“It’s not unheard of,” Fullerton said.
After Dey Street, Edith said she wanted to see where the murder had occurred. Now she and Fullerton stood side by side gazing up at the dull beige brick of the National Arts Club. She tried to imagine the currents of three lives in that ungainly space—was it always the same two against one, or did the alliances ever shift? As she envisioned Carolyn Frevert moving from room to room and man to man, she was so absorbed, she forgot Fullerton was with her until he spoke.
He had been ominously quiet in the taxi over. She suspected it was something to do with the money she had asked him to pay Frevert, but surely he understood that she had given over a much greater sum to the landlady. Anxious, she had tried to engage him by pointing out sights that had changed; he had not even bothered to look. His only contribution to the conversation had been to remark that Henry Frevert was a complete nonentity and Carolyn Frevert a wise woman to have left him. His instinctive siding with the leaver left her on the side of the abandoned. Tartly, she responded that if decent were deemed a synonym for dull, it was a sad world.
She noted that Fullerton had not specified what was unheard of; she was meant to ask. Asking would give him permission to say things she might not wish to hear. She sensed that his mood had turned malicious. Recalling Henry’s snipe about cousins and half-sisters, Edith decided not to respond.
Instead, she envisioned David Graham Phillips’s last journey. He would have come sauntering out of the building, preoccupied by his own greatness and the world’s wickedness. His head would have been down, she thought; hers was when she was thinking hard. And as it was a walk he had taken many times, he would not need to look where he was going. So he hadn’t seen the man with the gun until it was too late.
The quiet homeliness of the block, the brevity of the walk, struck her as painful. David Graham Phillips’s life had ended so quickly after he left this place. He had died so close to home.
That felt important. She reiterated the thought: He died close to home. And the letters had come to his home.
“What?” asked Fullerton.
“I am thinking of letters.”
In her preoccupation with David Graham Phillips’s home, she had forgotten that letters were a charged subject. The word hung, awkward and twisting, between them until she broke the mood, saying briskly, “Prior to his death, David Graham Phillips received several threats. Some were sent to the Princeton Club. Others came here.”
“Which means the killer knew his address,” said Fullerton, catching her line of thought.
“More than that, he knew his movements, the precise times he came and went. Not easy, even with a man of habit such as David Graham Phillips.”
“So, the killer was watching the house.”
“Precisely.”
But where had the killer stood as he charted the writer’s movements? It would be difficult to stand for hours in such a quiet neighborhood and not be noticed. Especially in the frigid air of January. If he had waited on the street, why hadn’t David Graham Phillips noticed him? A man who was receiving death threats would surely be aware of anyone watching or following him. A man idling close to his house would be suspicious, especially if one saw him repeatedly.
Turning, she gazed up at the surrounding buildings, then across the street where a row of drab, anonymous houses slumped along the block, interrupted only by a large, squat building that seemed to be an institute, judging by the plaque bearing the name RAND SCHOOL. The upper floors seemed to be lodgings. From a distance, she peered into windows. Saw nothing more incriminating than curtains and pane glass.
But there was a second possibility: The killer knew David Graham Phillips’s habits because he knew David Graham Phillips. A stranger would be noticeable on these streets, seen as possibly dangerous by a man who was being threatened. But a friend, a relative, a colleague …
But Fullerton was restless. “Is it a large apartment?” he asked.
It was the same artless tone he had used with Frevert, but she heard the subversion. “Not especially. Let’s walk his path to the Princeton Club.”
She started on ahead. He remained where he was.
“Two bedrooms,” he clarified.
“Yes, two bedrooms,” she said shortly.
She hoped her tone was a warning. But he smiled. She had answered; that was all that mattered.
As they approached Gramercy Park, she was careful not to look at him. She partly guessed what he wished to spring on her, and she hoped to avoid the trap.
Princeton, she realized, was also a charged subject between them. As were sisters. She had always known she was not the only woman to exchange letters with Morton Fullerton. Sometimes he read them in her presence, smiling as he did so. Always, she feigned lack of interest. But once, unable to resist, she peeked and saw the words “Ah, my own, my own!” She never looked again.
Several months after that, Fullerton’s adopted sister, Katharine, arrived in Paris. The young woman was ardent and literary, quite without the defenses of wit or irony. She had studied at Radcliffe, lectured at Bryn Mawr. She sent Edith a poem on the subject of Dante and Beatrice. Edith was unsure: Was it a confession? An inquiry? Or was she simply looking for affirmation? In the end, she sent praise, and an invitation to see Isadora Duncan.
“Does she know?” she asked Fullerton afterwards.
“Of course not.”
Do I know? she had wondered, and elected not to ask. She always felt lies were the worst humiliation he could inflict upon her. And yet he could use the truth—toy with it anyway—to unsettle her as well. Always, he … reversed things. If she did not beg for him, he called her cold. When she showered him with adoration, he accused her of suffocating him. She declared him free to do as he wished; he insisted she did not mean it. And now when she wished to discuss a murder, he wished to discuss love between brother and sister. And not because he truly believed it was the motive for the murder, but because he wished to see her off balance. Il ne m’aime pas.
Last year, Katharine Fullerton had married a Chaucer scholar at Princeton. Seeing the club rising above the gates of Gramercy Park, Edith thought to push it all out into the open. Lightly, she would say, Don’t you know someone at Princeton? But it was not a fight she would win.
“The shooter,” asked Fullerton. “Did he come up from behind or shoot him face-to-face?”
“As I understand it, they were face-to-face. The two witnesses were coming out of the building and they only saw the back of the shooter. One remembered a striped scarf.” Had William Walling worn a striped scarf? She tried to recall.
“But Phillips didn’t say anything?”
“Such as ‘My God, so-and-so, why have you shot me, I thought we were friends’? Nothing so useful.”
“But it was a man.”
In his eyes, a focus that demanded he join her in his thoughts. She found it hard to resist. “Yes, of course a man. What are you implying?”
He put his hands in his pockets. “I find it interesting that Phillips’s marital status was the subject of the final argument between the murdered man and Henry Frevert.”
“Your point?”
“I wonder how Mr. Frevert felt, being kicked out of bed for his brother-in-law.”
She had asked for honesty, she reminded herself. Well, here it was. Camarades should be able to negotiate such a conversation. But she felt his hunger for her distress. She would not give it to him.
“David Graham Phillips was complex,” she said finally. “But rather pure-minded in that frank American way. I feel the arrangement you are suggesting would have struck him as decadent. Aristocratic.”
“Hardly the first hypocrite to rail against what he desires.”
“No, he disliked hypocrisy in matters of sex.” She thought of that pompous introduction to Susan Lenox: There are three ways of dealing with the sex relations of men and women—two wrong and one right.
“He wrote about it a great deal in his novels. So much so that his editor believes one of the more deranged Comstockians might have killed him.”
“So, he liked writing about it. Did he ever … engage?”
She thought of what Henry Frevert had told her. That there had been a woman possessed of wits “worthy” of David Graham Phillips. It was worth noting that Carolyn Frevert had not been possessive of her brother. To the contrary, if her husband was to be believed, she was pleased he had found someone.
Wanting the matter of Henry Frevert’s innocence decided, she announced, “You think Frevert shot his brother-in-law out of jealousy and a wish to reconcile with his wife. But it is not as you suggest. For one thing, the landlady’s account is persuasive. If she wanted a nonpaying tenant out of her house, what better way to evict him than to announce he was suspiciously absent the day his brother-in-law was murdered? Not to mention, the Freverts had been separated for some time. Why would Frevert suddenly take against his brother-in-law so violently as to shoot him?”
Fullerton shrugged, as if the loss of his Greek tragedy bothered him not at all. “Then perhaps a different jealous husband?”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“Do you have a theory?”
She did, but not one she wished to share with him. To do so would invite the possibility of introducing him to the person she had in mind. Which—one could call it jealousy; one could call it whim—she had no intention of doing.
Instead, looking through the bars at the slush-sodden grounds, she remarked on the hubris of building such an ungainly fence around such an unprepossessing bit of park. “It doesn’t make it an Eden, keeping the sinners out.”
“Was it sin?” Fullerton looked at her. “As I remember it was a choice. Ignorance and bliss. Or knowledge and exile.”
“Poor Eve, if only there had been somewhere in Eden to quietly dispose of an apple core.”
“Ah, but could she rely on the serpent’s discretion?”
Again, he was teasing—no, insulting. Ne m’aime pas. It was time, she decided, to assert matters important to her.
Turning to face him, she said, “My letters.”
“I cherish them,” he said, his tone deliberately bland.
“You will have to cherish the memory. I want them back.”
Theatrically, he patted his coat to indicate he did not have them at present.
Impatient, she said, “When you return to Paris, send them to me.”
She waited for his of course. It did not come. What could she say that would not be pleading? You returned Henry’s letters. Henry, so reserved in person, allowed his emotions full and free expression on the page, to a degree that would be shocking to those who did not know him and even some who did. His letters often came with the instruction “Commit this to the flame.” Recently, he had made a bonfire of much of his correspondence, some of it from her. She had grieved, but also felt deep relief.
Now she had a disquieting thought. Last year, she and Henry had rescued Fullerton from his own epistolary folly, giving him the money to retrieve letters of a sensitive nature from a vicious little blackmailer named Madame Mirecourt.
Had Fullerton taken an ugly lesson from Madame Mirecourt?
“If it is money,” she said with difficulty.
“Ah, here it is!” he cried, suddenly furious. “Always with you, it is money. It is what gives you power, so again and again, you brandish it over my head like a whip. How can you say this … to me?”
So—she had been wrong to tell him to pay Frevert. She cringed with remorse, even as a small, exasperated part of her thought, Because you are often in need of money. It should not be heresy to say so.
“Does this mean you’ve decided about Teddy?” he asked. “You’re afraid the letters could be used against you in a divorce?”
His interest surprised her. Intrigued her. But she must not be drawn. “It means I would like my letters back.”
“Why?”
“Because they are mine.” And before he could object, she said, “You have no use for them. You’ve made that clear.”
“Then yes, of course,” he said, straightening. “When we return.”
His careless acquiescence hurt, as it was meant to. And she knew: He was lying. When she was in Paris, the letters would be in London. Or Boston. He meant to keep them, she realized. For what purpose she didn’t know. He would keep her letters, keep her raw, exposed self. And there was nothing she could do about it.
Except one thing.
I will write this, she thought. I will write you and understand you and make you a thing that I create. And I will write that other woman too, that young ardent girl, because I am not afraid of her. I can look at her. I can even look at myself in the reflection of her youth and your obsession with her. I can do that. That power, I do have.
Spotting a taxi on the other corner, she suggested that he go and fetch it.
As she watched him go, she thought of writers and lovers. Really, it was almost unfair that writers could take revenge in print on those who had wounded them in life, twisting the story and its characters any way they liked.
But that was not exactly true, not if the writer was good. Which was to say honest. Something authentic about the beloved usually appeared on the page. Something perhaps even … recognizable.
Susan Lenox. Had she been inspired by a real woman? A real love—and loss? Had Phillips written so much about her so he could, in some way, spend time with a woman he cared for but could not have?
Getting into the taxi, she instructed the driver to take her to Appleton. It was several blocks before she realized she had not said a proper goodbye to Morton Fullerton. In fact, she had all but forgotten him.