Our Woman in Moscow(27)
I have twenty-two years crammed full of memories of Iris, but she keeps appearing to me from her hospital bed in Rome, after the accident. She was a mess. Bruises everywhere, one eye socket so black and puffy you couldn’t make out the eyeball within, to say nothing of the broken ankle and various bandages stuck upon her body, so that she resembled a half-finished mummy. She was asleep when I came in, but her eyes opened the instant I came to the bed. She smiled bravely because she didn’t want me to worry. “I’m sorry,” she sort of croaked.
Sorry!
I don’t cry much, and I certainly wasn’t in the messy habit in those years. What a waste of time—what a crummy way to spend an afternoon. But I came within a kitten’s whisker of breaking down in that moment. Iris was sorry! She was sorry to have occasioned all this trouble. She took the blame on her delicate shoulders.
You understand, therefore, that Iris and I are not estranged because she failed me in some unforgivable way. Iris would never fail anybody. There is not one disloyal bone in her body, not one atom of her that would not sacrifice itself for your sake. People might call that weakness, but I’ve always envied her for it, if I’m honest with myself and with you. She will never stagger under the weight of guilt, as I do—she will know regret, which is the lot of all mankind, but not because she’s done anything to hurt you.
By the time I rise from the bath, dripping and wrinkled, it’s practically dawn. Saturday, thank goodness, so I don’t need to trouble myself about work. I brush my teeth and spread the cold cream over my face and find a clean pair of pajamas in the chest of drawers. The air in the bedroom is warm and stuffy and humid from the bath. I open a window and pull back the covers, and as I begin the ascent into bed my toe discovers something flat.
I glance at the floor. Just under the edge of the bedframe lies the snapshot Iris enclosed in her letter.
I take my time examining them, these nephews and niece I’ve never met. Iris’s kids. Their features are blurred, as if the photographer moved his hand at the exact instant of the shutter’s opening. Still, you can gather in the grosser details. Their hair glimmers in various states of blondness, like their father, and their neat, old-fashioned clothes are exactly the kind of uniform I imagine Iris would dress them in.
My finger touches the small, glossy rectangle and traces the outline of a face, a tiny ear, a smear of hair so blond it might be white. A hand that clutches the fingers of the little boy who stands next to her, whose face seems to have been caught in the act of turning toward her to say something. A smocked dress that comes just to her knees, and the plump little knees themselves, and the white socks with the ruffle and the black Mary Jane shoes, like the ones I used to wear when I was small.
My niece. And I don’t even know her name. I didn’t even know she existed. She would have been born in Moscow, I guess, after they defected.
As for the boy who holds her hand—the oldest of them, the tallest. This would be their firstborn, the son they conceived in the first mad dash of infatuation. I always knew he’d be the spit of his father, and I believe I’m right. You can see it in the outline of him, the way he stands, the hint of a strong brow, the probable blue eyes. Aunt Vivian told me they named him after Sasha, but you can’t address a young boy as Cornelius Alexander, so they call him Kip—or did. A mere tiny, secret bud in his mother’s womb when I last saw Iris—desperately in love, her whole heart stolen so that not a single piece of it remained to forgive me, her sister.
I lie in bed for a bit, staring at the ceiling, while the early summer dawn colors the air. Until I realize I’m not going to fall asleep, not now. I rise and pad down the gray hallway to the foyer, where my pocketbook lies on the hall table on which I tossed it a few hours ago.
I open up the pocketbook and rattle around in there until I discover what I’m looking for—not the postcard or the tissue-thin airmail envelope, but the small, rectangular ecru card with the raised black type that said simply c. sumner fox, and beneath it a telephone number from a Washington exchange. Underneath that, in precise letters, Fox had written Empire Hotel, room 808.
I carry the card to the telephone in the kitchen and lift the receiver. At twenty-six minutes past five o’clock, I dial up the Empire Hotel and ask the switchboard operator for room 808.
He answers on the second ring. “Fox,” he says, like a voice you hear on the radio.
“Mr. Fox, it’s Ruth Macallister. I’m so sorry to bother you at such a disagreeable hour.”
“Not at all. Is something the matter?”
“Not as such. It’s just that I’ve got a little confession to make.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he says.
Iris
May 1940
Rome, Italy
The first thing Harry did when he got his posting to Rome, he bought a three-year-old Ford Cabriolet convertible cheap from some young widow in Hemel Hempstead and had it shipped across the ocean. The car had belonged to her husband before he’d succumbed to sepsis acquired from a mosquito bite—just like President Coolidge’s poor son, except that was a blister—and Iris thought the deceased must have been an interesting fellow, because the car was bright red like a candy apple and had an engine Harry described as souped up. Iris wasn’t sure of the particulars, but souped up apparently meant loud and fast, such that you couldn’t fail to notice this machine, whether it was parked along the street or zipping past you on some highway. It was a swell car, all right.