The Summer Garden (3 page)

Alexander said ten dollars a day wouldn’t be enough to live on.

Tatiana said it would be plenty.

“What about high-heeled shoes? Dresses for you? Coffee? My cigarettes?”

“Definitely not enough for cigarettes.” She forced a smile, seeing his face. “I’m joking. It’s enough for everything.”

She didn’t want to mention that the amount he was spending on cigarettes was nearly what they were spending on food for the week for all three of them. But Alexander was the only one working. He could spend his money on whatever he liked.

She had been talking English to him as she drank her Sunday coffee. He was responding in Russian to her as he smoked his Sunday cigarettes and read his Sunday paper.

“There’s trouble brewing in Indochina,” he said in Russian. “The French owned it, and lost it to the Japanese during the war. The Japanese lost the war, but they don’t want to leave. The French, rescued by the victors and thus on the side of victory, want their colony back. The Japanese are protesting. While staying neutral, the U.S. are helping their ally France, but they’re really between a rock and a hard place since they’re also helping Japan.”

“I thought Japan is no longer allowed to have an army?” Tatiana asked in English.

And he replied in Russian, “They’re not. But they had a standing army in Indochina, and short of the U.S. forcing them out, the Japanese refuse to lay down their arms.”

She asked in English, “What’s your interest in all this?”

He replied in Russian, “Ah. In all this—because there just isn’t enough trouble—Stalin for decades has been courting a peasant farmer named Ho Chi Minh, paying for his little educational trips to Moscow, feeding him vodka and caviar, teaching him the Marxist dialectic by the warm fire and giving him some old Shpagins and mortars, and some nice American Lend-Lease Studebakers while training and educating his little band of Vietminh right on Soviet soil.”

“Training the Vietminh to fight the Japanese whom the Soviets fought and hate?”

“Believe it or not, no. To fight the former Soviet allies, the colonial French. Ironic?” Alexander stubbed out his cigarette, put down his paper. “Where’s Anthony?” he said in a low voice in English, but before he could even reach for her wrist, Anthony walked into the kitchen.

“I’m here, Dad,” he said. “What?”

They needed a room for just themselves, but Anthony didn’t think so, and besides, the old landlady didn’t have one. The choice was one tiny room next to the kitchen in a vertical house overlooking the bay—with two twin beds, and a bath and toilet down the hall—or their camper with one full bed, and no bath and no toilet.

They had looked at other houses. One had a family of five living in it. One had a family of three. One a family of seven, all women. Generations and generations of women, filling up the white houses, and old men going out on the boats during the day. And younger men—sometimes whole, sometimes not—trickling back from war.

Mrs. Brewster lived alone. Her only son was not back, though Tatiana didn’t think he was out with the troops. Something in the way the old lady said,
oh he had to go away for a little while.
She was sixty-six years old and had been a widow for forty-eight of them: her husband died in the Spanish-American War.

“In
1898
?” Tatiana whispered to Alexander.

He shrugged. His heavy hand was squeezing her shoulder, telling her he didn’t much like Mrs. Brewster, but Tatiana was happy to have his hand on her in any capacity. “This is your husband, right?” Mrs. Brewster had said suspiciously before she rented out the rooms to them. “He’s not just some…” She waved her hand around. “Because I won’t have that in my house.”

Alexander stood mute. The three-year-old said, “Have what?”

The landlady narrowed her eyes at Anthony. “This your father, boy?”

“Yes,” said Anthony. “He is a soldier. He was in a war
and
in prison.”

“Yeah,” said Mrs. Brewster, looking away. “Prison’s hard.” Then she narrowed her eyes at Tatiana. “So where’s your accent from? Doesn’t sound American to me.”

Anthony began to say, “Russ—” but Alexander pulled his son behind him, pulled Tatiana behind him. “Are you going to rent us the room or not?”

She rented them the room.

But now Alexander asked Tatiana, “Why did we buy the Nomad if we’re not going to stay in it? We might as well sell it. What a waste of money.”

What would they do when they got to the deserts of the west? she wanted to know. To the wine hills of California? To Hell’s Canyon in Idaho? Despite his sudden frugality, Alexander didn’t sell the camper, the dream of it still so fresh. But this was the thing about him: though Tatiana knew he liked the
idea
of the camper—he was the one who wanted to buy it—he didn’t particularly like the reality of it.

Tatiana got the impression he felt that way about a number of things in his new civilian life.

The camper had no running water. And Alexander never stopped washing one part or another of his body. Living too close for too many years to men at war had done this to him. He washed his hands obsessively; true, much of the time they had fish on them, but there wasn’t enough soap or lemons and vinegar in all of Maine to get Alexander’s hands clean enough for his liking. They had to pay Mrs. Brewster an extra five dollars a week for all the water they were using.

He may have liked the idea of a son, but the reality of a three-year-old boy being with them every waking moment, never leaving his mother’s side, sleeping in the same room with them! coming into bed with them at night! was too much for a soldier who had never been around children.

“Nightmares are hard for a little boy,” Tatiana explained.

“I understand,” he said, so polite.

Alexander may have once liked the idea of a wife, but the reality of one, Tatiana wasn’t so sure about either. Maybe he was looking for Lazarevo in every day that they lived, though from the way he acted, she fully expected him to say, “What’s Lazarevo?”

His eyes, once like caramel, were now hard copper, nothing liquid or flowing in them. He turned his polite face to her, and she turned her polite face back. He wanted quiet, she was quiet. He wanted funny, she tried funny. He wanted food, she gave him plenty. He wanted to go for a walk, she was ready. He wanted newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, she brought them all. He wanted to sit mutely in his chair; she sat mutely on the ground by his side. Anything he wanted, she was ready at any moment to give him.

Now, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, Tatiana stood barefoot in front of the mirror in a yellow, slightly sheer muslin dress, a peasant-girl dress, appraising, assessing, obsessing.

She stood with her hair down. Her face was scrubbed, her teeth were clean and white. The summer freckles on her nose and cheeks were the color of malt sugar, her green eyes sparkled. She rubbed cocoa butter into her hands to make them softer in case he wanted to take her hand as they walked down to Main Street after dinner. She rubbed a bit of musk oil behind her ears, in case he bent to her. She put some gloss on her sulky lips and pressed them together to make them softer, pinker. She stood, looked, thought. Smiled a nice fake smile to make the lips less sulky, and sighed. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Her hands went inside her dress and cupped her breasts. Her nipples hardened. Ever since Anthony was born, her body had changed. That, and the American food—all those nutrients. The post-nursing, American-fed breasts hadn’t lost their weightiness, their full-bodied heartiness. The few bras Tatiana owned were all too loose around and made her jiggle. Instead of a bra, Tatiana sometimes wore tight white vests, tight enough to restrain her breasts, which tended to sway when she walked, attracting the eyes of men. Not her husband, necessarily, but other men, like the milk boy.

She slowly lifted up her dress to see her slim rounded hips in the mirror, her smooth belly. She was slight, but everything on her seemed to have been curved by Anthony’s birth—as if she stopped being a girl at the point of his entry into the world.

But it was the girl-child with breasts that the soldier man with the rifle on his back had once crossed the street for.

She pulled down her sheer panties to see her patch of blonde hair. She touched herself, trying to imagine what he might have felt once when touching her. Seeing something in the mirror, she looked closer, then bent her head to look at her legs. On the insides of her thighs were small fresh bruises—thumbprints from his hands.

Seeing them gave Tatiana a liquid throb in her loins, and she straightened out, adjusted herself and, with a flushed face, started brushing out her hair, debating what to do with it. Alexander had never seen her hair this length before, down to the small of her back. She thought he would like it, but distressingly he seemed indifferent to it. She knew the color and texture of the hair weren’t quite normal. She had colored it black eight months ago, before she went to Europe, then painstakingly leached the black out of it last month in Hamburg, and now the hair was dry and limp. It wasn’t silk anymore. Is that why he wasn’t touching it? She didn’t know what to do about it.

She put it into its usual braid, leaving the fronts out and the tuft long in the back, threading the braid with a yellow satin ribbon, in case he touched the hair. Then she called for Anthony, who was outside playing with dirt, and cleaned him, making sure his shorts and shirt weren’t stained, pulling up his socks. “Why do you play with dirt, Anthony, right before we go see Daddy? You know you have to be tidy for him.” Alexander liked order in his wife and son when they came to meet him at the docks. She knew he liked how neat they looked, how put-together, how summery. The flowers in Stonington were breathtaking, the tall shimmering lupines purple and blue; she and Anthony had picked some earlier and now Tatiana put some in her hair, the purple, like lilac, to contrast with the hair, like gold, because once he had liked that, too.

She studied her fingernails to make sure there was nothing underneath them. They both hated dirty fingernails. Now that Tatiana stopped working—and Alexander was with her—she kept her nails a little longer, because, though he never said anything, he wordlessly responded to the light back and forth of her nails on him. Today she had a few minutes and painted them red.

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.