The Body In The Big Apple Read Online Free PDF

Vanities.”
    Faith had forgotten Emma’s sense of humor—it was as unexpected as the rest of her.
    â€œWhere did you go?” Faith was beginning to think they should get some lunch. She was getting hungry, and they still had a great deal of ground to cover. The bench was also getting hard.
    â€œI didn’t know any radicals, or Communists, or even socialists. Not personally. But I figured there would have to be some in the Village, so I took the subway downtown and started going from one bookstore to the next. Bookstores with the right titles in the window. Nobody seemed to think it was strange that I was trying to find out about Fox. I met a woman, the owner of Better Read Than Dead, who told me that someone named Todd Hartley knew everything there was to know about Fox. She gave me his address. He was living in a collective with a bunch of other people. One of them had money and had rented a huge loft in SoHo. Todd and the rest of them took me in right away. I thought it was perfect. Nobody had ever paid much attention to me at home, except to make sure my teeth got straightened and I didn’t put on weight. The comrades—that’s what they were called—wanted to hear what I had to say. They were all such dears and so serious.”
    â€œWould you mind if I sat here?” A young mother with a stroller, infant asleep, answered her own question by plopping down next to them. “I’m exhausted. She only sleeps in motion. I’ve pushed her through every museum, and, when the weather was better, from here to Battery Park and back.”
    This was news to Faith. She assumed normal babies knew enough to go to sleep in their cribs. An innate reflex. You put them in, they closed their eyes, and voilà. This baby didn’t look like something out of a Stephen King novel, yet clearly she was an aberration, tormenting her mother. The woman’s hair needed a trim and her lipstick was crooked. The baby, on the other hand, looked great. She had softly curling dark hair and her tiny lips pursed in a perfect little O. However, the poor woman’s problem was not of great interest to Faith. Children were something that happened to other people.
    Obviously, they couldn’t continue their conversation.
    â€œLet’s grab some dogs from Sabrett’s and walk through the park,” she suggested.
    â€œI’m supposed to be having lunch with people important to Michael. I’m already dreadfully late,” Emma said desperately. “Except you haven’t told me what to do yet.”
    â€œCall them and cancel,” Faith advised. “This is more important.”
    Leaving the young mother, who was nodding off herself while the baby tried to eat her toes, they went in search of a phone. Faith called Josie, too.
    Outside in the sunshine, deceptively warm, Emma picked up the threads. The Sabrett’s hot dog had satisfied Faith’s physical hunger; now she was longing for the rest of Emma’s story.
    â€œAnyway, they were so nice to me, you can’t imagine. Trotskyists. You know, you’re not supposed to say Trotskyites, they don’t like that. They were all getting ready to go into factories to mobilize the working classes. They said the movement in the sixties and seventies had concentrated too much on students and the antiwar movement. Todd used to stand up and shout, ‘If every student broke a pencil, what would you have? Splinters! If every worker shut down his machine, what would you have? Revolution!’ It was one of hisfavorite quotes from Daddy—Nathan Fox, I mean. It was wonderful to learn all about him.”
    If this represented Fox’s rhetoric, Faith had to wonder about the man’s intellect, but perhaps you had to have been there. So much depended on context: hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in front of the Capitol building, for example. Nursery rhymes declaimed would have sounded portentous and