“Come on,” Sharon said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“What are you doing home?” he asked.
Sharon sighed. “Marlene had some fund-raising something or other at the temple all day tomorrow, so we’re prepping for tomorrow’s dinner party this afternoon.”
Dennis was silent.
“The Epstein party, remember?” Then she smiled at Dennis.
Dennis evaluated the authenticity of the smile. Was it truthful or was that the Essential Training speaking? “I do.”
“I came home to do an inventory on the canapés in the deep freeze.” Her reflection dabbed its neck with perfume.
He smiled now—in earnest—to think of his wife’s famous crab cakes, made infamous at an embassy party in 1975. After three flutes of champagne, Andrew Steigman’s wife had declaimed that she would not be returning to Gabon with her ambassador of a husband, but would stay here in Maryland and have Sharon Goldstein make these Maryland crab cakes for her every day.
“They do not have these in West Africa!” She’d held up the crab cake, her eyes filling with tears. “They don’t even have green apples.” She’d sighed, kicking the floor with the toe of her golden sandal.
Dennis had not told Sharon about the compliment, and now he thought this could have been because it might have meant yet another step toward her independence. He loved it now, but back then it had felt as if she were running off with a group of furious women who were throwing out their laundry detergent, refusing to have babies, and stepping away from the “confines” of marriage. They were having loads of sex and Dennis had missed out being on the receiving end of that, though he had managed to get stuck with the rest of women’s lib. He hadn’t realized the girl eating onion dip with her finger out of the refrigerator in the dark could become so autonomous, and perhaps this was why Sharon would find out how popular her crab cakes were from three diplomats’ wives who called her the next day, each wanting her to cater a private party.
Sharon placed the perfume back on her vanity and watched him through the mirror. She looked terrific, still that freckled California girl with the long nose and light brown hair streaked with gold he’d seen stuffing herself with cheese puffs as her date droned on and on: gonorrhea, syphilis, it was really quite bizarre. No wonder she’d given Dennis her number when he’d caught her as she’d gone for her coat in the bedroom.
For their first date they’d gone paddle boating in the Tidal Basin one spring afternoon. The cherry blossoms had exploded around them. Those cherry trees were in bloom for only one goddamn week, sometimes less; the city waited each year to trumpet their blossoming to the nation, and he had somehow caught them in that moment of pure bursting, but he hadn’t appreciated his good fortune. I want to fight for peace, Sharon had said, her little muscles tensing with each push. And equality. He’d looked at her tanned, bare feet, and despite all he knew by then, he had nodded encouragingly at Sharon, in a manner he hoped would seem supportive.
Because by that time Dennis had stopped even thinking he might go into politics. He was already twenty-five and politics felt wrong and false and theatrical. It was the people who surrounded the politicians who effected change. He’d already conceded that it was most beneficial to work from within.
D.C. is a remarkable city, Dennis thought now. He still loved to parade visiting friends up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and turn them around to the perfect mirror of the Reflecting Pool. This is where we marched, he’d always tell them. For freedom. For as long as he’d lived here, he’d been showing off the exact line of that president’s unfaltering gaze that reached all the way to the Capitol. He brought them to the Smithsonian, the zoo, the National Gallery. All free! he’d say. He especially loved to tell his father, This is everyone’s city. It’s why his mother must have been so encouraging that he stay here. They have the best museums, she’d said, such a clean city, she’d said. But did he really believe this when he’d dragged his parents across the Mall, into and out of the Smithsonian and the National Gallery? Because Washington wasn’t really that kind of a place at all. What kind of a city didn’t even have representation in the Senate? A city that was not real.
“You might want to wait a bit before leaving,” Dennis said to Sharon as he sat up. “I hit a lot of traffic, even this early.”
Sharon opened and closed bureau drawers. “Did you take the park?”
“Yeah,” Dennis said.
“Well, I’m going the opposite direction anyway.”
“As you wish.” Dennis clasped his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.
When he drove out West with Len after graduation, endless fields of wheat had stretched all the way to the horizon. Had that image started him on his career path? The fields had bent and swayed in the breeze, the impression of a moving hand swept over rich velvet, and the shadows of birds and planes were cast over those golden blankets. Where had they been driving? Kansas? Iowa? Had they driven near the Mississippi? He remembered a river town, a grain elevator, barges tied up for the night. This image had always seemed far more American than the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, that twirl of a building he sometimes went out of the way to drive by on his commute to work. Looking up inside the Capitol, he still felt as he first had, that he was inside one of those Fabergé eggs his mother cried over as she cut photos from a glossy magazine article about the Bolsheviks closing down the house, the czar’s family executed, the children’s bones still not recovered. Those last jeweled bastions of imperialism that Stalin couldn’t get rid of fast enough.
Capitalism at its most absurd, Dennis thought now, remembering his mother hiding those magazine photos in her bedside table. Sometimes when his father was out, Tatti would remove the pages she’d torn from National Geographic and spread them on the kitchen table.
“So beautiful,” she’d say as she ran her hands over the pictures, leaving a new layer of fingerprints on the shiny pages.
The Coronation Egg, his mother’s favorite, was so striking and bright and shining. He’d once had a replica hanging in a glass cabinet in the living room; it was enameled in gold, with guilloche sunbursts just beneath the golden surface, the trellis of the egg marked by stones set in the faces of imperial eagles. And inside, the plush purple velvet felt as palpable now in his imagination as it had been in the photograph. It housed in its folds a diamond-studded carriage. Just like one the czar rode in, Tatti had said. Nicholas, when he was crowned in Moscow. For his czarina.
Dennis’s father hated everything about those eggs.
“It’s imperialism, right there, it’s the very essence of it,” he’d said, the one time he’d come home from some rally for one disenfranchised worker or another and caught his wife admiring the pictures. “The waste. The excess! It’s positively criminal.”
“Oh, come on.” Tatti had tilted her head to the left to admire the photo. “They’re just so beautiful. Can’t you see them only as beautiful? They are as beautiful as Russia! We should never have let them go.”
“We?”
“It was bad for Russia to send them away. In this, Stalin was wrong,” Tatti had said.
“In this?” Sigmund had said in disbelief. “In the Fabergés and a few other things, my dear.”
Socialism hadn’t saved anyone, had it? People were still hungry and poor and cruel and stupid. It hadn’t changed a thing. What did his father think now that Malcolm Forbes had purchased that egg last year for over $2 million and that it was now on display in the Forbes lobby, the very embodiment of capitalism?
“In this Stalin was wrong,” his father had muttered. “Look, Tatiana,” he had said. “You must know by now that you cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
Two days after graduation Dennis and Len headed to California. West, this figment of Dennis’s imagination, the beguiling place at the other end of this country that, when he thought of it now, must have been very much like his father’s idea of utopia. Like the idyll his mother had anticipated when stepping
off the boat, holding her little suitcase handle with two hands. He had always imagined her entry into the island of Manhattan a bit like Dorothy’s wide-eyed advent into Oz.
Dennis too had said no to capitalism. That had been over twenty years ago, but even now he could see the flat black roads outside Houston, distinctly still, the waves of heat rising up from the asphalt and blurring the fields and oil rigs in the distance, those silos so stark and clear against the horizon. Dennis had no idea that Len would go on to break his heart by succumbing to his Republican DNA. He’d actually joined the CIA; he’d become a Republican because that was who he was, by blood, and Dennis had remained friends with him because Lenny had Skatesville and Dennis loved Skatesville, because he worked for the government and he couldn’t afford a country house of his own. Even his Soviet colleagues had their dachas where they could schtupp their mistresses in the snow and plant beets and onions and breathe fresh air.
The CIA: Dennis would never shake his childhood perception, how he’d watched them come for the shopkeepers and engineers and the rabbis. His neighborhood was filthy with communists, as Hoover had said, and the CIA came around daily, pretending to need their trousers pressed or their hair cut. Stupid officers thinking they would go unnoticed. Or had it been the FBI? They had once seemed to Dennis to be one and the same institution. And to his father, who parted the curtains to watch the strange men with their mustaches. They are trying to walk along our streets as one of us, he’d said, letting the curtain fall. Tools of the ruling class! That’s what his father called them. Ethel Rosenberg’s mother lived just around the corner, and Dennis had seen Ethel’s children playing in the street when the Rosenbergs were taken in for questioning. Only questioning, the neighbors all told one another. She was brought in just after her husband, and she’d left those boys, half wild, with her mother, who had barely minded them at all. There was a line even then, straight and clean as a razor cut, bisecting his neighborhood, and the longer those children were at Mrs. Greenglass’s house, the more tense the neighborhood became. Those who supported the communists stood staunchly on one side, and those who did not stood self-righteously on the other. But the communists, in the end, did not help the Rosenbergs. They did not claim them and the Party had let them burn.
That’s what Sigmund said. Let me be clear: the Communist Party killed the Rosenbergs, Sigmund said, it was not the U.S. government.
But before any of that went down, before the communists did nothing to help free them, did nothing until the end when it was obvious that Party sentiment had turned in favor of the couple and that they could now be useful to their martyred cause, before they were strapped in that chair—ol’ sparky, they all called it—before they went, one at a time, before all that, Dennis woke up and those boys were gone. The lawyer took them away because Mrs. Greenglass couldn’t care for them, so barbaric were they. But that was a lie, Sigmund told Tatiana. Dennis had heard him say it. That old bitch is siding with the son, he’d said. Dennis remembered because his father rarely cursed. He was not a drinker, and he was not a cigar smoker; he was not a crass man in any way. That old bitch, he’d said, sided with the son, who would, in the end, do his sister Ethel in.
But what would have happened had the Rosenbergs not been caught? Dennis had wondered that then. Over the years, he’d think of it often: what would the Rosenbergs be slipping to the Soviets now, he’d think, when the sand at Los Alamos had already burned to radioactive glass, when the Soviets had gotten what they’d needed, when the Bomb had already been dropped. He imagined the two of them up late at night writing complex equations on tracing paper and handing them off. But to whom? And what would be on those slips of paper now? Thermonuclear stuff? Disarmament info? Or perhaps they would just have stopped, the Rosenbergs. Perhaps they would have grown out of their radicalism, and they would have raised their children and fed them properly and moved to the suburbs like so many other radicals Dennis’s father had once called friends. But they are frozen as they were in all their anti-American glory. They cannot pass gently through history.
How could Len have become one of those men trolling the street asking little kids questions when they got let out of school? That’s what they do, watch outside the candy store to ask kids questions. What a creepy job, being in the CIA. Sometimes, it seemed to Dennis, it served the wrong people. While at Columbia, as he and Len haunted jazz clubs and ate ethnic food and went to civil rights meetings and meant it, all of it, had serving the wrong people been Len’s intention? He’d been Sissy Ford’s son, for Christ sake. Dennis remembered Len following Sissy into the dorm like a dog that first day of school. God, Sissy Ford; Dennis hadn’t thought of that woman in years. He would go on to meet a thousand versions of Sissy—so many Washington wives with blond hair done up like Jackie Kennedy’s, frosted lipstick, tweed skirt and jacket, lots of long, heavy necklaces, cigarette like an afterthought, dangling between long fingers. The look changed only slightly over the decades. But this Sissy Ford was to Dennis the first and only one of her kind, and she had disarmed him with her aloof, ironic, and direct looks and her old Connecticut Yankee accent. When she’d asked Dennis his baahkground, he’d told her he was Russian. Well, he’d said, my mother and grandparents were. And she had patted his hand and told him, That’s okay, darling, some of our best and brightest have not been here for long.
Dennis got to San Francisco too late, in the summer of 1956; the Beats had already run their course, gone commercial. Dennis saw himself at twenty-two, walking down Haight Street, beneath the western sky. He even walked differently then; there had been jazz in his step. The neighborhood was still so quiet; the Victorian houses stood straight on their hills and the paint had not begun to peel from the wooden paneling. People were still washed; men’s hair didn’t fall below their ears. No one begged for money or dope, but people of all colors were dancing together. The sensation was still of standing on the lip of a world about to change. Or maybe he’d come too early; he left before Jack Kennedy was shot, before the hippies and the activists came in full force, and it pained him years later to watch the happy newsreels of the summer of ’67, everyone fucking for peace and running naked in the streets. He was in the suburbs with two kids, about to turn thirty that summer; he had missed out on everything, and history was going down without him. Yet, watching the circus on the Haight, Dennis had a nagging feeling that he would never have been one of those shirtless men with long hair, smoking grass and inviting drifters and their dogs into his apartment, shacking up with a new woman each week on a soiled mattress on the floor. He was shocked to find himself nodding at the bumper sticker he’d seen on the back of a Mercedes speeding around Chevy Chase Circle: You think cops are bad? When something goes wrong, try calling a hippie.
What had going West been like for his in-laws? The Weissmans hated every inch of the Lower East Side and its immigrants, its crooked carts of herring and potatoes, the women in stiff, ugly wigs, their long, black skirts skimming the dirty, manure-filled streets. It was disgusting, Helen said. Anyone who could leave and stayed was a moron, she’d say, pointing her Winston at Dennis. Sorry, Dennis, she’d say, taking a long drag, but it’s the goddamn truth.
They’d left for Los Angeles, where Herbert had some distant relative who worked in Hollywood, a few years before Sharon was born. The story was, Helen sang for their train fare, and Dennis imagined them on the train, heading from one ocean to the other, their hands in their laps, eyes trained on the moving landscape. The way they told it—over and over—from the moment they touched Los Angeles earth, it was only sunshine and happiness for them. It was clean and big and open, and the people were civilized. Ci-vi-lized, Helen would say. And money, Herbert would chime in, never missing the opportunity. Let’s not forget about the big old bundles of California cash.
“Maybe you can get me a new job tomorrow night?” Dennis said to Sharon, propping himself up on his elbows and watching his wife gather herself together in different parts of the room. “This one’s about to get very
pissy.”
“Stop it,” Sharon said. “You’ll never leave.”
“Oh, you bet I would,” he said, but even as he said it, he hadn’t meant it. Had he given up when he joined the civil service? Absolutely not! It was an elite agency. There were only 750 of them, and not all were GS-14s and climbing, as he was. But Dennis had always hated that hierarchical grading system the government had to rank its workers. “Absolutely,” he said.
Sharon rolled her eyes. “I gotta go. Duty calls. Or more,” she said as she walked out of the room, “Marsha Epstein does.”
Dennis watched Sharon leave their bedroom and head downstairs. He thought of tomorrow; he saw a map of the world and wondered where he would be told to fit inside it. One day, he thought, he might not fit inside. He thought of his mother, Dorothy, outside her world, looking at the brand-new skyline. When Dennis finally got up and went to pull the curtains back from the window, Sharon’s Volvo was speeding up the block.
CHAPTER 4
Russian Doll
January 5, 1980
Vanessa was born two weeks early, and instead of her father, who was tucked away in Moscow, Nana Helen had appeared in the delivery room. The story of her father’s absence at her birth was told to Vanessa so many times—according to Sharon, the moment Vanessa was crowning, Nana Helen grabbed Sharon’s hand and, instead of words of encouragement, loudly whispered in her ear, “How could you have married a spy?”—that she would swear up and down that she remembered the actual moment her father finally arrived home.
For her; he had come back for her, a tall man in an army green parka, with a fur-trimmed hood, and he leaned in and rubbed her nose with his in an Eskimo hello. He’d brought her a Russian doll, a real babushka. Vanessa was sure she remembered the swish of the nylon parka shell as her father came toward her, though she was born in late May. More likely she’d stolen the memory from the photograph on her father’s bureau of him in this very outfit, the tips of jagged, snowcapped mountains behind him.
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