“Sounds like a slogan she probably heard,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Sidney said charitably. “But she believed it. Once, she came home all bruised up after some demonstration. She claimed she struck a policeman who’d grabbed her. Clocked him with her pocketbook. We were just happy she didn’t land herself in jail.”
“Speaking of the police, Uncle Sid,” I said, “I was wondering if she ever had any run-ins with the police in Russia. I mean the secret police. They would have kept tabs on American expats.”
“What makes you wonder about that?” Sidney asked, a groove of disapproval forming between his brows.
“Just curious. Did she ever mention anything to you about that?”
“You mean when they tossed her in that dungeon?”
“Or…before that.” I hesitated. “Did she ever say anything about getting harassed by the NKVD, or, I don’t know…” I wanted to say “recruited,” but couldn’t get my lips to form the word. “…intimidated,” I uttered at last.
Again Sidney’s mouth got that sewn-up look of displeasure. “No, no, no. Florie wasn’t scared of anything,” he said.
He seemed to have misunderstood my question, and I felt somehow that I had lost my chance. To go back to the sensitive matter seemed impossible.
“Whatever or whoever she got involved with, she went into it all the way,” Sid said. “Everybody in the family said it was that job at the Trade Mission that screwed her up. That it was all the Russians she got involved with. That she had some lover she followed there. In those days it wasn’t nothing, you know. Not like today, a woman jumping into bed with any man like it’s hopscotch. Everything done out in the open, like in a Macy’s window. They talked about free love and all of that in my day, too. But I’m talking about among respectable people. Proper young women. It was a shandeh un a charpeh. You know what that means?”
I nodded sagely.
“A shame and a disgrace. A Pah-zor!”
“Pozor,” I corrected.
The Yiddish Sidney and my mother had picked up growing up in Brooklyn was so mixed in with Russian, likely because of their grandparents’ Litvak roots, that Sid sometimes mistook one for the other.
“She always had to be ahead of the train, your mother. And you know what happens to people who are ahead of the train?” He steadied his eyes on me once more. “They get run over!”
Uncle Sidney was not one for being figurative.
“But you’re sure she wasn’t a communist herself?” I asked.
“Nah! Look—all those people she knew were a little screwy in that respect. They had Sacco and Vanzetti’s birthdays marked up on their calendars along with Christmas and New Year’s. But, no, she wasn’t a communist. Just restless. Wanted to do something grand with her life. She was always rubbing elbows with important people, politicians and so on. She met Senator Borah once—a big shot, head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. You know what he said about her?”
“What?”
“ ‘It’s gals like Florence Fein who make the world go round.’ What do you think of that?”
I tried to look impressed. I’d heard it before.
A grimace passed across Sidney’s face. “Eh,” he said, swiping a hand. “All those fools are in the ground now.”
She stepped off the train in Cleveland into a wall of 101-degree heat. The sun had seared the crops and cooked the gardens. The air smelled of cement and smashed tomatoes. The apartment Florence was promised turned out to be a boarder’s room off an elevated porch in a house belonging to a retired couple named Shulte. Nothing had been fixed before her arrival. Three days into her sojourn, the collar around her shower head came loose, falling in a cascade of rust mixed with a miserly stream of water. It was 8:00 A.M., and she was late for work.
In her damp housecoat, Florence marched around to the Shultes’ front door. Her loud knocking brought forth no response. Through the door she could hear the loud asthmatic voice of Father Coughlin on the radio barking about Jewish Bolshevism. Florence took a calming breath and knocked more insistently. After a moment, Alva Shulte opened the door and offered Florence her pinched, inhospitable smile.
“Is Mr. Shulte in? The shower’s broken, and there’s no pressure again.” Florence tried to peek into the darkened hall, but her landlady’s broad back blocked the view. “I have to be at work in twenty minutes.”
Alva Shulte made no motion to summon her husband. She continued studying Florence, and finally called back into the house without turning around, “Mr. Shulte, we got a water problem!”
“Getting my tools, Mrs. Shulte!” Florence heard from within the bleak interior. The two women stood waiting, Alva wearing an odd grin that suggested she half-expected Florence to pick her pocket. Old Shulte finally appeared in the light, holding his toolbox. “Don’t know if I can do much, with the whole neighborhood keeping its water on,” he spoke while Florence followed him up the back stairway to her quarters. “The fire siren’s been going all morning, and when that fire department comes with its hose, nobody can get any pressure at all.”
Alva, who’d followed them, now stood watching Florence in the little green-painted room while Dwayne Shulte went down the hall to fix the shower. “You a secretary up there at McKee?”
“Not exactly.” Florence peered down the hall. Let the old cat stew in her curiosity.
“Dwayne said you do some bookkeeping.”
Florence turned to her. “I’m a liaison, actually. For a group of foreign business clients.” She sounded idiotic to herself. Who was she showing off to?
“Lays-on,” said Alva. “Heavens, me. Sounds awfully important.”
Florence shrugged. “It just means I’m an intermediary. Like an arbiter.”
“I know the word, hon. Didn’t know they had such big titles for young girls nowadays, with so many of our boys out of work.”
Dwayne Shulte shuffled out of the bathroom, wiping a hand on his pants. “I tightened that neck, so it’s got more force, but I wouldn’t run that shower too long now.” He glanced at Florence’s face, then at her hair, and his eyes seemed to dim at the thought of the water required to wash it. He looked disappointed, for reasons entirely different from his wife’s, that the tenant they’d been sent wasn’t a man.
—
INSIDE THE SIXTH-FLOOR CONFERENCE ROOM of the McKee building, a Midwestern sun cut through the blinds and fell in penal bars on the oak conference table. In New York, the canyons of high-rises had offered Florence some protection against the summer heat, but here there was no such cover. A stalemate was in progress among the Russians and McKee’s engineers. The Soviets claimed that the blueprints McKee had drawn for their rolling mill in Magnitogorsk were unusable. Moscow was refusing to sign off on any construction requiring so much iron and concrete.
“Hold on, now, we worked all this out three months ago,” said Kyle Clement, a dimpled Minnesotan. “You said you wanted a mill like the one in Gary, and that’s what we’ve given you.”
“You promise us mill ‘modified for Magnitostroy,’ ” said a Russian named Fyodor Zimin.
“A modified floor plan, not a plan that called for wood and brick!”
“Bricks and wood is what we have in Magnitogorsk. If we had iron, we would not need iron mill, yes?”
On her steno pad Florence tried hastily to give some order to the crossfire. She’d been sent to make sure the two sides got along, but was failing remarkably at this task. The McKee men, distrustful of the Russians and concerned about litigation, insisted she record every word of their meeting.
“Here’s how it is: We aren’t going to risk this company’s reputation on a structure that’s goin’a collapse before the last stone is mortared,” said a lipless engineer named Knur Anderson. “You can just telegraph your boys in Moscow and tell them we aren’t changing one centimeter of these drawings. We’ve got our building codes to mind by.”
Across the table the Soviets were conferring in mumbles too rapid for her to unde
rstand. She’d arrived aiming to improve her Russian, but her role as translator had turned out to be largely redundant, since two of the delegates spoke passable English. Now those two—Zimin and a massive-boned, tan-faced engineer named Sergey Sokolov—returned the Americans’ challenge with bored smiles. A whirring ceiling fan chopped up the silence that threatened to settle like dust over the room. The silence lasted a good eleven seconds before Florence rushed in to fill it. “Gentlemen, I’m sure we can come to an agreement that satisfies everyone.”
Sergey Sokolov rolled his eyes, presumably at her use of the bourgeois term “gentlemen.” He adjusted himself in his chair as though it were the saddle of a motorcycle. “Your codes,” he said, aiming a cynical grin at the Americans, “include many steel reinforcements we do not need. These codes were written by your steel industry kapitans to skveeze money, nothing more.”
Knur Anderson removed the lead pencil from his pocket and knocked it several times against the unshakable structure of the tabletop. “We showed you those mock-ups three weeks ago, and you said nothing. Maybe if you’d come to work a little less hung over…”
“And if we were not being cuck-holdened to make profit for steelmakers…”
“Cuckolded—now, that’s a gas!” objected Clement.
“But, then, I suppose in Soviet Russia, where you all got full employment,” Anderson continued, “anyone can show up to work half soused.”
“Everyone, let’s just focus on the matter at hand,” Florence begged. Both sides of the table ignored her.
“You’re welcome to break the contract,” Clement suggested.
Again Sokolov looked amused. “Yes, but it would be you who are breaking it.”
—
AT McKEE SHE’D BEEN given a desk with her own telephone in the personnel department, beside an unaccountably ebullient personnel director named Claude. She was waiting for Claude to leave for the day so that she could telephone Scoop in New York.
“Hear the news, Florence? Brick-road explosion near Frankfurt a few hours ago,” Claude said cheerfully.
“Awful,” she said, not listening.
“From the heat, they say. Sent a poultry truck flying twelve feet. Chicken crates everywhere.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Not for the hens that got free. You can bet it’s Independence Day for them. Say, are you going to the Independence Day Fair in Buford?”
“Still got a lot of work here, Claude. I’ll do my best.”
“Well, you have a good Fourth, now, Florence.”
“You too, Claude.”
“You bet I will.”
Once she was sure Claude had left, she dialed her boss.
“Scoop, you have a minute?”
“For you, Florie, always! How’s life on the High Plains?”
On the street below, dust-covered sweating men were mending the road.
“I’m not getting anywhere with these people, Scoop. The Soviets want to modify the blueprints. They’re claiming McKee is foisting more beams on them than they need. And now both sides are threatening to revoke the contract!”
Fumes from melted tar and hot gravel mixed in a dizzying bouquet in her head. “Goddamn it.” She tried to slam the window shut and almost severed her fingers.
“Whoa, slow down, Florence. No one is going to be revoking any contracts. The Soviets are just driving a sharp bargain.”
“But McKee’s men are saying they weren’t paid to do the job twice.”
“Forget McKee. The Soviets’ contract is with Burlington Steel in Pennsylvania. McKee is just working on commission from Burlington.”
“I don’t understand….”
“Moscow doesn’t want to order six thousand tons of steel from Burlington if they can get most of it on the cheap somewhere closer, like Germany. They promised to buy from Burlington if McKee did their plans, and Burlington is probably paying McKee extra for every foot of beam they can stick into those drawings.”
“That wasn’t in the contract…and it hardly seems fair.”
“Fair is a place where pigs win ribbons, sweetheart. The real trouble is that the Soviets have run out of money.”
“How can they run out?”
“Their grain exports have been falling. Guess they’ve had a few years of bad crops.”
None of this was easing her anxiety. “So what do you want me to do, Scoop?”
“Well, look—I’m guessing McKee can make some cuts, but they don’t want to bite the hand that’s feeding ’em. Get them to compromise a little. McKee doesn’t want to lose the whole commission.”
She felt a knot in her throat at his suggestion that she use persuasion. It was never her strong suit. She could imagine no words she could say that would get the stiff-necked men of McKee to bend. “It’s just…sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”
“You’re seeing that our Soviet friends don’t get ornery. Keep them busy. Didn’t you plan to take them to some county fair this evening?”
“Fourth of July fair. Just some local boosters trying to keep up morale.”
“Sure. Beautiful. Why don’t you go home, make yourself pretty, and then go and show our friends a slice of real American heartland?”
She hung up and let her eyes fall shut. With the window closed, she could hear Claude’s radio playing quietly on his desk. He’d forgotten to switch it off. From where she sat by the window the radio seemed to be playing two stations at once, alternating between a gabble of news voices, advertisements, foxtrot music, and static. Florence let her eyes behold the sweaty lumbar exertions of the workmen outside. Before arriving here she had never thought much about “men” as a species. But now the sight of these well-muscled Polacks and Slovenians filled her head with the echo of her mother’s injunctions about a girl living on her own “developing a taste for that kind of life.” Of course, Zelda, not being Christian, would never have called it “a taste for sin,” but burning, sulfurous sin seemed very much to be the path her own mind was veering down. She was still picturing the smirking Sergey Sokolov sitting irreverently astride his backward chair. Her brain was like the radio stuck between stations—on one frequency was the serious chanting of hard news, but turn your head a little and all you heard was seedy, sweet jazz.
—
There was barely enough room for the four of them plus herself in the old Buick steered by a short man the others called “Kotik.” He was the leader of this ragtag delegation and wore a serious face, either from the strain of driving or from the importance of his position. Florence had to squeeze in the back, between the pickled Fyodor Zimin and the broad-shouldered Sokolov, who’d come wearing a large straw hat that Florence guessed belonged to “the missus” who rented them a bungalow in Tremont. On his head the hat looked just shy of absurd, like a silk shirt on Paul Bunyan. Catching her looking, Sergey narrowed his eyes into a sly smile of familiarity, mistaking her surprise for admiration. And because it was Sergey that she’d taken speculative notice of that afternoon, Florence felt herself flush with the effort of avoiding bumping his knee with her own and instead pressed closer to Fyodor, who smelled like the back side of a brewery.
They left the car outside the fairgrounds and picked their way through the maze of battered trucks and trailers leading to the entrance. Only a handful of towns from Cuyahoga County were participating in the events this drought-stricken year. Nevertheless, Florence saw housewives setting out their rhubarb pies and jams and the air resounded with the murderous screeches of boys practicing their hog hollering. A welcome coolness was starting to settle over the field, the cow-plop smell of livestock giving way to a spicy evening scent of clove. The deference and friendly attentions of the foreigners were giving her a pleasurable awareness of herself—her height, the crisp, fitted feel of her cotton dress, the wild hair she’d pinned up at her temples. She’d been afraid the Russians would find the fair hokey, but even the unsmiling Kotik was getting a good laugh out of watching the sawing contest and tractor pulls.
Only when she’d led them to the miniature rodeo at the far edge of the grounds did she realize there were only two men in her company instead of four. “Where are the others?!” she said in a panic.
“Don’t be afraid,” Sergey said behind her. “They are exploring.”
“We need to find them.”
“Why? They will find us,” said Fyodor.
Sergey removed his straw hat and wiped the sweat off his low brow. His face might have looked dull-witted were his dark eyes not so alert. It struck Florence as a face that could belong to a criminal or to a poet, and she couldn’t look at it openly for more than a few seconds without feeling self-conscious. Beside him, the towheaded Fyodor sat down on an overturned crate and withdrew some furry tobacco. Absently rolling his cigarette, he watched some teenaged cowhands in the field. “Cowboys—like in film!” he remarked. “This is real America.”
“Hardly,” Florence said, unable to stop herself. “More like a dog-and-pony show.”
“A dog and what…?”
“A circus,” she said.
“I do not like the American circus,” Sergey spoke. “They take us to Barnum & Bailey. There is no”—he rubbed his fingers, as if the friction might generate a word—“art.”
“I’m sure it isn’t as fine as your circus,” said Florence. “You do have a longer tradition.”
“I am not talking of acrobatics. Why you Americans want to see aborted fetuses?”
For the first time she let herself stare at him. “Pardon me?”
“Cripple girl with tiny head the size of apple dancing like she is at a birthday party.”
“Oh—you mean the pinheads in the sideshow!”
“This entertains people? Black man in cage scratching himself like a monkey? He is not come from Africa.”
“Good God, those exhibits are just awful. Is that what they showed you? Well, that’s Ohio for you.”
“You are not from Ohio.”
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