The White Russian Read online

  ‘You did know your grandma,’ Hughie added eventually, as if he’d been weighing whether to say even this. ‘But maybe you won’t recall. You were very small.’ He measured the air with his big pink hand, bending slightly to get it down to beside his knee. Toddler height.

  This surprised me, all right. But I didn’t want him to suddenly remember they’d decided not to talk about it in front of me. So I turned the alert flicker I felt pass across my face into a look of half-remembering politeness – a kind of visual ‘Uh-huh? Oh, how interesting.’ It was the sort of thing I’d got good at, at home with Mother, with her dangerous sensitivity to slight: staying buttoned up; not doing very much.

  It was working, too, I thought. Hughie’s face lightened as he started to reminisce.

  ‘It was the only time I ever saw her, either, come to think of it. She showed up from the south of France to stay here with us, a couple of months after your mother married me – right here on Shelter Island. Just after she’d married, too – her Russian count. She brought him with her. I don’t expect your mother could have stopped her. It’s your whole family’s holiday house, after all.’ His lips twitched. Keeping my mind blank yet receptive, I smiled and widened my eyes encouragingly. ‘You don’t remember him either, I guess? The Russian count? Well, he was a real piece of work. Tall, stood like a soldier, impressive to look at, at least till you got close enough to know what you were seeing. And then, well … to my mind he had too much grease on his hair, collars all gone, even if he did bow all the time and kiss ladies’ hands and wear white gloves – grubby ones – at breakfast. Too darn knickerbocker for me. Couldn’t stop telling us all the usual stories: about how grand he’d been before the Revolution … and how tragic his life had become since … how he’d walked for days across a lake of ice to get to safety … about the priceless jewels sewn into his dead first wife’s corset, you know the kind of thing?’

  Despite myself, I felt my smile get more uncertain. It was good talking to Hughie, even if he never told Mother to stop when, for weeks at a stretch, something upset her and the whole rhythm of our life got messed up. We weren’t close, exactly, and I sometimes worried that he’d maybe have preferred it if I weren’t there and he could enjoy life with his beautiful, emotional wife without the quiet child who’d come attached to her. But I liked his slow way of talking. As he was saying all this, I told myself that I’d figure it out later, when I was alone: put the pieces of this unfamiliar story together in my mind. But what I couldn’t understand, right now, in this strange conversational byway we’d somehow gone down, was this: how could any of those wild, romantic stories possibly be called ‘usual’?

  Hughie’s grin broadened. ‘You won’t have come across many of them yet, either: Russians? Well, you soon will. The world’s full of lost Russians these days, all waiting for someone to buy them a drink and a meal. Just go to the Russian Tea Room any day: you’ll see crowds of ‘em, and every one with a title and a tall tale, getting taller every time they tell it. Not that I blame them. That’s revolution for you. There’s nothing to stop them exaggerating, now that the place they came from has disappeared. None of them has two dimes to rub together, mind, but they all have plenty to say for themselves. The con man, that’s what I called Constance’s count.’

  He chuckled. I did too.

  ‘So, he spent the summer drinking his way through my wine, which I’d been hoping to impress my new wife with, though nothing I’d brought could impress him; he’d always drunk far better with the Tsar or a grand duke, back in his glory days; and bending anyone’s ear who’d listen about how he was going into town in the fall to sell Marie Antoinette’s earrings to Mrs Hussey Degen, and make enough money to keep Constance – your grandma, that is – in luxury for the rest of her days.

  ‘To do her justice, Constance didn’t have a moment to spare for his émigré talk. She just laughed whenever she heard him start on about the past, and left it to me to listen – though she did it with charm; she’s quite a woman. She was more interested in the future. And I don’t just mean reading out improving texts from The Delineator, either, about New Women playing golf and driving automobiles, because it was 1919.’

  He raised an eyebrow, enjoying drawing me into his story. ‘She spent that summer campaigning for female emancipation.’

  I couldn’t help the quiver of astonishment that went through me at that.

  ‘Well, you can imagine how that went down with your mother,’ he added.

  I shook my head. Even then, years and years after the Nineteenth Amendment, Mother, unlike almost every other female I knew, still had no time for women working, or voting, or taking an interest in social improvements, or in fact leaving the home much at all. Mother, when she wasn’t upset, was kittenish, or maybe butterflyish. She thought women were for fluttering.

  ‘Do you mean giving out pamphlets?’ I asked weakly.

  He laughed out loud. ‘Oh, worse than that. Far worse. She was a whirlwind: committees, readings, meetings, you name it …’

  He paused. I waited. ‘But her really big idea was the parade,’ Hughie continued. ‘She’d read about one like it in The Delineator, and she was hell bent on copying it here. She was organizing getting on for a hundred women to go stand outside Prospect House in yellow sashes, holding yellow parasols.’

  I thought of those yellow amber beads I’d remembered.

  ‘And this is where it all went so wrong. You see, she asked Jeannie to head the parade, dressed as the Statue of Liberty.’

  I felt my eyes widen. In fact, I was so shocked I hardly knew how to make my body take in air.

  ‘She was quite insistent. And when Jeannie refused, and had me promise to take her right back to town on the weekend of the parade – I made it all right, you know; told Constance there was a dinner we couldn’t get out of – well, Constance just came right back and asked, very briskly, if she couldn’t “borrow” you instead? Put you in your best white dress up at the front instead – as the woman voter of the future?’ He caught my eye and nodded. ‘She was very keen on you, you know. She spent a lot of time playing with you.’

  I was having trouble breathing again. ‘… And … did she?’ I eventually managed to ask, gulping a bit. ‘Did I?

  He smiled regretfully. ‘Your mother would never have allowed it. You know that.’

  I nodded. Of course.

  ‘We took you back to town with us. Just in case, Jeannie said. She didn’t want Constance getting ideas.’ He looked more serious now. ‘And once we were home, Jeannie wrote Constance a letter, the kind of letter that’s probably more about all the things that have happened between people in the past than about whatever’s got on their nerves today, I’d say …’

  Hughie looked away from me, but even so I could see how carefully he was picking his words. I was guessing he’d decided not to interfere when this letter was being written.

  ‘A terrible letter,’ I hazarded. ‘The sort that says, “Never darken my door again.” ’

  Mother wasn’t a forgiver. When Mother fell out with a person, that person fell utterly from grace, suddenly turning out to have committed many, many earlier misdemeanours, stretching back through time, all detailed in faint, hurt tones to anyone who’d listen. Any such person stayed away from beach and card parties ever after.

  ‘It was about you,’ Hughie continued. ‘On the face of things, anyway. Jeannie told Constance never to think of trying to influence you to be like her, and a whole lot more besides. And that she could stay on the island until after the damn parade, but that she had to be gone by the end of the week, when we’d be coming back. And that was that.’

  He spread helpless hands.

  I ran through a mental list of things I should say: ‘Poor Grandmother’ or ‘Poor Mother’ or maybe something about having seen the photo Grandmother had sent. Or how I’d remembered those yellow beads, and were they connected with the yellow of the parade?

  Instead, into my mouth came other words. ‘I would like to go
to Bryn Mawr,’ I heard myself saying.

  Whatever could have gotten into me? I’d broken my number-one rule for avoiding trouble: never say what you want, or it will be too disappointing when you don’t get it. But when I finally dared look up, when the silence had gone on too long not to, I saw that Hughie was looking back at me with a faintly surprised smile, and nodding.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s see if we can make that happen.’ And although I didn’t yet know the way he’d find to ‘make it all right’, which this time he would achieve by telling Mother I should be allowed to go away, but that he should pick up the bill instead of Grandmother, I could already see in his eyes that everything was all settled.

  I would go to college. To Bryn Mawr.

  3

  Going away changed everything for me. First, there were the books we were all studying and arguing over – endless discussions about novels that transported us into revolutions in Asia and left us tussling with agonizing existential choices, or took us down the mean streets with Sam Spade, or to the house at Tortilla Flat in which Danny and his jobless friends became wino Knights of the Round Table. And then there were the people: an intoxicating rainbow of real people, whose lives had till now been so completely other from mine that finding out about them felt almost more exciting than the ideas of the humanities course, until I realized that, in all the important things, they were just like me. We all wanted to live, breathe, eat, dance, laugh, argue about FDR’s fireside chats and whether he, along with Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini, were really, as the Chicago Tribune had it, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Then there was the possibility of war in Europe and the rights and wrongs of Spain and fascism and anarchy and communism, along with questions about hunger and the dustbowl and whether poverty bred degeneracy and what about birth control and what would come of the union disputes. Anyway, in all that, happening at a rate so fast you could hardly keep up except at a breathless gabble, I soon stopped being tongue-tied. There was just no time for shyness.

  But I did have one secret I never shared with anyone.

  The first letter I received on campus was a small parcel from a bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare and Co. I didn’t know anyone in Paris; there was only my grandmother, who’d wanted me to study here. I had her picture, still folded into a book, somewhere in my still-unpacked box. I kept that little package in my bag all day, hugging the knowledge of it to myself, full of expectation. I didn’t open it until I got back to the privacy of my room in the evening, pleased that my new roommate was out. But there were no revelations inside. It contained no note, nothing, just a book: a small, plain, cloth-covered Everyman edition of a Russian novel in translation. Anna Karenina, I read on the spine. Leo Tolstoy. I opened it, a little disappointed, and looked at the first line. ‘Happy families are all alike,’ I read; ‘every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

  Was it a kind of oblique message? I looked for a return address. Could I at least write and thank her? But there was nothing.

  Well, Mother had told my grandmother not to try to influence me any more. I guessed she was trying to obey that order, while showing she wished me well. I couldn’t see what to do except read the book she’d sent, and move her photo into it, and keep it on my shelf, and treasure her kind thought.

  I made a point of reading my Tolstoy in a Russian café downtown, a dusty little place hung with dingy lace drapes. It was run by a grey-haired woman called Madame Brodyanskaya. She was tall and upright with thick lips and wore a flowered shawl round her shoulders. She spoke terrible English, but made good pancakes that she called blinchiki with sour cream, thicker sour cream, and sugar. You could see from her eloquent eyes that she had a big personality. She was a poet, she said, the one time we talked, after she’d noticed I was reading Anna Karenina.

  At the back of the café, behind the samovar and near the icon corner, was a bookshelf of Russian poetry. People brought in the dog-eared books they’d finished and took others out. Sometimes they sat half the day reading, over tea in a glass in a filigree holder. They weren’t young, yet they had good faces and thoughtful eyes. Madame Brodyanskaya said they were, or had been, writers. They didn’t smile much, these Russians. But sometimes when a new sombre person came in, brushing the rain off his hat, someone sitting quietly in a corner would look up, and they’d suddenly start laughing big bear laughs and hugging big bear hugs, with as much joy as if they’d cheated death to be reunited. I never dared start talking to them – I never heard them speak English – and of course I couldn’t understand what they said to each other. But I didn’t think these people were boasting about lost estates or jewels, as Hughie had suggested all Russians did. Probably they were really just talking about something mundane most of the time: the price of gas, or where to get potatoes. But I liked to imagine them philosophically meditating, like Levin in my novel, about the right way to live. And I imagined Grandmother sitting among them, nodding.

  The following September, another little parcel from Paris was waiting for me on my return to campus. It was another translated Russian novel, this time Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, which I was now sophisticated enough to characterize quite quickly as a wistful story about generation gaps. I was proud of being able to see more easily now what my mysterious correspondent was getting at. And the gentleness of her move made me feel warmly towards her. I wished, again, that there was some way I could respond. But, again, there was no return address.

  The third and last parcel arrived just as I was packing up to go home for good. It contained a different kind of book: a paperback of French surrealist poetry, wrapped in newspaper. I spoke French, by then; we’d had to read the poetry of Baudelaire and Victor Hugo and Mallarmé, but this dancing, dreamy, modern stuff – the first page I opened described a dear old priest lifting up his cassock and flying away across the lake, then wondering why his hem was wet – was quite different.

  Unlike the other gifts from Paris, too, I saw that this little book was used. There was nothing written in it, but the spine was bent in a couple of places. And there was a thin slip of paper inserted at a page-long verse called ‘Poem to the Mysterious Woman’. I pulled out the bookmark. Nothing there. So I read the poem.

  I have dreamed so much of you that you’re losing your reality.

  Is there still time to reach for your living, breathing body

  and kiss on that mouth the birthplace

  of the voice I cherish?

  I have dreamed so much of you

  that my arms, accustomed

  while embracing your shadow to cross themselves over

  my chest would maybe

  not fold around the contours of your body.

  And that, faced with the actual appearance of

  what has haunted and

  governed me for days and years,

  It might be I who became a shadow.

  O sentimental scales.

  I have dreamed so much of you

  that I might never wake up again.

  I sleep standing up, with my body exposed

  to all the appearances of life

  and of love and you, the only person

  who counts for me today –

  I could less touch your forehead and your lips

  than the first lips and the first forehead that

  happen by.

  I have dreamed so much of you,

  walked and talked and slept with your ghost so much,

  that maybe all there is left for me to do

  is to be a ghost

  among the ghosts, and a shadow

  a hundred times more shadowy than the one strolling

  and ready to go on eagerly strolling

  over the sundial of your life.

  The yearning tenderness of those verses tugged at my heart. I put it down on the bed, still open at that page. It was a poem to a lost lover, I could see, rather than to a child, and yet …

  And yet, how I wished I knew the person who’d sent me that po
em.

  I flipped over the wrappings. The book wasn’t from a store this time. It had been folded first in a layer of old newspaper and then in brown paper and string.

  I flattened out the newspaper first, a torn-out part-page with a blurry mix of tail-ends of stories about Leon Blum and ads for corsets around the edges. In the middle was a bigger ad for a Russian singer’s show at a Paris restaurant. ‘Retour de La Tsiganka!’ was what I saw first, in big cheery letters, above a photo of a stout, heavily made-up, soulful-looking middle-aged woman, in a patterned shawl like Madame Brodyanskaya’s. Underneath, in smaller letters, I read, ‘Une soirée inoubliable … Nadezhda Plevitskaya de retour Chez Raspoutine, rue de la Néva,’ along with details and a date a couple of months before.

  It was only when I also smoothed out the brown paper that I saw that there was a return address this time: Mme la Comtesse Sabline, 29 rue du Colisée, 8e.

  I got out a sheet of writing paper straight away.

  But when I sat down at the desk it looked too white, too empty.

  After a long time staring at that page, biting the handle of the pen in my hand, dipping it in the ink, wiping the ink against the side of the bottle, and wondering what I’d say, I put the pen back in the holder.