by Sharon Potts
Mama needed to see these, even if she didn’t want to.
Annette carried the album into the living room and sat down beside her on the sofa. Her mother was still looking out the window. The rain had turned to snow and flakes were sticking to the panes.
“Mama, I found photos of Grandma Betty when she was young. You have to look at these.”
“No,” her mother said, but her eyes turned to the book on Annette’s lap.
Annette opened to the portrait of her grandmother as a bride, let her mother study it for a minute, then turned to the next page.
She was confused. This one was of Grandma Betty and the groom. But the man that stood a head taller than her grandmother was a handsome, sparkling young man. He was dressed in a formal U.S. Army uniform with a number of ribbons and medals over his breast pocket. In the shadow of his billed cap, she could tell he had light eyes, probably blue like hers and her mother’s, a hint of pale hair, and a broad open smile. Annette had never imagined her real grandfather once looked like this.
Her mother made a small noise, like a bird about to be crushed.
“I’m sorry, Mama. We don’t have to look at these.”
Her mother patted her throat. “Show me.”
Annette turned to the next page. There he was again. Much younger, a grinning teenager wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit with a striped top. 1932. Upstate New York, the label read.
The face was open and pure. How could that be? These photos contradicted everything Annette believed.
She slowly turned the pages as her mother studied each photo with her. Her grandparents wrapped in a plaid blanket on a toboggan, wearing ice skates at the side of a frozen lake, laughing with another couple whose faces were blurry. December 1943, Laurels Hotel, Catskill Mountains, New York.
She turned the page. Another picture of her grandparents with the same couple seated around a table in a restaurant. Her grandfather was in his military uniform, the others in evening dress. In this photo, Annette could see the faces of the other couple clearly. An older man with thinning hair and a much younger-looking woman. The woman had dark hair and eyes, high cheekbones, and a movie-star smile. A cluster of large stones that looked like rhinestones sparkled in her ears. She was stunning. Next to her, Grandma Betty with her small eyes and pronounced upper jaw looked like a mouse, despite the white orchid she wore on a velvet ribbon around her neck. Annette read the caption. With Mariasha and Aaron Lowe. December 1944. Dinner and dancing at the Starlight Roof Supper Club.
She wasn’t sure why she was so taken aback that her grandparents had had friends. Yet here was a photo of four people out for an evening. None of these people looked like monsters. Certainly not her grandfather.
Her mother took the album from Annette and turned the pages. She stopped on the last page. Annette looked over her mother’s shoulder at the photo of two little girls, both blonde, holding hands in front of a brick apartment building. They could have been sisters.
“This is me,” her mother said. “And I think I remember the other girl.”
Annette read the caption. “1950. Our Sally with classmate Essie Lowe. In front of our apartment on 120 Columbia Street.”
Essie Lowe. Probably the daughter of her grandparents’ friends, Mariasha and Aaron Lowe. And if the girls were classmates, they’d probably all lived in the same Manhattan neighborhood.
“Essie was my friend,” her mother said, in a voice that sounded childlike and plaintive.
Annette’s heart ached for her. Her mother had once been a happy child until one day her ordinary life was publicly shattered. Then, probably to escape a vicious world, Grandma Betty bundled herself and little Sally off to Paris, away from friends, family, their old neighborhood, and a familiar language.
But why had it happened? Because her grandfather had been a monster or because it was convenient for people to believe he was?
Annette reached into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out the article she had torn from the newspaper, and looked at the smudged photo of Isaac Goldstein. His hooded eye glared at her. A monster?
She quickly read the two short paragraphs about the KGB agent’s memoir. According to the agent, Isaac Goldstein had no involvement in passing secret atomic-bomb information on to the Soviets. Goldstein was never a major player in communist spy circles, the agent had written. He didn’t have access to crucial material. That all came from another source.
What if there was something to the Soviet agent’s story? Annette was a journalist, someone who didn’t accept things at face value, and yet that’s exactly what she had been doing all these years.
She took the album from her mother and looked again at the photo of the smiling bridegroom, a decorated army hero. Her real grandfather. Isaac Goldstein. He looked nothing like the smudged picture of the angry man from Le Figaro, a traitor with a squinty eye. The hateful photo had been on ‘Death to Goldstein’ posters in 1953 and was the one that popped up hundreds of times if you searched on Google Images. But did that make it true?
Who had this man really been? A hero or a traitor?
Annette put her arm around her mother, holding tight even as Mama shrank from her touch. Perhaps the truth about Isaac Goldstein could help Mama reclaim her life.
And then his granddaughter could finally reclaim hers.
CHAPTER 2
Who the hell was this person? Everything about him was wrong.
Julian Sandman stared at his distorted reflection in the black lacquered door to his apartment. He’d been standing there for so long that the caked snow that had accumulated on his dress shoes during his walk home from his Midtown office had melted and soaked through to his feet.
Happy thirtieth b-day, man, whoever you really are.
A thumping bass beat leaked through the apartment door, which meant Sephora was probably inside getting dressed for her spinning class. Well, he’d made the first move and there was no going back. Might as well get this over with.
He jabbed his key into the lock, opened the door, and was hit by a blast of cold air from the open balcony door. Sephora preferred fresh air, even when it was freezing outside. He pulled off his soaked shoes and socks in the front foyer. His feet had turned white and crinkly and looked grotesque against the polished black marble floor.
But then, this entire apartment was grotesque. He and Sephora had been here a year, but it still felt more like a trendy hotel suite than a place where people actually lived. He took in the stiff black leather sofa, ebony brick wall, media console and giant flat-screen TV. A fake white Christmas tree with crystal ornaments stood in the corner of the room topped by a Jewish star, Sephora’s big concession to Julian. Beyond the open balcony door, the snow was coming down so thick it obscured the view of the Hudson River. Not that you could see the river even on a clear day, thanks to the new highrise that was under construction across the street. You didn’t get much for five thousand dollars a month in Manhattan’s West Village these days.
What the hell was he doing here?
He loosened his tie and dropped his wet cashmere coat, wool hat, and briefcase on the leather chair by the rarely used glass desk. The plain wood chess set Julian’s father had gotten him when he was five sat on a corner of the desk, though Julian never played chess anymore. There were lots of things he didn’t do anymore.
He followed the rhythmic beat of hip-hop music into the bedroom, recognizing Lil Wayne rapping.
Sephora sat on the bed, yanking on a pair of tight black high-heeled boots, her silky reddish-blonde hair falling across her face.
“It’s slippery out there,” he said. “Not high-heel weather.”
She tossed the hair out of her eye and stood up. “I’ll take a taxi.”
Julian watched her examine herself in the full-length mirror. Blue jeans over a black leotard. A body most guys drooled over, as he once did.
When they’d first met a couple of years before, Sephora had been one of the HR recruiters at the company’s corporate office and had
taken him out to lunch. For two hours over martinis and tuna tartare, she had tried to impress him with what an amazing opportunity was in store for him with one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The company invested more in R&D than any of its competitors, she’d told him, and that meant Julian would work in a state-of-the-art lab on projects that could transform the health and well-being of the world.
While Sephora hadn’t been the main reason he had accepted the employment offer, that lunch certainly hadn’t hurt. A few weeks after Julian joined the company, he and Sephora started dating. A year later, she moved in with him, and then dropped her corporate career.
“You’re home early,” she said, studying him in the mirror. She rubbed gloss on her lips with her pinkie. “Getting a head start on the big celebration?”
“Not exactly. Can we talk?”
“My class is in twenty minutes,” she said.
Lil Wayne’s voice pounded in the small room.
“Aww, come here, big boy. Let me give you a birthday hug.” Sephora pulled him toward her, swung her back against his chest in a spooning position, then crisscrossed his long arms around her breasts so that both their reflections were framed in the mirror. Her face was fresh and pink-cheeked, her green eyes sparkly. He, on the other hand, looked like he’d been dragged in from a shipwreck. Short black hair plastered to his skull like a swimming cap. His face a collage of pasty white skin, five o’clock shadow, and dark smudges around his sunken blue eyes.
“Lovely,” he said in a flat voice. “An award-winning couple.”
“You’ll feel better after you take a hot shower.”
“Can you skip your exercise class? I really need to talk to you.”
She dropped his hands and rubbed an invisible imperfection on her cheek that she must have noticed in the mirror. “We can talk when I get back. Should be around eight. We’re having dinner with Brent and Camilla at eight-thirty at a new restaurant in the Meatpacking District. I know you don’t want a big fuss over your birthday, but after that we’re meeting up with the rest of our friends at the Gansevoort bar.”
Her friends, she meant. “I’d rather we just stay home and order in a pizza or something.”
She cocked her head and frowned, as though he was speaking in a foreign language. “A pizza? For your birthday?”
“Or sushi. Whatever you want. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
She checked her watch. “I have to go.” She started across the room toward the dresser.
“I quit.”
She stopped and looked at him.
“I quit my job.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been miserable there with all the bureaucracy and bullshit.” He went over to the sliding glass door and watched the snow piling up on their balcony. The hibachi they’d bought and never used was almost completely buried. “This was never what I wanted to do with my life.”
“So you have something else lined up?”
He turned back toward her and shook his head.
She scowled and played with a strand of apricot hair. “I know some people at Pfizer and Merck. I’m sure they’d love to hire a brilliant guy like you. MD from Cornell, PhD in biophysics from MIT. Top of his class at both. Two years in new-product development.” She seemed to be warming to her subject, but she’d always had a knack as a recruiter.
“I’m leaving the corporate world.”
She glanced at her watch again. “I can live without the suspense. Where are you going? Some startup? Back to the academic world?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t gotten that far. Maybe I’ll take up painting again.”
She squeezed her eyes closed like she’d gotten a sudden headache pain, then opened them. “Painting? What, houses?”
He’d been stupid to hope she’d understand.
“Jesus, Julian. You’re working for one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world developing products that will change the health and well-being of the world.”
“I’m making a goddamn face cream. I think the world can do without one more of those.”
She opened a dresser drawer, pulled out a black silk scarf, then slammed the drawer. “I just don’t know where you get off quitting your job without even discussing it with me.”
“I’m sorry. I would have talked it over with you first, but it just happened. I was sitting in my office filling out yet another useless report and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ So I went in to give two weeks’ notice. They told me thanks very much, but company policy was for me to leave today. So I left.”
Sephora wrapped the scarf around her neck. He followed her to the living room where she grabbed her fur coat from the front closet.
“And what are you going to do about money?” she asked. “Or is your dream to be a starving artist?”
“I have a little saved.”
“But you have financial responsibilities, Julian. This apartment. Stuff. You know.”
“We’ll move someplace cheaper. Maybe Brooklyn. We can make this work.”
“Whoa, Brooklyn?” She held up her hand. “Since when did you become in charge of my life’s decisions? I happen to like this apartment.”
He felt a spurt of rage. “Then how about you going back to work to pay for it while I ‘find myself’ like you did this past year?”
Her nostrils flared as she held his stare. “So that’s how it is.” She pushed past him and opened the front door.
His reflex was to tell her he was sorry, but nothing came out.
She glanced down at his shoes and socks in front of the door. “Happy birthday, asshole,” she said, and then was gone.
He clenched his fists, quaking in the frigid air that blew in through the open balcony door. What had he been thinking? Sephora was interested in his earning potential, not in his happiness. He paced in his bare feet in his ridiculous apartment with its high ceilings, purported Hudson-River view, and ugly black furniture that Sephora had persuaded him to buy. How the hell had he gotten to this place in his life? In a hated career, an alien apartment, with a girlfriend he didn’t much like? Living an inauthentic life to please everyone except himself.
And then his fists relaxed. Sephora wasn’t the problem, and he knew it.
He picked up the black queen on the wooden chess board and turned it over in his fingers. One minute he’d been a happy kid playing chess with his dad, reading comic books, and sketching his favorite superheroes. Then Dad died and nothing felt right after that.
The chiseled face of the black queen stared up at him. For most of his life he had ignored the truth, but deep inside he knew exactly how he’d gotten to this place. Excelling in all the things he thought would please his mother. Trying to get her to finally notice him, maybe even love him.
Well, he was thirty years old. Time to grow up. But in order to go forward, he would first have to go back.
He set the black queen on its square and caught his reflection in the glass desktop. A little blurry, but he could almost recognize the person that hadn’t been there for a long, long time.
Himself.
CHAPTER 3
Annette was jetlagged, woozy from fatigue. It was midnight back in Paris, seven pm here in Manhattan, and she knew she should try to get back on a normal schedule. Probably eat something and stay awake at least until ten.
She had called her mother when she’d landed at JFK. With Grandma Betty gone, Annette worried that Mama, who had no close friends, would be terribly lonely. Before she’d left, Annette had asked her to come to New York with her, but Mama had looked at her as though she’d gone insane. “New York?” She made it sound like a curse. “I’ll never go back.”
Annette sank against the blue-chenille sofa that doubled as the bed in her studio apartment, and checked her phone. Bill had texted her two hours ago. Call when you get in. Dinner? But she’d been too busy researching Mariasha and Aaron Lowe on the internet, looking for possible connections to Isaac Goldstein.
Now, her eyes were practically crossing from staring at her computer screen and her stomach grumbled. She hit speed dial on her phone, hoping Bill hadn’t given up on having dinner with her. He was her go-to person when she had a problem, either personal or professional.
“Yo,” Bill said. “If it isn’t Annie-get-your-gun.”
Bill insisted that Annette resembled Annie Oakley. Probably the frantic blonde hair she occasionally wore in braids like the famous sharpshooter. Or maybe he was joking about Annette’s attitude about life.
“You still want dinner?” she asked.
“Absolutely. The Black Sheep?”
“Sure. See you there in fifteen minutes or so.”
She quickly straightened up the room, more out of compulsion than because she thought Bill might come back here later. She shoved her empty suitcase into the back of the closet and stowed away her grandmother’s clothes and tablecloth in a drawer of the armoire. Her grandmother’s photo album, brass candle holders, and coverless book of Jewish recipes and traditions now sat on top of the wood steamer trunk. She’d picked up the battered trunk at a flea market and used it as a table and to store the books she couldn’t fit on the two bookcases on either side of the bricked-in fireplace. She would have loved a working fireplace, but could appreciate that the building’s owner was concerned about a fire hazard.
Her apartment had originally been the front parlor of an 1890s brownstone in a neighborhood just north of Morningside Heights that was now on the verge of a comeback. Annette had moved in three years before, because the rent was cheap and it was pretty close to Columbia University. After she graduated last year with her master’s in journalism and started work as a freelance writer, she hadn’t wanted to move, loving the light from the large bay window, the original oak floors, and the proximity to laid-back restaurants, old bookstores, and vintage shops. Perhaps it also reminded her of Paris.
