Chapter 2 American Crow #4
The question was why? Why everything? What pushed her to change course in the first place?
Did that veer have its roots in something that happened long ago?
It seemed unlikely that such a white-bread place as Sheboygan, Wisconsin, would give rise to dark deeds, but didn’t every true crime show start with the cliché that said “things like this just don’t happen here .
. . ?” I would go to that place where Felicity’s family and mine still lived and talk to the hometown crowd.
And I would talk to my mother.
Miranda was as stunned as I by the news of Felicity’s arrest. She and Ruth Wild were still friendly, if not exactly friends,
and my mom might help ease my way into what would certainly be an agonizing encounter.
This story was worthy of my mom’s attention. Mom was now a well-paid PR executive for a national organization that helped
women, but twenty years ago, she’d been a newspaper reporter.
At the old Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, my mom, young Miranda McClatchey (now Miranda McClatchey Bigelow), not much older than I was now, was part of a Pulitzer
Prize–winning team investigating conditions at pricey elder-care facilities. Undercover, she worked as an overnight nurse’s
aide, watching the abuse, powerless to stop it, until, with her meticulous and irrefutable stories, she stopped it in its
tracks. Back when Miranda was a reporter, I was little more than a tot. But I dimly remembered her coming home every morning
from her night shift at one of the awful places, sobbing as she made our breakfast.
So okay, Mom won a Pulitzer Prize. I wrote about the enduring chic of a vintage Versace clutch compared with a Judith Leiber.
My mom considered me a dabbler. She never said so, but you didn’t have to be a mental gladiator to figure it out. I didn’t
care, or so I said. Brokering my journalistic soul seemed a fair price for not having to spend my life hideously depressed
about things I couldn’t change. This walk on the wild side would be temporary but I wanted it to matter. Whatever it took.
Downtown the next morning, I nearly charged directly from the train through the (pink-tinted) glass revolving doors into the
Fuchsia offices. At the last moment, I stopped, making a detour into Latta Java coffee shop next door. Composure, and even a soupcon of detachment, were qualities that my editor respected. I didn’t want to confront Ivy with a full head of steam.
I’d decided that, for the moment, I would act as though Felicity had agreed to talk to me—while I implored the universe to
send me a justification she would buy into. (If she never came around, I could always later say that she changed her mind.)
Convincing Ivy that this piece was worthy of all the real estate it would take up in Fuchsia, and all the time I would need away from the wonderful world of scarves, was still an uphill battle. One afternoon last week,
I got Ivy’s attention by positioning this as a Vanity Fair–worthy drama with a third-wave feminist flourish: “This isn’t just an ordinary murder story, it’s mythic. It’s the story
of a modern woman’s vengeance on the kingdom of men . . . It could even be seen as a sort of dark reverse of the Me Too dynamic,
women taking advantage of men’s appetites and bamboozling them into paying big bucks.”
She agreed, suddenly excited and on board. But the next morning, she started to waffle.
I brought Ivy a skim latte, extra hot. She would know that I was currying favor with her, but Ivy appreciated subtle coercion.
It was Saturday, and though we always worked at least half days on Saturday, the voltage was a little lower, a good atmosphere
for a chat.
Ivy was always in early. She didn’t have to fight traffic, although, given her nature, she’d have been on deck at dawn even
if she’d had to mush a team of six sled dogs from Winnetka. As it was, she just took the stairs. Her parents owned the building
(and the magazine). Ivy and her family lived in an apartment that occupied the whole seventh floor. Her parents lived in the
penthouse above, her two brothers on the two floors below Ivy—the vertical equivalent of a family compound. The rest of the
building housed the Fuchsia offices and the family business. (Something called Exquisite Enterprise. We had no idea what it did, although we knew it was either fabulously lucrative or a front for a drug cartel, since Ivy’s parents and their parents were billionaires.)
No one knew Fuchsia’s financial status or even why it existed at all or how long it would last. Her parents had bankrolled it for two years.
In an era when once-regal print publications were thin to nearly nonexistent, it was a gambit born of a whim. The whim was
not Ivy’s, but her mother’s. Like many chic and clever writers of previous generations—true stars like Joan Didion and Meg
Wolitzer and Mona Simpson—Sabrina Torres had been a guest editor at Mademoiselle in 1980, just before that plucky magazine gave up the program. These “college girls” of another era competed by writing essays
for the privilege of working at the magazine for a summer in New York, living at the women-only Barbizon Hotel. An idea so
antique it was alluring, it evoked a shiny, healthy blonde dressed in an oatmeal turtleneck and green wool “slacks,” the kind
of thing my grandmother wore at Oberlin College fifty years ago.
I got on board because of a fluke question at a lecture Sabrina gave about Fuchsia to Northwestern’s grad school, just a month before I graduated.
“I had a lifelong love affair with Sylvia Plath, that brave and beautiful and doomed poet. She was a guest editor at Mademoiselle before I was born,” Sabrina said.
“I wanted to follow in her footsteps . . . well, most of them . . . although I’m not much of a writer.
” She went on, “People question my sanity, but I see this yearning, as if people are homesick for a place they never lived. Women are going traditional, changing their last names when they get married. Families are using up vacation time to take the children to stay at a working farm.” She would hybridize this picture, classy nostalgia with edgy modern views—a demulcent print magazine with advertisements for colognes that cost a thousand dollars an ounce set about with the strongest front-line reporting on women in prison, women in the arts, women in homeless shelters, women in the Senate.
“So why Chicago?” I asked.
“Hometown pride,” she replied. “My family has been in Chicago for twelve generations. Came here working on ships, ended up
owning the ships. This city has taken so many blows to its reputation. But look what it has! The most beautiful lakefront
in the world. The most vibrant art scene. A world-class university. Legendary writing community. And my amazing daughter,
Ivy, to head it up.”
After her talk, Sabrina pulled me aside and said, “Come work for me when you finish school.” I had an offer for a lucrative
but brain-rusting job editing the alumni magazine for the University of Illinois Chicago, but this was much more my style.
So I showed up at the Fuchsia building (indeed, it was a pale shade of fuchsia, thus called “the Purple Palace”) the Monday after graduation. I met Ivy
(the aforementioned wonderful daughter). She had been a correspondent for CBS morning shows and, later, style editor for Red. She didn’t confide much about her personal life, but once, out of nowhere, told me that she’d been applying to medical schools
when her mother asked her to helm the magazine, for at least the first two years—which might easily be all the years there
were.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in,” Ivy told me, dramatically pulling her fists, Michael Corleone–style,
toward her chest.
That Saturday, Ivy was studying mock-ups of possible pages that would feature hats. I’d written the scant amount of copy that
went with the photos. Veils were back. Black was back. Not just for Edwardian widows anymore. Mystery, majesty, melodrama,
a magical brew (and a lot of alliteration).
Gosh.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like hats—or at least I didn’t dislike them any more than I disliked other really ostentatious clothing—but I didn’t really understand them. Although I’d done it often enough, I still didn’t entirely get the soul of dressing for ornamental reasons only.
Although she didn’t say a word to me, my editor pointed to a space on the counter, far from the photo proof sheets, and nodded
her thanks for the coffee. She got out her loupe and peered closer. I gazed over her shoulder, not daring to say a word. Ivy
Torres was famous, if not notorious, for her myopic focus on whatever task was at hand. Whether she was interviewing a white-hot
celebrity or studying a sandwich menu, she gave it the kind of attention usually reserved for spinal surgery. It was what
made her so lethally effective at her job. Interrupt her and she would say something low and slow in her Bryn Mawr accent
that you didn’t realize had cut you until you woke up the next morning on a bloodstained mattress.
The photographer was no Irving Penn. In one of the shots, a model wearing only a hat had blown her breath on the window glass
and written an F in the mist. In another, a second model, in nothing except black stockings, had positioned the hat between her spread legs,
the brim just covering her concave belly and afterthought breasts.
Ivy straightened up, kneaded her lower back, and reached for the coffee. “Mmm,” she said. “You know what, Reenie? We should
do a feature about extreme larks.”
“Like white-water rafting?” I asked. What kind of accessories would you need to shoot the Colorado River rapids?