The Other Traitor (24 page)

She left Bill with a hug and a promise to visit the next day with the books he asked her to bring. Her brain was churning. How could she have been so rash, jumping to conclusions about the date of that letter? And she had also conveniently explained away Linda’s reference to Isaac being “a cruel, heartless man” rather than searching for the letter where Linda had very likely read the remark. Now, Annette realized, it must be in the missing letter.

She wandered down the hallway, relieved to find an empty waiting room. She turned the volume on the TV to mute and called Linda, wondering if her second cousin would talk to her after their ugly confrontation that morning.

The phone rang four times before Linda answered. “What is it, Annette?”  Her voice was chilly and flat.

“I know there’s another letter. My grandmother sent it the day before Isaac was executed. I have the envelope.” She could make out droning voices in the background, perhaps the news. “Do you have the letter?”

“What if I told you I destroyed it?” Linda said.

“I don’t think you did.”

Linda didn’t say anything. In the background, the newscaster’s voice sounded harsh and robotic. Finally, Linda gave a little cough. “My mother always told me what a monster he was and how deeply he hurt her sister, but I never understood to what extent. When I found the letters after you asked me to look for them, I read them for the first time. I wanted to destroy all of them, but I couldn’t. Aunt Betty had written them and I knew I’d be destroying a part of her, as well. But I kept out that last letter, planning to burn it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Please, Linda. I need to read it.”

“Can’t you leave it alone?”

“I wish I could.”

There was a female newscaster speaking now on Linda’s end, all chipper, probably giving the weather report.

“Please, Linda. Let me come by tonight and pick it up.”

She seemed to be thinking. Finally, she said, “I’m going into the city in a few minutes to pick up Kenny. I’ll drop off the letter then, but I don’t want to see you right now.”

“Thank you,” Annette said. “Thank you so much.”

“I don’t think you’ll be thanking me after you’ve read it.”

The rain had slowed to a drizzle and turned into a frosty mist blurring the cars and buildings as she and Julian walked home from the hospital. They went down slushy streets and she filled him in on her discovery about the letter her grandmother had written just before her grandfather’s execution.

“Linda told me she’ll bring me the letter tonight.”

“And then what? The letters you already have are pretty harsh. Your grandfather chose to die a traitor and basically ruined your mother’s and grandmother’s lives. But Linda has a letter that could be even more damning. Are you sure you want to read that?”

Gray steam rose from the manholes in front of Annette’s brownstone. Her apartment was dark, as she’d left it. She looked up at Julian. His black wool cap was dotted with ice crystals. “I have to,” she said. “Because as awful as it may turn out to be, I need to know the truth.”

They went inside the building. She could smell a chicken roasting. Her mother made roast chicken for special occasions. Maybe it had been a dish Mama remembered from her childhood. Friday night dinners from ‘before,’ when she’d lived with both her parents on the Lower East Side. When her life had been simple, secure, and happy.

She hung up their jackets and went into the kitchen alcove to open a bottle of wine. She filled two glasses then brought them to the sofa and sat down beside Julian. They drank without talking. She leaned back against the sofa cushions and closed her eyes. The wine made her woozy, the strain of the day and lack of sleep finally hitting her.

Julian’s arm slipped around her shoulders. His breath warmed her ear and sent shivers down her back. “You know, Annette. You already have your truth. You have a plausible explanation for your grandfather’s actions. He was a flawed and complex man who grievously hurt your grandmother and mother by choosing to follow his convictions.”

“If that’s all there is.”

“Do you think it’s possible to know the complete truth about anything?”

“Probably not.” She opened her eyes and took another sip of wine. The edges in the room were blurring. The bookshelves, bricked-up fireplace, soft blue sofa, the old trunk. On it was the photo album, open to her grandparents’ wedding picture.

“Then if Linda brings the letter, tear it up, burn it,” he said. “Let it go.”

His face was close to hers. His blue eyes closing in.
Let it go
.

He was right. She had her truth about her grandfather. A flawed and complex man. Not a monster. She’d let it go.

Her lips touched his.

And a sound, gentle as a flapping bird wing came from the front door.

She turned toward it. On the floor, partially stuck beneath the door, was a manila envelope. The letter she no longer wanted to see.

“I don’t want to read it,” she said.

“Then don’t.”

She struggled with herself. Rip it up. Burn it.

“But I have to.” She put her empty wine glass down on the trunk and went to pick up the manila envelope. She felt a loosening in her gut as she took out the letter in her grandmother’s handwriting, written in same shade of blue ink as on the envelope postmarked June 11, 1953.

She sat on the sofa and read her grandmother’s words, as Julian looked over her shoulder.

Dear Irene:

My husband is a cruel, heartless man.

There, finally—Betty’s remark, just as Linda had said.

Isaac will be executed tomorrow and to Hell with him. I pray that no legal tactics or further stays of execution will intervene. I wish him gone from my life forever.

As I was arriving at the prison today, I saw a woman dressed completely in black leaving. She was stooped over and a veil shaded her eyes. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t place her, and the handkerchief she held prevented me from seeing her face. I think she had seen me and knew who I was because she left in a hurry. Somehow I knew she had just been to see Isaac. That she had come to say goodbye.

When I saw Isaac shortly after, I was left with no doubt. His eyes were red and he was unable to look at me. And then, without warning, he dropped to his knees and grabbed hold of my ankles. “Forgive me,” he said. “You don’t deserve any of this.”

My heart felt like it had been ripped from my chest as I listened to my husband of almost ten years tell me he loved another.

Annette gasped. He loved another? Her grandfather had loved someone other than Grandma Betty? She glanced at the photo album on the trunk, open to the wedding photo of Betty and Isaac.

And then, as though loving another woman wasn’t enough to destroy what little of me is left, he told me that he loved her so much he was willing to make this sacrifice. He was going to die for her.

“
Ce que l’enfer?
” Annette said, stunned. There had been no grand gesture in her grandfather’s death. He hadn’t died for his principles, but for this mystery woman.

She met Julian’s eyes. “He was no hero.” She spit out the words. “Isaac Goldstein went to the electric chair because he was in love with someone else.”

Her apartment felt too small, too close, no air to breathe.

The old photo album sat on the trunk, filled with pages of false dreams. It was too difficult to look at her grandmother’s young happy face, knowing the pain that was in store for her.

“Let’s get out of here,” Julian said.

She was only vaguely aware of a hustle out of her brownstone into the street. A taxi ride huddled against Julian, then into the lobby, up in the elevator, and into his overheated apartment.

She sat on the black leather sofa now, a glass of something stronger than wine in her hands. She took another sip, felt the burn. Cognac. But it couldn’t burn out the anger she felt toward her grandfather.

Julian was beside her, his arm draped over the back of the sofa, the fingers of one hand tapping against the leather, a glass in his other hand.

At least it was over. Her search for the truth was over.

“I turned the heat down,” Julian said. “It’s been on since last night.”

She processed that. Last night was when Bill had almost killed himself and she had called Julian to help her. She’d hardly slept since.

She stared out the window. Distant, blurred lights from lower Manhattan broke through the darkness of the night. “I guess I got what I was looking for,” she said. “Now I know the truth about Isaac Goldstein. Not a traitor to his country, but he sure hung my mother and grandmother out to dry.”

“It seems that way.”

“I’m sorry I ever got involved.”

“Are you?” Julian brought his arm around her, tightened it. “But then we never would have met.”

She rested her head in the crook of his neck and closed her eyes. Inhaled his smell, sweat and something like the licorice candy she loved as a child.

He took the cognac glass out of her hand. She heard the clink of glass against glass as he set it on the coffee table. Then his soft fingertips touched her face. Gently massaged her temple, her cheeks. Deeper.

Her breath quickened. No, she wasn’t sorry.

She leaned toward him, her mouth open. His sweet breath mixed with hers. Then his lips pressed against her lips. His tongue against her tongue. His chest against her chest. The ugliness of the last few days faded. Bill’s near death. Isaac Goldstein’s deception. Only one face remained.

Julian.

She dug her fingers into his back. Felt his kisses up and down her neck, behind her ear. His hands in her hair, squeezing her shoulders, running down her spine. Digging deeper, deeper. Kneading out her childhood loneliness and shame. Expelling the knots in her life as she flinched beneath his strong fingers.

Hot. It was too hot. Her sweater came off. His shirt. Her pants, then his.

Their naked bodies burned up against each other’s. Burned up the hate, the bitterness, the lies, the deception.

She cried out. A moment later, she felt him shudder, then lie still. She buried her face in his chest and drifted off to sleep, dreaming of licorice.

The sound of clicking fingernails awakened her. Against the windows, icy snowflakes, or perhaps hail.

A dull light filled the room. For a moment, she stayed perfectly still. Her head rested in a nest of soft hair and hard muscles. Julian was breathing deeply, his breastbone expanding and contracting. Gently, she pushed herself up and watched him sleep. His face was relaxed. The tension gone. Thick black eyelashes. Pale veins on his eyelids. Full lips. Tiny cleft in his chin. High forehead in a perfectly shaped head. She’d never seen him like this before. Hadn’t realized how beautiful he was.

She could make out the time on the microwave. 10:03. Had they only been asleep an hour? She blinked again. It was morning. And everything had changed.

Julian shifted beneath her. Opened his eyes. Blue and clear. He smiled. “Hello.”

“Good morning.”

He stretched. “Is it morning?”

“It is. We’ve been asleep for twelve hours.”

He pressed his hand against her heart. She could feel his pulse pounding along with hers. Then he kissed her. And the heat began again.

At some point, they realized neither one of them was going anywhere. They didn’t need to squeeze a lifetime into an hour. They showered. He made coffee. She poured juice and popped four frozen waffles into the toaster.

Julian, in gym shorts and a T-shirt, came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. “I like your shirt.” She was wearing one of his old jerseys, sleeves rolled. “But I’d like it better off.”

“First, we eat,” she said.

“Tough task-master.”

They carried the juice, coffee, and plates of waffles over to the glass coffee table and sat on the sofa.

Julian brought his last forkful of waffle dripping with syrup into his mouth. “Man. I was actually starving.” He leaned back against the cushions and gazed out toward the window. The snowflakes had formed a frozen shield making it impossible to see out.

“So cold out there,” she said. “I don’t want to leave our cocoon.”

He brought her close to him. “Then let’s not.”

She picked up her mug of coffee. The cognac glasses from last night were still on the coffee table. They reminded her that their cocoon wasn’t impenetrable.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I was just remembering my grandmother’s letter. I wish I could forget all about Isaac Goldstein.”

“Like your grandmother and mother did?” Julian said. “They tried to erase him from their lives and it didn’t work out very well for them.”

The room felt chilly. The magic gone. “What are you suggesting? That I invest more of myself in this bastard who brought nothing but pain to his family?”

“A few hours ago you labeled him a hero because he didn’t give Saul away.”

“A few hours ago, I didn’t know he’d sacrificed my grandmother and mother for another woman.”

“It’s got to make you wonder though, doesn’t it?” he asked, rubbing his thighs. His arms and legs were muscled like a runner’s.

“What?”

“How strong his love for the woman in black must have been.”

“Don’t romanticize it, Julian.”

“Can’t help it. I’m in that kind of mood.”  He pushed her hair away from her neck and kissed her ear.

She wiggled away from him. “I understand about being in love, but he had responsibilities. A wife. A daughter.”

“He still may have been covering for Saul,” Julian said. “That would make him somewhat heroic.”

“
Bien
. Let’s leave it at that.”

“But something doesn’t make sense to me. How come no one seems to know of Saul’s career as a spy?”

“The Soviets knew,” she said. “Saul was Slugger.”

“Maybe. We’ve been assuming Isaac was protecting him, but in your grandmother’s letter, Isaac said he was dying for the woman in black.”

She folded her bare legs under her on the sofa and took another sip of coffee. As much as she wanted to move on from Isaac Goldstein, the analytical journalist side of her brain protested. Grandma Betty’s letter didn’t support their theory that Isaac Goldstein had been protecting Saul. “You’re right,” she said. “We need to figure out who the woman in black was.”

“And what she did that Isaac was willing to take the fall for.” Julian frowned. “You realize the significance of this. The woman in black was very likely the traitor.”

A crackling noise came from the window, as though the expanding ice was about to break up.

“Maybe,” she said. “But it’s also possible that Isaac was so guilty about loving her that he chose the electric chair as a form of suicide.”

“Suicide out of guilt?”

“Why not?” she said. “Saul effectively committed suicide through radiation poisoning. Bill tried to kill himself with pills. Both of them felt tremendous guilt.”

Julian shook his head. “Your grandmother’s letter said Isaac was making a sacrifice for the woman in black. That doesn’t sound like guilt.”

“True.” She thought about Betty’s letter. “The word sacrifice sounds more like he was covering for her.”

“I’m sure we can figure this out,” Julian said. “Nana’s told me stories relating to Saul and you’ve read about the communist movement and the players in the thirties and forties. Let’s pool what we know.”

The fear of discovering something else that would hurt her held her back, but the need to see this through won out. “Okay.” She put her coffee mug down on the table. “Let’s start with the known players in the spy ring. There was Florence Heller, who gave the most damaging testimony against Isaac.”

“Do you think she may have been the woman in black?”

Annette worked the possibility through. “Why would he be willing to make a sacrifice for Heller if she was pointing the finger at him?”

“Love can make a person do strange things.”

“True. But Arnie Weissman believes Heller was protecting Joseph Bartow.”

“Maybe there was a love triangle and Heller chose Bartow over Isaac. That may have been the reason he was willing to go to the electric chair.”

“There are other pieces that don’t fit,” she said. “Supposedly Albert Shevsky, who was working at Los Alamos, was the point person leaking the information, but he only had intermediate clearance, so it was highly unlikely that he would have had access to the atomic-bomb technology.”

Julian scowled.

“What?”

“I’m just remembering something Nana told me.” He rubbed his forehead. “She told me about a dinner Saul went to when he was at Los Alamos where he met the Soviet agent Dubrovski.”

“The one who was at the Popular Front meeting?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I’d assumed that was when Dubrovski recruited Saul, but now I’m wondering about the other people who were at that dinner.”

“Who?”

“Nana’s friend Flossie had organized it. She was in Albuquerque to take care of her boyfriend Joey, who was at a tuberculosis sanitarium. And Flossie’s cousin Bertie was working over at Los Alamos as a machinist with intermediate clearance.”

“Intermediate clearance,” she repeated. “Like Albert Shevsky.”

Flossie. Joey. Bertie.
The names hung in the air as the ice on the window snapped. And then everything snapped into focus for Annette.

“
Mon dieu.
They’re nicknames. Flossie, Joey and Bertie are nicknames for Florence, Joseph, and Albert. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Florence Heller, Joseph Bartow and Albert Shevsky were part of the spy ring that Isaac was accused of masterminding.”

Julian rubbed his unshaven cheek. He looked disturbed about something. “Flossie, Joey and Bertie also all knew Nana’s friend Yitzy.”

Annette felt a spasm of nausea as a troubling idea came to her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You just got very pale.”

She picked up the mug of coffee and took a sip. It was icy cold. “I’m not sure I want to go there, but do you think Isaac was Yitzy?”

“That occurred to me, too, but let’s not jump to conclusions until we talk it through.”

She nodded, though she was terrified of where this was heading.

“Okay,” he said. “We know from Nana’s stories that Yitzy was her age, so he would have been born around 1918. He was an outspoken communist who attended City College in the late thirties and majored in engineering.”

Just like Isaac Goldstein, Annette thought.

Julian’s forehead was in a scowl, as though he was working through a math or logic problem. “Isaac, call him ‘A’, was friends with Florence, Joseph and Albert, call them ‘B’,” Julian continued. “And Yitzy, call him ‘C’, was friends with Flossie, Joey and Bertie, call them ‘D’. We’re hypothesizing that B equals D. So logically, if A is to B, as C is to D, and B equals D, then it follows that A equals C.”

Isaac equals Yitzy. Julian hadn’t needed to say it aloud. It was plain enough to her.

“It’s still just a theory,” he said. “There are probably lots of other ways all these pieces could make sense.”

She watched sections of ice slide down the windows, creating crevices of visibility. She didn’t want to look at it, but she couldn’t help herself. If Isaac had been Yitzy, there were implications to consider. Mariasha had been in love with Yitzy. But that had been a youthful infatuation. It wouldn’t have continued once they were married, or could it have?

“Let’s think about this hypothetically,” Julian said. “If Isaac was Yitzy, then everyone in the spy ring was connected, possibly as early as 1935.” Julian ran his hand over his cheek. “That’s when Nana and Flossie went to the anti-war demonstration at City College. Then later they all met Bertie and Joey and Dubrovski at the Popular Front meeting.”

Annette was only half listening. She remembered something in Grandma Betty’s letter. Betty had seen a woman at the prison who seemed familiar, but Betty couldn’t place her. A disturbing possibility was forming in her head. She needed to stop Julian, but he was too wound up, his grandmother’s stories suddenly coming together for him.

“But it goes back even earlier,” Julian said. “Nana became friends with Yitzy at summer camp. She was supposed to meet Yitzy at Yankee stadium by the baseball-bat smokestack, but Saul got sick and she never went.” Julian chewed on his lower lip. “My dad took me there when I was a kid. He told me the smokestack was patterned after Babe Ruth’s bat. The Slugger.”