Lest it seem that money is the only reason I fly back, it isn’t so. What I most count on is the chance to see my son, Lenny, who for the past nine years has been chasing his own fortune in Moscow. Chasing, indeed. There are a few things Lenny hasn’t told me that I happen to know anyway. But persuading my son to cut his losses in Russia and come home has proven even harder than extricating my mother was thirty years ago. Wanderlust and stubbornness are homologous traits in our family. Were Florence still alive, she would be impressed with how her grandson has managed to dig in his heels. Her own refusal to budge was a masterpiece of dignified mutiny as monumental as one of Gandhi’s hunger strikes. In 1978, as we were getting ready to exit, she not only declined to emigrate with the rest of the family; she even refused to utter the word “America.” Only after a brush with incapacity did she start timidly, testingly, bringing up the topic. “Are you still planning to go to…that place?” was how she put it. That place. A couple of years ago, I read about a neurological condition that can afflict victims of stroke. A person suffering from this condition can look at a lightbulb and tell you its components—the filament, the wire, the glass. He can describe the shape and its properties. But for all the gold in Araby he’ll never be able to screw it in and turn it on. “Agnosia” is the formal name of the condition. Ancient Greek for “not-knowing.” There is no injury to the senses, no loss of memory. Simply, a person has lost the ability to recognize something for what it is. I’ve often wondered if a similar kind of menace had gotten its fingers around Mama.
Maybe I would have been less hard on my mother had she been another ordinary Russian afflicted with that national form of Stockholm syndrome they call patriotism. But she wasn’t. She was, like I am now, an American. More so. She had grown up on the elm-lined streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, debated the Federalist Papers at Erasmus Hall High, studied mathematics among the first emancipated coeds at Brooklyn College, tuned in to Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, and watched Cagney kiss Harlow on the projection screen at the Paramount. No matter how much she pretended to have forgotten it all, I was never convinced that all that New York upbringing could be stripped from memory like so much scabbed paint. Surely, I insist even now, she must have once known what freedom smelled like.
She would have done anything to escape Flatbush, gone anywhere to find a life of meaning and consequence that surely existed beyond the pale of Brooklyn—a territory that, like Ireland or Poland, was always doomed to lie in the shadow of a superior power.
As salutatorian of her class at Erasmus Hall, she’d set her sights on attending one of the esteemed private women’s colleges, where she would spend four years mingling with other intellectually curious and unconventional young women. That Florence had believed her father would finance this plan said less about her self-regard than about Solomon Fein’s ability to shield from his family certain obvious financial realities. Her first year at Hunter College was largely spent getting over her disappointment. Then, in October of her sophomore year, the stock market collapsed, and her unhappiness was replaced with astonishment at her good fortune to be attending college for free. The following year saw another unexpected turnabout: the Brooklyn branch of Hunter merged with the City College of New York, and was spun off into Brooklyn College, the first coed public campus in the city. To call it a “campus,” as Florence observed, was a stretch; having as yet no buildings of its own, the college rented classrooms in five different office buildings in the restless business district that circled Borough Hall. Dodging trolleys and manning the obstacle course of Fulton Street, Florence soon discovered the cafés and cafeterias of downtown Brooklyn, where lawyers from nearby courts popped in for corned-beef sandwiches, as did congregations of curly-headed students who formed, if not the brain center, then a close synapse of the student movement. She hadn’t even known there was a student movement. But here they were, arguing Lenin versus Marx, Stalin versus Trotsky, not arguing so much as yelling at one another across the long wooden tables while brandishing slices of rye. At first she had been intimidated by these kids from New Utrecht High who’d read William Foster’s Strike Strategy, who knew how to set up a committee, how to print a pamphlet, how to organize. While the girls and boys at Erasmus were reenacting the Lincoln-Douglas debates in civics class, these Bensonhurst kids were staging milk boycotts to protest the price hikes of their high-school lunches.
It struck her as crazy that she’d ever considered attending a college where the girls adopted finishing-school attitudes and the teachers tried to govern their morals and behavior. At Brooklyn College, the girls were no less militant than the boys, cutting their hair, wearing sacklike dresses and sandals without stockings, knocking on doors to advocate birth control to the Irish housewives. And they were militant in another way that Florence had yet to follow. Under the blessing of their patron saint, the anarchist Emma Goldman, they felt the need to give away their virtue freely, so as not to commit the more venial sin of trafficking their virginity under the hypocritical code of Capitalism.
—
EACH WEEK, FLORENCE STOPPED to examine the Help Wanted section of the campus bulletin board. “Part-time work for Physical Science majors,” a posting might read. And when she, a mathematics major, would inquire, the job would turn out to involve not physics or chemistry or astronomy, but lugging trash cans or mopping snow slush. The administration would post jobs by major to prevent the whole college from applying.
She learned of the job at Amtorg from a professor for whom she did occasional secretarial work. He told her an organization uptown was seeking a secretary with a head for numbers. “You know a bit of Russian, don’t you? That could be helpful.”
It was her father who had insisted she study mathematics, with the advice that the insurance business sailed on an even keel even in the severest economic storms. Florence was fairly sure, however, that the job the professor had in mind had nothing in common with the life-insurance company where Solomon Fein spent his days as an actuary.
“The Soviet Trade Mission?” She had a vague recollection of it from reading the newspapers. It operated as a de facto embassy, since America didn’t officially acknowledge the Bolshevik government. “Aren’t they mostly…spies?” she inquired uncertainly.
The professor, a grizzled old progressive who smelled of tobacco and menthol, did his best not to look disappointed. “I didn’t peg you for a reader of the yellow press, Florie. Anyway, the contracts department is staffed mostly by Americans,” he said reassuringly. “And if you’re nervous that they’ll ask you to present your Party card, not to worry. No American who works at Amtorg is permitted to be an active communist. The diplomacy is too delicate. Mainly, they put together import-export contracts for companies selling goods to the Russians—tractors, cars, factory equipment, and so on.”
“I thought we didn’t do business with the Bolsheviks.”
Again the man indulged her with a downturned smile. “During the Napoleonic Wars, ships traveled along the English Channel, carrying goods back and forth between England and France. This, while the two nations were locked in bloody battle. Are we at war with the Russians?”
—
THE SOVIET TRADE MISSION—otherwise known as Amtorg—maintained its quarters on tony Fifth Avenue, keeping up a legal fiction as a private corporation of the State of New York. It was common wisdom in diplomatic circles that the Americans who staffed its posts, including Florence’s boss, Scoop Epstein, took their orders straight from Moscow. But if this were so, Florence wouldn’t have been able to guess it from the speeches Scoop delivered at luncheons in the Financial District to the managers of American import-export firms. He spoke not about the world proletariat but about the “Soviet awakening to the value of American technology and efficiency.” He told American businessmen of the million Russian peasants who had never heard of Rykov or Bukharin but who all knew the name of Henry Ford. It was a fact not lost on Florence that, although the American government continued to deny the U.S.S.R. official recognit
ion, American businesses were happy to provide their newly flush Bolshevik customers with steel and lathes and roller bearings and rebar and tractors while their American clients remained cash poor.
At Amtorg she was not much more than a secretary, but the tedious work reliably filled her with excitement for its proximity to the cranking gears of power. Even modest acts felt momentous. Blue-penciling a contract for nine thousand tons of steel for export to the Ural Mountains seemed an act of more heft and consequence than all the angry noise made by a hundred cafeteria commies. In a single week she might place an order on behalf of Russia’s AMO factory with the Toledo Machine and Tool Company for a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cold-stamping presses, and another order with the Greenlee Company in Rockford, Illinois, for multi-cylinder lathes, or call up the Hamilton Foundry and Machine Company of Ohio to commence talks for a technical-assistance agreement to help the Russians produce two hundred thousand chassis for their new ZIS-model automobiles.
Now that she was free of the spell of the college dining halls, she was willing to admit how little she’d enjoyed the fulminations and rhetoric. All that talk of smashing the bourgeois machine of the state offended her values of discipline and hard work. It seemed pointless to desire to overthrow something old when you could help build something new. In the pragmatic tranquillity that underlay the chaos of the busy office, she felt the peculiar pleasure of a world shedding its bruised skin and admitting her into some inner sanctum—a chamber in which the steady whoosh and hum of typewriters and telefax machines was like the muffled murmur of a heart pumping blood through a powerful arterial system.
Scoop Epstein, a rotund, soft-featured boy in his fifties, was many things at once: generous, sly, boastful of his connections, and adoring of his young assistant, sometimes taking Florence along to his meetings with Manhattan financiers and Indiana manufacturers. But before her first luncheon on Wall Street, he had plainly addressed her legs: “We’ll need to find you something different to wear. Wool stockings won’t do.”
“But it’s still winter!” she protested.
“Is it? I must not have noticed. You have perfectly lovely legs, Florence. May I be frank with you? Wool stockings are for nuns and apple sellers. There’s no harm in making yourself attractive.” Because Scoop’s frankness felt less like a come-on and more like the confidential guidance of a mentor, she followed him that morning from Fifth Avenue to a wholesaler he knew on Seventh, who turned out to be a cousin. Atop a footstool, Florence raised her arms while this other, quieter Epstein circled her waist with tape and worked his assertive fingers under her bust and around her narrow hips, molding stiff fabrics to her body. Her new wardrobe included a felt jacket with velvet piping and a pencil skirt tailored high against her waist, a silk crepe blouse in cream, and another in apricot satin. The cost of these clothes, heavily discounted, would be deducted from her salary. At the sight of this new Florence in the mirror, she experienced the vexing pleasure of at last seeing her own true self.
“Beautiful,” Scoop reassured her.
“Hah. They’d crucify me if I showed up at campus like this.”
“The fellows we’re meeting aren’t looking to lunch with Mother Jones.”
“I feel like a banker’s moll,” she said in an anguish of self-admiration, turning sideways to an even more flattering angle.
“Florie, honey, if you’re going to wear your politics on your sleeve, you’ll get further with nicer sleeves.”
But at home, her mother said, “You think those clothes make you special? They make you as common as dirt.” Her parents knew whom she was working for and didn’t approve. Still, with her older brother Harry out of work and expecting a baby, they could hardly advise her to quit her job. Only, in the evening, she could hear her father arguing with her mother; it was Zelda, after all, who’d pushed his Florie out into the world to earn a piece of bread, out into the workplace, with all its moral dangers. And why? Were they starving? He had been against it from the beginning. With Florence, he was more careful. “Florie, why do you need these people? They’re snakes. A girl with a head like yours—you learned to read and write before you were five,” he reminded her. “And I remember in first grade, when all the parents came to school to watch the children read poems, you could recite yours and everyone else’s, too. The other kids forgot their lines and you’d whisper them. Whole verses you learned by heart.” He offered to help her find a job in his company. But at a time like this, when Metropolitan Life had recently given the axe to a quarter of its agents, they both knew that a girl—even one with a mathematics degree—would do little more than fetch coffee and take dictation. And so, in the end, it was not her mother’s scorn but her father’s unrelenting praise, his stubborn belief in her specialness, that felt the most infuriating.
Florence’s small salary was not enough to plug the hole in the dam of changes that were taking place on Beverly Road. One evening, in the kitchen, Florence was pulled from her reading by the sound of dishes being stacked in the dining room. The angry clang of her mother’s tidying made her pause, but it was her father’s voice Florence heard first: “You haven’t told her yet?”
“You said after Rosh Hashanah.”
“And after Rosh Hashanah there’s Yom Kippur, and after that…”
“Yes, Sol, I need help those weeks! You think our daughter is going to cook for all your relatives?”
“Okay, but we have to give the woman warning now. It’s only right.”
The clanging stopped. “I don’t know how I feel about this whole idea, Sol.”
“We used to get on fine without a maid. She only comes in three days a week, now that the kids are big.”
Florence set down the apple she’d been chewing. The mention of Sissy—her old nanny, who only months earlier had been willing to endure listening to her rehearse lines for the college’s production of Dido while she mopped the floor—made it painful to swallow.
“I’m not twenty.” Her mother spoke from the other side of the kitchen door. “You can’t expect me to bend on my knees and scrub those stairs.”
“Florie can help.”
“Florence? She can’t wring out a rag. Maybe if you had ever let her lift a finger around here. God forbid—‘Don’t trouble Florie, she’s reading. Let the girl study.’ ”
“All right, then,” her father said in a reasoning voice. “If you don’t want to let Sissy go, we can stop the synagogue dues.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“We hardly ever go.”
“Sidney has his Bar Mitzvah in April.”
“He can have it at the Community Center. At least their rabbi doesn’t have three assistants writing his speeches while he goes off playing golf.”
“How ungrateful would it make us look, Sol, after Cantor Kleiner has worked so hard with Sidney on his stutter?”
A silence came from Sol—a silence in which Florence could hear all her father’s grievances with organized religion in general, and with the fancy Midwood congregation in particular. As an actuary who had spent his years tabulating the most meaningful occurrences in people’s lives—their births and marriages, their children, their accidents, their sicknesses, and, in the end, their deaths—Sol no more believed in the God of Abraham than in a God that behaved like a blackjack dealer. But the atheist Jew was, nonetheless, a Jew, and so he answered, “Only until April, Zelda.”
—
ZELDA LET SISSY GO just before the Christmas holiday. To Florence her mother gave a shoebox of items Sissy had left behind and asked her to send it by post. The box was shockingly light and contained little: a pair of Bakelite hair combs, a pocket Bible stamped with the “Active Service” seal of 1914, and a square headscarf of crepe de chine. Perhaps it was the air of hermitry these items radiated, or the odor of Sissy’s bergamot hair oil still lingering in the scarf—the smell of Florence’s own recent childhood—that kept her from sending it back immediately. But what Florence now felt, as she gathered these orpha
ned objects in her hands, was a sense of such astonished guilt and solidarity that she could barely breathe. Her parents were away, visiting Harry in Riverdale, while Sidney was getting dressed for Haftorah class. Adjusting his collar, he followed Florence from room to room, talking about the Cardinals’ new roster. “They shouldn’ta traded Grimes to the Cubs,” he complained with his amateur’s astuteness. Ever since the Yankees had hammered his beloved Dodgers, he believed it was time for them to pay. The only team in the league with a shot at beating the Yanks were the Cardinals, but they were pursuing a bad strategy. “They’re picking off veteran players from the minors and raiding old guys from the clubs. It’ll give ’em a few easy wins. But it’s no way to build a team.” He trotted after Florence down the stairs, his hair molded to his head like a cornhusk. Her brother’s nonstop talking normally entertained her; talking and thinking were not, for Sidney, separate acts, just one revolving mechanism. But this morning his chatter was like the noise of a foghorn in her ear. She placed Sissy’s package in her book bag and strapped it shut.
“Where are you going?”
“To mail Sissy’s things back to her.”
“Why can’t she take them herself when she comes back?”
Florence paused long enough to turn and stare at him. Had their mother not told him? “Where have you been, Sidney? She’s not coming back.”
“What do you mean, not coming…?”
“Mom fired her. Why do you think she hasn’t been around?”
“I thought she was on vacation, like us.”
“Vacation?” She rummaged her bag for the scrap with the Harlem address.
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