The Secrets We Kept

by Lara Prescott

  When they’d packed up their tiny room, in a collective apartment shared with four families, Mama had been three months pregnant with me and hoped to reach American shores in time for my birth. In fact, Mama’s pregnancy was what motivated my parents to leave. As her belly swelled, my father had secured the necessary papers and a place to live temporarily—with second cousins who’d made a life for themselves in a place called Pikesville, Maryland. It sounded so exotic to Mama at the time, and she’d whisper it to herself like a prayer: “Maryland,” she’d say. “Maryland.”

  At the time, my father had worked in an armaments factory, but before that, he’d attended the Institute of the Red Professors, where he studied philosophy. In his third year, he was dismissed for expressing ideas which fell outside the designated curriculum. The plan was for my father to seek work at one of the many universities in Baltimore or Washington, save up by living with our cousins for a year or two, then buy a house, a car, have another baby—the whole thing. My parents dreamed about the baby they’d have. They’d visualized its entire life: birth in a clean American hospital, learning its first words in both Russian and English, attending the best schools, learning to drive a big American car on a big American highway, maybe even playing baseball. In their dream, they’d sit up in the stands and eat peanuts and cheer. And in their future home, Mama would have a room of her own to make her dresses, and maybe even start her own business.

  They said goodbye to their parents and siblings and everyone and everything they’d ever known. They knew that once they left, they’d never be able to return, their citizenship stripped permanently for the pursuit of the American dream.

  I was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and my first word was a Russian da, followed by an English no. I did attend an excellent public school and even played softball and learned to drive in my cousin’s Crosley. But my father never saw any of it. It took years for Mama to tell me why I never met him, and when she did, she blurted it out in one rapid speech, as if she had something to confess. As she told it, they’d gotten in line to board the steamship that would take them across the Atlantic when two uniformed men approached and demanded that my father show them his papers. They’d already gone through this process with the other uniformed men, so Mama hadn’t immediately sensed the danger that Papa had when he pulled the papers out of his jacket. Without even looking at the travel documents, the men had taken hold of my father’s arms, saying their superior needed to have a look—in private. Mama grabbed hold of Papa, but the men yanked him away. She screamed and Papa calmly told Mama to board the ship—that he’d be along shortly. When she protested, he said again, “Board the ship.”

  As the steamer whistled that it was about to leave, Mama didn’t run to the railing to see if my father was running up the ramp at the last minute; she already knew she’d never see her husband again. Instead, she collapsed on the cot reserved for her in the third-class bunk. The cot next to hers would remain empty for the remainder of the journey, my steady kicks inside her belly her only companionship.

  Years later, when we received a telegram from Mama’s sister in Moscow saying that Papa had died in the Gulag, Mama spent exactly one week in bed. I was only eight at the time, but I carried on with the cooking and cleaning, getting myself to and from school, and finishing Mama’s small sewing jobs—repairing torn sleeves and hemming pants and then delivering the finished items.

  Her first job in America had been at Lou’s Cleaners & Alterations, where she pressed and ironed men’s shirts all day, coming home each night with her hands stained and cracked from the harsh chemicals. Only occasionally did she have the meager opportunity to take out her needle and hem a pair of pants or repair a jacket button. But a week after hearing about my father’s death, Mama got out of bed, put on a full face of makeup, quit her job at Lou’s, and went to work. Stitch after stitch, bead after bead, feather after feather, she applied the full extent of her grief to making dresses. She barely left the house for two months, and when she was done, she’d filled two trunks with gowns more beautiful than anything she’d ever produced. She persuaded the priest at Holy Cross Russian Orthodox Church to allow her to set up a small table at their annual fall festival. She sold every dress within hours, even the showpiece—a bridal gown that a woman bought for her eleven-year-old daughter to wear sometime in the future. When she was finished, we had enough money to move out of our cousins’ crowded house in Maryland, to put first and last months’ rent down on an apartment in D.C., and for Mama to get her dress business off the ground. She’d have her American dream, even if she had to do it by herself.

  She set up her shop—USA Dresses and More for You—in our basement apartment, and word of her talents spread. First- and second-generation Russian Americans sought her out for the intricate work she could do for a wedding or funeral or any special occasion. She boasted that she could stitch more sequins onto a bodice than anyone else on the continent. Soon enough she was known as the second-best Russian seamstress in the District. Number one was a woman named Bianka, with whom Mama had a bit of a rivalry. “She makes cuts,” she’d tell anyone who’d listen. “Her needlework, it’s sloppy. Her hems fall out if the wind blows. She has been in America far too long.”

  Mama supported us with her business, even paying for my college tuition when I received only a partial scholarship to Trinity. But when our landlord threatened to raise our rent, it became critical that I get a job. As I sat in reception, surveying my competition, the thought settled in my chest and I pressed my hand against my sternum to suppress it.

  Just as I was about to ask the receptionist where the ladies’ room was—so I could finally fix the paper towel that was now midway up my back—a man entered. He clapped his hands as if killing a fly. Then I recognized him: it was the same man who’d been waiting at the diner bathroom with the newspaper under his arm. My stomach fell through a hidden trapdoor.

  “This it?” the man asked.

  We all looked at one another, not knowing whom he was addressing.

  The receptionist looked up. “Indeed.”

  I felt like hiding behind the coat rack.

  We followed the man down a hall and into a room arranged with rows of desks. On each one sat a typewriter and a stack of paper. I sat in the second row, not wanting to seem too eager. It seemed no one else wanted to appear too eager either, so the second row turned out to be the front row after all.

  The man’s face—well, his nose anyway—made him look as if he’d once played hockey or boxed. He gave me a once-over as I took my seat but still didn’t seem to recognize me from the diner, thank God. He removed his suit jacket and rolled up his light blue sleeves.

  “I’m Walter Anderson,” he began. “Anderson,” he repeated. I half-expected him to turn around, pull down a chalkboard, and write his name in cursive. Instead, he opened his briefcase and removed a stopwatch. “If you pass this first test, I’ll learn your names. If you can’t type fast, I recommend you leave now.”

  He made eye contact with each of us and I looked right back at him the way Mama had always taught me to do. “They won’t respect you if you don’t look them in the eyes, Irina,” she’d told me. “Especially men.”

  Some women shifted in their seats, but no one got up.

  “Good,” Anderson said. “Let’s begin.”

  “Excuse me,” the older woman in the heavy cardigan asked. She had her hand raised and I burned with embarrassment for her.

  “I’m not your teacher,” Anderson said.

  She dropped her hand. “Right.”

  Anderson looked to the ceiling and exhaled. “Did you have a question?”

  “What will we be typing?”

  He sat at the large desk in the front of the room and removed a yellow book from his briefcase. It was a novel: The Bridges at Toko-ri. “Any literature fans?”

  We all raised our hands.

  “Good,
” he said. “Any James Michener fans?

  “I saw the movie,” I blurted out. “Grace Kelly was wonderful.”

  “Good for you,” Anderson said. He opened the book to the first page. “Shall we begin?” He held up his stopwatch.

  * * *

  —

  After, standing in the crowded elevator, I subtly plucked my blouse from my sweaty back. I reached underneath and fished around. Nothing. It was gone. Had the paper towel fallen out in the elevator? Or, God forbid, had it fallen out when I stood up after the test? Was Walter Anderson looking at the disgusting thing at that very moment? I thought about going back and retracing my steps to see where it might’ve come out but decided it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to get the job anyway.

  I was the second-slowest in the group, which I knew because Walter Anderson had tabulated, then read the results aloud.

  “Well, that’s it, I guess,” the pretty young brunette named Becky said as the elevator descended. She’d been the slowest.

  “There’ll be other opportunities,” said the older woman in the cardigan. She tried suppressing it, but I heard a tinge of joy in her voice—she had the best score by far.

  “That guy seemed like a total creep, anyway,” Becky continued. “Did you see how he looked at us? Like a steak dinner.” She looked at me. “Especially you.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. I had noticed Anderson looking at me, but I thought it had just been in an interview kind of way. But that was always the case with me and men. If a man found me attractive, I was always the last to know. A man would have to tell me directly for me to believe it—and even then, I only half-believed it. I thought myself rather plain—the kind of woman you might pass on the street or sit down next to on the bus without a second glance. My mother always said I was the type of woman you had to get a good look at to appreciate. And to tell you the truth, I preferred fading into the background. Life was easier being unnoticed—without the whistles that trailed other women, the comments that made them cover their chest with their purse, the eyes that followed them everywhere.

  There was a slight disappointment, though, when, at sixteen, I realized I wasn’t going to turn out to be the kind of beauty my mother had been in her youth. Whereas Mama was all curves, I was all angles. When I was a girl, she’d wear a shapeless housedress during the day while she worked. But sometimes, at night, she’d change into her handmade creations and model the dresses she’d made for wealthy women. She’d twirl and make the full skirts fly in our kitchen, and I’d tell her the dress would never again look as beautiful.

  I’d seen a photograph of her at my age, wearing her factory uniform—an olive-green smock with matching cap. We couldn’t have looked more dissimilar. I looked so much more like my father. After he died, Mama kept a photograph of him wearing his army uniform in her bottom dresser drawer. Sometimes, when she was out of the house, I’d take it out and stare at that photograph, telling myself that if I ever forgot what he looked like, an empty space would open inside me that could never be closed again.

  The applicants parted outside the Agency’s gates with a wave. The older woman who’d bested us all called out, “Good luck!”

  “I’ll need it,” said the woman who’d sat next to me during the test, as she lit a cigarette.

  I needed it too, although I didn’t believe in luck.

  * * *

  Two weeks passed and I found myself back at the kitchen table circling want ads while drinking tea. Mama was at the Ping-Pong table working on a dress for our landlord’s daughter’s Quinceañera in hopes of buttering him up not to raise our rent. She was telling me for the second time that day a story she’d read in the Post about a woman who’d given birth to a baby girl on the Key Bridge. “They couldn’t make it to the hospital in time, so they stopped the car and delivered the baby right there! Can you believe this?” she called out from the next room. When I didn’t answer, she repeated the story, but two decibels louder.

  “I heard you the first time!”

  “Can you believe this?”

  “I can’t.”

  “What?”

  “I said, I can’t!”

  I needed to get out of the house—to go for a walk, to go anywhere. Mama had me running errands for her, but besides that I didn’t have much to do. I’d responded to a dozen ads but secured only one interview for the following week. As I put on my coat, the phone rang. I ran into the living room just in time to see Mama pick up the receiver. “What do you say?” she said in the extra-loud voice she reserved for telephone calls.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Irene? There is no Irene here. Why are you calling here?”

  I grabbed the phone. “Hello?” Mama shrugged and went back to the Ping-Pong table.

  “Miss Irina Droz-do-vah?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “Yes, this is she. I’m sorry about that. My mother doesn’t—”

  “Please hold for Walter Anderson.”

  “What?”

  Classical music switched on, and my stomach muscles clenched. After a moment, the music stopped, cut off by Mr. Anderson’s voice. “We want you to come back in.”

  “I thought I scored second to last?” I asked, then gritted my teeth. Did I really have to remind him of my mediocrity?

  “That’s correct.”

  “And I thought there was only one position open?” Was I trying to self-sabotage?

  “We liked what we saw.”

  “I got the job?”

  “Not yet, Speedy,” he said. “Or should I come up with a better nickname for you, given your typing skills? Can you come in at two?”

  “Today?” I was supposed to go to a fabric store in Friendship Heights to help Mama pick out some silver sequins for the Quinceañera dress. Mama never liked to go to the fabric store alone because she thought the woman who owned it was prejudiced against Russians. “She charges me twice, no, three times as much!” she’d told me the last time she went by herself. “She looks at me like I’m about to drop the bomb on the store. Every time!”

  “Yes. Today,” he said.

  “At two?”

  “Two.”

  “Two?” Mama appeared in the entryway. “We have to go to the Friendship Heights at two.”

  I waved her away. “I’ll be there,” I said, but was met with silence. Anderson had already hung up. I had one hour to get dressed and get downtown.

  “So?” Mama asked.

  “I have another interview. Today.”

  “You already did the typing examination. What else do they want you to do? Perform gymnastics? Bake a cake? What else do they need to know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked up and down at the flowered housedress I was wearing. “Whatever it is, you can’t go looking like that.”

  * * *

  —

  This time, I wore the linen.

  I was early again, but was escorted into Walter Anderson’s office as soon as I arrived. What he asked first was not a question I’d anticipated. He didn’t ask where I saw myself in five years, what I thought my biggest weakness was, or why I wanted the job. And he didn’t ask if I was a Communist, or if I had any allegiance to the place of my birth. “Tell me about your father,” he began as soon as I sat down. He opened a thick folder with my name on it. “Mikhail Abramovich Drozdov.” My chest tightened. I hadn’t heard his name spoken in years. Despite the linen, I could feel beads of sweat collect at the nape of my neck.

  “I never knew my father.”

  “One moment,” he said, and pulled back from his desk. He removed a tape recorder from the bottom drawer. “I’m always forgetting to turn this thing on. Do you mind?” Without waiting for me to answer, he clicked the button. “Says here he was sentenced to hard labor for illegally procuring travel documents.”

  So that was it: th
at was why they’d taken him at the docks. But why had they let my mother go? I asked Anderson the question as soon as I thought it.

  “Punishment,” he said.

  I stared at the coffee stains on his desk, overlapping like Olympic rings. A flush of heat ran down my arms and legs and I felt unsteady. “I was eight when I found out,” I managed to say. For eight years, we knew nothing. As a child, I’d imagined the moment I’d be reunited with my father—what he’d look like and how he’d scoop me up into his arms and whether he’d have a certain smell to him, like tobacco or aftershave, as I’d imagined.

  I scanned Anderson’s face for sympathy, but all I got was slight annoyance, as if I should’ve known what the Big Red Monster was capable of. “I’m sorry, what does this have to do with the typing position?”

  “It has everything to do with your working here. If you’d like to stop now, if you find it too uncomfortable, that’s fine with me.”

  “No, I…” I wanted to scream that it was all my fault, that it was I who’d caused his death, that if I hadn’t been conceived, they wouldn’t have risked so much. But I composed myself.

  “Do you know how he died?” Anderson asked.

  “We were told he had a heart attack in the tin mines at Berlag.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No. I don’t.” I’d always felt the answer buried deep inside but had never said it aloud, not even to Mama.

  “He never made it to the camps. He died in Moscow.” He paused. “During interrogations.”

  I wondered what Mama knew, and what she didn’t. Had she believed what was in the telegram from her sister about my father’s death? Or had she known better? Had she pretended all this time for my sake?

  “How does that make you feel?” Anderson asked.

  This was not a question I’d prepared for. I fixed my gaze on the coffee rings. “Confused.”