Sincerely,
Dottie Carpenter
Some evenings now, when I sit in my living room listening to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations late in his career, the pianist’s ghostly, animalistic moans emanating from the exquisite formal arithmetic of Bach’s musical line, I find myself getting lost not in the ever-extending correspondences of notes but rather in the raw, inchoate exhalations of a man quite obviously on the cusp of some kind of madness. Ecstatic madness, perhaps, but madness all the same. And this reminds me of something, a time and place. Of certain desperate, uncontainable feelings I have known—on whose behalf I see that I too was capable of being a bully and a fool.
Back then, of course, I didn’t explain it to myself this way. A social invitation had been received. There were reasons—good, solid, professional reasons, I insisted—for accepting it, and what was clear to me, possibly the only thing that was clear, was that, because she was my wife, it was Martha’s duty to assist me in this endeavor, for the good of my career and thus, ergo, for the benefit of our family. Oh, I doubt she believed a word of this crap. But then, as I presented it to her over three nights running, gradually, quietly (were we not quiet, polite people?) bullying her into submission, she didn’t have to believe it. She didn’t have to believe anything at all. She didn’t even have to believe in me. All she had to do was agree to go.
* * *
—
As it turns out, Dottie Carpenter’s description of the birthday dinner for Svetlana as “small” is no mere figure of speech. Martha and I are still in the Carpenters’ front hall, handing coats and scarves to Thomas (“Reverend Tom”?) Carpenter, when I notice the grim resentment in my wife’s expression—up to now visible only to me, I believe—suddenly threatening to become explicit. I follow her gaze to the living room and there, standing by herself with martini glass already well in hand (this is not a dry house, I’m relieved to see), is the woman of the hour, wearing a red cardigan sweater over a brown woolen dress.
“Are we early?” Martha’s polite smile evaporating.
“You’re right on time,” Mrs. Carpenter assures her. Then in a lower voice adding: “The other couple had to cancel at the last minute. Their son has tonsillitis.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
The Carpenters’ two preteen children, boy and girl, pale and earnest, appear and make respectful hellos to the guests, then start drifting back up the staircase.
“Billy,” the mother calls lightly to the flannel-shirted boy, “don’t forget your guitar.” The boy nods once, and is gone.
Turning back, I find Svetlana kissing my wife’s cheeks—once, twice, three times.
“Martha, you are good to help celebrate my old age! That beautiful blouse you are wearing.”
“Happy birthday, Svetlana.”
“Yes, happy.” The guest of honor’s martini glass is nearly empty. “And you, Peter, what a strange face you have tonight. But you are here, that’s the main thing after such long absence. While we are both not too old to still enjoy life a little, hm?”
“Happy birthday, Svetlana.”
“So people keep telling me. Now, Mr. Staehelin, you must have a drink with me on my special anniversary.”
“Certainly, Mrs. Staehelin.”
It’s not the little smile that’s just popped onto my lips that catches Martha’s attention, I imagine, so much as this exchange of private names that she’s never heard before, uttered in public. Our hosts don’t seem to have noticed, but my wife’s face has morphed into an ominous mask, fitted so as to allow light neither in nor out.
“Why don’t we go into the sitting room for the hors d’oeuvres?” Dottie Carpenter suggests.
On the coffee table sits a spinach and Velveeta cheese dip and a plate of Triscuits. “Dip?” Dottie Carpenter offers. It looks like a bowl of goose guano but is actually not half-bad. Between slathering crackers with green-and-orange goo, Reverend Tom asks Martha if we have ever attended service at All Saints’ Church, and she responds that, to tell the truth, her relationship with organized religion has never been especially pleasant.
“Then perhaps on one of my better Sundays, Mrs. Horvath,” the minister remarks with sly humility, “I hope I might have the opportunity of attempting to change your mind on the matter.”
My wife makes no further comment.
“It was at our church that I first met Svetlana,” Dottie Carpenter tells Martha. “I looked over and thought, Who is that remarkable-looking woman? You know what I mean, Mrs. Horvath. That combination of strength and vulnerability she radiates. A person with the courage to look her own monstrous history right in the eye without blinking. It reminded me a little of some faces we used to see among the Ugandans. Wouldn’t you agree, Thomas?”
I don’t catch the rest because I’ve joined Svetlana at the bar cart in the corner of the room, where she’s taken it upon herself to mix her second martini and my first. If nothing else in America, I note with a certain pride, she has learned how to make our national drink with the necessary degree of hubris. Her idea of vermouth is a vanquished dream that never was.
“You’re not still angry about our phone call, Peter?”
“I’m not angry. I’m embarrassed. I’ve never lost my temper like that with anyone.”
“Because I am not a normal client. And you were being human and emotional—not always usual with you. But listen, I’ve told you this before. Don’t get stuck on little words I throw out between big feelings. Sometimes my brain can be like a fist. A thing which, how do you say…?”
“Clenches?”
“Clenches. So my feelings come out too strong. But you must realize I’m no fist. That was my father. I am more my mother. A turtle, with the soft belly underneath.”
“Okay, turtle.”
She laughs—the sound an unvarnished story flung from deep within her chest; also a gauntlet thrown down. A bit of martini sloshes over the rim of her glass onto my shoe, though somehow this too is charming. We are on the plane from Zurich again, two bank robbers on the lam, making our break for freedom.
She takes a swallow of drink and turns back into the room. “Has Peter not told you, Dottie and Thomas, how he fetched me from Switzerland during my defection?”
“Let’s not bore them with that,” I interject with a quick glance at my wife, whose gaze is chilling my toes from ten feet away.
“Yes,” Martha agrees, “let’s not.”
But Dottie Carpenter is studying me with newfound interest. “That was you?”
“I will tell you how it was done.” A note of rare triumph in Svetlana’s voice as she plops herself on the couch next to Martha and launches once more into our tale of magical, heroic escape from her past.
* * *
—
And so…forward. Time for cake. Somehow we have got through split-pea soup; ham and sweet potatoes; iceberg lettuce with “Russian” dressing. The dishes have been cleared, a cloudy pause fallen over the table, the sky just before lightning. I become aware without exactly being aware that Martha—seated at the round dining table between Dottie and Reverend Tom—has uttered hardly more than a brief sentence or two these last twenty minutes. While Svetlana, placed between Dottie Carpenter and myself and still floating on the ebbing tide of her two early martinis, seems content to let the conversation go where it will (or won’t). The ship of international hospitality is sinking, in other words. But our faithful skipper will not let her go down without a fight.
Captain Dottie emerges from the kitchen bearing a homemade vanilla-frosted cake with a single candle burning on top. Behind her, holding a three-quarters-size guitar and looking full of regret for someone who can’t be much more than twelve, comes her son. “Billy.” Dottie Carpenter nods at him as she sets the cake on the table in front of Svetlana. And Billy commences, somewhat haltingly, to play “Happy Birthday�
� on his instrument.
We sing, of course. Even Martha does more than lip-synch. And when it’s over and the wish has been silently invoked and the candle extinguished, Reverend Tom says to the boy, “Now, Billy, how about ‘Hey Jude’ for the guests?” And then to us: “Billy’s crazy about the Beatles.”
But crazy or not, Billy shakes his head. He doesn’t want to play “Hey Jude” or anything else for the guests, whoever the hell we might be.
“Come on, William,” his father insists, a note of Episcopal sternness entering his voice. “One song for the table.”
“For God’s sake, leave the boy alone!”
The voice loud. And Russian.
“I beg your pardon?” sputters the Reverend.
“He doesn’t want to sing. So leave him alone now.”
“I’m sure I don’t know who you think you’re speaking to, Mrs. Evans. I’m the boy’s father.”
“That is your problem.” Svetlana scrapes back her chair and stands. The rest of us, even young Billy, remain nailed to our stations. “Reverend, in your own house I will tell you something, since you don’t ask. When I was your son’s age, my father would have his dinners and parties. The whole Politburo would be there, sometimes others too. I would be off by myself, quiet, reading or just thinking, sometimes already asleep and—and suddenly there he was, deciding it was time for me to sing and dance for his crowd, simply because that’s what he wanted. My hair was in braids then. Pigtails. And he would grab my pigtails like this”—with a vicious double-handed yank, she mimes the pulling-back of her head—“and drag me onto floor in front of everyone. He would make me sing and dance for him while they all watched. Can you imagine such a thing for a child, Reverend? No? Then I will show you.”
She stalks from the room. No one else stirs. Through the doorway I watch her open the front hall closet and rummage around inside.
I have an inkling then. But I do nothing to stop what’s happening. I just sit there.
She reenters the dining room wearing a man’s gray fedora and holding a black furled umbrella. The hat too large for her and partially covering her eyes, which are wide but taking no notice of any of us, as though she is seeing into the heart of some awful waking dream.
“Watch how I danced for my father.”
She begins to kick out her legs, first one, then the other. Hard to describe, even now, how cruelly pathetic. Twirling the umbrella like a parade baton, she performs a half turn and then more kicks, following some routine drilled into her long ago and never forgotten. A small skip to one side, a hop; then back, another turn—and now she stumbles, almost toppling over—before somehow righting herself with the umbrella and managing a last, broken pirouette.
Tears are streaming down her flushed cheeks.
Beside me, Dottie Carpenter’s gasp suggests the purest pity. Across the table, the minister fervently regards his lap, praying to his own corporeal reality. And young Billy has fled the premises; the future has defected. Only my wife—leaning back in her chair, chin slightly raised, lips parted, eyes bright with spectacle—seems ready to embrace the horrible strangeness of the moment, this utter humiliation of a once-feared rival.
I can’t stand another second of it. “That’s enough.” I get up and go to Svetlana, now bent over and weeping. Gently I pull the hat off her head and the umbrella out of her fist and drop them on the floor. “I’m taking you home.”
“Peter,” Martha snaps—on her feet, mouth a hard thin line.
“Sit down, Martha.”
“Peter, this is totally inappropriate.”
“I said sit down.”
And my wife, pink-faced as if she’s just been slapped by a stranger, sits back down.
“I’m driving Svetlana home in her car,” I announce to the room. “I’ll call a cab from there.”
I glare around the table. The Carpenters are gawking like rude children, but for once I don’t give a fuck.
“Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, Svetlana thanks you for dinner. We all do. You’re good people and this is no one’s fault. Come on, Svetlana, let’s go.”
* * *
—
We do not speak on the way to her house. I am driving her beloved green Dodge. How she has managed to hold on to it through all the moves and mistakes, the makings and breakings of the last few years is anybody’s guess. But somehow she has, and now we are under its cover, moving, the heater struggling to warm us. The starless sky eggshell white, promising snow. Signs of a student party, loud beautiful bodies spilling off the front porch of a townhouse, slide by: not for us. Farther on, we pass a Jersey Central Power & Light truck, men in hardhats preparing for a cold night of work. We are invisible. I fish a white handkerchief out of my pocket and hand it to her. She does not ask, as an American might, whether it is clean. She does not care. She wipes her eyes and blows her nose. Her tears are gone. And soon we are at her house.
“You will come in.”
It is not a question.
The babysitter a neighbor’s daughter, a year or two older than Jean. While Svetlana searches for her wallet, I wait awkwardly with the girl in the living room, finding it impossible not to notice, even obliquely, her firm new breasts under her tight cable sweater. Then catching myself and thinking: I wouldn’t want my daughter showing herself off like that.
No? the girl’s expression says back, when our eyes briefly intersect. And who the fuck are you, mister, and what the fuck are you doing here?
“You are okay walking?” Svetlana asks, pressing some bills into the girl’s hand.
“I’m okay, Mrs. Evans, thanks. It’s just two blocks and my mom’s waiting.”
The girl leaves, a gust of cold air entering the house on her way out. And what will she tell her mother, if anything, about the evening?
“I will check on Yasha,” Svetlana says.
I nod vaguely, listening to her steps, a bit heavier from drink, climbing the stairs. Lost in my own fugue state. As if I’ve never been in this house before, yet know it intimately. Like a dream in which every detail of a landscape is at once completely new and completely familiar, and the hand one sees reaching into the unfolding narrative is one’s own, yet different.
I discover an LP cover left out beside the turntable on the shelf. Classic Russian Songs: one of those generic compilations of kitsch that music companies are always putting together and selling on late-night television. The jacket art shows a photograph of a man dressed exactly like one of the waiters from the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-seventh Street.
There’s a knot in my throat I don’t know what to make of.
In her kitchen, I find vodka in the freezer and pour myself a drink. Raising the glass to my lips, I notice my hand trembling.
“One for me?”
While upstairs, she’s removed her cardigan; her arms are bare to the shoulders and pricked with goosebumps. Strong arms still, but softer now in places. Like the brown wool of her sleeveless dress, which looks both coarse and fine. Eight years older than when I first laid eyes on her that morning in the Zurich airport. Both of us. Though what strikes me in the heart is not pity or shame—the wisps of gray in our hair, the few added pounds around our middles—but how she grasped that little dinner gathering of cowardly stiffs (myself included) by the scruffs of our necks and shook us until the masks of our hypocritical composure cracked and fell away, showing us, for just an instant, our true faces. Unlike her own face, which—love it or leave it—has in my experience only ever been true.
That face that I have come to love, and cannot leave.
“Take mine,” I say, handing her the drink. “I’ve had enough.”
But instead of drinking, she sets the glass on the counter and looks right into me.
“So, Peter. What do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“Don’t be stupid. You do
n’t do it very well.”
We are standing very close. Whether I will ever feel more alive than I do at this moment is a question for another day. But now, slowly, her eyes leading mine, she takes my hands and places them on her full, womanly breasts.
“This,” she says. “What do you think about this?”
1975
11 March
Let us call Peter’s body a contradictory series of reluctantly divulged messages. His waist narrow and still boyish, but his chest—with little help from its owner, one assumes, other than the odd game of legal tennis—rather naturally broad and muscular. His biceps on the lax side, as if they could not be bothered to do more; his subtly impressive thighs, however, appearing ready to press above their weight. And where his chest and legs wear a thin but masculine carpeting of hair the color of chestnuts, the areas around his hip bones are as endearingly pale and smooth, I suspect, as when he was a boy.
More contradictions. His shyness at being seen fully naked versus his completely unexpected lack of inhibition in the way of noise at the moment of crisis (my nurse’s phrase, when she finally understood, without a word passing between us, that I was no longer a virgin of the Motherland). Peter’s prized Enlightenment virtues—thoughtfulness, rationality, science—of which he really is quite vain, versus his simmering anger against the timid of the world, himself perhaps included, which he has borne as long as he can remember. His passion versus his fear of passion. His secret desire for dominance. His private wish to break and hurt, however quietly, versus his public inclination to fix and heal. His rigid view of himself as a good husband and father and what this means in the life he has constructed versus the imaginative courage he must have needed to escape his oppressive childhood and which, he must already sense, he will need once again if he is to ever truly break free of what binds him.
17 March
The train to Penn Station; a taxi to West Forty-seventh Street and the Edison Hotel; pick up the lobby phone and ask for Mr. Horvath.
The Red Daughter Page 17