“Sharon, this is wonderful!” Penelope said when she’d sat down.
“You’re a great cook!” Gerald said, inhaling his food. “You should come on the road with us and do the cooking.”
Sharon took a deep breath and felt a satisfying sense of accomplishment as she picked up her own plate of pasta. “That’s an idea. But I did have some help today.” She balanced her plate in one hand as she moved back to her seat. Indeed, she thought, twirling the spaghetti around her fork and piercing a zucchini, I have had the help of many.
* * *
Gerald was dead asleep, the dirty soles of his bare feet turned up in the aisles, Roy held his completed sailboat in the air and mimicked a ship sailing rough waters, and Vanessa and Schaeffer chatted away in the back as Benji, who had taken over the wheel, steered them back onto 95 for the rest of the journey to Baltimore. The monotonous East Coast highway gave him too much time to think. About last night, his sister unfastening, a loose shoelace he had not knelt to help tie. He remembered lying out back in the dark with her a few years back. Then she was a girl with freckles, and he was a kid who played soccer at the high school. But he had shed his skin when he’d come to college; it had felt right, and this now was another layer peeled back, only now was he discovering that this layer was the real layer. I am a person who believes in following my bliss. I will not judge anyone, and in return I hope that others will do the same.
As he drove south, through Delaware and into Maryland, a landscape mired in sameness, Benji imagined being out West, with Rachel, and the way you know where you are, because nature tells you so. He imagined Colorado, evergreens jutting out along the highway; he saw New Mexico’s sky hanging low before him; in Utah, he’d heard, the landscape changed by the moment. Soon—within the hour, he thought, checking the clock that was strapped to the dashboard like a ticking bomb—he would drop Vanessa and his mother off at the bus terminal in Baltimore, then he would pull into the parking lot of the show, and only then would he be himself. He could already hear the sound of the band warming up; it was light and flighty; fireflies blinked to the open tuning. He saw the good, great people dancing in the stadium, night coming in and blanketing them, everyone together. In this, Benji thought, picking up speed, I can disappear. There was so much to choose from, an unbroken chain of goodness and music, and in this, thought Benji, I will be exactly the person I am meant to be.
“Here we are!” Benji said. Several homeless people were sprawled out on the benches in front of the grimy depot windows, their faces turned toward the sun.
He stood. “I’ll walk you guys in. Make sure you get your tickets and everything.”
“Okay, honey,” Sharon said.
“You don’t have to do that. We’re big girls.” Vanessa watched Ben at the driver’s seat. She imagined him dancing, arms thrown akimbo, eyes shut, amid a mass of people.
Sharon turned around. “He wants to, Vanessa,” she said.
Vanessa shrugged and followed them, waving to Schaeffer once her mother and Benji had stepped off. He blew her a kiss just as she turned back to look at the ridiculous hippiemobile, which, as she took in a final view of it, actually had its charm. It wasn’t terribly original—it just needed an orange soda bottle plastered on it to be transformed into a commercial for Fanta—but it was sweet, and the drawings were good. There was nothing wrong with it, per se.
The bus to D.C. was leaving in a little over an hour. Sharon went to the depot entrance where Ben and Vanessa stood, clasping two tickets to Union Station.
“Do you want us to wait?” Benjamin looked at his watch.
“No, that’s okay,” Sharon said. “Bye, honey.” She placed her hands on his cheeks and brought her face close to his. “Have a great time, okay?”
The children didn’t know! They could still have fun tonight. How would she tell them what awaited them in tomorrow’s papers? I need a miracle; she thought of Rachel’s T-shirt, the rise of her breasts pressing against the truism. That French bat touching down, lightning on the clearest night, a château on a black hill; these were ghosts, and they were miracles. I will not look at this as how it should have turned out between us. How my marriage should have turned out. I have made the best choices available to me. I have tried to live my life authentically, she thought, and she pictured her mother emerging onstage out of a puff of smoke in a long blue satin dress.
“Bye, Mom,” Ben said, his eyes cast downward as she looked so intently into his eyes. He hugged her.
When she let him go, he turned to hug Vanessa. “Bye, Van.”
“Fucking hippie,” she said into his ear. She loved the smell of him. It was her smell and not her smell at all.
“Yeah, yeah. I can tell how much you hate us.” He slapped her cheek lightly. “You can keep the sweats,” he said as he turned back to the bus.
He slid into the driver’s seat, waved, and pulled the bus doors shut. “Onward!” he shouted, pulling onto the street, toward the highway from where they’d come.
Vanessa and Sharon stood silently, arms at their sides, as they watched the bus drive away.
CHAPTER 21
Spring
Tatiana sat between two officers, her hands placed one over the other on the metal desk. No lawyer was with her. This was what Gary had promised: You may see her before we take her to the Department of Justice, he’d said, and even then Dennis had pictured them driving her over the bridge and just leaving her there. And then what? You may see her before we take her, and your father may see her. There will, Gary had said, be officers present.
One such officer took Dennis’s arm, the other his father’s, and they both lowered themselves gingerly into their seats across from her.
“Where have you been?” Sigmund leaned forward. He wore a navy suit and a green-and-blue-striped tie, and despite the puffiness beneath his eyes and the hanging flesh at his cheeks and neck, he looked like the man Dennis remembered disappearing into a crowd. “Tatiana,” he said, “it’s been days. I’ve been looking for you. All over the neighborhood.” Sigmund leaned back. “No one has seen you.”
Dennis was suddenly furious. How long had his mother been taking from him? Since the day he’d walked into his office to find her slipping a camera into the pocket of that hideous coat? He knew that’s what his mother had done. He knew that now. Had he known it then?
She had to have been aware of how damaging this could be for him. Do you know a Herndon Skye? Gary had said. Don’t tell me, he’d said, just as Dennis was about to say he had no idea who this person was. This was the name in a batch of cookies. That’s what Gary had told him on the phone, and that’s when Dennis had remembered that asshole in his blue polyester suit eating a tuna fish sandwich over the Landsat images. Your mother named the wrong guy this time, that’s for sure, Gary had said, and Dennis pictured Herndon Skye, the Republican holdover, hardly amenable, wiping watery mayonnaise off the glossy surface, dulling the sheen in the napkin’s wake.
Those meringues, his mother’s hands gathered together at the tips, dropping cherries into the egg whites, mounds of egg whites, like the view of mountains from a plane. He and his sister had pushed them into white peaks in the bowl. The cookies held all the information, Gary had told him. Dennis remembered looking over at Sharon in the dark of that hotel room, willing Gary to stop speaking. It was the last time she could know nothing. He had not known the moment before the call would be his last to know nothing, and so he watched his wife blinking in her final seconds of ignorance. Those cookies. His mother brought them out on plates, browned at the edges, like burned paper, stacked high on the plate. Invisible ink, Gary said, you gotta hand it to her. Inside each one, a note. I see, Dennis had said. Sharon’s head was silhouetted in the dark, her hair swept over one shoulder, and he could sense her moment of innocence ending as fear began to etch its way into her brow. It hovered around her like a magnetic field, but it did not reach out to touch him.
Only after Dennis had hung up the phone and laid this all on Sharon h
ad he remembered why he’d left the office that day with the kids. It was to go to the supply closet for a new typewriter ribbon. They were goofing around on the typewriter, the way he used to at his mother’s office. And Ben wanted Wite-Out to take home, but Dennis wouldn’t let him take it. Because that’s stealing from the government, he’d said. And we don’t steal, he’d told his son.
Stupid, insignificant Herndon Skye. Isn’t it always this way? He’d heard Jerome Mooney had gotten caught merely on the most microscopic trail of apple juice on the documents returned. Mooney had a place in New York State—he was always bringing bushels of Golden Delicious into the office for the secretaries. Soon as they detected the juice traces they printed him. Dennis imagined his mother photographing the names from the contact list Glinda had typed and clipped to the Landsat folder. It is always the smallest things that do us in; Dennis thought of those green guitar picks falling out of the folded envelope in Sharon’s drawer. Had the folder been on his desk? Or had his mother been sent by Misha to search for it?
He had been so stupid about Misha! How would a Jew stay so decidedly safe in the Soviet Union? That was all his mother had said. Had he simply accepted it because his mother had told him so? He had doubted every single thing his father had told him. But his mother he had never questioned. Gary had said the cookies were going to a Misha Baskov. Do you know him? No, he didn’t know him! He had no idea who this man was! But his mother had, it seemed. How long? How did it work exactly, this invisible line of communication, a game of telephone even through the Iron Curtain? Dennis might never know.
How could his mother have let him believe this man was his uncle? She was so resistant to giving him Misha’s address! Yet he had pressed and pressed and she had relented; he had gone shopping for his kid with him, a KGB agent, for Christ sake. Pick this one, he’d said, at the store just above the grand GUM fountain where they’d cut in front of the enormous queue. He’d pointed to a box with a troika scene, not the golden rooster Dennis had chosen. He thought of following behind Misha now, through those streets, the Kremlin’s towers rising ahead. The Bolsheviks, Dennis had said, and Misha had bent his head. It had looked as if he was laughing. Dennis had been thinking of his father when he’d asked, How many Bolsheviks are buried there? Had Misha been laughing? At him? When Dennis hung up the phone at the Ritz, he remembered that night he’d sensed trouble in Moscow—turned out this Misha would have known exactly what he should have done after his slip at dinner. And Boris? Dear, fat, drooling Boris who lifted him in his arms and skated with him across the rink at Rockefeller Center? Boris was not himself either. None of them were, so what did that make them?
And his mother? She was not the weak woman she had always seemed, hiding her glossy magazines beneath the mattress when Sigmund came home; tentatively ringing doorbells to smile so fucking sweetly for the New Deal, for crippled, privileged, adulterous, pioneering Roosevelt. Or perhaps this was the heart of weakness; perhaps inside that door, she was breaking. Perhaps she was breaking now.
Dennis turned to watch the driver go, knowing he’d be waiting outside when he emerged, for his own questioning, then the briefing. Because of course there would be a briefing—beyond this he couldn’t fathom. It was out of his realm of experience, now that it was clear that some of the information had been from Agriculture. He had not been able to talk to his father to tell him, No matter what, you didn’t know. Tell them—and please, God, tell me—you knew nothing. We know nothing. Say it over and over and over so you do not fuck it up. Now is not the time to stand up for anything. Now is nothing. Now is the time to protect your family with nothing.
Dennis looked back to the table. Sometimes his mother used to cry as she separated the eggs. Dennis had thought then, What will she do with all those insides? His sister would torment him by saying each yolk was a dead chicken. His mother filled bowls of them; he remembered her weeping over the mixing bowl, and he had thought, not wrongly perhaps, that she was missing her home.
Again Dennis willed his father’s silence. Please, God, and then, as if it had been in every memory he’d held, he thought of praying, the hard pews, someone knowledgeable and good and righteous interpreting the past for him so that the present would have meaning. He wished then that he had given Benjamin the chance to decide for himself if those stories held true. He remembered watching his son singing at the Torah, his voice breaking with adolescence, and he tried to offer this gesture up to God now, not all the petty things Dennis had done that had belittled Him, those acts had been performed less against God than those who always seemed to rally around Him. It was God’s organizers whom Dennis had protested with the midday Yom Kippur break fasts and the Hebrew-school car-pool boycotts. Please, God, Dennis thought now, my goodness, please, make sure he says nothing. My father has talked his whole life; today please silence him.
“Well, now you see where I’ve been.” Tatti looked down and rubbed the top of her hand with her thumb.
“Mom, it’s highly unusual that they are letting us see you now.” Dennis looked from side to side, to make sure his mother acknowledged the presence of the officers. They were in blue suits like his father’s and they were waiting. In a matter of moments they would take her. “They have let us see you before they decide what will happen. But I’m not going to ask you”—again Dennis looked at the officers—“if any of what they say is true.” He was treating his mother as he always had, as an immigrant who needed help deciphering street signs, who needed assistance reading the back of a can of soup, with ordering the prune hamantaschen from the Jewish bakery. All the other women on the block made their own. But his mother bought her hamantaschen at Purim when huge stacks were piled high in the window of Moishe’s Kosher Bake Shop all the way on Second Avenue. He had always thought she was so lost in this world. Had she been acting? Or had she been that woman also? He pictured a Russian doll—like the one he’d picked out with Misha for Vanessa—so many pieces inside to make it whole.
Tatti shrugged. The corners of her mouth turned down to tell him, What do I care now? It was Ethel Rosenberg’s face, only it was so much older. This was what happened to a face that had not been caught in time. It was Stalin’s face. It was his mother’s face, the face she wore when he and his sister banded together to inform her, no, they were not staying inside to study as they had told their father, they were going out instead to the pool, to Pitt Street, where even now he could see those girls in their white swimming suits, preening and reading their movie magazines. Dennis and his sister would walk down Orchard Street with their stiff white towels and their bottles of Coca-Cola, and the promise of that day was as lost to him now as anything he could name.
“Okay, Mom,” Dennis said in Russian. “You okay?”
“I don’t understand where you’ve been,” Sigmund said, and Dennis could not tell if he was serious. “You went out for eggs and you never came home. The house, it’s a disaster. And I don’t know how to make the rice! I put in what I thought was the right amount, and I have enough now for an army. It’s all gone bad. I’ve spoiled the rice. Such a waste.”
Tatti nodded. The face, his mother’s face, said, I have been beaten, but this? This is nothing. You would never have known Ethel Rosenberg had children had they not been dragged in and out of Sing Sing to visit her. They carried signs that said Don’t Kill My Mommy and Daddy. Had the older one not written a letter to Eisenhower that Dennis had read in the New York Herald Tribune, you would not have known she was a mother from her face.
Dennis put his hand over his mouth, but he said nothing. He pictured his father sweating over a stove; he imagined him walling himself in that apartment with his papers and his books and his ill will. How would he dig his way out? Or maybe it was better inside there, inside those books, Dennis thought, inside the closed tenement of his childhood where he’d played the clarinet; he could still feel the reed against the tip of his tongue as he wet it before playing. Live your life taking chances. Commit yourself in your hopes and your dreams! De
nnis had buckled beneath the weight of that demand, and now he had no idea what would become of him. Everyone will soon know. The president will know. There was Carter at his desk: an unbreakable chain, he’d said when he’d announced the embargo in that ridiculous Southern accent, and Dennis had laughed at him. Who knew what would happen? The farmers were ruined. The Soviets were not suffering. But his mother, apparently, was a spy.
Tatiana looked at her husband and smiled. “Sigmund,” she said so certainly, so surely. This woman who had been scared to go out into the street alone. She had looked up at the Empire State Building holding her hat like a refugee, every time. And that office was a front! Boris didn’t go to Hollywood; Boris fled. But today her voice was serene and low, and Dennis remembered her telling him stories before bed: And then her feet began to melt beneath her. She’d bent over him, a hard shell surrounding his soft child’s body, and she’d whispered in his ear, in Russian, She fell onto the earth and then the Snow Maiden was gone. “This is something I’ve never told you,” she said now, looking deliberately at each officer’s elbow. “I never said this, but I cannot forget a face, believe me I have tried many times, but I can’t. And that day, Sigmund, when we met at the Workers Party meeting, do you remember?”
Sigmund fidgeted in his seat and nodded. “Of course,” he said.
“It’s okay.” Tatiana waved her hand in Dennis’s direction. “This is not against the law. So we were at a meeting? Many of us were. We were all young then, and we met at that Workers Party meeting, and I tell you, it was Helen on the stage that night. It was no more Ethel Rosenberg than a black bear singing. How could you not have remembered? Helen was in the front singing, and I tell you, she had a beautiful voice, very low, unusual for a woman, I remember. I remember everything! We were all screaming with happiness! Don’t you remember?”
Dennis looked over at his father, who gripped both padded arms of the metal chair—it was impossible not to acknowledge the image—and he nodded slowly.
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