Habit of Fear Read online

“If you want my opinion, the only person he’s in love with is himself. If he wants a divorce, make him pay for it, Julie.”

  “He says the same thing himself. Please don’t knock him, Tim. You said you wouldn’t. I’ll have to defend him if you do, and I don’t want to.”

  “What kind of shit is that? You don’t have to defend anybody but yourself. Next thing, you’ll be defending those buggers every man in this room would like to cut the balls off.”

  She had come back too soon. She wasn’t ready. Or was she preparing herself never to be ready? Was she going to want to throw up at every mention of sex? She thought of Jeff and his dream of impotence and being glad about it. Not anymore he wouldn’t be. “Oh, boy,” she said, aware of what had just gone through her mind and how she felt about it.

  “Yes?” said Tim.

  “I just realized I’m not jealous of Jeff’s new woman anymore.”

  “You’ve got to be jealous,” Tim said in apparent contradiction of himself. Then: “Otherwise you won’t go after the money.”

  Julie smiled a little. It wasn’t that she didn’t like money. She just didn’t want Jeff’s under the circumstances.

  “You won’t go after it,” he said. “I know you.”

  Julie shook her head. “I’ll make out all right. … Is there anything in the basket I could go to work on?”

  “You’re sure it’s okay?”

  “As long as it isn’t something with a heavy sex angle.”

  “What else is there in our business?”

  Julie agreed. When she wanted to escape from the gossip business, she had to hustle a feature assignment from the Sunday-magazine editor, and she was dead sure that just now the only story she could sell Ray Duggan would be her own.

  Tim brought out a folder from his middle drawer, but he didn’t open it. “Why don’t you give yourself a couple more days, Julie? Get around town and see people on your own so you won’t be running hostile, you know?”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “That’s how it comes across to me, and that only calls attention.”

  She didn’t know how she was going to get out of the office, how to manage the long walk to the elevator. Especially with the white carnations. But Tim got a sheet of newsprint and wrapped them, and then carried them himself as he walked her to the elevator.

  She crossed Forty-second Street and made her way to the nearest church, Saint Agnes’s, not far from Grand Central Station. She didn’t suppose it had much of a congregation, but in bad weather a lot of people came in out of the rain or the cold. It was a raw, windy day, not a bit like summer. She sat in the front pew—a basilica-type church with its semicircular arch. A poor-man’s basilica. She sat and listened to the sounds from the sacristy, someone doing the chores of God. She was making up phrases, images. Not a true believer. A sentimentalist. A seeker? A sentimentalist. She sat with the flowers in her lap waiting for the sacristan to put in an appearance out front. The fragrance wafted upward. White for the pure of heart … each with a drop of blood in the middle.

  The sacristan emerged carrying a box, the contents of which rattled when she genuflected at the front of the altar. She was heavy and slightly lame; her shoes were badly turned over and her ankles were swollen. She took the box to the rack of candles in front of the statue of the Virgin and replaced those that had burned out. Julie took the flowers to her.

  “What am I going to do with them at this hour?” the woman complained. But she took them and thumped back into the sacristy for a vase. She was running hostile, to use Tim’s words.

  Julie felt her own trouble to be that she wasn’t running at all. Leaving Saint Agnes’s, she dawdled at the window of a religious bookstore. She was no great patron of bookstores. Her mother had worked in one and striven to make enough money to send Julie to Miss Page’s School and then to college. She hadn’t made enough money—that way. Julie dug her hands into her jacket pockets and moved on.

  Her mother had worked at Books of All Nations, a shop not far from United Nations Plaza. Most of its customers were UN personnel. She remembered some pretty exotic types among her mother’s friends. The store was still there, she discovered, but it was now part of a discount chain. She chose the oldest clerk on the floor and asked him if he remembered Katherine Richards, who used to work there.

  “It’s a name I’d like to remember, but I can’t say I do.” He had the soft voice and the shiny cuffs of a dignified penury.

  “She worked here in the nineteen-fifties and sixties.”

  “Ah, that was when it was a real bookstore. I myself worked at Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue at that time, and I thought that store would last forever. But nothing does. … Katherine Richards: I’ll ask around if you want me to, but I can’t think of anyone here now old enough to remember back then.” His pale eyes settled on a customer a few aisles away. He made a little sound of disapproval and then said, “Excuse me a moment. If I assist him now, it may keep him out of trouble.”

  “Thank you,” Julie called after him. A potential book thief was making tracks.

  “Come and see me. I’ll remember.” Then, “Miss …”

  She waited.

  “It occurs to me: why don’t you go and see a man named Morgan Reynolds in our main office? He used to be the manager here. A top man in the chain now, but he might remember.”

  Julie murmured her thanks and fled. The name Morgan Reynolds brought on a kaleidoscope of memory: a man who smelled of licorice and pipe tobacco who was often at their house. His laugh was silent except for a wheeze every time he inhaled. His fingernails were clean and shiny. He taught her to play checkers and then one day he had brought a set of chessmen. She remembered very clearly her mother saying no to his teaching Julie chess. She could have the pieces to play with, but that was all.

  Julie walked clear across town for the first time in weeks. She could smell the dust of the memory: coming home from college to find the chess pieces still lined up in opposing positions on the wide bedroom windowsill; they stood against a background of iron bars that gave an authentic feeling of dungeon, for the window overlooked the dark inside courtyard of the apartment on Ninety-first Street, where she had grown up. By then, Morgan Reynolds did not visit anymore, but she knew then and now that he had to be considered a benefactor of sorts.

  FIVE

  JEFF HAD VISITED “THE shop,” as Julie called her first-floor rooms on Forty-fourth Street, only once. She said of it herself that it was an okay place to visit but she wouldn’t want to live there. So when Jeff phoned to suggest that she return to Sixteenth Street while he was abroad, she was briefly tempted.

  “Surely you’d be more comfortable here,” he said.

  Looking around at the thrift-shop assortment of necessities—dresser, a kitchen table, wall shelves, a couch and a clothes rack—she agreed that there was no question about that.

  “It’s important that you have a sense of well-being just now,” he went on, and then changed his approach when she was silent. “I don’t want the apartment left unoccupied, and I certainly won’t rent to someone I don’t know. Or for that matter to anyone I do know. …”

  So, Julie thought, his new woman wouldn’t be hanging around town waiting for his return. She’d be with him. “Thank you, Jeff, but I’m getting along just fine. I have friends in the neighborhood. I like it here.”

  “God knows why, but however you want it, Julie. We are not the first couple to divorce, you know.”

  “No kidding.”

  “When it’s convenient for you, you’ll want to collect your things before I close up.”

  “Tomorrow,” Julie said instantly. “Okay?”

  “I shall leave some bank forms on the kitchen table. They need your signature. I’m putting a sum of money in an account in your name.”

  She said nothing, but resolved not to sign the forms.

  “I wish there were something we could say to each other,” he said.

  “How about good-bye?” She was chokin
g up. “No, wait. Jeff, in all those talks you and my mother used to have, did she ever tell you anything about my father?”

  “Not that I remember at the moment.” He thought a bit more about it. “I’d have told you by now in any case. You’ve asked before.”

  “I’d forgotten,” Julie said. “She flirted with you, didn’t she?”

  “I suppose you could call it that. I always thought of it as her mode of flattery. … I don’t know whether this would apply to your father or not, but I remember her saying to me once, ‘I’m such a pushover for literary types.’”

  “I thought he was a diplomat type,” Julie said.

  “Do you want me to make inquiries with the Irish UN Mission?”

  “No!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Thank you,” she added softly. “I did that myself years ago.”

  And so she had, having since all but blocked it out. No one there or at the Irish Consulate in New York could remember him, and at the time of Julie’s conception and birth the Republic of Ireland had not yet been admitted to the United Nations.

  THE CLACK OF HER HEELS on the bare floors echoed through the apartment as she went from room to room to see that she had left nothing that was hers. The rugs had already been rolled for storage, and someone had covered the furniture with sheets she did not recognize. She gathered perhaps twenty objects from almost as many countries—sculptures, glass figurines, scarves, jewelry—all Jeff’s gifts from his many journeys on faraway assignments. The only thing to do with them when she got them to Forty-fourth Street would be to hold a sidewalk sale as soon as possible. Or donate them to an Actors’ Forum benefit.

  Jeff had had her trunk brought down from the attic. She packed the marital souvenirs in cartons, bagged her clothes, and left the trunk till last. She knew very well what was buried at the bottom underneath her ski clothes, college gown and gym suit: her father’s picture—if it was her father—and her birth certificate, something she never wanted to look at unless she had to—when she’d gotten her passport, for example. Dr. Callahan was right: she was curious about everything except herself. Not entirely so; it was more that she was afraid of what she might find out. She removed the winter woolens, her gown and gym suit, exploding the smell of camphor. Not only was there the picture of her father in its gilt frame, but one also of her grandfather on her mother’s side, whom she could just remember, a man so sick at the time, she could now understand, that when he had put out his hand to touch her, he had let it fall before he could reach her face. She could remember forcing herself not to pull away from him. He had turned his face to the wall, releasing her. Beneath his picture was one of her mother, a handsome, sensual-looking woman whom Julie did not resemble. Except in name. She took her father’s photograph to the mirror over the mantel in the living room. There was a resemblance, she would swear. It was in the wide separation of the deep-set gray eyes, the long, straight nose and the large, sad mouth. She smiled at herself, and her whole expression changed. She became, she thought, someone a stranger might want to know. If only the face alongside her image could also change, would their smiles be alike?

  She went back to the trunk telling herself that she had to hurry. But that wasn’t so. The movers weren’t due for two hours. With neither joy nor fear, with no emotion she was aware of, she reached for the manila envelope. It contained, besides the expected birth certificate, her baptism papers and her and Jeff’s marriage certificate. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Her sponsors at baptism were Jane and Allan Burlingame. They were UN friends of her mother’s, and theirs was the only large family within Julie’s intimate experience. One of the girls, Janice, had gone to Miss Page’s School with her. She had loved to go to their home, a very large apartment on the West Side—full of noise and boys and laughter. But the Burlingames had been recalled by their government, and the last she had heard from them was on her twenty-first birthday, when they had sent her an Indian sari and a bank draft for a hundred dollars. She made herself look at the marriage scroll. Very fancy. And it, too, called on the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. She and Jeff hadn’t promised to obey, she remembered, only to love, honor and cherish for as long as love remained. Okay. No broken promises. Their witnesses had been Frances and Tony Alexander.

  She unfolded the Certificate of Live Birth. She had been born Julie Anne Richards in Doctors’ Hospital in New York City. Her mother’s name was Katherine Anne Richards, her age twenty-eight. She had been born in Illinois, and at the time of Julie’s birth was living at the 499 East 91st Street address. The father’s name was Thomas Francis Mooney, age twenty, born in Ireland, and there was a notation: “whereabouts unknown.” The name of the informant was Allan Burlingame; relation to the infant: family friend. The certifier was George Stephen Macready, M.D.

  Whereabouts unknown. There had to have been a time when his whereabouts were known. To have had a marriage annulled—if that was what really happened; and if so, why didn’t a notation to that effect show on the birth certificate instead of “whereabouts unknown”? For the marriage to have been annulled it had to have occurred in the first place. In other words, there must be a record of it somewhere. She thought back to the preliminaries of her and Jeff’s marriage … the blood tests, the application for the marriage license three days later … the forms, the names of parents, Richards and Mooney. A comedy team. But not very funny.

  SIX

  THE SEX CRIME UNIT DETECTIVES, Al Beamis and Mabel Hadley, came to see her every few days. This time they were accompanied by Detective Dominic Russo, a precinct man Julie had known since her first days in the shop. She thought his inclusion was intended to put more pressure on her; the police were not satisfied that she had wrung everything out of her memory that she could. They were probably right. She had recalled that neither man wore rings, that they smelled of stale beer and sweat, and one of them of medicine and some kind of machine oil or grease. She’d smelled vomit. Her memory was strong on smells, weak on what she saw. She didn’t think the taller man was more than five foot ten; they had ordinary New York accents, no racial intonation that she could detect. More, more, the detectives always wanted more. She resented the repeated questioning. If they were making progress, they were not sharing the information with her.

  Detective Russo lived on the West Side only a few blocks from where he had grown up—five minutes’ walk from the shop and not much farther, coming from the other direction, from the building site where the attack had occurred. He was a rarity among modern urban police, a neighborhood cop. Solid and stocky, he seated himself gingerly in one of the director’s chairs at the round table in Julie’s living room. The others followed suit. Russo looked with solemn eyes at the table’s one ornament, the large crystal ball, no doubt remembering his early encounter with Julie at this address. His wife was a believer in the occult. “Mrs. Russo sends regards,” he said.

  Mrs. Russo was also a friend of Mary Ryan, another neighborhood character, so that Julie had to anticipate that old lady’s imminent arrival. She’d expected her before then. Loaded with soda bread and sympathy.

  It was all so goddamned neighborly.

  “I don’t like to wait until the bastards strike again,” Detective Beamis said, getting the interrogation under way.

  “Am I supposed to have been their first victim?” She tried to keep the hostility out of her voice.

  “We can’t be sure they’ve always played as a team,” Beamis said.

  “That’s some game they’re playing, sir.” The hostility was out in the open.

  “Detective Beamis’s way of speaking,” Hadley explained softly. She was a good-looking, forthright young woman. “It’s not unique that two men team up that way, but most rapists are loners. What was their attitude toward one another?”

  “Cooperative.”

  “Be a little more specific, can’t you, Mrs. Hayes?” she pleaded.

  But Julie’s control broke. “What do you want me to do? Take my clothes off and show yo
u the scars? I’m trying to get it out of my mind, and you’re screwing it in forever!”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Hadley said.

  “If we get them, don’t you see,” Beamis tried, “it can help you get rid of them, get them out of your system.”

  Julie drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry I blew,” she said. “What was it you asked?”

  “You go right ahead and blow all you want,” Hadley said. “You’ve got a right.”

  Beamis resumed the questioning. “Was there anything feminine about them? Swishy?”

  “No.” Then: “I don’t know. The one with the knife giggled every time he dug the knife in. That’s what it sounded like, a kind of falsetto giggle.”

  “Could the knife be a tool of a particular trade?” Russo asked.

  “I don’t think so. A switchblade.”

  “Would you recognize their voices?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Anything about them to make you think they might live in our neighborhood?”

  This was the reason, of course, that Russo had been rung in on the interrogation. The possibility of locals made Julie even more uncomfortable. She drew a deep breath. “I’ll tell you again everything I can remember about them, and I’ll try, damn it, to get it all up this time.”

  Detective Hadley checked the small tape recorder.

  She told everything she remembered and became aware of adding nuances that were not there before: “the heavy black hairs on the sodomist’s fingers”; she was more sure the shorter man rolled when he walked; she wouldn’t now call it a limp. “He was lighter-complexioned, freckly, with hair on his body like dry dead grass. Their skin was taut. Young. They smelled young. How about that?”

  “Go on.”

  “I felt they knew their way around the whole building project. With that strong smell of machine grease on the hands of the taller one, I figure they could be maintenance men on all that heavy machinery. … Yet his hands were soft and clean … a disinfectant soap maybe.” Her mind went dead on that subject. “What about that person in the lot with the shopping bags? Why can’t you find her?”