“You see, the child begins to know your daughter and be more relaxed with her,” Sonia told Elaine.
From across the room, Irina Petrovna, stylishly dressed in a pale blue wool suit, lifted a reproving finger to her lips and made a notation in her notebook. Ignoring her presence, Lisa rolled a soft cloth ball to Genia and clapped when the child rolled it back to her. The time passed pleasantly as Lisa improvised one gentle game after another and Sonia and Elaine watched quietly. With Genia seated on her lap, Lisa turned the pages of Goodnight Moon. She softly read the words that the child did not understand but to which she responded with a sweet babble. Irina Petrovna moved her chair closer, her gaze stern and unflinching.
When Alla appeared to reclaim Genia, they rose to leave but Irina indicated that Sonia should remain in the room. Elaine and Lisa looked nervously at each other but they followed Alla out.
“Bye bye, Genia,” Elaine said and blew the child a kiss. They laughed as Alla held the child’s finger to her lips.
“Bye bye, Genia,” Lisa called and waved.
Genia waved back and then buried her head shyly against Alla’s shoulder.
They waited for Sonia on the steps of the Home but when the translator joined them, her face was furrowed with worry.
“What did she say to you?” Elaine asked.
“She wants to observe Dr. Gordon when she is alone with Genia. She does not want you or me in the room. And that is not good,” Sonia replied worriedly.
“Why not?” Elaine asked.
“Irina may say things that are not true. If there are no other witnesses she may perhaps claim that Dr. Gordon hit the child or that she did not behave properly with her. Misha and I worked with one adoptive family last year and Irina asked that only the father be with the little boy during her observation. Then in the court she said that this man, who was such a nice man, such a good man, opened the boy’s trouser and touched his penis. It was a lie but the judge believed her. Of course he would take the word of a Russian official against that of an American. He would not approve the adoption and that man and his wife could not adopt any child in all of Russia. We cannot let that happen to you. We must ask Misha what to do.” Sonia pursed her lips.
“But Misha was not able to intervene on behalf of that other family, was he?” Elaine asked.
“No. He could not help those poor people,” Sonia admitted sorrowfully.
“Mom, what are we going to do?” Lisa was very pale. She did not discount Sonia’s warning. She had felt Irina Petrovna’s hostility from the moment of their first meeting. “Should I call Claire?”
“Claire’s in Philadelphia. But I’m right here.” Elaine’s tone was decisive. “Wait here for me. I’m going to speak to Madame Directress right now.”
“But you will need me to interpret,” Sonia protested.
“Oh, I think she will understand what I have to say. She did speak some English to us,” Elaine assured her as she knocked at the door.
She stalked past the woman who opened it and walked straight into Irina Petrovna’s office.
The directress frowned and rose from her desk chair, her hand threateningly raised, her finger pointed to the door. Elaine noted that her fingernails were long and painted with a scarlet polish that matched her lipstick, too thickly applied.
“I am here to tell you that I will be with my daughter during every observation session and our translator will also remain in the room,” she said.
Irina Petrovna flushed angrily.
“You will leave this office,” she commanded sharply. “I do not understand what you say in your English.”
“Oh, I think you understand well enough,” Elaine retorted. “I want you to know that if you deny me the right to be with my daughter I will go directly to the American ambassador and register a complaint. I will also complain formally to your Ministry of Education. I do not think such complaints are taken lightly in Russia. Nor should they be. Do we understand each other?”
There was no reply.
“I will return with my daughter tomorrow. And with our translator. Dosvedanya, Irina Petrovna.”
The directress nodded. The slight inclination of her head was a surrender of sorts although her lips were pressed together, sealing an anger which would not be easily assuaged.
Trembling herself, Elaine left the building.
“Mom, what happened?” Lisa asked anxiously as they hurried to the car.
“I simply told our friend that Sonia and I will be with you at every session.”
“And she agreed?”
“So it seems.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Your father’s modus vivendi. Act authoritatively and authority will be assumed. I think they teach that in Psychoanalysis 101.”
Lisa smiled.
“That’s right. I remember Dad saying that the only authority he had with his patients was the authority he assumed for himself.”
“He said that more than once,” Elaine reminded her. “But I never thought to practice it at all, certainly not in a Moscow Children’s Home.”
“Thanks for practicing it on that bitch, Mom. Dad would have been proud.”
“Actually, I think he would have been surprised,” Elaine agreed. She, after all, had surprised herself.
Bonded by shared memories, they sat quietly in the rear of the Lada as Sonia drove too quickly past the huge government apartment complexes.
Irina Petrovna came to their next session and glared at Elaine and Sonia, but raised no objection. She watched as Lisa showed Genia the toys they had brought with them from America, the pop-up board books and the yellow wooden ducklings that could be pulled along with a bright blue string. Genia stood unsteadily on her spindly legs and imitated Lisa’s movements. She took one step, then two, then three, clapped her hands at her own progress and then turned and clapped approvingly for the obedient ducks. Lisa built a tower of soft cloth blocks and Genia knocked it down and chortled with delight as Lisa built it yet again.
Elaine sat beside Lisa and Genia on the floor, opened her sketchbook and drew a picture of a house and a garden. Her house. Her garden. She drew the tree that shaded the yard, the tree all her children and grandchildren had climbed.
“Pretty?” she asked liltingly and Genia nodded although she did not understand the question. What she understood was the love in Elaine’s voice.
So absorbed were they in Genia, that they forgot the presence of Irina who sat erect in a high-backed chair and made copious notes. Occasionally Sonia spoke to her in Russian, translating Lisa’s affectionate murmurs, Elaine’s replications of the picture that flowed from the brightly colored markers onto the pages of her sketch pad. The directress listened without interest, adjusted her scarf, toyed with a brooch.
They repeated the games and the drawings each day and when they left they smothered Genia with kisses. At the end of the week, Genia pressed her lips against Lisa’s cheek and jeweled it with a moist flutter.
“I love you,” Lisa said as she held the child close.
“Ya loo-blue tibya,” Sonia interjected softly. “That is how we say ‘I love you’ in Russian.”
“Ya loo-blue tibya,” Lisa whispered to Genia and the child’s face lit up with joy.
“Mom, I love Genia so much that my heart breaks each time I see her,” Lisa confided that evening as they sat over their shish kebab dinner in a Georgian restaurant.
Elaine glanced disapprovingly at the flocked red wallpaper and the chandeliers in which half the bulbs were dead, and turned to her daughter.
“You’re wonderful with her,” she said.
“You sound surprised.”
“I suppose I am,” she admitted. “I never thought you were that interested in children. You seemed irritated each time Sarah announced she was pregnant.”
“It never occurred to you that I might be jealous of those pregnancies?” Lisa asked quietly.
“Jealous? Why would you be jealous?” Lisa’s reply surprised her. “
You could have married any number of times. You could have had a child of your own. You could have had a child even if you chose not to marry. You still can. Your biological clock is still ticking. You could give Genia a sister or a brother.” She smiled encouragingly.
“No, Mom. Actually I can’t have a child of my own. Not then. Not now. Not ever,” Lisa said, her eyes downcast, her voice heavy with sadness.
Elaine set her knife and fork down and looked at her daughter.
“Why not?” she asked quietly.
Lisa looked at her, crumbled a bit of bread and toyed with the crumbs, staring down at them while she spoke in a voice so soft that Elaine had to strain to hear her.
“You remember my junior year in Italy?”
“Of course I remember. You wrote us the most wonderful letters. You loved Rome, your courses, those wonderful trips to Tuscany. Your father and I read your letters aloud.”
“I had a boyfriend that year,” Lisa reminded her.
“Yes. Of course. Bert. I remember him. He was in your class at Penn. A tall lanky boy. From California, I think. And you liked him a lot. I remember now.”
“I loved him,” Lisa corrected her.
Elaine took a sip of wine.
“What happened, Lisa?” she asked. “What happened between you and Bert?”
“You’re sure you want to know? You’re sure you’re ready for this?”
“I’m sure.”
Lisa took a deep breath and when she spoke her voice was husky and the words came slowly, as though wrested from a bedrock of painful memory.
“We were together. Together in Rome, lovers in Rome. Young and free and so happy just to be with each other, to play house, to study together and then go to the market and fill our baskets with vegetables and then go back to our student apartment near the Spanish Steps and cook crazy silly meals.”
Lisa paused. She would not tell her mother how she and tall lanky Bert had often cooked naked, laughing at their own daring as they stirred thick sauces while the sun poured through the windows ribbing their bodies with rays of gold.
“Yes, there were those trips to Tuscany,” she continued. “And weekends when we camped out or stayed in cheap pensiones pretending we were a honeymoon couple which I surely thought we would be one day. And then—” Her voice faltered, her eyes clouded. She lifted the carafe of wine, filled her glass but did not drink from it.
“And then I found out that I was pregnant. Carelessness. Stupidity. My fault, I suppose but I didn’t think, at first, that we even had to think about whose fault it was, because I was so happy about it. What was wrong with my being pregnant? We loved each other. We both had supportive families. All that had happened, I thought, was that our timetable had accelerated. We’d get married sooner rather than later. I’d have the baby and somehow I’d work out medical school. I could organize my life. After all, I’d watched you organize yours. I walked on air, those first two months. I had a secret. My own secret. I’d never had such a wonderful secret before. I was a twin and twins don’t have secrets from each other and lovers can only keep secrets for so long. So I hugged that secret to myself. I didn’t tell Bert. I thought that I’d surprise him and share it with him on his birthday. We were going to celebrate it in our favorite trattoria.”
Lisa closed her eyes, remembering that dimly lit restaurant, candles in straw-encased Chianti bottles burning on each table. She struggled to remember what she had worn that night but could only recall that Bert had bought her a bunch of violets and the waiter had placed them in a small vase and set it on the table next to the candle.
“How old was he on that birthday?” Elaine asked.
Lisa smiled wistfully.
“Twenty-one. I realize now that the news that your girlfriend is pregnant is not a terrific twenty-first birthday present. But back then I was naive enough to think that he’d see everything from my perspective, that he’d be as happy as I was.”
“And he wasn’t?”
“That would be an understatement. He totally freaked out. He was furious, accusing me of tricking him. He said terrible things. It was as if I had never known him, never slept beside him in a field full of sunflowers, never walked across the Ponte Vecchio with him. I didn’t recognize him. He knocked over the candle, the flowers he had bought me fell to the floor and he stormed out of the trattoria. He didn’t come back to our apartment that night.”
“What did you do?” Elaine asked calmly although an unfamiliar weakness swept over her. That distant memory, an old and bitter memory for Lisa, was a fresh sorrow for her.
“What could I do? I waited. He came back to the apartment the next morning. He was miserable. He cried. He apologized. He got angry, accusative and then he cried again. He said that he didn’t know what he wanted but he definitely knew what he didn’t want. He didn’t want to be a husband and a father at twenty-one. And I saw that he couldn’t be. He would have to be a man to be a husband and a father and he wasn’t a man. He was a boy. A scared, bewildered boy. I went to class. Then I went to the movies. I sat in that dark theater near the Piazza Navona and I cried and cried. Then I went back to the apartment and Bert was gone. He’d taken his books, his clothes, even the frying pan that we had bought together from an iron monger in the old market. That’s what I couldn’t forgive, that he took that frying pan. But he left me an envelope with five one-hundred-dollar bills and the name of a clinic. A really good clinic, he wrote, although he didn’t even sign his name.” She shook her head as though still bewildered by that wounding omission.
“And then?”
“And then I called Sandy in Jerusalem. She flew to Rome and we went to that really good clinic together and Sandy held my hand while they scraped my wonderful secret out of my womb. It was all sterile, that clinic, and the very good doctor administered a local anesthesia so I didn’t have too much pain. But that night I hemorrhaged and Sandy and I were scared to death. She called an ambulance. They told me at the American Hospital that the doctor at the very good clinic had made a slight error. He had perforated my womb. I would be fine but I would never carry a child again. Never,” she whispered as though to cushion the terrible finality of the word.
“We never knew. Why didn’t you tell us?” Elaine’s voice broke.
“I don’t know, Mom. Sandy and I talked about it. Sandy thought that we should tell you. But I just couldn’t. You and Dad were so content, so wrapped up in each other, so happy with your lives, so glad that we all seemed to be doing so well. I didn’t want to shatter that happiness, that contentment. I didn’t want to be an intruder, breaking into the brightness of your life, darkening it with my problems, my mistakes. And I didn’t want to disappoint Daddy. He’d always been so proud of me. I didn’t want to lose that pride.”
“You wouldn’t have,” Elaine assured her but her own mood grew heavier.
Of course, it would have been Neil’s reaction that concerned Lisa all those years ago and even now, it was of Neil she spoke. The parent of choice, the parent to be emulated. The thought shamed her and swiftly, she banished it. She would not allow herself to be jealous of her dead husband, to begrudge her daughter her preference.
“But I never lost the memory of that sweet secret, the knowledge that I hugged to myself for those brief weeks of my pregnancy,” Lisa continued. “A life was growing within me. I would be a mother. And then my baby was gone and I listened to that very kind Italian doctor tell me that I could never become pregnant again. But still, I wanted to be a mother and I wanted it more with each passing year. So I began to think about adoption and when it became clear to me that I was so well established professionally that I could manage my career and life as a single mother, I made inquiries and I was referred to the adoption agency where I met Claire. I remember the day that I sat in her office and she showed me an album of photos of Russian children who might be available for adoption and I saw Genia’s picture. I stared at it and I thought ‘that’s what a daughter of mine would look like—that dark-haired child with
her heart-shaped face.’ She could have been my never-born baby. That night I dreamed of Genia, I saw her as a baby, sheltered deep within my body, playing within the soft pinkness of my womb, and I woke up smiling. I called Claire and asked her to begin the process. I kept thinking, ‘I have another secret, another sweet and wonderful secret and I don’t have to share this secret with anyone and no one can endanger it. I am going to be a mother.’”
“And you’ll be a wonderful mother,” Elaine said firmly.
She gripped her daughter’s hand, grateful to her for the sad truth she had revealed to her, even after the passing of so many years, grateful too that the barrier of silence between them had, at last, been destroyed.
“Lisa, what happened to Bert?” she asked and struggled to recall what he had looked like. A nice smile, she remembered, but a weak mouth. And, as it turned out, a flawed character.
Lisa smiled grimly.
“He transferred to a university in California and went to medical school out there. I met him at a conference a couple of years ago. He was divorced and had two kids or maybe three. Forget about lanky. He had a potbelly and was balding. He sort of hit on me in an embarrassed and embarrassing way. I did have a drink with him and he apologized for Rome and I told him that he didn’t need to apologize, that actually he had taught me a lot.”
“Oh?” Elaine frowned. “That was carrying forgiveness a bit far.”
“That’s true, Mom. He taught me to be self-protective, self-reliant, to never give my trust lightly. Because of Bert I came to recognize that nothing is permanent and most relationships are, at best, tenuous.”
Elaine sighed. She understood now why so many lovers had drifted in and out of her daughter’s life, why Lisa had resisted long-term commitments and pursued financial and professional success, always insisting on her own inalienable independence.
“And David. What about David?” she asked. “How much does he know?”
Open Doors Page 27