The waiter walks by our table and Sid calls out to him that we will have another bottle of wine, though the first bottle is still a quarter-full.
Sí, señor.
Sid is silent. His hand with his glittering gambler’s ring looks misplaced on the table now. I put my hand—with my new ring—on top of his.
You took the call, I say.
Yes.
Who was on the phone?
Service station owner. He’d been driving his tow truck over the little bridge that crosses the runoff from the river. He looked over and saw…the Jeep. Upside down in the water.
He falls silent.
Sid, if you’d rather not…
No. I need to. For God’s sake, it’s almost a quarter century ago!
A woman with beehive hair and a lizard handbag is staring at us from her table in the corner, where her fat cat date is boring her into early spinsterhood. With one look, I send her back to her own affairs.
Svet never liked that soft-top Jeep, Sid says. Didn’t trust it. Said it was fine for the Army but in peacetime everyone deserved a real roof over their heads. I wouldn’t listen.
He twists the ring on his finger. Now my hand feels as though it’s trapping his, pinning his life, so I pull it back.
We had a kitten, Sid says. Tiny little thing. Lloyd begged her to let it ride to town with them. Svet said absolutely not, then she gave in. Lloyd was four, you know, hard to refuse. He was always telling anyone who’d listen that he was teaching that kitten to play fetch.
Sid reaches for his glass. They were on their way back from buying groceries. Somehow the kitten must’ve got loose while Svet was driving and jumped onto the back of her neck—they found scratches on her. She must’ve lost control of the wheel. The Jeep slammed into the abutment and flipped over into four feet of water…
Sid reaches for his glass. When I got there…
He shakes his head and falls silent.
Sid…
You build a roof, he says. A real roof, I mean, not some fucking piece of worn cloth. The point of the roof is to protect the people inside from the elements. The people you love and have sworn to protect. You put a roof over their heads and maybe that’s all you can do. But you do it. You don’t not do it.
He reaches for his glass.
Lloyd was trapped under the Jeep in the water. You understand? He was drowned. Four years old.
He drinks.
And my wife…Svet’s neck was broken and she died. She was seven months pregnant.
He drinks again.
The night it happened, I didn’t sleep. Afraid of dreaming. Just spent hours wandering around the property. There was a single dim light on in the drafting room. I looked in and Mr. W was bent over one of the far tables, working on a design. Still had his wide-brimmed hat on. He didn’t look up, and I wasn’t going to disturb him.
Sid puts down his glass.
That was all that was left, he says.
He takes my hand.
That’s what family is to me.
* * *
—
He asks me to marry him on the path outside the guesthouse. The climbing bougainvillea makes a small amphitheater around us.
We have known each other less than two weeks.
29 March
Peter?
Svetlana? Everything okay? Are you still in Arizona?
Yes, still here. And very all right, thank you. But, Peter, remember what you said? How I should call if I need anything?
I remember.
Well, I need something now.
Okay…Tell me.
Exactly the problem. I can’t tell you why I need you.
You can’t tell me?
Peter, you will simply have to trust me.
I do trust you, Svetlana.
No, I mean trust in a new way. With extras. All I can tell you is that I need your presence here on Saturday.
You’re asking me to fly to Arizona this weekend, but you can’t tell me the reason?
Let us say I prefer not to.
Hm.
Thank you with my heart, Peter. I knew you wouldn’t let me down. I will meet you here at the compound late Saturday morning. Okay? I will be the one shouting happily at you in Russian.
I work in New York, Svetlana. People are always shouting at me in Russian and many other languages, though not necessarily happily. I’m going to have to break the news to Martha. She’s expecting to go to Block Island Friday and she’s going to want an explanation.
I’m sure you will think of something.
EDITOR’S NOTE
She was waiting for me by the entrance to the compound, wearing a pretty dress of seashell pink. Slimmer, tanned by the desert sun, brimming with a happiness that made her radiant.
Beside her, long arm disappearing behind her back, stood a tall broad-shouldered man with the sort of square-jawed American handsomeness found in John Ford westerns. Though perhaps my memory is overstating the case. He was maybe a dozen years older than she but physically fit, his face deeply lined by years in the desert sun. His clothes, cowboy boots included, were surprisingly, almost conspicuously fine and well tailored.
She came forward and kissed me affectionately on both cheeks. Close like this, she smelled of dry sunshine and something wonderfully fresh—cactus?—that was unknown to me.
“I still don’t know why I’m here,” I said.
She stepped back. “Peter,” she announced, “this is Sid.”
He approached in long strides, gave my hand a firm shake, and said he’d heard a great deal about me. Then he excused himself, adding with a smile to Svetlana that he had a few things to take care of, but promising that we would all be seeing each other soon.
Once we were alone, she put her hand on my elbow. “Did you bring the pink tie?”
“I did.” The pink tie had been the subject of its own telegram.
“Good. Now I will show you your guesthouse.”
I had done my homework and seen pictures of the famous property in architecture books. In person, I found that the desert rootedness of the buildings, while unquestionably impressive, resonated above all with the ego of the artist who’d set them there; one felt everywhere the oppressive aura of genius. Perhaps a similar feeling gnawed at Svetlana, for the Russian-accented tour-guidisms she chattered at me as we walked along flower-lined paths gave the impression that she was proud of the history of this historic compound but wary of its reality, as if it were an ancient temple built by a demanding god and she had discovered herself already something less than a true believer.
She led me into the guest quarters, where the first things I noticed were low ceilings, unwelcoming furniture, an elaborate bar cart, and a complete lack of telephones.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked.
“No, thanks. But if I wanted to make a call…?” Thinking about Dick Thompson, who before I’d left New York had asked me “as a personal favor” if I would check in with him and let him know how “our Russian friend” was getting along in the “high desert.” (Was this the high desert? I had no idea.)
“I’m marrying Sid in an hour,” Svetlana said.
Completely blindsided, I dropped my briefcase. “Sorry.” I picked up the case and set it on a table, which gave me a moment to compose myself. “Well, I guess congratulations are in order. What’s Sid’s last name? I don’t think you told me.”
“Evans. Sidney Evans.” She was looking at me closely. “Peter, will you give away my hand in marriage?”
“Of course.” The words out before I could stop myself. But then, I was her lawyer—what choice did I have? Nothing to do but paste an idiot smile on my face and keep blundering forward. “Just your hand? Or the rest of you too? You know, if you don’t mind, I think I will have that drink.”
Martini for one. There was no shaker so I knew it wouldn’t taste right, and she wasn’t going to share it with me anyway. She said it was important that she “stay like myself” during her wedding, which was so soon, so she would not drink, or at least not yet, later yes absolutely, maybe some vodka, though I should please go ahead, there was so much to celebrate.
And I did go ahead, there was so much to celebrate. And the drink tasted off.
“Peter,” she said as I emptied my glass, “Sid has known great sadness. I will tell you sometime how much. It makes me want to take care of him.”
“He’s a lucky man.”
“Peter, I have been in this country barely three years.”
“I know.”
“I will always be grateful how you came and fetched me in secret. More than grateful.”
“We took that flight together, it’s true, Mrs. Staehelin. I won’t ever forget it.”
I had to turn away from her for a moment; the word forget was what stuck in the throat.
When I turned back, she was looking at me. It’s called a brave face, I believe, that thing you wear when you’re all out of arrows. I just couldn’t tell, at that moment, which one of us was wearing it.
“You should probably get dressed,” I said finally. “Wouldn’t want to miss your own wedding.”
She nodded, kissed me on the cheeks, and left. I drank half of a second bad martini, showered, put on my blue suit, and knotted my pink tie. I was all ready by the time I heard the knock on my door. It was one of the young apprentice architects—a tuxedo-clad Bolivian—come to collect me for the ceremony.
* * *
—
The great living room was like no other room I’d ever been in. A low articulated ceiling and high-positioned windows, architectural furniture and luxurious fabrics, and a grand hearth like a personal high altar, beside which sat, in a pose of victorious contemplation, a striking, slender older woman with jet-black hair dressed in a long black tunic. Mrs. Wright and a massive black Great Dane lying at her feet stood up together when they saw me.
“You are here,” she announced, her voice carrying the length of the room without being loud, her very dark, heavily made-up eyes ferociously distinct at twenty paces. It was like running into an aging Mayan warrior at a cocktail party. “Come closer, Mr. Horvath. Let me meet you properly.”
Her hand when I took it felt all thin bones and heavy rings, but strong. Tendons stood out along her dancer’s neck. The skin of her face was as intricately wrinkled as a piece of papyrus I’d once seen in an Istanbul museum. Her beauty hung about her in severe remnants, yet emanating a strange, irresistible pull.
* * *
—
We were twenty-four in all. I was the bride’s sole representative and friend. The majority of the guests in the great room were virtual strangers to her, local royalty—which is to say, obviously wealthy—whose access to this celebrity event had been arranged by Mrs. Wright. It all made quite an impression.
The wedding service had been carefully orchestrated from the top down. The vows had everything you could hope for except a single note of Russian, or any evidence of Svetlana’s spirit.
She had asked me to give away her hand in marriage—something I had never done for anyone before, and which frankly I had always viewed as more of a romantic metaphor than a literal act. I didn’t know how ignorant I was.
She was next to me, in a sleeveless white dress, hand resting on my forearm. And then the time came and I took her hand, and guided her to her new husband’s side, and placed her hand in his.
And for a fleeting moment we were no longer at her wedding, or any wedding at all, but back on the tarmac at Kennedy Airport that day of her arrival. A part of history. And I was by her side. And she was facing—bravely, beautifully, honestly—the huge ravenous crowd of a new country, an enemy people no longer, every one of whom wanted something from her without knowing her, something they believed she was because of her name, something she was and wasn’t, something she would never be able to give.
Then it was over. And just beginning.
1971
24 May
San Francisco
It is late finally and the hospital, or at least my room in it, seems to have taken a pause in its hectic life-and-deathness. Three days old, Yasha sleeps on my chest. The milk from my forty-five-year-old breasts—may wonders never cease—has stupefied him and now he dreams only of more, his lips making sucking noises though the meal is over. Thin cap of reddish brown hair soft and milky sweet against the tip of my nose. When I lift my head, his helpless scent mixes with the dense perfume of the elaborate bouquets, which Sid was having sent to me daily while he was in Iran on architecture business (who, if anyone, has paid the florist, I am afraid to ask) and which earlier today, upon seeing his new son for the first time, he and the local television crew he brought with him saw fit to rearrange around the room for better viewing.
Not just flowers my love was sending, but accompanying notes written before his departure with instructions for distribution according to a strict calendar, as I made my heavy way toward childbirth in his absence. Different days, though the same message each time: I am missing you. Fifty separate cards, which I will save always. He had deposited me, thirty-four weeks pregnant and round as a Russian oven, in the elegant Mill Valley home of his sister and brother-in-law. For safekeeping, he said. A word which, like the cards themselves, I confess touched me to the core of my feelings for him.
He came to the hospital this morning straight from the airport, having flown all night and half a day. Bearing one final bouquet of flowers, larger than all the others and this time delivered in person, he entered my hospital room looking older and more worn—more his true age—and yet more exuberantly hopeful than I had ever seen him before.
He could not stop smiling. And this is Jacob, he said with quiet pride.
Yes, I said. This is our Yasha.
Sid placed a hand over his heart and for a long while said nothing more.
He is a large man, as I have said, almost a foot taller than I am. We made room for each other on the hospital bed, my leg draped over his, our shoulders touching, with our beautiful infant son sleeping across both our chests.
Thank you, he whispered to me with a grateful smile.
For what? I replied, smiling back at him through my happiness.
For being strong enough to do this without me.
It was a strange reply, perhaps, though I didn’t have more than a few seconds to reflect on it, because at that moment there came a knock on the door and a man carrying a television camera entered the room.
* * *
—
Mrs. Evans—is that the name she prefers?
The television producer’s query was directed at Sid rather than me, as if I was but a piece of baby-holding furniture in the center of the room.
You may call me Lana Evans, I answered the man sternly, for this was something I’d decided on my own while Sid was away, and long before I ever set eyes on this media character with the cartoon facial hair. I glanced at Sid and found him looking rather pleased by my pronouncement, if a bit concerned, at the moment, by the tone in which it was delivered.
Great, remarked the TV man. Sounds good. Okay, lights, camera—rolling. And what about your son, Mrs. Evans? His name’s Jacob, right?
Yasha had begun squirming in my arms. Could these people not see that their television spotlight, held by the producer’s gum-chewing assistant, was assaulting my baby’s face and making him unhappy?
Yes. After my oldest brother.
Your brother—Stalin’s son?
No! I mean yes—Yakov was my brother’s name, but this has nothing to do with anything.
Did you give your son any Russian middle names? Something from his grandfather?
My son’s name is Jacob
Evans! He has no other names. He is American citizen.
I was losing control of my temper, and Yasha producing gasps of irritation. I would have too, if I’d had the guts. Instead, as I became agitated, my English was shrinking. Sensing chaos, Sid signaled a nurse through the doorway—she entered and, without so much as a beg-your-pardon, whisked my son from my arms. And I let her do this, as the television producer with his caterpillar sideburns kept hounding me.
Mrs. Evans, do you really think your son can grow up in America without people connecting him to his grandfather Joseph Stalin?
After a moment’s hesitation, Sid stepped forward. Look, I’m very sorry but I think we’d better wrap this up. Mother and baby need some rest.
* * *
—
But the truth was that after the TV people had packed up and left, Sid appeared deflated, as if disappointed in me for miscalculating a fine opportunity and casting a shadow over the event.
However, I confess to being then in no mood for such considerations.
This was a terrible mistake, I complained. Now they will never leave him alone.
Please don’t talk like that.
It’s true—their only interest was the grandfather. No mention of you, the American father. No mention of citizenship. Is it only my blood? Was this immaculate birth? Does the boy speak Russian? No, and he never will. I would drown him first.
The Red Daughter Page 11
