Don't Think a Single Thought, page 5
When she was fostered and then adopted, she’d cry herself to sleep sometimes.
‘Mommy! Come and get me! Oh, Mommy…’
She told her adopted mother (who she never called Mommy) one winter’s night, ‘When I’m asleep, I fly to Mommy… even through the cold and snow.’
When she was given dolls, she made them talk to each other – conversations she could remember.
‘"Why’d you let her go, Suse? Why’d you let her go?"’
‘"I can’t manage her. I can’t manage any of them. It’s too much, it’s too hard!"’
Girls at her new school taunted, ‘Your real mommy gave you away.’
MANHATTAN, 1966
A few months after the boring dinner, she and Jonathan were invited to a party at the home of a TV scriptwriter. An apartment with a pool right outside the terrace. A butler serving miniature lobster canapes, tiny squares of caviar on toast, finger-sized coffee eclairs, little cubes of iced birthday cake, each with a sugar rosebud on… with tall flutes of French champagne.
A celebration party in Manhattan. Crowds of screeching people, a room too small to hold them all, loud music, hysterical laughter… drugs? Girls with wild curly hair to their waist, wearing kaftans and rows of beads… rumors that Diana Dors would turn up… “drop in”, anyway… a feverish atmosphere.
But, as it turned out, there was nothing to celebrate.
Two days later, Emma had a visit from a couple of police officers: one tall, dark, like someone from a Visconti film; the other, small, chubby and nervous. The tall one did most of the talking.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Bowden – no doubt you’re still shocked. As you know, a two-year-old girl, Sophie, child of one of the guests, drowned in the pool. We’re told the child simply “got away"’ (he put inverted commas round the words) from her parents and was later found in the water. You were on the guest list, and we’re seeing everyone who was on it. Did you see the child?’
‘I saw her at the start, yes, with her parents. But it was a huge party – I didn’t see her after that, though I saw her mother and father. I assumed she was with her nanny.’
‘She had no nanny with her. So, you didn’t play with the little girl? Or see anyone with her?’
‘No. I didn’t. I didn’t know her.’
The Italian-looking one stared round the room, then said softly, ‘Mrs. Bowden, I believe you were at The Hamptons when Joe Spencer drowned?’
Her heart began to thump.
‘Yes, we were.’
‘The parents said that at the time, the children annoyed you in some way?’
‘They sent me an unpleasant note, yes, or at least I thought it was from them. I can’t pretend I wasn’t angry.’
‘Yes. Do you still see the Spencers?’
‘I’ve seen George, sometimes, as we go to the same fitness club. Fiona, no. She’s been ill.’
She’d forgotten Fiona had recovered.
‘Is that a real Picasso?’ He sounded admiring.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Nice. We may need to see you again.’
He looked again appraisingly at the Picasso.
When they left, she burst into tears.
‘Jonathan! They think I killed Sophie!’
‘Get a grip, Emma. They’re interviewing everyone on the guest list – they have to do that, for God’s sake, and your name was there. The Joe Spencer thing was a coincidence. His drowning was random; they said so at the time.’
She still shook and cried.
‘In any case – in any case – that child was shockingly looked after. Rich parents, probably had a few drinks, can’t even keep an eye on their own little girl. In a mad crush like that she could easily get lost and wander off to the pool. If they weren’t taking care of her.’
‘The terrace leads right on to it,’ she said. ‘A little girl would just walk into it… simply step in.’
‘Em, a brandy?’
She recalled the evening. Loud rock music – The Rolling Stones – deafening. She’d retreated to the bathroom, feeling jittery. Claustrophobia and loud music, two of her favorite fears – the levels were alarming. She planned to move to the terrace when she came out – it could be done. Desperate, she hadn’t any pills in her evening bag. Oh, the cool air! The bright blue of the water… too blue. Not like real water… not like real sea.
And that’s when she heard screaming, saw a blur dive into the water, heard alarm sirens. Paramedics, sweating, shouldered their way in and tried to bring the child back to life. The mother was screaming, weeping, throwing herself onto the child. They were taken to hospital. Everywhere she could hear hysterical cries of “She’s dead! She’s drowned!” Everyone was asked to leave. She and Jonathan left, sat on their own terrace with large drinks.
The horror of the scene brought its own post-horror adrenalin – it was almost peaceful. All Jonathan said, quietly, was, ‘A totally unnecessary death. Most deaths I see in this city are.’
All Emma could think was, I was in the bathroom then – I had to get out. To the terrace. That’s when it happened…
Don’t think any more, she told herself. Sleep.
The good-looking Italian one dropped by again.
‘We have a suspect for the death of Sophie – but we need more evidence,’ he says, lounging on the sofa, wearing shoes a little too pointed for a cop. ‘You say you were in the main room, and then you went out onto the terrace? Can you recall what you saw?’
‘I wasn’t feeling well. A little claustrophobic – the music was loud, the room was stuffy… I was desperate for some air.’
‘Was anyone on the terrace at that time?’
‘I… don’t think so… maybe, yes. I don’t know.’
She recalls having said these words somewhere else, another time.
‘Please think hard, Mrs. Bowden. It will help us.’
She thinks.
‘I had the impression of… a blur. Something red.’
‘The child was wearing a red dress.’
‘And then, I think… someone else dived in, there was a splash. And then crowds of people screaming.’
‘The person who dived in, can you remember what they were wearing? Even the color? A man or a woman, would you say?’
‘Maybe, black… perhaps… a woman… I can’t remember clearly.’
‘When this person dived, you were the only person there?’
‘I think so. But of course, I can’t be sure. There may have been someone behind me, I don’t know. I can’t imagine I was the only one feeling claustrophobic.’
He says she’s been helpful, takes another look at the Picasso, chats for a few minutes about modern art, then leaves.
A week later, the child’s mother was arrested. Suffering from depression, she’d pushed the child in and then tried to rescue her. Her husband had tried to cover up, insisting she’d dived in after the child, to save her. The mother was a fashion designer: glamorous, often on television. Her husband was desperate to protect her. Emma heard on the grapevine that, when his wife was arrested, he begged the police to arrest him instead, to let him take the blame.
As always, Jonathan was calm, measured. ‘She was a brain disabled child – they had to take her everywhere with them, she wouldn’t let them go out without her. She had no regard for safety and wandered off – I guess the mother was temporarily out of her mind. She pushed her in, then instantly regretted it – but it was too late. A brain disability – when the child looks fine, is pretty – is hard for parents to deal with. But the mother could have gotten better treatment.’
Emma could understand why she’d pushed the child in, but not why she’d tried to rescue her.
‘Jonathan… is there something wrong with me? I feel more sympathy for the mother than for the child. I’m absolutely sure I could never cope with a brain damaged child – every day would be torture… you do see that?’
He saw. But added, ‘People do cope, and with far worse. The human being can be infinitely compassionate. The thing is, never to judge. I still think the child could have been more carefully watched. But I imagine the mother was enjoying herself for the first time in ages. She was very depressed, but alcohol and a party atmosphere can temporarily uplift. I did judge them then, but didn’t know the child was brain damaged.’
‘She won’t be put in jail, will she?’
‘I’m sure not. They’ll advise some medical help. It’s enough for them to live with it. That’s enough of a punishment. Yet they will recover.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t “know”. But there’s always hope.’
MANHATTAN, 1967
Her novel Manhattan Diary continues to be a great hit. It’s on bestseller lists. It’s translated into nineteen languages. Critics recognize her stressed heroine, Carol, struggling to cope with apartment, children and difficult husband, panic attacks.
All women will recognize some of Carol’s problems, and many women, all of them, writes one critic.
She’s asked to write a piece for the Saturday Evening Post on being a student at Vassar in its all-women days. She recalls long evenings – nights – spent with her best friends Ruth and Mia, the conversations, the comfort of it. The pleasure. They’d stayed friends. They always would.
Being all-women was much better, she believes. She makes an argument for it, written in her witty “diary” style.
She accepts all publicity: her agent advises it.
‘All publicity is good, Emma. Bite the bullet!’
The make-up girl uses all kinds of cosmetics Emma hasn’t tried, contours her face, blow dries her hair, sprays some shine onto it, suggests a different, softer but still red, lipstick. She’s forty now – on TV she looks ten years younger. Make-up – what would she do without it?
She was being interviewed again for television, following her Vassar piece, this time on the rise in student deaths by suicide. It was because her Manhattan Diary novel was haunted by “falling bodies” – two characters jumped from balconies. She’d said that, walking in Manhattan, she was always wary of the falling body, the person falling from a great height. Worse, she knew that opposite her own building – her own building! – a diplomat’s wife threw first her two children, then herself, from the twelfth floor. She was suffering from loneliness and depression, the inquest recorded. After that, a “welcome group” for diplomatic wives was set up. Then, visiting a friend in hospital, she was told that the friend was sitting on the window ledge smoking when an old man flung himself from four floors above her. She witnessed the blur of his falling body. Her friend began to cry and became anxious.
The nurses said, ‘He was old and going to die anyway. Please don’t think about it anymore – concentrate on getting well.’
So callous! She’d always found nurses to be cool and rather heartless – maybe that was too drastic an adjective, maybe not – while male doctors had more… sensitivity. Seemed to anyway. Their voices were better modulated.
To throw oneself from a great height… it would be painless, she thought.
You’d lose consciousness before you hit the ground. And there would be the thrill of flying… and seeing everything, albeit for the last time, from the air.
The TV studio, early in the morning, was a little chaotic, almost domestic. Coffee was offered, jokes made, the presenter read through notes in a panicky but show-off last minute way. Then “insider” jokes were cracked between the team, who clearly felt themselves a cut above everyone else. The slot began with the latest student suicide figures – getting higher each year. Every university had at least one suicide a year, some three or four. Yet there had always been suicides at Vassar. Emma knew – she’d researched it ahead of the TV show.
She quoted from a newspaper report of 1925 – Miss Anna Bailey, twenty-one, hanged herself in her room with a scarf attached to her clothes press. Her poems “showed ability” though she was subject to “fits of depression” and the coroner concluded there was “no adequate reason” for Miss Bailey to hang herself: “Temporary insanity was responsible”.
No “adequate” reason? What would be an “adequate” reason?
Another Vassar girl, the daughter of a priest, drowned herself in a water cistern at her home because she felt she wasn’t doing well enough – that she’d let her family down.
Yet another, a film major, set fire to herself.
‘Of course, Jackie Kennedy went to Vassar – around your time; and there were suicides then.’
‘Philosophical suicides,’ said Emma.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Two girls, brilliant philosophy students, did commit suicide when I was there, but they’d always been fascinated by death. They were always talking about it. To them it was the great adventure, the great mystery – they had this theory that, if one was going to die anyway, why wait until you were old and ill and hopeless to do it? Why not do it when you were young and could, as they said, “enjoy the journey?” They were discovered in a weekend studio they rented, both in black silk nightdresses, with their arms around each other. Medicals revealed they’d taken huge overdoses of a sedative drug which first induces euphoria. Their notes said goodbye and thank you to their families, and that they’d embarked on what they called, “The most fascinating journey of our lives – we’re on a thrilling voyage. Don’t mourn for us”.’
‘What did staff and students make of that?’
‘There was grief and sadness mixed with… a kind of puzzlement. Women at Vassar were thinkers – there wasn’t a clichéd reaction. No one wrote “RIP” anywhere, or “Heaven has found a new angel”. We’d find that absurd. With some students, there was almost a kind of awe.’
‘Awe?’
‘Some students were impressed they’d taken their beliefs so far. Hadn’t backed out. In fact, a sort of group, a cult, was set up to look into death and death writings. I don’t know if it still exists. I left in 1947.’
‘Do you remember the girls?’
‘Yes. I do. Kelly, and Mary Lou. Both blond, slim and pretty. They were tremendous dancers – they did an exhibition rock ‘n’ roll, and a perfect tango at dances. It was great to watch them.’
‘Was there a backlash to this tragedy?’
‘Some parents took their daughters away from Vassar. There were complaints to the principal, and the trustees were involved. Then there were tabloid accusations of “black magic” and of course suggestions that drugs were a serious problem. There were drugs. Plus – boys were not admitted at that time, it was an all-girl college. That made life so much easier – there was little or no anxiety. You could relax, come to class without make-up, never worry about whether a boy liked you or didn’t. I believe admitting boys to Vassar was a mistake. It’s so much easier to concentrate on your studies without also being embroiled in a romance. When boys are at a college, a kind of hierarchy sets in – who’s the prettiest girl, who dresses best, who has the most boys like her? It’s so competitive. Then, when a relationship goes wrong – and you still have to see the boy every day – life would become misery to the girl. It’s enough to study – then relax with your girlfriends. No wonder there’s so much stress and anxiety at college now! No woman student should have to put up with dealing with men as well.’
‘Apart from the professors, you mean?’ However, the interviewer said this, smiling, with the microphone off. And that was the interview done.
The double suicide was a faint memory.
After all, they’d talked about it so much! The “afterlife” – whole groups sat up late into the night discussing it. Which Emma thought was stupid. The death-groupies talked endlessly about what might happen, how we’d all have to die. How curious death was and how little curiosity was shown.
Suicide? They thought it a fascinating option. A bit like doing the Caminito del Ray walk near Malaga – a hair-raising walk above steep gorges and falls, with just a rope to hang on to. Something she’d thought she might attempt for the terror – but knew she never would. At the same time – and only now and then – she could see it was a tempting option. Death. Or endless sleep, which was the same but without the inconvenience for everyone else.
Her Diary book is still doing well – in the USA and in Britain, as well as other countries. She’s doing notes for another one, based on a woman’s relationship with her shrink. She’s working at her best.
One day her publisher had a note for her. The handwriting was untidy, in pencil. The signature – who was it from? She saw “Cathy”. Cathy who?
Cathy! Her sister – the sister she never imagined she’d see again:
I saw your book in the Book store here, with your Picture on it. We live in Omaha where we have a nice trailer and not so far from the river. Wayne and me have 5 kids, the baby is only 3 months old. Our brother – Mikey – he died years ago when he was 20, a bike accident, I’m sorry to tell you this. It would be nice to see you, if you ever could get here. The camp is signposted and there’s a motel not far. The book looked good, though I couldn’t buy a copy then. I hope to though.
A blurry snapshot was enclosed. Cathy looked overweight, her partner thin and undernourished, the children all smiling and making silly faces. Emma didn’t feel a thing. Except surprise. All those years when she’d felt the pain of losing little Cathy – and now to be confronted with this huge woman… she raked her emotion for some shred of feeling, of affection, attachment.
She felt much sadder when she thought of Mikey dying in a motorbike accident. Tears came into her eyes. Didn’t they meet in New York? About seventeen years ago? When she was working in a bookstore? As always, she appealed to Jonathan for advice.
‘Should I go to visit? She is my sister. But that trailer… and she’s huge. Yet why should that matter so much? Why aren’t I kinder?’
‘You aren’t unkind, Em. Obesity is off-putting. I imagine the family lives mostly on trashy food. It may be difficult to cook in that trailer. I think you have to consider responsibility rather than emotion here. But remember Cathy has chosen this life, chosen to have five kids. Wasn’t she adopted, too?’
