She decides she wants her old house in Princeton back, the little white house on Wilson Road. The familiar, some sense of a place she’s already been in a country she no longer knows, if she ever did. Lucky for her the married academics she sold her Cape Cod to eighteen months earlier, soon to retire to Key West, are only too happy to sell it back to her at a modest markup. The down payment further depletes what’s left of her savings after the paying off of Sid’s exorbitant debts in their divorce settlement, but Svetlana doesn’t think twice about the money. She wants to be American. Isn’t owning one’s home and castle the essence of the American dream? And why should such a life, the very antithesis of the Soviet plan, be any less manifest for her than for anyone else? Within a single month, in 1972, she signs contracts for the sale of her Arizona property (occupied but a few months) and the repurchase of 50 Wilson Road. Though I am not a real estate attorney, I counsel her on the transactions as best I can. Meaning that I offer some advice and say a few factual things in discreet tones, and then she goes ahead and does what she’s going to do anyway.
Perhaps unavoidably, her relocation to town is noted by the local newspaper, The Princeton Packet, the last week of May, if only as a rather cheeky addendum to its lead article on Nixon and Brezhnev’s historic signing of the ABM Treaty. You have to navigate the “continued on p. A-5” before finding, in the piece’s final paragraph, the following digestif:
In other, more local affairs relating to the Soviet Union, Lana Evans, formerly known as Svetlana Alliluyeva, and, previously and more notoriously, as Svetlana Stalin, only daughter of Joseph Stalin the deceased Soviet tyrant, is reported to have moved back to Princeton following her separation from architect Sidney L. Evans, with whom she has a one-year-old son. Mrs. Evans, who defected to the United States in 1967, spent the previous two years living with her husband at the Taliesin Fellowship, the alternative-minded architectural school established by Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin and Arizona, where Mr. Evans is currently Chief Architect. According to Mrs. Evans’s attorney, local resident Peter Horvath, the timing of her return to the East Coast “obviously has no connection whatever” to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and her native country.
Yes, thank heavens for good old Peter Horvath: always around to set the record straight.
Svetlana moves back into her former home. But somehow the place, the longed-for domestic comfort, is not quite as she remembers it. The interim residents made certain alterations, added on a screened porch and a two-car garage, ruining symmetry, spatially impinging on her beloved backyard. The neighbors have built an “aggressive” fence. Other additions and subtractions as well, too obscure for me to register. At least her beloved dogwood tree is still standing: she can see it from her bedroom window. Taller, fuller than before. Symbol of memory and hope.
Unopened boxes are still in evidence in her new/old house as Yasha approaches his second birthday. “Don’t worry, Peter,” she assures me, “we celebrate. Nothing grandiose. We are simple people, Yasha and I, and he’s only two. As his godfather, of course you are with us.” Godfather? This is news to me. But yes, I am with them. And over the phone the handsome architect-cowboy Sid Evans tells her that he plans to fly in, of course he will, just needs to straighten out a knot in his work schedule. Right up until the morning of the event, in fact, she believes that Sid will magically appear so they might celebrate their son’s birthday together. When instead of her ex-husband, however, a delivery boy from Princeton’s most expensive children’s-wear shop, bearing a wrapped and beribboned box, rings her doorbell on the big day, Svetlana finally understands that Sid is not going to come.
Inside the gift box is a beautiful, toddler-size sweater, robin’s egg blue. And a card from the shop describing the tiny Scottish isle on which, in some craggy, windswept cottage, a very old Scotswoman knit this garment from wool sheared off her very own sheep. And so forth. Happy Birthday, Jacob, from your proud father…
“Sid always has beautiful taste,” Svetlana says, voice as bleak as the Siberian steppe.
She gets vodka from the freezer and pours small glasses for us both. Sticks a birthday candle in a blue-frosted cupcake from the Acme market and places it on the plastic tray of the high chair where Yasha sits eating apple slices, lights the candle with a match from a book that says PEKING PALACE, and begins to sing “Happy Birthday” to her son, her Russian accent stronger than ever. I join her, our voices not quite synchronizing. She gently orders Yasha to make a wish, but he is not speaking yet, and the notion of a wish is too abstract for him anyway, so his mother closes her eyes and silently invokes one on his behalf. (I have often wondered what it was.) With a blunt Russian breath, she blows out his candle. We down our vodka shots, which she immediately refills. And she looks at me, unbowed, as if to say: You see, Peter? American birthday. I am learning.
That summer I see her rarely. On each occasion I observe her acting out the role of American woman, mother, homeowner happy with her situation. And while this unlikely self-representation ought to alert me to its own lie, for various reasons I am feeling somewhat caged and awkward in my own life and so perhaps not looking closely enough. Martha too, as it happens, is a loyal reader of The Princeton Packet. And my wife has suddenly decided that this is the summer we are going to renovate—at our own expense, though we are renters—the guest room in our Block Island cottage. Meaning that, unlike Svetlana’s first American summer, we will be unable to have guests stay with us during our monthlong vacation.
Back in town, second weekend of September, Svetlana throws an “open welcome party,” as she advertises it, for her friends and neighbors. I have never enjoyed such forced community endeavors, but uncertain how many friends she still has left in Princeton—the fact is, with her well-earned reputation for being a fascinating but at times “challenging” woman, many of her former crowd no longer invite her to their dinners or barbecues—or who her neighbors are, I feel compelled, on protective grounds, to attend. As it turns out, unsurprisingly, Martha is struck down with a last-minute migraine, and Jean has a sleepover at a friend’s. So I venture over to Wilson Road by myself.
Six o’clock on a balmy, end-of-summer evening. She’s mowed her yard with her brand-new lawnmower, bought full price from friendly Mrs. Urken at Urken Hardware; wisps of cut grass clinging to the edges of the bluestone walkway and the tips of my loafers, the cooling air pearled green with it. She always leaves the door to her house unlocked “on principle,” she has told me, “so why not anybody—the washing woman, you understand, Peter, the man who cleans the chimney, college professors, a Negro from Chicago, all of them, they can walk into my house as they like and find me where I am.”
This is part of what I love about her, I realize, this relentless democratic dreaming expressed in her own particular American idiom. The daughter of a monster, okay, but she refuses to be held back, this forty-seven-year-old single mother of a baby boy, in a foreign country, by the bridge that can’t be built, the door that can’t be opened.
“Peter!” she greets me with warm cheek kisses as I enter her living room, where a small group of guests—two old Christian Science biddies; a Polish astrophysicist; a Native American garage mechanic; a couple of academic types; and, yes, a black man from Chicago—stand uneasily mingling under what feels like a general cloud of diminished social expectation. “Here you are. What again, no Martha? Another headache? Well, never mind. Come and have some punch. I got recipe out of stupid ladies’ magazine, but actually it’s not so bad.”
I go in. And she is right about the punch. And soon I find myself smiling like a teenager, because I have missed her.