Full Stop (24 page)

By now she knew the whole sad story of Frank's birth and adoption, having pieced it together from the documents in the envelope he had dropped in the park. Curled up on the sofa, the phone in front of her on the coffee table where she could reach it without getting up, she had felt no compunction as she up-ended the envelope and allowed the contents to slide out, as though the intrusion was somehow balanced by the amount of damage she had sustained during the struggle in the park: her new white shirt ripped and smeared with blood, a painful gash on her left hand and a long abrasion running from her elbow to her wrist as well as minor scratches. The shirt was beyond repair and she had had to borrow one of Toni's, a bright turquoise that wasn't her colour at all but the only thing on the rail that went comfortably with her trousers. She changed into it as soon as she'd washed the ingrained dirt and blood from her hands, smearing them with antiseptic ointment from Toni's bathroom cabinet and covering
up the two largest cuts with plasters. Her own shirt she screwed up in a ball and thrust into the waste bin, thinking she'd never owned anything for so short a time. She was going to feel quite aggrieved when it finally appeared on her Visa bill.

With Honey snoring on the floor, Loretta had quickly and efficiently examined the neat collection of papers Frank had clipped together: letters, photocopies, even some photographs. They began with a copy of his birth certificate which showed he'd been born in 1974, making him a year or two older than her hasty estimate in the park. His birthday was in August, the same month as Loretta's, and he'd be 20 next month. The mother's name was given as Antonia Annetta Stramiello, occupation student; Loretta wasn't sure whether this meant Toni was already at college when Frank was born, or still in high school. She had heard Americans use the same word for both. The space for the father's name was blank.

Attached to the birth certificate was a letter from an organisation called Right To Know, replying in detail to a letter from Frank asking how to go about tracing his natural mother. They had written to him at an address in Philadelphia, where he seemed to be at college. Loretta guessed that he'd gone home to his adoptive parents for the long vacation, travelling to New York to see Toni without telling them; Newburgh, she had discovered from an atlas on Toni's bookshelves, was in New York State, closer to Manhattan than Philadelphia. The letter was accompanied by a leaflet, a combative manifesto in which Right To Know insisted on the right of every adopted child to meet his or her biological parents; it was clear, in spite of the fastidiously inclusive language, that this meant the mother. Next came a couple of blurred ten-by-eights of Toni, one of her leaving the apartment building arm-in-arm with a man Loretta took to be Jay, the other of her walking Honey in Riverside Park. Jay was taller than Toni, wearing glasses, a bit nondescript, not at all Loretta's idea of a jazz musician, but the picture had been taken clandestinely, with a long lens, and it hadn't enlarged well. In the second photo Honey strained at the lead, staring angrily
ahead as though she'd intuited the presence of the camera, while Toni's face was partly obscured by her hair. It was the same length as Loretta's and it wasn't really surprising that Frank, with only these poor images to rely on, had assumed that any blonde woman walking a bulldog in that particular park must be his real mother. The remaining picture was a snapshot, a colour photo of a chubby, fair-haired baby whom she took to be Frank at three or four months; it wasn't clear why he'd included it in the package, unless he had invested it with some talismanic power to bridge the gap between himself and Toni.

There was one more document in the envelope, a report from a private detective, Pete Dunow of Inside Investigations Inc, which supplied Toni's present address and phone number along with a startling quantity of other information. There was a schedule of her daily movements: the regular walks with Honey, her journeys to Columbia on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, where and when she did her shopping, the fact that Jay stayed over at the flat two or three nights a week. With a growing sense of outrage Loretta read that Toni had had an ‘intimate' relationship with Jay for almost a year and two boyfriends in quick succession before that; there were rumours, Dunow wrote, of an earlier, lesbian relationship with a female lecturer at Columbia, but he hadn't been able to stand them up. Loretta had been goggle-eyed, unable to believe that this degree of surveillance was permitted in New York, when a new and alarming idea gripped her: if Dunow had been watching Toni from a distance, always having to conceal himself, was it possible he had made the same mistake as Frank Ryan? That it was
Pete Dunow
she had glimpsed behind the statue in the Met,
Dunow
that the nutritionist had warned her about in the book shop? Loretta shook her head, refusing to take the idea seriously. The detective had done his job, written up what he'd found, and that was the end of his involvement. But his tone worried her, the lubricious interest he displayed in Toni's ‘intimate' relationships; there was a fine line between private eye and Peeping Tom and she couldn't help wondering whether he had overstepped it. It was just
possible that Frank had innocently initiated this line of inquiry, he might well have wanted to know whether his real mother was married or single before he approached her, but this Mozartian catalogue of ex-lovers was something else.

Had Toni really noticed nothing while Pete Dunow was on his marathon trawl through her life? Either he was extremely skilful or he hadn't got really close to his target; at this point Loretta had put the papers to one side and dialled the Sag Harbor number again but there was the customary click and she broke the connection, in no mood to listen to that holier-than-thou voice reciting nonsense about prayers and credit cards.

She went back to the report, finding a garbled summary of Toni's academic career which apparently included a visiting lectureship at St Freda's College, Oxford; there were also details of her bank account and the ownership of her flat. A final paragraph consisted of advice on how Frank should approach his mother: ‘Subjects do not generally respond well when the initial contact is made by phone,' Dunow had written, ‘and letters may go unanswered for days or even weeks. For this reason, our recommendation is that the subject be confronted direct, at or near the home address. The subject's initial reaction may be defensive or hostile and for this reason, we also recommend that you carry full documentation with you at all times.'

He might have been writing about a criminal, Loretta thought indignantly, a shoplifter or a drug pusher rather than an 18-year-old who, for reasons Dunow presumably knew nothing about, had given up her child for adoption. There was no acknowledgement that the sudden appearance of an adult son or daughter might cause turmoil in a woman's life, as Loretta suspected it was about to do in Toni's. Her own involvement, accidental though it was, had left her winded and aching but it was as nothing to the impact the affair was going to have on Toni, Jay, their unborn child ... Loretta glanced at the resolutely silent phone, acknowledging her dread of the moment when it finally rang. On top of everything else, how would Toni
feel, how would any woman feel, when she discovered her son had employed some quite possibly perverted private detective to
spy
on her? It was hardly a good omen for their future relationship.

Unable to quell her uneasiness about Dunow, Loretta had turned back to the first page of his report and read an office address on Lexington, a few blocks north of Tracey's hotel. He had told her the area was called Murray Hill and that it was rundown, a little seedy, and that was exactly how it had looked when she dropped him off the previous evening: drab buildings in brown brick, junk shops, the neon lights of cheap stores that stayed open all night. It was easy enough to picture a dark doorway between two shops, steps leading to a poky upstairs office, a glass door stencilled with the Inside Investigations logo; on the other side she imagined a thickset man with thinning hair, a phone in one hand and his feet up on the desk. Below the address was a column of telephone and fax numbers and without giving herself time to think, Loretta pulled the phone towards her and dialled one of them.

‘Inside Investigations, Julie speaking. How may I help you?'

Loretta was unprepared, expecting an answering-machine.

'
Inside Investigations
, Julie spe –'

‘Can I speak to Pete Dunow?'

‘Mr Dunow isn't in the office right now.' She sounded wary. ‘Can I put you through to Mr Delehanty?'

‘No, I don't think ... All I want to know is whether he's still working for one of your clients, his name's Frank Ryan.'

She heard an intake of breath. ‘Client information is confidential, I'd better put you through to Mr Delehanty, if he's free. Would you hold on one moment?' Loretta heard the soft tap of computer keys, a chair scraping back, voices conferring out of earshot. It didn't tally with the picture she'd formed of a shoestring outfit, a middle-aged man in a dirty mac and a part-time secretary. After a longish wait, Julie came back. ‘I'm sorry, Mr Delehanty's with a client right now. Can he call you back?'

‘There's no need, if you can just tell me –'

‘I'm sorry, we're not allowed to give out client information over the phone.' Julie was losing her temper, if you leave your name and number Mr Delehanty will call you back as soon as — ‘

Recognising an impasse, Loretta interrupted: i won't bother, thanks very much,' and put the phone down.

She frowned and looked down at her palms, wondering why they were hurting so much. It was a niggling pain, like a mouth ulcer, and it didn't seem to have been eased at all by the antiseptic cream. She realised she'd been digging in her nails while she was on the phone, making it worse.

‘Oh
God,'
she complained, uncurling her legs and accidentally kicking Honey.

The bulldog growled, scrambled to her feet and backed away, teeth bared. Loretta did her best to pacify her, uncertain of the dog's temper after what had happened in the park, and eventually resorted to bribing her back into good humour with a plate of meaty biscuits. Looking at her watch and deciding she'd waited long enough for Toni to call, she stuffed Frank's documents back into the manila envelope and made sure the answering-machine was switched on. Trying to remember the exact location of the Moroccan restaurant she'd spotted the day before, she slipped quietly out of the flat while Honey was too busy eating to protest. In the corridor she glanced in both directions, still thinking of Pete Dunow, but it was as quiet and empty as it had always been; Loretta wondered briefly what kind of people Toni's neighbours were, why they never seemed to show themselves. As she rounded the corner to the lift an impressive chorus of aches and pains started up in her calves and ankles; Loretta shook each leg in turn, not looking forward to the walk to the restaurant but relieved to have a good reason for leaving the small and increasingly claustrophobic flat.

It was hot on the bus, sweltering, and it stopped with annoying frequency, letting in another blast of toxic air every time someone got on or off. By the time it crossed Christopher Street, way down in the Village, Loretta had read seven more pages of
The Last Supper
and didn't feel any more engaged by it; things hadn't improved much with the arrival of the long-awaited guest, an elderly man in a dinner jacket who was carrying, for no obvious reason, a conductor's baton. She could feel her leg muscles seizing up again and she longed to get off but her destination, Battery Park, was literally the end of the line, a green blob on the map covering the southern tip of Manhattan, with dotted lines marking the ferry routes to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Loretta wasn't interested in the Statue and she was neutral about the immigration museum on Ellis Island but a friend in California had recommended the boat trip, saying the views from the ferry were fantastic. She liked the idea of sea air, especially after sitting outdoors on stuffy Amsterdam Avenue, but she hadn't realised the journey would take so long. Now they were trundling through TriBeCa, not far from the restaurant where she'd eaten with Tracey the previous night, and there was still something eerie about the quiet streets and flat-fronted commercial buildings, even in bright sunlight. Pete Dunow came unbidden into her mind and she grimaced, not wanting to think about him or his shabby activities; she closed
The Last Supper,
thinking she'd have another look at it on the plane, and busied herself looking up the times of the Ellis Island ferry in her guidebook. The boats left every half hour and she should just be in time for the three o'clock.

A band was playing in Battery Park when she finally got off the bus, the music drifting through trees that had the twisted, slightly stunted appearance caused by exposure to biting winds and salt spray. In winter the place would look bleak but on this hot Sunday afternoon the water glinted and glittered like mercury, boats bobbed under a serene blue sky, and Liberty presided over it all, in a commanding position at the harbour entrance. The Statue was more affecting at a distance than she expected, Loretta thought, trying to imagine the feelings of immigrants who had travelled steerage, crowded into the bowels of a steamship for weeks on end without proper food or exercise, until the moment came when they were allowed up on deck for
their first sight of New York. The Statue must have seemed then like a promise, its arm raised both in greeting and as a pledge of protection. These days it was — what? A tourist attraction, a shorthand symbol for New York, having to compete with the ubiquitous green apple on postcards and guidebooks, a relic of a more innocent and hopeful past. Loretta turned away from the tranquil seascape, remembering she had a ferry to catch, and walked stiffly past stalls selling Liberty T-shirts and hats, visitors snapping each other with the Statue in the background: ‘Left a bit, no, too far, come back, that's it, hold it
right there
.'