She closed her eyes, banishing him, banishing his two subordinates. She recalled and then chose not to recall her pinched girlhood apartment on Avenue J and the two gloomy women who had raised her; her long and indifferent marriage; her contributions to topology; her only son, victim of cancer at thirty-five. Another dead Romanov. And she, propped up in a bed under three watchful pairs of eyes … might she at this late hour be invested with that old bear’s power to envision the future? Plagues, civil disruptions, babies born monstrous — any wag could foretell those catastrophes. No. Her gift was to witness not what was to come but what had been. She thought of the Little Father, Nicholas, abandoned before his death and disregarded afterward, remembered now only by a stroked-out mathematician who had not known him but could nevertheless see khaki garments. Beard. Kindly eyes. Mouth smiling at the freckled nurse who on a warm afternoon had soothed his troubled spirit. A solitary incident, one moment of singular ease, its issue one life of singular unremarkableness: hers. And with her passing would die not the memory of the incident — that memory had perished with Nicholas, with Vera — but the memory of its deathbed telling. The reputation of the tragic tsar … no further stain …
She opened her eyes. The doctors were still there, writing on their clipboards, exchanging glances, as thorough as the cheka. “My mother was mad,” she said hurriedly in English. “Her story was merely an invention,” she recanted, “to console me for my shameful birth. The season is winter, Dr. Hauser. The president is … a boob.”
Dr. White touched her hand. Little Mother, she said in the old woman’s tongue. If a lie, a generous one. And if the truth, safe with you and me. Rest now.
A few minutes later, in the hall, “Natalie,” snapped Dr. Lilyveck. “Your command of Russian — an unexpected talent. The patient’s prattle: what was it?”
“Mortimer,” Dr. White said sweetly. “A folktale, more or less.”
GIRL IN BLUE WITH BROWN BAG
THEY HAD MANY THINGS IN COMMON, the man of sixty-seven and the girl of seventeen. They were both undersized. Their eyes were a similar light blue, though Francis’s vision was excellent, requiring reading glasses only for very small print, and Louanne’s was poor — she glared at the world through spectacles so thick they seemed opaque. They lived in mirror-image apartments on the second floor of a double brownstone. (Such solid burghers’ buildings were the mainstay of housing in Boston and its nearer suburbs, Francis said often, probably too often.) Louanne lived in her apartment with her uncle and aunt. Francis lived in his alone. Both preferred ice cream to pastry. Both favored backpacks.
Francis’s worn pack was almost empty nowadays. It held a book or two, the morning Globe, the neglected reading glasses, the Cystadane powder he had to mix with water and drink every four hours. But the pack was, he liked to think, his sartorial trademark. During the forty years he’d served in the Great and General Court of Massachusetts — first in the house, then in the senate — he’d disdained a briefcase. His pack had been full then.
Louanne’s was full now. It bulged with high school textbooks. She was studying chemistry, calculus, English, French, and Constitutional law. Constitutional law was a new and experimental course for gifted seniors. She had some trouble with it because it presumed a knowledge of American history. She’d come to this streetcar suburb from Russia only two years earlier, as a sophomore; American history was offered in the freshman year.
“American history is finished,” she’d muttered to him on a memorable afternoon the previous September. They’d met on the staircase. She was coming home from school, he was going out for a stroll.
“What do you mean, Ms. Zerubin?”
“I mean that I’ve never learned it and I can’t take it now,” and she explained further. “Please call me Louanne, Mr. Morrison,” she wound up.
Her name was no more Louanne than his was Édouard Vuillard. She’d snatched it from some country singer she’d seen on TV the morning she arrived from Moscow. “All right, Louanne. Please call me …” He hesitated. Senator?
“I’ll call you Mr. Francis, Mr. Morrison. Mr. Francis, aren’t you sort of American history in your own person. You’re an embodiment.” She was two steps below him. Her raised face was flushed. He saw dandruff in the parting of her dull hair, weasel-brown. “I mean, serving as a lawmaker all those years — you’ve only just retired, my uncle told me. And your ancestors were Pilgrims. Didn’t they sail on one of those ships?”
“The Pinta.”
“I thought it had another name. Mr. Francis, could I come to you for instruction? I would consider it a weighty favor,” she added in an imperious tone.
He backed up a stair. “Oh, my dear, you see, my hobby, looking at paintings, it takes up much of my now freed time. I am a museum trustee, too; I serve on the Acquisitions Committee—”
“Once a week, I could come once a week.”
How long had she been planning this attack?
“We get out at noon on Wednesdays,” she said. “It’s the afternoon the teachers go to meetings.” She moved up a stair and threw her backpack beside her feet. He wouldn’t be able to descend without leaping over the pack. “You may assign texts,” she continued. “I will read them. I am thorough.”
He knew she was thorough. She was a thorough housekeeper. On Saturday mornings her aunt left the apartment door open, as did Francis, honoring the unbuttoned quality of the day. He had seen Louanne vacuuming on her knees, reaching her wand far underneath the sofa. She was thoroughly plain — ungroomed, un-adorned, her wardrobe limited to jeans and denim jackets — as if she’d made it her mission to complete what nature had begun.
“You may give quizzes,” she offered.
He had never seen her with a schoolmate. She was thoroughly friendless … And did his retirement really promise to be thoroughly fulfilling? Did he have so many friends?
“Instruction?” he said. “Wednesday afternoons? I will consider it a privilege.”
And so had begun their modest tutorial, six months earlier, conducted mostly in Francis’s living room — they were sitting there today, a cloudy March Wednesday — and sometimes at the museum and sometimes at a nearby pond. They didn’t adhere strictly to the original curriculum — the Constitution, the colonial period — but drifted into art and nature and even pedagogy.
“I disapprove of yes-or-no questions. Your essay answer is very good,” he said one day, handing her back a test she’d shown him. She’d earned a B-plus.
“What wrong with yes-or-no? Either you remember something or you don’t, and if you don’t you’ve got a 50 percent chance …”
“A test is a teaching device. It should encourage the student to consider the uncategorical, the ambiguous.”
She grumbled a little at that. “I never give my clients tests. They’d throw them back at me.” Her clients, three lawyers who’d answered an ad she’d placed in the paper, were perfecting their conversational Russian, which was already excellent.
Sometimes Francis and Louanne strayed into the area of personal history. “You have never married,” she remarked one afternoon, with comradely spurning of tact. “Perhaps you prefer men.”
“I like women and I like men, both at arm’s length.” He even liked homely outspoken schoolgirls with an odd attachment to a motherland in ruins.
On a different occasion, pausing near the pond, she’d told him she planned to go back to Russia after high school. “And would not you also return to the country of your birthing?” she demanded of his raised eyebrows.