ELECTRIC BOAT WAS GOOD to Finn in June. His dividend check topped $800. He drove to Boston, tried (unsuccessfully) to pay Franklin Reynolds, and called in on Schumann. Guided by the tailor’s advice, Finn bought Isabelle a balalaika. He even wrapped it before presenting it to her on their bench.
“Oh my God,” she said, hugging it to her chest. “Why did you do this?”
He shrugged. “I thought you might like it.”
“It’s so expensive. You shouldn’t have.”
“That can’t be right,” he said. “You don’t think you’ve done enough to deserve a small gift?”
“This isn’t small,” she said. “It’s little bit priceless.” She strummed the three strings. “I’m going to play you such nice Ukrainian songs.” She played and sang for him “Ochi Chernye” or “Dark Eyes.” “Ochi chernye, ochi strastnye, ochi zhguchie i prekrasnye! Kak lyublyu ya vas . . . kak boyus’ ya vas! Znat’, uvidel vas, ya v nedobryy chas. . .”
“Why does that sound so familiar?” Finn said. “Tell me the lyrics.”
“All the best in life God has given us . . .” she sang in English.
“You sang for ten minutes and recited one line. Where’s the rest?”
“Rest unrecitable.”
“Untranslatable. I’ll ask Schumann. He’ll translate for me.”
“I made song up. He’s never heard it before.”
“We’ll see about that,” Finn said. “We should have a summer party, invite him. Lucas, too. The Brysons. Mickey Winslow, maybe?”
“Only if you want him to talk about nothing but horses. No songs, no dance, no fire, no games, just horse talk.”
“Uh, no, thanks. Nate? He’s supposed to be back at the start of July.”
Isabelle chewed her lip. “Did Schumann have any news when you saw him? Telegram from Nate maybe?”
Finn shook his head. Schumann had told him the people coming from Ukraine carried with them soul-crushing stories. There was no point telling Isabelle that. As if she didn’t already know. “Franklin managed to get two hundred visas for Nate,” he said.
“Finn, don’t say two hundred. Please,” said Isabelle. “At thirty dollars each? How much do we already owe that man?”
“He refused to take my money.”
“He’s not giving you any more visas?”
“He is. He just didn’t take my money.”
“Really?”
“Yes. So don’t worry. When is Starfire running his first race?”
“Travers Stakes in August,” Isabelle said. “Mickey invited me to Saratoga with him to watch race. But it’s harvest season.”
“Do you want to go? You can if you want.” He didn’t mean it.
She shook her head. “It’s harvest season,” she sang, strumming her balalaika.
“How much is first prize?”
“Twenty thousand dollars,” sang Isabelle.
Finn whistled. “So if he wins, you get three grand.” He grinned. “I am exceptional. The banker in me came in quite handy.”
“Yes, you did all work.” She smiled. “Will that be enough to get new ship for Nate and Florin?”
“No. But don’t worry. I’m working on a plan.”
“You got plan for everything, don’t you.” She played a soft sad slow tune. He smoked, watching her hands on the strings, listening to her sing.
“I don’t want you to worry about the money, Isa,” he said. “I learned the hard way. We all did. Easy come, easy go. We’ll get more. Or we won’t. Now that we’re growing our own food, I’m philosophical about it. If it makes you feel better, Franklin told me he’s not actually paying for the visas. His INS contact is budgeting it out of his discretionary fund, which hasn’t been divested in two years.”
“I’m going to start talking about horses if you don’t stop.”
“What part was financial jargon?” Finn laughed. “Budget? Money?”
“A well-conformed stallion can do live cover one to three times daily,” Isabelle said, her eyes twinkling.
“Touché.” He twinkled right back at her. “What’s live cover?”
“Someday maybe I tell you.” She clutched the balalaika. “Thank you.”
“I owe you a lot.”
“You owe me nothing,”
“But when they ask you”—he pointed to the dark house—“as they inevitably will, don’t tell them I bought it for you.”
“I won’t. But why?”
O, you fool and slow of heart, Finn thought, whether about himself or her, he couldn’t say. He wanted to reach out and stroke her face with the back of his fingers. He wanted to lean over and press his bearded cheek to her satin skin to feel her gratitude, but it was too dark and too late at night for caresses and cheek kisses, and they were too alone and had consumed too much of Schumann’s celebratory whisky. What he really wanted to do was lean forward and place his lips over hers. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted her to kiss him. And then he wanted them to kiss each other. Without answering her, he said an unwilling goodnight, and she stayed behind, and through his open window he listened to her melancholy strumming as she played him to sleep, singing the same line about God giving us the best in life over and over. “Kak luyblyu ya vas, kak luyblyu ya vas, kak luyblyu ya vas, kak luyblyu ya vas . . .”
Yes, July was a very good month. Even though on Friday, July 8, 1932, the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the trading day at a shocking 41.
“You heard that right, Walter, Earl, gracious ladies and children,” said Finn, addressing his family as he raised a glass of toothless lemonade. “That wasn’t a misprint as my father and father-in-law had reasonably assumed this morning when I brought them the Boston Globe. After the infamous, notorious, never before, and possibly never again to be repeated Great Crash of 1929, we all—wise college graduates and business and finance experts alike—fully believed that the hiccup was temporary, that things would improve, that investors would come back to the market, that the economy of this great land would straighten out—for how could it not? The stock market was at a record 381 in September 1929, at 260 on the worst day in the market’s history, and since then has not only not corrected itself, but has continued to plummet—50 points here, 70 points there, 100 points one year, 100 points the next—until we found ourselves here, on July 8, 1932, at 41! We have lost more than 90 percent of the value of our largest companies in less than three years. That simply beggars belief. No wonder we are suffering an economic depression such as we’ve never had.”
Though things were gloomy in the market, on the Adams farm, it was party time. A little joy had to be found somewhere. They were gathered around the firepit, lounging on the outdoor chairs. With Mae and Junie’s help, Isabelle had strung some lights around the patio and arranged flowers and fruit baskets as decorations. Earlier that day, Finn had desperately tried to convince Vanessa to join them. Right before he left to pick up their guests at the station, he came in to change into a clean linen shirt and trousers. “Our neighbors Chuck and Shelly Bryson are coming, with some of their children and grandchildren,” he said. “It’s going to be the first party we’ve thrown in a very long time. It would be nice if the beautiful lady of the house came out and said hello to our new friends and old, if she sat and had an iced tea and a conversation. You could fix yourself up, put on one of your fancy dresses. It would be good for us.”
“The party isn’t good for me, Finn,” Vanessa said, not looking directly at him. “Why are my feelings not taken into any consideration?”
“Vanessa, if we planned a party around your moods, we would never have one,” Finn said. “One person cannot decide for twenty others. And Lucas, Schumann, and Nate are coming from Boston. You want me to cancel with them because you’re not feeling up to it?”
She opened her hands.
“This isn’t normal,” Finn said. “This isn’t right.”
“Don’t you have a party to attend?” She motioned him out. “Spit-spot.”
“You know, I keep asking you to participate in this life, in this marriage,” Finn said. “Less and less, it’s true, but eventually, I’m going to stop caring whether or not you come outside, whether or not you eat with us, whether or not you lie down with me.” Finn paused. “Whether or not you’re my wife.”
“Do you have somewhere else to be, Finn?”
“Do you have somewhere else to be, Vanessa?”
They stared at each other grimly. “We’re trapped, with nowhere to go,” she said. “Welcome to modern marriage, darling.”
“This may not be the bottom yet,” Finn said in his State of the Union speech to his family, talking about the market but thinking about his wife. “Even though it feels like the bottom. But we said this about the market at 260, at 200, at 130, at 80. Today we are at 41. Soon we might be at zero. No profits to be earned, no profits to be made, and the country is dancing on the backs of a third of its people out of work—one-third of its people! What a calamity. Well, we know why. Because our business giants have lost 90 percent of their value! They’re making nothing and employing no one.” He glanced toward the windows of his bedroom. “However, despite falling on unprecedented hard times, I’m going to point to some rays of sunshine for our family. Most important—ten of us are not unemployed.” He deliberately excluded Vanessa from that figure, hoping she was listening. “We work nonstop, feed ourselves, and make a little money. We’ve grown zucchinis the size of small submarines, when a month ago we barely knew what a zucchini was. We’ve sold nine-tenths of our cucumber and carrot harvest and still have too much left for ourselves. Our wheat is already taller than I am, and we’re six weeks away from reaping. If our cabbage crop is as good as we hope, we might afford twenty chickens next year.
“Elsewhere, Isabelle’s handpicked thoroughbred is running his first big race next month in Saratoga, and if any of you are betting men, I suggest placing a few dollars on him.
“Nate and Florin are doing God’s work, sailing back and forth across the seven seas, trying to help the destitute and desperate who have fled their blighted borderlands. We are all working to secure our future. Our cucumbers and eggplant have been canned. We bought strawberries and prepared jams and jellies to last until next year when our own strawberries and raspberries come in.
“To help us along, my graduation gift from my father, which, like a sentimental fool, I refused to part with, has continued to pay us dividends through the toughest times. What’s impressive about the barely surviving submarine company Electric Boat is that over the last few years, its shares have split, and though they’re not worth very much, the quarterly dividend on what is now three thousand shares allows us to pay our debts and better withstand the vagaries of our intermittent cashflow.
“This fall we are going to buy a car to supplement my truck so the entire family can travel in comfort. And of course, the most important election in our lifetime is right around the corner and with any luck, Franklin Delano Roosevelt will make good on his campaign promise to end the true blight on our country—Prohibition.” Finn smiled, raising his glass of virgin lemonade fizz. “And so, with hope for the future, and barring any floods, blizzards, tornadoes, droughts, and enemy invaders, the state of the Adams Evans Lazar Schumann McBride union is good. God bless America.”
Vanessa listened to Finn through her open bedroom window. But what she heard even louder than Finn’s sermon, or the cheering, or the laughter, was her girls running in and saying, “Mommy, please come outside. We’re about to play sack races. Come, Mommy.”
“Why do we have to have the party outside, my darlings?” Was it even that irrational? Mosquitoes lived outside, bees, flies, spiders. There was dirt and dust everywhere, as evidenced by the dirt and dust the humans brought inside her clean house. Once she had thought she and Finn were the same and hated to be dusty, sandy, gritty. Not anymore. He washed, but he got dirty. There was not a single thing to recommend being outside, not one, save for the incalculable loss Vanessa felt at not being able to share in some of the fun they were having without her.
The adults and children alike played horseshoes and cornhole. They ran three-legged races, blindfolded each other and whacked a piñata, they raced in sacks, played tug of war, they dragged out a radio onto the patio, but instead Schumann offered to play his accordion for the musical chairs game. It simply wasn’t fair how much fun they were having—even Vanessa’s father. Walter had a bad heart yet was hopping a three-legged race with her mother against Junie and Mae and Lucas and Isabelle!
Lucas and Isabelle won because Isabelle needed to win at everything, even against the young and infirm. Eleanor got upset that Lucas raced with Isabelle and not her, so she harassed Finn to take a break from grilling and pair up with Isabelle against her and Lucas. Eleanor tied herself to Lucas’s leg with a bandana, and Finn tied his leg to Isabelle’s with rope—“Very securely,” Vanessa heard him say, “so we don’t get loose.” The two pairs raced while everyone else hooted and hollered, and of course Finn and Isabelle won because Finn needed to win at everything, too. But Eleanor didn’t care because all she wanted was to be close to Lucas. Vanessa couldn’t think of anything worse than Lucas and Eleanor getting together. He doesn’t have a steady job, Ellie! Vanessa wanted to shout through the window.
She heard Lucas wheedling Schumann for some work in front of Earl sitting next to them, and Schumann, not knowing what to say, trying to get Isabelle’s attention with an expression that read help me! And Isabelle, flushed and breathy, leaning over Lucas with a warm arm around his shoulder and saying, “Lucas, Schumann wouldn’t mind hiring you to drive few of his immigrants to North Carolina. He needs steady driver. But he can’t give you work if you can’t hold your wheel dry and sober for twelve hours. Those poor Ukrainians, Lucas, they’ve suffered enough.”
“Is that true, Schumann?” Lucas said with hope in his voice. “About the work, not the Ukrainians.”
“It’s not not true, Lucas,” Schumann replied, with a grateful glance at Isabelle. “But it’s a question only you can answer—can you do it?”
“Of course he can, Schumann,” said Earl in his no-nonsense judge voice, answering for Lucas. “He can and he will. Only a dead thing cannot go against a stream. And our boy Lucas here is a living thing.”
Isabelle put her arm around Earl and kissed his cheek. And he let her with a smile! She flitted away, shouting, “I’m coming, Walter!” because Vanessa’s father was calling for her. Vanessa had never seen Isabelle so carefree and happy. No one had. She was laughing and was so out of breath, she was red in the face. It wasn’t very becoming, even for a foreign woman, to look that exhilarated because of a little party. Isabelle ran a sack race against Vanessa’s father and let him win. And a delighted Walter hugged Isabelle as if this was the Olympics! The whole thing was one level of vexation on top of another.
Finn grilled sausages and hamburgers and chicken. They had a smorgasbord of salads and Isabelle’s delectable fried eggplant. They ate while the radio played. For dessert Isabelle made her own whipped cream and ladled it over raspberries and blueberries, and they all oohed and ahhed as if they’d never tasted anything so good. Vanessa harrumphed down on her bed, and a few minutes later Isabelle came in, offering her a bowl of berries with cream. Vanessa tried it grudgingly and hated that she liked it. When Isabelle asked how it was, Vanessa said she didn’t enjoy it. “For shame, Vanessa,” Isabelle said, probably meaning oh, shame, and ran off, and a moment later Vanessa heard her doing her best Goodman and Ace impression and chortling as if she couldn’t care less what Vanessa thought of her raspberries.
“Goodman: Jane, did you hear about the talking cow on Farmer Brown’s farm?
“Jane: No, Goodman. What did the talking cow say?
“Goodman: I’m udderly fantastic!”
She was fantastic every which way, including utterly.
When she gave Finn his dessert bowl, he swallowed a spoonful of her whipped cream and said he’d never tasted anything so good, and she replied that he probably hadn’t tasted a lot of delicious Ukrainian things, before fluttering away to laugh by the fire.
“The Kolomeyka” was a relentless tune that started at 120 beats per minute and ended at 240. For three minutes Isabelle played it on the balalaika, faster than Finn had ever seen anyone play a stringed instrument. It was fantastic. And then Nate and Schumann played it on the fiddle and the accordion and Isabelle danced to it, faster than Finn had ever seen anyone dance to anything, and that was fantastic too.
She started out fast, but by the end she was twirling like an out-of-control merry-go-round at spin-top speed. Mae and Junie tried to keep up, Lucas tried, Chuck Bryson’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter tried, Nate tried, but no one could. Bright and vivacious, she was almost as much in her element dancing in a red dress as she was galloping in ivory on top of Starfire.
Her wraparound necklaces swung from side to side, her hair flew wild, her face was flushed with joy. Romance and poetry were her companions in the dust by the fire, just as they had been out in the broad sunny meadow where she chased the ghosts that haunted her.
Chased or outran?
She was musical, tender, sacred, irreverent.
Quantifiable physical things were being mortared in the crucible inside Finn along with his elemental awe. He took in her body, the perspiration on her neck, the tanned swell in the deep cleft of her cheerful dress, held together with a belt made of dried tulips. He took in her abundant breasts pushed together by a low snug collar, her exposed pulsing throat, her bare neckline. She bobbed and twirled with abandon as if she were still alive in another life, and all that she loved was alive with her.
Made of crimson velvet roses, the tiara crowning her hair kept falling off as she spun to the beat of the music. The heady air where she danced glowed with jasmine and lavender, her body was in a swirling fever, her voice as she sang in Ukrainian was bluesy, potent, chaotic. She was a breathtaking spectacle of all that was beautiful in women.
This is the new world: an exclamation in a red dress, a flame. Welcome to America, Finn whispered to himself, stunning, heartrending Ukraine.
“Isa, sing the song you sang to me the other week,” he called out to her when she was taking a break, still panting.
“Which one? ‘Hopak?’ ‘Kalinka?’ ‘Song of Volga Boatmen?’”
“No, the untranslatable one.” Finn knew he’d heard it on the radio sometime before she came into his life. “Feodor Chaliapin!” he said, suddenly placing it. “He performed it at the Boston Metropolitan Opera.”
“Chaliapin sings hundreds of songs,” Isabelle said. “How do I know which one you mean?”
“I went to that concert,” Schumann said. “Maybe I can help, Finn. Do you remember any of the words? Or a melody, perhaps?”
“Would you like some more dessert, Schumann?” interrupted Isabelle.
“No, thank you. Finn, how did the song go?”
“Something about the best in life being given to us by God.”
Schumann nodded. “Of course!” he said. “It’s ‘Dark Eyes.’ One of the most popular songs. Every Ukrainian knows it by heart. We’ll sing it for you. Kids, shall we?” he said to Isabelle and Nate, opening his accordion.
“We shall not,” said Isabelle, whooshing the accordion shut. “Lucas! Don’t you know any Irish ballads? You must! Please sing them for us—and your brother can join you.”
“Now I want to hear ‘Dark Eyes’ more than anything,” Finn said, his ardent gaze trained on Isabelle.
“Lucas!” said Isabelle.
Lucas didn’t know if he could. “I’ve never sung drinking songs without getting hammered first. I can’t remember the words without whisky to help me.”
“Come on, Lucas,” said Earl. “Sing a song with your brother.”
Instantly Lucas jumped up and said he would do it.
As the fire burned and the marshmallows melted, Lucas and Finn sang the ditty their brother Travis had taught Finn on the banks of the Piave River, near the Italian Alps, while they waited for the last battle of the Great War to claim them.
“Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li, Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don’t you cry . . . Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral . . . that’s an Irish Lullaby . . .”
Perspiring and light-headed, overjoyed and carefree, Isabelle forgot herself utterly for three minutes of “The Kolomeyka.” She spun in bliss, and when she opened her eyes, she saw Finn in a chair by the fire, smoking and watching her, his sun-bleached hair brushed back, his trimmed beard neat around his soft mouth, his eyes more familiar to her than her own. He was magnetized to her, his gaze blinkless, his pupils dilated. He looked so casually handsome in his cream linen shirt and trousers, with one leg draped over the other, and so besotted, it took her breath away.
He gawped at her, the soul bond between them the melody, but desire the drumbeat they dared not go near. In his expression she saw that it was pounding through his blood. His eyes said, I’m a firedrake and I don’t care that you know it. I am Dionysus, son of Zeus, and I’m not hiding. Approach me at your peril.
Late that night, when everyone had gone to bed, and Isabelle cleaned up after one of her happiest days in recent memory, she hummed the full lyric from “Dark Eyes” she hadn’t offered Finn. “All the best in life God has given us, I have sacrificed to your blazing eyes. Kak lyublyu ya vas, kak lyublyu ya vas . . .”