A Fugitive Truth (8 page)

As I tucked my feet under me and wrestled with the stopper, I tried to conjure up some image of a private club and was startled to realize that all my companions would have been men. Places like the Bellona, Diogenes, and Drones, although fictional, were strictly male preserves, as were the real-life Mohocks, White’s, and Button’s.

Well, damn, I thought disgustedly. I suppose if you can only afford prunes and stewed beef, there’s really no point in having a quiet place to enjoy sherry you haven’t got. In that case, I decided, lifting my glass, I will inaugurate the first, occasional meeting of the…what should it be called? Something to do with pioneering women, libraries, research…Hypatia popped into my mind, but I quickly rejected her name as too bad an omen. She had been a scholar at the library of ancient Alexandria, and met her demise when an angry crowd murdered her, believing that it was inappropriate for women to do such men’s work.

I shuddered and quickly ran down a list of other possible honorees: Bradstreet, Behn, Elizabeth, Franklin, Hathshepsut, Mead, Montagu, Roosevelt…I realized that I didn’t want anything too specific to one woman and immediately came up with the answer: The Bluestocking Club.

The whiskey was sterling. I let the next sip linger a bit more, savoring the sharp peaty bite, and allowed my eyes to unfocus on the fire as it hungrily devoured the dry wood. Lovely. I didn’t bother worrying about wretches with too much power and not enough to do, I didn’t worry about existential puzzles, I didn’t even bother trying to unravel more of the mysterious Madam C’s life. I snuggled into my sweater and tucked my feet up underneath me, nearly drowsing as I listened to the crackle and hissing of the fire, letting the smoke of the single-malt mingle with the smell of burning wood. After admiring the dull glow of my bracelet in the flickering light, I was feeling so mellow and content when the door opened a crack, that I didn’t even mind the intrusion. I decided that whoever it was would be welcome; the Bluestocking way was to be generous with guests. I would even show Jack what real booze was. Whoever knocked would be voted in with all the privileges, moved and seconded and passed by unanimous vote of one.

It took me a moment to realize that although it was neither Jack nor Michael, I recognized the face that peered from the narrow opening between the sliding doors. “Sasha? What are you—?”

But although there was a superficial resemblance to the manuscript librarian—blonde hair, same approximate height and build—this woman had none of Sasha’s vibrancy. Instead, angles and planes seemed to dominate the stranger’s profile, as if she was built to deflect unwanted attention. Over a dark turtleneck, she wore a sleek, narrowly cut jumper that I could see was made of a fine wool, but none of its warmth seemed to be conveyed to her features; her skin was as pale and cool as marble.

Then a name from the past surfaced and snapped into place alongside my vague recognition of the work being conducted by the fourth Shrewsbury Fellow.

“Good God, Faith Burnes!” I said with more enthusiasm than I might have without the soothing effect of the fire and the whiskey. “I haven’t seen you since…well, since Coolidge I guess! What are you doing here? How are you?”

The other woman started visibly at my robust greeting and looked around her, as if out of habit. “I’m not Faith Burnes anymore. I go by my maiden name, Morgan.” Then the penny dropped for her too, and her face relaxed into a cautious half smile. “Emma…Fielding, right?” she said slowly, working memory from the mire. “It has been a while, hasn’t it, since graduate school?” Then, almost reluctantly, “I thought I recognized your name on the memo. It’s been a long time.”

“It’s me, all right,” I said. “Look, come in, come in, have a seat, Dr. B—er, Doctor!” I gestured grandly. “Pull up a pew.”

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” she said, backing away quickly. “I just thought I’d left my notebook in here…”

There was no notebook, and we both knew it. “Nonsense, disturb! Look, really, let me get you a glass, this stuff is brilliant.” Perhaps a little too much “r” in brilliant, Emma? Better slow down, you’re overtired and the whiskey’s got a kick.

With a little effort, I extricated myself from my nest and toddled over to the cabinet and fetched another glass. “Honestly, won’t you join me? I’ve had the whole place to myself all night, I’ve been telling myself ghost stories and I need a bit of human companionship. You’d be doing me a favor. What have you been up to?”

Faith seemed to think about it for a moment, then, as if compelled by something other than her own will, slid the doors together behind her and glided over to the other chair. She picked up the bottle and looked at it thoughtfully, then turned her gaze at me. Her pause was overburdened with contemplation of a decision that had nothing to do with a drink, I thought. “Why not? For old times’ sake.”

I got the impression that she was talking about old times that had nothing to do with our brief, shared time in graduate school. Even though I’d been in the anthropology department and Faith had been in the English department, we’d ended up together in several classes on early American culture. I poured a measure and Faith drank. As an afterthought, she said, “Thank you.”

“Not at all.
Slàinte
!” I toasted, and settled back into my chair. “So tell me about your name. I’m a little out of the Coolidge loop, I guess.”

“No, no,” she said, “it’s not you. I am Faith Morgan now. I took my maiden name back after the divorce. I needed to be someone else after that.”

I frowned; that was such an odd way of putting it. But at least now I remembered why Sasha’s description of her work sounded so familiar despite the different name.

“I left Paul over two years ago,” she explained. “You met him back in Michigan, I think. He was a year ahead of me, two ahead of you. He was in the English department too. I brought him to a couple of functions.” She took another sip. “We’d been married a long time. Far too long.”

I nodded, only dimly remembering her husband—ex-husband, I corrected myself. Fiancé, when I knew him. My impression of him was not an appealing one; a cold fish, calculating, appraising, demanding. Oh, dear. Now that I thought of it, I also recalled thinking how perfect a match he was for long, blonde Faith. Two icicles flavored with disdain. But I hadn’t known her well and only interacted with her under the most constrained of circumstances. She seemed different to me now.

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately, taking another big sip from my drink to cover my discomfort. I had friends and bracelets, after all.

“So am I,” she replied briefly. She demolished a good inch of liquor. “Tell me, where are you now?”

So I plunged in with a brief outline of the last twelve years, more than willing to help build the bridge she’d started. Oddly, Faith seemed genuinely interested in what I’d done, and this surprised me. I found myself responding to her more warmly than I expected, not with the inflated lists of achievement generally reserved for trumping unlikable colleagues at conference brawls, but a plain history. She nodded throughout my description, then she too filled in a brief resume: several teaching stints, sporadic work on the book she came here to finish, finally settling in to a good job and new life in California after the divorce.

It took more than fifteen years and a thousand miles from where we first met before we could sustain something like a real conversation, give and take of even this limited sort. Not a giddy reminiscence filled with “and what abouts” and “do you remembers”—our earlier relationship had extended no further than cool formality at very best—but a civil exchange. We each had another couple of fingers and I calmed down: My fear that my premature bonhomie would trap me with the Ice Queen gave way to a recognition that we both had moved away from the guerrilla warfare of graduate school. That’s all it is, I thought. People can change. The satisfaction of having repaired something mangled by youth has a comfortable heft and a subtle, almond taste.

The warmth of the drink eventually drew back to reveal my underlying weariness, and, swaying a little, I rose to bank the fire and say good night. Then I realized that Faith had asked me for another glass. Unwilling to jeopardize our fragile bond—we were going to be housemates for the next weeks, after all—I poured her another shot, and an eighth inch for myself, and resumed my former position. But was it the dying light of the fire, or was her face more flushed than I remembered? There was something behind her green eyes that troubled me. Her fingers kept twitching at the fabric of her jumper as though they had a life of their own, until she caught herself doing it, and carefully tucked her legs underneath her, replacing the skirt so that it covered her tights to the tops of her shoes.

She noticed that I was watching her, though, and with a hostile glare, she unnecessarily smoothed the side of her perfect chignon. In that instant, I was transported back to Coolidge and my first encounter with Faith, who had evaluated me in this same unsparing fashion. A shadow crossed her face, or maybe the firelight shifted with a falling log.

Whatever I had lacked then, I apparently now possessed, for she said, “You know, I never liked you. No one could possibly be that…enthusiastic, that eager, and be for real, I thought. I thought, I assumed, you must be rather calculating. But you seem the same, only quieter now.”

She seemed to be waiting for some sort of reply. I shrugged, but I knew what she meant. “Life has a tempering effect,” I offered. Strange; I expected to feel more hurt at her admission, but the blisters failed to rise, and I realized that Faith was simply being honest. Her opinion didn’t mean anything to me. It suddenly occurred to me that ice is compact and brittle and being aloof is an excellent means of protection.

“Still, I wonder what you would have done. You know, I believe I trust you.” Without waiting for a response to that rather startling pronouncement, Faith launched into a narrative I would have given anything not to hear.

“I never believed it could happen to me. Even when I was living it, I didn’t understand that I was a battered woman. I mean, everyone
knows
that it’s only poor, uneducated women who get beat up, right, Emma?”

Faith’s sarcasm, a recrimination—against who knew what—slammed into me like a blow. I wasn’t certain I knew what she was talking about, all of a sudden, and yet had a sickening feeling I knew exactly what she was saying.

Faith got out of her chair and filled her glass nearly halfway with whiskey. She stared at a drop that had splashed out of the glass and onto the table, and then ran her finger through it, before she turned away from me and drank deeply. “I’m still learning to deal with the fact that I was too afraid to leave.” Faith turned on me. “You told me you married that guy you were seeing in Coolidge. What would you do if he hauled off and slapped you across the face with every ounce of strength in his body?”

I
OPENED MY MOUTH AND CLOSED IT
. T
HE SHOCK OF
the question and what it implied was as brutal as the act she described. Faith waited briefly for some quick, easy answer she knew I didn’t dare make, before she pounced.

“Right. Can’t even get your brain around the idea. Neither could I the first time it happened.” She sat down in the chair across from me and stared at the fire. Shadows danced across her profile, which was composed in spite of the harrowing tale she was telling.

“I couldn’t leave the house for two days. Paul’s handprint was a brand on my face.” She raised the glass to her mouth, but then didn’t drink. She set the glass down. “The first time. The first time should have been the signal to pack a bag, call the cops, and run like hell, right? Only it’s not that easy. I loved him. I knew he loved me. It could never happen again, it was just that we were both so worn out, had such a bad day.

“I say afraid, but maybe I should say vain. It still stings when I think just how classic my case was. Classic.” She shrugged. “Ordinary? Me? Of course, by the time I accepted what was really happening, I was too afraid to leave. But don’t delude yourself, Emma. It can happen to anyone.”

I thought about protesting, I wanted to protest, but I knew that, in a way, she was right: It could happen to anyone. Without thinking, I reached for her, but Faith went rigid at the gesture. I wrapped my arms around myself instead.

“The trick is,” Faith was saying, “the trick is not to think about it, ever. Of course you can’t, but you try to make this perfect little shell around you, try to keep everything out. Drinking’s good. Valium’s better. But something always gets through, ruins your concentration, and you screw up. Then it happens.” She picked up the glass and took another swallow of the whiskey, savoring its bite, considering what she’d said. For a moment, I thought she was shaping the story as she told me, but then I recognized that for wishful thinking. Knock it off and listen, Emma, I rebuked myself.

“It doesn’t matter to someone like Paul that mistakes happen. Mistakes happen every day. And every action begets an equal and opposite reaction. But…it took me a long time to realize no one ever does anything to deserve…what he did to me. For so long.”

I felt ill. Growing colder and more sober by the second, I couldn’t imagine getting up and doing something as homely as adding another log to the lagging fire. Worse still, the way that Faith recounted her story left no room for me to offer comfort, sympathy—even my anger for her seemed insufficient, like it would be an insult to offer it. I wanted to stop this outpouring, this
mechanical
relation. I wanted to be a million miles away, with all of this just a faceless statistic and in a small, hidden part of myself, I knew I resented her for personalizing this atrocity.

The fact that I was spellbound only added to my horror.

Faith held up her glass to carefully observe the last half inch of amber liquid. Something about her expression was chilling, as though she was relishing holding us both in thrall with her story. She went on, calmly, deliberately. I had been telling myself ghost stories, and now she served me up a true tale of horror.

“The problem was, that in between times, things seemed really good, just like when we first met. There was always some excuse I could find to explain the last time. My fault or his, it
couldn’t
happen again. So things went on, what felt like normal life, until the next disappointment at work, the next too-big credit-card bill, the next…there was always a next. And Paul was always very careful to take me to a different hospital, always had a perfectly believable story. Who’d have doubted him? He was gorgeous, well respected—hell, people felt sorry for him, saddled with a wife who drank and popped pills and got herself into the
worst
accidents. He’s one hell of a good actor; he believed himself. I believed him. I helped: I developed a talent for lying. I became clever with makeup. I learned about first aid.”

I realized that she had been silent a moment and I, needing to fill up that awful silence, asked the only question possible under the circumstances.

“How did you ever manage to leave?”

Faith uttered a short, humorless laugh. “I was in the hospital, but this time it wasn’t because of Paul. I couldn’t stand the wait anymore. I decided to kill myself.

“Once I thought of that, I knew everything was going to be okay. I felt very calm; the tension simply left me, for the first time in years. There was this delicious sense of anticipation, like I was getting ready for a big date. I bought an expensive bottle of vodka, took a long, hot bath, and dressed in a silk nightie. A Billie Holiday record played as I set out the Valium and the vodka in a nice arrangement.”

I bit my lip, trying to resist imagining someone who so welcomed death.

Faith watched me for a moment, then continued. “When I woke up in the hospital, they told me how lucky I was that I threw up all the pills I’d swallowed. Lucky. Can you believe it? Then Paul came to visit. He charmed the devil out of everyone there; only this time I didn’t believe his soft words. You see, he’d found my note. I saw the look in his eyes, something I’d only ever seen the edge of before, and I knew, sure I was still breathing, that when I went home
he
would kill me. And no one would ever know about it.

“I decided that was
one
decision he wasn’t going to make for me,” she said. Inside I cheered, feeling giant relief at this welcome, recognizable emotion.

“So I told the nurse.” She said softly: “And then it was like going through withdrawal.”

The effect of three rapidly swallowed drinks was starting to catch up with Faith and her words became slurred and more insistent. I tried to say something, anything, but this had never been anything like a discussion.

“I won’t bore you with the details. Just let’s say that the legal system doesn’t do battered women any favors. Despite what you might think, domestic violence is not taken seriously. The day I was most afraid was the day that Paul went to prison. That’s when the really hard work began. Hard work on me, reshaping how I thought. But I did it.”

Faith got up and jabbed at the coals with the poker, startling hot life out of the embers. Turning, she must have seen me as I felt; horrorstruck, curled up and pressing myself into the back of my chair. She took pity on me, maybe, or maybe she was just getting tired. She shook her head, wobbling a little as she sat again.

“Emma, the good news is I got out.” She waved her hand drunkenly in front of her face and her words were slurred. “Don’t worry about me. It will take five years. I’m still processing the anger.” She drained the rest of the liquor from her glass. “Only now, I’m not angry with me. There’s a big long line of folks who deserve it more. And you know, not all of them hit me.

“Some just didn’t speak up. Some, after I’d left and they found out, asked in the politest way possible what I’d done to deserve it. There’s a negative aura that surrounds a woman when people know she’s filed a restraining order—
she
must be dangerous.
She’s
the one who’s unstable.
She
must be to blame.

“And it was because of that idea that it took me forever, once I spoke up, to realize that
it wasn’t me
. Four little syllables, a whole universe away. But I got there.” She got up and brushed off her skirt with an exaggerated, almost flippant, gesture and stumbled a little as she walked to the door. “And now I’m here.”

“Faith,” I started lamely, sincerely, “if there’s anything I can do for you, please, let me know. I will do it.”

She looked at me and smiled. It was an unhappy smile and not at all reasssuring.

“I know you will, Emma. I know you will.” And with that, Faith left me crouched in my chair, all alone in the cold, dark library.