My legs go limp and for a moment I think I’m going to be sick right there on the street. I wait until the sensation passes, then pull a copy from the rack. I’m shaking all over and the words shift and blur as I read, but the story is all too familiar.
Multiple suicide attempts, an unexplained knife, the thinly veiled suggestion that what had previously been labeled an accident might not have been an accident at all. There’s more on the second page, a laundry list of anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi groups with which my father is said to be affiliated, a longer list than I knew, and finally, the thinly veiled suggestion that he may have gone to nefarious lengths to conceal his wife’s Jewish heritage. At the bottom of the second page are two additional photos: one of me and one of Cee-Cee, with our names.
You haven’t left anything out. Not even me.
“Buy it or put it back, lady. This ain’t a library.”
I glance up to find a man with wind-burned cheeks and a day’s worth of beard glaring at me. I close the paper and toss it down, too numb to feel relief that he appears not to recognize me. He will by tomorrow.
By tomorrow, everyone will.
Forever, and Other Lies
(pgs. 81–83)
December 18, 1941
New York, New York
There will be no wedding in June.
Teddy’s parents have made it official, expressing shock and dismay at the Weekly Review’s recent revelations about my father. I suspect they’ll waste little time before arranging another matrimonial merger. There are faces to save, after all, and what better way to paper over their son’s brief but unfortunate engagement to me than to wed him to some new and unsullied bride—preferably one with pure gentile bloodlines.
My face will not be saved.
I’m the jilted one, unworthy in light of the scandal that has tainted my family, which, in light of my transgressions seems only fair. It’s a relief to no longer be thought of as an asset, a thing to be dealt or traded, but it’s made me strangely invisible. My father has barely spoken to me since his return from Boston. He’s occupied just now, trying to salvage his business interests, which appear to be in free fall. I suspect his newfound visibility has kept him from acting on his first impulse, which was likely to pack me off to some godforsaken place—the way he did my mother.
In that way, at least, your vulgar little exposé has protected me.
It took several days, but eventually, the most lurid details elbowed past the war news. The other papers have picked it up now as well, as you surely knew they would. How proud you must be to have pulled it off.
Father’s enemies are ringing bells and drinking champagne. He’s threatening a libel suit, but his lawyers warn that a trial would only keep the thing alive and require him to answer uncomfortable questions—publicly and under oath. Wiser, they say, to roundly deny the allegations and let the thing die a natural death.
And so we are all in scandal mode. The phone rings morning and night and the press is camped out on the street in front of the house, waiting to pounce on anyone who happens to enter or exit, rendering us all virtual prisoners. I’m beyond caring about any of it, but Cee-Cee’s mood pivots between grief and outrage as, one by one, her friends find reasons to cancel lunches and teas and card games. The usual invitations to holiday parties haven’t come and she’s been asked to resign from several of her women’s clubs. I wish I could feign sympathy, but I can’t. There’s an old adage about chickens coming home to roost that keeps popping into my head.
I do feel bad for her children, who’ve been pulled out of school and handed over to a brigade of tutors who come to the house three days a week via the kitchen entrance. It seems I’ve made rather a mess for everyone, welcoming a viper into our midst.
Poor Dickey seems to be taking it the hardest, avoiding my gaze when we happen to pass in the corridor or on the stairs. I suppose he resents being enlisted to deliver my letter that night, to have, in his mind, unwittingly been part of his family’s downfall. I wish I could explain that nothing in that letter had any bearing on what’s happening now, that the damage had already been done—and that it was done by you. But Cee-Cee has forbidden me to speak to any of them. It’s not so terrible: none of them except Dickey ever paid me much mind. I do regret losing his affection, though. Such a sweet and guileless boy. So unlike the rest of us.
For now, I’ll bide my time and get my affairs in order. I must plant myself somewhere, put down roots, and make a life of some kind. I’m not sure what that life will look like. I never planned beyond you. I never imagined I would have to. My mistake.
I wonder now and then if you ever wonder about me. If, when you close your eyes, you still see my face, hear my voice, feel my touch? Or am I already a part of your past? A shadow that briefly crossed your path, nebulous now and unshaped?
I wonder how long it will be until I’m free of you—and what it will feel like when I am. I can’t quite imagine it, looking inside myself and not finding you there. Like a piece of me has been carved away, which I suppose it has.
Perhaps I should count myself lucky, feel relief that I found out who you were before things went any further. But no, I don’t think I’ll let you off quite so easily.
Regretting Belle
(pgs. 93–95)
31 December 1953
London, England
It seems another year is ending, all gone by in another hour or so.
A fitting time to write our epilogue, I suppose, and put an end to this unhappy exercise. I was hoping for a kind of catharsis when I began it, or perhaps exorcism is a more appropriate word for what I hoped to accomplish. To be released from my sins—and yours.
A few scribbled pages, I told myself, and it would finally be over. I would let myself bleed until the bleeding was done, until I was emptied of you. How foolish I was to ever think it could be that simple. Still, there are a few things more to say.
I’ll begin with the story that appeared in the Review shortly after I left the States—a story, I might add, I learned about purely by chance, nearly two full years after it was published. That this story happened to contain facts to which I was privy has no doubt led you to conclude that I had some hand in it, but it is a matter of record that the name attached to it was not mine. I gave you my word that day in my apartment—the last time I saw you, as it turns out—and I will not do so again. If you know me so little after all we shared, there’s no point in trying to absolve myself.
And now, in the interest of full disclosure, I will endeavor to flesh out some of the more glaring gaps in my narrative and the semblance of a life I’ve lived since I lost you.
I was married once. Her name was Laura. A woman with dark hair and amber eyes. She looked like you but she wasn’t you, and I couldn’t forgive her for it. She deserved better than I could offer, as I told her the night she left. She deserved to be happy and to make someone else happy, but that someone was never going to be me.