The Other Traitor

by Sharon Potts

  She slipped on a red ski jacket and a pair of well-worn Ugg boots over her jeans, and locked the apartment door behind her. Snow was falling lightly so she pulled the hood over her head and walked through slush to the restaurant three blocks away. Discarded Christmas trees with tangled tinsel lay on their sides near the gutter, shedding brown pine needles. The air smelled of smoke and fir and garbage.

  She stepped inside the crowded entryway of The Black Sheep and stomped the snow from her boots. The restaurant was a former bar turned vegan restaurant with a full liquor license and still looked like a saloon with a tall bar and stools in front of a mirrored wall of booze. Along the opposite brick wall were oak booths with at least fifty years of initials and hearts scratched into the wood. Definitely not a white-tablecloth kind of place, which made it popular with students from Columbia and City College, residents and interns from St. Luke’s, and locals from Harlem and Morningside Heights.

  All the barstools were taken and the booths occupied. Then Annette saw a large dark-skinned hand waving to her from a booth in the back. Bill gave her a smile and pushed his tortoise-shell frames up on his nose. He was wearing his usual nerdy-professor outfit—navy crew-neck sweater over a white button-down, and probably loafers, which she couldn’t see under the table. His prematurely gray afro was cut close to his scalp, like a low-pile carpet.

  “Hey,” she said. She slid into the booth opposite Bill and shrugged out of her ski jacket. There was a pot of tea, a mug, and four used teabags leaking brownish liquid on a small plate. “How’d you score a booth?”

  “I’ve been here for two hours holding this table.”

  “Mon dieu! Seriously?”

  “I figured you’d have to eat sooner or later.”

  She waved at the teabags. “That’s all you’re drinking?”

  He pursed his lips, as though considering what to tell her. “I thought it best to take a break. I had a little episode early this week.”

  “C’est affreux,” she said, concerned for her friend. Bill’s dark moods had taken him to bad places in the past. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you. Are you okay?”

  “I’m great,” he said. “Stop being a mother hen.” He signaled to the waiter. “But you should have a drink. I understand their special tonight is a rum punch smoothie made with fennel and plums.”

  Bill seemed okay, so she relaxed. “Sounds like the chef had too much leftover plum pie from Christmas.”

  The waiter came over. Annette ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc, Bill asked for another pot of water and a couple more teabags, and they got a platter of tofu and black bean nachos and two brown rice avocado rolls.

  Bill put the four used teabags into his mug and poured what was left of the water over them. He had the same purposeful expression she remembered from the first class she’d taken with him in Twentieth-Century Political Journalism. At the time, Professor Bill Turner had looked like another student, but the last year had aged him and he now seemed more than his forty years.

  “Tell me about Paris,” Bill said.

  “You’re in an awfully big hurry to make this about me. Can we first talk about what happened to you this week?” She wanted to know what had set him off on a drinking binge. “Was it Kylie?”

  He took a sip of his tea and made a face. “Cold.” He put the mug down. A few tea leaves floated to the top. One of the teabags had broken open. “It’s not really her fault,” he said. “I blindsided her. Here she thought she was in a forever marriage and she learns that her husband has a sick alternative preference for men.”

  “Stop acting like you have a disease,” Annette said. “There’s nothing wrong or immoral about being gay.”

  The waiter set the wine, hot water and teabags on the table, then left.

  “But if I had understood it sooner,” Bill said, “I could have avoided the pain I’ve caused everyone.”

  “And you wouldn’t have your beautiful son.”

  Bill took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, took in a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “She doesn’t want me to see him,” he said. “She’s talking about moving away. She’s concerned I’m a bad influence.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Annette said.

  Bill waved his hand for her to keep her voice down.

  “You’re a wonderful influence, Bill. A brilliant man and an amazing human being. Billy is lucky to have you for a father.”

  He put his glasses back on and gave her a closed-mouthed smile. “Okay, Annie-get-your-gun. Pipe down. You don’t have to right all the wrongs of the world in one day. Let’s give Kylie a little time to adjust to the idea. The wound is still fresh.”

  “It’s not a wound and it’s been almost six months.”

  He smiled broadly this time, his strong, even teeth strikingly white against his dark skin. “I love you, Annette Revoir. I’m sorry I only gave you an A-minus.”

  Annette let go of her anger and laughed. It was an ongoing joke between them. The A-minus on a paper she’d written about Alger Hiss that Annette felt should have been an A.

  He pulled the old teabags out of his mug, put a fresh one in and poured water over it. This time it steamed. “Ah, better,” he said. “Now tell me about Paris and your mother.”

  Annette took a long sip from her glass of wine as the waiter put their food down on the table. Bill was the only person Annette had entrusted with her secret that Isaac Goldstein was her grandfather. Bill knew about her shock when she’d learned of her grandfather’s existence when she was sixteen. Her shame when she searched the internet and learned Isaac Goldstein was a hated man who had betrayed his country. And her anger at her mother for never trusting her with the truth. He had told Annette to read beyond the headlines, to be a journalist and dig deeper. But Annette hadn’t wanted to learn more. Every time she read her grandfather’s name and thought about her roots, she felt dirty.

  She stared at one of the hearts carved into the wood tabletop. TJ Loves LM. ’83.

  “I found a photo album that my grandmother had hidden away,” she said. “There were these incredible photos I’d never seen before. My grandparents’ wedding picture, pictures taken on their honeymoon, my mother as a little girl. The photos ended in 1950.”

  “The year your grandfather was arrested.” Bill was widely read, especially in twentieth-century politics, but Annette was always surprised when he would recite what seemed to her to be arcane details. “Your mother was how old? Seven or eight when your grandmother took her to live in Paris?”

  “Eight.”

  “That’s tough. She not only lost her father that year, but she must have sensed he was someone she should be ashamed of.” Bill stared into his mug, as though he was trying to read the floating bits of tea leaves.

  “It’s not the same thing as you and Billy,” she said. “Isaac Goldstein was viewed as one of the most hated men in America. A communist who passed on atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviets. An enemy to all that was good.”

  “Hate and fear come in many different flavors, my Annie.” He gave her a sad smile. “Tell me more about the album.”

  Bill was right. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t fix everything and everyone overnight.

  “In the wedding photo, Isaac Goldstein was dressed in his military best with medals and ribbons,” she said. “The photo…” she searched for the right words. “It made me question everything I’d once accepted as irrefutable. Isaac Goldstein was a decorated war hero—how could he have been a traitor to his country?”

  “An interesting dichotomy,” Bill said.

  “He was also so normal-looking. I’d say ordinary, but that’s not quite right, because even through the photos I could tell he must have been very charismatic. And handsome. Nothing like the photo of him that’s plastered all over the internet. Death to Goldstein! That man looked like something straight out of Orwell’s 1984.”

  Bill raised an eyebrow. “You don’t believe that’s a coincidence, do you?”

  Annette leaned against the ha
rd booth, taken aback. She’d read 1984 in high school, the year before she’d learned about her grandfather. There was a character in the novel, Emmanuel Goldstein, who was used as the focal point of hatred. His ugly, distorted face was broadcast on all telescreens each day so the masses could yell and scream and direct their fury and resentment toward him in what was known as ‘Two Minutes Hate.’

  “Merde,” Annette said. “Do you think the government created the ‘Death to Goldstein’ posters with that awful picture so people would identify him with Orwell’s monster?”

  “I’ve always thought so,” Bill said. “1984 was popular during the peak of the anti-communist frenzy. Everyone was reading it at the time your grandfather was executed. If Emmanuel Goldstein was ‘the number one enemy of the state,’ as he was called in the book, then wouldn’t people conflate his image with this other Goldstein?”

  “So you don’t believe my grandfather was a spy?”

  “I’m not saying that.” He swished his teabag back and forth in the mug. “He was a known member of the Communist Party. But I’ve told you before there’s a lot more to Isaac Goldstein’s execution than is taught in schools. Many theories and speculation. One supposition is the government was trying to create fear in the form of a communist threat in order to garner support for the Korean War.”

  A group of burly young men had pushed in from outside and were crowding the bar to watch the football game on the hanging TV. They shouted and cheered.

  Bill leaned closer to her across the table so as to be heard. “Even at the time, a contingent was against his execution. And now recently released KGB documents suggest Goldstein wasn’t as deeply involved as believed. A few political experts theorize he was executed as an example, because they couldn’t catch the real spy.”

  “So you believe there was someone else?” Annette asked.

  “Don’t know.” Bill pushed his glasses up. “Problem is no one’s ever identified anyone who might have done what Goldstein was accused of.”

  “A memoir just came out by a former KGB agent,” Annette said. “He claims someone else was involved but doesn’t name names. Still, there may be something useful in the book. I’ll get hold of it tomorrow.”

  “Good. I was wondering when you’d get off your ass and approach this like a journalist.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said. “This hits too close to home. Especially when I saw how it scarred my mother and grandmother.”

  “I know it’s not fair, but just because it’s personal doesn’t mean you should shy away from investigating. The key to being a good journalist is to be able to view any situation objectively.”

  “You can take the professor out of the classroom, but…”

  He waved her joke away with his hand. “I’m glad you’re finally able to talk about this without getting angry and defensive.”

  “I wasn’t defens…” She stopped herself. “Okay, maybe a little. Anyway, there was something in the album I’m following up on. Photos of my grandparents with a couple named Mariasha and Aaron Lowe.”

  Bill scrunched up his face and shook his head to indicate that he didn’t recognize the names.

  “They had a daughter named Essie Lowe who’d been my mother’s friend,” she said. “I started researching the Lowes looking for other connections between them and my grandfather. “

  Bill nodded, as though to encourage her, just like he used to do in class.

  “Aaron Lowe died thirty years ago, at the age of eighty,” she said. “I found an obit online. He was survived by his wife, Mariasha, daughter Esther, also known as Essie, and two grandchildren. He’d been an economics professor at NYU.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “You think that’s significant?”

  Bill took off his glasses and examined them. “If he was teaching at NYU in the 1930s, there’s a good chance he was a communist or at least a socialist. Most of the professors were left-wing back then. There wasn’t the stigma of being a communist that developed years later. I can research him for you. Did you find anything on Mariasha?”

  “Quite a bit, actually. She was a sculptress. Worked primarily in metal. Has several pieces on display at a few small museums.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “At least as of an hour ago,” Annette said.

  “She must be pretty old.”

  “Ninety-five. A bio mentioned that she’s still in the same apartment in the Lower East Side that she lived in with her husband. I looked it up. It’s on Ridge Street, one of the few buildings that haven’t been bulldozed.”

  “I take it you’re planning to pay her a visit.”

  “I am.”

  “Interesting,” Bill said. “You’ll be returning to the same neighborhood where your grandparents and mother once lived.”

  “That’s right.” The place her mother refused to revisit.

  Annette ran her fingertips over the carved initials, hearts, and dates in the wood tabletop. ‘63. ‘79. ‘48. Had any of these people been back? And if so, were they happy they had returned, or sorry they disturbed their memories of the past?

  CHAPTER 4

  The thought of going back to his childhood house in Forest Hills, Queens always caused a knot in his stomach. Even now, almost twenty years after his father’s death, Julian still felt the same hollow ache knowing Dad wouldn’t be there. Would never be there again. But as much as he didn’t want to return, he needed to see his mother and clear away the past.

  A blast of cold air sliced through the army-surplus jacket that he’d dug out of the back of his closet after Sephora had stomped out of their apartment. The old jacket was special to him, a souvenir from the brief period when he’d lived in Paris. Despite his hat, his ears felt like they might freeze and crack off, but at least it had stopped snowing. He turned up his collar and ducked his head down into his jacket like a turtle as he entered his old neighborhood. Streetlights brightened the snow that was neatly piled against the curbs and around the bases of thick oak trees.

  He turned the corner. He slowed his pace as his heart sped up. His childhood house was down the street. A rambling white Colonial with peeling paint, it stuck out from among the large, elegant brick and stucco Tudors as much as Julian had stuck out among the other kids. He’d been the fatherless geek, the kid who preferred homework to teamwork.

  Smoke circled up from the red brick chimney into a pewter sky. He blinked. No. There was no smoke. That had been a memory, or maybe an illusion. His mother never made a fire in the fireplace.

  He turned down his collar, pulled his head up out of his jacket, and opened the front door with the rarely used key he kept on his key ring. “Essie,” he called, stepping into the small foyer. There had been a time when he called her Mom, but that had been when Dad was alive and Julian had felt like he was part of a family.

  The house had its customary sterile smell and the entranceway was still covered with the paisley-patterned wallpaper from his childhood. There was a piece missing at the bottom that he’d torn off when he was a kid. He didn’t think his mom even noticed.

  He hung his jacket and hat on one of the wooden pegs that were almost too low for coats. His dad had screwed those pegs into the wall and probably set them at a height that Julian and his sister Rhonda could reach when they were kids.

  He heard the slam of a cupboard door in the kitchen and tentative footsteps crossing the planked dining-room floor.

  His mother stood in the arched foyer doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. She was tall, almost his height, and as erect as a model balancing a book on her head. She wore a white button-down blouse and black slacks, her wavy hair cut along her jawline like she’d always styled it, except there were now streaks of white mixed with the dark blonde.

  “Your call was certainly a surprise.” Her blue eyes were slightly unfocused, and Julian picked up a vague scent that could have been antiseptics. She must have just gotten back from the hospital. Dr. Essie Sandman. Not Esther. Odd that she used her childhood nickname pr
ofessionally, but maybe it appealed to her kid patients, who called her Dr. Essie.

  “A nice surprise, I hope,” he said.

  “So do I.”

  Essie was such a downer, always expecting the worst. But that could have been because she was an oncologist and many of her young patients died. Or maybe her negative disposition had led her to her chosen profession.

  “I figured you’d be out celebrating your big day with friends,” she said.

  She had remembered his birthday. He hadn’t expected that.

  “I’ll get you a beer. We can sit in the living room.” She headed toward the kitchen before he could remark on how odd it was that she had beer in the house.

  He stepped into the “dead room” as he thought of it, since it was anything but a living room. It hadn’t changed in his lifetime and was rarely used since Dad died. His eyes roamed over the leather Chesterfield sofa and two navy-and-green plaid club chairs. Built-in bookshelves faced the windows, which were flanked with heavy drapes that matched the chairs. In the corner of the room was the game table where Julian and his dad once played chess every evening, until they didn’t. That ended when Julian was ten.

  The heart attack had come while Dad was making dinner. Julian had heard a crash in the kitchen and ran in to find his father unconscious on the floor. Julian tried to shake his father awake, then called 911. Terrified, he left an urgent message for his mother, who’d been at the hospital working. If she’d been home, would that have changed anything? Probably, but unfortunately you couldn’t change the past.

  Julian crossed to the white brick fireplace that hadn’t had a fire going since his father’s death. At least he could change that. He jiggled the flue open. A basket of logs sat on the hearthstone. They were probably twenty years old, but wood was wood. Julian laid the fire like he remembered his father doing, broke off a piece of kindling and lit it with a match from the matchbox. The fire caught. He fanned it and watched the flames flick against the logs, just as they had when he was a kid. He stood up, pleased with himself, and took a step back from the fireplace.