My niece. And I don’t even know her name. I didn’t even know she existed. She would have been born in Moscow, I guess, after they defected.
As for the boy who holds her hand—the oldest of them, the tallest. This would be their firstborn, the son they conceived in the first mad dash of infatuation. I always knew he’d be the spit of his father, and I believe I’m right. You can see it in the outline of him, the way he stands, the hint of a strong brow, the probable blue eyes. Aunt Vivian told me they named him after Sasha, but you can’t address a young boy as Cornelius Alexander, so they call him Kip—or did. A mere tiny, secret bud in his mother’s womb when I last saw Iris—desperately in love, her whole heart stolen so that not a single piece of it remained to forgive me, her sister.
I lie in bed for a bit, staring at the ceiling, while the early summer dawn colors the air. Until I realize I’m not going to fall asleep, not now. I rise and pad down the gray hallway to the foyer, where my pocketbook lies on the hall table on which I tossed it a few hours ago.
I open up the pocketbook and rattle around in there until I discover what I’m looking for—not the postcard or the tissue-thin airmail envelope, but the small, rectangular ecru card with the raised black type that said simply c. sumner fox, and beneath it a telephone number from a Washington exchange. Underneath that, in precise letters, Fox had written Empire Hotel, room 808.
I carry the card to the telephone in the kitchen and lift the receiver. At twenty-six minutes past five o’clock, I dial up the Empire Hotel and ask the switchboard operator for room 808.
He answers on the second ring. “Fox,” he says, like a voice you hear on the radio.
“Mr. Fox, it’s Ruth Macallister. I’m so sorry to bother you at such a disagreeable hour.”
“Not at all. Is something the matter?”
“Not as such. It’s just that I’ve got a little confession to make.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he says.
Iris
May 1940
Rome, Italy
The first thing Harry did when he got his posting to Rome, he bought a three-year-old Ford Cabriolet convertible cheap from some young widow in Hemel Hempstead and had it shipped across the ocean. The car had belonged to her husband before he’d succumbed to sepsis acquired from a mosquito bite—just like President Coolidge’s poor son, except that was a blister—and Iris thought the deceased must have been an interesting fellow, because the car was bright red like a candy apple and had an engine Harry described as souped up. Iris wasn’t sure of the particulars, but souped up apparently meant loud and fast, such that you couldn’t fail to notice this machine, whether it was parked along the street or zipping past you on some highway. It was a swell car, all right.
Iris loved going for drives in Harry’s convertible. She loved the wind in her hair and the sensation of speed, and the snug, fateful feeling of hurtling down some stretch of highway in a vehicle beyond your control. She loved it more than ever now that Sasha was at the wheel, and she sat next to him, and somewhere ahead lay a crumbling house on a sunbaked hillside where she and Sasha would spend the weekend.
If she had to confess, Iris would’ve told you that she rather enjoyed carrying on a secret love affair right beneath Ruth’s sharp, perfect nose. (Iris’s nose was decidedly snub, although Sasha called it adorable.) The secret was part of the fun! They’d go out to dinner, for example, the four of them, and Iris and Sasha would carry on a little flirtation of the feet under the table; or else Sasha’s hand would slide underneath her dress, and Iris had to keep her face absolutely straight while he fondled her right there in the restaurant in front of everybody, while Harry told some story about the Swiss consul. Or they’d meet at some diplomatic party—those officials and their wives, all they ever did was meet and drink—and Sasha would flirt outrageously with some woman on one side of the room, to keep up appearances, while Iris did her best to flirt with someone on the other side, until by some prearranged signal they’d steal out separately to meet in the fragrant, darkened corner of a courtyard or a hallway and kiss the daylights out of each other, or worse. Or they’d bump into each other quite by accident in the Vatican museum, say, or the ruins of the ancient Roman agora, or even the Villa Borghese again, and experience all the riches of Western civilization, which they later discussed over coffee or lunch or the pillow of Sasha’s bed.
Best of all were the times when Sasha rang the telephone around eleven o’clock in the morning and asked whether the coast was clear, and Iris would say yea or nay, depending on the proximity of Ruth. If yea, then Sasha arrived in a taxi fifteen minutes later, and they spent the next hour or two in bed, or on the sofa, or really anywhere a person wearing a plaster cast on her leg can have sexual intercourse with another person without discomfort or outright injury. Iris learned to speak up boldly and ask for a pillow or a change of position or a load off, for God’s sake. Sasha always complied. He was terribly considerate, if also insatiable. After the first hasty bout, he liked to stalk naked around the apartment, mixing drinks for both of them, while Iris lay back and watched him happily. She told him he was like a cat, always prowling except when he was sleeping. He’d drink a couple of gin and tonics, maybe three if he was especially thirsty, while they talked about everything, the state of the world, capitalism, communism, Spain, East Hampton, Schuylers and van der Wahls and Digbys, where they would go on holiday.
In fact, that was how they devised this weekend—Sasha lifted his head from the pillow one afternoon and announced he wasn’t just going to hang around his apartment with Iris from Friday to Sunday, or run the risk of bumping into somebody should they venture outside. He had a friend who had a villa in Tivoli, he told her on the twenty-second of April—a friend willing to let Sasha spend the weekend there with whomever he pleased. Nobody at the embassy would know. He could borrow Harry’s car without raising any suspicions, because so far as her siblings would know, Iris had already gone off on her drawing holiday with some friends from the American Academy in Rome. Why, it was airtight! Not even Agatha Christie could have devised a better plan.
Even the weather conspired with them. Seven consecutive days of rain dampened Iris’s spirits in the last week of April, but when she walked out of the doctor’s office on the second of May a free woman, except for a cane, which was really rather stylish, the clouds parted and the sun poured down, and Iris spread out her arms and knew that everything would work out perfectly.
The next day, a Friday, she packed a small valise with sundresses and toothbrush and Pond’s cream and said good-bye to Ruth. Ruth stopped her at the door and asked if she was forgetting something?
“No, I don’t think so. What am I missing?”
Ruth made a cynical smile and nodded to the desk in the corner. “Your sketchbook and charcoals, maybe?”
The cynical smile worried Iris all the way over to Sasha’s apartment on Via Terrenzio, near the Vatican. She let herself in with the key he’d loaned her and fretted until he met her at the small trattoria around the corner for dinner at half past seven.
“You’re worried about a smile, darling?”
“You’d have to know Ruth. It’s this particular smile she wears when she knows something you don’t.”
“But she doesn’t know something you don’t.”
“Be serious.”
“Well, who cares, anyway? It’s about time she knows about us, if you ask me. Harry, too. We can’t go sneaking around forever.”
“Oh? Just when do you plan on telling them, then?”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “We’ll know when it’s time.”
Now it was Saturday, the fourth of May, and they were hurtling around some hairpin turn toward this ancient yellow-brown town nestled into the neck of the Sabine Hills. Behind them, the Roman countryside spread out in a quilt of new green fields. The sun beat down on Iris’s head. The draft streamed through her hair and filled her lungs. The land was so beautiful, her eyes ached with it. She wo
uld remember this drive forever. She’d remember the smell of exhaust and of asphalt, and the delicate green scent of spring.
The villa wasn’t much, after all. It sat a mile from the center of town, up on the hillside overlooking the falls, and the view was the best thing about it. The privy was outdoors. The kitchen sink had a pump handle. Needless to say, there wasn’t an icebox or a stovetop in sight. Iris wandered from room to room—hall, living room, snug bedroom, walls of pink stucco, dark, monastic furniture, old books, sunshine, dust—everywhere the smell of centuries—and declared she loved it.
“It’s rustic, all right. Like camping,” Sasha said.
“You’re the camping type, are you?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m the type, exactly, but my brother and I used to climb up around the Adirondacks in August, while Dad watched his horses run at Saratoga.”
Iris clasped her hands. “Your father has racehorses?”
“Why not? Profit in pursuit of trophies.”
“No. You’re not going to ruin horses for me. They’re noble and beautiful, I don’t care what you say.”
He stood in the middle of the pink stucco living room, blinking at the dust and at her. He opened his arms. “Come here.”
Iris launched herself at his chest. Her feet flew through the air in a loop or two before he settled her back to earth. “Horses should do useful things,” he said, “not race each other around some crummy dirt track for the amusement of the wealthy.”
“And the gamblers. Don’t forget all those poor people losing their wages at the pari-mutuel window.”
“You see what I mean?”
She shook her head against his shirt. Her arms still looped around his neck; his arms circled her waist. She felt the thud of his heart and the tingle of gin on his breath. (He’d packed a Thermos for the drive.) “They’re still noble and beautiful, and it’s noble and beautiful to want to run fast. They can’t help it. It’s who they are.”
He grunted—agreement or disagreement, who knew—and kissed her.
“Am I ever going to meet your father?” Iris asked.
“You only want to meet his horses. Admit it.”
“I want to meet everything that belongs to you.”
“My father doesn’t belong to me. He’d say it was the other way around. You’d be much better off meeting my mother. She’s a decent human being, even if she’s a prisoner of her class.”
“We’re all prisoners of something, aren’t we?”
“Is that so, Miss Macallister? And what are you a prisoner of?”
“Nothing!”
“That sister of yours, maybe?”
Iris was snug inside Sasha’s arms. He wore a shirt of crumpled white linen that smelled of cigarettes and perspiration, warm human smells, and his hair was straight and loose and flopped over his forehead. His eyes were the color of summer.
She said, “My father killed himself in 1929, after the crash. He’d lost all our money, and his clients’ money, and most of my grandparents’ money. We were broke after that, but pretending not to be broke. Mama didn’t take it well. She always liked to spend money. Closets full of clothes. She would take all these sleeping pills, things her doctor prescribed her. If it wasn’t for Aunt Vivian marrying Charles Schuyler, we couldn’t have gone to college. There was just no money, none at all. No father and no mother, really. So I guess I’m a prisoner of that.”
Sasha frowned at her.
To break the silence, Iris said, “That’s why Ruth and I—we’re so different, but we share this thing. We’re both prisoners of it. It holds us together, always. Does that make sense?”
Sasha swooped her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. The window faced south and the room was very hot, but Iris didn’t notice the heat until much later, when they lay sweating on top of the sheets and she couldn’t seem to get her breath back. She rolled off the mattress, opened the window, and returned to the bed to tuck herself back under his arm. He’d lit a languid cigarette in the meantime. She tugged at the fine gold hairs on his chest and asked what he was a prisoner of.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “You.”
Iris said she couldn’t possibly cook anything inside that primitive kitchen, so Sasha headed into town to fetch supplies. His skin was cold and damp after an improvised bath from a bucket of water pumped from the kitchen. They agreed to bathe in the stream at the corner of the garden from then on.
When the roar of Harry’s motor died away down the lane, Iris rose, washed off the sweat from her skin, and put her dress back on. Her hair tangled around her face, but when she looked inside her valise, she realized she’d forgotten her hairbrush, of all things. Sasha’s valise lay open on the floor next to the dresser. She looked inside and found a hairbrush under a folded shirt. Under the hairbrush was a thick manila envelope, of the type you found in offices, bound with a loop of twine that fastened around a clip.
Iris brushed her hair in the scrap of mirror above the dresser. Over the past few weeks her skin had acquired some pleasing color. Her short hair was thick and shiny, frizz in submission—curls in order that looked like disorder—little glimmers of Italian sunshine starting to streak through. Her large hazel eyes—by far her best feature, she’d always thought—sparkled back at her, rimmed with wet black lashes. She looked like a child, she knew, so heart-shaped and rose-skinned, and she also knew that her innocent face and delicate, curving figure—in contrast to Ruth’s—drove Sasha’s obsession for her. But her small mouth bowed downward. She brushed her curls a little too aggressively. Why should Sasha bring work with him this weekend? He’d had all week to clear his desk for their holiday together.
Don’t be childish, she told her childish reflection.
Then she set down the hairbrush and returned to Sasha’s valise. Carefully she disengaged the twine from its clip and opened the flap of the envelope.
They ate in the garden, on a small wrought-iron table and chairs, somewhat rusted. The garden was enclosed by a low wall of crumbling brick, and a gate at the back opened to the hills and the stream that rushed happily past. Sasha fiddled with the terra-cotta fountain, trying to make it work, but it was no use. He threw himself on the grass instead and stared up at the generous sky. Iris joined him.
“Tell me about your friend,” she said.
“What friend?”
“The friend who owns this place.”
He shrugged, inasmuch as you could shrug your shoulders while lying in grass with your hands behind your head. “A friend, that’s all.”
“A girlfriend?”
Sasha squinted one eye at her. “A friend who happens to be a woman, yes.”
“Was she your lover?”
“Why all the questions? Christ. Yes, we were lovers once. Are you satisfied?”
Iris rolled herself on top of his chest and set her chin on her linked fingers, just below the hollow of his neck. “Is she the same woman you met outside the Borghese, the day of the accident?”
“How—”
“I saw you from the window.”
Sasha untucked his hands from behind his head and slid them under her dress. “Ah.”
“Ah what?”
“Somebody’s jealous.”
“Of course I am. Aren’t you?”
“No. I don’t believe you can possess exclusive sexual rights to another human being. I believe we are all free agents, men and women.”
“Oh, is that so?”
“Don’t be grumpy.”
“Grumpy? Me?”
“You’re grumpy because you think I’m telling you I’m not going to be loyal. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about my parents. What I saw as a little kid, how what started out as a little jealousy turned into something monstrous. How it turned my father into a monster. And the more monstrous he became, the more she turned away, until whatever love they had for each other at the beginning was just a pile of spent ashes.”
“How awful.”
“But
loyalty, that’s different. That’s voluntary. That’s free will. I choose to sleep with you. Every time I kiss you, every time I go to bed with you, I do it because I want you, because you’re the woman I want to sleep with. That doesn’t take away your freedom.”
“Do you mean I can take another lover, if I want to?”
“If you like.”
“What if I don’t want to? What if I only want to sleep with you?”
He turned them both over on the grass and unbuttoned his trousers. “I see what you’re getting at. You want me to make some kind of proclamation.”
“I don’t care. Any man can say whatever he wants, I guess.”
“What if I proclaim, Iris Macallister, in front of God and this goddamn grass under your back, that I happen to be crazy for you? Is that enough?”
“Not nearly enough. You don’t even believe in God. Anyway, how do I know you’re not crazy about that other woman, too?”
“Well, I’m not. I’m in love with only one woman in the world.”
“You don’t say! Which one is that?”
Sasha reached down and yanked up her dress. The sun made a halo of his hair. Iris settled her hips and lifted her knees—sucked in her breath—ah God—what a wallop!—all right, fair play, a bit of revenge, a bit of primeval possession, whatever he said about that. She dug her fingernails into his furious buttocks—he yelled out—but didn’t miss a beat.
“I want you to say it, Iris. Who am I in love with?”
“Me!” she gasped.
“And who are you in love with—madly—badly—as you have never loved anyone in your life?”
She released her claws from his skin. “You!”
Sasha growled out some filthy, triumphant word and lifted himself on his palms to hammer her in earnest. Iris grabbed fistfuls of grass. She shut her eyes against the jealous fury of the sun in Sasha’s hair. She thought of random things, like flashes from another life—bacon frying, a fiery October maple, racehorses—oh, Sasha’s father, not random at all—it’s too much, too hard, too much, too deep, too much—sweat dropped on her face—too much—how does he do it, how does he keep going—she couldn’t stand another second—the world went tiny and gigantic, both at once—short, desperate strokes, almost there—almost—then smash—finally—and Iris hollered her rapture as loud as she wanted because only the sun and stones and Sasha could hear her—how divine.
Our Woman in Moscow Page 9