The Edge of Doom (6 page)

Reed had, more than once, heard from Kate how conventional her mother was, insisting that Kate go to dancing school and behave in a manner appropriate to the mother’s ideas of ladylike behavior. Reed had often wondered what would have happened if Louise had lived past sixty, long enough to face the fact that Kate was determined to be a professional, a feminist and a far from ladylike woman. Louise had become ill some years before her death, and had not challenged Kate, nor disputed with her. Reed wondered now if perhaps it was not her illness, but her memories of Kate’s father that explained her tolerance of Kate’s decisions.

He did not mention this. “What sort of temporary work did you undertake when you weren’t being an architect?” he asked.

“Subcontracting, usually, or just working as a builder. I liked learning how one put up buildings, or how to renovate them; it was work I could almost always get. In good times, workers with experience were needed; in bad times, workers who came cheap were desired. That was how it went, during most of the between periods.”

Reed could think of nothing else to ask. In fact, he could think of much else to ask, but this hardly seemed the time or place for such questions; some of them could never be asked. As to the résumé, he needed to study it more closely, and perhaps make a few inquiries.

“You’ve been most agreeable about all this,” he said to Jay. “You might well have told me to stuff it.”

“I’m glad you wanted to know more about me. I’m glad Kate’s married to someone who cared to find out more about her father.”

“I wouldn’t have even met with you unless Kate agreed,” Reed said.

“I took that for granted.”

Reed smiled, and reached for his wallet.

“Do let me pay,” Jay said. “I’ve been the cause of all this inquiry.”

“Another time,” Reed said.

CHAPTER SIX

Do you not know I am a woman?
When I think I must speak.

Reed handed Jay’s résumé to Kate.

“He gave it to you?” she asked, glancing at it. “It’s all typed up. You mean he brought it to you unasked?”

“All of those,” Reed said. “He’s no fool; he guessed why I wanted to see him. This was to show me how he’d spent his life and that he was as open as anyone could be.”

“A busy life,” Kate said, reading the résumé. “He worked as an architect or builder most of the time; just as he told us. Is his architecture firm still in existence?”

“Oh, yes. See, he gives the address, the phone numbers, the name of his partner who now runs it. All clean and above board.”

“Why do I catch a note of skepticism? I take it the lunch did nothing to assuage your doubts about him.”

“Look at that résumé more carefully.”

Kate studied it in detail, pausing over each entry. “There are lacunae, of course. And whatever it was he was doing seems a little vague after he went west, but is that so unexpected? And doesn’t everyone have gaps unless they’re trying to be appointed as a judge or attorney general?”

“He explained the gaps to some extent. In between jobs in restoration he worked temporarily as a subcontractor, a carpenter, a bricklayer possibly. That’s not what’s troubling me. Look at the years between 1970 and 1975.”

“I see,” Kate said. “Nothing much there. Perhaps we are to assume that it was temporary jobs again.”

“Why not say so?”

Kate smiled. “I don’t remember you being this serious before, this doubtful. Is there something about Jay that’s getting to you? Aside from the fact that he’s my father.”

“That’s rather a bigger aside than usual. Perhaps I’m jealous of this new man in your life; perhaps I’m just naturally a mean, suspicious person. I can’t really tell you why, but I sense something not quite right. It need not be something to his discredit; it may merely be something he’d rather not disclose. If you don’t want me to snoop, just say so.”

“Of course you must snoop as you choose, provided you keep me informed of all you uncover.” Kate grinned at him. “But as you keep telling me, whatever he had to offer me in the way of a paternal inheritance he’s already done. Nothing we can find out will change that.”

“Kate,” Reed said, answering the undertone rather than her words. “If you have the slightest hesitation about my looking further into the life of Jay Ebenezer Smith, just say so. As you so wisely point out, there’s nothing to be learned that could affect you in any way.”

“Do you think the name is made up too? It does sound a bit unlikely.”

“Only because Smith is so common a name that, if we suspect someone of dishonesty who says his name is Smith, we tend to assume he’s lying.”

“That is not a logical sentence,” Kate said.

“No, but it’s a logical thought which, as usual, I trust you to disentangle from my sorry syntax.”

They were again in Reed’s study, where Kate had found him on her return from the university. She fully extended his lounge chair and lay in it quietly for some minutes. Reed, behind his desk where he had been working, watched her. One of his most prized qualities, in Kate’s view, was that he could look at her and wait to hear her response, not, as with so many of the males she encountered, waiting to speak themselves, or retreating into their own private musings.

“I can’t decide if I want to know more about him or not,” she eventually said, having tried to sort out her thoughts. “I want to go on seeing him from time to time, to stay in touch. I’ll certainly be interested, not to say engrossed, in anything I learn about him. But whether or not I think we, you, ought to dig into his past is a different question. We both realize, I hope, that those missing years will turn out to have been a series of jobs so repetitive and dull that he saw no point in reporting them; probably he couldn’t even remember them all.”

“Probably,” Reed said.

“But if I agree, you’d still like to dig a little?”

“I think so.”

“Well,” Kate said, pulling herself and the lounge chair into an upright position, “I can’t imagine how you’d even begin, but if begin you must, you have my agreement, if not quite my blessing. I’ve never investigated the past, exactly. I’ll learn a lot watching how you do it.”

“You’re already beginning to discourage me,” Reed said. “But not definitively.”

The next day, a Friday, Kate went in the afternoon to talk with her friend Leslie Stewart, who was a painter and could be found in her studio, happy—if her guest was both expected and welcome—to put down her brush and relax. Between her and Kate there was likely to be brisk and enjoyable conversation. They went into the kitchen where, as was their habit, they drank tea, which Kate never did anywhere else, and nibbled on ginger cookies.

“I take it that acquiring a father this late in life is having disruptive effects?” Leslie said. “I don’t wonder. Finding out in one’s later middle years, as I did, that one is in love with a woman is certainly an astonishing experience, but this is even more noteworthy. And to think that without DNA he could have claimed fatherhood till the cows came home, and you would hardly have believed him. At least, you would never have known for sure and could have sent him packing.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Kate said. “He was clever enough to prove he was my father before suggesting that we meet. One shudders to think what the world will be like in future years with all our genes mapped and if necessary altered, to say nothing of giving away the secrets of the marriage bed.”

“Or the hurly-burly of the chaise longue, as Shaw or someone put it. Did you want to discuss genes or your father?” Leslie asked. “I’m ready for either, though at the moment I find the latter more challenging.”

“That’s just it,” Kate said. “I can’t decide whether I think his turning up is challenging or, after the first shock, simply another fact to be calmly accepted. It’s a romantic story, all right, and certainly casts my mother in a new light; but all that’s the past. Does the fact of this man have any bearing on my future, or my peace of mind?”

“Maybe it depends what you think about fathers generally. They, after all, particularly for our generation and the women before us, are the carriers of the patriarchy, the male world, the sense of men as human beings and women as an interesting, if usually annoying, appendage. Does it matter who carries the disease?”

“It may matter whether the carrier—to continue your metaphor—is infecting one purposely, accidentally, or not at all.”

“Good point, Kate. But surely whatever effect either father might have had, or did have on you, is hardly significant now. It’s not as though some other woman had turned out to be your mother.”

“That, I’m relieved to say, would have been impossible. After all, my brothers would have noticed if there had been a substitution.”

“Anyway, of what importance were mothers in our day? If it comes to that, what is there to be said about the relationship between mothers and daughters at any time—speaking honestly, of course.”

“I didn’t have much of a relationship with my mother,” Kate said. “But I did come to realize some years ago that she had permitted me, without hysterical confrontations or without confessing it, to live the life I wanted, or to prepare for the life I wanted. She died before she had to witness the results of her tolerance. And it was a tolerance cleverly camouflaged by her insistence on conventionality. Now that I know she had a lover, she returns to me in a new light, or at least from a new perspective. Perhaps that’s the most important result of Jay’s materializing at this late date.”

“Your mother’s dead; you can afford to be sentimental and ooze gratitude,” Leslie said, pouring more tea. “Dead mothers are one thing. Living mothers—and remember, I’m one, as well as a daughter and an observant woman—are at best necessary supplements to life whom we tolerate, if we are kind, with courtesy and generosity. Remember, that’s at best. More often than not there’s a residue of resentment on both sides, and civility is barely maintained.”

“Leslie, motherhood has never been your long suit in the game of life,” Kate said, relishing the idiom or cliché, though she hadn’t a clue what card game was providing the metaphor. “Anyway, I’ve acquired a father, not a mother.”

“I will say for you, Kate, that you’ve never gone on about the emptiness in your life because you don’t have children. I try to convince childless women of the advantages of their condition, but they just say since I have children I haven’t a right to speak on the subject. That seems to me an idiotic objection there’s no way out of. The truth is, Kate, you get more pleasure from your present and past graduate students, to say nothing of your niece and nephew, than most people, myself included, get from their children.”

“I get pleasure only from some graduate students, and only from two of my many nieces and nephews,” Kate said defensively. “And don’t forget Benedict’s defense: ‘The world must be peopled.’ ”

“Not these days. With all this genetic work curing and preventing diseases, everyone will live forever, and we had better find a way not to people the world, and soon.”

“Genes, again. You see, they do keep turning up. Now could we get back to my father?”

“Right,” Leslie said. “Why not just enjoy it. Let all the ramifications of your genetic heritage whirl about in your brain, follow each supposition to its illogical but fascinating conclusion, and then just look on him as a new friend. That’s my advice. You did come for my advice, didn’t you.”

“I came for the tea. Reed is suspicious of Jay. Not of his motives in turning up, but of his past, which Reed seems to suspect of being murky.”

“Well, there’s murky and murky. Promise not to spare me a single detail.”

“What I can’t decide,” Kate said, “and I know I keep returning to this, is what difference it makes who was one’s father. I mean, half a century later, what can Jay’s appearance possibly mean?”

“Now that’s an easy one. It obviously provides a simple, irrefutable explanation of why you aren’t a standard Fansler. No one else in the family turned out even remotely interesting; I bet they all voted for George W. Bush in 2000.”

“No doubt. But am I really ready to believe—which I never had to do before—that it is only spermatozoa that made me what I am today.”

“Probably. And yesterday, and all the days before that. Is the truth of your paternal heritage so disturbing, and if so, why?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said.

“I do. You have long prided yourself, with justification, on breaking away from every opportunity to be a self-satisfied, conventional, right-wing, wealthy, socially established Fansler. Now it turns out, you don’t get any credit, or not much. It all goes to Jay—whom I insist upon meeting in the very near future.”

“I might have had Jay for a father and still become a traditional Fansler. After all, that was my upbringing, my identity.”

“I know that, you owl. I’m just teasing you. But I do think Jay’s appearance has ever so slightly dented your amour propre.”

Kate sighed. She was not about to admit to Leslie the stunning accuracy of her analysis, but she was beginning to acknowledge it to herself. “And what shall I do if my father turns out to have been something either illegal or shameful or maybe both?”

“If you’re worried about it, I’d stop Reed from investigating. You’d have gone on with your life quite nicely, thank you, if your father had never darkened your door, but since he has, why not let well enough alone?”

“Good question, but I told Reed he could go ahead. I don’t feel entitled, after the life I’ve led, to turn away from learning something just because it might turn out to be disturbing.”

“You’re right, of course. Now,” Leslie said, “could I complain for a while? There is more that can be annoying in life than was ever dreamed of in your philosophy. Art galleries, for example.”

And they went on to speak of Leslie’s life.

But the question of how to think about Kate’s father, or whether to investigate him, or whether his appearance affected Kate’s view of herself—these questions vanished almost without a trace. Jay Ebenezer Smith disappeared as suddenly and as shockingly as he had materialized.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I will acquaint my daughter withal, that she may
be better prepared for an answer . . .
Go you, and tell her of it.

It was several days before Kate noticed that Jay had not called as promised, and that calls to him were not answered; nor was there any longer a machine to take messages. Well, she thought at first, anyone can be called out of town, or be faced with some unforeseen demand. But when a week beyond when he had said he would call her had gone by, she asked Reed if he thought she should look into the matter.

Reed found it odd that Jay had promised to call Kate and failed to do so. People often made empty promises, but surely if one had gone to so much trouble to look up a daughter one had not seen in half a century or more, one would not simply forget to make a promised telephone call. In the end Reed offered to go around to his apartment and see if he could learn anything about Jay’s whereabouts. Kate said she would come, too.

Jay had told them that he had sublet a small apartment in a large building near Astor Place; toward this they set off on a Saturday morning. Banny looked woeful at being left by both of them, but settled down, head on paws, to await their return.

“Meeting this man involves a certain amount of unaccustomed intracity travel,” Kate observed. “First Laurence’s club, then you off to the Plaza, now we move on to Astor Place.”

They took the subway to West Fourth Street and walked eastward across town to the address Jay had given them. It turned out to be a large building indeed; in fact, it occupied a square block, and was guarded at the entrance by two men who demanded to know to whom they wished to be announced. Reed began by giving Jay’s name in the usual way, but was hardly surprised when the house phone to his apartment failed to elicit a reply.

“Have you seen Mr. Smith lately?” Reed asked the doorman.

“Not lately, no,” the man replied, as though he had just realized this. With as many apartments as this house contained, the doorman grumpily explained, he could hardly remember who came and went. But, it seemed, he could dredge up a memory of who had not come or gone. “It’s a while since I’ve seen him, now that you ask,” the man said. “Maybe a week; maybe less.”

“Might we be able to look into his apartment?” Reed asked. “Just to be sure that he is not there; not, perhaps, ill or injured.”

The doorman looked them over. Kate had the impression that were they, well, less proper looking, or younger, he might have simply refused. As it was, he agreed to call the superintendent, leaving the decision up to him. Kate wondered if Reed had plans beyond the legal way of getting into the apartment, and reminded herself to ask him later.

If Reed had nurtured more nefarious plans to gain entrance to Jay’s apartment, he did not need them. The superintendent led them to the elevators, thence to one of many doors on a long corridor. He knocked loudly, waited, knocked again and called. Then he opened the door with his master key, still calling. There was no response; the apartment looked not only empty but deserted, though Kate would have been hard put to explain exactly in what this impression of abandonment consisted.

They followed the superintendent as he walked about the apartment, opening the doors to closets; all the other doors to the few rooms, even to the bathroom, stood open. It was what was usually called a three-room apartment: living room, bedroom, kitchen, bath. There was a small foyer, and a generous allotment of closets. The whole place was neat, as though it had been recently cleaned, although a light layer of dust on some of the furniture suggested that another cleaning was shortly due.

Even as they stood in the living room trying to decide what the apartment was telling them, if anything, there came a knock on the apartment door, which stood open. It was, evidently, the cleaning woman. She greeted the superintendent, and stared at Reed and Kate.

“Anything wrong?” she asked.

“I hope not, Maria,” the super said. “These are friends of Mr. Smith’s; it seems he hasn’t been heard from these last few days. This”—the super turned to Reed and Kate—“is Maria. She cleans for several people in the building, and for the people from whom Mr. Smith sublet this apartment. When were you last here, Maria?”

“A week ago,” she said. “I hope nothing’s wrong with Mr. Smith.”

“Probably nothing is,” the super said. “He’s probably had to go away suddenly and forgot to notify his friends.”

“He always leaves me a note and my money,” Maria said.

They looked again, but found no note, no money.

“Perhaps you had better come back another day, Maria,” the super said.

“Before you go, Maria,” Reed said, “would you be good enough to look around—the kitchen, the bathroom, everywhere—and tell us if you think anyone has been here since you last cleaned?”

Maria nodded and went to examine the rooms as she had been requested to do. The woman was Hispanic but spoke excellent English. Reed in his long legal career had met many like her. Clearly intelligent, she worked as a cleaning woman, but her children went to parochial schools and would go to college; they would never need to clean other people’s homes. It was, in Reed’s opinion, a not unusual, yet admirable and difficult immigrant story; it had a long history. The countries of origin changed, but not the hard work or the ambitions for the next generation.

Maria returned to report that no one had been here since her last visit. She could tell from the bathroom and kitchen, although nothing seemed to have been touched in the other rooms. Mr. Smith’s bed was still made as she had made it a week ago; he left it unmade for her to change the sheets. The kitchen was exactly as she had left it; the bathroom shower and towels had not been used.

They thanked Maria and, when she had left, asked the superintendent if they might look through Mr. Smith’s drawers and closets for a clue as to where he might have gone. The super was reluctant to give this permission, but did, hovering over Reed as he opened drawers and closet doors. Nothing of the slightest significance emerged from this search. Nor was there anything worth noting in or on the desk: no address book, no date book, no computer. The closets contained only a minimum of clothes, supposedly Jay’s. The contents of the linen closet and the kitchen cupboards obviously belonged to the apartment’s owners. The only clue to be found was the blatant evidence that nothing of Jay’s remained, no sign of him, no indications, apart from his few clothes, that he had ever been here.

“Did you meet Mr. Smith?” Reed asked the super.

“Oh, yes. I greeted him when he moved in. We only allow apartments to be sublet for brief periods, and under certain conditions. I always keep an eye on subtenants; there’s rarely any trouble. He was a pleasant man.” Which, Reed thought, probably meant that he was a good tipper and didn’t complain about anything.

They left the apartment, the super carefully double-locking the door and then escorting them to the building’s entrance. Clearly, life in this multiple dwelling was closely watched; there were monitors in the entrance hall, showing the elevators and all of the lobby not directly in the doorman’s vision, allowing him to oversee all comings and goings. Somehow, Kate admitted as they walked away, the place made her nervous. She supposed that if one lived there, one might get used to it. Maybe.

“Most of the tenants are probably older people who have moved back to the city from the suburbs, or from large city apartments,” Reed said. “They value security above all else.”

“Do you suppose Jay knew the people he rented the apartment from?” Kate asked.

“I doubt it. Though he must have been pretty thoroughly vetted. I think I’ll get in touch with the building’s management firm and see what information he gave them.”

This additional inquiry, however, produced nothing of interest. Jay had given the name of the architecture firm with which he still maintained some connection, his bank, his broker. In addition, he had paid all the rent he would owe in advance, so there was no question of his defaulting.

“Do subletters always do that?” Kate asked that evening as they reviewed what information they had gathered—hardly new information at all.

“No. It’s a bit unusual. Why pay in advance instead of letting the money accumulate interest in the bank or elsewhere? It almost seems as though he was preparing for a quick exit, if necessary.”

“Which you think he has done—exited, I mean?”

“It looks that way. Of course, there may be a perfectly simple explanation. Time will tell.” But from his tone, Kate rather doubted Reed believed this.

“Would you have broken into that apartment if we hadn’t got in as we did?” Kate asked.

“I’d hardly have broken in,” Reed said, smiling. “But I would have managed to get in some way or other.”

The question was: what to do next? Ought they to do anything?

Reed walked up and down the room, deep, Kate suspected, in the contemplation of various plots. “I don’t like it, Kate,” he finally said. “I haven’t really liked it from the beginning; I admit that. To turn up as he did is odd enough, but then to disappear. If it weren’t for the DNA evidence, I’d set the police after him.”

“Or at least a private detective.” She grinned at him.

“I think we just wait a few days and see if anything happens.”

“And then?”

“We just wait.”

Reed, however, while he was ostensibly waiting, got in touch with Yale’s alumni office, asking to confirm that Jason Ebenezer Smith had been a student in the architecture school; he gave the years of attendance as Jay had included them on his résumé. The answer, when the alumni office called him back, hardly astonished him. There had been no one of that name in the class Reed had mentioned, nor in the preceding or following year.

Reed asked then if he might be sent a list of the members of Jay’s supposed class. He explained that he was a professor of law, calling from the law school, and that he needed the information for an investigation he was pursuing; he would also be grateful for any information they had on the architectural firms with which members of that class were, or had been, associated—the sort of account got up for reunions. Reed promised that the list would not be used for fund-raising, or any other nefarious purpose. In the end, having gone off to consult with a higher authority, the person on the phone agreed to send Reed what he wanted. He could, after all, have got it from any number of sources or connections, and there seemed no reason to deny the request.

The information came through by fax an hour later. Reed pored over it with more eagerness than he would readily have admitted to Kate or anyone else. Two graduates of the class were associated with Jay’s firm—at least with the firm Jay had claimed to have founded. Reed picked up the phone and called it; he asked for each man. He was told that one of them had had a stroke and retired to Florida; the other man was still a member of the firm, but no longer worked there full time. He did come in often, however, although he was not in at present. Did Reed care to leave a message? Reed declined the offer, with thanks.

The no-longer full-time member of the firm was named Edmund M. Dyson. Unable to abandon the trail, Reed walked over to the library to consult a directory of architecture firms and architects. Edmund M. Dyson’s career paralleled Jay’s; indeed, it was in many respects identical to it, except that Jay had not mentioned all his honors in his résumé. This was perhaps modesty, or awareness that these awards offered too easy a clue to his other identity.

The unavoidable fact was that, by any name, he was Kate’s father. But why the name change, why the subterfuge, why, if it came to that, look Kate up at all? He must have foreseen that doing so would lead to an investigation, and that his true identity would very soon emerge. Reed badly wanted to confront Jay, who had now disappeared, which was damn frustrating. All sorts of possible plots surged through Reed’s mind, but none of them made any sense. He was a man who had wanted, late in life, to meet his daughter. Was the rest of any real importance? Could this be some racket after all, to do with money or some fraudulent scheme? Kate was hardly the natural object for such a maneuver, let alone the fact that she was married to a former assistant D.A. with contacts in the legal world, and was related to powerful figures in the investment world.

Still bristling with frustration, Reed set off for home. He would tell Kate what he had discovered. Protecting her was not part of their partnership, nor did he keep secrets from her for any reason, apart from professional matters that he did not discuss with her or anyone other than those directly concerned. The only question before him now was whether or not to persuade her to abandon the whole investigation into Jay’s identity and life. Provided Jay did not return, provided there was no further news of him, might it not be more sensible to let the matter, at least for the present, rest?

He had about convinced himself that this was the better course of action. He had in fact decided to urge Kate to accept the wisdom of this advice, and had even begun to rehearse how he would present it to her. After all, he would point out, she had not particularly wanted to undertake the investigation of Jay in the first place. She had only gone along, and that reluctantly, with his impulse to find out more about her suddenly appearing father. So why should she argue with his recommendations about abandoning the search?

When he arrived home, however, Kate emerged from her study to greet him.

“What now?” he asked, rather irritably. When one has spent so much energy planning a conversation, one does not welcome having it diverted before it begins.

“I’ve had a short note from Jay,” Kate said. “Scrawled on a piece of paper, and left with the doorman. I asked him, the doorman, about the man who left it, but he said a black man handed it to him. I doubt it was Jay in disguise.”

“A messenger, obviously,” Reed said. “What did Jay scrawl on the piece of paper?” Kate was holding it in her hand.

She looked at it, although she certainly knew what it said. She read it to Reed. “It says: ‘Sorry to disappear. I’ll be back in touch. Tell Reed it’s not quite as bad as it looks.’” Kate glanced at Reed. “Do you think he knew you were planning to investigate him?”