“According to Renee Evers, you did pretty well yourself. She also said you had a handsome silver-haired gentleman in attendance.”
Mimi, long divorced, always on the prowl for a new and preferably brief relationship, shot her a quizzical look.
Elaine laughed.
“My daughter-in-law’s widowed father. And yes, he is attractive,” she admitted and realized that she did, in fact, miss Herb Glasser, missed his admiring glance, his gentle touch.
“Attractive gentlemen grow rarer as women of independent means grow older,” Mimi said caustically.
Elaine shrugged.
“I’ll take my chances,” she had retorted, her words more flippant than she had intended.
She returned from her visit with Mimi and sat at Neil’s desk to study the packet of legal papers Denis had sent. Neil’s estate had been settled and, as Denis pointed out, her position was more than comfortable. She was, as Mimi had said, a woman of independent means.
“You might want to think about investments,” Denis had suggested gently when he called her.
“I will. After the trip to Russia.”
“I hope you’ll think about coming out to Santa Fe then. Andrew and I are building a guest cottage. You’d have absolute privacy.” He chose his words carefully.
Elaine wondered if Denis, the most sensitive and vulnerable of their children, had been aware of the unease she and Neil had felt when they stayed in the home he and Andrew shared. It was possible, although she and Neil had made a special effort to treat Denis and Andrew with the same quiet acceptance they had offered to Sarah and Moshe, Peter and Lauren, Lisa and David. It was, perhaps, that very effort that they sensed.
“Of course I plan a visit to Santa Fe,” she assured him, staring out the window at the maple tree which swayed dangerously in a sudden gust of wind. “We’ll talk about it as soon as Lisa and I get back with Genia.”
“Genia.” He repeated the name slowly.
“Lisa’s baby. Your niece.” And my granddaughter. And Neil’s. A grandchild he will never know. Bitterness soured her mouth, tears burned her eyes. “Denis, we’ll talk soon. Give Andrew my love.”
“I will.”
She had hung up then and reached for the photo Lisa had sent her of the Russian child. The camera had captured Genia’s wistful smile and the soft dark eyes that seemed to plead for love.
Now, seated in Bookbinders, her drink finished, the olive tart upon her tongue, she removed the photo from her purse and stared again at the sweet-faced child soon to be welcomed into their family. She replaced it as Lisa and David hurried toward her, their hands linked, their faces wreathed in smiles of welcome.
She embraced Lisa and extended her hand to David. She liked the tall man who had been Lisa’s constant companion for more than five years. He was the last in the procession of lovers who had trailed after Lisa through the years, all of them attractive and attentive, all of them gone from her daughter’s life within months. She and Neil had learned not to ask about the various young men who disappeared from Lisa’s radar with disquieting regularity. But David Green had remained, a caring and affectionate presence who would not, Elaine suspected, easily be dislodged.
He was a divorced father and his son and daughter lived with his ex-wife in a Washington suburb. Craggy-faced, his dark hair spattered with gray, graying eyebrows thick above serious eyes, he had a solidity and a demeanor that inspired confidence. He spoke slowly and carefully, his words always backed with a depth of knowledge and a seriousness of approach. He was a political consultant, advising legislators and government agencies, business executives and international conglomerates, his name occasionally appearing in news stories on critical issues. Based in Washington, he traveled extensively, jetting to Paris or London, to conferences in South America and think-tank meetings in the Middle East. Still, he and Lisa managed to scavenge time together, sometimes in Washington, sometimes in Philadelphia, sometimes in obscure resort areas, a complicated arrangement that appeared to suit them both.
“I have the best of all possible worlds,” Lisa claimed. “David and I have a marvelous relationship and we both have absolute freedom. I have my work and David has his. Our lives are not on a collision course.”
Actually, Elaine thought, they were remarkably in synch. It was pleasant to be with them in the busy brightly lit restaurant as waiters sailed through the large room balancing huge trays laden with platters of steaming red-shelled lobsters and deep bowls of fragrant golden garlic butter. Young couples leaned toward each other across tables covered with red-and-white checkered cloths and a group of Penn students, assembled at a round table, lifted mugs of foaming beer and toasted the end of exams. The celebrated fish restaurant was an island of urban gaiety, all cares abandoned at its heavy oaken door. Elaine’s mood lightened.
“Another drink?” David asked.
“A short one,” she said, glancing at Lisa who smiled at her indulgently.
David, a man who was used to giving directives, to taking control of situations, authoritatively ordered for the three of them. They would all have the sole with salads and an extra order of garlic bread. A baked potato for Elaine. She marveled that he remembered her preference but that, of course, was one of his professional talents. He remembered trivia, birthdays, tastes in food and literature, with the same acuity with which he analyzed international events. She thought that he would make a marvelous husband, competent and caring, but she would not dare say as much to Lisa. She had long recognized that an inexplicable emotional barrier existed between her daughter and herself and she would not risk breaching it.
“Give her time,” Neil had advised when she spoke of it to him. “She has issues of her own, I’m sure.”
Elaine sipped her second drink and looked at her daughter, who seemed so happy, so at ease. Perhaps the time to clear the air between them had finally arrived.
Lisa, wearing an apple-green suit, looked especially beautiful. Her color was high, her closely cut raven-black hair framed her angular face and her eyes glittered with amusement as David described a meeting on Capital Hill at which a ranking diplomat had spilled a Bloody Mary over his light-colored slacks.
“Probably set Intermonetary Fund negotiations back a full year,” David said and they laughed as the waiter set their salads down.
Lisa’s pager went off before she could lift her fork.
“Damn,” she said, glancing at it. “I’ll have to make a call. It’s a colleague who asked me to read his wife’s mammogram. I’ll have to give him news he would rather not have. I’ll find a quiet corner to talk and be back as soon as I can. You two go ahead.”
She hurried across the room and Elaine noticed that several men looked after her as she passed. David, whose gaze followed her own, smiled.
“She’s beautiful in a very special way, isn’t she?” he said.
“She is,” Elaine agreed.
“I’m going to miss her while she’s in Russia.”
“We’ll only be away for a few weeks. But David, if you feel that way, couldn’t you have gone with her?” she asked. It was ironic, she thought, that she could speak more easily to her daughter’s lover than to her daughter.
He frowned, toyed with a piece of garlic bread, glanced across the room to the corner around which Lisa had disappeared, so that she might speak at a remove from the raucous restaurant sounds of pleasure and quietly tell her colleague of the darkness that lurked within his wife’s body.
“I have a lot of commitments just now,” he said at last. “I could have managed to juggle them but the truth is that Lisa never asked me to go with her and I didn’t want to trespass. We’re careful about turf, Lisa and I. Her life. My life. She’ll be meeting her daughter for the first time. I guess she wants to be alone with her.”
“But I’ll be there,” Elaine protested.
“Yes. But you’re Genia’s grandmother. And I—” His voice faltered. He held his large hands up as though despairing of finding the words to describe wha
t role he would play in the life of the small girl asleep now in a distant city.
Elaine was silent. She understood that David Green loved her daughter and she understood too that both Lisa and David stepped carefully around clearly defined parameters, so wary were they of jeopardizing their relationship. Nothing she could do or say would alter that, not now, perhaps not ever. She remained pensive as Lisa returned to the table, her expression grave.
“It was a really tough conversation,” she said. “And I’m not sure I handled it too well. They say that radiologists and pathologists select those specialties because they’re reluctant to deal with patients directly. And I know that’s true of me. Maybe because I saw how Dad was constantly worried about his patients and I hated the way they intruded on our lives. The midnight phone calls from the near suicides, the emergency consultations on weekend mornings, the psychotics who always seemed to flip out just as we were loading the car for a vacation. I didn’t want to deal with any of that, not with tears and not with pain and not with situations that I couldn’t control. All I wanted to do was straight radiology. Get the imaging right, keep up with the technology, read the pictures, write the reports. But here I am, telling my friend Max that his wife has a stage-three carcinoma with compromised nodes.”
“Lisa, I’m sure you handled it as well as anyone could. Drink some wine. Eat your salad. Let’s talk about good things. Journeys out, arrivals home,” David said gently.
Elaine looked at him gratefully. How gentle he was, this large man who spoke with such quiet authority, this powerful man who loved her daughter.
Deftly, David steered the conversation to their trip to Russia. He had been to Russia many times and he reminded them to pack heavy clothing.
“You don’t understand the word cold until you walk across Red Square on a chilly day,” he said. “And make sure that all your documents are in order. The ones for the Russians and the ones for our INS.”
“All taken care of,” Lisa assured him. “Claire and I went over it, page by page, checking everything off, making sure that I had every damn form in duplicate or triplicate, embossed certificates, apostilled data sheets. The damn dossier must weigh ten pounds, maybe twenty.”
“Who is Claire?” Elaine asked, “and what does apostille mean?”
“Apostille is a kind of notarization. And Claire’s the social worker I’ve been working with at the international adoption agency. She’s the one who first showed me the album with Genia’s picture. She’s great. She set me up with a facilitator in Russia who’s important because the Russians can be tough when it comes to adoptions. Really tough,” she said worriedly.
“And so are we,” Elaine countered grimly. “They’d better not tangle with the Gordon gals.”
Lisa smiled and reached across the table and stroked her mother’s hand. Elaine folded her fingers around her daughter’s soft palm and reflected that it had been a long time since Lisa had touched her with such ease, with such a spontaneity of affection. It might well be, she thought hopefully, that their shared journey might heal the inexplicable breach between them.
David lifted his wineglass.
“To the Gordon girls and to Genia.”
“To Genia,” they replied and clicked their glasses in a toast to the dark-eyed child who was already part of their lives.
The next morning Elaine and Lisa shopped for baby clothes.
“I have to bring everything Genia might need,” Lisa explained. “The orphanages have a strict policy. They will give you the child but the baby’s clothing is their property. I would bet that they wouldn’t be above sending the kids out naked if the adoptive parents hadn’t been told to bring new clothes.”
“Or arrange for you to buy their own gorgeous garments,” Elaine said dryly. “What size are we looking for?”
“Genia’s about two years old. A guess because she was abandoned so they don’t have a birth certificate. The Russians don’t put babies into the adoption database until they’re six months old. Then, of course, it takes time for all the red tape. I would have wanted to adopt Genia sooner but that didn’t work out. But from what I’ve seen on the video she’s small for two so maybe we should go for the eighteen-month size,” Lisa said, holding up a pink sleeping bag of the softest fleece.
“Sarah always buys her children’s clothes a little bit bigger. Easier to dress them and they grow into them. And of course Sarah really knows about things like that,” Elaine reminded her.
“Of course. Sarah knows best. She always has, even in her Sandy days,” Lisa retorted sharply and immediately regretted her tone.
Her twin had been nothing but supportive and the days when they competed for their mother’s approval were long gone. It was stupid of her to resent the sister who was her best friend, who had done so much for her. She would never forget all that Sarah, Sandy then, had done so long ago during that Roman spring.
“What colors?” Elaine asked. She ignored Lisa’s comment. Her daughters were grown women, too old for sibling wars.
“She’s dark-haired and from what I could tell from the video, olive skinned. She looks a lot like Sarah’s Leora.”
Lisa remembered visiting Jerusalem when Leora was a baby. Sarah had sat contentedly on her balcony, Leora nestled against her shoulder. The little girl’s dark hair had brushed her mother’s cheek. Lisa had turned away, fearful that her sister would see the sadness in her eyes and sense the memory and desire that teased her still. She wondered if it was that memory that had drawn her to Genia, that odd resemblance to Leora, or was it the wistful smile that had tugged at her heart? It did not matter. Genia would be hers as surely as Leora was Sarah’s. My daughter, Genia. The words seemed magical to her.
“I suppose dusty rose, violet, yellow. What do you think?” she asked her mother.
“I’ve always been partial to little girls in red,” Elaine said, holding up a red corduroy dress with matching tights.
“Completely impractical but let’s take it,” Lisa decided.
Then they plucked up undershirts, pajamas, fleece-lined sleepers, sweaters and jaunty woolen hats with matching scarves. They laughed in delight at the discovery of a soft white blanket across which a flock of lady birds fluttered and Elaine nodded approvingly at the padded royal-blue snowsuit Lisa selected.
“What a lucky baby,” the clerk who rang up their purchases said.
“My daughter,” Lisa said.
“My granddaughter,” Elaine added although the clerk was no longer listening.
She and Lisa smiled at each other, delighting in their new complicity.
They packed that night. Lisa filled a small pink suitcase embossed with a picture of Dora the Explorer with the new baby clothing. The suitcase was a gift from Peter and Lauren. The huge teddy bear which Denis and Andrew had sent and the soft blanket across which Sarah had sewn felt cutouts of smiling red pomegranates and dancing oranges and lemons were already in the high white crib. Genia’s new aunts and uncles had been swift to welcome her into their family, their gifts awaiting her arrival.
Lisa groaned as she placed the huge dossier encased in a blue plastic file into her carry-on luggage.
“What’s in it?” Elaine asked.
“Everything that the Russian authorities and the American government will need to verify that Genia is not a terrorist. Also my entire identity. My birth certificate, my degrees, the incorporation papers for my labs, financial reports, income tax statements, my fingerprints, letters from ten different people swearing that I’m honest, sober, hardworking. Reports from the social worker on the suitability of my apartment, the size of the nursery. Photographs of the apartment and the nursery. Letters from my nanny’s previous employers vouching for her competence. If this dossier disappears, Mom, I cease to exist.”
Elaine grimaced.
“All that for a country where the minimum monthly wage is twenty-two dollars,” she said. “Russia today is hardly a land of opportunity. I heard a little bit about it from a young Russian woman I
met briefly in California. Karina. A former colleague of Peter’s.”
“Former?” Lisa asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Elaine looked at her in surprise. Her children clearly knew a great deal more about each other’s lives than she had supposed.
Lisa folded the white blanket and pressed it against her cheek.
“Oh, Mom. It’s going to be so wonderful to bring Genia home. I imagine her voice, her laugh, just her being. Is it weird to love a baby you’ve never met?”
“No,” Elaine replied. “Expectant mothers love the babies they haven’t met. And that’s who you are, Lisa. An expectant mother.”
Lisa’s eyes filled. She sat quietly beside Elaine on a bed covered with their own thick sweaters and the delicate rainbow-colored baby clothing.
“This is a wonderful thing you are doing, Lisa,” Elaine said. “Wonderful and brave. Your father would have been proud of you.”
“That was all I ever wanted.” Lisa’s voice was very soft. “To make him proud.”
“He was always proud of you,” Elaine said. “We both were.”
“I just wanted never to disappoint.” Lisa struggled to find the words she should perhaps have spoken all those years ago but still they eluded her.
“You never did,” Elaine assured her.
They sat side by side in the gathering darkness, their fingers intertwined, reluctant to shatter their new and surprising closeness.
seventeen
Their Aerof lot plane landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in the early hours of the morning. Lisa peered through the window at the stark buildings shrouded in the milky light of a lingering darkness and wondered if the sun would ever break through. She sat very still as they taxied across the badly paved runway until the heavy Boeing 737 lurched, gathered speed and thundered to an abrupt stop.
“Welcome to Moscow,” she said dryly to her mother.
Elaine smiled wanly. She had slept fitfully during the long flight, her brief naps disturbed by the grim-faced flight attendant who insisted on thrusting at them trays laden with foods of mysterious origin covered with thick and oily gravies. They ignored the airline meals and instead ate the sandwiches and fruit in the festive white boxes from Zabar’s that David had given them.
Open Doors Page 24