The White Russian (4 page)

Sadness stole through me. I could imagine how outraged Aunt Mildred would have felt, how sincere she’d
have been, and what she’d have said … I could imagine, too, how a small child hearing what her family was saying would have feared the idea of a summer alone with her shockingly improper and invisible parent … At the same time, I thought I also had an inkling of why a bookish, well-travelled young woman like my grandmother, so recently a widow, and then, while still in grief, a mother, might have felt stifled by her return home. I could imagine her falling in with what she thought they wanted, at first, and going to Europe – and then being bewildered when she found they’d locked her out forever, and she’d lost her daughter.

‘And that was that,’ Aunt Mildred finished, not without satisfaction. She eyed me.

‘She went back overseas …?’ I prompted.

‘Yes, off she went, and from then on she seemed to be positively going out of her way to be outrageous. There was another painters’ colony in a fishing village in Italy; Rapallo, I think she called it, because she did write, sometimes. She said it was peaceful. And then ambulance driving in France in the Great War, which she said was her duty – which was quite absurd: it was clearly no job for a woman … or at least a lady. We couldn’t even find her to ask her to poor Jeannie’s wedding …’ At this, Aunt Mildred picked up her coffee cup and stared fiercely at the grounds, in a way that suggested she hadn’t tried very hard. ‘But we always kept the door open, in case she’d changed. And, sure enough, she did pitch up again, after the war – and even though she brought some shady new Russian husband of her own to meet me, she made a very affecting speech, about how sad she was not to have known your father, and how much she wanted to meet Hughie,
and could she spend a few weeks on the island with the family?’

Aunt Mildred put down the coffee cup. ‘So I put aside my doubts and did the decent thing. I said she could go to you all in July, before my children and I got there, when the top floor was free. I suppose I was impressed that she’d come to ask my permission. And that she was still trying at all. Maybe I even felt sorry for her … But it was a terrible mistake. I realized that afterwards. I blame myself. She hadn’t changed at all.’

‘You mean’, I said, making myself small, making my voice very innocent, wondering if I’d be giving away too much knowledge, or too much interest, by finishing my question, ‘because of the women’s parade?’

A great snort travelled through Aunt Mildred’s tightly encased frame. ‘
That!
’ she rumbled dismissively. ‘No, long before
that.
Your mother said it was clear from their first day there. She said that Constance was
teaching you the Charleston
whenever her back was turned, and
reading Dostoyevsky.
She had to go.’

I bit my lip. Excommunicated, then … I supposed it was only to be expected that Mother would get her revenge, in the end, for having been abandoned as a child. And suddenly, despite the sadness of this tale of inevitable estrangement, Aunt Mildred’s emphatic horror at those two particular crimes made me want to laugh. As did the guilty question that came fleetingly into my head: what would Aunt Mildred, or Mother, think if they knew I also had
The Brothers Karamazov
in my trunk, packed ready for my departure in the morning?

‘And now?’ I asked quickly.

‘Oh … Paris. Artists, no doubt. Maybe more Russians. It does no good to know too much. The point is, she was always too clever for her own good, my big sister. But, in the end, all her ideas did her no good at all. They just left her on her own.’ Aunt Mildred stretched out her black sheeny arm towards me, setting her taffeta-encased flesh swinging. The improbably small finger that touched me felt improbably hard. ‘That’s something for
you
to think about, too, my girl,’ she added with the glint in her eye that I’d always found amusing, ‘now you’re nearly through with your college education: the danger of ideas. Don’t get your head too full of them to know what really matters. It’s family that counts.’

I felt much more warmly towards Mother by the time we set out for home, now that I could picture her as a lost, worried, golden-curled child, looking along the beach for a lost mother and crying too much over every grazed knee or lost toy.

I even half imagined, half hoped, we might somehow talk together about Aunt Mildred’s revelations. But of course this didn’t happen. She chattered happily to Hughie all the way home in the car, as if we had all had a pleasant evening together. But her eyes passed blackly through me as she kissed me goodnight.

It was only once I was alone in my room, in my bed, going over in my head the events and discoveries of what was perhaps my first day as an adult, but full of an unsettled, unnameable sadness, too – perhaps it was loneliness, I thought – that I finally said, though only to myself, ‘Poor Grandmother.’

My friend Eliza’s brothers came in a rattling jalopy to empty our college room after graduation that summer and bring both of us roommates back to New York forever.

Mother didn’t come to the phone when I called to ask whether I could travel home with Eliza. It had been a while since I’d managed to speak to her, and recently I only seemed to get Florence, our maid, when I called home. Your mother’s asleep, she’d say; or, your mother asked not to be disturbed. Try again tomorrow, Miss E. I’ll send her your love. This time I got Hughie, who said Mother wouldn’t mind my travelling with Eliza; she was a little indisposed and needed to rest up for a few days.

It was a bad line, but his voice sounded distant in every way. It made me uneasy. Guilty, too, without knowing quite what I should be feeling guilty about. But by the time we set out in our convoy of three packed cars on another hot morning, full of the fresh greenness of early summer, all talking nineteen to the dozen about our plans, I had forgotten my unease about that possible coolness in Hughie’s voice. My friend Dorothy was going to stay with her married sister over the summer while she pestered a
magazine in the city for editing work. Her brother and his friend were talking, in snatches of breeze, about going to Spain and fighting fascism. Eliza’s brothers, one a painter, one a photographer, had found a partially furnished temporary apartment above a pastry shop on the corner of Bleecker and Barrow, where Eliza was going to camp for the summer, too, and write her novel.

It was easy for all of them, I found myself thinking with a twinge of envy that seemed so ungracious I tried to stifle it. Eliza’s German philosopher father and Dorothy’s intellectual doctoring family didn’t mind at all what their daughters did. I could bet their fathers never fretted aloud about the national debt, either. You were so much freer to ride around with the wind in your hair, talking about philosophy or whatever else came into your head, if your family were not-rich immigrants with big ideas and kind hearts from somewhere in Europe. How lucky my friends were not to come from money.

‘What great swells,’ Mother said the next evening, leaning out of the bedroom window of our house. ‘Where are you all off to tonight?’

The sun was setting, the light golden, the temperature still sticky hot. My friends were on the sidewalk, drinking the cocktails that one of the men was mixing al fresco – Florence had put glasses and a shaker and bottles just inside the front door – while we waited for the stragglers to arrive for the evening.

We looked like a snapshot of youthful happiness; I could see that. Everyone talking plans again, loudly and happily. Eliza’s brothers were scuffling – arm-wrestling and
laughing, with Winthrop, the older one, calling ‘
¡No pasarán!
’ and playfully barring Bill’s way. Freddy the doorman from the apartment building down the road was watching with silent disapproval. Mother, too, from her window, with her hair arranged in a gold cascade on her head and her white bedjacket ribbons fluttering. There were maybe a dozen of us down below: the girls, like me, in thin dresses and heels, the men in white ducks ranging from clean to careless, but all with touches of colour that I knew would make Mother wince. Winthrop was in a Burma pink jacket with a green silk cummerbund, brushing back too-long blond hair from his sunburned face. The other one, the painter, was in grubby shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, but then he wasn’t coming out with us. I was aware of Mother’s eyes stopping on him. He looked far too unconventional for her.

No one answered her question. Instead they turned their faces up to her like flowers to the sun, and smiled, shading their eyes, waiting for me to answer. ‘Oh, we haven’t really decided,’ I called, trying to sound casual. ‘The Stork Club … Twenty-One … who knows?’

‘Well,’ she said, emanating sadness, ‘you enjoy yourselves.’

Eliza’s raggedy brother raised his glass as if to toast that, but Mother had already turned away and disappeared back inside.

In case he felt snubbed, I said quickly, ‘Bill, doesn’t that glass need freshening?’

But he was still grinning with his face turned up to the window, a little drunk. ‘Pretty, your mom,’ was all he said. He hadn’t noticed.

Perhaps I was being over-sensitive. But it had been a very long first day home and, oh, I was so excited to see
them all again, with their carefree talk and brown faces, and so relieved, too.

I was already wishing I’d made a plan of my own. Two days ago, back in my college room, I’d still been telling myself it would all wait. There was plenty of time. I wasn’t in any hurry to decide what to do next with my life. I could take the summer off, maybe get a job in a bookstore (through her Gurdjieff-obsessed brother, Eliza knew of a woman who’d got hold of some of the dead Sunwise Bookstore’s stock, from years back – radical books wrapped in exotic-coloured paper covers, tattered textiles and unwanted paintings – and was looking for unpaid assistants to help her set up a little store of her own, paint it orange, and sell them off). What would be good about that, I’d thought, would be that it would mean I wouldn’t have to go away with my family to Shelter Island for a month or more this summer. I’d much prefer to enjoy my new crowd of grown-up friends milling around the city before deciding on a longer-term future. I was also wondering if I should ask Eliza if I could move into that space they’d found over the bakery, right now. I hadn’t realized, until I got back here, how unhomelike my old home might seem.

There was something new and threatening here. Hughie had mixed me his familiar Manhattan yesterday evening, and toasted homecoming as usual, but despite his practised joviality I’d felt a restraint I didn’t understand. Mother hadn’t got up at all, even for dinner, and hadn’t felt well enough to see me; he’d taken her a tray, saying he wouldn’t be a minute, then spent an hour away. I waited in the dining room, watching my soup congeal, wondering whether it would be rude to start, until Florence, taking
pity on me, said, ‘You go on and eat, Miss Evie.’

‘Is Mother ill?’ I asked Hughie when he came back. He shook his head, but in a way that didn’t necessarily mean no, just that he felt sad for her.

‘One of her headaches,’ he said. ‘You know she doesn’t find the heat easy.’

She didn’t appear at breakfast, either. ‘Go to her, Miss E.,’ Florence urged kindly. ‘You haven’t seen her since Easter. She’ll want to hear your news.’

‘What is it, Mother?’ I whispered as I came into her room holding the breakfast tray Florence had given me. But she shook her head, and turned away from me.

‘Well, can I bring you a cool drink, at least?’ I asked. Silence.

At noon, still worried, I went out to meet Eliza. Her idea had been to hunt down the bookstore woman she’d been trying to locate. We walked to her door and knocked. Even though there was no answer, it was a relief to be out with the sun on my back, laughing with a friend who laughed back.

‘Let’s go look at those photos Dorothy was talking about, then,’ Eliza said cheerfully after we’d given up knocking. ‘I think the woman who takes them lives somewhere just close by.’

‘I’ve got to get home,’ I said, and the laughter went right out of me. ‘My mother’s not feeling well.’ I stopped before reaching home and bought a big bouquet of white roses and ferns.

‘Look, Mother,’ I whispered from the door, trying to sound excited and not just nervous, peering into the gloom of drawn drapes, ‘aren’t they beautiful?’

Slowly, she turned her head and, when she saw the
flowers, and maybe the worry in my face, she let her tight, sick expression loosen just a bit, and nodded weakly before turning back towards the wall.

‘I’ll put them here, on the chest by your bed, shall I?’ I babbled, hoping against hope that this was the beginning of something better. ‘Look, do you see, I’ll move the water glass over here, and these photos on to the window … then you’ll be able to see them easily.’

I moved the photos in their silver frames, very carefully. Mother in white lace, with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Herbert. One of a young Mother, looking beautiful in pearls and very carefully made up, with a small, howling, red-faced, newborn me. Mother and Hughie, waving from a yacht … a family shot of all the cousins, grinning at the camera, on the island … Hughie and Mother, in Venice, waving from a gondola … there were so many of them.

It was only when I lifted the big vase on to the chest that I noticed something was lying on the mahogany top, among all that metallic display. It was a small sepia photograph in an oval card frame that I hadn’t ever noticed before among these stiff public mementoes. It didn’t have a frame. It must have got stuck at the back of something else, I thought, picking it up. It showed two young people in long-ago fashion, side by side, hand in hand, a young, timid-looking girl in white lace mutton-chop sleeves, with her black hair pinned up in a bun, looking very seriously at the camera, and a thin young black-haired man, maybe her cousin or brother – they were very alike – in a stiff jacket, waistcoat and high collar, looking just as serious.

When I turned it over, a little furtively, I saw the words ‘Constance and Eddie, 1893’ in faded ink and old-fashioned
loopy copperplate. I held my breath. That must be my very young grandparents, in the year they married and set off for Imperial Russia together. I’d had no idea that any such picture existed. I wanted to stop and stare, or even ask … Touched that my mother had secretly kept it all these years, tucked away behind the display of her happy family, I put it carefully down with the others on the shelf.

And then I caught sight of another faded picture, which had slipped down somehow behind the chest and was stuck between its back and the wall. I nudged it out, not wanting to tear it.

It was the same picture as the one I’d kept for the past few years, which was now tucked into that book of French poems, with the wrapping next to it: Grandmother in her sixties, looking straight at the camera, with that hint of a smile, half-amused, but a little bit nervous too, on her face. No frame or anything. How strange, I thought, straightening it out, unable not to stare. It even had a fold in the bottom right-hand corner, where the photographic paper had cracked, in the same place as my one.

Had she been receiving more letters from Grandmother then? I turned to her, almost ready to ask, before my nerve failed me, and I pushed the picture under the other one, face down, on the window ledge. ‘What a lot of pictures you have here …’ I half whispered, but Mother didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t say any more, either, but when I tiptoed out a moment later, murmuring, ‘You have a little sleep, now,’ I was easier in my mind, because, although she was still wan and wild-haired, she would, at least, have those flowers to look at and smell when she turned around: a reminder that I’d been there, and that I’d tried.

We didn’t make it to the Stork Club or Twenty-One that night, as it turned out. There was a flyer up outside the Russian Tea Room for a singer. ‘The return of Nadezhda Plevitskaya!’ it read. ‘La Tsiganka! The Tsar’s Nightingale!’ and when I looked closer I saw the same stout, heavily rouged face that had been gazing out of Grandmother’s newspaper.

‘I’ve heard of her,’ I called, startled by the coincidence. ‘Let’s go listen.’ And the group wavered and coalesced around me in the hot dark and good-naturedly headed for the doorway.

I don’t think any of the others were really in a listening mood. Winthrop and Bill got caught up in a discussion with the moustachioed waiter about whether a vodka Martini had any place in Russian life. The girls squeezed in next to them on the red banquette, laughing.

So I went and sat down on an empty chair near the singer by myself. This place didn’t have the wistful charm of Madame Brodyanskaya’s. I couldn’t tell whether it really was full of escaped princesses and down-on-their-luck counts, as Hughie had once told me. My impression was that it wasn’t that full at all. Apart from my friends at the banquette table nearest the door, all I could really see was smoke and silhouettes, the occasional flash of glass and, in front of me, in the most interior corner, a large woman in a tight burgundy dress and a loose flowered shawl with jet beads, already well into her programme.

The pictures had been flattering. The reality was older and blowsier and at least thirty pounds heavier. But she had a good pair of lungs on her, and a big, deep, swoopy voice. She sobbed her way through songs that you didn’t
need to understand the words of to know they were about heartbreak, and Cossacks, and wolves in the snow, and the tremble of greyish vines against the dacha window, and war, and partings …

They were shamelessly sentimental, those songs, just like the candelabra at that last table lighting the singer and the balalaika player in the shadows by her side, but they brought a lump to my throat all the same.

There was only a thin scatter of applause when she stopped and bowed. My friends didn’t stop their noisy talk, even for a moment.

Blinking a little, the singer sat down at the candelabra table with her accompanist.

I got up too. Perhaps it was just the gallantry of that shawl draped over her quivering arms. I wanted to pay my respects.

Close up, I saw that Plevitskaya’s face was damp under the kohl-lined black eyes, and her grey-streaked black curls were gleaming. A huge Orthodox cross was dancing up and down against her heaving décolletage. Even against the lurid red and green décor you could see that she was sweating heavily.

I’d thought she looked disconsolate, but as soon as she saw someone approaching she was suddenly radiant again. It didn’t matter that there were flashes of gold in her mouth. The smiles she was now giving her accompanist, who was also so lit up by the appearance of audience that he started kissing her hand, said, in the simplest and most joyous way imaginable, ‘Here I am. Here you are. Let me make music for you. Let me give you pleasure.’

I liked them both at once.
‘Prekrasno … prosto divno …’
he
was saying, to her, but also watching me out of the corner of his eye, before adding, in English: ‘You are
won
-derrrful.’