A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

  “Since ’fifty-one. Our worlds overlapped that year,” I said, thankful to finally have a story to rest on.

  “Isn’t that lucky,” she said pleasantly. She signaled to the waitress for more coffee. “Lucky you, to have your life overlap with such interesting men. Like Jacob.”

  “Jacob,” I said, grinning, thrilled to be moving on to someone I knew more about. “We had a drink together after you left that afternoon.”

  “Yes, he told me.”

  Of course he did.

  “I didn’t know what to expect, it had been so long, but he was just the same as he was at Columbia. Still full of life. In college, besides being very intelligent, Jacob always had things to say that curved slightly differently from what other people were saying. And what I liked best of all was that everything with him was big. Big thoughts, big dreams, big meals, big laughs.”

  “It is infectious, that kind of energy. I’ve always liked that about him, too,” Ava said thoughtfully. “People like that are hard to find. Though that can be easy to forget, since they’re so loud.”

  “He is still pretty loud,” I said, smiling.

  “I have the utmost respect for Jacob Gornev,” Ava said, and I could tell she meant it. “I marvel at his commitment to the cause. I wish I were half as useful to the party as he is. But I’m trying.”

  “How did you meet?” I was starting to guess I wasn’t the only one who’d been Jacob Gornev’s lover.

  “He recruited me,” she said, her voice lower. “I met him through my father. You get a card-carrying communist as rich as my father and the whole party leadership shows up at his door. Jacob himself made that trip to Connecticut. After he noticed me lurking about, he asked me to help him with a specific task. I suppose I was rather good at it, so he asked me to do it again.”

  That task had to be Washington.

  “That’s how it works,” she continued. “You know as well as I do. Your commitment to the party will be rewarded. Unlike in America’s capitalist society, where your commitment leads to neither financial nor spiritual gain.”

  “Sometimes that’s true,” I said cautiously.

  “Sometimes? Come on, Katharina. It’s always true, especially for women. Jacob told me that you worked for the United Nations. Why did you leave?”

  “Because I got pregnant.”

  “Well, isn’t that just disappointing.”

  “It was exactly that.”

  “And now you’re at home.”

  I nodded. Yes, I’m at home. Almost all the time. But because of a stroke of good luck, I tell a few lies and poof! I’m let loose to spy on you.

  “But here we are now,” she continued, smiling. “Comrades.”

  I nodded enthusiastically. Ava’s suspicions of me seemed to have disappeared with my mention of the CRC’s inside man. She was enjoying my company, perhaps even thinking of us as equals, two different women who had found themselves in very similar situations.

  “Listen, Katharina,” she said, leaning forward. “If you’re up for it, there’s someone in town I think it would be beneficial for you to meet. He’s an important man. A representative of the international party movement. He’s been abroad for quite some time but just arrived back in New York.”

  I nodded with interest, knowing that Coldwell would happily throw me off a cliff for such an opportunity.

  “His name is Max. He works in transportation.” Her voice neared a whisper. “To be specific, he buys airplanes for Cuban revolutionaries. What he’s doing is extremely exciting. But he needs some assistance with the administrative elements. Would you like to meet him? See if you can be of any help? Not every woman in the party has your level of experience and speaks Russian. Jacob told me that you do,” she clarified.

  My level of experience. A month earlier, I couldn’t imagine that I’d hear the words “Cuban revolutionaries” anywhere but on the television as they went on about Castro, or that I would be anyplace on a Saturday night but home with my boys, helping them grow while I shrank.

  I was tired of observing the world via a television set. And I was very tired of shrinking.

  CHAPTER 21

  I walked Ava home to her building on Eighty-first and Broadway, then continued downtown six blocks at a pace just short of a jog until I found a pay phone. Coldwell answered on the third ring. After I told the story once, he had me recount it again.

  “I don’t know anything else except that his name is Max—although, I suppose that may not be his real name?—and that he supplies airplanes to Cuban revolutionaries. Finances them.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Well, I’m sure of what Ava told me. Not sure of where the truth starts and ends regarding Max.”

  “No last name?”

  “None. No blood type or college transcript, either.”

  Coldwell didn’t laugh. “Where are you to meet him?”

  “At a French restaurant on the Upper East Side. Tomorrow at eleven in the morning. Considering Tom is not scheduled to work, it’s logistically impossible.”

  “We’ll make it possible. Anything else I should know?”

  “Ava Newman followed me to the meeting. Or at least to 103rd Street.”

  “Turner mentioned. You’re sure it was her?”

  “Yes. Of that, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t know what is bothering me more about Ava,” Coldwell said after a long stretch of silence. “The fact that she followed you, and then showed up at Turner’s meeting an hour late, the fact that we missed that her father is a communist, or her request for you to meet this man. Regardless, you and I can’t meet in public anymore. She’ll definitely be following you now, if she wasn’t already. Maybe because Gornev asked her to; maybe of her own accord, simply because she’s curious about you, especially since she now believes you and Turner have a man at the FBI. That’s a damn pot of gold, by the way. It’s lucky as hell that she was at that meeting now that I think about it. You two were able to just hand her that story without even trying.”

  “There was a little trying,” I said. A Communist Party meeting was not exactly dinner at the Colony Club.

  “Right. Have I said thank you? Thank you.”

  I smiled and leaned against the glass wall.

  “You and I will keep speaking on the telephone,” said Coldwell, “but from now on, anytime you need to see someone in person, it has to be Turner. He is now your man on the ground. It’s much safer that way.”

  “All right.” I paused, my mind spinning in all the right directions. “What am I going to do with the boys, Mr. Coldwell? When I go meet Max?”

  “Could you call that Negro woman?”

  “Jilly.” I’d never mentioned her, but clearly, Lee Coldwell had seen my whole life. “I can’t call her again. She’s with the boys tonight, and it’s almost eleven. But that’s not even the biggest problem. Like I said, my husband will be home.”

  “We’ll get him out of the house. And we’ll send someone. A Barnard student. She’s the daughter of one of our agents. She’s done this for us before, without knowing what she’s doing, exactly.”

  A stranger with our children, and a student at that. Not a nurse or a doctor or Maria Montessori or someone the Edgeworth family had known for twenty years.

  “She will do just fine.”

  “Good,” said Coldwell. “And you are, too. Doing just fine.”

  * * *

  Our elevator dinged at ten-thirty in the morning, just thirty minutes after Tom had been called to the hospital unexpectedly by a new employee. A young woman with pulled-back brown hair, wearing Bermuda shorts and loafers, the look that defined college girls in the spring, came in with a grin and extended her hand to me. “Good morning, Mrs. Edgeworth, I’m Sarah Beach. Are these your boys? Aren’t they darlings.”

  The boys looked at her as if she were holding two pistols, one for each of their heads.

  Gerrit took two steps toward her with the defiance that had marked him since birth and started stomping his
bare feet. “No Sarah Beach.”

  She chuckled, then leaned down and picked him up. To my shock, he did not bite her, hit her, or put his fingers in her nose. “You’re a firecracker, aren’t you?” she said, flipping him upside down. He started laughing hysterically. “I bet you drive your mother crazy.”

  I watched her with awe as she swung him back and forth by his ankles like a macaque she’d just plucked from a tree.

  “Anything I should know before you leave, Mrs. Edgeworth? Any foods to avoid? Are treats okay?”

  “Avoid arsenic and whiskey,” I said. She put Gerrit down and took the baby from me. “Otherwise, by all means, be my guest. You can give them sugar out of the bag if that’s what it takes.”

  She laughed, and I leaned down and kissed Peter and Gerrit. “I love you very much,” I said, each word ringing with truth. Tom was wrong about the boys having to be stuck to me and only me. Having them be around someone young, patient, and completely unattached to the Edgeworth family was not going to harm them forever. It might even help.

  “I’m one of six,” Sarah explained as I reached for my bag. “And my little brother was like this.” She looked down at Gerrit, who was trying to get her to swing him again. “Still is.”

  I knew that the line “It gets better when they’re older” was yet another lie to keep mothers from descending into the black hole of depression.

  “But is he a functioning member of society? Did he grow a devil’s tail when he hit puberty?”

  “No. He’s a freshman at Harvard. The unruly ones are always the smartest, aren’t they?”

  “That better be true. Thank you for your time, Sarah.”

  I left the apartment via the service stairs, took a left down the alley to Sixty-fourth Street, and jumped on the subway to meet Max at a restaurant near John Jay Park.

  I didn’t know how Coldwell had gotten Tom out of the house, or how long he could keep him out, but I knew it was supposed to be the least of my worries. I should be focused on making it seem like chatting about Cuban revolutionary activity was what I did best. Another Sunday, another communist fresh in from Moscow who wanted to meet me.

  At a drugstore on East End Avenue, I studied my reflection in the window, and saw a nervous, scared woman. I remembered how being next to Turner as I’d approached Jacob had calmed me enormously. How I’d been smiling as I waited on the landing with him yesterday, not afraid to walk into that room with him next to me. His warm, competent presence had taken my mind off things. I reached into my purse, reapplied my lipstick, and thought of his shoulder accidentally brushing my arm as we sat in that tiny apartment. That alone had made the evening worth it.

  Le Bain Marie was a little bistro with tables of dark wood topped by candles of varying heights. There were stuffed animal heads on the walls—two buffalo and three deer—and several cured ham legs hanging above the counters. It reminded me of the village restaurants in Normandy, of driving on hilly roads between Switzerland and France during family holidays in Europe.

  There was only one man sitting alone in the restaurant, in the very back corner. He stood when I entered.

  I smiled and headed toward him.

  “I am Max,” he declared, taking my hand and shaking it with both of his, clearing any doubt that I had the right target. “You are Hanna Graf.”

  “I am,” I said, trying to confidently wear the name.

  “Good.”

  A waitress came and tried to give me a menu, but he declined it before it was in my hand. “I ordered with another woman already,” he explained. “Venison for two.”

  I nodded and expressed my love of game meats. As he picked up his glass of water, I saw his hand was trembling.

  Catching my eye, he mumbled something about low blood pressure and put the glass down, his hands under the table.

  After ten minutes of polite conversation, the waitress set enormous slabs of venison in front of us. Max was a thin, jittery man, one who did not seem capable of tackling this cut of meat, never mind supplying Cuban revolutionaries with airplanes. Though what did the latter take but guts and money? Perhaps Max had both, though neither was evident. He was balding, sloppily dressed, and his eyes seemed to be twitching behind his glasses. I was not at ease.

  “You speak Russian?” he asked after taking a bite of venison, which seemed to take about thirty chews to get down.

  “I get by.”

  “You are a friend of Ava Newman’s,” he said in Russian.

  I nodded. “I am. And I’m very fond of her,” I replied in Russian.

  “I like her too. But more importantly, I trust her. She said you’re intelligent, an American who speaks Russian, and that you are very close to Jacob Gornev. Because of these things, I wanted to meet you.”

  I should have clarified about Jacob, that we had been close but weren’t any longer. But my relationship to him seemed to matter tremendously. “We are very close friends,” I repeated, echoing his use of the Russian present tense.

  “Good. I trust Gornev, and I trust almost no one.”

  We ate in silence, chewing on our slabs of meat.

  “A bit like eating a dinosaur,” he said finally. I laughed, maybe because he became more human in that instant, or because my rising fear needed a release.

  “Come,” he said, standing up. “You don’t want to eat the rest, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. Let’s go for a drive. I don’t like to be trapped between four walls for too long. Makes my skin itch.”

  I followed him out of the restaurant like a loyal dog. It had started raining. On York Avenue, just before Seventy-fifth, he nodded at a white two-door Studebaker sedan. He went around to the driver’s side and I opened my door. Just before I climbed inside, I looked behind me. There was no one. I closed the door thinking about how much I wanted to see Turner Wells.

  Max pulled into traffic and we drove in silence for a while. When we turned on Second Avenue, he threw a series of questions at me in Russian that seemed to be testing my language skills more than my ability to do secretarial work for him.

  He asked what I knew about the Cuban Revolution. I told him. Cuba was an original member of the United Nations. I pretended that I’d been following the revolution as if it were in my own backyard.

  “Cuba is America’s New Jersey,” he said loudly.

  That made absolutely no sense, but I nodded yes.

  He asked if I’d ever been to Russia. I had not. Would I like to? Of course. Wasn’t that the dream? Shouldn’t be, he said, going as fast as traffic allowed toward the Queensboro Bridge. He was never going back.

  “I would die there, Mrs. Graf. In a matter of months, I’d be dead.” We rattled on to the bridge.

  “No,” I said, unsure how else to respond. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  He turned and looked at me, his eyes off the road for far too long.

  “Do you actually care about the situation in Cuba?” he asked as we moved toward the expressway. “You aren’t saying yes because Jacob and Ava led you to me?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” I said, still in Russian. That much was true. He just didn’t ask which side I was on.

  “And you also care about Ava?”

  “Ava? Of course I do,” I said, and it didn’t feel like a lie. “She’s one of my closest friends in the party.” Also not a lie. I only had two.

  He stayed quiet until we were on the expressway going toward Jackson Heights.

  “Do not let her go to Russia,” he said, speeding up again. “Do you hear me?”

  “Ava?” I whispered.

  “Do you hear me?” he yelled. “Do not let her leave the country!”

  “Why?” I asked so quietly that I could barely hear myself.

  He tried to pass a truck, speeding up before abruptly braking. He wove around three cars while coughing loudly, one hand on the steering wheel. Three fingers slipped off until he was driving with only his thumb and index finger.

 
“Here they want so much, but in Russia, they want everything. More information, more money. You take one bite of venison, then they ask you to eat the whole animal. They ask you to eat it alive. Ava will have to eat it all in one bite. And she cannot.”

  “I think she’s very courageous. You all are. What you’re—”

  “Courage?” he said, laughing wildly, and going even faster. “What does that matter? You should know better, intelligent as you’re supposed to be. It’s not courage, it’s what happens when you no longer care about yourself. I gave up caring for my own life long ago. That’s how they peel you apart. Yes, my lungs are caving in, yes, my hands are shaking, but the Cubans need their airplanes, so I will get them their airplanes. They before me. The state before I. You see that devotion everywhere. Look at Gornev. Withering away, his heart beating too fast for a man his age. All that strength and they can still chisel away at him.”

  I thought of Jacob. Of his infectious laugh, his long, hungry looks. What had I missed?

  “He is a patriot’s patriot.”

  “We should be proud to put the state before us,” I said confidently, thankful for my Communism 101 crash course.

  “We should be proud if it didn’t kill us. Gornev has ten years left, if he’s lucky.”

  Ten years in the party, or ten years alive? I was too afraid to ask.

  We hit a swath of wide-open road, the route to Queens completely clear. Max moved into the middle lane and sped up even more. As he did, the sky groaned, and it started to rain harder.

  He swerved around the eighteen-wheeler that had appeared in front of us, bumping the wheel with his. The truck started beeping wildly.

  “You have to help Ava. Do you hear me? She does not listen to me.”

  I looked at Max as if he had a scythe in his hand.

  Suddenly, he accelerated sharply and I screamed, my eyes flying open. We zoomed down the expressway, the car rattling, groaning, begging us to slow, until a burst of traffic insisted that we do and Max stepped on the brakes, slowing the car to a stop. After a full minute of idling in silence, Max moved to the shoulder, exited, parked on the side of a neighborhood road, and cut the engine.