Calm down, Sid pleaded. Now look, I promised Mrs. W I’d call and tell her how the interview went. She’s been incredibly considerate and interested in our welfare.
I was silent. My breasts ached; I missed my baby.
I’ll come back again after lunch, Sid added more gently. You get some rest. I love you.
I love you too.
He kissed me on the forehead and left.
* * *
—
He did come back as promised—a good and loyal husband—and then a short while later departed again. There was an interview to give to a San Francisco society magazine, and another call to make to the Widow. Sid assured me that all the press he’d arranged around the birth of our son was an important part of his responsibility to the Fellowship, a way of attracting attention and funds to the cause. Yes, I’m afraid that my husband is a great and honest believer in the hopeful American dictum that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
And I must bite my tongue not to point out to him that in the world my father made there also was no such thing as bad publicity. There were only people who officially deserved what had befallen them. And others, like my aunts and uncles, who simply disappeared with no publicity at all.
12 July
Taliesin East
The Architect’s Welsh ancestors settled this green Wisconsin valley more than a century ago: these fields of wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, chicory framed by oaks and elms, these sandy walking paths, these cornfields, these distant meadows studded with unmoving cattle. All this, I tell myself, will be Yasha’s Motherland; the imprint on his inmost dreams, the idea of place he will never be able to turn away from.
He is asleep now in the bassinet that I rock with my right foot while writing these words. I hear him sucking the back of his tiny fist like a lucky chestnut. And the sound of a typewriter clacking from the studio adjacent to our two-room apartment (one room more than in Arizona, so I will not complain), and a male voice, vaguely familiar, calling out, Come and look at this, will you? The Widow informs me—or rather, she informs Sid, who informs me—that Yasha is the first child born inside the Fellowship in a dozen years. Thus: wildflowers, cattle, and rich people, yes; children, no. But fortunately my son, bless him, does not yet comprehend the corrosive milieu in which he spends his infancy. It is not his presence required every evening at dinner with the Widow, Vanna, and the others of the inner circle as they compete to charm some local financial baron out of his wallet, or to inspire Sid to mush his poor architect slaves toward one more dogsled victory in the name of Truth.
Poor Sid. Can’t he see that he is by now little more than a slave himself? The Widow’s favorite, no question, and her most devoted, but no more the general of his own army than my brother Vasily was of his drinking. And still Sid insists—it’s the greatest source of argument between us—that I present myself for the Widow’s mysterious judgment each evening. These people unified in believing that their exceptionalism rests at least in part on this being not a commercial endeavor, oh no, but an artistic one, a way of living beholden to the spirit, rather than to capitalism or, God forbid, something more base. And yet, at least in my presence, all they seem to think about or imagine morning till night is money! Not enough of it, how to get more of it, how to conjure it out of thin air. If they could, they would print it themselves. They would walk miles for it, dig their hands deep underground to mine it at its source. To keep Genius alive! However, such extremes of action aren’t necessary. No. For hallelujah, a meal ticket has been discovered.
In this morning’s post, a letter from Peter:
Dear Svetlana,
I hope this finds you and Yasha comfortably settled in Wisconsin. The fact that I haven’t heard a word from you since your arrival could tilt either way, I suppose, but for the moment I’m choosing to interpret it as a sign of calm and contentment. I hope you received the baby present from Martha and me.
I wanted to check in with you about a couple of important matters. Dick Thompson called the other day and we spoke for a long time concerning your inquiries about Josef and Katya. Lucas Wardlow and George Kennan have informally weighed in as well. We are all in agreement, and the conclusion will upset you. Dick is convinced that the Russian “journalist” periodically sending you encouragements “from” your son in Moscow is almost certainly working for the KGB and should under no account be engaged by you. Silence is the only recommended course of action. None of us of course is suggesting that Josef is aware of playing any role in this subterfuge. I know you’ll be worried about him and what your silence might mean for him under the circumstances. But I urge you to consider the position that you would be putting both yourself and your new baby in were you to initiate a return correspondence, to say nothing of making plans for a potential rendezvous. You must assume that whatever Josef’s true feelings, the messages he’s sending you represent state influence, and thus are inauthentic in a personal sense.
I’m sorry to sound so much like your lawyer, but I feel to do or to be anything less would be to let you down. So while I’m already wearing my lawyer’s crash helmet here, let me speak to you about a second subject of real concern. I’ve tried to keep some of this from you until now to spare your feelings, but perhaps that was a mistake.
As you know, I flatly rejected the Fellowship’s request to Wardlow Jenks that you sign a contract donating $30,000 per annum of your money in perpetuity to the Fellowship. I explained that this was impossible—your publishing earnings were held in a charitable trust, much of which was already tied up in building a hospital in India under the name of your late common-law husband, Brajesh Singh. What I never told you was that on the very afternoon of your wedding, the deed on the land adjoining Taliesin East that Sid some years ago bought for the Fellowship (using virtually his entire personal inheritance, I believe) was legally transferred to the Fellowship, so that it could never be inherited by you (or now, by Yasha), no matter what should happen. Which means that the only asset of any kind currently owned by your husband is the nearby farm you bought for him last year, improvements for which you have since paid to the tune of over half a million dollars, despite the fact that the property has yet to bring in a cent of income.
I’m worried for you and Yasha and your financial future. I can’t say it any more plainly than that. With your book out of print, and no more in the pipeline (at least none that you’ve told me about), you have no foreseeable means of replenishing your funds. And from what I can tell, you are spending (largely on Sid and his hobbies) at a rate clearly unsustainable for more than at most a year or so. If you keep going like this you’ll end up impoverished by a husband whose intentions may well be decent, but who earns no income yet is an inveterate spendthrift; and by a woman (you know the one) who still appears to believe the insane myth that the reason you went to Switzerland when you defected was to recover legions of gold stashed there by your father.
It’s late here, time for me to bring this monologue to a close. I feel quite helpless, you understand, that’s what’s driving me mad. The whole point of my becoming a lawyer was to somehow try to gain enough knowledge to be able to protect my clients from the systems and processes that threaten them. But in your case that seems the opposite of what I’ve managed to do, at least as things stand now. Of course, you must know, you are much more than a client to me. If you weren’t my client, I would still do everything in my power to protect you. And there, you might say, is another of the stories between us that I will probably never write.
Ever yours,
Peter
16 July
Out on our daily constitutional, he perambulating in his pram, Yasha and I make our way up from the pond that once, historically, was a brook. I have picked a bouquet of wildflowers in the near meadow and these I dangle playfully in his eye line.
What he needs, declares an unmistakable voice, is some real food.
I glance ahead on the path…and there is the Widow. All in black, black Great Dane trotting ahead of her. Leaning on the arm of her personal physician, who I’m quite sure is a charlatan. Behind her, one of the more recent architectural servants—a strapping fellow I have seen around the property framing windows—has parked the golf cart that follows her everywhere she goes on the grounds, in case the old lady might need a rest.
The Widow and I regard each other coldly. We live in a Kremlin of gossip of her own design. And she has made it clear what she thinks of the practice of breast-feeding.
She nudges her doctor and he trudges her forward until her rice-paper mask of a face is peering down into my baby’s eyes.
Has he lost weight?
I don’t answer, nor does she expect me to. My son’s weight is more than adequate, we both know.
He has his father’s features, she observes pointedly.
I hope so.
Her eyes lock on mine suspiciously, as if I’ve just tried to slip an insult past her. You’re never at meals anymore.
Yasha needs me. And I don’t wish to disturb you or the others.
For some reason—perhaps what she perceives as my maternal arrogance mixed with a false, antagonistic humility—it is this banal remark that tips her over the edge.
I don’t know why you’re so ungrateful, she snaps. We’ve given you everything. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given your history.
She’s attacking me, not my baby. But every word strikes me as if it were directed at him. And this I will never accept. I look her straight in her eyes.
All cults are the same. All dictators too.
Her face goes rigid, grotesque. What did you just call me?
I called you nothing. Come, Yasha.
I wait until she removes her claws from the edge of the pram, and then I wheel my baby around her and on toward our quarters.
21 July
Today something happened—perhaps only inside me—and now I am afraid to sleep.
Earlier I wanted an errand, as so often I am looking for little trips or jobs to occupy Yasha and myself while Sid spends his days in consultations with the other architects or away in client meetings. I will do almost anything to remain absent from the great house at mealtimes, or from the kitchen in between times, since the Widow likes to go there for her kitchen talks with the other women—who is sleeping with whom and having what sort of sex.
I am missing the one friend I had in this strange, suffocating place. Jane Arnold, the wife of Nathaniel Arnold, one of the architect fellows, hailed from Nebraska, with a poet’s gaze but a farmwife’s hands. She wore her hair as short as her husband’s, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and liked to square-dance rather than tango. Willa Cather was her favorite author, she confided to me one evening when I found her sitting outside on the stone steps, reading My Ántonia.
Jane was not a fan of the kitchen talks, I came to understand, but an outlier like myself. The Widow’s so-called marital advice to her female minions was meaningless to Jane, who had no worldly power except her certainty that she was no one’s minion. The Widow, of course, perceived this silent rebellion and was threatened by it; her radar for independent thinking was as sensitive in its way as my father’s ever was. And gradually, through the assigning of demeaning tasks and the spread of unflattering gossip, she began from her black heights to wage war against my friend’s humble position in the group.
By the time I returned from California with my baby, Jane and her husband were gone.
Yasha and I are on our own now. And so today, with him beside me in his basket, I drive our Dodge to Dodgeville for a car wash. Not that I’m complaining: My Dodge to Dodgeville for a car wash—if this is not the very best errand in America, I don’t know what is. Yasha enjoys sitting inside the car while the young men circulate their drying towels over the windows, their little squeaks and then the sudden windswept clearness. Later, at the chemist’s in Spring Green, I buy a tin of lavender pastilles for Pam, my favorite of Yasha’s teenage babysitters, and a tube of therapeutic hand cream for myself. The old man in the yellowing lab coat behind the counter, with his haunted eyes and time-spotted hands, reminds me of how Uncle Stanislav might have looked had he survived the Gulag.
The café in town has a nice tapioca pudding, I have discovered. I sit at a window table with a bowl of it, while Yasha studies a fat fly bouncing against the window glass, the few other patrons in their plaid clothing openly staring at us. I am a minor celebrity in this town less because of Josef Stalin or the Cold War, I suspect, than because of the trail of unpaid debts left by my husband and the Widow at merchants up and down Main Street. And perhaps they have heard the Widow’s rumors about Swiss gold and Communist vaults. In any case, I am careful to always leave a generous tip for the waitress.
There is only one route back from town, a two-lane highway that runs over the same narrow river in which Sid’s first wife and their son died in the car accident. This is not the first time I have driven over the truncated bridge. But never until today, for some reason, have I slowed my car and really looked at the killing water below, burned low by the summer heat.
Which perhaps is why, some minutes further on, observing from the highway the modest iron gate leading to Unity Chapel, where I happen to know the Architect himself lies buried, I find myself gripped by a powerful need to visit his place of eternal rest for the first time. As if tribute must be paid, or else.
And so I pull the Dodge to the side of the road, lift Yasha from his basket, and together we enter the grounds.
Midweek on a summer afternoon, we are the only visitors. The little graveyard lies to the side of the chapel that the Architect designed, with atypical humility, in a pastoral corner devoid of fanfare. The Architect’s people, I have heard it told, were a proud and accomplished lot: farmers, educators, a minister or two, firebrands and Truth seekers in the American vein. You must walk through their generations to reach the Master himself, whose personal gravestone—asymmetrical and upside-down, rough-hewn, unexpectedly stirring—announces its own distinction. I stand before it a little while, but Yasha begins to fuss until, jiggling him in my arms, I move us on to the next stone. Obviously older and placed flat in the ground, this grave marker seems to speak a private language from all the others:
MAMAH BORTHWICK, 1869–1914
And suddenly I realize who this must be. The forbidden subject that some of the Fellows—never Sid—have made it a point of recounting to me out of the Widow’s hearing and usually after a few drinks. Mamah Borthwick, the married woman from Oak Park, Illinois, scandalous love of the Architect’s life, for whom he built the first Taliesin. A mad cook murdered her and her two children and burned down the house. An unbelievable story but true, unlike so many stories all too believable but false. In his grief, the Architect eventually rebuilt Taliesin as a vessel for her spirit, so the Fellows say. The Widow hates the Borthwick woman and would kill her again with her own hands if she could, some believe. At the very least, she will make sure one day that the Architect’s bones are dug up and moved to lie beside her own sacred corpse in a better, truer place. Wherever that may be.
All this death is having an irritating effect on Yasha. Poor boy, he has to go everywhere I take him. He is hungry and tired. Okay, I tell him, we’re going. I turn and start walking us back toward the chapel and the road. But as we go, we happen to pass two unequally sized gravestones tucked off along the edge of the Jones family plot. I look down at the larger of the two and shock seizes me by the throat. A terrible shudder runs through my body.
It is my own name, SVETLANA EVANS, etched on the gravestone. There are birth and death dates too. But all I am able to take in is my name, along with the smaller, neighboring stone for my child.
Yasha does not understand his mother’s sudden terror. Why in this empty peaceful place she would cry out and run as if from death it
self. But run she does, carrying him in a jolting rush past God’s house and out through the iron gate and across the two-lane highway to the parked car, where in a single motion she flings open the door and tosses her baby inside like a leaking sack of garbage. What kind of mother is this? Her baby is already crying. Who wouldn’t be? But these early tears are nothing compared to the pain that assaults him the moment his bare legs come in contact with the sunbaked car seat—oh, then he shrieks bloody murder! Gives her a dose of her own medicine. And what does she do then? I’ll tell you what she does. She grabs her baby in her monster’s hands and screams into his face, in Russian, to shut up or by the love of God she will kill him.
8 August
I am afraid to drive Yasha anywhere. I do it when I must, and he has no choice but to come along for the ride, but the mental struggle disturbs us both. I’ve told no one about what happened at the Architect’s family graveyard. Weakness is not something to trumpet in this poisoned atmosphere. And Sid, between his work, the Widow, the regular group dinners, and the Saturday evening beauty contests for prospective patrons, is too busy to notice.
It was his first wife—the other Svetlana—and their son whose graves I saw. I know this now. But it makes no difference. With my own eyes, I saw us buried in the ground.
This is my fixation. Perhaps I am not healthy in my thinking. But to be a mother is to be both cause and instrument of another’s fate. To play God. Like my father, who did not believe in God but despised Him all the same.
What did I expect? I, who abandoned my first two children without even saying goodbye.
Did I honestly believe I would not be punished?
17 August
The light inside the Dodge is a trembling egg yolk, hardly strong enough to see by. Outside, midwestern night presses in. It was important to the Architect that the drab reality of a car park not impinge on the spatial perceptions of those living within his house. So I am well away from them now, the car’s front seat pushed back as far as it will go. Doors and windows closed, the only sound this pen on paper. My dear nurse, I think, who was never properly educated but cared so much what I might become, would have been proud to know that I keep notebook and pen in the glove box of my vehicle at all times, for just such contingencies as this.
The Red Daughter Page 12
