I sat down on the braided rug and looked around the room, My room. All my life I’d lived in luxury, created for me by someone else. In this clean, simple, bare place, I could begin to find out who I was as a woman, no longer a child.
Chapter 16
Polly was famous on the farm for baking bread that surpassed any we’d ever tasted, but her true love was desserts. For my birthday that next year, she made me a combination of the two, a creation she called bread pudding, soaked with real bourbon. She ringed the edge of the platter with orange and yellow dahlias and topped it with a candle. I couldn’t believe I was having bourbon for breakfast.
I came to love being around Polly. I put up with her repeating herself and she put up with my difficult to understand English until it improved.
I was trying to absorb the customs, but I could not bite my tongue any longer and ignore the obvious question: “How come there are two lines and two entrances for everything? And why wasn’t Polly allowed to eat with us? Didn’t the Yankees win?”
There weren’t many negroes in Russia, but the ones who were there were educated and valued. “Why, Peter the Great emancipated then adopted an African slave. The gentleman was given a superb education, served in the Russian military, and became a member of the noble class,” I told Polly one evening when we were in the privacy of our own home and could more freely interact.
Irina opened up the dialogue by reminding me that this man I was speaking of was also the great grandfather of Russia’s heralded poet, Alexander Pushkin. Irina followed certain Southern traditions out of her love and respect of the colonel and she had no desire to bring trouble down on herself or his good name, but at home, that was private and where one should be able to relax. Besides no one was going to keep Polly down!
“Well, my grandfather was emancipated in eighteen sixty-one,” Polly quickly retorted. Polly came from an island off the Carolinas that did things a little differently. “He served in the Union’s first South Carolina volunteer army. And his daughter, my mother, was an educated woman. Some teachers came to our island with their church. They called themselves Unitarians.”
I had never heard of this church, but they gave Polly a louder, more confident mouth from which to speak. And late at night I’d see her turning the pages of the books Irina bought for her but having to do so without drawing attention to herself or anyone else. One night, I remember passing her room only to see her reading Great Expectations. Polly smiled at me and asked, “Do you like Dickens?” Embarrassingly I had to admit that I had never read Dickens.
The following week, I found her book next to my bed on my nightstand.
¯¯¯
Irina counseled me on the things she thought young girls needed to know, like distilling wildflowers and herbs to make natural remedies and reading tea leaves and palms. “How else will you know which way to go in life,” she’d say, “or if your suitor has good intentions?”
Sometimes she’d say, “Did you notice that you told me exactly what I was thinking before I could form the words? My darling, you have a gift, one that’s much greater even than the gift of your legs.” Then, to close our lesson, she’d repeat one of three old Russian proverbs: “Without rest, even the horse can’t gallop”; “Without effort, you can’t even pull a fish from a pond”; and, most importantly, “Be swift to hear and slow to speak.”
We took walks every day. Irina would pick a flower or herb, tell me to close my eyes, then she’d ask, “What is this, Donatalia? Keep your eyes closed.” If I wasn’t able to name it by scent, Irina would put the flower in the palm of my hand and direct my fingertips to identify it through touch.
My senses heightened, and my world blossomed beyond anything I could have imagined. Irina was captivating almost as much so as my mother or Maestro Cecchetti; nonetheless, I found it strange that after all my years of dance, it was Irina who truly awakened my senses and introduced me to the mysteries of life.
Being the owner of a grand estate brought Irina into contact with businessmen from around the globe, which set her apart from most women of that day. With her lively spirit of inquiry, Irina absorbed knowledge from these men, knowledge she now passed on to me.
She had me practice the “breath of fire,” which she’d learned from an old Indian businessman, who swore he’d learned it from a yogi. She showed me the power of crystals and amethysts, explaining, “This is what my mother taught me, just as your mother taught you French and how to dance ballet. This is what I have to pass on. Mothers teach their daughters what they know.”
After spending a day learning the magical arts of nature from Irina, at night, when I closed my eyes, I was free of my limp. In my dreams, I was healed, and I danced for our czar, for kings and queens. I was content. My life, it seemed, was beginning to have purpose again.
Chapter 17
All the women in my life had left their mark. Irina acquainted me with many abilities that up to that point I had been unaware of. She said, “You’ve always been spinning too fast and only focused on one thing: dance. Your accident,” she continued, “allowed you, no, forced you, to discover your truest nature. Someday you might even be thankful that a situation arose that made you examine the deepest part of yourself.”
With Irina’s guidance, I learned midwifery—how to predict if someone would live a long life, have children, find love. Explore and have adventures, be rich or be poor. “But remember,” she added at the closing of each lesson, “read not only their palms but their eyes, too. It’s the little crease in the hand, the sparkle or a shadow in the eye, that makes the difference. Truth is in the nuances.”
And every night when I said my prayers, I silently thanked Mary Bradley because I felt quite certain that my family’s association with her good name helped to solidify Irina’s decision to have me stay. She once said to me that if “Mary can look after all the children in an orphanage in Africa, why surely I can take care of one wayward misplaced girl from Russia whose dreams got lost in a revolution.”
“You have a gift,” Irina told me. “You can see things others cannot,” she went on. “Don’t be frightened. It’s just that your senses are more highly developed.” Strangely, I understood what she was trying to say. I suddenly remembered the night before my mother passed away and I had the dream of the moon and how it blew my mother’s flower petals right off their stems. The next morning, I recalled telling my father he would have to learn to make me breakfast. I couldn’t tell you why I said what I did, only that somehow I knew it was true. That same afternoon it went from premonition to truth.
There was something about the way my mother, Irina, and Lillya, the three most influential women to me, were determined to grab every ounce of life. They could make a simple tea party feel like the grandest affair. They were radiant because of the way they chose to walk through the world. Instead of seeing ugliness and despair, they gravitated toward beauty whether it were a deep-violet tulip, a new dress, a special exhibit at an art museum, or architecture old or new.
Irina loved to make up excuses to go into town, look at the buildings, and watch the townsfolk walk by. Her latest obsession was Savannah’s newly completed city hall with its distinctive copper dome. She acted as if her father or Colonel Butler had built it especially for her.
“It’s Italian Renaissance,” she told me. “Oh, how I admire its architect for creating a building so exquisite and functional at the same time. And the flowers, look how beautiful!” She swept her hand grandly so that I not only noticed the flower beds but all the magnificent live oak trees and their Spanish moss. “Forgive me”—Irina laughed—“I get carried away.”
We spread out a brightly colored Mexican shawl that Polly had packed along with the desserts and spent the afternoon on the lawn talking and eating.
“By the time I leave this earth, Donatalia,” Irina said as I took the last bite of Polly’s banana cake, “you will understand your talents and know ho
w to best use them.” I brushed the crumbs off my lap, folded Polly’s shawl, and silently contemplated the weight of Irina’s words.
¯¯¯
In 1908, Georgia prohibited alcohol, ten years before Prohibition, starting up a booming bootlegger business. Ford came out with the new Model T, and Irina was first in line to buy one. In 1909, the Great White Fleet returned to Hampton Roads, in Virginia; William Howard Taft was elected president, and Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole. We read about these things in the paper, sitting on the porch swing, but they came from a world that seemed very far away.
Living with Irina, like living in the South, was slow and easy. Time passed and I hardly knew where it went. I thought about what my life might have been but quickly buried those dreams. I was happy and it didn’t do any good to obsess on what wouldn’t occur. Irina knew the time was coming for me to step out into the world and perhaps meet a boy. I had carried a joyful spirit through much adversity for several years, but underneath it all, there was still fear. And if I left behind what I no longer needed, how would that feel?
My slight limp, a remnant of my past life, continued to be a reminder when the weather got cold and damp. I tried not to focus on it. But sometimes I couldn’t help myself and my thoughts would wander to the mysterious Frenchman, Hervé, and just how different my life would have been if we hadn’t met. How strange he didn’t say goodbye and disappeared. Then I would turn my thoughts back to my family and Russia, the Imperial School, and sometimes even Vladimir.
¯¯¯
A frost had hit Savannah the night before. Earlier Polly had brought in some fresh bread pudding for us to share. Her favorite spice, cinnamon, with its distinctive scent, drifted from room to room. Irina, with a bit of a chill, was wrapped in a brightly colored woolen scarf I had given to her. We had just finished celebrating the twelfth day of Christmas the night before and now Irina and I were taking the Christmas ornaments down from the tree and neatly packing them in their boxes. The fireplace was crackling and the sweet smell of burning pine needles filled the room. The moon was high in the sky, shining in through the windows. Only the angel at the top of her tree remained to be taken down when suddenly Irina started speaking in Russian, as if some ghostly spirit had inhabited her and a deep voice inside me told me it had. So I climbed a ladder and carefully lifted the angel and put it in Irina’s hands.
“The colonel gave me this,” she smiled. Then she got serious. “I’m happy you came here, Donatalia,” she said. “Us Russian girls were meant to be together.”
Then Irina—usually so independent—let me help her up the stairs. She pulled her nightgown from her drawer, and I turned down her bedcovers. She told me she loved me, and that the angel that had always watched over her would now watch over me. “My angel is strong,” she whispered, “stronger than the serpent and the one who poses as a witch.” I felt Irina’s forehead, certain she was running a fever, for her words made little sense.
Then she kissed me on both cheeks, closed her eyes, and never opened them again. Sometime between her good night kiss and the morning light, she died in her sleep.
¯¯¯
I’d lived with Irina four years before I buried her in the colonel’s mausoleum, amid winter honeysuckle and golden winter jasmine. Apart from the money she bequeathed to her favorite charities, she willed all her worldly possessions to me. Unlike most young women, I was now self-sufficient. I could take my time deciding which road in life I would follow.
Uncertain what to do next, I spent the rest of the winter and most of the spring swinging on the porch swings, one day swinging east toward prosperity and the next west, thinking about opportunities. I planted herbs, mostly for cooking—oregano, rosemary, thyme—relaxed in the sun, and became very good at putting off the big decisions. There’d be plenty of time for those later.
¯¯¯
June 1911
I stepped out from the fabric store’s dimness into the bright early June sun of Habersham Street, clutching a little tissue-wrapped bundle of fabric and lace that I was sure Polly would find good use for. Ben had driven me into Savannah to shop; I’d left him reading a newspaper on a bench in Oglethorpe Square. Irina had always admired Savannah’s many little grass-covered squares, always so beautifully planted. “We can thank Mr. Oglethorpe for making Savannah such a convivial place. All those benches where neighbors can sit and talk—a brilliant touch!” she’d say.
Lately I’d been feeling a new impatience. I’d barely been off the farm since Irina passed. There was a big world out there. Surely it had a place for me, and I knew I would find it. Yet I hadn’t. Months had passed without a sign, a clue, a dream. Nothing. I was beginning to doubt myself.
I’d begun to cross Columbia Square, headed back toward Ben and the car, when suddenly I stopped. Struck with a craving for some fresh bread and honey, I turned and went the other way.
At the general store on East President, its wide-plank floors worn smooth by countless feet, I bought bread and honey and a few other things, set them on the counter in front of a pale young man, and signed the account ledger. I was about to turn and walk out when I froze. My childhood friend Vladimir was staring back at me from a colorful poster on the wall behind the clerk. I immediately recognized the smile in his eyes. He had gotten older, but he hadn’t changed. The years and miles that separated us felt both long and short.
Memories began to wash over me. “I know that man!” I finally told the shopkeeper, who looked as if he was wondering what had come over me. “He and I studied together at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg when we were young. The Vronskys were circus royalty there. Probably every child in Russia knows who Vladimir is.”
The clerk murmured something politely and turned to the next customer, but I didn’t pick up my parcel. I stood reading words on the poster over and over:
Come One! Come All!
The Vronsky Family Circus
welcomes Children of All Ages
for an Unforgettable Experience!
And, in smaller letters below the decorative headlines and sublines:
Savannah at sunset on Tuesday, June 8, 1911
Performances the following five nights
Admission only five cents, children free
I could hardly believe my luck. June 8 was this very day.
Chapter 18
When I came home from the store, I looked in the mirror thinking of all that had happened since I last saw Vladimir. It had been a world away and I wondered if he would recognize the girl who was once me, and I the man he’d become.
How could it already be 1911? I asked myself. The image of planting New Year’s wishes in Russian soil with my father, greeting the twentieth century, seemed so fresh and recent.
¯¯¯
It was the kind of late spring day that seemed to stretch into two, making one feel like August had come early. The kind of day when even the most Yankee-hating Southerner would have welcomed a cool northern breeze. The night before, I’d felt as if I were living in a swamp, the air so heavy with moisture that I felt I was inhaling mosquitoes with every breath. So many, I could picture them dancing around in my lungs.
I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. I pulled out a light blue party dress that I liked and asked Polly if she would cut some flowers from the garden. Then I dusted myself off.
“I brought you some mock orange for your hair,” Polly said, marching back into the room.
Together we carefully set a few midnight blue combs with freshwater pearls in my hair to hold the fragrant white flowers in place. Polly looked at me with questioning eyes, but she knew not to ask. I took a deep breath, thanked her, and left.
¯¯¯
The hum of activity at the circus grounds was overwhelming. Men were putting up the tents, the dull ring of hammers filling the air. Brightly dressed, exotic-looking women bustled about, preparing fo
r the show. I felt lost. I asked several men who looked as if they could have been Russian lumberjacks if they knew where I could find Vladimir. “Bella,” every one of them replied.
Who is Bella? I wanted to ask.
I walked around in circles until finally, dizzy, I found myself headed for home. The poster said he would be staying five days so I allowed myself to give in to my nerves. I passed a field spangled with meadow flowers and stopped to pick a white daisy. One by one I plucked the white petals. Should I try again, or just leave well enough alone? Surely, he knew my heart. The last petal I plucked directed me to try again. I promised myself I would return the next night.
The hours passed slowly the next day. I felt like a child waiting for the last snowflake to fall in a Russian winter. Oh, how anxious I was to talk to someone from my past—how anxious I was to talk to him, but I was also afraid that Vladimir’s memories might be very different from mine. But then I told myself it was just a schoolgirl crush and I made up my mind to go see my friend.
Polly gave me a knowing look as I left: for the second night in a row, wearing a dress and flowers in my hair.
The circus grounds that had been skeletal before were now full of life. Something about the gaudy confusion drew me in. Actually, it reminded me a bit of Coney Island. My senses awakened. My nose and ears felt bigger. Touched with the salty tang of popcorn and sweat, the air tasted sweet. Children were laughing, parents were scolding, and lions were roaring. It was magnificent! I was already happy I had come.
Before going to my seat, I explored the midway. Along the way, I stumbled across a frightening fortune-telling machine but was momentarily distracted by a woman charming a snake. For a penny, the animated metal automaton with a wild, curly dark wig, brown eyes almost popping out of their sockets, and bright red lips smiled mechanically as it handed you your fortune. This one looked especially sinister, as someone—no doubt unhappy with what she’d foretold—had painted one of her teeth black.
The Fortune Teller's Fate Page 9
