He said nothing that day about the nails. (Or the lilac lupines, the satin in the hair, the lips, the hips, the dress, the breasts, the sheer white panties.) The next day he said, “They sell such dazzling nail polish at the Stonington store?”
“I don’t know. I brought this one with me.”
He was quiet so long, she thought he hadn’t heard her. And then: “Well, that must’ve been nice for all the invalids at NYU.”
Ah, some participation. Not great—but a start. What to say to that, though? Oh, it wasn’t for the invalids. She knew it was a trap, a code for, since nurses aren’t allowed to wear nail polish, what’d you have nail polish for, Tania?
Later that evening at the kitchen table, she took the polish off with acetone. When he saw it was gone, he said, “Hmm. So other invalids rate the red nails but not me?”
She lifted her eyes at him standing over her. “Are you joking?” she said, the tips of her fingers beginning to tremble.
“Of course,” he said, without a glimmer of a smile.
Tatiana threw away her red New York nail polish, her flirty post-war ruched and pleated New York dresses, her high-heeled New York greenbelt brilliant Ferragamo shoes. Something happened to him when he saw her in New York things. What’s the matter, she would ask, and he would reply that nothing was the matter, and that would be all he’d reply. So she threw them all out and bought herself a yellow muslin dress, a floral chintz dress, a white cotton sheath, a blue wrap dress— from Maine. Alexander still said nothing, but was less quiet. Now he talked to her of other things, like Ho Chi Minh and his band of warriors.
She tried, tried to be funny with him like before. “Hey, do you want to hear a joke?”
“Sure, tell me a joke.” They were walking up a Stonington hill behind a huffing Anthony.
“A man prayed for years to go to paradise. Once, going up a narrow path in the mountains he stumbled and fell into the precipice. By a miracle he grasped some sickly bush and started crying: ‘Anybody here? Please, help! Anybody here?’
“After some minutes of silence the voice answered: ‘I am here.’ “
‘Who are you?’
“ ‘I am God.’
“ ‘If you are God, then do something!’
“ ‘Look, you asked me for so long to be brought to paradise. Just unclench your hands—and immediately you will find yourself in paradise.’
“After a small silence the man cried: ‘Anybody ELSE here? Please— help!’”
To say that Alexander didn’t laugh at that joke would have been to understate matters.
Tatiana’s hands trembled whenever she thought of him. She trembled all day long. She walked through Stonington as if she were sleepwalking, stiff, unnatural. She bent to her son, she straightened up, she adjusted her dress, she fixed her hair. The churning inside her stomach did not abate.
Tatiana tried to be bolder with him, less afraid of him.
He wouldn’t kiss her in front of Jimmy, or the other fishermen, or anybody. Sometimes in the evenings, as they walked down Main Street and looked inside the shops, he would buy her some chocolate, and she would turn up her face to thank him, and he would kiss her on the forehead. The forehead!
One evening Tatiana got tired of it and, jumping up on the bench, flung her arms around him. “Enough with the head,” she said, and kissed him full on his lips.
His one hand on the cigarette, the other on Anthony’s ice cream, he couldn’t do more than press against her. “Get down,” he said quietly, kissing her back without ardor. “What’s gotten into you?”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you man o’ war!
Alone with Anthony, in their daily wanderings up and down the hills of Stonington, Tatiana made friends with the women who ran the stores and the boys who brought the milk. She befriended a farm woman in her thirties up on Eastern Road, whose husband, a naval officer, was still in Japan. Every day Nellie cleaned the house, weeded the front garden and waited for him on the bench outside, which is how Tatiana met her, just skipping by with her son. After talking to her for two minutes, Tatiana felt so sad for the woman, viscerally remembering grieving for Alexander, that she asked Nellie if she needed help with the farm. Nellie had an acre of potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers. Tatiana knew something about these things.
Nellie gladly agreed, saying she could pay Tatiana two dollars a day from her husband’s army check. “It’s all I can afford,” she said. “When my husband comes back I’ll be able to pay you more.”
But the war ended a year ago, and there was still no news of him. Tatiana said not to worry.
Over coffee, Nellie opened up a little. “What if he comes back and I won’t know how to talk to him? We were married such a short time before he went to fight. What if we find out we’re complete strangers?”
Tatiana shook her lowered head. She knew something about these things, too.
“So when did your husband come back?” Nellie asked with envy.
“A month ago.”
“So lucky.”
Anthony said, “Dad didn’t come back. Dad was never coming back. Mama left me to go find him.”
Nellie stared dully at Anthony.
“Anthony, go play outside for a minute. Let Nellie and me finish up.” Tatiana ruffled Anthony’s hair and ushered him outside. “Kids these days. You teach them to speak and look what they do. I don’t even know what he’s talking about.”
That evening Anthony told Alexander that Mama got a job. Alexander asked Anthony questions, and Anthony, happy to be asked, told his father about Nellie and her potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers, and her husband who wasn’t there, and how Nellie ought to go and find him, “just like Mama went and found you.”
Alexander stopped asking questions. All he said after dinner was, “I thought you said we were going to be all right on ten dollars a day.”
“It’s just for Anthony. For his candy, his ice cream.”
“No. I’ll work at night. If I help sell the lobsters, it’s another two dollars.”
“No!” Tatiana quickly lowered her voice. “You work plenty. You do plenty. No. Anthony and I play all day anyway.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Play.”
“We’ll have time for everything. He and I will be happy to help her. And besides,” said Tatiana, “she is so lonely.”
Alexander turned away. Tatiana turned away.
The next day Alexander came back from the boat and said, “Tell Nellie to stuff her two dollars. Jimmy and I worked out a deal. If I catch him over a hundred and fifty legal lobsters, he’ll pay me an extra five dollars. And then five more for every fifty legals above one fifty. What do you think?”
Tatiana thought about it. “How many traps on your trawl?”
“Ten.”
“At two legal lobsters per trap... twenty at most per trawl...one trawl an hour, hauling them up, throwing most of them back . . . it’s not enough.”
“When it comes to me,” he said, “aren’t you turning into a nice little capitalist.”
“You’ve sold yourself short, Alexander,” Tatiana said to him. “Like a lobster.”
Jimmy must have known it, too—the market price for lobsters increasing, and Alexander receiving many job offers from other boats— because he changed the terms without even being asked, giving Alexander five dollars extra for every fifty legals above the first fifty. At night Alexander was too tired to hold a glass of beer in his hands.
Tatiana marinated Nellie’s tomatoes, made Nellie potato soup, tried to make tomato sauce. Tatiana had learned to make very good tomato sauce from her friends in Little Italy, almost as if she were Italian herself. She wanted to make Alexander tomato sauce, just like his Italian mother used to make, but needed garlic, and no one had garlic on Deer Isle.
Tatiana missed New York, the boisterous teeming marketplace of the Saturday morning Lower East Side, her joyous best friend Vikki, her work at Ellis Island, the hospital. The guilt of it stung her in the chest— lon
ging for the old life she could not live without Alexander.
Tatiana worked in the fields by herself while Nellie minded Anthony. It took her a week to dig up Nellie’s entire field—one hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes. Nellie could not believe there was so much. Tatiana negotiated a deal with the general store for 50 cents a bushel, and made Nellie seventy-five dollars. Nellie was thrilled. After twelve hours on the boat, Alexander helped Tatiana carry all hundred and fifty bushels to the store. At the end of the week, Nellie still paid Tatiana only two dollars a day.
When Alexander heard this, his voice lost its even keel for a moment. “You made her seventy-five dollars, we carried all the fucking bushels down the hill for her, and your so called friend still only paid you your daily wage?”
“Shh... don’t . . .” She didn’t want Anthony to hear the soldier-speak, kept so carefully under wraps these days.
“Maybe you’re not such a good capitalist after all, Tania.”
“She has no money. She doesn’t make a hundred dollars a day like that Jimmy does off you. But you know what she did offer us? To move in with her. She has two extra bedrooms. We could have them free of charge and just pay her for the water and electric.”
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch.”
“There’s a catch. I hear it in your voice.”
“Nothing.” She twittered her thumbs. “She just said that when her husband came back, we’d have to go.”
Across the table, Alexander stared at Tatiana inscrutably, then got up and took his own plate to the sink.
Tatiana’s hands trembled as she washed the dishes. She didn’t want to make him upset. No, perhaps that was not quite true. Perhaps she wanted to make him something. He was so exceedingly polite, so exceptionally courteous! When she asked him for help, he was right there. He carried the cursed potatoes, he took the trash to the dump. But his mind was not on the potatoes, on the trash. When he sat and smoked and watched the water, Tatiana didn’t know where he was. When he went outside at three in the morning and convulsed on the bench, Tatiana wished she didn’t know where he was. Where was she within him? She didn’t want to know.
When she was done clearing up, she came outside to sit on the gravel by his feet. She felt him looking at her. She looked up. “Tania...” Alexander whispered. But Anthony saw his mother on the ground and instantly planted himself on her lap, displaying for her the four beetles he had found, two of them fighting stag beetles. When she glanced up at Alexander, he wasn’t looking at her anymore.
After Anthony was asleep and they were in their twin bed, she whispered, “So do you want to—move in with Nellie?” The bed was so narrow, they could sleep only on their sides. On his back Alexander took up the whole mattress.
“Move in until her husband comes back and she kicks us out because she might actually want some privacy with the man who’s back from war?” Alexander said.
“Are you... angry?” she asked, as in, please be angry.
“Of course not.”
“We’ll have more privacy at her house. She’s got two rooms for us. Better than the one here.”
“Really? Better?” Alexander said. “Here we’re by the sea. I get to sit and smoke and look at the bay. Nellie’s on Eastern Road, where we’ll just be smelling the salt and the fish. And Mrs. Brewster is deaf. Do you think Nellie is deaf? Having Nellie at our bedroom door with her young hearing and her five years without a husband, do you think that would spell more privacy for us? Although,” he said, “do you think there could be less privacy?”
Yes, Tatiana wanted to say. Yes. In my communal apartment in Leningrad, where I lived in two rooms with Babushka, Deda, Mama, Papa, my sister, Dasha—remember her?—with my brother, Pasha— remember him? Where the toilet down the hall through the kitchen near the stairs never flushed properly and was never cleaned, and was shared by nine other apartment dwellers. Where there was no hot water for four baths a day, and no gas stove for four lobsters. Where I slept in the same bed with my sister until I was seventeen and she was twenty-four, until the night you took us to the Road of Life. Tatiana barely suppressed her agonized groan.
She could not—would not—she refused to think of Leningrad.
The other way was better. Yes, the other way—without ever speaking.
This bloodletting went on every night. During the day they kept busy, just how they liked it, just how they needed it. Not so long ago Alexander and Tatiana had found each other in another country and then somehow they lived through the war and made it to lupine Deer Isle, neither of them having any idea how, but for three o’clock in the morning, when Anthony woke up and screamed as if he were being cut open, and Alexander convulsed on the bench, and Tatiana thrashed to forget—and then they knew how.
Tainted with the Gulag
He had such an unfailing way with her. “Would you like some more?” he would say, lifting the pitcher of lemonade.
“Yes, please.”
“Would you like to take a walk after dinner? I heard they’re selling something called Italian ices by the bay.”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
“Ant, what do you think?”
“Let’s go. Let’s go now.”
“Well, wait a second, son. Your mother and I have to finish up.” So formal. Mother.
He opened doors for her, he got jars and cans for her off the high shelves in the kitchen. It was so handy him being tall; he was like a step stool.
And she? She did what she always did—for him first. She cooked for him, brought the food to his plate and served him. She poured his drink. She set and cleared his table. She washed his clothes, she folded them. She made their little beds and put clean sheets on them. She made him lunch for the boat, and extra for Jimmy too, because one-handed Jimmy didn’t have a woman to make him a sandwich. She shaved her legs for him, and bathed every day for him, and put satin ribbons in her hair for him.
“Is there anything else you would like?” she asked him. Can I get you something? Would you like another beer? Would you like the first section of the newspaper or the second? Would you like to go swimming? Perhaps raspberry picking? Are you cold? Are you tired? Have you had enough, Alexander? Have—you—had—enough?
“Yes, thank you.”
Or...
“No, I’ll have some more, thanks.”
So courteous. So polite. Straight from the Edith Wharton novels Tania had read during the time of his absence from her life. The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth (ironic).
There were times when Alexander wasn’t unfailingly polite.
Like one particular afternoon when there was no wind and Jimmy was hung over—or was it when Jimmy was hung over and there was no wind? In any case, Alexander had returned early when she wasn’t expecting him and came looking for her when she was still in Nellie’s potato fields. Anthony was inside the house, having milk with Nellie. Tatiana, her hands grimy from the earth, her face flushed, her hair in tangles, stood up in the field to greet him in her sleeveless chintz summer dress, tight in the torso, slim down the hips, open down the neckline. “Hey,” she said with happy surprise. “What are you doing back so early?”
He didn’t speak. He kissed her, and this time it wasn’t calm and it wasn’t without ardor. Tatiana didn’t even have a chance to raise her hands in surrender. He took her deep in the fields, on the ground, covered in potato leaves, the dress becoming as grimy as her hands. The only foreplay was his yanking the dress off her shoulders to bare her breasts to his massive hands and pulling the dress up over her hips.
“Look what you did,” she whispered afterward. “You look like a peasant milkmaid in that dress.”
“Dress is ruined now.”
“We’ll wash it.” He was still panting but already distant.
Tatiana leaned to him, murmuring softly, looking into his face, trying to catch his eye, hoping for intimacy. “Does the captain like his wife to look like a peasant milkmaid?”
“Well, obviousl
y.” But the captain was already getting up, straightening himself out, giving her his hand to help her off the ground.
Since Alexander came back, Tatiana had become fixated on his hands, and on her own by contrast. His hands were like the platter on which he carried his life. They were large and broad, dark and square, with heavy palms and heavy thumbs, but with long thick flexible fingers—as if he could play the piano as well as haul lobster trawls. They were knuckled and veined, and the palms were calloused. Everything was calloused, even the fingertips, roughened by carrying heavy weapons over thousands of miles, hardened by fighting, burning, logging, burying men. His hands reflected all manner of eternal struggles. You didn’t need to be a soothsayer, or a psychic or a palmreader, you needed not a single glance at the lines in the palms but just one cursory look at the hands and you knew instantly: the man they belonged to had done everything—and was capable of anything.
And then take Tatiana and her own square hands. Among other things, her hands had worked in a weapons factory, they had made bombs and tanks and flamethrowers, worked the fields, mopped floors, dug holes in snow and in the ground. They had pulled sleds along the ice. They had taken care of dead men, of wounded men, of dying men; her hands had known life, and strife—yet they looked like they soaked in milk all day. They were tiny, unblemished, uncalloused, unknuckled, unveined, palms light, fingers slender. She was embarrassed by them— they were soft and delicate like a child’s hands. One would conclude that her hands had never done a day’s work in their life—and couldn’t!
And now, in the middle of the afternoon, after touching her in places unsuitable to the genteel propriety of Nellie’s cultivated potato fields, Alexander gave her his enormous dark hand to help her off the ground, and her white one disappeared into his warm fist as he pulled her to her feet.