The Golden Unicorn Read online

  The Golden Unicorn

  Phyllis A. Whitney

  1

  Except for the mumbling of the television set, the living room of my New York apartment seemed utterly still and empty—without life. My presence hardly appeared to matter, and I wondered if it ever had. I had dressed for bed in my georgette gown with its matching blue robe—but there was no one to see, and I had a strange, glowing feeling that nothing about me or the room had any reality. I felt as static as the room itself, emotionally drained—as empty as the apartment. The loss I had suffered two months ago in July, as well as what had happened to me that afternoon, was having a delayed effect. But I couldn’t seem to fight this reaction, or counteract my depression.

  If I was honest, what had happened today wasn’t even terribly important, but just another setback in a long list of setbacks. I wasn’t completely bereft of hope. Tomorrow I would be on my way to East Hampton and my searching would go on. But for now, for this moment, I was numb with discouragement.

  On the television screen the talk-show host was putting on his best now-I-am-about-to-present expression and I tried to focus my attention. It was necessary to watch, to listen to his words.

  “I want you to meet a young woman who has enjoyed an amazing success,” he was saying. “She has become known to us all in the last few years because of her outstanding articles in National Weekly. I’m sure you’ve read her interviews with American women of accomplishment, and you know what lively and penetrating pieces she writes. I want you to welcome Miss Courtney Marsh.”

  The audience applauded with flattering enthusiasm, and the girl came out from the back of the set while I watched with the blank feeling of never having seen her before.

  Don’t swing your arms when you walk, I thought, but I had no other real criticism. She was slim, blond, smartly dressed in a dark red sheath which hinted at a good figure and revealed a well-shaped pair of legs. She moved with poise and assurance, shook hands with the host and the other guests with accustomed grace, and sat down in her chair, smiling without self-consciousness—well used to being in the public eye. Her fair hair fell to her shoulders with a brushed shine, swinging when she moved her head. She began to answer questions intelligently in a clear voice and with an attractive effect of modesty, speaking of the surprising success she had made for herself in the last few years. She was a complete stranger to me.

  “You’re still in your twenties, aren’t you?” Hal Winser said. “How did you become such a whiz so soon? How come people tell you so much in your interviews?”

  “I’ve always been interested in other people,” she told him smoothly. “I like to find out what makes them tick.”

  “But now you specialize in women only—and not even particularly famous women. Why?”

  “I suppose I’ve become aware of a great many women around the country today who’re doing outstanding work in the arts and the professions. Most of them are working quietly without a great deal of recognition. I’ve wanted to learn about them myself and I try to give them a little of the credit they deserve—and haven’t sought.”

  “Did you always like to write, Courtney?” he asked with the easy familiarity of his breed, though he’d never seen the girl he called by her first name until this moment. “Did your parents encourage you when you were young?”

  I left my chair and turned off the set with a sharp click. I ought to watch critically for whatever I could learn, but that girl on the screen had nothing to do with me, and I didn’t want to hear any glib talk about her parents.

  Courtney Marsh.

  I was Courtney Marsh—whoever that was. Yet right now I could hardly recall the taping of that show weeks before. It had lost all reality for me. Indeed, I sometimes wondered what reality there had ever been for me in my whole life.

  Without warning, memory whipped back over the years to a very young Courtney in fifth grade. I had been adopted when I was two months old, and my loving adoptive parents had never kept this fact from me. No one had ever made anything of it until that day in school. I could still hear the voice of the poisonous little boy who had sat next to me.

  “My mom says you don’t have any mother and father. My mom says you aren’t real.”

  I had run away from school before classes were dismissed that day. I had run all the way home to Gwen Marsh’s arms, and she had held me gently, pouring out comfort, consoling me for what could not be helped.

  “Of course you’re real, darling. You’re the realest thing in our lives. Leon and I have had you since you were a baby. We are your mother and father, even though you weren’t born to us.”

  I switched off the memory as sharply as I’d turned off the set. Because I wasn’t real. What that boy had said was true and I had only been thrusting back the knowledge all these years while I explored other people’s lives and made up fantasies about myself. I had always done that, wondering as a child if I could be the youngest daughter of a queen—kidnaped and lost until Gwen and Leon found me. Or—in a darker mood—perhaps I was the daughter of that horrible ax murderer who had terrified the country. What sort of blood ran in my veins? How could I know?

  The only thing I knew for sure was that I was not the natural child of Gwen and Leon Marsh. They had been good and kind, but they had never understood my wild imaginings, my flights of fancy, or, later, my driving will to be somebody. They’d have been happy if I could have married a boy next door and grown up in suburban Connecticut without any thought of a career. My success had bewildered them. I was the cuckoo in the robins’ nest, but they’d done the very best for me they could, and I had loved them both dearly.

  Now they were lost to me too in that dreadful train accident near Rome during the summer, and I had felt devastated ever since. They hadn’t been old enough to die and they should have had the comfortable old age I could have given them. Yet their loss had brought everything to a climax in my life, so that I was driven by a new urgency.

  I felt terribly alone, and what that boy had said so long ago began to seem true—I wasn’t real. The girl I had just seen on television wasn’t real. How could she be when there was so much she didn’t know—such as how to be a person in her own right, how to love a man and be a woman a man could love. There was a dark void out there that I was never free of, and because of it I couldn’t be fully alive.

  It wasn’t as though I’d not had a happy life with Gwen and Leon. But I could only bring that back in memory. Across the room, the telephone was silent. Once I would have called them in Connecticut, told them I was feeling low, and their love would have poured out to me, even if they didn’t fully understand my mood. Of course I had friends I could phone. I had Jim, who had brought me home this afternoon—if I wanted to call him. But apathy persisted.

  I had never thought of myself as a self-pitying type, and I took real satisfaction in my job and the work I loved to do well. It mattered to me to be important in my field. Perhaps that was a part of who I really was—the long fight to prove my equality with all those who already knew everything about themselves. But self-pity or not, I was entitled for this one night to long for something others had that I had never known.

  In recent years I had met other adoptees and I’d learned that our yearnings to know were the same, that I wasn’t an oddball exception. We called what we were doing “The Search,” and society had made it as difficult for us as possible to bring such a search to an end.

  The phone rang as I stared at it, and I went reluctantly to pick up the receiver. Easy cheerfulness wasn’t what I needed now and my “hello” wasn’t exactly welcoming.

  “Courtney, hon, you were terrific on Hal Winser’s interview! You
showed him how.” That was Jim’s voice. “All that glamour you project! And you couldn’t have looked more elegant and sure of yourself. You did Courtney Marsh proud. I liked the way you turned some of those snide questions about professional women back on him without being in the least rude—really great!”

  “I couldn’t watch,” I said.

  There was a small silence at the other end of the line. Then Jim came on again. “Darling, don’t let what happened this afternoon get you down. It doesn’t matter. Why should it? You’ve got things all mixed up in that pretty head of yours.”

  “I’m not real,” I said. “Good night, Jim.”

  I put the phone aside and looked about the room as though I were seeing it for the first time. Thinly worn antique Persian rugs, their colors muted against the austere black and white room. A few Thonet pieces, complemented by some Art Deco. A Castiglioni lamp and elaborate stereo, with original oils and name lithos on the walls. Who did this room belong to? What was it trying to prove? Good breeding and a sophisticated taste—good blood? All acquired and superficial—perhaps not even mine.

  I turned my back on it and went into the bedroom, where I swallowed a sleeping pill, threw off my robe, switched out the lights, and got into bed. I wasn’t Jim Healy’s darling. Courtney Marsh wasn’t anybody’s darling. How could she be with a great part of her vital identity missing? That girl on television was only a stranger talking to other strangers. She had no self of her own to talk about. She was nothing but a façade—and no one around her knew it.

  “Go to sleep and stop being a fool,” I told myself. “You’ve got a career that most girls would give an arm and a leg for. You’ve compensated beautifully. Your name is well known, you’re at the top of your profession, and you’re only twenty-five. What on earth do you want? Every life has something wrong in it, goodness knows. What do you expect?”

  I answered my own critical self. “Not all that much. Just to know who I am. Everyone else knows—so why shouldn’t I?”

  I was done with waiting and brooding and imagining. The time had come for action—even though it was so desperately difficult to find a course of action that would take me anywhere. This afternoon I had tried—and once more failed. I went through the scene again in my mind. Quite intensely I had begun to hate the not unkind man I had talked with. Even as I had taken the chair offered me near his desk, I had known that Alton Pierce and I were antagonistic.

  The lawyer was already on guard when I walked into his office. In order to make this late afternoon appointment, I’d had to give my identity, and he must have looked up my name in his files so that he was prepared to tell me nothing of what I wanted so terribly to know.

  I was startled to find him younger than I expected, since I had been prepared to see the man with whom Gwen and Leon had dealt. He met me with a stiff, rather watchful manner that did not reassure me, and I began too abruptly, not trying to lead into my questions gracefully as I would have done if the interview had been on a subject other than myself.

  “I believe it was your firm that handled the details when I was adopted nearly twenty-five years ago, Mr. Pierce.”

  The guarded look moved to a folder that lay on the desk before him, and he barely nodded. “My father handled the case, Miss Marsh. He has since died. Has the adoption worked out well for you?”

  Well? How could I answer that when the ramifications were so many, when mixed into my love for Gwen and Leon and their love for me were all the inner questions and longings that I couldn’t begin to make anyone understand?

  “It has gone very well,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t a right to know who I am.”

  He was shaking his head before I’d finished the sentence. “I’m sorry, but you have no right, Miss Marsh. No legal right at all. You must know that. These matters are sealed—and very sensibly so, in order to protect all the parties concerned.”

  I couldn’t help the bitterness that crept into my voice. “Yes, I’ve been to the agencies where such records are kept. They wouldn’t give me anything.”

  “You didn’t expect them to, did you?”

  “I suppose not. I had to try. But I was told some years ago that Pierce and Benton had handled the case, and I knew you weren’t bound by the same restrictive rules.”

  His look was not entirely without sympathy, but I could see that he didn’t mean to give an inch. “Perhaps not. But we are governed by the ethics and the responsibility to those concerned. This is not anything I can possibly divulge, Miss Marsh.”

  He put a hand on the manila folder on his desk in a manner that told me the interview had already ended and there was nowhere else for me to go. In those papers before him, well within reach of my hand, were hidden all the answers to what I wanted to know—my mother’s name, and perhaps my father’s. Whether I was legitimate, perhaps even the reason why my mother hadn’t wanted to keep me, had given me away. Yet the folder might just as well have been locked in a safe, for all the good it would do me.

  “In this case,” I said, “I think there is something more important than these rules of silence. I wonder if even the ethics you speak of matter any more? All this began more than twenty-five years ago. I can understand that adoptive parents must be protected from a young mother who might change her mind and cause trouble about a baby. Even the mother needs protection from exposure, if that’s what she wants. But years have changed all this, and you must know, Mr. Pierce, that I have no intention of causing anyone trouble or embarrassment. I only want to know who I am.”

  “You are the daughter of Gwen and Leon Marsh, who so generously adopted you and gave you a good home,” he said sternly. “Nothing else really matters. Haven’t you considered the pain you may be bringing them by asking such questions now?”

  I swallowed hard and tried to keep my voice steady. “They both died just two months ago in a train crash in Italy.”

  He looked a little shocked. “ I’m very sorry. I can understand that this loss has left you with an emptiness you want to fill. But believe me, Miss Marsh, it would not be wise for you to pursue this search any further.”

  “Why not?” I snatched at his words. “What do you mean—‘not wise’?”

  “You have to remember that your mother gave you away. To speak bluntly, she’s not likely to want you back in her life now.”

  “But I’ve told you I don’t want to make any trouble for her. I probably wouldn’t even let her know who I am. It’s only my identity I’m seeking. Surely you can understand that?”

  He shuffled the papers on his desk impatiently as his good nature began to run out.

  “You think now that you’d be silent. But if you found your mother, or your family, you’d discover that sooner or later you would be driven to identify yourself. And that could be disastrous. It could hurt you all. Such things are better forgotten.”

  “If I live to be a hundred, I won’t forget,” I said.

  “Then I am very sorry for you. Because there isn’t any way for you to go on. It would be wiser to accept the end of the road in this office and stop fighting something that happened long ago and can’t be changed now. All the decisions were in other hands than yours. You can’t affect them and you have to learn to accept them.”

  “I won’t accept them!” I cried. “Other people had no right to make decisions I could never agree to. And it’s not the end of the road. There is one other thing.”

  His look was suddenly alert. “Yes?”

  “I know where my mother lived. Her home was out on Long Island. In East Hampton.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “When I was going through his things after the crash, I found a letter addressed to Leon. It had been written many years ago by an elderly aunt of his who has since died. It asked how the little girl from East Hampton was doing.”

  The man behind the desk was silent, his expression still guarded
, giving nothing away.

  “Of course it referred to me, though they’d never told me where I came from. Gwen used to say that I had to be protected from the past when I began to ask too many questions.”

  “Very wise of her.”

  “Then you won’t even confirm this small detail?”

  He shook his head. I hadn’t hoped for anything else.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said and stood up. “I’m going to East Hampton tomorrow.”

  “Without a single lead to follow? That’s pretty foolish, isn’t it?” He rose from his desk and came around to stand beside me. Now that I gave evidence of leaving, his manner softened a little. “I’m sorry I can’t help you, Miss Marsh.”

  We had reached a complete impasse and I knew it was final. In the outer office Jim would be waiting for me, and there was nothing to do but rejoin him and let him take me back to my apartment.

  Mr. Pierce came with me to the door and when he opened it for me I thanked him stiffly and went out. The receptionist glanced at her watch as though eager to be off, and Jim Healy tossed aside a copy of National Weekly and stood up. Jim and I worked together on the magazine, where he was an assistant editor.

  “I’ve been rereading your story about Dr. Ruth Brooks,” he said. “I’d never heard of her, but you did a good job of making her come through as a skilled doctor and a compassionate woman.”

  I couldn’t have cared less. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please.”

  “Right away, lady,” Jim said cheerfully and we walked down the hall to the elevator. “You notice I’m not asking questions,” he said when we were alone in the descending car, just ahead of the five o’clock crowds.

  “I don’t expect you need to.”

  “Right. Your face is a mile long. Let’s go over to Bruno’s.”

  I couldn’t bear to talk while we walked the two blocks, and I let him rattle on, trying to amuse and cheer me. Jim found us a booth at the back and ordered coffee for me and a whiskey sour for himself.