Habit of Fear (3 page)

“Go on.”

“I panicked but I didn’t want him to know it. I didn’t want him to see how shaky I was, but I couldn’t help myself. And that made me angry.”

“With yourself?”

“Who else?”

“And you were afraid. Is that what you mean by panicked?”

Julie nodded. “All of a sudden I was nobody again. There was nothing of
me
in that living room. I remember looking for a china giraffe I’d bought in a Paris flea market, the one thing of mine, but when I found it, I put it right back on the shelf.”

The doctor sat, her forefinger touching her lower lip, her dark eyes blinking as she stared at Julie while Julie recounted the length and depth of the reliance on Jeff. Then, winding up: “But I’m not going back. Even if … I’m not.”

“All of a sudden you were nobody again.” The therapist picked up on something she had said sometime before.

“Growing up with my mother’s name. I never even knew my father, except for his picture on the mantel. I’ve said this to you so many times.”

“Go on.”

“I think she made up all the stories about him, an Irish diplomat who up and disappeared after he got the marriage annulled. I guess he was a Catholic. And you know what that makes me as far as the church is concerned. Oh, to hell with him. To hell with him! I’ve been saying it all my life.”

“Tut, tut, tut,” the doctor chided. “You are
guessing.
You
think
she made up the stories. What do you
know
?”

Julie was given pause. What did she know? As a child she had asked questions, and as a child she had liked what her mother told her, and she had believed every word, even the ones she knew were contradictory. As to the question still foremost in her mind, why the annulment? It was one question her mother answered consistently right up to the end of her life.
“Because it was what he wanted.”
Her mother was great at giving men what they wanted. Julie looked at her watch.

The doctor repeated the question in that voice Julie recognized from old whenever she’d been trying to escape the couch: “What do you know?”

“I don’t
know
anything.”

“Not anything? No marriage license? No record of annulment? No friends of your mother’s to talk to, no best man, no maid of honor at their wedding? No wedding photographs? Nothing about him on your birth certificate?”

“That was almost thirty years ago, doctor. It’s a long time.”

“Thank you for telling me. You amaze me: you are curious about every urchin on the street. You play detective. You dig up secret lives of celebrities and do not even know your father’s name.”

“I do know that,” Julie said softly.

“So?”

“Thomas Francis Mooney. And I know he was born in Ireland. It’s on my birth certificate.”

“And your name on the birth certificate?”

“Julie Anne Richards.”

“Your mother’s maiden name, yes?”

“With a notation about my father—whereabouts unknown.”

“Very curious.” It was one of Dr. Callahan’s rare comments. She adjusted her analyst’s chair to relieve a back strain. “How do you feel about the men who attacked you?”

“I loathe them. It makes me sick to think about them.”

“
Do
you think about them?”

“I can almost turn it off now, but in a way that’s bad. I ought to be trying to remember things about them if I’m going to be any help to the police.”

“Do you feel ashamed? Guilty?”

“I don’t know about ashamed exactly. I feel dirty. As though a thousand enemas wouldn’t clean me out. But guilty, no. Not this trip.”

The doctor nodded understanding. “A thousand enemas will help. And getting on with your life. That is the important thing. You are not going back, so you are going forward, yes? Do you want to talk about the impending divorce?”

“I don’t know what there is to talk about. The sooner the better. Did you think it would happen? I mean back when I was in therapy with you?”

The doctor almost smiled. “I am not always right,” she said. “Do you wish to resume therapy?”

“No. For one thing, I can’t afford it.”

“Do you still have the job on the newspaper?”

“Yes.”

“And there will be a divorce settlement, no? You were not married yesterday. How many years?”

“Nine. I will not take any more money from Jeff.”

The therapist breathed deeply, as though she needed patience. “So you have come full circle. Independence.”

Sarcasm? Julie wasn’t sure. “I hope so, doctor. Maybe that way I’ll get rid of the anger. I wish I understood it. It’s like an obsession.”

“Is it possible that you need it at the moment?”

Julie thought about that. She was surprised. “Possibly,” she admitted.

The doctor released the brake on her chair. “Total independence is as neurotic as total dependence. Fortunately, either condition is beyond most of us. You know I am here in an emergency.”

Julie thanked her.

No good-bye, no handshake, no convoy to the door: it made for a continuity of sorts, something unfinished, something that might never be finished.

I
F DR. CALLAHAN WAS
amazed at Julie’s only occasional curiosity about her father, so was Julie now that she looked at it from what might be called an adult perspective. It was as though there was a door in the house that she, as a child, had been told could not be opened. She had grown up with the feeling of truth about the unknowability of her father. There were no wedding pictures among her mother’s papers, no certificate of marriage such as Julie and Jeff had received from the minister. Her mother seemed to have erased every possible image of him and filled in the vacancy when Julie asked questions with whatever came into her mind. Was the name Mooney a fabrication? No. That was on her birth certificate, not to be nullified by “whereabouts unknown.” But it was totally missing from her certificate of baptism, an event that occurred eight months later in the Protestant Episcopal Church. It was a church in which to this day she felt an alien for all that she had grown up in it. The seed of Rome seemed, somehow, not to have died.

IT WAS OVER TWO WEEKS
since she had been in the
New York Daily
office. She did not go in regularly in the normal order of things, only to meetings and her occasional bout with the Terminal Data System when her partner was out of town. She went in that day as part of therapy—to get on with her life. With every step her dread grew stronger.

Tim Noble, her collaborating columnist, spotted her coming along outside the glass-enclosed editorial room and hastened to meet her. She hesitated as he came close. He stopped short. Then they rushed into each other’s arms. It was hard to break away and stand face to face.

“You’re looking great,” Tim said.

“You too,” Julie said. And he did look good to her: a homely face with a lovely smile and ears that looked as though he had been picked up by them as a child.

He tried awkwardly to keep pace with her as they reached the main aisle of the vast room. “Do you feel as good as you look?”

“I feel pretty good,” she said with all the cheer she could muster.

Everybody stood up and either saluted or shook hands as she and Tim moved along to their cubicle. Such a reception wouldn’t have come with an appendectomy, she thought. She willed herself off that track until she saw the bouquet of white carnations on her desk. White. With a drop of red at their hearts. She had to stop seeing symbols even when they were obvious. The boss, Tom Hastings, came out from his office, hesitated about it, and then kissed her on the cheek.

Julie thanked him for the reward the paper had posted for information leading to the arrest and conviction … Five thousand dollars, recently upped to ten.

Hastings merely nodded. “It’s nice to have you back on the job,” he said and retreated to his office.

The others returned to their desks, the kindest thing they could have done.

“I promise I won’t make jokes,” Tim said.

“Oh, for God’s sake, do.”

“Okay. Did you ever see such a guilty bunch of dudes in your life? I’ll bet there isn’t a guy in the office who’s laid his wife in the last two weeks.”

“That’s a joke?” She shuddered. She wasn’t out of the trauma by any means.

Tim sank his head between his shoulders and got onto something safer. “Have you been able to read the column?”

She made an effort. “That’s why I’m here. I was afraid you didn’t need me anymore.”

Tim grinned and reached out his hand. Involuntarily she drew away. Realizing, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard. “It’s great you’re back,” he said.

She tried to sit more loosely in her chair, to feel comfortable. But it was not going to happen, not that day.

“Why don’t you take off something and stay for a while?”

She shook her head. “Tim, I’m going to be wobbly for a while. Not only because of … the rape. There, I’ve said it and it feels better. I know somebody who won’t say the word
cancer.
She calls it the big C.”

“There are a lot of big C’s—courage, confidence …”

“What I started to say is: Jeff and I are getting a divorce.”

“Congratulations.”

“Don’t be frivolous about it, Tim.”

“I’ve never been more unfrivolous in my life. I won’t knock the guy, but I think it’s the best thing that could happen to you.”

“He’s in love with another woman. God! That sounds corny.”

“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.”