Private Life (27 page)

Margaret leaned forward and caught Dora's eye, asking, as if she might report this

to Mrs. Bell, "How long have you known him, really?"

Dora touched her mouth with her napkin, then set it in her lap. "Almost a year, to

be honest. I met him through Mr. Kimura."

"I read that article."

"The editor cut most of it. Only flowers and plants. Nothing about, as he would

say, 'all the Japs everywhere.' He held it for months."

"You have been very secretive!"

"Dear Margaret, you've known me since I was sixteen. When haven't I been
very

secretive?"
She spoke with a satisfied smile. "Can you really be on my mother's side,

waiting for me to get married? You? After all of these years with Andrew?" She stared

into Margaret's face for a minute, no doubt gauging her reaction to this remark, then said,

"Anyway, the question of whether Pete is that special Cossack I'd been planning to take

home to St. Louis and shock my mother with was answered the first time he asked me to

loan him a thousand dollars."

"I thought you said he has plenty of money."

"He does, but, he tells me, it isn't always available. Anyway, you know I am much

more prudent with my money than I am with my affections."

"I didn't know that." Margaret tried to make her voice light.

MARGARET would have thought that, as a Cossack, Pete Krizenko would be a

tall man, imposing and physical, but Andrew was taller than he was by a head, and had a

fuller mustache, too--Pete favored something trimmer and more English-looking. Apart

from his clothes, he was plain-looking--you would not pick him out in a crowd. Dora said

he had grown up on horseback, but you couldn't tell that, either.

Andrew, so busy with his new book that he wouldn't leave their house except to

go to the observatory, seemed fascinated by Pete--he came out of his study when he heard

Dora's voice, and he took a chair rather than disappearing again. The four of them sat in

the front room, drinking a bit of sherry and waiting for Margaret's baking chicken.

Outside the bay window, the fog was so thick that it muffled the sounds of the factory.

Dora said, "Pete has made four fortunes and lost three of them, haven't you?"

Pete made a gesture that indicated to Margaret that he was rather proud of this. He

addressed himself to Andrew, as if only a man could understand such adventures. He, his

uncle, and his cousin drove a hundred Don horses to Kiev and offered them for sale to the

Russian army. "I was sixteen," said Pete. "They were good horses, and we got a good

price on them, because when the Russians made too low a bid my uncle turned them right

there, and we headed southwest, as if we were taking them to Romania to sell them to the

Turks. They let us go twenty verst. A verst is like a kilometer, in case you didn't know

that, but then they came after us, because we went so fast with so many horses, and all

beautiful chestnuts, like honey. They paid a hundred thousand for the lot."

"A hundred thousand what?" said Andrew.

"Call them dollars, I don't care," exclaimed Pete, good-naturedly. "They were as

good as dollars to me. My uncle took half, and my cousin and I split the other half, and

instead of going back with them to the village, I went to St. Petersburg and walked down

the Nevsky Prospect and bought some nice clothes from the English Shop there, and I

invested my money in a newspaper, and away it went, like a basinful of water running

downhill."

Dora said, "No one loses money on a newspaper."

"Ah, but we were very principled. The editor was twenty-two. I thought he was a

very worldly man." Pete smiled. His accent wasn't at all like that of Leonora Eliot, or any

accent Margaret had heard around Vallejo. It came and went as he spoke.

"Did he steal from you?" Andrew asked.

"My goodness, no. He disdained advertisers, and his views were too depressing to

attract customers." Pete threw his head back and laughed. "After that, I lived for a while

like Raskolnikov in his room, and it almost drove me to murder, of course, but not quite."

Dora winked at her, and then Pete said, "I am a big talker and a show-off.

Sometime Dora here will tell you which parts she believes and which parts she does not

believe, but I am giving no clues myself!"

"Fortune number two?" prompted Andrew. Margaret could see he, at least, was

believing every word.

Pete glanced at Dora. "Ah well. I will tell you only this. There was a woman in St.

Petersburg named Bibikova. Her first name doesn't matter, you would not have heard of

her, but she was from a well-known noble family. When I was about twenty, she took me

up as her pet. Ach! She was a very ugly woman, even with her fortune and her family's

house near the Winter Palace, she had not been able to find a husband, though possibly

this was not her fault--everyone knew that her father, who controlled the money, was a

miser and carried a pistol in the pocket of his dressing gown. But when her father and her

uncle died, leaving her huge estates and houses in Petersburg, you can be sure that the

handsomest men in Russia were lining up to marry her, and so she employed me as a

spy."

Andrew was clearly enjoying himself, and Margaret was struck for a moment by

the poignancy of such a thing.

"She dressed me nicely and sent me to parties to eavesdrop upon the gossip, or to

bring up a certain name and then listen to what people said. In Moscow, I pretended to be

just in from St. Petersburg, and in St. Petersburg, I pretended to be visiting from Moscow.

I followed her suitors home at night, and peered into their windows. I was good at

climbing up drainpipes and scrambling over roofs. Or I got their servants drunk, and

discovered mistresses and bastards and God knows what. After my reports, she would get

rid of one suitor or favor another in a way that seemed quite arbitrary and gave her for

one time that experience of being courted. My reward was that every week or so she

would take me out, and we would go look at things--pictures, china, silver, horses,

carpets, old pieces of furniture, even jewels. If she liked something, and I liked it, too, she

bought it for herself, but if there was something I liked that she didn't like, she bought it

for me, and that was my fee for working hard. At the end of a year, she chose a boring

fellow from Moscow named Yerchikovsky, who had large estates in the south, and I was

dismissed with my treasures and my wardrobe. I sold it all to some fellows from France

who knew enough but not too much, and that was my second fortune, four times the size

of the first. Now I was homesick, because St. Petersburg is such a damp and gloomy city,

so my plan was to go back to the Don and buy more horses, which would have been a

sure bet, but I was too young to know any better, and so I ..." He shook his head, but

good-naturedly. Andrew was so intrigued, he shook his head, too.

"Do tell them," said Dora. "This is my favorite, because I would have done

exactly the same thing."

"I invested in an expedition! Have you heard of Przhevalsky? Nikolai

Mikhailovich?"

"I have! He went to Tibet!" Andrew nearly leapt out of his chair.

Pete said, "Well, I did not go with the great man himself."

Margaret stood up and went into the kitchen to tend to the chicken. A bit later, she

heard Andrew's voice boom out, "Khara Khoto! Khara Khoto is in Mongolia! The

Chinese destroyed it in the fourteenth century. There's no telling what's there! It's a lost

world, like Troy, or Pompeii!"

When she returned to announce supper, Pete was saying, "Sinkiang is very

interesting. I plan to return. In spite of the mosquitoes."

Dora laughed, then said, "I would go there."

"Yes, you would," said Pete. He seemed fond of her. They all got to their feet.

Once they were sitting down, Andrew pressed, "Now the third fortune."

"Ah," said Pete. "Well, by now I was an old man for those regions. I was twentythree. Pushkin was already exiled by the Tsar before he was twenty-three. I saw that I had

better hurry to make another fortune before infirmities would force my retirement. So-have you ever heard of Omsk?" Margaret went back into the kitchen for the beans. When

she came back, Andrew was saying, "The latitude would make it more like one of the

Canadian prairie towns. Or Scotland. Scotland is at the latitude of Omsk." Latitude and

longitude were Andrew's daily fare.

"I imagined I would find a nice Cossack town and buy a horse or two, but the

streets were crawling, yes, Dora always says this, the streets were
crawling
with

Europeans, real Europeans, from Germany and Holland and France, which was good for

me, because I spoke better French than English at that time. If you had a bit of capital,

Omsk was the place to be. Those French fellows did. We bought some plots and built

some elegant houses and named them 'Les Milandes' and 'Les Domes.'" Margaret passed

him the platter. "White facades, you know, with mansard roofs and a dome every little

bit. It will be a great city, Omsk. Up until the railway, it was an outpost, and Dostoevsky

was there, did you know that? That's where he was sent to the prison camp after they

didn't execute him. He wouldn't mind it there now. That railway is a great

accomplishment, I am telling you."

Margaret passed him the bread and asked, "Is it finished?"

"The main lines have been finished for eight or ten years. As soon as I heard that

the two ends had met, I got on it. It took me four months to get from St. Petersburg to

Sinkiang, and three weeks to get from Sinkiang to Omsk, but only four days to get from

Omsk to Vladivostok."

Andrew beamed as if he had built the railroad himself.

Over breakfast the following morning, Margaret said, "Did you believe all of

that? I must say, he hardly has an accent."

Andrew shook his head. "Some people are naturally fluent, my dear. I do believe

any native I might have known in Berlin would have mistaken me for a German."

"But there's something about him--"

"He's a brilliant fellow," said Andrew. "That's all. He's such a rare bird that we

don't recognize his rarity."

Margaret turned this over in her mind, then said, "I asked Dora if he had ever

been married."

"What did she say?"

"She said, 'I don't know, really. But if so, I'm sure the wife regretted it.'"

Andrew laughed outright for the first time in weeks.

Margaret would have said that Dora could not be duped, so she didn't understand

her friend's delight in this Pete Krizenko. For herself, she didn't believe a word he said.

He told his stories as if he had gotten them out of books, and she thought that it was

perfectly possible that he was a small-time crook from Seattle, up to no good--Dora was

something of an heiress, after all, and acted like one. But, of course, now Margaret

sounded, even to herself, exactly like the Bells. It was also true that the man had had a

magical effect on Andrew, and for the first time since his "denunciation," as he called it,

Andrew seemed relaxed and even personable. Once when she was in San Francisco, Pete

Krizenko appeared at the observatory and asked to be shown about the place. Andrew

reported, with delight, that the fellow had looked through the telescope and listened to

Andrew's theories. And Mrs. Wareham seemed to know him as well, and to like him--she

complimented his manners. But Margaret remained suspicious.

ONE rainy day, Margaret and Dora were walking from Mrs. Wareham's house to

the ferry when a horse-drawn cart passed them, then slowed and stopped. The cart was

small, two wheels, freshly painted black with yellow trim. It had a bellows top, which

had been pulled up against the weather. The horse was more of a pony--probably a pony

crossed with a heavier, more lethargic breed, since it had a Roman nose--but it had an

intelligent expression, and its ear tips pointed delicately at each other. A lady leaned

forward and put her head around the top. Margaret recognized her instantly and with a

start. Dora said, "Mrs. Kimura! How do you do, ma'am?" The midwife, wearing a brown

wool coat and a man's trilby against the weather, smiled brightly and nodded. She said,

"Miss Dora, you kind ladies must come out of bad weather!"

Dora was in the seat in a moment; Margaret clambered up more hesitantly. She

could hardly stand to look at Mrs. Kimura, so strongly did her face remind Margaret of

Alexander--but not of Alexander himself, more of that feeling she had had, horror and

suspense that could not be acted on or even reacted to, only waited out. Once they had

settled themselves, Mrs. Kimura stirred up the pony with the whip, and he trotted briskly

away. As they bowled along, Mrs. Kimura put her shoulders back and held the reins in

her gloved hands with a sense of dash, as if she had been born to do it. Margaret made

herself look at the woman and think shallow thoughts about, for example, the distinct

family resemblance between her and Naoko, so that that old feeling would be overlaid by

something. Fortunately, they were going rather fast; Margaret had to grip the side railing

with both hands. Mrs. Kimura said, all at once, "I have had successful delivery this

morring!"

Dora shouted into the wind, "Boy or girl?"