The subcontractors and suppliers whom he hired talked about their kids and wives, about birthdays and holidays, about the money they were making and spending, about sports and politics. It was a different world, but even with monks for roofers, with one hand on the rosary, the other on the clay tiles, Tatiana no longer came to his construction sites. Instead, on the days she was off, Alexander went home for lunch. He was the boss now, he could do as he pleased. It worked out much better. They were home, they were alone, and lunch often included some sweet afternoon love for Alexander, after which he wanted nothing but a nap. He returned to work as happy as if he had his senses. The smile never left his face.
Richter called Thanksgiving of 1952 from Korea, mutely listened to the story of Dudley from Montana. When Alexander finished telling him, he said, “Tom, it’s what any man would do for his wife, right?”
And Tom Richter said after a beat, “Well, I think that depends on the wife.”
He asked Alexander for a small favor. One of his young sergeants had been wounded and was coming back stateside; he was originally from San Diego, but was willing to work anywhere; would Alexander have a position for him? As it happened, Alexander had signed contracts to build four more homes, and even before that he’d known Phil had too much work, with all the houses going up nearly simultaneously. He readily agreed to help his friend, and that’s how he met Shannon Clay.
Shannon, barely twenty-two, went into combat in Korea on May 9, 1952 and went MIA three days later. His recon patrol team was ambushed, they lost contact with headquarters, and while waiting for a helicopter extraction were engaged in a firefight that left all of Shannon’s team dead and him with a round in his leg. He was in enemy territory for four weeks, living in the woods, before he was picked up by another chopper passing through the area. Alexander and Tatiana thought any man who could be wounded and survive by himself for a month in the mountains of Korea would do well in anything. Shannon walked with a slight limp from the round that was still lodged in his thigh, but was mild-faced, well-presented, polite to a fault, eager to please, and incredibly hard-working.
Alexander liked Shannon instantly, and liked him even more after Tatiana said, “He is wonderful,” when they came home after having a drink with him. “But lonely. Do we know any single girls?”
A smiling Alexander wanted to know if Tatiana was really asking him if he knew any single girls.
“I said we, Shura. We.”
One afternoon when Alexander and Shannon were both in the office, Tatiana stopped by to say hello. She had just run into Amanda while shopping in Scottsdale.
No sooner had she walked through Alexander’s office door, than Shannon stood up and said, “Tania, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
With unsuppressed reluctance, Tatiana introduced a smiling Shannon to a smiling Amanda. Two days later, the four of them went out to dinner at Bobo’s. Amanda quite liked Shannon—who wouldn’t like him, said Tatiana, with his polite face and innocent blue eyes—but Shannon extremely liked Amanda.
“So what do you think of our adorable Shannon with her?” Tatiana asked Alexander that night as they were brushing their teeth before bed.
“Hmm,” he said, rinsing his mouth.
“What, you have reservations, too?”
He spat into the sink. “I have none. But I think Amanda does. He seemed quite taken with her. She less so with him.” He shrugged. “Women.”
Tatiana studied her face in the bathroom mirror. “Where’s the surprise? Shannon is a decent young man. And Amanda likes bad boys.”
“Does she indeed?” Alexander looked at Tatiana sideways. “And what kind does my own wife like?”
“I like,” she said, grinning back through the mirror, “the baddest boy of all.”
Shannon and Amanda didn’t need Tatiana and Alexander after the first outing. They got engaged two months later, in March 1953, right around the time of Stalin’s death (though Shannon maintained the events were concomitant, not consequent—unlike, say, the arrest and execution of Lavrenti Beria), married in June and the following March had their first baby.
Baby Baby Baby
And it wasn’t just Amanda who was having a baby.
What in heaven’s name was going on in Phoenix? Alexander could not walk through the Indian School Road market, to the drive-in, for ice cream, to the Apache Trail in the Superstitions without seeing strollers, babies, twins, toddlers everywhere. He played ball with Anthony in the Scottsdale Commons—babies all over, arrayed like lilies in the fields, baby boys, baby girls, pink blue yellow green, chubby, white, dark, brown, and all the colors in between. The Yuma married barracks, where they stayed once a month, had twelve carriages all in a row on the decks outside. Ghost towns in the Superstitions? Babies. Pueblo Grande Museum? Babies. Why did babies need to go to the Indian Museum? Or the Sonoran Desert National Monument? Alexander couldn’t see the giant saguaros for all the tiny babies in his way. It was the first topic of every conversation, and the last. Who was pregnant again? Who just had a baby, who was having a third? When were they moving to a bigger house, and how many more children were they planning on having? Alexander even made it a motto of his business efficiency. He told all the crews he hired and all the prospective homeowners he talked to that his goal was to have their house built to the same high standards but in less time than it took one woman to grow one human being.
To the one unpregnant woman, he said, “That’s it. I’m taking charge. I obviously need to take matters into my own hands.”
She smiled. “Hands? Perhaps it’s this small mistake in anatomy that’s been the problem all along.”
He applied himself to the business of making a baby the same way he applied himself to everything—dutifully, tirelessly, and conscientiously. For a year his spawn went nowhere but over the redd. He even stopped smoking in the house, saying the nicotine was not good for her once tubercular lungs.
“It’s your house,” Tatiana said. “You smoke where you want. And I’m not growing the baby in my lungs.”
They waited noisily; Alexander held his breath around the days when they would know, and when one more month brought no baby, he breathed out and went on and worked and built another month. There were no babies, but there was swimming in December! Plunging into the heated pool at night under the desert stars. And sometimes not heating it, and plunging in stark naked—oh, the ice, the numbing squealing joy of it.
There were no babies, but there was Rosemary Clooney wanting a piece of his heart, and the Andrews Sisters, who wanted to be loved, and Alexander making love to Tatiana in the night on one of their deck lounge chairs and humming, “If I Knew You Were Coming, I Would Have Baked You a Cake,” and Tatiana, holding his head, murmuring, “Shh. Shh!”
Humming “The Song of the Volga Boatmen” he had sung when he plowed through Byelorussia, Alexander put in a pebbled driveway for the house, poured a cement basketball court for him and Anthony, and built a flat roof sun cover for their cars.
Armed with “The Russian Sailors’ Dance” he had hummed on the approach to Majdanek death camp in Poland, he tried to get rid of the cholla. The cholla cactus penetrates anything that comes near it— leather, rubber, gloves, the soles of Alexander’s boots—penetrates to pollinate; jumps and germinates; imbued with evil spirits, cholla.
“Dad,” said Anthony, who was helping him, “you’re in America now. You’re an officer. Here we sing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ when we conquer cholla. You don’t know the words to it? Want me to teach you?”
With “Varshavyanka” at his lips, Alexander planted palm trees and agaves, built masonry walls for Tatiana’s flower garden—which she found “endearing and symbolic”—and laid terra cotta winding walkways around the yuccas and the palo verdes. After dinner they would amble down the paths Alexander set down amid lush desert foliage. The ocotillos, the prickly pears, the velvet mesquites, the purple lupines, the desert poppies all bloomed in their landscaped summer garden by the
mountains. And below them through the towering saguaros, the lights in the valley twinkled and multiplied, the farmland was long gone, the communities sprang up, and had streetlights and residential associations and pools and golf courses and baby carriages, and homes Alexander built for the newly pregnant women and their anxiously waiting husbands.
Tatiana had her arm through his, gazing up at him when he talked about building houses, about Shannon, about Richter still in Korea, and the French fighting to their death in Dien Bien Phu—and sometimes Alexander could swear she wasn’t listening to a word he was saying, her mouth was just dropping open and her eyes were unblinking, as if... almost as if...he was in uniform and she was in factory clothes, and the rifle was slung on his shoulder, and her hair was down, and they were ambling through Leningrad, through the streets and the boulevards, past the canals and the train stations in the first summer of their life when the war first cleaved them together before it rent them apart.
Meanwhile, the one great boy they managed to have played his guitar on the deck, learning Francesca’s Mexican songs, and his own mother’s Russian ones. Tatiana would hum them, and Anthony would strum them, and she would cry when she heard them. And he serenaded his father and mother with “Corazon Magico” and “Moscow Nights,” as they strolled and smoked and chatted in the fond falling evening.
And then at night—love.
And then—another month.
Anthony sees Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
Tatiana had just come out of the bath, and was perched on their bed, brushing out her hair and leaning in as Alexander spread out the final version of the blueprints for their new house. With a pencil in his hand, he led her down the driveway, showing her the plan: first the elevation, then the inside of the house, then the back elevation, and then the artist’s rendering of the kitchen.
“It’s so sprawling,” said Tatiana.
“Yes. Our sprawling adobe house is in the shape of a crescent Lazarevo moon,” said Alexander, “curving out to the meandering driveway, the basketball courts and the garages.”
“I love how that looks.”
“You walk in through faux-gilded gates”—Alexander lifted his eyes to Tatiana, hoping she’d remember the reference to the other—not faux—gilded gates, ones that opened a certain elm-filled garden onto a certain white night river. By the dreamy look of her on his bed, she remembered. The blueprints as foreplay. Nodding his head in tacit approval of himself, Alexander continued. “Through these gates you walk into a tumbled travertine square courtyard with palo de fierros around a circular fountain, and then proceed into the heart of the house—the kitchen, gallery, family room, playroom, library, and the long, wide dining room through the butler’s pantry. Nice, right?”
“How big is this dining room?” She peered closer.
“Twenty-four feet by fifteen. With a fireplace.”
“That’s big,” she said.
“I’m thinking generationally,” he said cheerfully. “As in, three generations down, there will be a lot of children. Look—the kitchen connects to the den by a gallery, with wall to ceiling windows for plants and the long wall across for photographs and memories. And here on the left are the children’s bedrooms. And here on the right wing is our secluded master suite...”
“Is that what you call it? A master suite?”
“I don’t call it that. That’s what it is. Are you listening, or are you being saucy?”
“Why can’t I listen and be saucy? All right, all right, I’m listening.” Tatiana made a serious face. “What’s this?”
“A fireplace that faces both the bedroom and the en suite bath,” said Alexander. “And this just outside is a private stone garden that faces both the mountains and the valley. I’m going to build us an enclosure for an outside fire.”
“I like the fireplace in the bedroom,” she said quietly, still brushing out her hair, but quicker. “I’d love to have one here.”
“Yes, well. They don’t put fireplaces in trailers,” Alexander said. “The house is all limestone and flagstone and terra cotta, and hardwood plank floors. Except our bedroom—that’s wall-to-wall carpet.” He grinned from ear to ear. “Where was I? Oh, yes. A covered porch runs the length of the inward curve of the back of the house. Over here is a patio and a walkway that leads to the pool.”
“It’s all extraordinary,” she said.
“The bathrooms are white,” he said, “just like you like. The kitchen is white. But look here, see this island? This is one of the most important features of the whole place.”
“Even more important than the fireplace between the bed and the whirlpool tub?”
“Almost,” Alexander said. “Imagine this black granite island, like Vishnu schist, in the middle of your kitchen as the heartbeat of your house. On this island you prepare food and make your dough. It’s where your children and your husband sit on cushioned barstools and eat your bread and drink your coffee and shout and argue and read the paper and talk about their day, and move earth and heaven. It’s the beginning and middle and end of every day. The music plays and your kitchen is never quiet.”
“All isolated and alone in the mountains,” Tatiana murmured.
“Yes,” Alexander said. “Privacy to yell, to weep, to swim, to sleep. Privacy for everything.”
“Shura,” Tatiana said caressingly. “It’s a beautiful dream. I see it. I see it all. I feel it. As soon as I get pregnant, we’ll build our house.”
Pointing out the increasing need for privacy now, with Anthony growing up and becoming more aware of things in their little home, Alexander, who had spent four years changing and adjusting and tinkering with the blueprints, carefully suggested building the house anyway. Tatiana gently declined.
“Who is going to manage the floorboards and the crown molding and the paint colors and the door handles? It’s a full time job. Amanda can do it, but she doesn’t work. I can’t. My two plates are full.”
Alexander was quiet, it seemed to him for, like, an hour, staring into the blueprints lying on their cream-and-crimson bedspread. “So make one of your plates less full,” he finally said, raising his eyes to her.
From across the bed she gazed mildly and affectionately at him. “Shura,” she said, “as soon as I get pregnant, I’ll leave work. We’ll build our house. What’s the hurry?” She smiled. “We have everything we need for now. Everything,” she whispered. “And we have plenty of privacy.” Putting the hairbrush down, Tatiana took off her robe and flung herself onto the bed, right on top of the house plans. Tilting her head back and stretching out her arms, she murmured, “Here on your bed, on her back, lies a naked young woman with her hair down, just as you like it, just as you like her. And to this you say...”
“Um, can you just ease up off the blueprints, please.”
Another year passed. They paid off the note on the land, gave everyone raises, hired new people, for the holidays flew in Esther and Rosa, a miserable Vikki and a sullen Richter, just back from Korea, gave lavish Christmas gifts and parties, had loud Sunday barbecues, went out to dinner every Saturday night, and traveled far and wide on their Sundays together, transsecting Arizona, riding horses in the mountains.
They remodeled the kitchen, bought new appliances. Alexander finished his degree, became an architect.
In the winter of 1954 they started watching television. Tatiana allowed Alexander to spare no expense in buying her one of the new color sets, on which they watched The Singing Cowboy and Death Valley Days, I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. Sometimes when they watched TV Alexander lay down in her lap—as if they were still in front of the fire in Lazarevo. Sometimes Tatiana lay down in his lap.
And sometimes...as Marlene Dietrich would say, she had, mmm, mmm, kisses sweeter than wine.
Around Christmas season 1955, they forgot to lock their bedroom door and Anthony opened it late one night. He came in perhaps because of a nightmare, perhaps because the Christmas music was too loud on their radio, and so while “I Saw Mommy Kissin
g Santa Claus” played on, twelve-year-old Anthony saw his naked mother underneath his upraised naked father, he saw gripped legs and small white hands clutching large arms, and he saw unspeakable motion, and he heard his mother making noises as if she were in pain but yet not in pain. He made a noise himself, and Alexander, without even turning around, stopped moving, lay down on top of Tatiana to cover her, and said, “Anthony—”
The boy was out, vanished, the door open wide.
They tried to imagine the things he may have seen. They tried to feel grateful for the other—completely unexplainable—things that he could have seen and blessedly had not.
“Should we build a house now?” Alexander asked.
“Why?” Tatiana said. “You can leave the door unlocked in a brand new house just as well as in our mobile home. But now you better go talk to your son, Shura.”
“Oh suddenly it’s a mobile home, not a trailer—and what am I supposed to say to him?”
“I don’t know, Alexander Barrington, but you’re going to have to think of something, or do you want me to talk to him the way your mother talked to you?”
“All right, let’s just take one small step back toward reality,” said Alexander. “My family and I were living in a communal apartment where the man in the next room kept bringing in whores he picked up at the train station. My mother had a responsibility. She was trying to scare me off with nightmarish stories of French disease. I don’t need to scare my boy off; I think what he’s seen tonight will put him off sex for life.”
The next day Anthony squirreled away in his room with the door closed instead of sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework and chatting with Alexander. Tatiana came home; they ate. Unable to look at his mother, Anthony disappeared into his bedroom immediately after cleaning up; he didn’t even want to play basketball, despite Tatiana’s offer of a ten-point handicap.
“Has this been the order of things this morning and evening?” she asked.