Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [131]
“Oh, would you? That’s wonderful.” Ruth releases a grateful sigh. “If you could just please ask him to call me in New York, as soon as he gets into Kennedy.”
“Yes, all right.”
“I’ll be at my father’s place. I think he has the number, but anyhow it’s in the book: L. D. Zimmern, on West Twelfth Street.”
“L. D. Zimmern?” Vinnie repeats slowly.
“Uh huh. Maybe you know him? He’s a professor.”
“I think I’ve heard of him, yes,” Vinnie says.
“And hey. When you speak to Fred, you could tell him, if you wouldn’t mind—”
Stunned by what she has just learnt, Vinnie is silent. Ruth March takes this for assent.
“Tell him I love him. Okay?”
“Okay,” Vinnie replies mechanically.
“Thanks. Thanks a lot. You’re a real sport.”
As soon as she hangs up, Vinnie begins searching for the Vogelers’ phone number. At the same time, rather distractedly, she wonders why Fred’s wife is not named Ruth Zimmern or Ruth Turner. Maybe she’s been married before. The idea in the forefront of her mind, however, is that her wish has been granted. Her generic and specific enemy has been, in a manner of speaking, delivered into her hands; the sins of the father can be visited upon the daughter, a young, beautiful, and loved woman. Without the slightest effort Vinnie can prevent Ruth and Fred from having a reconciliation—for surely that is what it would be—in New York. And her subconscious seems eager to cooperate, for the Vogelers’ phone number refuses to surface. Vinnie is positive that she has it somewhere, written on the back of a British Museum call slip; but this slip, in league with her worser nature, has concealed itself completely. Yet her better nature, which doesn’t believe in the law of genealogical justice—what harm has Ruth March ever done her?—continues to search.
Of course it doesn’t really make any difference, she thinks, giving up at last. If Fred doesn’t meet his wife in New York tomorrow they’ll get back together eventually. She will phone him from New York tomorrow, or from New Mexico, or wherever she is going.
Or maybe she won’t phone him, because she’ll believe that he got her message and deliberately ignored it. She’ll be hurt, angry. She’ll take that job she mentioned and move to the opposite corner of the United States and that will be the end of their marriage.
Well, too bad—or maybe not so bad after all. Since she is L. D. Zimmern’s daughter, Ruth may very well take after him. She may be spiteful, inconsiderate, destructive; the sort of wife Fred or any man is well rid of—just as her first husband, if he exists, was well rid of her. Probably it’s her fault that her marriage broke up in the first place; nobody could say that Fred was hard to get on with. Anyhow, Vinnie can’t do anything for her. She hasn’t got the Vogelers’ phone number, and she doesn’t know anyone who might.
The trouble is, she does know where Fred is, or at least where he soon will be: on the highest part of Hampstead Heath with the Druids. But she certainly can’t go out at this time of night and look for him there. Nobody would expect her to do that. Let events take their course. Vinnie turns off the sitting-room lights and begins to prepare for bed.
No, most people Vinnie knows certainly wouldn’t expect her to go to Hampstead Heath. But one person would, she thinks as she sits on the side of her bed with one shoe off and one on. Chuck Mumpson would take it for granted that she’d go, without even stopping to consider the great inconvenience and even possible peril of such an excursion. And when he hears that she hadn’t delivered Ruth March’s message, he will stare at her in a surprised unhappy way, as he did once when she said she’d never met a dog she liked.