Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Surely there had been nothing of note to report when Dennis had driven by this past Friday. He was sure of it; only two days previously the trees had been bare, stripped, their thin boughs and the filament-like branches extending out from them had held the same brittle sorrow they’d cultivated all winter. But here, unexpectedly early, was a whole new day, bright and beautiful, and Dennis had the sensation he’d been punched in the stomach, so stunning was the sight. It was a splendid, startling image; were he someone else—and today he wished more than anything that he were—he would have called it a miracle. How could he have been this wrong, this brutally incorrect? If the cherry trees bloomed for only one moment and then fell away, they were worth every amount of hysterical propaganda this city—this country—offered up. The brevity was the point. He had been a stupid, immature man to ignore them that day he and Sharon had paddled along just here, on their first date, her feet bare, the nails painted a light pink, which he remembered now had matched the blossoms almost identically. He had pointed out all the buildings to her as if she’d been a tourist; these monuments are testaments to history (he thought he might actually have said this), but never did he tell her, See these trees? Do you see them? A gift from the Japanese. In peace and friendship.

  He had placed Vanessa in one of these very trees when she was just four; it was the year they’d bought the house on Thornapple Street, and he had lifted her into the V of a low-to-the-ground trunk. Instinctively she had spread her arms and placed each palm flat to the rough bark on either side of her, balancing herself. The blossoms burst above her, giving the effect of a spectacular headdress; it looked as if she wore a cushiony, pink, and flowing crown of flowers. As Dennis framed her in blooms for the photo, he had thought, My little warrior. He had staggered backward, taking in both the tree in its grand entirety and his glorious daughter. My daughter will be a warrior. She will save us, he’d thought, it is her turn. And I will be the warrior’s father.

  Something this astonishing, this large and meaningful, of course it can only last a moment. Vanessa’s childhood was over. He saw it arch like a rainbow, reaching for its unattainable pot of gold, fading fast. Sharon’s popovers: if they weren’t eaten quickly enough, they collapsed and turned hard as stones. And, yes, when everyone was done singing and making speeches, the protesters filed out and went home. But some threw marbles, Dennis thought, thinking of Sharon’s militant college roommate, Louise. He half expected to turn and see the cherry blossoms disappear, but instead they simply receded with the rest of the Mall as Dennis turned onto Memorial Bridge.

  Abruptly the light turned violent, blindingly clear as the early-afternoon sun skimmed off the Potomac in sharp shards of glass. The monuments appeared in order in his rearview mirror, but what lay ahead of him was against history. For the first time since he was awoken this morning, still believing as his wife lay across his chest that it was she who needed to apologize, Dennis lost his composure.

  Unable to drive, he pulled the car over to the side of the bridge and stepped out carefully, the black car unwillingly passing him, the driver fixing on Dennis, his head turning in disbelief as he sped by. Dennis knew the man would simply go around the circle at the other end and return, and he didn’t much care. He went to the sidewalk and leaned into the granite balustrade with his hips, his forearms reaching up to the smooth ledge. He looked north, toward home. It was nothing like where he grew up, like New York, the island tethered to its boroughs with strings of bridges, tautly stretched stitches in the leather of Manhattan. D.C. was low to the ground and sprawling; it was lighter in all ways and it was not an island; there was no danger of the city unhinging and floating away.

  Dennis could see the tip of the Lincoln Memorial, which he had stood facing on so many occasions. There was the Kennedy Center with its golden columns, the western terrace suspended above the parkway he’d headed home along more nights than he cared to count. On winter nights the purple and white lights skidded over the river; the building appeared to glow, humming with the golden light of the inside. It really is a beautiful town, Dennis thought each time he drove beneath that terrace. And he thought this now, though this was usurped by the notion of his wife flung across a man that, no matter how many photographs he imagined, did not wear Dennis’s face. The man played guitar; he knew that much.

  Cars whizzed by, several honking at his idled Beetle, which was taking up an entire lane. Dennis felt his hips and arms warm against the sun-heated granite. He looked down the river and thought of it in all its parts: in Georgetown, where he’d taken his children along the C&O Canal—it connects tidewater here on the Potomac River with the headwaters of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania, the ranger had once told them—and deep in Maryland, where they’d canoed in quiet waters; at Great Falls on the Virginia side where kayakers crashed between massive boulders. Just like government, everyone in his little bureaucratic department pushing paper toward the gaping mouth. Working in government, it was no different from being a garment worker; his father could have rallied and screamed and spit for his rights. Everyone just does his part, his little bitty part, and perhaps the whole turns out as swell as that river. But, the whole, it turns out, was too contaminated to be of use. The river was a polluted organism; Dennis had dreams of falling into it and being stuck in its muck, unable to get to the surface for breath. Yet the river was distinct in each place he’d beheld it; it hardly seemed correct to call it by a single name.

  Dennis looked at the water below, the current swirling beneath him, and he thought of the wide and open light of Texas cast across immense rolls of hay and catching the steel of the oil rigs, flashing off the massive web of telephone lines strung high above. There he was as he had once been, with Len, eager, committed, a little unsure, half the country still to travel, the Golden Gate, the most spectacular bridge on earth, still ahead of them.

  Now Dennis leaned over the ledge of the small and simple Memorial Bridge, not even, he thought, high enough to kill a man. He put his head in his hands and wept.

  The car was waiting on the parkway to follow Dennis into the South Gate of CIA headquarters, where it maneuvered in front of Dennis, who then followed as they drove through what felt like a winding forest. Huge trees surrounded a narrow roadway, then suddenly a clearing appeared, and the headquarters, a long building with a low-hung terrace over the entrance—clearly the product of fifties architecture—came into view. Dennis had never been to these new headquarters; all his meetings were taken in the D.C. office on E Street, just across from the State Department, and now he felt as if he were entering a college campus, so immense were the grounds. The modern architecture made him think of Brandeis, and as Dennis drove into the enormous lot after the driver cleared his access, he thought of watching his son speak at his rally. Only yesterday, he thought, remembering Ben’s surprisingly delicate fingers making a point in the air, then gripping the podium as he leaned in to emphasize his position. It had been brief and beautiful; there was no crime in that. He had been cruel to place his own jadedness over his son’s hope.

  We are all living down or living up to a legacy now, aren’t we? Dennis thought as he pulled next to the black car. So what now was his son to inherit? Was his a moral, priggish birthright, or was he the heir to something fearless, if foul? In one moment those two inheritances were split directly down the middle, but the differences were so great they were meaningless. Suddenly he felt he understood Caleb Blonsky, posing with Nixon, a glass of white wine held high in the air, because he had circled around and found there was no distinction. A communist could love her country and a Fabergé egg.

  The driver—who turned out to be a man in a blue suit, a bureaucrat just like Dennis—nodded.

  “Mr. Goldstein,” he said, pointing to the stairs.

  Dennis took the few steps and headed through the glass door, which he held for the driver, into the shining lobby of the CIA. In all its grand governmental glory. Because something about a government building, no matter what it looks lik
e from the outside, has, on the inside, the faint whiff of Eastern Europe. Inside is always the endless, slow, dusty colorlessness of bureaucracy. Only the Capitol was different. He wanted to be that young man spinning beneath its spectacular dome again; he wanted just once more to shake the incomparable Hubert Humphrey’s hand.

  Stepping inside, Dennis stood atop a massive CIA seal, inlaid in granite in the floor, the eagle peeking out from a white shield marked with a red compasslike star, its spokes radiating. The United States of America was printed in red on a golden scroll, and above the seal, in generic white lettering, it said Central Intelligence Agency. Dennis had seen this seal countless times: on stationery, in offices, stamped on book covers and confidential documents, yet he had never noticed how furious that eagle seemed now, even in profile, and how much the great bird resembled an old man.

  Before him stood a wall of white marble engraved with black stars, representing soldiers now perished. And below this rather quiet memorial lay an open book encased in glass, The Book of Honor.

  “This way,” the man said, guiding him to the stairs, then out at the first floor.

  Dennis bowed his head and followed, as instructed. He wondered if his father had arrived yet; Gary had refused to give any details over the phone, and Dennis wondered what his father would do or say, what he’d been doing when they’d called for him. Or perhaps they had come directly to the apartment, just walked in as his father sat hunched over those books at the kitchen table, and taken him then and there.

  The walls of the headquarters were painted a deep, rather beautiful midnight blue, and the hallway was lined with portraits of men, a Hall of Great Men, each man standing boldly in military uniform, hands hooked to breast pockets directly below his many medals or seated with a hat in hand, or leaning over the ledge of a massive, spinning globe. As the paintings moved chronologically closer to the present, the poses grew more casual: important papers were strewn on slackened laps; a man relaxed in a chair, the arm of his glasses swinging in his left hand. The men had slipped out of formal uniform and into business suits; the last painting captured George H. W. Bush, seated casually on a table ledge in pinstripes.

  Dennis watched the footfalls of the man leading him, and he heard their shoes squeak on the linoleum floors, but they seemed inconceivably separated by time, and he could not feel his own legs, which took him up another flight of stairs and down another shining hallway to an office. For the second time today, Dennis lost control.

  The man waited—almost gently—for him to stop shaking. Dennis could not think of a single image that would calm him. The past was burdened; the future was fraught. But in the center of those time frames, just as in the middle of the mob of protesters singing and holding their children and waving peace signs, was the Reflecting Pool, its still, clear waters mirroring the few wisps of clouds passing by in the clear sky, unchanged. Somehow he had reached this image, and after about a minute, he was still, and the man in the blue suit wrapped his fingers around the chipped golden knob and opened the door.

  Dennis hadn’t realized his eyes were closed, but now they shot open. What had he expected? Because it was just an office, a government office, not so different from his own, though it had no plants or posters or framed photographs, and a table, not a desk, faced the door. Today it was set with five chairs, the three facing the door taken, the two on the opposite side still empty.

  She sat at the table straight as a needle, flanked by two men in uniform. Her hair was so red! On the carousel on Coney Island he rode a bobbing horse in many circles to the frightening throng of the organ, always looking during each rotation for the safe spot of her bright hair. Her long neck was tilted a little to the right, as if she were furtively trying to listen. The cookies had names in them. Written in invisible ink, Gary had said. Dennis had been silent, watching Sharon, her long hair falling over her bare shoulders in the gray light. You didn’t know this? In lemon, or vinegar. Maybe even urine. When they were baked, the coded names turned brown. They all went to a Misha Baskov in Moscow. What did you say your mother’s maiden name was? Gary had said, just this morning, on the telephone. No, he’d said. Don’t tell me.

  “Hello, Mother,” Dennis said in Russian.

  He watched his father enter the room, guided by another driver. Sigmund stood straight, his hands resting on the back of the chair. Then the two men flanking his mother rose and came toward them.

  CHAPTER 19

  Just Call Them Wishes

  The Sunday-morning call-in program came back on the radio. Okay, folks, we’re talking about the hostages. It’s day one hundred and forty. One hundred and forty, folks! Do you really think President Jimmy Carter is gonna get them out?

  Sharon leaned over and turned off the radio. “Christ,” she said.

  “Hey!” Benji wiped his sticky hands on his comforter. “That sounded kinda interesting. And they might talk about the boycott soon. They could even mention the rally.”

  “We can listen in later,” Sharon said. “I’m tired.”

  “You’re tired? If you only knew what the past twenty-four hours has been like for me!”

  “Stop it, Ben.”

  Benji looked back at Sharon, surprised.

  Vanessa lay back in Arnie’s bed, and Sharon closed the happy box of doughnuts and perched it precariously on top of the clock radio. “Look, guys.” She brought her knees to her chest, the sheets tenting around her legs, which she wrapped her arms around. “People in this country say horrible things about the Soviet Union. Just horrible. And they’re not all wrong, but they’re not all right either.”

  “I think I know a little about this, Mom. I mean, more than anyone, I should know about empathizing with the Russians. That’s what I’m about.”

  Sharon closed her eyes and worked her toes into the mattress. “Just listen, Benjamin. I am trying to tell you something that is difficult.”

  Vanessa looked at her mother. She was so close; Vanessa could see the little blond hairs above her mouth, and the delicate web of lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, as well as the darker, greenishtinged circles beneath. She could see the bits of flaking skin on her mother’s chapped lips, and the bright pinpricks of red in the spots where she had clearly chewed or picked the skin loose too soon.

  “You know your father is Russian, right?” Sharon ran a palm over her burned hand. “Of course you know that. Well, we’re all obviously very much American, but Grandpa Herbert is Polish—though his village was taken over by the Russians a long time ago, but that’s a whole other story. And Nana Helen, she’s Hungarian. But Tatti, Nana Tatti, you know, she came over from Russia. From St. Petersburg. When she was older. She has many, many ties there. Unlike my father. Anyway, look, people say horrible things now, but Russia was once a wonderful place.”

  “Have you ever been?” Benji asked.

  Sharon sighed. “No, Ben, I haven’t.” Was it strange that all she’d wanted to hear from her husband was if he’d known? And he had not known, he’d said. Even in the dark in the hotel, she could tell he was not lying.

  “I’m just wondering, is all,” Benji said. “How you know it was so wonderful?” He stuffed bits of a sheet into his clenched left hand and pulled it out with his right.

  “Let me put it this way,” Sharon said. Dennis said he hadn’t known, but that it wasn’t shocking. “Everything has changed . . .” Imagine. Not being shocked by such news. Sharon could hardly imagine anything more revelatory.

  There was a scratch at the door.

  “In Russia?” Vanessa asked, ignoring it. “How so?”

  “No.” Sharon put her hand on Vanessa’s knee. “What I meant was, well, your father won’t be going back to Moscow anytime soon, that’s for sure.”

  “Hey, Benji?” a tentative voice came from outside the door. Scratch scratch. “You in there?”

  Benji looked sheepishly at his mother and his sister, then rose from his bed, adjusting himself in his briefs as he padded to the door in his bare feet.


  “Why? Where’s Dad?” Vanessa looked as if she might cry.

  Benji cracked open the door. “Hey,” he said, leaning in at his hip. “Hey, you.”

  “Who’s that?” Sharon whispered to Vanessa.

  She shrugged. “How should I know?”

  “I’m not alone,” Benji whispered into the hallway. “I mean, not like that. My mother and sister are here with me.”

  Sharon hit Vanessa on her leg and whispered, pointing at the door, “It’s that Rachel!”

  Vanessa ducked her head into her hand, a smile passing over her face. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Well”—Sharon placed her arm back around her shins—“something came up at work and he had to go to the office.”

  “If you want to, I guess,” Benji said, opening the door and stepping aside.

  “Really?” Vanessa said. “On a Sunday?”

  Sharon nodded, looking straight ahead. “Yes,” she said. “Really.”

  And then Rachel Feinglass stepped inside.

  She stood in the center of the small room, a brown leather bag crossing her chest snugly, and a small backpack with two heavy, black shoulder straps dug in tight just at the outside curve of each breast. Her nipples pressed against the faded white cotton of her shirt, where the felt printing of boardwalk T-shirt shops spelled out I Need a Miracle! in blue bubble letters.