Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  “He has remarried and has a five-month-old son, Evgeny. He says that he thinks of you all the more often since his child was born because he so loved looking after you and indulging you when you were little girls…. [I]ndeed I particularly remember that when Lilechka cried only Papa was able to calm her. He very very much wanted to find you, and us.”

  Remorse on draft, like German beer.

  This was the individual—Alexei Evgenevich Iacovleff, alias Al Jackson, former architect of the czar’s opera houses, now a blue-collar worker at the Kodak Company—who was waiting for us on the morning of January 8, 1941, as our boat landed at the Brooklyn docks: the Carvalho Araujo was too small to dock at Manhattan’s Hudson piers, and our hearts had sunk as we approached a grim area of small red houses instead of Manhattan’s fabled skyscrapers.

  Even at the age of ten, within a few seconds of being in my grandfather’s presence I could sense some of the ways in which he differed radically from the other Iacovleffs I had known. The family’s physical carapace was all there, reminding me poignantly of Aunt Sandra and Uncle Sasha—long, lean limbs, narrow, fine-boned face, almond-hued eyes, rich baritone voice speaking exquisite prerevolutionary Russian. But he was far taller and more gaunt than any Iacovleffs I’d known, looking curiously mournful in his six-feet-four frame. And hovering over his bushy, graying mustache, his aquiline nose, were eyes whose gaze had nothing of Sasha’s swift slyness, or Mother’s intensity, or Aunt Sandra’s and Babushka’s soulfulness. They were filled, instead, with a melancholy apathy, with the emptiness of resignation. But before I could give it any more thought, the reunion was occurring.

  New York Herald Tribune, January 9, 1941: Tatiana and Francine photographed as they arrive in the United States after “stormy voyage.”

  A half century later, I’m still obsessed by the curious fatefulness of this meeting: my mother, my grandfather, embracing again after a separation of twenty-six years.

  I’ve often tried to imagine the emotions each of them experienced that morning. There was a curious parallelism of ages: the wan exile waiting for the thirty-five-year-old daughter he had last seen when she was nine years old, about the same age as the child, so strikingly resembling her, whose hand she was now clutching. And the young blond widow looking down at the crowd below to find the sixty-year-old father whom she had last seen as a dashing thirty-four-year-old gambler. The striking Iacovleff physique, of course, speeded the recognition: They found each other within a few seconds of our reaching the bottom of the gangplank. “Papasha!” my mother exclaimed. “Detka! [little girl!],” the tall mustached stranger sobbed out as they fell into each other’s arms. “Zdravstvuite, Dedushka [Hello, Grandfather],” I said in turn, out of docile mimicry, when he turned to embrace me.

  Standing at the side of Alexis Jackson was another member of our new American family, Simon Liberman, Alex’s father. I had never met him before, and upon our first embrace I had a wave of sympathy for him far keener than any I felt for my grandfather. Simon’s compact, rotund solidity, the sheer cunning and determination he emanated, were both awesome and very reassuring. His swift, rather Oriental eyes darted swiftly over us and sized up our situation, and he immediately took action. “Porters!” he called out, slipping a few dollars to a man standing on the dock who instantly summoned a colleague and took charge of all our bags. With a swift, authoritative step he walked over to a customs official, narrated some dramatic detail of our arrival, made flattering comments about the Customs Service, and within twenty minutes we were on the way, long before any other passengers. As we got into his chauffeured limousine, tiny, powerful Simon Isaevich now smiled warmly at us, his owlish, spectacled face radiant over his big fur-collared coat. Alex’s mother was home with a migraine, he said—Alex had predicted that this would be her way of signaling her continuing disapproval of my mother. Sitting next to Simon was my grandfather, his chin still quavering a bit with emotion, his mild, perplexed eyes locked into a perpetual expression of surprise—he may not have been exposed in decades to the kinds of luxuries Simon enjoyed doling out. The car swerved across the Brooklyn Bridge and the first true symbols of the promised land—Manhattan’s skyscrapers—finally came into view. Simon beamed with delight as we three refugees exclaimed and admired.

  Once in Manhattan, we went straightaway to Simon’s duplex at 4 East Sixty-fourth Street, a lush habitation where, I instantly decided, I would spend as much time as possible. It was decorated in darkly warm, luxurious textures: brown velvet couches, cashmere throws, zebra and leopard skin rugs, several of Uncle Sasha’s portraits of Henriette. It was also replete with the newest American gadgets, and I was immediately hypnotized by the workings of a wireless radio, the tiniest I’d ever seen, which became my talisman for the day. As I played with it—the adults were huddled in a corner, talking in hushed tones—Henriette came down, making a dramatic descent of the stairs; and after an effusive, tear-laced embrace of her son and a glacial greeting to my mother and me, she asked about her fur coat. “These idiots lost my fur coat!” she wailed in several languages upon hearing that it had been stolen on our way to Madrid, “Ces crétins ont perdu ma fourrure!” She thereupon climbed back upstairs with swift, angry steps, not to reappear.

  It was time for lunch, which was served by a black housekeeper in a bright pink apron. My grandfather sat silently through the meal, eating faster than anyone else, continuing to cast astonished glances at all that surrounded him. I concentrated on Simon. He sat across from me, his short neck almost buried in his sturdy shoulders, looking at me through his thick glasses with a smile of warm approbation, which was akin to the purr of a solid, contented cat. After lunch, it was time to go on to what Mother and Alex kept referring to as “the hotel.” Simon stayed home to rest, having put us into a cab with our sparse luggage. My grandfather in tow, we drove to the Windsor Hotel on West Fifty-eighth Street, the manager of which was a friend of Simon’s; after a brief session at the registration desk, we went upstairs to Alex and Mother’s rooms, which were on the same floor, discreetly located down the corridor from each other.

  My memories of the next few hours are far hazier than those of the earlier part of the day—they are muffled, most probably, by the shock of the news I received. For shortly after arriving at the Windsor Hotel I learned that I was not destined to stay on at the hotel with my mother and Alex. I was informed, rather, that I was to leave that very evening with my grandfather for Rochester, New York, where I would remain until further notice. I must have been totally stunned by this news. It was certainly the most painful moment I’d known in life thus far. It is possible that I wept grievously upon leaving my beloved new guardians; on the other hand, I was already so skilled at the art of concealment that I may well have repressed all tears. However the three of us parted, some eight hours after arriving in the United States I found myself in the third-class carriage of a night train bound for Rochester, New York, being taken by a total stranger, my grandfather, to a city I’d never heard of until that very afternoon, clutching, as my only reassurance, the little suitcase I’d brought from France. Looking at it in retrospect, from Mother and Alex’s point of view it all seems perfectly lucid. Seeing the material hardships of their own childhoods, their principal priority was to see me adequately lodged and fed—to consider my psychic needs might still have seemed like an extravagance. Moreover, once all uncertainties and persecutions lay behind them, the lovers were finally free to tend exclusively to their own happiness. Now that we were all safe, I was again being looked on as a lost parcel of sorts, as I had been the previous summer of the debacle of France—SOS, burdensome child here, needs to be forwarded somewhere, who’ll take care of her? Ah, how marvelous! Papasha will take her away!

  It was a stone-hard, uncomfortable, vinyl-lined train seat I sat on all the way to Rochester, of a discomfort and ugliness I’d never before experienced. Thinking back with longing to the plush, velvety textures of French trains, my body aching terribly after a few hours, I began to contem
plate my options: This whole deal might not be as utterly catastrophic as it seemed. Out there in Rochester, there might be people to be charmed—Dedushka’s wife, his son—there might be a job to be done.

  Sliding about on the disgusting vinyl seat, I tried to size up the mustached stranger sitting across from me. He would sleep for a half hour or so at a time, his head slumped on one of his shoulders, his body rocking with the lurching of the car, and then wake with a jolt and set his astonished eyes on me. For that was my grandfather’s most characteristic expression, an air of startlement, the eyes saying, “What, there’s a world out there? And I belong to it? And you’ve got something to do with me?” He would give me a timid, surprised smile, pat my knee with a gruffly whispered “Detka,” and go back to sleep. So my night was spent: staring at the gently snoring stranger in the opposite seat, fuming, pondering the disgrace of my exile. We arrived in Rochester a half hour or so after first light. I sat glumly through the cab ride from the station, wondering whether his home would be as dismal as the train ride. The cab drove slowly down a treeless street in the Rochester suburbs lined with several hundred drably identical habitations and stopped at one particularly dreary lodging. “My doma,” my grandfather said as he paid the driver and lifted my suitcase out of the cab, “we’re home.”

  I slouched behind him in my long camel’s-hair coat, cursing the day I was born. Hadn’t I been a model child? Had I offended Mother and Alex in some way I was not aware of? The very ground—whatever of it peeked out under the dirty strips of snow—was ugly in this place, it had neither the snazziness of a city nor the beauty of the country, there wasn’t a bush around, not to speak of trees…. I was close to tears as I slumped behind my grandfather, up the three steps of his grim house. But then the front door burst open, and my spirits suddenly lifted. A tiny slender brunette with brilliant blue eyes, wearing a bright red sweater—she was only three or four inches taller than I—ran out and enfolded me in her arms. “Frosinka,” she cried out in Russian. “What a treasure! At last you’ve come to us! I who always wanted a daughter!” This was Zina, my grandfather’s second wife, whose half-weeping, half-laughing state clearly displayed great joy. Behind her stood her mother, Ekaterina Ivanovna, a stout woman in her sixties, still dressed in the flowered kerchief and thick woolen stockings traditional to Russian peasantry, who also beamed at me radiantly.

  Reassured that things might be endurable for a while, I followed Zina into her bleak little house, of which I was immediately given a tour. Going up the narrow, uncarpeted stairs, you reached a landing that accessed the house’s only bathroom and three small bedrooms, one of which was occupied by Zina’s mother, the second by Grandfather and Zina, the third by their sixteen-year-old son Eugene or “Jika.” Downstairs were a kitchen; a tiny dining area; a living room, the principal furnishings of which were two easy chairs set on either side of a coal grate, and a sofa on which Zina had placed pillows, sheets, and blankets. “Yours,” she said radiantly, “your own bed.” “Not even a room of my own,” I moaned to myself. But her sweetness again allayed that dismay. A big snowstorm was predicted for the following day. And that very afternoon Zina, who did not drive, gleefully persuaded my grandfather to go out shopping and buy me a snowsuit—it was navy blue with red piping, and I found it so novel and delightful that I insisted on keeping it on, day and night, for the next few days.

  For the following many weeks, I became Zinochka’s and Katia Ivanovna’s shadow, following them on their daily routine: doing the breakfast dishes, making the beds, dusting the house, laundering, ironing. The two women were readily given to tears, and their lamentations were particularly abundant on the heaviest workday of the week, Monday, wash day. It was then that every feature of bygone life in Russia—its dachas and green pastures, the glory of its nature, its music and its cuisine—tended to be most longingly recalled, most tearfully compared to the drab tedium of their Rochester life. “Servants bringing us tea at every hour, such emerald lawns, such orchards!” Zina would sob as she ironed Grandfather’s shirts, pointing to the narrow backyard, identical to some three hundred adjoining ones, where the muddy ground lay like mangled flesh under the dirty bandage of the melting snow. A rusty car motor, Eugene’s abandoned summer project, lay decaying on the ground. The laundry lines of every family in the neighborhood were going up that afternoon, flapping desolately in the icy wind. My companions would go on to deplore the bleak monotony Alexis Jackson imposed on his family, his apathy and indifference, his failure even to ask for a promotion or a raise in all the years he had been working for Kodak. I fully sympathized with them, for I’d realized after a few days that the Jacksons never traveled or entertained or dropped in on anyone; that they seldom read anything beyond the local paper and Popular Mechanics; that after dinner Grandfather just listened to his radio and chomped on his toothpick, Zina and her mother sighed and mended garments, and Eugene loped upstairs to do his science experiments. So I joined readily in their tears, concealing as ever my worries about my father but pretending, instead, to mourn all the splendors I, too, had left behind on another continent: the elegance of our Paris flat, the radiance of Alex’s villa, the beauty and excitement of the Mediterranean.

  Rochester, 1941, clockwise from lower right: Tatiana’s half-brother, Jika; Tatiana; Grandfather; unknown woman; Francine; Tatiana’s stepmother, Zina; Zina’s mother, 1941.

  In the afternoon, when most of the day’s chores were done, I enjoyed my only respite from the monotony of the Jacksons’ life: I turned on the radio and took my daily English lesson by listening to the soaps. For improved diction and enlarged vocabulary, I rehearsed the parting lines from a large variety of shows: Our Gal Sunday, Life Can Be Beautiful, Woman in White, When a Girl Marries, Young Doctor Malone. “What will Nancy do? Will she tell Dr. Malone about her suspicions?” At 3:30 or so, the peaceful concentration of my task was broken by Jika’s return from school. A loutish youth with a savage laugh who excelled at pulling radios apart and putting them together again, he made a point of totally ignoring me, vexed that the women’s attention was now so centered on me. Very occasionally—when he was coming down with a cold or a bad snowstorm was predicted for the afternoon—Grandfather came home earlier than usual and found the women weeping over their domestic tasks. He stood at the threshold of the kitchen, majestic, disdainful, and thundered at us with his most violent Russian word: “Erunda!” he shouted. “Nonsense! Nonsense, this women’s tears!” He walked away, his head bent, his frame incongruously fine-boned and aristocratic under the loose folds of his faded blue work clothes. We might continue to whimper as we hovered over the day’s wash. He would walk back to the doorsill, more threatening this time. “Erunda! Siberia for this women’s folly! My slippers! When is dinner?”

  For when it was a normal day and he came back from the factory at 5:30, Alexis Jackson’s habit was to eat directly upon coming home—he wanted his dinner “on the table” within a few minutes of arriving. “Obed gotov?” “Is dinner ready?” he would query loudly upon walking into the house. As Zina scurried anxiously about the kitchen, he slumped into the armchair, exclusively reserved for him, which stood by the coal grate; he tossed off his shoes, thrust his feet into the slippers that Zina had prepared for him, and unfolded his copy of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. By this time Jika had galloped down the stairs and slumped into the chair opposite his father’s, looking at him with an air of glum expectation. “Zdravstvuy, maly,” “Hello, young one,” Grandfather greeted his son curtly. When all was ready for supper, Zina would meekly call us in for the meal, which usually began—this was a particularly bizarre detail to a foreigner’s eyes—with a goblet of Del Monte canned fruit. It proceeded to some potatoes and stew swimming in a fecal gravy—roast was reserved for Sundays—and often ended with bowls of trembling multiflavored Jell-Os, which Zina had lovingly cut up into small square cubes for a decorative effect. Grandfather was one of those very thin men who can eat vast quantities without ever putting on any weight, and he
gulped his food down with noisy proletarian slurpings, greedily and hungrily, as if he had to catch a train. Whatever conversation there was at the Jacksons’ meals was held in Russian, in part because Zina’s mother had never learned a word of English, in part because Grandfather, to his credit, thought a mastery of Russian might be beneficial to his son—it was one of the few parcels of his Russian past he had not discarded or forgotten. But throughout most meals, silence hung over the table like an ax, occasionally relieved by an exchange of information about the weather forecast or by father and son comparing the relative merits of various brands of radio batteries.

  I perused the members of my current family as they put away their dinner, attempting to decode the peculiar brand of joylessness that suffused this morose fellow—my grandfather—whom family legend had presented as an irresistibly seductive playboy. I never once saw him laugh, and his smile, if such there was, radiated little else than a wan, jaded indifference. Yet his melancholy, I came to understand in the following months, did not reveal any sense of failure—since he had stopped gambling, he had never desired anything enough to experience failure. His was a sadness, rather, which had to do with the tragedy of living in a desire-free world. Most baffling of all, in my eyes, was his total lack of that longing for distinction and achievement that had suffused that entire side of my family: Sasha, my mother, even Sandra and Babushka. All such aspirations, to him, seemed to be as much of an erunda—trifling, meaningless nonsense—as religion or women’s tears; and it was for this reason that even at a tender age I saw him as something of a traitor to our family.

  Yet after dinner, which due to the speed of his eating was over shortly after 6:00, Dedushka did regain a bit of sparkle. He loped to his chair, started chomping on his toothpick, and gave himself wholeheartedly to the only occupation that still brought a gleam of life to his vacant eyes: listening to the radio. “This is H. V. Kaltenborn!” a voice boomed out of the box as he fiddled gently with the dials of his favorite machine. “President Roosevelt orders twenty-four-hour shifts on war production…. King Carol of Rumania and Magda Lupescu are said to be in Chile…. thousands of islanders flee Crete.” The content of the messages emitted by the wooden box meant little to him: In his eyes, contemporary events were yet another erunda. It was the sheer marvel and intricate working of the machine that mattered, its triumph over time and space. Tinkering with the dials, figuring out how clear the reception could become with the proper tuning, how many stations were available on any one night, he clucked his tongue admiringly, saying, “Fantah-stic, fantah-stic what the radio can do.” He listened to it religiously until our nine o’clock bedtime, surrounded by his subdued family—Jika tinkering with some science project, Zina and her mother repairing some torn sheet or worn garment, I eagerly continuing, through Grandfather’s radio programs, the English studies I’d started that afternoon with the soaps. Having delighted to Orphans of Divorce, and The Road of Life, before going upstairs to bed, he inevitably put an end to the evening with a curt statement concerning the fact that it was only two more days—or three or four—to Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, which was the high point of his week, and which brought out whatever zest was still left in him.