“Fueling the Future”—that’s our slogan, hanging right above the doors I walk through each morning into our lobby, an acre of black and white marble that runs past Reception and up to a back wall of blue and red pixels pulsing with the movements of Continental Oil’s three hundred–plus ships as they set sail from ports all over the globe. This breathtaking lobby is the first place I took my old friend Yasha Gendler when he paid me a visit in D.C. In hindsight, this was an error.
Half a decade had passed since Yasha and I had seen each other. He had flown in from Haifa, a trip he undertook every few years to visit his adult son in Bethesda. “Come downtown, I’ll show you where I work,” I offered when he called. If anyone could appreciate the wild course my life had taken, it was Yasha, the one person alive who not only knows my childhood nickname—Yul’ka—but feels it necessary to repeat it at every opportunity. As boys of six and seven, we’d played jacks and nozhiki on the same common hallway, over oak floorboards ruined with lye soap. By 1945, when my parents brought me from Kuibyshev to Moscow as a teething toddler, the apartment (whose original owners had escaped the Bolsheviks in 1922) had been partitioned and subdivided so many times that there were seven families sharing it in schismatic harmony. My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouting of her neighbors, to doing her wash by hand in the collective tub, to keeping her dry food locked up in her wardrobe. But where Florence was alien, I was native—Yasha and I both products of that pinnacle of evolution known as the Communal Apartment. Western scholars like to say our Soviet kommunalki were places devoid of personal space. This is not true. What better testament to private dominion could there be than the dense tangle of seven separate buzzers on the front door? The seven separate kerosene burners in the kitchen? The seven separate wooden toilet seats, which each tenant scrupulously tucked under his arm as he marched to the single communal toilet?
Those were the good days, before our real troubles began. Before the disappearances.
The next time I saw Yasha was in 1962, when we were reunited as students at the university. We both sat in a course called Fundamentals of Cybernetics, taught by an aging redheaded asthmatic who’d been tossed out in the early fifties for pursuing research in computer science, a field banned by Stalin for being one of the mercantile whores of imperialism. A decade later, it occurred to someone up top that the country was too far behind in its race with the Americans, and the disgraced professor was tracked down (he was mixing resins in an industrial-paint plant) and reinstated to teach the very subject he’d been fired for pursuing. The little man’s impiety revealed itself on the first day of class, when he wrote his full name on the blackboard: Arnold Peysakhovich Lubarsky. “Most people call me Arnold Petrovich,” he said, turning to face us. “You can call me whatever you prefer.” But that enormous “Peysakhovich” stayed on the board for the rest of the lecture, a patronym not merely Jewish, but so boldly and undauntedly Yid that I couldn’t keep myself from twisting my neck to glance at the faces behind me. Lubarsky might as well have announced he was Ben-Gurion himself come to read us a lecture on Zionism. Thus glancing backward, I locked eyes with the stunned face of Yasha Gendler, possibly the only other Jew in the room who’d also managed to pole-vault the university’s invisible quotas.
Lubarsky was the only professor at the university who dared mock that to which the state had given its approving stamp. One afternoon, he interrupted his own lecture to interrogate the lyric of a popular song. “ ‘I love you, Life, and I hope that the feeling is mutual’…Can anyone tell me what in the world this means?” He removed his spectacles to scan our timid faces. Each time Yasha and I walked into his lecture, we were entering a universe whose plane geometry held nothing in common with the contorted realities of our daily lives. With each theorem and arched brow, Lubarsky seemed to be saying to us, “Young people, what sense is there in these ‘laws’ that are violated by the very officials who issue them? How can they compare to the eternal, immutable laws of Newton, Pascal, Bernoulli, Einstein?”
Neither Yasha nor I ever forgot our little redheaded professor. Lubarsky immigrated to Israel and died a few years thereafter. This was the sort of news that Yasha stayed abreast of and reported to me faithfully in our annual New Year’s Eve phone call. In this way, he was more like a relative than a friend, our relationship cemented by mutual history. Years could pass without our seeing each other, but then we’d meet and Yasha might say, “Remember that New Year’s party when your father made costumes for the kids? We were both crows—he made us caps with cardboard beaks. It was the Year of the Ox, and everyone hung a picture of a bull on their door?” And just like that, I would remember.
The technological revolution arrived at the perfect time for brainy kids like Yasha and me. Strategically indifferent to politics, but not as yet perceiving ourselves as anything other than loyal Soviet citizens, we chose technical fields that seemed relatively immune to propaganda yet unimpeachably useful to society. Though we smirked at slogans, we were no less idealistic or enamored of ourselves than that first generation of revolutionaries. Instead of barricades, we believed in satellite launchers. Instead of marches, we had particle accelerators.
But, as I was reminded upon our reunion in D.C., I had long shed my idealistic notions, whereas Yasha’s had multiplied, like barnacles on a stranded vessel.
“Well, it’s what you always wanted, isn’t it?” He yawned, affecting a grand lack of interest in the pulsing spectacle of Continental’s lobby, and the view of the National Mall from my office window. “A big-time career. That’s why you left, after all.”
The boy who’d once been as lanky as a telephone pole was now a telephone pole with a gut. He’d let his stringy gray hair get too long, and now raked it back like a pompadour across his high forehead.
“Why I left?” I tried to clarify.
“Sure. They denied you your Ph.D., so you said, ‘Nothing more to do here, time to pack up and go to Ah-merica.’ ”
“I would have left sooner or later. We all did.”
“Ah, but if they’d given you your fancy doctorate, you’re telling me you wouldn’t have happily stayed and built ships for them? Hell, who do you think you’re building your ships for now? Who are you making rich? The same bastards who had red telephones on their desks.”
“I see,” I said. “So you left for the right reasons, and I left for the wrong ones.”
“Hey, I applied to leave before the word ‘refusenik’ was invented. I’m not boasting. I’m just talking about principles. When they finally let me leave I’d been working six years as a janitor, not a physicist. A little bird whispers and suddenly you’re tossed out of your department and the only work you can find is cleaning elevators. But I’ll say this: in all those years I never compromised my convictions. I never gave up my activity like they wanted me to.”
Yasha loved alluding to his dissident “activity,” which as far as I knew was limited to attending a few underground Hebrew lessons to meet girls. He hadn’t gotten much past the Aleph-Bet, either with the Hebrew or with the girls. “Yasha, is it my fault,” I said, “that ‘out of principle’ you elected to immigrate to a country that enjoys a Euro-socialist lifestyle of monthlong vacations and forced unemployment? If you wanted a career in research, you could have had one. Picked up where you left off.”
“Oh sure, with all the kids graduating every year from the Technion.”
But Yasha became more animated at the Air and Space Museum. Forced early retirement had given him abundant time to obsess over Israel’s parliamentary politics while attacking various theorems whose proofs he had abandoned as a young physicist. He was also, he informed me, writing a “popular book” on the lives of the great mathematicians. At present he was working on a chapter about Niels Henrik Abel, a Norwegian who had invented group theory by age nineteen, yet died, penniless and rejected by the Academy, of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six.
Yasha was still talking about this unheralded genius when we arrived at the upscale restaurant that I’d carefully selected for our lunch. But then he abruptly switched topics, from the underappreciated dead to the overrated living.
“A few weeks ago, I open Vesti, our Russian paper,” he said, “and there’s a review of some book. Some samizdat press, but the author’s name I recognize. You remember our apartment neighbors, the Vainers? Their two girls, Dita and Marina…”
I conjured up a vague memory of blue hair-bows and white pinafores. “The family that had the Ukrainian relatives staying for three weeks at a time?”
“The same one. The father with the drooping mustache. Dita immigrated to Israel, and a couple of years ago, she writes the father’s ‘memoirs.’ Full of inaccuracies. Forget the small ones. She writes that, because my mother was never arrested, she must have been the informer in our kommunalka. Can you imagine drawing that conclusion? Very scientific. I wanted to pick up the phone and call the publisher.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point? To ask what this Dita’s process of deduction was! And mezhdu prochim, by the way, if there was an informer, it was probably Vainer himself. Or Flora Solomonovna.”
This was the point where I stopped hearing. The sounds of the restaurant rushed into my ears like an ocean roar. Flora Solomonovna. Florence. My mother. Yasha was still talking ecstatically, gesticulating with his French fry. He must have forgotten for a moment who his audience was. “What are you talking about?” I interrupted. “You’re saying my mother was the apartment informer?”
Yasha reluctantly bit his fry. A familiar twitch at the corner of his mouth told me this was no slip. He’d meant to say it. But his voice carried a note of regret, even sympathy. “Look, I wasn’t there. My mother, she lost her mind a little by the end. I don’t know who was right, who was wrong—and I don’t care. But to put it on paper like that! That’s what got me.”
“Come on, now, Yasha, I didn’t pull you by the tongue. You started, please finish. What did she say?”
“Who, Mama?”
I was silent.
He palmed back his untidy gray hair. “Flora used to talk to her…when all the chaos started in that apartment with the arrests. Flora told her, ‘Rosa, if you’re taken away, they can send your boy to live with relatives. If it happens to me, where is Yulik going to go? Lord knows they won’t send him to my relatives in America. What will happen to him?’ Mama said Flora was ready for anything. Ready to go to any length.”
“Well, that’s certainly more deductive.” I felt something cold and stern taking hold of me. “A conversation over a kerosene burner.”
Yasha was avoiding my eyes, wolfing down his brisket like a sword swallower, though the effort of it seemed to be causing him some difficulty now. “She said some things. What does it matter now? I’m sure you could get all the facts, if you wanted.” I could see satisfaction wearing through his apologetic grin. “They’ve opened up the archives again. Didn’t you tell me you always wanted to get your mother’s classified files?”
I stared at him. He certainly never forgot a thing. It was true: I’d once lamented to him about missing my chance to obtain my parents’ dossiers. That had been some time after ’92, when Yeltsin had decreed that the KGB’s old archives could be opened for anyone who’d had a relative arrested, killed, or sent away under Stalin. But a few years after the announcement, access to the files was again restricted, without warning or explanation, as is our Russian way.
Yasha mopped up the sauce on his plate. “You must have read about it. It was in all the papers.”
“I haven’t had much time for reading,” I said.
“Of course.” He gazed around at last, taking in the view with a look that said, I can see you’ve kept yourself busy. “Well, if you’re still interested, you ought to do it soon. You never know, they could start reclassifying everything tomorrow. That’s how it is—a few years of so-called freedom and they turn the screws tight again.”
I smiled. “I’ll give it some thought.” I raised two fingers to signal for the check.
“Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, right?” Yasha said, giving me a shrug and a half. “Especially if you’re already traveling there for business.”
“My trips are scheduled pretty tightly,” I said.
He took another bite of beef. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find the time.”
That night, I couldn’t sleep, thinking about all the counterarguments I’d failed to make to Yasha’s face. My mother, going “to any length” to save her child? Was he kidding? The defining tragedy of my mother’s life was that she’d never had an instinct for family preservation. I recalled a conversation around our small kitchen table in Moscow. We’d been reminiscing about my old babysitter, Avdotya Grigorievna, the old woman who’d lived down the hall and was fond of me. Mama and I were laughing at old Auntie Dunya’s queer way of rolling her “o”s when Florence suddenly said, “Her family was from one of those Volga villages, outside Gorky somewhere. She offered to help us get there, stay with her relatives for a while, keep low after Papa was arrested.”
“So why didn’t we go?” I said.
But she’d laughed at my dismay. “What was I going to do in a village? Pick turnips? Grow potatoes?”
“And what were you doing that was so special in Moscow? Writing letters to Comrade Stalin? Dragging me out before dawn so you could get a better spot on the prison lines?”
“I wasn’t going to abandon your father. I had to find out what happened to him.”
“You knew what happened to him. You were just drawing attention to yourself.”
At this, her face acquired that gloss of incomprehension she liked to retreat behind when challenged. “I couldn’t have just left him,” she said irritably.
“And what about me, Mama? Did you ever think about what would happen to me when they came for you?”
She chewed her food for a while before answering. Then she said, “Yes, I did think about it. Your father and I talked about it.” This was a surprise to me. “We knew that, no matter what happened to either of us, they would never let anything bad happen to the children here. The children were always going to be taken care of.”
Then it was my turn to laugh. Taken care of, indeed! It was a miracle my arm hadn’t been emancipated from its socket when I was six years old by my state-appointed caretakers.
“No matter what happened to you, Mama?”
“Yes, no matter what happened to us, the country would always look after the children,” she repeated like a robot.
“But, Mama,” I said, “it didn’t have to happen to you at all! Don’t you get it? None of it had to happen to you, or to anybody.”
Again the fact-proof screen was raised. Once more her eyes acquired the perplexed look that indicated all communication had ceased.
The list of subjects to which my mother could apply her famous silence was bounded by neither taste nor logic. I could understand her not wanting to elucidate on her years in the labor camp. But later, in the seventies, I almost never heard her speak about our family in America, though we were regularly in receipt of packages filled with sweaters, denim Levi’s, instant coffee, and sneakers. And still later, in Brooklyn, she refused to let me change the name tag on the intercom in the vestibule of her Section 8. For the next eight years, I would buzz myself up to the flat of one deceased “Marquita Muñiz.” If I asked Florence for whom all this subterfuge was intended, she simply answered, “Whoever needs to find me knows where I am.”
Her tight-lipped-ness I’d long made my peace with. Why, then, after my lunch with Yasha Gendler, did it set my teeth on edge that there might be things about my mother—humiliating, atrocious things—that others knew, or believed they knew, and that I did not? Over and over I’d weighed every word I’d spoken to Yasha and felt ugly about the indifference I’d affected. “Touch shit and you’re the one who smells”—that had always been my motto in dealing with unsavory innuendo. Not for a moment did I believe Yasha’s suggestion that Florence had betrayed her friends and neighbors to the Soviet secret police. And yet I was pained by the unfair impression my mask of amused silence must have made on him.
And so, at midnight, with a glass of Rémy in my hand and wearing only my pajama bottoms, I found myself climbing the eight steps up to my attic office and booting up my Dell. I cracked open the skylight above my head and let in, through the liquid reaches of the night, the restless summer screeches of the cats and raccoons.
I called up a browser and in the search window, in Russian, typed “repressions,” “stalin,” “FSB,” and “archives.” In .45 seconds, the search engine returned 48,535 entries. Most of the links were to articles or academic texts, though those gave way to personal accounts: unpublished stories, poems, and screeds pertaining to brothers, fathers, uncles swallowed up by Stalin’s terror. The Internet was undeniably demonstrating that the affliction of graphomania, to which Dostoyevsky claimed every Russian was predisposed, had blossomed into a disease as contagious as it was incurable. I shivered at the thought of adding my number to that roll of countrymen sucked back endlessly into the past.
When I limited my search to recent news stories I found what I was looking for—articles in several prominent newspapers covering the announcement that the Russian government had made just months earlier: The FSB had declassified millions of documents on victims of repressions. Relatives could now request information about those who’d been executed in prison or deported to camps.
I’d missed that window in ’92. Traveling back there had been the furthest thing from my mind. I had work to do, and my mother’s growing list of ailments to manage. And she, I was sure, had no desire to reopen chapters of her life she’d so carefully forgotten. Now I wondered if my failure to raise the topic with Mama had been inspired by a fear of trespass. Our relationship was fraught enough without adding this to the mix. That summer was still entangled for me with the memory of our last fight, which it anguished me now to recall. My mother had suffered a stroke. For days, her right side was paralyzed. Gradually, she began to recover her speech and movement. But there was no longer any question of her living alone. With unsettled feelings, Lucya and I relocated her to a nearby group home. She’d been at the facility for almost a year when doctors operated on her leg. A few days after she was released from the hospital, I visited Mama in the nursing home and discovered that the undersides of her legs and her backside were covered with bedsores. The so-called caretakers were clearly neglecting to sponge-bathe her in a timely manner and properly apply ointment to her sores. Enraged, I started berating the nursing assistant on duty—an imperious imbecile who continued to insist, even as I pointed to the subclean sheets, that everything had been done properly and “according to procedure.” I informed the woman that only a mental incompetent could fail to see my mother was in serious discomfort. I demanded to speak with the doctor in charge. That was when the nurse stormed out, maybe to find her superior, more likely to complain about me while she sucked a cigarette or whatever it was she normally did instead of tending to her patients.
But all of this is only the backdrop to the crucial part of the story: While I had been chewing out the nurse, Florence, reclining in her metal bed, would not stop interjecting that everything was “just fine.” Why was I making a fuss, she demanded, when she was feeling “absolutely all right” (though she had confessed quite the opposite to me minutes earlier)? There was “no need to make trouble,” she kept insisting to me, smiling wanly at her idiotic caretaker.
I could understand her impulse to appease when the nurse was within hearing range, but she continued defending her own abuse even after the woman had stormed out. “These people know how to do their job.”
“If these people were doing their jobs,” I said, “your backside wouldn’t be covered in sores.”
As if not hearing me, she said, “They take care of it their own way. They know best.”
They know what they’re doing. They know best. It was the refrain I’d been hearing from her all my life. For heaven’s sake, I thought, you are eighty-two years old. You’ve been living in a free country for thirteen years now. Why must you compulsively parade your loyalty to whatever cruel and indifferent master happens at this moment to be pressing his boot on your neck?
What I did in fact say was “Enough, Mama. I’m doing the talking now.”
We remained locked in disagreement until the day she died, less than a year later. Now, with my mother buried along with her silences, I googled the names of activists quoted in the news articles, and came upon the object of my search: a website called MEMORIAL. Apparently, it was a Russian society dedicated to the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin’s repressions. The website was forlorn-looking, a Gulag of defunct links, many of which, like the victims the site represented, were themselves “under rehabilitation.” But toward the bottom was the name of the webhost, listed simply as Yevgeny@memo.ru. For a full minute, I let my cursor hover uneasily over the address. I pictured Yasha’s gloating face. His invitation had been a challenge. What was I afraid of?
I double-clicked on the link and composed a short email asking how and to whom I was supposed to address my request for my parents’ documents. Judging by the site, I didn’t expect an answer. I pressed send and closed the window. Now Yasha could be satisfied.
Only I wasn’t. If there were any secrets to be found, there was one person I knew who might reveal them. And I was overdue to pay him a visit.
The Avalon was unlike any place to which one might attach the words “retirement” or “home.” The reception area, with ferns and planted palms, large armchairs, carved wooden side tables with exotic ironware artifacts, and a grand Steinway in the corner, resembled a waiting room in some far-flung U.S. embassy. The residents looked like vacationers shuffling about in their loafers and Bermuda shorts. On my way out to the patio I consulted the calendar, on which the weekly activities were mixed in among such notable events as:
AMELIA EARHART IS LOST OVER THE PACIFIC, 1937 * Sundaes on Sundays 2:00. THE BIKINI DEBUT IN PARIS, 1946 * MARC CHAGALL BORN, 1887 * Morning Stretch BR 10:30 * Mind Boosters BR * MILTON BERLE BORN, 1908 * Caribbean Party w/Gary Lovett * JOHN DILLINGER KILLED BY THE FBI IN CHICAGO, 1934 * Spanish for Beginners BR 4:00 * Poker Pals GR 2:00 * JFK JR. CRASHES OFF MARTHA’S VINEYARD, 1999 * Shabbos Service * 10:30 Schmooze & News BR
Out on the brick terrace, I sat down on one of the striped-cushioned chairs and tilted my head back to drink in the sun. It wasn’t long before my uncle Sidney emerged, sockless in espadrilles, with an issue of The Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm. He was moving more stiffly than I remembered. “Julian, my boy, good to see you! Sit back down.”
“How’s the colon, Uncle Sid?” I said.
“Very good. Doctor says I have the longest colon he’s ever seen in a man my size. A spool of kishkes a mile long. Apparently, I’ve got plenty more to snip if the day comes again.”
He was letting me off the hook. I felt terrible for not coming to see him sooner. Despite the easygoing way he managed to speak about it, the physical signs of his recent surgery and chemo were difficult to disguise. His lightweight khakis hid the sticks of his legs well enough, but his polo shirt couldn’t do the same for his thin arms and wrists, his sharply protruding shoulders. My mother’s brother Harry had passed away before we’d arrived in America; his children now lived in California. Sidney was the only one who remained who still remembered Mama.
“So you’re feeling good?” I said.
“That’s a different question.”
“Looks like they keep you busy as a cruise line here. Spanish lessons. Board games.”
“I skip all that kindergarten stuff.”
“Poker your game?”
“Gin. I’ll play a hand with anyone. What do you want for lunch?” he said when a member of the staff appeared. “Get him a cup of coffee, Deborah,” Sidney instructed. “With cream, and some herring. You like herring? Good. An egg-white omelet for me, and a coffee, black.”
The scrub-attired Deborah smiled and left with our unopened menus.
“How’s Judy?” I said.
“My daughter and her husband are in Myanmar. Last spring it was Turkey. Each year a more exotic destination. I don’t think middle New Jersey is far enough away for them to visit. But you know what they got here now?” he said, almost perking up. “Computer tutors! Twice a week, they teach us how to email our grandchildren, like nobody can pick up a telephone anymore. But me—I’ve started doing my stock trading on the computer now—just a bissele.”
“I didn’t know you still played the market.”
“I don’t play. I read the papers, I look at the numbers, and I only listen to myself.” Talking about stocks always got Sidney animated. “Last week,” he rushed to add, “my broker called, said he had a tip for me. I told him, ‘Jeff, you’ve known me for twenty years. You know my name and you know where I live. The day you start giving me advice on trading is the day you’re no longer my broker.’ ”
I’d loved Sid’s disarmingly gruff manner since the first time I’d met my uncle, back in Moscow in 1959. I was fifteen; he, thirty-nine, a dapper vision in a gray flannel suit, brimmed hat, shiny black wingtips, striding to greet my mother and me in Sokolniki Park. As an executive at Dow, he’d managed to score himself a visa that year as a delegate to the Moscow World Exhibition, an enormous trade show intended as a technological pissing contest between Nixon and Khrushchev. My first memory of him is still engraved in the Kodak colors of that day, along with all the panoramas of American houses and automobiles, the “model kitchens” and washer-dryers of tomorrow and the other marvels of domestic technology meant to teach us Soviets about the humanity of our rivals. I saw him again twenty years later, at JFK Airport, upon our arrival in America. It was Sidney who, along with his now departed wife, Stella, had welcomed my family that first cold evening in New York, with his reassuring warning that the United States was just a labor colony with better food. And Sidney who, while giving Lucya and me our first nighttime car tour of luxury Manhattan, told me, “You’ll do all right here, Julian, as long as you don’t let envy clog up all your senses.” We’d found a mutual language right away; all the things I’d never had in common with my mother, I finally had with Sidney. Like me, he was no justice crusader. After he’d gotten out of the army, he’d taken his GI money and picked up a master’s in chemical engineering at Northwestern, then spent the next forty years pragmatically embracing the American Dream his sister had turned her back on.
“It’s good to trust only yourself. I guess that’s why you haven’t lost money,” I said to him now.
“Oh sure, I’ve lost. Never enough to break the bank. I’m not a gambler. I grew up during the Depression, when folks was tossing themselves off buildings.”
“So did Florence,” I said. “I guess it taught her a different lesson.”
Sidney took a moment to think and finally shrugged. “I was a kid. Florie, she was older. Folks who lived through that time, they were like survivors of a war. And your mother was always very sensitive to all the injustices. She’d get into fights at the dinner table with our father every night. At the Sabbath dinner, we all had to agree not to talk about politics.”
“What would you talk about?”
“Well, I remember they once argued about the Harlan County miners who were getting beat up by the police for striking. Dad said, ‘Nobody got jobs nowadays, and those ones are striking!’ Well, Florie, she was quick, she said, ‘They starve while they work, they might as well strike while they starve!’ Every night it was something like that.”
“Sounds like a slogan she probably heard,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Sidney said charitably. “But she believed it. Once, she came home all bruised up after some demonstration. She claimed she struck a policeman who’d grabbed her. Clocked him with her pocketbook. We were just happy she didn’t land herself in jail.”
“Speaking of the police, Uncle Sid,” I said, “I was wondering if she ever had any run-ins with the police in Russia. I mean the secret police. They would have kept tabs on American expats.”
“What makes you wonder about that?” Sidney asked, a groove of disapproval forming between his brows.
“Just curious. Did she ever mention anything to you about that?”
“You mean when they tossed her in that dungeon?”
“Or…before that.” I hesitated. “Did she ever say anything about getting harassed by the NKVD, or, I don’t know…” I wanted to say “recruited,” but couldn’t get my lips to form the word. “…intimidated,” I uttered at last.
Again Sidney’s mouth got that sewn-up look of displeasure. “No, no, no. Florie wasn’t scared of anything,” he said.
He seemed to have misunderstood my question, and I felt somehow that I had lost my chance. To go back to the sensitive matter seemed impossible.
“Whatever or whoever she got involved with, she went into it all the way,” Sid said. “Everybody in the family said it was that job at the Trade Mission that screwed her up. That it was all the Russians she got involved with. That she had some lover she followed there. In those days it wasn’t nothing, you know. Not like today, a woman jumping into bed with any man like it’s hopscotch. Everything done out in the open, like in a Macy’s window. They talked about free love and all of that in my day, too. But I’m talking about among respectable people. Proper young women. It was a shandeh un a charpeh. You know what that means?”
I nodded sagely.
“A shame and a disgrace. A Pah-zor!”
“Pozor,” I corrected.
The Yiddish Sidney and my mother had picked up growing up in Brooklyn was so mixed in with Russian, likely because of their grandparents’ Litvak roots, that Sid sometimes mistook one for the other.
“She always had to be ahead of the train, your mother. And you know what happens to people who are ahead of the train?” He steadied his eyes on me once more. “They get run over!”
Uncle Sidney was not one for being figurative.
“But you’re sure she wasn’t a communist herself?” I asked.
“Nah! Look—all those people she knew were a little screwy in that respect. They had Sacco and Vanzetti’s birthdays marked up on their calendars along with Christmas and New Year’s. But, no, she wasn’t a communist. Just restless. Wanted to do something grand with her life. She was always rubbing elbows with important people, politicians and so on. She met Senator Borah once—a big shot, head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. You know what he said about her?”
“What?”
“ ‘It’s gals like Florence Fein who make the world go round.’ What do you think of that?”
I tried to look impressed. I’d heard it before.
A grimace passed across Sidney’s face. “Eh,” he said, swiping a hand. “All those fools are in the ground now.”