The Red Daughter Read online

  Ever been to Vietnam?

  No.

  The shit going down over there is worse than anything even your old man ever cooked up. And I’m not fucking kidding.

  Suddenly, Peter is at my side, a hand on my elbow. All right?

  Our Russian friend and I were just talking about travel, the journalist says in a tone that might as easily be sincere as a savage joke. So many places to go and so little time.

  Peter glances at me for confirmation. I allow him to guide me across the room to the female novelist, whose black hair is cut straight across her forehead like that of a schoolgirl in a provincial town. She lives in Atlanta and has written fifteen books. When I ask whether she has a particular subject that she returns to in her work, she replies, Human beings, more or less. We find common ground in our admiration for Chekhov, though not so for Pushkin, whom she clearly has never read.

  At dinner, I am seated between our host and the bank director, who regrets to say, goddamnit, that being in a war, any war, he means to say, is simply good for business. I’m very sorry, but it just goddamn is, Jasper. That’s the way of the world and everyone knows it.

  Oh, my grandfather Lawrence certainly would’ve agreed with you, Jasper Penshaw replies. He made a killing in coal during the First World War, you know. And he only had one leg.

  The bank director appears startled. Your grandfather lost a leg in the war? Christ, I didn’t know that.

  No. He lost the leg flying a kite.

  There follows a brief silence. Then as the borscht is served by a waiter, our hostess rings a crystal glass with a tiny silver spoon, rises to her feet, and, with one diamond-encrusted hand placed over her significant breasts, recites:

  Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

  Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,

  Misery gnaws to the bone.

  Why then do we not despair?

  By day, from the surrounding woods,

  cherries blow summer into town;

  at night the deep transparent skies

  glitter with new galaxies.

  And the miraculous comes so close

  to the ruined, dirty houses—

  something not known to anyone at all,

  but wild in our breast for centuries.

  Staring at me across the long oval table, she then speaks the same poem in Russian. Last, comes her toast:

  Our late prophetess Akhmatova was persecuted for what she believed and had the courage to say in her poetry and in her life. Our honored guest this evening has made her own poetic statement against the morally bankrupt Soviet system by choosing freedom of act and expression over the chains of her own blood. We salute her for her courage and welcome her to our country.

  Two hours later, we embrace by the door. She calls me sister and predicts an everlasting bond between us. I profess my deepest debt of thanks for her heartfelt welcome, the poetry of the great Akhmatova, the most generous toast, the pristine Russian vodka—though in my private mind I already have doubts about my new sister. Here in this country, cut off from its roots, her abject romanticism for survivor-heroes strikes me as a couple of shades too bright. She is enjoying herself too much. Only in the drawing rooms of émigré nostalgics like Raisa Malinov will we go on making toasts and singing songs as though the original film were still running, over and over, the villains larger than life, the heroes ever arriving.

  I did not leave my children and my homeland to traffic in such fairy tales.

  19 July

  Almost noon and I am still in bed. This cottage made of flimsiest wood, reverberating sound. Half an hour ago, I heard Martha say to Peter in what I am sure she believed was a low voice, This is ridiculous. We’re not waiting another minute for her. And the family gathered itself together—towels, suntan lotion, beach umbrella, sandwiches by the sound of it—and piled itself into the car and drove off for the beach on the other side of the island, where the surf is always strong.

  I have brought my notebook into bed so that I may revisit yesterday and lie here a little longer and think. The story goes on. There is more to say. And still one tries to tell the truth. Yes, one tries.

  All right: I drank too much. But I wasn’t the only one.

  * * *

  —

  On the way home from the Penshaws’, Martha sits in the shadows of the backseat with a hand covering her eyes as though a spotlight is trained on her and she is trying to disappear. Migraine. We arrive at the cottage and she goes straight upstairs, leaving Peter to pay the babysitter.

  The teenager drives off, and Peter and I are alone. For a moment my lawyer stands with slack features, looking suddenly doubtful and tired and all too young. But then he seems to recognize this as a dangerous condition in himself, some weak or drifting quality that he must remain vigilant against. He puts a smile on his face and asks if I wouldn’t care for one more drink for the road.

  I have no idea what road he’s talking about, not that it makes a difference.

  I’ll just go check on Jean, he says. Be down in a minute.

  By now, I know to look for the vodka in the freezer. I pour two drinks in plastic blue glasses designed for small children and take them to the back porch, where folding chairs are set up around a small wooden table. If the crickets would be quiet, I might hear the surf breaking on the beach. But these insects are something plugged into an electric current, pulsing like stars in the black sky.

  In a few minutes Peter emerges, sits down next to me, and picks up his drink.

  Once in a while Jean has nightmares. He keeps his voice low, presumably to spare Martha’s headache.

  What do you do for her?

  Nothing much. Hold her and tell her it was just a dream. Give her a back rub till she falls back to sleep.

  And Martha?

  He swallows more vodka. We each have our roles, he says finally.

  I say nothing. Because when my children were small enough to have nightmares that caused them to shiver with fear, it wasn’t me they called for in the middle of the night. Nurse! they would cry. Nurse, come! Come now! I’m scared! And Alexandra Andreevna would always be near; she was the one who would comfort them in their beds. As she did for me when I was a child. Yes, we may call our land Mother Russia; but it turns out that we are not a land of mothers after all. I cannot remember, not really, physical tenderness from my own mother. Nor, though I was unquestionably more demonstrative in my love with my children than my mother ever was with me, can I honestly claim that I ever was for them what my nurse was for all of us, which is to say a physical mother whose love daily and nightly was delivered through hands and hugs and kisses; whose body, profound in its comforting solidity, would always lean across any distance to bridge the ever-yawning gap between lonely child and all that is cold and cruel in the world.

  Peter and I finish our drinks in silence. He goes inside and returns with two more. And we finish those too.

  Mr. and Mrs. Staehelin.

  There is a kind of drunkenness one finds only in Russia. The Irish don’t know it, the French, the Greeks. An ecstasy of melancholy. The oldest lament in the world. A sadness that has no limits and so is very close to joy, but never reaches it. Joy’s dark cousin. I want Peter to know this feeling, I think. To be drunk like this, like a Russian, just once in his life. I want him to live.

  I reach out and touch my hand to his cheek. His chair creaks as he leans his face toward mine. We kiss, but still he seems to be waiting for some kind of permission, a sign.

  I take his hand and place it inside my blouse, on my breast. As I press against that hand, a small groan escapes him—and suddenly he grabs my hair, twists my head around, and kisses me hard on the mouth.

  Then, just as suddenly, he is standing, our bodies divided; prickling, cool air where his hand was.

  Sorry, he mutters.

 
He is careful to close the screen door softly behind him. Careful to climb with a penitent’s guilty attention the stairs to the room where his wife sleeps. Yet still those stairs crack and groan beneath him. And I wish to tell him—because I want him to live, because he needs me to tell him, because if not I then who?—that he cannot spend his life sitting alone at the front of the school bus, dreaming of foreign cities he will never visit. Sometimes we must act on our truest instincts, no matter the cost to others, or we will never escape the cages our cursed histories have put us in.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  From the moment I met Martha Lewiston, at a cocktail party thrown by a friend of a friend on East Seventy-eighth Street in the spring of 1960, when she rather fiercely explained to me the difference between a barn owl and a barred owl, I believe I recognized that she was a person who guided herself according to the stringent comforts of a few deeply held convictions. Then one evening in the third month of our relationship, following a day filled with menial frustrations at the office, I joined some young associates from Wardlow Jenks at the bar at Grand Central. One martini led to another, one bar to another, and after a few hours I was pretty well adrift and thinking, frankly, about Martha and laying my hands on her. Stopping by her apartment, however, I found her in tears, declaring that she never wanted to see me again.

  What I had done was unacceptable and very threatening to her. We had not had plans for the evening, she admitted, but that wasn’t the point. By gratuitously going out without her, then dropping by to rub her face in the gap between us, I had betrayed her, turned something private and beautiful into something exposed and cheap. I could never quite understand why this was so, but looking at the tears on her face, I found it impossible to doubt her certainty that it was.

  * * *

  —

  Svetlana’s entry into our marital orbit was something neither Martha nor I ever recovered from. Our own personal Cold War, you might say, a living embodiment of an existential security threat; to the point where, toward the end of her life, four decades later, my wife would not under any circumstance utter the other woman’s name.

  After my retirement from Wardlow Jenks five years ago, my study on the third floor of our Princeton house was for a time littered with towering stacks of file boxes containing material from virtually every legal matter I had ever worked on during my fifty years as a practicing attorney. Martha’s cancer had by then spread to her spleen and lungs, leaving her more or less housebound. I, on the other hand, with so much time on my hands, was often out running minor errands, trying my best to remain “useful.” (If lawyers are trained to successfully negotiate people’s problems, then cancer, it must be said, is truly the client from hell.) Returning from the pharmacy one day, I found Martha’s usual chair in the sunroom empty. The nearest bathroom too was unoccupied. I called to her but got no reply and, suddenly panicked, began climbing the stairs two at a time.

  I finally found her in my study, head bent over my desk, reading something with an almost violent intensity. The most recent round of chemo had taken her hair again and this time it had not grown back, and the sight of her shiny exposed scalp filled me with dread and pity. Open before her was a legal file, perhaps the thickest of any in my possession. And trembling in her fingers, I saw, was a document—from which now, in a hoarse attenuated voice, she began to read aloud.

  “ ‘Subject is an active, alert and intense individual who probably is somewhat immature and naïve for her age and experience. Essentially a very dependent person, used perhaps to being bullied by her powerful father, she is prone to become a disciple or a follower rather than an activist in anything she undertakes. She has a discernible fear of being taken advantage of and is cautious in how she accepts authority and direction, but once committed, she will competitively strive for acceptance and is (1) jealous and disappointed when others receive the acceptance and praise she wants and feels she deserves; and (2) furious when she feels she has been misled or misdirected by someone she thought she could trust. She is particularly vulnerable to humiliation.’ ”

  Martha glanced up sharply, her gray eyes shining with a vindictive triumph that I had never seen in her before. “Do you know what I’m reading from?”

  “Yes.” A lawyer’s response: say as little as possible.

  “What is it?” A lawyer’s rejoinder, learned from me: never ask a question whose answer you do not already know.

  “Right after she requested political asylum at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi,” I said, “the CIA had one of their shrinks do a clinical assessment of her.”

  “How long have you had this?”

  “A very long time.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about it?”

  “Would it have helped if I had?”

  “It’s exactly what she’s like. It’s who she is, Peter.” Two pink blotches were emerging from the papery hollows of my wife’s cheeks.

  “Martha, you’re exhausting yourself. Come downstairs. We can talk about this after you’ve had some rest.”

  “I can’t rest! Don’t you see? This is who she is. This is what she’s done.”

  1970

  9 January

  I have bought a house in Princeton, my first American house. Peter is nearby; and Lucas Wardlow; and George and Annalise Kennan too. The town is neither city nor country, which suits me. Still, I was not especially looking for this particular house, but it found me anyway: a small white Cape Cod with black shutters, a brick porch in front, and a brick patio in back. A small garden with a dogwood tree.

  But now that I’m physically settled in my new home, I feel as though I’m waiting for something to happen, I don’t know what. So many movements over time, shiftings and haltings across continents and lives, my children left behind: and here this period of stillness, domestic but uncertain.

  I refuse to let this frighten me.

  12 January

  Peter and I are nearly neighbors now, separated by at most a twenty-minute walk. And yet, it pains me to say, the distance between us feels greater and more awkward than that. There is no obvious problem or break—that would never be Peter’s way. But we are not as close as I’d imagined we would be by now. These days I rarely see him except by happenstance; most of our communication is by letter or telephone and professional in nature—he is the lawyer and I am the client. And so it has been ever since our porch encounter on Block Island three summers ago. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised; perhaps it’s better not to mix these things. Fewer complications this way, but also fewer possibilities. Still, I can’t help but feel that something precious has been carelessly misplaced, and that it was I who caused it to happen. Turning closeness into distance as I have done in this case, with a man I like, is something I regret. I have had too much distance to begin with. I live and breathe it. I, who cannot see my children even through the telescope of my longing.

  23 January

  She has written me again, the Widow, her third letter in as many weeks. I recognize the stationery, her cursive on the envelope, the address in Scottsdale, Arizona, the postage stamp bearing the likeness of her late husband, the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, with his handsome, self-regarding mien and flowing white hair. The letter, like the others before it, so full of exotic intensity it practically opens and reads itself:

  It was clear the moment I first saw your name, then read your extraordinary book. You have been returned to me. You are the first Svetlana I have heard of in this country since my daughter’s death, twenty-three years ago. A rare and luminous name. Nowhere else have I found it except in Russian fairy tales. And suddenly here you are, in this country where we have landed and reborn ourselves. Like you, my own darling Svetlana was filled with light and courage. I gave birth to her in Georgia, not far from the village outside Tiflis where your mother was born and raised. Yes, your mother. Whose own mother’s name was Olga, from which my name too comes
. I do not believe in coincidence. The world is made of interlocked layers of energy and receptivity. Only the rare few, having trained and understood, can secure the pathways through time so that their energy may reach us here unmitigated. I have long steeped myself in the study and teaching of sacred dance, so that these pathways might never be closed to me. So that I may see them where others may see only walls and dust. In this way I have kept my husband’s spirit and genius alive here and throughout the world. His buildings are those very pathways I mention. His vision reaches back into the depths of time even as it grasps the energies ahead. You will see all this when you come here to visit. My daughter, you must come! You must.

  * * *

  —

  It is strange and unsettling to be courted like this—made cosmic love to—by someone I have never met (at least, not in this life).

  Contained in the envelope are photographs of the architectural compound in the Arizona desert where the Widow lives with her students and fellows—an entire Fellowship and School organized, as she describes it at proud and mystical length, according to the architectural principles and creative philosophy of her late husband. I study these pictures, hoping they might reveal something. He was a very famous architect—I have looked him up—though it is not greatness I think I see out there among the reptiles and cacti, but rather a claustrophobic flattening of space combined with theatrical displays of decoration. The ceilings oppressively low, the light generous, yes, but bowed down. No people in the photographs, no human faces. Standing by myself in my Princeton living room—pretty, square, with quaint details and plenty of room above my head—I try to read in these images the heart of this woman, this stranger reaching out to me across a vast, unknowable desert and the shadows of time, but all I see are empty rooms lacking comfort.

  The letter continues. She wishes to tell me everything about herself, she insists, as a mother would to a daughter. At the center of her tale, a tragedy: in 1946, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where the Fellowship has a second compound to which they all migrate for the warmer months, her daughter Svetlana was killed in a car accident along with Svetlana’s four-year-old son. As though the light of the world was stolen by a great hand and buried deep beneath the earth. The grieving son-in-law, Sid Evans, stayed on at the Fellowship, never remarrying, eventually becoming chief architect of the practice that still bears his father-in-law’s name and is faithfully sustained, I am to gather, under the Widow’s vigilant guidance. You will like Sid as much as I do. He is a man of substance, vigor, loyalty, a true man who knows true things.