The Secrets We Kept

by Lara Prescott

“I better brave it.” She patted her purse. “Mama’s expecting her beets.”

  I laughed but felt a stab of sadness. “Rain check, then?”

  “Deal.”

  Irina ran out to the turquoise-and-white streetcar idling on the corner. She boarded and I watched as it turned the corner and disappeared from view. The sky opened up with a crack of lightning. I leaned against a movie poster for Jailhouse Rock and it started to pour.

  * * *

  —

  In the weeks following the movie, I took Irina to my favorite bookstores, going over each shop’s pros and cons and what I’d do differently if I owned it. We saw the West Side Story premiere at the National and sang “I Feel Pretty” at the top of our lungs the entire walk home. We went to the zoo but left after Irina saw a lion who’d paced so long in her cage she’d worn a narrow path alongside the bars. “It’s a crime,” she said.

  In all that time, we hadn’t so much as let a hug linger a second too long, but it didn’t matter. It had been so long that I didn’t recognize it at first. Not since my Kandy days had I let someone get so close so fast. I’d built up a wall after Jane—a Navy Corps nurse with Shirley Temple hair and teeth white as soap—broke my heart.

  Really, more than the heart breaks. When Jane told me our “special friendship” would be over as soon as we stepped back onto American soil and chalked it up to just one of those things that happened during the war, my chest felt as if it was caving in and my legs, my arms, the top of my head, even my teeth hurt. I vowed never to put myself in harm’s way like that again, and I had been relatively successful.

  Plus, I knew there was no path that wouldn’t dead-end. I’d had friends who were picked up during their late-night walks in Lafayette Square, locked up, their names printed in the newspaper. I’d had friends who were fired from their government jobs, their reputations destroyed, disowned by their families. I’d had friends who convinced themselves the only way out was to step off a chair, a noose wrapped around their neck. The Red Scare had dwindled, but a new one had taken its place.

  And yet I kept going. I kept asking her to grab lunch at Ferranti’s, or check out the new Korean art exhibit at the National Gallery, or try on hats and fascinators at Rizik’s.

  I kept seeing how far I could go before needing to step back.

  So when Frank asked me for another favor, I told myself that work would be a good distraction, a necessary distraction.

  * * *

  The night before I left for my next job, I put on a Fats Domino record and felt a jolt of happiness every time I placed an item inside my mint-green Lady Baltimore luggage. After years of last-minute jaunts, I’d learned the art of packing light: one black pencil skirt, one white blouse, one nude bra and panty set, one cashmere wrap for the flight, black silk hose, my Tiffany cigarette case, toothbrush, toothpaste, Camay rose soap, Crème Simon face cream, deodorant, razor, Tabac Blond, notebook, pen, my favorite Hermès scarf, and Revlon lipstick—in Original Red. The gown I’d wear to the book party would be waiting for me when I arrived. After years away, it felt good to be back in the game, to know secrets, to be useful.

  I arrived the next evening at the Grand Hotel Continental Milano, just hours before the party started. Minutes after I entered my hotel suite, there was a knock on the door and a bellhop brought in my gown. I pointed for him to lay it on the bed, and he did so as gently as laying down a lover. I tipped him generously, as I always did when someone else was footing the bill, and sent him on his way. I’d ordered the red-and-black floor-length Pucci as soon as I heard the words Milan and party. Running my hand across the silk, I was quite pleased I’d secured a clothing budget from the Agency. After a bath, I applied a drop of Tabac Blond to each side of my neck, then to my wrists, then under my breasts, and slipped on the gown that had been tailored to my exact measurements.

  That was the best part: the moment you become someone else. New name, new occupation, new background, education, siblings, lovers, religion—it was easy for me. And I never broke my cover, even down to the smallest details: whether she ate toast or eggs for breakfast, whether she took her coffee black or with milk, whether she was the type of woman to stop in the street to admire a crossing pigeon or shoo one away in disgust, whether she slept nude or in a nightgown. It was both a talent and a survival tactic. After assuming a cover, I found it harder and harder to go back to my real life. I’d imagine what it would be like to completely disappear into someone new. To become someone else, you have to want to lose yourself in the first place.

  * * *

  —

  I’d timed my entrance to exactly twenty-five minutes after the party began. A waiter handed me a flute of bubbly as I entered the gilded room, and I immediately located the guest of honor: not the author of the novel whose publication was being celebrated, as he could not possibly attend, but the novel’s publisher. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli stood in the middle of Milan’s finest-dressed intellectuals, editors, journalists, writers, and hangers-on. He wore thick black glasses, had a high widow’s peak, and was slightly too thin for his height. But all the women, and more than one man, couldn’t take their eyes off him. Feltrinelli’s nickname was the Jaguar, and indeed, he moved with the confidence and elegance of a jungle cat. The majority of the party guests were in black tie, but Feltrinelli wore white trousers and a navy blue sweater, the corner of his striped shirt beneath untucked. The trick to pinpointing the man with the biggest bank account in the room is not to look to the man in the nicest tux, but to the man not trying to impress. Feltrinelli pulled out a cigarette, and someone in his orbit reached to light it.

  There are two types of ambitious men: those bred to be ambitious—told from a very young age that the world is theirs for the taking—and those who create their own legacy. Feltrinelli was cut from both cloths. Whereas most men born into great wealth carry the burden of preserving their inherited legacy, Feltrinelli hadn’t started a publishing company just as another notch in his empire, but because he truly believed literature could change the world.

  In the back of the room was a large table covered in books stacked into a pyramid. The Italians had done it: Doctor Zhivago had made it into print. Within a week, it would be in every bookstore window across Italy, its name splashed across every newspaper’s front page. I was to take one of those books and hand-deliver it to the Agency so they could have it translated and determine if it was indeed the weapon the Agency thought it might be. Frank Wisner had also tasked me with getting close to Feltrinelli to see what we might find out—about the book’s publication and distribution, about the publisher’s relationship with Pasternak.

  I took a copy of Il dottor Živago and ran my fingers across its glossy cover: a design of white, pink, and blue scribbles hovering above a tiny sleigh making its way to a snow-covered cottage.

  “An American who reads Italian?” a man standing on the other side of the book pyramid asked. “How fetching.” He wore an ivory tuxedo with a black pocket square and tortoiseshell glasses with frames too small for his broad face.

  “No.” In truth, I could read Italian and was conversationally fluent. When I was young, back before I’d changed my name from Forelli to Forrester, my grandmother had lived with our family. First generation Italian American, Nonna spoke hardly a word of English—just yes, no, stop it, and leave me be—and I learned how to converse with her over card games of Scopa and Briscola.

  “Why take a book you can’t read?” His accent was hard to place. Italian, but a practiced Italian. He either wasn’t Italian or was attempting a Florentine dialect to appear posher than he was.

  “I love a first edition,” I said. “And a good party.”

  “Well, if you need help reading it…” He tipped his glasses downward, and I noticed a small red mark on the bridge of his nose.

  “I might just take you up on that.”

  He waved a waiter over and handed me a glass of
Prosecco without taking one for himself.

  “Nothing for the toast?”

  “I’m afraid I must go,” he said, and touched my arm. “If you ever get a spot on that pretty gown of yours, look me up back in Washington. I own a dry cleaning business and we can get any spot out, I assure you. Ink, wine, blood. Anything.” He turned and left, a copy of Il dottor Živago tucked under his arm.

  KGB? MI6? One of our own? I looked around to see if anyone had noticed the strange interaction as Feltrinelli clinked his glass with a spoon. The publisher stepped atop an overturned wooden crate as if about to make a stump speech. Had he brought the crate himself for the effect? Or had the hotel provided it? Regardless, the look fitted him.

  “I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone for being here tonight on this momentous occasion,” he began, reading from a piece of paper he’d pulled from his pocket. “Over a year ago, the winds of fate brought me Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece. I wish those very winds could be here to celebrate with us tonight, but alas, they cannot.” He grinned and a few people in the audience laughed. “When I first held this novel in my hands, I could not read one word of it. The only Russian word I know is Stolichnaya.” More laughter. “But my dear friend Pietro Antonio Zveteremich”—he pointed to a sweater-vested man puffing on a pipe toward the back of the crowd—“told me that to not publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture. But even before he read it, I knew just by holding it in my hands that it was special.” He dropped the piece of paper he was reading from and let it flutter to the ground. “So I took a chance. It would be months before Pietro would complete his translation and I could finally read these words.” He held up Zhivago. “But when I did, the Russian master’s words burned themselves into my heart forever, as I’m sure they will into yours.”

  “Hear, hear!” someone called out.

  “I never intended to be the first to bring this work to an audience,” Feltrinelli continued. “It was my intention to secure the foreign rights after it was published in its native land. But of course life doesn’t always go according to plan.”

  A woman at Feltrinelli’s feet raised her glass. “Cin cin!”

  “I’ve been told it would be a crime to publish this work. I’ve been told that to publish this book would be the end of me.” He looked around the room. “But I hold in my heart the truth Pietro spoke when he first read it, that not to publish this novel would be an even greater crime. Of course, Boris Pasternak himself asked that I delay publication. I told him that there was no time to waste, that I needed to bring his words to the world posthaste. And I did.” The crowd erupted. “Please raise your glasses for a toast to Boris Pasternak, a man I’ve yet to meet but feel tied to by fate. A man who created a work of art out of the Soviet experience, a life-changing—no, a life-affirming—work that will stand the test of time and place him firmly in the company of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. To a man much braver than I. Salut!”

  Glasses were raised and drinks downed. Feltrinelli stepped off the crate and was absorbed back into his crowd of well-wishers. Moments later, he excused himself and made his way to the restroom. I positioned myself at a telephone in the lobby so he’d have to pass me on his way back.

  He did, and I hung up the phone timed to the second he noticed me. “Having a pleasant time, I hope?” he asked.

  “A wonderful time. A beautiful night.”

  “Unbearably so.” He took a step back, as if to admire a piece of art from another angle. “We’ve never met?”

  “The universe hasn’t willed it, I suppose.”

  “Indeed. Well, I’m happy the universe has made a point of correcting its grievous mistake.” He took my hand and kissed it.

  “You are the reason the book has come to print?”

  He placed his hand over his heart. “I accept sole responsibility.”

  “The author didn’t have a say in it?”

  “No, not exactly. It wasn’t possible for him.”

  Before I could ask if Pasternak was in danger, Feltrinelli’s wife—a dark-haired beauty wearing a sleeveless black velvet gown and matching jeweled choker—approached. She took her husband firmly by the arm and escorted him back to the party. She looked back at me once, in case I hadn’t gotten the point.

  As the party wound down, the red-jacketed waitstaff began clearing away the mounds of uneaten stuffed mussels, beef carpaccio, and shrimp crostini, along with the copious number of empty Prosecco bottles littered across the room. Mrs. Feltrinelli had left in a limousine moments earlier, and Feltrinelli called out to the dwindled crowd to join him at Bar Basso. As he left, followed by a throng of hangers-on, he turned abruptly to me. “You’ll be joining us, no?” he asked. He didn’t stop to wait for my answer, already knowing what it would be.

  A silver Citroën and a small fleet of black Fiats awaited us at the front of the hotel. Feltrinelli and a young blonde who’d arrived just minutes after his wife left got into the Alfa Romeo, and the rest of us piled into the Fiats. Feltrinelli revved his engine and sped away, while we got stuck behind two men carrying dates on Vespas—tourists, judging by the fact that they drove slowly and steadily instead of weaving in and out of traffic like locals.

  Our group spilled out of the cars and pushed its way inside Bar Basso, shouting out drink orders at the white-jacketed bartenders. I found a spot along a mirrored wall and scanned the bar for Feltrinelli. No sign of him. A short man with an undone bow tie and red-wine-stained lips passed me carrying an oversized cocktail glass. I recognized him as one of the photographers from the party. “Would you like a drink?” He held out the glass. “Take mine!”

  I kept my hands to my sides. “Where is the guest of honor?”

  “In bed by now, I imagine.”

  “I thought he was coming here.”

  “How do you Americans say? Plans are made to be rearranged?”

  “Changed?”

  “That’s it! I believe he decided to have a more private celebration.” The photographer put his arm around my waist, the tips of his fingers drifting below the small of my back. Shuddering, I removed his hand from my body and left the bar.

  * * *

  —

  I’d succeeded in obtaining the book, which I placed in my hotel room’s small safe before heading back out. But I’d failed at getting more information out of Feltrinelli. It seemed he’d been protecting Pasternak, but why? Was the author in more danger than we thought? The blonde Feltrinelli had taken off with was at least fifteen years younger than I, and I couldn’t help but think if I were that age, I’d have been the woman he pulled into his sports car and told his secrets to.

  Taxis passed, but I decided to walk. I wanted to enjoy the fresh air. And I was hungry. My first stop was at a gelato cart attached to an old mule. The teenager manning the cart told me the mule’s name was Vicente the Majestic. I laughed, and the boy said that my laugh was just as beautiful as my red dress and my red hair. I thanked him, and he handed me the lemon gelato, “Offerto dalla casa.”

  The free gelato helped soothe my damaged ego but didn’t keep me from wondering if I was getting too old for this job. It used to be so easy. Now my skin glowed only with the application of expensive creams that made more promises than they could keep, and the sheen on my hair came from a bottle of pricey exotic oils bought in Paris. And when I lay down at night sans bra, my breasts gravitated to my armpits.

  When I turned thirteen, boys and men alike began to notice me, the anonymity of my prepubescent form having disappeared over the course of one summer. My mother was the first to notice. Once, after she caught me looking at my profile in the reflection of a store window, she stopped and told me a beautiful woman needs to have something to fall back on when the beauty fades, or she’ll be left with nothing. “And it will fade,” she said. Would I have nothing to fall back on? How much longer did I have until I was forced to find out?


  Unlike Feltrinelli, my ambition didn’t come from my wallet. It stemmed from a delusion that I was someone special, and the world owed me something—perhaps because I was brought up with nothing. Or maybe we all hold that delusion at some point—most of us giving it up after adolescence; but I never let it go. It gave me an unwavering belief that I could do anything, at least for a while. The problem with that type of ambition is that it requires constant reassurance from others, and when that assurance doesn’t come, you falter. And when you falter, you go after the lowest-hanging fruit—someone to make you feel wanted and powerful. But that type of reassurance is like the brief buzz of alcohol: you need it to keep dancing, but it only leaves you sick the next day.

  The lemon gelato tasted like summer, and I told myself to stop the self-loathing. I changed my mind about going straight back to the hotel and stopped in the Piazza della Scala to see the Leonardo da Vinci monument.

  The piazza was aglow. A small team of men were hanging white Christmas lights from the trees encircling the monument at the square’s center. One man in brown coveralls was holding the ladder with one hand and smoking with the other, while a man atop the ladder was trying to undo a knot in the wires. The other men stood to the side, arguing over the best way to undo such a significant knot.

  A middle-aged couple sat on one of the concrete benches near Leonardo’s feet. Their faces were close and intense, and I couldn’t tell whether they were about to break up or kiss.

  I thought of Irina. I thought about how we could never be that couple—kissing, or even fighting, right out there in the open for all to see. The thought came over me like news of someone’s sudden death, and I realized I had to put a stop to whatever was happening between us and just mourn what could have been.

  I walked to the edge of the square and hailed a taxi.

  “Signora, si sente bene?” the taxi driver asked when we’d arrived at the hotel. I’d fallen asleep, and the driver spoke to me with such tenderness, I surprised myself by tearing up. He looked so concerned. He held out his hand and helped me out of the car. “Starai bene,” he said. “Starai bene.”