The Golden Unicorn Read online

  “I warned you that a lawyer would tell you nothing,” Jim said when the waitress went away. “Courtney, why don’t you give this up? There aren’t any open doors and you’ll just keep banging yourself against stone walls. I don’t like to see you hurt.”

  I found myself studying his rather broad, good-natured face in the dim light of the booth. I was fond of him. I respected his intelligence and his integrity, and he had taught me a lot about my job. But I wasn’t in love with him. I hadn’t ever been really in love with anyone, and sometimes I wondered if I ever would be.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m an adult. I do have a right to know. None of the arrangements that were made had my consent. I have a right to know who I am.”

  He reached across the table and took my hand. “I know who you are. And what you are right now is enough. Just take me—I’ve got family galore, and you can have most of them as far as I’m concerned. Aunt Helga trying to run my life because she thinks I look like Uncle Hubert. Mother fussing if I stay out all night. Dad thinking I’m crazy to work on a magazine instead of getting a real job. Who needs relatives?”

  I withdrew my hand gently and sipped hot coffee. Jim didn’t understand, any more than anyone else ever had. How could there be understanding when I didn’t truly understand myself? I only knew that I’d built up a façade to hide behind, and that somewhere there was a woman who needed to come out into the open and prove herself as flesh and blood—someone who was more than clever words on paper.

  “What have you got to go on?” Jim demanded, setting his glass down with a thump of protest. “You haven’t any leads. And without a lead you can’t even get started.”

  Around my neck, hidden beneath the collar of my blouse, I wore a pendant on a fine gold chain, and now I reached back and opened the clasp.

  “I have this,” I said, and held up the chain, so that the golden unicorn dangled from it—a tiny, perfect thing, its front legs prancing, the slender golden horn protruding from the forehead, the etched eyes somehow wise and knowing.

  Jim had seen it before and he did not take it from me. “What can you possibly tell from that?”

  “It came with me. It was around my neck when Gwen and Leon brought me home. It was a—a memento from someone. Someone who must have cared a little to leave such a precious thing with me.”

  “But it gives you no information of any kind.”

  “Perhaps it does. There’s something you haven’t seen.” I opened my handbag and took out a yellowed clipping, spreading it open on the table between us. “When I went through their bank deposit box after Gwen and Leon died, I found this.”

  Jim bent over it, studying the newsprint with its hazy reproduction of a painting, trying to press out the folds with his forefinger. I didn’t need to look. I had almost worn out the clipping since I’d found it. It reproduced—badly—a painting by an artist named Judith Rhodes: a beach scene with a desolate stretch of sand fading into the distance. It was a night scene with a full moon sailing an otherwise empty sky above the dark ocean.

  Jim looked up at me, puzzled. “So what?”

  “Read the penciled words on the margin,” I said.

  He turned the clipping sideways and read the words aloud. “‘Is this the unicorn in our Courtney’s life?’” He shook his head at me. “Who wrote this? And what unicorn?”

  “It’s Gwen’s handwriting. Look at the shadow on the moon.”

  It was there when he searched—the outline of cloud in the strange but unmistakable shape of a unicorn.

  “It’s not much to go on,” Jim said. “Who is Judith Rhodes, anyhow? I’ve never heard of her.”

  “Neither had I. But when I found the clipping I took it to an art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. The owner knew her work well and was enthusiastic, though she’s apparently recognized and admired only by a small coterie of the knowledgeable because she won’t exhibit often, and doesn’t want to sell many of her paintings. He told me that the Rhodes are an old, wealthy family in East Hampton. That might—well it just might—tie in with the letter I showed you asking about the little girl from there. Evidently Judith Rhodes is something of a recluse. Her husband’s in banking—plenty of money—and when she does have a show he brings in the paintings and sees to everything. She never comes in herself.”

  Jim shook his head. “So—what’s the connection?”

  “The man at the gallery told me she makes rather a thing of including unicorns in her pictures. You know, like Whistler’s butterfly signature. She seems to use them often. There must have been some connection in Gwen’s mind because she wrote those words in the margin of the clipping. Anyway, I’m going to East Hampton, Jim.”

  “Blindly, without any more of a lead than this?”

  “What sort of reporter do you think I am? Judith Rhodes is an artist of unusual talent, yet she’s one of those unknowns I like to interview. I wrote to her, and her husband answered. He’s keen on the idea, and he’s sold it to her, which is unusual. So I’m to go out there and stay for a visit—as long as it takes to get the material for my piece. And Jim—I’m not coming back to the office.”

  He looked at me, startled, waiting. I folded the clipping carefully and put it back in my bag.

  “Today I turned in my resignation,” I told him. “They can’t do anything else at the office but accept it. I’ll still free-lance a bit if they want me to, but after this piece I’m on my own.”

  “Why, Courtney—why?”

  I didn’t want to explain, and I wasn’t even sure that I could explain, but I had to try. I owed him that.

  “I’ve got to get away. I want to do a book—a collection of the articles I’ve been writing about my talented women. I’ll add to it, of course, and flesh the whole thing out. I even have a publisher who’s interested.”

  “They’d give you time off from the magazine if you asked. They won’t want to lose you.”

  “I don’t want time off. I want to burn my bridges. Oh Jim—don’t you see? I’ve got to burn them! I’ve got to find out how to be me. Going to Mr. Pierce’s office was a start, and I’m grateful to you for coming with me. I’ll admit I felt like a cub reporter going to see him under the circumstances. If you’ll put me in a cab, I’ll go home now. I need to pack so I can leave tomorrow.”

  He didn’t like any of it, but there was nothing he could say or do to change my mind, and he knew it.

  “I’ll miss you around the office.” He paid the check and we went out to the street.

  I couldn’t honestly tell him that I would miss him, nice as he was, though sometimes I wished I could. At the curb he halted, with a hand on my arm.

  “Are you pinning some wild hope on having this Judith Rhodes turn out to be your mother?”

  “No! No, really I’m not. There’s not enough evidence to lead to that. I only want to find out why Gwen wrote those words on that newspaper clipping, and why there’s a unicorn in my life.”

  He hailed a cab, kissed me, and let me go, and all the way home I sat numbly, letting New York slip by the cab windows without being conscious of it, smelling the smoke of bridges burning and feeling a little frightened.

  Back in my apartment I had gone around turning on lights, trying to cheer up the living room. All that black and white! Why had I ever wanted it? I went out to my small kitchen and started a warm-up supper. My meeting with Alton Pierce had taken away my appetite, but when the food was hot I carried a tray into the living room, set it on the coffee table, and tried to eat. But I couldn’t stop my churning thoughts, my memories.

  I hadn’t always been a rewarding daughter to Gwen and Leon. They had never stopped making me feel that I was cherished, valued, loved. Yet again and again while I was growing up I’d pestered them for information—information they didn’t have to give me. In the ordinary conflict that must arise in any family between parental discipline and the waywardness of childre
n, I had a special weapon that I learned to use shamefully: “How could you know? You’re not my real mother. You’re not my real father.”

  The cruelty of the young!

  Uncomfortably, I remembered Mr. Pierce’s words. He had said that I could only bring disaster if I walked into my mother’s life today, and that I would very likely be unwelcome. I wondered if he had said that out of some knowledge of her now, or if he was just stating a general pattern.

  I had been eating automatically, and somehow my plate was empty before me on the tray, and I poured myself another cup of coffee. But it cooled while vivid pictures surged through my mind.

  I could see myself going into some public place, perhaps a store in East Hampton. The golden unicorn might rest outside my blouse and I could imagine the sudden attention upon that distinctive pendant, the abrupt pouncing, the question “Where did you get that?” My imaginings gave me a sudden fright. That was not the way I wanted it to happen. I wanted to view and appraise and know, before anyone knew me—almost the way I did before one of my interviews. I wanted to find out from a safe emotional distance, with no one guessing my identity. Just as the adoptive parents never knew who the real parents were, the real mother never knew where her baby had been given for adoption—so the name of Marsh would mean nothing out in East Hampton. Probably for the first weeks of my life I had gone by another name—a name I didn’t even know. I had been given for adoption a little before I was two months old, but not immediately at birth, as was usually the custom. That much Gwen had been able to tell me because she knew my age and date of birth when I came to her, and I’d often wondered why I had been kept for that short space of time.

  My own imaginings disturbed me. I would wear the pendant because it was a talisman, and it could identify me, if ever I wanted to be identified. But I would be sure to keep it hidden from view.

  As the evening wore on, I had turned to Hal Winser’s talk show on television, but I hadn’t been able to watch for long, and my churning thoughts had never quieted. Now, as I lay in bed and waited for the sleeping pill I’d taken to work, I realized that my memories of this evening had come full circle.

  The Search! We were all alike, we adopted children, in our wish, however secret we might keep it, to know where we had come from. It mattered more in the pattern of where we were going than outsiders ever understood.

  I realized that such a search, if successful, might end unhappily—with parents I didn’t want to accept, who wouldn’t want to accept me. Even then, I wanted to know. Yet it didn’t have to be that way. If she could only know, I might very well sympathize with a girl who had been alone and frightened and without money or help, and who had been forced to give away a baby she couldn’t keep. I was sentimentalizing now.

  If the Rhodes’ name led anywhere, it might mean that disgrace, not poverty, had caused my being given away. I could sympathize there too. Even twenty-five years ago a baby born out of wedlock in a well-to-do family might have brought fear and grief to the mother. It comforted me to make allowances, and I fell asleep foolishly pitying that lost young girl who had been my mother, and whom I knew absolutely nothing about.

  2

  The next morning I made the long drive out toward the eastern tip of Long Island in my Volvo, and when Montauk Highway turned into Woods Lane, and then into Main Street, I was in the village of East Hampton. I liked its air of rural tranquility, its old houses and unique windmills. Drowsing in the center where the road divided lay the Town Pond and the Old South Burying Ground. On either side were houses of historical vintage, their shingles a silvered brown. As a reporter I had done my homework, and had been reading about East Hampton, so I already knew some of its landmarks.

  When I had found a place to leave my car at the curb, I got out to walk. The Rhodes wouldn’t expect me until early afternoon, so there was time to reconnoiter a bit, perhaps ask a few careful questions, and have lunch before I drove to the house.

  Main Street was generously wide, laid out in an earlier century by those who were accustomed to wide spaces and uncramped living. Trees overhung the sidewalk, but I was to learn later that the hurricane of ’38 had destroyed most of the great elms that had once arched above the street, and many of these were replacements.

  As I walked along, I found myself wondering if I could have been born here. Was there a house in this town where I had slept in my crib until I was nearly two months old? Something in me quickened at the thought of coming at last to my own source. How would I accept the final ending to that search, I wondered—and what would it do to me? In spite of all those childish fantasies, I wasn’t sure how I might react in the face of final reality, and that was a somewhat frightening thought.

  In any case, I liked the casual, small-town flavor of the village, the informally dressed people who moved in the warm sunshine of early September without the urgency of New York. Yet it was a small town with a special distinction because it had long been a haven, not only for wealthy summer visitors, but for the arts as well, and the shops had a smart look about them that suggested a traveled clientele with cosmopolitan tastes. Writers lived here, and artists, and from John Drew to Laurette Taylor and on, the area had been a haven for those connected with the theater.

  At a dress shop I stopped in to look around and speak to the woman behind the counter, mentioning that I was here to do an interview with Judith Rhodes. She was past middle age, and her response seemed oddly startled.

  “Oh? Then you’ll be going out to The Shingles?”

  I knew the name of the house from the stationery on which Herndon Rhodes had written me.

  “Yes. Is it one of those houses on the ocean?”

  She nodded. “It’s on the dunes, but it’s not like the summer houses. Old Ethan Rhodes built for the year-round, and the family has always lived there.”

  Sensing both curiosity and hesitation, I let her catch her breath while I asked to see a yellow and brown scarf displayed in a glass case. When I’d bought it to go with the beige pants suit I was wearing, I went on, testing again.

  “I’m looking forward to my visit. The Shingles sounds like an interesting place, and Judith Rhodes is a fine painter.”

  “Mm.” The sound was noncommittal, yet I suspected that she was torn between a desire to talk and a natural reticence toward a stranger. I waited encouragingly until she continued. “Once when I was a little girl the Rhodes opened the house to visitors for an afternoon. We have a regular tour every summer, you know. It’s a spooky old place. But they haven’t been a part of our tour for a great many years now.”

  “Why is that?” I asked directly.

  “Perhaps it was those deaths, coming so close together as they did. Even all that long ago. Anyway, they don’t entertain much any more.”

  I knotted the scarf about my throat, further hiding the golden pendant, thanked her, and went outside again. It wasn’t wise to ask too many questions of one person, but it might be to my advantage to collect what tidbits I could here and there.

  A restaurant displayed its attractive interior through long windows, and I went in and took a table near the front. Bay scallops were in season on Long Island, and I ordered them with an accompanying salad. The young waitress was friendly.

  “The Shingles? Oh, wow! Hardly anybody gets inside that house. Though I have a girl friend who works out there as a maid sometimes. She says there’s a woman they shut up in the attic who paints pictures all the time. Though my friend never saw her when she worked there.”

  This was fantasy, and I ate my lunch without encouraging further revelations from this particular source. It was interesting, though, that mentioning The Shingles could bring so curious a response.

  When I’d finished my meal I walked toward Hook Mill, turned down a cross street, and found a well-stocked bookstore where I could buy a map and ask directions. The woman in charge had seen me on television the night before, and she was friendly
and helpful—and much less lugubrious. Apparently members of the Rhodes family often dropped in for books, and she spoke of having borrowed paintings of Judith Rhodes occasionally to hang in the store.

  “Herndon Rhodes comes in for books for his wife frequently. You’ll like him, I think. And it should be a privilege to meet Judith.”

  “How many are there in the family?” I asked casually.

  “Let me see . . . there’s Stacia to begin with. She’s the daughter of Herndon and Judith, and she lives at the house with her husband, Evan Faulkner. And of course there’s John, Herndon’s older brother. He does a lot of traveling, though he’s at home right now. I saw him in here just yesterday.” There was approval in her slight smile, as though John Rhodes was someone she liked.

  “Is there a Nan Kemble too?” I asked. “Herndon Rhodes mentioned her in his letter. I’m supposed to stop at her gatehouse shop when I arrive.”

  “Yes, of course. You’ll like Nan—unless you get off on the wrong foot with her. But she’s not really a Rhodes. Her sister Alice was married to John, but Alice has been dead a long time now.”

  I shook my head in bewilderment and spread my map on the counter. “You’ve given me more names than I can handle, I’m afraid. Will you show me how to find The Shingles?”

  “That’s Ethan Lane, right there,” she said, pointing a pencil on the map. “Ethan Rhodes built the house, you know, back in the mid-1800s. The lane is a dead end and it runs right into Rhodes property. There are several ways to find it. These crossroads along this section mostly run to the water. But you might go this way. . . .” She marked a few arrows on the map and I thanked her and went back to my car.

  One of the roads that led south to the water lost me quickly in a maze of wide lanes dreaming green-gold in sunlight. It was going to be a late fall, and only a few trees had begun to turn. I drove slowly past well-trimmed privet hedges, past post and rail fences twined with rambling roses in late summer bloom. Now and then, through the hedges, or over the fences, I could glimpse enormous lawns leading to white mansions, most of them built in a much earlier day. Blue hydrangeas still bloomed along driveways, and there were signs to preserve privacy. Yet in the midst of all this luxury there would appear an unexpected potato field stretching between green lawns. Potatoes and summer people—these were the main business of this South Fork of Long Island.