in an afternoon.
“Do you still work for a publishing firm?” Kate asked. “Of course your memoir ended thirty or so years ago, so perhaps that’s a silly question?”
“Still the same job,” Anne said. “More responsibility, more pay, still the same job. It’s actually rather interesting, if you don’t pretend you’re selling anything more than a product. Not something sacred like books, I mean, just a product. You study the markets, develop selling and distributing techniques, use the computer inventively, and wish to God that the people who are supposed to fill orders, the warehouses and the accounting departments, did not make so many knuckle-headed mistakes. I’m very good at what I do, and the fact that it’s not madly glamorous or innovative means I can go on doing it even now when I’m getting a bit long in the tooth. I root for the Mets too, though I wish to hell they hadn’t gone in for ball girls. If a woman ever makes it into baseball, it should be because she plays so well they can’t not hire her. Till then, I’d rather not have girlish legs in ridiculous uniforms cavorting around like playboy bunnies. You mustn’t pay too much attention to me; I don’t often get the chance to shoot my mouth off; I’m either too busy or too tired. What did you want to talk to me about? Surely not the Mets.”
“As you probably know,” Kate said, “I’m a literary type. As such, I couldn’t help noticing that you ended your marvelous memoir the way Jane Austen ended her novels, rather too rapidly, as though you’d passed the interesting part and had to tie it all up as fast as possible, not much liking the way you had to end it.”
“How tactfully you put it, and quite right too. The end was about Gabrielle’s papers, but the story was really about me, as most stories are. I guess I knew readers, if any, would be rushing toward the inevitable end. No need to linger over it.”
“It’s an amazing story, the three of you there together, and you and Dorinda before that. It’s a heartwarming story. I was rather relieved,” Kate added, watching for Anne’s reactions with some trepidation, “to find that Dorinda was such a nice person. One gathered from what you wrote and from her mother that she went through a long period of being, well, rather a prig, which was so different from her as a child and young woman.”
“Yes. Dorinda’s come round nicely. We all have. Might I say that we all realized that someone would decide one day to do a biography of Gabrielle, it was really inevitable, wasn’t it, and when we heard it was you we were very pleased. I mean, it might have been someone less scholarly and less, well, intelligent, less able to understand what life was like when we were all young and modernism was at its height.”
“Am I to infer from that complimentary speech that you sent the memoir to Simon Pearlstine after deciding that I should do the biography—perhaps to add weight to that inducement?”
“Nellie and Dorinda both said you were clever as well as intelligent—a detective as well as a literary type. I see they were right.”
“Simon Pearlstine certainly went a considerable way toward giving me a somewhat different impression. But no doubt he was covering his ass, as they say in the big crude world. You said you wanted it especially for my eyes.”
“Yours only. It was to encourage you, specifically you, to do the biography of Gabrielle. Dorinda only sent it to Pearlstine after she was able to learn from that wonderful grapevine she still has her ear to that there was a real chance he was going to pursue you. There are no secrets in publishing, and my own sources confirmed Dorinda’s. You might wonder why I didn’t just send it to you myself. Partly, Dorinda is the one among us who does that sort of thing; but the truth is, I wanted this to reach Pearlstine indirectly, as a faintly mysterious document. Also, I had not quite overcome the need for distance I felt so acutely after I took Gabrielle’s papers to the bank in London. Anyway, we had looked into you and your doings, taking rather a long time and special care about it, well, mostly Dorinda did, but she had some help from me, and we definitely determined that you were exactly the right person. So when Pearlstine approached you, we went, so to speak, into action. You were chosen.” Anne smiled.
“You seem to mean,” Kate said with sufficient asperity to indicate that she was not being carried away by compliments, “if I understood Nellie and she was certainly clear, you sent it to encourage me not to do the biography of Gabrielle.”
Anne smiled and put down her empty glass. “Well, not a usual biography; but an elegant portrait of Gabrielle as an introduction to your edition of her writings.”
“Which you spirited off at her insistence?”
“Exactly. Our feeling is that the lives of marginal people like the three of us and Emile are not what’s really important. What’s important, because it’s where all her real life went, was what Gabrielle wrote.”
“Another beer?”
“In a minute,” Anne said.
“You imply she was writing much of her life. Why did none of it ever appear, why did no one know of it or mention it until that moment when she gave you the papers in Kensington, practically Knightsbridge?”
“You can’t imagine even for a moment that Emmanuel Foxx the great creator could have borne her writing anything at any time. He was the writer, she was his muse, at least at best; his minion, really, not to say his servant. She kept all her writing secret, all tucked away. I don’t know when she began writing; no one does. It’s possible that she wrote the greater part of it all after Foxx’s death, when she was alone in Paris. Perhaps it was when she had finished writing that she decided to move back to England. Or perhaps she wanted to finish up in England; honestly, one doesn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t the actual papers themselves tell you something? The age of the paper, the ink, the watermarks, that sort of thing? Did you notice anything?”
“Not me,” Anne said. “Do let’s have another beer; it’s so pleasant, drinking and talking like this. At that time in London I felt as though I had some sort of divine command to follow; I shuffled those papers into a bank so fast, I never really got a look at them at all.” Anne pushed herself up from the deep chair where she had happily been lolling and followed Kate into the kitchen. “My thought,” she said to Kate’s back as Kate opened the beers, “is that you and I would look at them when we remove them from the bank.”
“Where is the bank?” Kate asked when they were once more happily ensconced. They could hear the telephone ringing in the distance. “Wonderful things, answering machines,” Kate said. “I fought them as I have fought every new dehumanizing device that has come along, but in the end one succumbs and has to admit to the benefits. I have arranged whole events without ever speaking directly to the other person involved. Is it progress or disaster, or are these just another name for convenience?”
“The bank is in England,” Anne said, grinning at Kate to show she agreed about the telephone machine, but would honorably avoid any temptations to defer discussing the important subject before them. “In London. The nearest one at the time. I’ve gone on paying all these years for the vault, which has been a bit of a burden, but Eleanor, bless her, agreed to contribute once I’d told her the story of the papers. She even gave me a retroactive sum, so to speak. Eleanor is great. Really great.”
“I liked her very much,” Kate said. “Am I being invited to accompany you to London for the first real look at Gabrielle’s leavings?”
“You are. I thought of asking Eleanor, but she’s a bit old for traipsing around, strongly as I consider it her right. Sig’s money of course, but it was Eleanor who had the instincts about Gabrielle and Nellie. Eleanor always had the right instincts, except in choosing a husband. But even there, she wouldn’t have been able to help the Foxxes if she hadn’t married Sig.”
Kate had by now caught on to the fact that Anne may have appeared to ramble in her conversation, but her topics and observations, as well as her emphases, were as carefully orchestrated as any musical score. Kate put down her glass and leaned forward to address Anne with body language as well as words.
“Look here, Anne, I’ve been handled by the three of you—you and Dorinda and Nellie, I mean—with all the delicacy of some spy operation. I don’t want to say I feel set up, that would be a bit crude and not accurate, but I do have the sense of being about to receive a proposition that is going to be startling and very carefully thought out. Do you think I might have it? That is, of course, if you and Dorinda and Nellie have decided you’re the ones to inform me and today’s the day I’m to be informed?”
“You’re hard to set up,” Anne said, laughing. “You were supposed to ask me about Sig; that was your next line: a question about Eleanor and Sig. I like to take things in order.”
“That,” Kate said, “is fairly obvious. All right, consider yourself asked the appropriate question about Eleanor and Sig. Like why should you care what their relationship was, apart from what you’ve written in your memoir?”
“I showed the memoir to Eleanor, or rather, I read it to her. She was only ninety then, or nearly, but she preferred to listen. Eleanor always was a good listener; I guess listening was the major part of what she did, apart from arranging to make everyone’s life easier.” Anne sipped her beer. “Eleanor liked my memoir. I apologized for what I had said about the Goddards’ generosity; it sounded a little mean-spirited when I read it out that way, but Eleanor wouldn’t hear a word of it. ‘You got it just right, Anne,’ she told me, ‘and so did Gabrielle. You all sensed the truth even if you didn’t know it. Did you never guess?’ Eleanor asked me. ‘Guess what?’ I naturally said.”
“Another mistaken father?” Kate asked.
“Clever! You are clever,” Anne said. “Though of course I didn’t have the example of Nellie’s parentage to give me a hint, as you did. Anyway, I didn’t guess at all, and poor Eleanor wondered if she ought to have mentioned it. In the end she told me. I think she always meant to; I think one of the things she had decided on when she grew old was honesty, getting through the lies we live, and tell ourselves, and tell each other. Well, you’ve had no trouble with it.”
“I wasn’t really involved,” Kate said. “It’s easy to guess things you haven’t an emotional stake in.”
“Sig was my father. That was why they were so willing to take me in, even if my mother did have her doubts. But at least it wasn’t charity. The one thing I never understood about my mother was why she was willing to take charity; she was so proud, and so insistent on holding up her end, holding up her head she used to say. But if he was my father, he owed me. Only me, never her. She never took a thing from him, never gave him the time of day again, although they met from time to time.”
“He didn’t dance with her at Dorinda’s wedding?” Kate asked. “That was someone else?”
“Definitely someone else, though I think she danced there as a kind of abandon, a moment when the pretense didn’t need to be maintained. After all, she had been invited as my mother, because I was so much part of the Goddard family; nothing could change that. That’s an odd thing for you to ask, really.”
“Her dancing impressed me,” Kate said. “Does Dorinda know?”
“Dorinda and Nellie both know now. I think, I really do think, we all three know everything worth telling.”
“Sig was dead by the time you read your memoir to Eleanor.”
“Long dead. It’s odd to think of; I still muse about it, in a humorous sort of way. Sig always wanted a son, and he got two daughters at almost the same moment. Hilda wanted a son, and she got a daughter too, at almost the same moment. We were all three close when we were young, and we’re close again now. It’s as though Dorinda had gone under a spell for a time, and we all went under it with her; I’m glad it’s over. More than that,” and Kate had the sense of Anne’s saying something she had not quite formulated, not quite intended to say for a while yet, “we all have a second chance, a chance to live our friendship, to attend to what matters. And, most of all, a second chance for Gabrielle. Do you think all women really have a second chance, even if life hasn’t given them a clear first chance?”
“The history of the English novel is like that,” Kate said, sensing the need for an interval of impersonality. “From the very beginning, from Tom Jones and Moll Flanders up until Hardy, it was all about second chances. Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a fine example. And then with Hardy, second chances lost their force. Think of The Mayor of Casterbridge; an obvious example, but there are many others. I have a feeling now that, for women at any rate, second chances may be coming back.” Kate drank her beer and smiled at Anne.
“What did Dorinda say about Sig being your father as well as hers?” she asked.
“She said it shows you female genes are more powerful, at least for women, since we don’t look any more alike than our mothers, whom we both resemble. Nellie actually looks more like Sig, but she’s the daughter of his sister. Dorinda very nicely said we couldn’t have been closer if we had known we were half-sisters, and that’s quite simply true. And now it’s even truer, since we know.”
“Nellie seemed more obviously a relation,” Kate said. “Yet you and Nellie were as closely related as the other two. It all seems to go to prove how little difference fathers make.”
“Except to the fathers. What Nellie told you about herself made an enormous difference to Emile, I assure you. And if Eleanor had been anyone other than who she was, that fact of my father would have made an enormous difference to her.”
“Was your mother really married?”
“Oh, yes. I think she despised him, although no one ever spoke of him. In fact, when I asked her about him, she said he made no difference to me and I should not bother my head about him, which was closer to the truth than I ever guessed. He took off when my mother became pregnant; he didn’t want responsibility. Not that he knew I wasn’t his. I did ask Eleanor that. She said he never knew, and my mother wanted it that way. He died sometime later; that she did hear, but she never married again. I don’t believe any one of her sisters knew the truth; I’m sure they didn’t. They probably just thought my mother was being smart when she let the Goddards take me over.”
“Do you think Eleanor always knew?”
“Oh, yes. She was the one who helped my mother to get work, at which she was really very successful and highly paid. She only died a few years ago, you know, and she’d saved a good bit which came to me; I only wish she’d managed to spend it a little more wildly in her old age, but thrift with her was a passion. I realize now that when Dorinda suggested my coming to live with them, Eleanor seized on the idea, although she no doubt made it appear that Dorinda was once again getting her own way. I never changed a word of that memoir after I found out the truth. And yet, now you’ve read it, you know nothing in it contradicts that fact when you discover it. Yet nothing really required it either. I think it’s a lesson in biography; perhaps facts don’t matter all that much.”
“I’m afraid my position is asking impertinent questions,” Kate said. “But you said your mother left you ‘a good bit,’ and Nellie said you were hard up. I know ‘good bits’ are of different sizes, but was Nellie telling the truth?”
“She exaggerated a little. Len—the one in the memoir—lives with me now. He married someone else, but it didn’t finally last. He’s only got his pension and social security, but we like to take expensive trips on our vacations, and he likes to come with me when I travel on business. I think Nellie was adding another incentive to urge you to publish the papers, the hope of increasing my income. And it will increase it if you do, in a most welcome way. Nellie could use the income too, not out of desperate need, but she isn’t paid all that much and her husband makes very little from his books. We all do hope you’ll want to publish the papers.”
“Do you mind if I talk to Dorinda again before I decide whether to go with you to London or not?”
“Of course you must see Dorinda whenever you want. You don’t really have to come to London; I could go and ship the papers back. But I’d rather you came.”
“If I go on with this quite mad scheme, I’ll come,” Kate said. “After all, I have taken the whole year off, and what’s that for if not popping around the world? Besides, the simple truth is that I’m dying to see those papers—consumed, you might even say—so of course I’ll come.”
Anne rose to leave. “It’s been a lovely afternoon, lovely getting to know you, as the governess said in the song to the children of the king of Siam. The three of us saw that when we were young together.” Anne started to giggle. “I just remembered what Dorinda said when I told her about Sig being my father. ‘Aha,’ she said; ‘I should have known from a villainous trick of thine eye and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip.’ We read Henry IV, Part I in school. Of course, I wondered, we both did, how he had seduced my mother, whom he must have come across working in his house or someone else’s. But it doesn’t take much imagination. He was a reprobate and a charming one; my mother must have had some profound desires only partly buried. As I noticed when she danced. I never liked her, nor, I think, she me very much, but I did admire her, and I’m glad I saw her dance.”
Kate walked to the door with Anne, denying herself the many questions still to be asked. Their trust of her was, when you came to consider it, quite amazing. No doubt, having once determined on their and Gabrielle’s second chance, and having decided on Kate as their instrument, there was no turning back. She would see Dorinda again, and perhaps, just for the pleasure of it and because the chance might not be hers for long, Eleanor. Then she would go to London with Anne. After that—well, her decision was at least a clear one. Either she would do what they wanted or nothing at all. There was no other way in which she would tell the stories she had heard from the three of them nor any story she might in future hear.
In choosing to trust her, they had chosen well, and that, not unnaturally, endeared them to Kate. That other secrets might emerge to be reluctantly revealed was certainly possible. But once you decide to trust someone, you must trust them. Unless you are unmistakenly betrayed, there is never any turning back.