I set down my briefcase, stuffed with my students’ bluebooks, and hit rewind. Then I called Katka.
“She’s twenty-four!” I said.
“So?”
“So when we were her age we were living under Husák, and we’re not writing autobiographical plays.”
“Your fatherly pride astounds me.”
I wondered how the wife I had known when Daniela was first born — the quiet, sunken woman who read the Czech newspapers in the library every morning and then wrote long letters to her mother in Prague, letters Katka had known would be swallowed by security — could have become this confident voice on the line.
“I’m just suggesting,” I said, “that Daniela may not know what she’s getting into.”
“Well, she’s the one with the play, and you’re an aging man who begins sentences with ‘When we were her age.’”
“Ha,” I said, and after we hung up I spent the rest of the evening calling Daniela, getting her voicemail each time. Finally, just before eleven, she answered.
“Congratulations!” I said. “I hope I’m not waking you.”
“No, now that people are actually going to see the thing, I’m up trying to fix it.”
So there was still time for revising.
“Why don’t I fly down this weekend to take you out?” I said. “Dinner, a show, whatever you want.”
“What about July?”
My yearly New York trip. “I’ll come then also.”
“You don’t want to be down here,” she said. “It’s a hundred degrees and pouring.”
I told her I’d fly her up to Maine, then. It was humid here for May, too, but being on the water was almost pleasant. She’d never been up and it was an easy ninety-minute flight; we could make a leisurely weekend of it, driving along the jagged green coastline, stopping at Ocean Street Pier for taffy. “They have this big machine,” I said, “where they’ll make your own flavor right in front of you.”
“Sorry,” she said, and my heart flopped: didn’t she used to have a sweet tooth? I had no idea what she did like. I pictured her in her apartment on 103rd Street, a glum matchbook studio she had brightened up by painting it yellow and lining the sill with ferns. She would be on her bed, doing ballet stretches, and her hair, long and thick and the color of cola, would be falling into her mouth. “I’ve got a lot of work.”
“So?” I said. “Me, too.”
“I figured as much.”
Ah, this directness was new. The young artiste emboldened by a sale. “I’m so proud of you, Daniela. I just want to celebrate,” I said, and finally her voice softened and she said okay. I knew I was laying it on thick, but what were my options? I pictured a velvet curtain pulled open to reveal the stage. I saw that Queens backdrop: the low huddle of brick tenements with the metallic sparks of the city beyond. Under the spotlight sat a girl on her stoop, pudgy and pale with dark brown bangs cut straight across. She was waiting for her father. It was his weekend; he should have arrived an hour ago. She waited and waited. The theater lights brightened as the afternoon got hotter, and when the mother returned from the third house she’d cleaned that day, she took one look at her daughter and led her inside. The mother, tired and tall in bleach-stained sweats and sneakers, called the father long-distance as her daughter slumped on the sofa, still clutching her lavender suitcase with both hands. And when the father told the truth, that somehow the Saturday pickup had become Sunday in his mind, the whole strained story of their relationship was revealed in the way the mother drew in a breath to stop from yelling, before ripping open a package of cold cuts and making their lunch.
I KNEW ANY good parent would have been thrilled. And I wanted to be. In some ways it would have been easier if I’d been a monster — at least I’d know what was coming. Instead, I just hadn’t been around much. And so, for the next few days, sitting through office hours or doing laundry in preparation for Daniela’s visit, all I could think about was being written into her life story — especially because I knew just where she had gotten her facts.
Daniela was two when Katka and I separated; she was bred on a lifetime of her mother’s tales about me. Katka, I imagined, would begin by saying that I was the one who dragged her to America in the first place. In Prague we had written anonymously with our colleagues for the journal the Chronicle of Our Time. We wrote by hand — the government had a record of everyone who owned typewriters — and late at night I’d sneak into different university buildings to type the materials. Every time we finished an issue, we’d distribute it to people we knew, who then passed it along to people they knew, until we had thousands of readers throughout the country. But when the StB still managed to link me to a typewriter, I was brought in for questioning and fired from my teaching post in the political science department. At the time Katka had seemed like the lucky one: she was on maternity leave from the economics department that term, and so avoided suspicion. But it was my name people chanted outside the university. It was my name that made international headlines and reached the desk of Saul Sandalowski, the Collins College professor who campaigned to get me a visa and a teaching job to avoid imprisonment.
She’d tell Daniela about packing our entire flat in three days before boarding the long flight to the States. She’d talk about the brick faculty apartment that awaited us in Vermont: boxy and carpeted and new; a million times nicer than our flat on Bo
ivojova Street, but dimly quiet without our friends crowded around the living room, chatting away the evening. She’d talk about how my assistant professor’s salary barely covered our rent, let alone food or doctor’s bills — and she’d talk about working the early morning shift as a janitor at the college, mopping the same mahogany classrooms I lectured in, emptying the garbage can full of my students’ crumpled napkins and paper coffee cups.
Katka came from a long line of intellectuals. She was the one who was supposed to be offered a professorship in America. Her father had been shipped to a psychiatric prison for writing his own anti-government pieces when Katka was still a baby, and an enormous part of her childhood was watching her mother devote herself to getting him out. I remember meeting Katka back in university and trying to impress her with my big ideas, only to realize the political books I was reading for the first time were ones she had already dissected and gleaned an understanding of years ago. There was something so exciting, almost romantic, about watching this brawny college girl reduce my ideas to a lumpy pile of porridge, making me feel not like a rising star at the university but what I really was, deep down: a skinny kid from a family of uneducated dairy farmers in Moravia. A big part of me had always believed I was destined to ride her coattails. The only thing I had over her was fluency in English; I’d studied in London after college. I could see how hard the move to Vermont was on her. I could see it in the way she closed into herself when I dragged her to cocktail hour at the provost’s house, the way even meeting me for a quick lunch before class made her anxious. The woman who had once stood outside Party headquarters, chanting “StB Equals Gestapo,” was suddenly afraid to order at the campus sandwich shop because she didn’t understand the menu.
At this point, Katka would say the transition would have been difficult no matter what, but that I certainly didn’t help. She’d say even when I was home I wasn’t really there—at the dinner table, or lifting a crying Daniela from her crib, I always seemed to be silently working on another essay. How I ducked into my study at every possible moment, how birthdays and anniversaries slipped into a murky, irretrievable place in my mind — but how I never seemed to forget the dates of Saul Sandalowski’s dinner parties. And she would be right. But those dinners! Saul, with his floppy, wheat-colored hair and shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, clamping a hand on my shoulder as he led me inside. His stone house on Seminary Road, so mazy and grand I always got lost looking for the bathroom. I was the honored guest, the man with the stories scholars and journalists and philanthropists wanted to hear.