Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Lying in bed, the mattress hard in his boniest spots, a simple bedside lamp he switched on and off, the flash of a plain, nearly empty room, Dennis had thought of his son, not even two years old; he saw his wife, her belly round and high. A girl, Tatti assured them. No question. It was true, Benjamin had sat low on Sharon, with a dark line down the center of Sharon’s belly, which hadn’t appeared this time. He had been reckless, and now he wondered if he should say anything of what had transpired to his boss. Perhaps he should call Viktor into a private meeting and lay it out again that he’d merely been joking, simply having a laugh with them, which is the American way. Or maybe he should do nothing, he thought. Say nothing. To no one. Never speak of it again. And as he gratefully watched the gray light come in through the single, tilted window, this is what he decided to do.

  The next day, before leaving the country, Dennis waited for someone—Soviet or American—to confront him with tapes of the conversation. He thought to call Misha, to ask him his advice, but what, he rationalized, did an out-of-work musical prodigy know of Soviet intelligence? Yet he had been so assured when picking out this enamel box for Ben. Misha certainly knew more than him, Dennis realized. Back then, anyone would have known more than Dennis. What had stopped him from calling Misha was the knowledge the news would reach his mother and terrify her. He imagined her opening a letter, if Misha was stupid enough to write to her, and reading about Dennis’s fear, and Misha’s concern; the subsequent hysteria was something Dennis could not have borne.

  Perhaps there would be a letter in the lobby, Dennis feared, or the driver would turn around, his large arm hooked over the seat, to tell him he would not be getting to the airport that day. Or at the airport, maybe someone would come out from a crowd and take him by his elbow. But there was nothing. Nothing. And upon returning home, he searched through his personal mail with dread, the only thing of interest a flyer for Goldwater that Sharon had left to amuse him. At work the next morning, he expected a discreet brown package to be waiting for him on his chair, set there by unknowing Glinda. When nothing appeared, he waited for Gregory Handel, his boss, to ask to meet him outside the office, on a bench in Lafayette Park perhaps, where Jerome Mooney had just been taken in after a stroll through the park two months previously. Dennis would be handcuffed and just taken away right there amid the protesters holding signs for civil rights. It was rumored that an espionage project, Venona, had been decoding Soviet spy messages and that Jerome, who worked in the Africa Bureau at State, had been caught sending messages to some Russian ringleader, that JFK knew about the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba. How someone in the Africa Bureau got this info was no mystery: the government bled information. It seeped from one department to another; information was currency. Each day since March the protesters had stood in this park in front of the White House, and it would be among these committed people, these upstanding humans effecting change, that Leo would slip Dennis a manila envelope with photos and a cassette tape, proof of his utter lack of these benevolent qualities. Or mightn’t it be proof of the opposite? The Russians, after all, were people too. They did not deserve to starve for politics.

  Would Gregory ask him directly, Are you? Or would he just state it: You are. He would cut him off from the Soviets, perhaps; Dennis was already far too comfortable. Maybe they would send his mother back in return. He thought of Jerome—whose code name was rumored to have been Trusty—under house arrest, awaiting trial. The Warren Commission’s investigations had just been made public; had this been coincidence? Why had they only taken him then? Who was hiding what? It was always all about the way one looked at it.

  Now we question everything; this, Dennis had thought, was what the death of President Kennedy had done. It made us look at ourselves differently. As a nation. But an individual could make himself crazy looking at a thing from so many angles. A prism, after all, fractures the light to throw a rainbow on the wall.

  Dennis waited like a character in a Russian novel; none of these scenarios took place. The next time he saw Viktor, a month later in Washington, there was no mention of the incident. Dennis hoped, and soon he began to believe, that Viktor and all the others had been drunk as well, and that they too had forgotten the exchange. He trusted that it had been erased from Viktor’s recall, just as the night slowly receded into the deep folds of Dennis’s own memory. Now it sat in the same place as his childhood nightmares: a clarinet overflowing with spit, the Italians screaming at him on the corner of Essex Street, their faces as red as the Soviet flag, a shadow chasing him down the Bowery and into a flophouse lined with unshaven men on filthy mattresses. And also snippets of old recollections, his parents’ arguments, the neighbor beating his wife and daughters, the light shining bright from the Empire State. Adult memories were also stored in these folds: innumerable fights with Sharon, and several (often subsequent) vulnerable declarations of love, small moments of his children’s untellable grace, all moments from which he was protected. So much so, he could rarely find this place in his own mind. His heart safeguarded him for fear, and from fear, and it also shielded him from happiness—both, he found, could undo him—and he tried most often to sit by and just let his heart do its good, purposeful work.

  What emerged from that evening in Moscow became less a fear of what would transpire, and more a cautionary tale. Drinking with the Soviets. He laughed about it at embassy parties, wagging his finger. Know your vodka! he’d tell anyone headed East. And he could pass it on to his son. When, a decade and a half later, they’d dropped him at the impossibly small and criminally expensive Brandeis dorm room and unloaded his duffel bags, after Sharon had made Ben’s bed and wept over him, clutching his face in both hands to say good-bye, Dennis had pulled him aside. Have fun, Bennie, he told his son. Be yourself; always follow your heart. Be sure to have a good time, okay? Because this—all of it—will be gone in an instant. Like smoke through a keyhole. But whatever you do, stay away from the vodka! It is worse than a woman. Vodka is not your friend.

  Dennis had not realized that the evening in Moscow twelve years previously had left him so alarmed until he had looked into the rearview mirror and watched that CIA agent following him, so closely, all the way home.

  He’d save calling CIA Gary for later, but now Dennis wondered exactly whom the Soviets were buying their grain from. Briefly he had an image of the Russians gobbling up the planet’s food supply. He imagined a map of the world: here was Africa, drought-ridden in yellow and brown, dropping off the map as the rich, bold, red USSR and its satellites got fat, their red land bleeding into the blue of the sea. Anyone could have leaked news of the embargo days before it was announced, even if Dennis hadn’t heard a word. And anyone could be turning a profit right now.

  As Dennis moved satellite images across his desk, he imagined the little houses in this large patch of many greens, the spaces where people lived. Perhaps right here was the Eastern Bloc housing to which he had grown inured. It was not so different a tenet from what he had been forced to live by. No more than anyone else. Enough for everyone, but there was always more than enough for some. Perhaps this was why his father turned on communism; he was not one of those idiots who hung on to Stalin for too long. But Sigmund sure continued to use enough of the lingo. He refused to leave the East Side and their third-floor walk-up on Orchard Street. His father felt that suburbia was death. Dennis found it amusing now that, in one of her torrents of anger, Vanessa would unleash some similar sentiment: suburbia (which was not where they lived, goddamn it!) was the death of culture, the death of freedom. Nothing is happening here! his daughter roared as she stormed out the front door and into an idling car. Jesus Christ. When had his daughter begun to roar?

  Dennis would never shake his parents’ first visit to his new home in Chevy Chase. How long would he look to his father to measure where he stood? Even in his adulthood, he had been unable to stop gauging his father’s responses. Like any son, Dennis wanted his father’s approval, to know that his decisions matched the pur
e and perfect quality of his father’s beliefs. Only later would it occur to Dennis that Benjamin might look for his approval. Dennis had never felt the pull to sanction much of what his son did or said, and his son never seemed to need anything from him, so confident was he in the way his body navigated the world.

  In one of Sigmund’s articles he had urged his readers to “live your lives taking chances. Commit yourself in your hopes and your dreams.” Dennis remembered looking at the page, the difficult type smashed together—so much rage and hope and knowledge to get onto that single blank page!—and he’d gazed up to see his mother staring out the small window over the sink, the only source of natural light in the kitchen. Was she looking up at the sky, or down onto the street? Her face was turned, her cheek illuminated by the gray light that lit the dim blue kitchen, and he had wondered what his mother was thinking. He wondered it now too. He was just a boy then, perhaps eleven, and he’d turned back to that page. Commit. Hopes. Dreams. Each word was such a lofty and incomprehensible concept back then; these terms were still perplexing, though he had made every effort to live by them.

  Dennis had thought of that quotation often, as he greased the cork and put together his clarinet, as he moistened the reed and placed it in the mouthpiece, just as he began to play. He’d stumble through “Für Elise” over and over, in B flat, in the kitchen, and he could hear his sister giggling in the back room. He thought of these words at most of his life’s crossroads and they made him ashamed of the career decisions he had once held pride in. His refusal to work for some corporation, for instance. Because the private sector serves only the self. And yet his children would have benefited were he able to leave them something more substantial. But what? A nice house with a fenced-in yard and the Jacuzzi Sharon wanted so damn badly did not fulfill a dream. It did not make a legacy. But what, Dennis thought, does?

  Dennis had tired of listening to his father fight his friends: What is utopia? Is it dead? Are you still a radical? If you are not, who are you then, how will you change society? Screw the Zionists! they said. Screw the anarchists! Well, screw him! Everyone is doing the best they can.

  It was not, however, lost on Dennis that many of his father’s friends had headed to the safety of universities. His father complained bitterly all through the sixties that his friends were now protected in academia. Why was it safer to be on a campus than up in that shit apartment? Dennis had wanted to tell his father when he complained of an old friend who had become a professor at Berkeley. What Dennis had said, though, was, No one is safe in the universities. Don’t you get it? No one is safe anywhere! And that had been before those four students were gunned down at Kent State.

  His father felt betrayed by his old cronies from City College. Caleb Blonsky, who had grown up on the same block as Sigmund, who had gone to school only three years behind him, took out an ad in the Times, Democrats for Nixon. His mother told Dennis that Sigmund had wept when he opened the paper and had seen so many of his like-minded peers from school listed on the advertisement. It seemed to Dennis that Sigmund thought the whole goddamn world was that cafeteria they argued in, that life was one big radical buffet. He got a dose of reality later, when Nixon was elected, and Blonsky—Blonsky!—who had argued so righteously for the workers, for revolution, was photographed shaking hands with the new president, Nixon, at a fund-raiser dinner.

  “What?” Dennis had asked the first time he brought his father to his new home.

  “Well”—Sigmund looked out to the living room—“why shouldn’t we be comfortable? Why not? We all deserve it. But then, of course, you can’t have the other part now, the authentic part. It’s all diluted here.” He flicked his wrists dismissively. “Because now, you see, Dennis, it won’t be natural, everything will be a choice.”

  This was the kind of talk that drove Dennis bananas. What is not a choice? And who the fuck was his father talking to, an audience of thousands? Dennis was tired of the rhetoric. His father was losing ground. He’d lost half his friends to conservatism, yet still he couldn’t embrace the next generation’s agenda.

  “Now come on,” Dennis said. But the seed of doubt his father had planted had already begun to take root. Didn’t he think of his father watching him as he sat at his desk, waiting for his administrative instructions? Brief this one, brief that one. Toe the party line. So often he saw this through his father’s eyes. Where did he stand? It was confusing to him: working from within the government was both the most benevolently liberal thing he felt he could do, the most socialist really; had the last gasp of the sixties not been evidence of this? So why now did government work feel sometimes to Dennis like the most conservative anti-individual, anti-independent-thinking move he could have made? Where did he stand?

  “Okay,” Sigmund had said, still gazing out at the living room. He smiled at Benjamin, who had come downstairs and was now leaning over the banister. “As long as you all are happy here, what’s to discuss? Perhaps this is your utopia.”

  Utopia! Dennis wanted to pull out his hair. Happy. That fucking word again. Even if he heard mention of it in passing, Dennis couldn’t help but question his state of mind. No, he was not happy. No, this was not utopia. At certain times perhaps: walking into a meeting, about to broker a deal. Happy? Sure: watching his daughter when he caught her unawares in the den, her legs curled beneath her, a hand on her bare foot as she chewed a pencil while looking into a book. Happy? Yes, but these moments were always bittersweet: they came with the deal not going through due to pork futures, or looking closely enough to see his daughter inexorably changed, her hair an awful inky black, her face so white, almost chalky against her scalp, the turned cheek of an old woman. Inevitably she would see him watching her and turn hard.

  Dennis chastised himself that only at this moment did it occur to him that Sigmund had only been happy in his struggles, those seemingly unconquerable causes. He was only happy in the YPSL, the SWP, running the ISL, so many letters strung together it felt like Washington. It was a wonder Dennis hadn’t become a goddamn Republican.

  “Perhaps it is,” Dennis had told his father as he listened to the sounds of his wife preparing dinner in the kitchen. “There are, after all, worse things.”

  The office phone rang and Dennis watched the light blink.

  No Glinda on a Saturday. He picked up.

  “Hello, Dennis,” Sharon said.

  “Hi. I’m just heading to my morning briefing.”

  “I was just thinking,” Sharon said, a little too leisurely given Dennis’s schedule if you asked him. “I want to visit Ben for parents’ day this spring. I think it’s important that we all go.”

  Dennis shut his eyes. One. Two. Three. Four. “Sure. We should go. When is it?”

  “It’s two months away, not until the weekend of March twenty-first.”

  “Surely we can discuss this later, Sharon. I mean, c’mon.”

  “We can, yes, but I just needed to make sure you were willing. We’re going to have to bring Vanessa, you know. Unless I see some drastic changes by then. We can’t leave her alone. I don’t know what she’ll do to herself.”

  Five. Six. Seven. “I have to go, Sharon. We can discuss it tonight.”

  “But I have the Epstein event tonight.”

  “So tomorrow, then. Tomorrow night. The next morning. We have plenty of time,” he said. “We have our whole lives.”

  “Ha ha. I just felt like I needed to know now that you wanted to go. And you do, D, which is great, it’s really terrific, and I’m sure Vanessa won’t mind. I’m going to call Ben and tell him today. So put it on your calendar. In pen.”

  “Did he ask us to come?”

  “No,” Sharon said. “I read about it in the Brandeis newsletter.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want us there.” Dennis started to get up from his desk, craning his neck to hold on to the phone.

  “Why on earth wouldn’t he want us there?”

  Dennis was silent. He thought of how relieved he’d been that his mother, wi
th her box of Russian tea cakes tied up with twine, her ghastly Russian sweaters, her vast hand gestures and thick accent, had left the dorm room before Sissy Ford got there.

  “Well, we’re going. It’s decided. Good luck in the meeting, okay?”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Dennis hung up the phone and pictured the three of them driving up to Waltham for a visit with Benjamin. Perhaps it would be one of those important weekends that went so perfectly one could never imagine having experienced any trepidation. Briefly, this made him happy. Happy, he thought. But he doubted the weekend would turn out this way. He raised his head rather warily, as if he were the old man he saw his own father becoming. Thin, paper skin, legs as slight as a heron’s. His mother, by contrast, seemed ageless, and he was sure there were a hundred reasons, Freudian and otherwise, for this, but truly, her skin was still lovely and luminous, set against her deep red hair. Perhaps she dyed it, but Dennis thought not; this type of vanity wasn’t like his mother.

  He took his khaki jacket from where it hung at the back of the chair, swung it around, and put it on. North Korea or Washington, Japan or the daily reports, the search for trade alternatives. Dennis threw his head back, brushed his hair from his face, and headed out of the office to see what would await him over the bridge.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Cherries

  January 5, 1980

  In retrospect, Vanessa’s gobbling up all the canapés for the Epstein event was a terrible omen for the evening. But at the time it just seemed to Sharon to be a small disaster that Marlene was able to fend off with the salted almonds and frozen fish balls and mini-quiche-lorraines she’d vacuum-packed and stacked in the Food Matters deep freeze a few weeks previously for such an emergency.

  As for the rest of the meal, the women had it down to a science. Slow and measured in the kitchen, Marlene was a careful slicer, and she always left enough time to fluff the flour and then smooth the top of the cup with a straight edge for the exact amount. This made her a far superior baker to Sharon, whose temperament was precisely the opposite. Fast and frenetic, she was always racing to finish, so her juliennes were invariably slightly different widths, her chopped onions a complex range of sizes. Yet she could accomplish many tasks at once, and if need be, she could orchestrate the entire dinner on her own. In the time it took Marlene to unwrap the butcher paper, trim the fat, and salt the rack of lamb—they would be serving it Provençal tonight—Sharon had finished the filling for the stuffed mushrooms and had her new potatoes prepped for the oven.