I never told about anything, really, except in confidence to John and Hilda. I carried on. What else was I supposed to do? At the end of the year I got the extended contract, and John took me out for a glass of celebratory wine. I signed a lease on a furnished house five blocks away from campus—one bedroom, a study that was attached to the living room, and an eat-in kitchen. My own bathroom, at last. In the greenhouse my orchids were thriving, and a well-traveled parent sent me a bonsai tree, which I dutifully pruned into contorted proportions.
The staff were expected to attend graduation, mostly standing around the edges of seats filled by students and proud family members. Seniors were placed up front, and the other girls sat in order behind them—I could see my own spot from the previous year, now occupied by one of the egg girls. Her hair curled and pinned back neatly beneath her cap, a smile of self-satisfaction quivering on her lips. I listened to the speeches about greatness and empathy and moving into the world to do good in our dark times—America wasn’t at war, but I suppose all times feel dark in their own way. Certainly the day felt different from my own grad ceremony had, more bittersweet and ominous. Afterwards I accepted a piece of white cake with yellow frosting, buttercream.
“Hi, Zo!” Kay called from a nearby table. An eating area had been erected outside to help celebrants enjoy the weak spring sun. “I so look forward to seeing you again next year.”
She beamed, and I tried to smile back with some measure of aggression, enthusiasm. But it was as if all my emotions were on mute; even Kay couldn’t get a rise out of me. She seemed distant and almost dear. Already parents were lugging boxes into cars while girls signed yearbooks and blubbered over their good-byes. I could feel the shift. A floodgate, open. A tide, receding.
When the proceedings were over, I went back to my little house and lay down on top of the bedclothes. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to the idea of relaxing in the living room, sitting on a couch or chair. But the house was mine. I rubbed the edge of the blanket against my cheek, calling up the faint memory of a blue bunny, many years before. Lost now. I felt a bit sad, and reminded myself that I had work to do all summer. Good work. We’d planned a total inventory of the species in the greenhouse, reorganizing and cutting back as necessary, making room for the new year of biological science students and their Mendelian experiments on radish seedlings. I was going to help John choose new border flowers for the campus walkways. The weather would grow hot, and I would take one of the wooden kitchen chairs out onto the porch and sip iced tea. There would be fireflies.
I feel so keenly for that girl now. Her terror of being alone. I know the rooms of the house creaked and echoed, and that the pilot light in the stove soon developed a habit of going out just when circumstances called for a cup of strong tea. I know she cried herself to sleep, sometimes. That memories of her parents and the smell of bullets burning through flesh would come to her at the strangest moments. She’d look at walls and imagine them crumbling, falling on top of her, weakened by mortars or booby-trapped with wire. A friend, reaching out with soot-blackened fingers from beneath a stone too heavy to lift.
But I also know that the summer would end without calamity, as would the year following, and the year after that. Three years gone in a blink. I know that the girl had pleasures in her future she couldn’t yet dream of. Troubles too. But pleasure first, for once. Lev first.
VOLUME TWO
Lev
28 June 1931
Airmail via [Redacted]
I’m imagining you, my darling, on the first day of our new life in Maple Hill, which didn’t go quite the way we expected. You wore a blue dress—wool, despite the warm fall weather—and your hair was cut so severely I thought I might slice my hand if I brushed a strand off your shoulders. After the years we spent in Paris and the years we spent in that absurdly small apartment in New York, we needed a change and you had found it.
A pair of children ran by outside. Young girl with a knapsack, following a boy who seemed to be her brother. They cast long shadows and laughed as they ran, and through the window you watched them, waiting for me to meet you by the door. One hand on your hip, purse at the ready. Really devilish shoes, I must say. I stood at the top of the stairs and watched you, your eyes tracking the children and then tracking their absence. Small-town life. I had a momentary impulse to lift you off your feet and throw you onto whatever surface was available, taking torrid liberties. Making you as round as an onion, so I could peel you back and see what was inside. Your little white face, replicated. But I restrained myself, knowing as I do your delight in keeping a schedule.
Neither of us wanted to be in New Jersey, though you wouldn’t admit it out loud. It was an afterthought of a place, a backcountry charm school. That was certainly my first reaction when the letter arrived, offering me a tenured post—we’d been in New York long enough to consider all land beyond the Hudson provincial. But the provost at the Donne School was a fan of my writing, and willing to overlook what many more prestigious administrators had called the “childish philosophical wish-making of a pseudo-biologist” (among other plum summaries of my work). Not to mention the money was surprisingly good: wealthy parents, rich tuition. And so you insisted this was what we needed. A place to rest, after all our wandering. Until the day my books could support us I would have to teach, and I could teach here. Little girls. Little women. I was surprised you didn’t protest on this point. Instead, before walking me to campus for the first time, you smoothed my lapel and re-knotted my tie, running the length of it through your fist with a flourish.
“There,” you said. “Dashing.”
By then I was used to having you dress me. Everything I once owned had been thrown away by the date of our wedding, or else pressed and brushed, nipped in with a tailor’s unfailing eye. I’d never cared about my wardrobe, and found it relaxing to have you take the reins. One less thing to occupy my mind while writing. Sort “clothes” with “food” and “friends” and “mail.” The postman handed you our stack of letters, and you cut them open with a nifty switchblade from one of the more roguish Parisian flea markets. When something merited my attention—like the offer from George Round in Maple Hill—you let me know. The rest you dispatched yourself.
Our true partnership—it started with my manuscript, didn’t it? A single, cleansing fire. After that I gave myself over to you. Not a statement of regret, my love, just a dispassionate review: our lives as a slide show, leading up to the Donne School steps. Once we made up, there were conversations held late into the night, ideas I scribbled down on napkins and scraps to show you in the morning. The wrinkle in your forehead when you were scratching something out. You found all the pieces of me that I wanted to deny, and excised them with neat precision. Extraneous phrases, characters who could be combined into one better man, lopsided philosophies. Nothing escaped you, and I grew to rely on it.
That morning, I watched you apply lipstick in the hallway mirror. Our house was still half empty then, though your embellishments were beginning to show. A few tasteful portraits hung in the sitting room, plus one wedding photo. Coffee cups with blue limning stacked in the cabinet at rakish angles. Your bedroom bureau an airplane console with powder compacts and brooches for buttons. I sometimes had the sense that I was looking at fragments of your mind left out in plain view, the larger picture still obscured. But of course—I reminded myself—I knew the larger picture. Our success, toasted. Our happiness, secure. You pressed your lips together to smudge the red more evenly around your mouth, then used a pinky nail to scrape away an imperfection that was, to me, invisible.