by Woods, Karen
“I love you,” he protested.
“I know. But it will never work between us. There are too many things against it. I simply won’t marry you. Get used to it.”
“Mama,” Kiril said from just behind her, breaking into her memories.
“Son,” she replied.
“Can’t sleep either?”
“No.”
“Can I join you?”
“Of course.”
He sat down beside her at the table. He had a tropical drink in his hand.
“What is on your mind?” she asked.
“Svetlana,” he said.
“Why would you be thinking of your sister?”
“She would have been seventeen this December.”
“Yes,” Rita replied, her voice heavy. “I know.”
“I dream about her as a teenager. I see her learning to drive. I see her with a first crush on a totally unsuitable boy. I see her in college.”
Rita sighed and blinked back tears. “So many things she never lived to do.”
“All of our lives would have been different if she had lived.”
“All of our lives are always different for all the people in them. That’s one of the joys of living.”
“Was Babushka asleep?” Kiril asked.
“No, she was working on an article, I left the cabin to let her work in peace.”
“When I get to be her age, I hope I still have her energy and her sharpness of mind.”
“Take care of yourself and there is a good chance you will.”
He was silent for a long time. “Masha’s afraid that she is sterile,” he confessed, his voice low and pained.
Rita’s inner diagnostician came to the forefront. “Does she have menses?”
“Yes.”
“Are they regular?”
“Yes.”
“Any serious problems with them, such as excessive pain, unusual bleeding, anything that would lead to you think there was a physiological problem?”
“No. That all seems to be within normal levels. No excessive bleeding, no excessive pain. Her gynecologist says everything looks normal. And that she should just relax.”
“Then why would she be worried about sterility?”
“We’ve been married for a year, and she hasn’t conceived. And she wants children. We both do. We’re not using any form of contraception, and haven’t done so at any time during our marriage.”
“Do you keep the fasts fully?” Rita asked.
She could see the heat rise to her son’s face, even in the low light of the deck.
“Yes,” he said, his voice tight. “We do.”
“So, basically, you are not having coitus for over half the year. A woman’s ability to conceive is limited to a few short days each month. You have four prolonged fasting periods each year that you aren’t even trying for children, plus two days each week during most non-fasting periods. Then there is the fact you both have very busy, stressful, careers. Those two factors could easily be part, if not all, of the problem. You know this. Have you been tracking her ovulations?”
“We’ve begun doing that recently.”
“Good. It’s easier these days to keep track of such things. There are better and cheaper tests for hormone levels than there used to be. I really wouldn’t worry about it. If you don’t conceive in another year, after you track her ovulations then see someone about it and have the tests done. But before going to that expense, privately explain your desire for a child to your confessor and ask his blessing to lighten your fast for the purpose of having a child. I don’t imagine any priest would have a problem with that, given that most people don’t even begin to keep the fasts as rigorously as you do.”
“You and Papa always did,” Kiril reminded her.
“Your father and I never discussed our sex life with you boys,” Rita replied, feeling surprised.
“Papa, in ‘the facts of life’ talk, spoke of the requirements of sexual abstinence until we were married, and of abstinence during fasts after marriage. We were never stupid or unobservant. Papa lived as he taught, and that always impressed us that the faith could be fully lived.”
“We raised you and your brothers to work on your souls by observing the fasts fully with prayer, almsgiving, and self-denial.”
“That you did, Mama. Borya said that when he went to the monastery for his seminary studies that he was the only one in his class who didn’t have significant difficulty with the rigors of living a monastic lifestyle because he was used to it at home.”
“We have never lived a truly monastic existence.”
“Much more so than some other people.”
“And much less than others.”
“If the others were living on Mount Athos, maybe,” he countered with a laugh. “I miss talking to you like this, just the two of us. You always have seen things so clearly.”
“Not really,” Rita said on a sigh. “No, not really. I wish I did. It’s easier to see other people’s problems than ones’ own.”
“What is on your mind?”
“People.”
“What people?”
“Your grandmother, for one.”
“I worry about her. She’s all alone in Manhattan now, since all of us have moved away. It’s a good thing that you’ve asked her to move to the clinic with you. That is a good thing. We’ll all worry about her less if you are keeping an eye on her.”
“I wonder if it is the right move for her. I don’t want her to feel that I worry about her, even though I do. You know she’s never filed for her Social Security until now?”
Kiril chuckled. “She said that. I can hear her saying that getting Social Security is for old people. She should have plenty of credits to have a good benefit coming to her.”
“That’s what she said. She doesn’t want a salary. Says that it will be enough for her to draw room and board for working at the clinic.”
“If that’s what she wants, Mama, then you can’t force her to take more.”
“At least this way, I’ll be able to see her daily.”
“You don’t know how much her being with you relieves my mind.”
She sighed. “Which of us have you been worried about, Son?”
“Both.”
The silence between them stretched out for several minutes.
“Your father wanted to be a mission priest, going out and founding a church, and to work as a general surgeon to support that ministry.”
“Really? I never knew that.”
“I talked him out of it,” Rita admitted.
“Wise move. He would have absolutely hated being a general surgeon. It would have bored him to death. I can’t imagine him loving anything more than he loved being a trauma surgeon.”
Rita nodded. “That’s what I told him.”
Kiril took her hand and patted it. “Mama, you have nothing to feel guilty about. Papa never let anyone or anything get in his way doing anything he really wanted to do. If he let you talk him out of it, he really didn’t want it badly enough. Besides, if Vladika had wanted Papa to be a mission priest, he would have insisted upon it. Papa was happy to serve at the Cathedral.”
“Now, who sees things clearly?” Rita said, after a moment’s thought, and with a chuckle.
“We all have different blind spots. I wouldn’t tell you mine even if I knew what they were.”
“Probably not. And I wouldn’t want to know.”
“Were you and Papa happy in your marriage?”
“As happy as most couples are. More so than most.”
“Marriage is tough.”
She sighed. “It is. But it has rewards. Why don’t you go hold your wife and tell her that you love her? Masha could use that. Especially now.”
Kiril rose from the table and kissed his mother’s forehead. “Good night, Mama. See you at breakfast?”
“I’ll see you at seven for breakfast in the dining room. We’ll be in port tomorrow at Georgetown. We should be ready to leave the ship
by eight since we’re due to meet our excursion at eight thirty.”
After he walked away, she took her piccolo out of the case and assembled it. Looking out onto the ocean night, she played from memory, Mozart’s Flute Concerto Number One in G major.
Then she disassembled her instrument and swabbed it out before casing it. She took her cup and saucer to the dirty dish area and went to her cabin.
Her mother was reading through the article she’d written. Irina looked up from the screen of her notebook computer. “Are you well?”
“I’m fine,” Rita dismissed.
“No, ‘fine’ is one thing you are not. You’re uneasy, Daughter.”
Rita sighed. “Just tired and contemplative.”
“Contemplating what?”
“Old memories. Playing ‘what if I had done things differently’ games with myself.”
“Not productive. Your life has been a good one. It will continue to be good. There is no sense in delving into the past when we have enough to deal with in the present.”
Rita sighed. “That’s how you’ve always gotten through things, hasn’t it been? To not worry about the past, to just do the best you could in the moment and hope for a brighter tomorrow?”
“It’s worked for me, all my life. I’ve never found it useful to dwell on past happenings. Life is lived in the moment. Worrying over the past or speculating on the future only leads to unhappiness and disappointment.”
“I understand that. There are times, Mama, however, when I dearly wish that you had just let Township High give me the high school diploma after the testing. I could have been spared the whole trauma of the two years I had there.”
Irina saved the document and folded up her notebook computer. She placed it on the night table and looked at her daughter for the longest time. Then she said, “If I had one thing in my life I could take back, that would be among the top three of my choices for something to change.”
“What would the other two have been?” Rita asked.
Irina sighed heavily. She blinked back tears. “Does it matter? All three are painful to me.”
“Don’t cry, Mama! I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Irina wiped her eyes and sighed heavily. “I could have spared you the trauma of high school. But, in sparing you that, you would have been a vastly different person, now. Those years gave you something important, the ability to empathize, the ability to stand on your own feet no matter what came your way. In many ways, they helped to form you into the woman you are today.”
Rita sighed. “And what am I? I’m a lonely old woman who is so much of a workaholic that I had to be blackmailed into taking a vacation with my family.”
“You are a multitalented, beautiful, woman who cares deeply about people and who uses her mind and hands and soul to take care of the sick. You are a woman who inspires loyalty, who is loved, whose friends will put her needs way ahead of their own. You are a woman who won the love of a hard man and who by loving him transformed him into a gentle man. You are the mother of three wonderful men.”
“Dryusha was always a gentle man at heart. The hard exterior was a defense mechanism,” Rita countered.
“Perhaps it was. Perhaps not. I know that Natalia Denisova was worried her son would be so enmeshed in that hard shell of his that he would never let any woman touch his heart. But you got through his shell and helped him become the man he was meant to be.”
“He did the same for me,” Rita said. “Both he and I had developed hard shells in order to cope with the reality of our lives, to defend ourselves. Both of us helped the other one to break free of that, at least to the degree that we were able to do.”
“Which is how marriage should be. We should help our spouses work out their salvation.”
“I’m lonely, Mama.”
Irina nodded, “I understand that. I’ve been lonely for a long time. You become, mostly, accustomed to it.”
“I wonder if Svetlana had lived, how my life would have turned out,” Rita said.
“I wonder the same thing for myself. If your brothers had lived, how might our lives have been different?”
Rita looked at her mother for the longest time. “You never told me I had brothers,” she said, keeping her voice level, in spite of her shock.
“I do not dwell on past losses. You learn to live with the pain and go on. Sharing pain only hurts others. I never wanted you to have that pain. They were dead several years before you were born.”
“Where are they buried?”
“Cartagena. Sasha and I were living there when they died. I thought I’d go out to their graves while we were in port. Would you come with me?”
“Yes Mama. I will. What were their names?”
“Albert, Arseny, and Artur,” Irina replied. “They were triplets. They were almost a year old when they all came down with bacterial meningitis. We lost all three of them within hours of one another,” Irina said, her voice profoundly sad. Then she forced a smile but there were tears in her eyes. “Now, we simply vaccinate babies to prevent this tragedy.”
“That vaccine wasn’t common until the nineteen eighties.”
“I wish it had been. But that cannot be changed now.”
Rita sighed. “I’m going to brush my teeth, pray, and get ready to sleep. Are you about ready to rest?”
Irina yawned. “That sounds like a good idea. We have a big day tomorrow. I’m looking forward to being in the water with the stingrays.”
Chapter Fifteen
At dinner that next evening, the group were lively in their discussions.
“Did you ever think that you would be ever able to see stingrays that close, to touch them, to feed them?” Anya asked.
“It was amazing, Anya,” Irina replied, her smile being as big as Rita had ever seen.
And the conversation continued in the same vein for some time.
Over dessert, Irina, suddenly solemn, announced, “Tomorrow, we will be at sea all day. And we’ll put into port in Cartagena the following morning at seven. I intend to go into Cartagena to visit the cemetery where my three sons are buried. If you would come with me, I would greatly appreciate the company. We should be done at the cemetery by nine thirty and would be able to spend the rest of the morning in the city and return to the ship for lunch. It has been decades since the last time I was in that city.”
Alexei looked at his mother and then at his grandmother, “Mama had brothers?”
“Sasha and I had triplet sons who reposed, in infancy, several years before your mother was born. They died within hours of one another,” Irina replied, her voice heavy. “The loss was not anything I’d ever discussed with your mother, until last night. I haven’t been back to their graves since before we emigrated to the United States. I would like to see the graves one last time. I would like for your mother and you all to go there with me.”
“Of course, Babushka, we would be honored to go with you to their graves,” Masha replied. “We’ll stop and get flowers.”
Kiril offered, “And we’ll take our prayer books and sing a panikhida for them at their graves. And we’ll add them to our lists from now on for memorial Saturdays.”
“I would like that,” Irina replied, her voice small. “They’ve always been on my lists.”
“This was why you didn’t want to book an excursion in Cartagena,” Anya said.
“I wasn’t even certain I was going to get off the ship in Colombia, Anya dear. I wasn’t sure I could endure the sorrow of it all,” Irina said. “But then I decided that this is something that I should do, since I will be close by, as this will likely be the last time in my life when I will be in Cartagena. If I have all of you with me, the trip out to the cemetery may be bearable.”
“Of course, we will be with you,” Alexei said. “This is what family is for, to be there for one another, to support one another. I will hire a van service to pick us up and take us out to the cemetery and then to show us about town.”
“What’s everyone el
se going to do the rest of the evening?” Irina asked, pointedly changing the subject.
“I was going to take my best girl dancing,” Kiril said, taking Masha’s hand in his.
“Sounds like fun,” Rita replied. “Have a good time.”
“Would you like to go to one of the evening shows?” Irina asked.
“I’d rather just go sit on the deck, listen to some music from the band on deck tonight, and maybe watch the sun set from inside the hot tub,” Rita said. “Then maybe go see the comedy show later.”
“Don’t stay up too late.”
“Said the pot to the kettle,” Rita quipped with a laugh.
Irina laughed boldly. “True enough. I’ll be in the casino, playing poker this evening.”
Alexei chuckled. “How much have you lost, Babushka?”
“I’ve won just about enough to pay for everyone’s cruises and airfare, four times over,” Irina said.
Everyone at the table laughed.
“You’ve won how much?” Kiril asked, in clear disbelief.
“You heard me,” Irina answered.
“What will you do with all that money?”
“I might treat the whole family, including Bora, Sonya, and their children, to a cruise to mark my hundredth birthday, in another ten years,” Irina said. “Or I might do something totally frivolous with it.”
“If you’re still here and able to travel on your hundredth birthday, I’m sure we’d love to go with you, wherever and whenever you want to go,” Anya replied. “Maybe we could make that trip for your ninety-first birthday instead. Where would you like to go?”
“Maybe I will take you all to St Petersburg. I haven’t seen the city of my birth since before your grandfather and I left Russia.”
“You always said you’d never go back,” Rita reminded her mother.
“For decades after we left, returning would have been impossible. But things have changed. It might be a good thing to go back and see all the changes.”
“Mama, if you want to go, I’ll go with you,” Rita said.
“There’s a strong possibility that I could be posted to Russia in the next year or so,” Anya replied.