The Summer Garden

But Alexander wasn’t sleepy. “What? You can’t imagine me in an office?” he asked. “In a suit all day, sitting at a desk, selling stocks, bonds, insurance, going to visit you in a winery in my drab flannel suit, coming from my city office?”

She was all coiled up inside. “I can imagine you visiting me.”

“My father wanted me to be an architect,” Alexander said. “A fine thing—an architect in the Soviet Union. He wanted me to build with the Communists, bridges, roads, workers’ houses.”

“Yes.”

“And I spent my life blowing up fucking houses. Perhaps I can be in demolition work.”

“No, not you.” Please could it be the end of this conversation. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.”

But Alexander continued. “Is that what I’m doing here? Figuring it out? Who I am? I spent my whole life asking myself this question. There in the Soviet Union, here in Suisun Bay. No easy answers to that one, me with SS Eagles, and hammer and sickles on my arms.”

You are an American, Alexander Barrington, Tatiana wanted to say to him. An American, who fought in the Red Army and married a Russian girl from Leningrad who can’t live without her soldier. That’s who you are.

“My mother and father knew who they were.”

It was the absolute last thing Tatiana wanted to talk about. Her body was a spring; in a minute she was going to catapult away from him.

“They have nothing to do with you,” she said, and couldn’t say anymore.

“The Communist and the radical feminist, the Soviet émigrés, oh, they knew who they were.” Alexander sat up and lit a cigarette. “You can only hope in today’s climate, no one will find out about my mother and father, because who then is going to give me permanent work? I might as well be a murderer out on work release.” He blew smoke rings above the bed.

Tatiana couldn’t endure it, she coiled away. “Jimmy hired you, Mel hired you, Sebastiani hired you …”

“Yes, until just one man says: what are the numbers on your arm, Alexander? and we’re off. I don’t know what happened back in Vianza, but something did because it was a slice of heaven, but we didn’t stay, did we? What are we going to do? Every time someone asks us a question, we run? Where in the army did you serve, Alexander? and we go right in the bunker, Tania? Is that how we’re going to live?”

Tatiana didn’t know how they were going to live. She didn’t know if they would ever get to have a normal life, like other people, like other married couples, simple, calm, small, nice. What was a normal life for the two of them? She didn’t know how long she could keep him remote in a bunker, in splendid isolation, secluded from all men.

Stepping Out For Love

Alexander wanted to see Idaho, Hell’s Canyon. He wanted to see Mount Rushmore, Yosemite, Mount Washington, Yellowstone National Park, the wheat fields of Iowa.

No, she kept saying, let’s stay here just a little longer. Weeks passed.

I’ll come to the store with you. Help you with shopping.

No, stay here, catch us a fish, Shura.

I’m going to go to the Boathouse, have a drink with the postman.

Let’s go to Sacramento on Sunday. Find a Catholic church, have brunch afterward at the Hyatt Regency, walk on Main Street, show Anthony the Capitol building, have ice cream.

I don’t want to. I have things to do. I have to wash-clean-cook-bake-peel-scale. I want you to build me a chest for my knick-knacks, a bench to sit on, fix the posts in the fence, planks on the dock. Let’s go for a boat ride on the canals instead.

Her reluctance to leave reminded him of wintry Deer Isle—it’s snowing and she is still not saying, let’s go. This is how it still was. Metaphorically snowing, and she was staying put.

He didn’t mind it in the beginning, this slowness. It left him alone with himself while he fished and listened to the call of the herons, and taught Anthony to row a boat and to play baseball and soccer, while Anthony read to him from his children’s books as Alexander held the fishing line. The soul was repairing itself little by little. And it was on Bethel Island, with his mother and father twenty-four hours by his side, watching over him, talking to him, playing with him, that Anthony stopped waking up with nightmares in the middle of the night and settled down to silence inside himself.

And it was on Bethel Island that Alexander stopped needing ice cold baths at three in the morning—the hot sudsy dimly lit baths with her soapy hands and soapy body in the late evening sufficing.

But eventually, one Sunday morning in July 1948, Alexander said, let’s go to Sacramento, and he wasn’t asking.

They went to Sacramento. They went to a Catholic mass and then had brunch at the Hyatt Regency.

In the late afternoon they were strolling down Main Street, window shopping, when a police car pulled up to the curb and out jumped two officers and ran toward—

For a second it was unclear what they were running toward, and in that second, Tatiana stepped out in front of Alexander, covering half of him with her small body. Paying no attention to the Barringtons, the police officers ran into the grocery store.

Tatiana stepped away. Alexander, after a double take, his eyes widening, continued to stare at her.

When they were having an ice cream soda at a drug store, he was sitting across from her, studying her, waiting for her to volunteer.

“Tania …” he drew out.

She was chatting to Ant, not meeting Alexander’s eye, volunteering nothing.

“Yes?”

“What was that back there?”

“What?”

“Back there, with the police.”

“I don’t know what you’re referring to. I stepped out of their way.” Still not looking at him.

“You didn’t step out of their way. You stepped out in front of me.”

“I had nowhere else to go.”

“No. You stepped in front of me, as if …” Alexander didn’t even know how to say it. His eyes narrowed, his heart narrowed, he saw something, understood a little bit, not much, but something. “Did you think they were coming for … me?”

“That’s silly.” Studying her soda. “Anthony, you want whipped cream?”

“Tania, why did you think they were coming for me?”

“I didn’t think so at all.” She tried to smile.

He took her face into his hands. She averted her gaze.

“You won’t look at me? Tania! What’s happening?”

“Nothing. Honest.”

He let go of her. His heart was doing odd things in his chest.

That evening Alexander found her in the back of the house—when she thought he was having a bath—cocking and recocking his P-38. She was grimly aiming it from the shoulder, her legs apart, holding it with both hands.