Something Red
Page 39
“You were there!” Tatti said. “You were going to be very big in the party then. You were so excited and everyone wanted to hear what you—you!—had to say. Herbert Weissman was there too.”
Dennis watched one of the officers take down the name.
“Did you know this?” Tatti said. “He was there this night too. I can still see him helping Helen down from the little stage when she was done with her singing. They were not married then, and he nodded at me before they left; I can never forget that. I cannot forget that because I almost approached him. I liked his hat very much, and so I almost went up to him and offered the money like we were trained.” She nodded her head deliberately. “Yes, so what, we were trained. Greetings from Fanny, we would say to the ones who were expecting it. Sometimes they came to the music office. At the Empire State. Remember, Dennis?” She looked at him.
Dennis nodded. Then, without thinking, he asked, “Was Misha a musician?”
Tatiana smiled at the side of her mouth and looked at the officers. “He was. He was very good, I heard. And Boris was a wonderful skater too. We had fun together, didn’t we?”
Dennis sat back.
“But this night. I almost approached Herbert this night because he seemed like he was waiting, and I thought perhaps he would say the right answer, How is she, how is Fanny? And it would be done and I would have done my job well that night and I would be praised. He did something, though, and this I don’t remember, but it was a gesture of a kind that made me realize he was not expecting my approach, though he did seem like a man who would not refuse money. And yet I didn’t touch his arm. Why not? Why did I instead turn to you, to you, who already I could tell was a man of ideas? You were living in your head, if not a little bit your heart. But it was all of us there that night; we were all there together.”
Tatiana cleared her throat and looked up at the ceiling. For a moment Dennis thought it was to keep the tears from rolling down her face, but her eyes were dry.
“I said to you, Do you want to share secrets? Just like that, I said this to you. Only you thought I meant my own, Sigmund, didn’t you?”
Dennis looked at his father, still frozen in his bureaucratic, governmental, piece-of-shit seat. Don’t they have a decent chair in here?
Tatti looked at her husband, then at her son. Her face was long and white. Her hair was still so red; she couldn’t really be dyeing it, could she?
“I’m sorry if I have hurt you. Don’t think that I did not love my family. I did. I do.” She was calmer than Dennis had ever seen her; had he made up her fear? This was not his mother. This had never been she. That person he had spent his youth translating for did not exist. “I love my family. It’s different now. I’m so much older now. The world has changed; some things we outgrow. Our own principles, we are always testing them, no? I woke up one day and found I had not outgrown my beliefs.” She stood up, and as she did, so did the agents flanking her. This was it. This was all. “But back then, you thought I meant secrets of the heart,” she said to her husband, leaning in before leaving the room. “But, darling, my darling, I was talking about a country.”
Dennis stood and looked at his father, who seemed momentarily unable to rise. His mother was leaving. A slip of light came streaming through the window. It seemed so sudden, but perhaps the sunlight had been there since they’d entered the room. His father was still seated. She was going now, then she would be gone. Like winter. What a brutal winter it had been. The few times Dennis had thought it might be nice to do so, the weather had been too cold for skating. But now it was spring. Please, he thought. Get up. It was 1980. Dennis went to help his father out of his chair. Where, Dennis wondered, are we supposed to go from here?
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to many texts, especially E. L. Doctorow’s wonderful novel The Book of Daniel, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood, and Irving Howe’s Socialism and America. But there are always certain details that a novelist can’t get exactly right on her own, despite her research. For these I am grateful to Linda Viertel for sharing her extensive knowledge of cooking and cookbooks in the seventies, and to Gus Schumacher and Chris Goldthwait for describing what it might have been like to work at USDA at that time. Thank you to my family friend in the CIA who I don’t think would want to be mentioned by name (that’s why it’s the CIA . . .), to Lara Vapnyar for fixing my “little Russian mistakes,” and to Laurie Brown and André Bernard for their spy-novel schooling. I am also indebted to Nina Revoyr, always one of my most stalwart first readers, and to Peter Cohen, Emily Chenoweth, Jen Haller, and Adam Langer for help with early drafts. Thank you to Pedro Barbeito, who has always read with patience and encouragement, and who, during the writing of this book, listened to music with earphones and painted very quietly as we shared a workspace, and managed to remain married. I’m grateful to Wendy Sheanin, director of marketing at Simon, who, since the moment I turned this book in, has been such a big supporter. And thank you, thank you to Jenn Joel, my agent, who has championed this novel from its tentative first pages, and to Alexis Gargagliano, my fairy-tale editor come true.
About the Author
Jennifer Gilmore’s first novel, Golden Country, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2006 and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She currently teaches at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and lives in Brooklyn, New York.