The Secrets We Kept(55)
“Darling.” She reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “No.” She held on, and something inside me, from a location hard to pinpoint, bloomed.
CHAPTER 13
THE SWALLOW
She was no mole—I was sure of that. A few months prior, Frank had asked me to suss out Irina and ensure her na?veté was not a put-on. It wasn’t, I’d told him. “Good,” he said. “We want her on the book project. Train her up, Sally. You know the drill.”
Befriending Irina may have been a setup and training her part of the job, but it had turned into something else—something I could’ve put my finger on but wasn’t about to just yet.
The Tuesday after Leonard’s party—my own test of sorts—I stopped by her desk and asked if she wanted to see Silk Stockings that night. I’d planned on asking her to a Sunday matinee a few days earlier but lost my nerve mid-dial and hung up.
We walked to the Georgetown Theater after work, stopping at Magruder’s for some candy to sneak in—Irina’s idea. I rarely ate candy other than chocolates, but decided to get a box of Jujubes just for the hell of it. Irina picked up two boxes of Boston Baked Beans, and we got in line to pay. “Hold my place for a second?” she asked.
She came back a minute later carrying a large bouquet of beets.
“Interesting snack choice.”
“They’re for my mother. She makes a vat of borscht once a month and asked me to pick some up at Eastern Market. She’s convinced the beets sold by this elderly Russian man are superior to the beets sold at a regular store.” She held up a finger. “It’s worth the extra nickel for the quality,” she said in a Russian accent.
I laughed. “Can she really tell the difference?”
“No! I always get them at Safeway and just take them out of the bag before I get home.”
We paid for our movie contraband and Irina stuck the beets inside her purse with the green ends sticking out. After purchasing two tickets, we made our way into the theater.
Seeing a picture was one of my greatest pleasures, and one I almost always chose to do alone. If I had the money to spare, I’d take myself to the movies once or twice a week. Sometimes I’d see the same movie two or three times, sitting in the balcony’s front row, where I could lean against the gold railing and rest my chin atop my hands.
I loved everything about it: the Georgetown’s neon sign glowing red, waiting in line for the person in the glass booth to hand you your ticket, the smell of popcorn, the sticky floors, the ushers directing you to your seat with their small flashlights. I even had a habit of singing “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” in the shower. But my favorite part has always been the space between when the lights go down and the film begins to flicker—that brief moment when the whole world feels like it’s on the verge of something.
I wanted to share all this with Irina. I wanted to find out if she, too, felt on the verge of something. The lights dimmed, and when she looked at me with wide eyes after the MGM lion roared, I knew she did.
I don’t remember much about the movie. But I do remember that about a quarter of the way through, Irina opened her purse and poked around the beets to find her Boston Baked Beans. The candy rattled and she cursed when the beets fell to the floor. She made such a commotion that a man smoking a cigar turned around to shush us. I found it charming.
And when Fred Astaire stomped on his top hat at the end of his “Ritz Roll and Rock” number, Irina gasped and touched my hand. She removed it right away, but the feeling lingered until the lights came back on.
When we left the theater, it was raining. We stood under the awning watching water pour off in sheets.
“Should we wait it out?” I asked. “We could run across the street and get a hot toddy.”
“I better brave it.” She patted her purse. “Mama’s expecting her beets.”
I laughed but felt a stab of sadness. “Rain check, then?”
“Deal.”
Irina ran out to the turquoise-and-white streetcar idling on the corner. She boarded and I watched as it turned the corner and disappeared from view. The sky opened up with a crack of lightning. I leaned against a movie poster for Jailhouse Rock and it started to pour.
* * *
—
In the weeks following the movie, I took Irina to my favorite bookstores, going over each shop’s pros and cons and what I’d do differently if I owned it. We saw the West Side Story premiere at the National and sang “I Feel Pretty” at the top of our lungs the entire walk home. We went to the zoo but left after Irina saw a lion who’d paced so long in her cage she’d worn a narrow path alongside the bars. “It’s a crime,” she said.
In all that time, we hadn’t so much as let a hug linger a second too long, but it didn’t matter. It had been so long that I didn’t recognize it at first. Not since my Kandy days had I let someone get so close so fast. I’d built up a wall after Jane—a Navy Corps nurse with Shirley Temple hair and teeth white as soap—broke my heart.
Really, more than the heart breaks. When Jane told me our “special friendship” would be over as soon as we stepped back onto American soil and chalked it up to just one of those things that happened during the war, my chest felt as if it was caving in and my legs, my arms, the top of my head, even my teeth hurt. I vowed never to put myself in harm’s way like that again, and I had been relatively successful.