The Tate house, once full of conversation, fell silent. The holidays passed, and even after the New Year, Kitty wasn’t inspired to write. She feared her gift to craft fairy tales was gone. She stayed up late into the night, trying to force words onto paper, which only resulted in chain-smoking and thoughts of Sarah. When she closed her eyes, she could hear the echoes of her shrill cry. The pain was suffocating, and without Nellie, Kitty learned the comforts of gin, and drowned in the missing of her baby. Nathan didn’t stop her; he too, had become heavy-handed with his pour.
Kitty had misjudged things. It didn’t matter that Sarah wasn’t really dead. She would never be her daughter, and that felt like a death in itself.
Emma called every day. Sometimes Kitty answered the phone, sometimes she didn’t. With Nathan only plugged into work and her Blair House duties nonexistent, she knew that anything anyone wanted could wait. Then one night, Nathan was working late, or maybe fell asleep on his office couch, which happened often (even during the day when he started reading scripts), and she called Emma. It was 11:02. Emma only had to hear her voice and, by 11:29, was ringing her doorbell.
CHAPTER 34
Kitty
January 1965
“How is Mr. Tate handling it?” Nellie set her glass of water down on Kitty’s coffee table.
“He’s been sleeping in his study again.” Kitty looked down at Sarah with a smile. She responded with a spit bubble, eyes still locked on Kitty. It was as if, after four months, she recognized her. She was a fat baby, with legs and arms composed of rolls, and dimples piercing her cheeks and thighs. “Nothing’s changed about his life. I can’t sleep, and he’s maintained his usual ten-hour workdays.” Her lull in work and sequestration indoors was ripping their relationship apart at the seams. Nathan loved his “Kitty Karr star.” And because her celebrity persona was the furthest layer from the self she’d revealed to him, she felt like a puppet. Kitty knew it was up to her to fix it.
“Where is he now?”
“He stays overnight with his mother once a week.” Nathan’s father had an around-the-clock nurse, but his mother needed emotional support. They were very close, and Kitty, always maintaining distance from his family for obvious reasons, encouraged their quality time.
Kitty, plagued by Sarah’s phantom cries, had called Nellie in the middle of the night. Whispering into the phone, huddled in the corner of the kitchen, with the sink water running, Kitty had begged Nellie to bring Sarah for a visit. Nellie heard the panic in her voice and worried that Kitty was being cavalier in her invitation. Kitty assured her that home was the last thing on her husband’s mind.
“He spends as much time away from the house as possible to lure me out. He wants me to get back to work.”
“That’s smart,” Nellie agreed.
“I do miss my career, but I couldn’t care less about acting again if she’s not in my life,” Kitty explained.
Nellie’s eyes darted from Sarah up to Kitty as if she wanted to snatch her.
Kitty readjusted Sarah to kiss her cheek. “I’d like to see her, sometimes.” She cleared her throat. “I need to see her … I know I said I didn’t want to, but it’s been harder than I imagined. Nothing else will change, but please let me be there in some way to see her grow up.” Kitty was nervous for her answer, unsure if she could accept a no.
“I already told you I didn’t like the idea of you not being in her life.” Nellie put her hand over her heart. “I didn’t like the idea of you not being in my life.” Suddenly at peace, Nellie closed her eyes and nestled into the sofa.
“Are you okay?” Kitty had been so consumed with Sarah she hadn’t looked Nellie squarely in the face.
“I’m exhausted. Sarah has me up every three hours or so.”
“Where’s Clifford?”
Nellie smacked her teeth. “On a farm, tending to horses. Haven’t really seen him with the extra shifts.”
“Do you need more money?”
Nellie flicked a hand. “You’re doing too much already.”
“Not if Clifford’s working and leaving you without help.” She thought about the puttering pickup truck he’d dropped Nellie off in. Kitty had worried it would leave an oil stain in the driveway she’d have to explain.
“He’s saving up to leave us,” Nellie said of Clifford.
“Can’t you try to make it work?” Kitty wanted her daughter to have a chance at everything she didn’t, the first being a father.
“How, if he’s never around?”
“Have you tried?” Kitty gestured to Nellie’s body, covered per usual in a floor-length shift. “You could show some skin. I bet you sleep in a long-sleeved nightgown, too, don’t you?”
“When it’s cold!” Nellie waved her off, but Kitty could tell she was embarrassed by the subject. “What’s wrong with him has nothing to do with me.” Turning serious, she balanced her elbows on her knees. “I don’t want Sarah to ever know that you’re her mother. We’ll tell her we’re friends. Best friends.”
“But she’ll learn soon enough that that’s not how the world works,” Kitty said. “And she deserves to know where she came from.”
“Did it help you?”
Kitty paused. Learning who her father was hadn’t done her much good. “Maybe when she’s an adult, the world will have changed. We can tell her then.”
Nellie shook her head. It was her bottom line. “I couldn’t bear for her to grow up, learn you’re her mother, and wish you had been the one to raise her.”
“Babies are closest to whoever raised them. They don’t know the difference.”
“Don’t they?” Nellie pointed at Sarah, now asleep on Kitty’s lap. “That baby doesn’t cry with you. When she’s with me, I can’t get a moment’s peace. Tell me she doesn’t know who her mother is.”
It was their first disagreement about Sarah’s rearing and a sprinkling of what would follow. Kitty agreed to Nellie’s terms, knowing anything could happen between “then and never.”
In the meantime, their arrangement gave Kitty the best of both worlds—the highlights of motherhood without the daily slog of mothering. Feeling optimistic again with her child in reach, Kitty went back to the lot, only to face rumors about what had happened to her baby.
Kitty went to Nathan for answers. “I thought no one knew I was pregnant.”
He looked more unnerved than usual. “I didn’t think so either.”
“Then I think we should tell the truth and be done with it.”
The pair let the news pass quietly at the studio, with assistance from Lucy. From there it circulated as a whisper among intimate groups and eventually became an unspoken, known public fact.
Kitty explained her reasoning to Nellie. “If someone suspects anything or, God forbid, I’m found out, no one will ever have a reason to go looking for her.”
As the word circulated among the circles of the who’s who, Kitty received condolences and an invitation for tea from Claire Pew, the talkative photographer’s wife, whom Kitty hadn’t seen in years.
CHAPTER 35
Kitty
February 1965
Pulling into Claire’s circular driveway, Kitty was impressed to see a sapphire-blue Rolls Royce in the garage. Kitty had been pleased but surprised to hear from Claire and accepted her invitation out of curiosity. Her new money didn’t touch Claire’s wealth, but her fame made them equals.
“Kitty Karr! Lovely to see you.” Claire brushed one of her curls out of her face before moving aside to let Kitty enter. In her parlor were ham sandwiches, strawberries, and lemonade.
“Yes, thank you for inviting me.”
Claire handed her a plate and said, in a somber tone, “How are you doing?”
“I have my days.”
Claire sat down, stirring the Earl Grey tea she’d prepared with milk and a cube of sugar. “Our son was almost six months old when he died.”
“I’m so sorry.” Kitty produced a cigarette from her bag.
Claire rushed to light it. “I’m so sorry for you.”
“Thank you.”
“The doctor said these things happen—it was no one’s fault. I came in one morning because he hadn’t stirred yet. He was cold. Must have died in the middle of the night.” Claire was reliving her pain in an effort, Kitty suspected, to make her talk about her own, but all it did was make her regret coming.
“My grandmother died a few months later, and I spent three months in a mental institution,” Claire said. “All of my friends are afraid of me now.”
Her honesty was shocking, but Kitty sympathized. “No one calls me anymore, but it’s probably for the best.”