Alexander had to hire an architect and a foreman right away. Skip was his architect, Phil his foreman. Skip was doughy and sparkless, but Alexander had seen Skip’s portfolio; his work was good. Phil, in his late forties, wiry like a winter twig, always in old jeans and plaid shirts, didn’t say much, but he played guitar—which Anthony liked—had been living with the same woman for twenty years—which Tatiana liked—and boy, did he know a remarkable amount about building—which Alexander liked. Alexander couldn’t have built more than one house a year without Phil’s unflappable efficiency. With his new title as project manager, Phil took on four houses, while Alexander kept his hands firmly on two, and ran the rest of his business: hired contractors, met with clients—which took up a tremendous amount of his time—and helped Skip with home design. Linda scheduled him. Tatiana counted his money.
The subcontractors and suppliers whom he hired talked about their kids and wives, about birthdays and holidays, about the money they were making and spending, about sports and politics. It was a different world, but even with monks for roofers, with one hand on the rosary, the other on the clay tiles, Tatiana no longer came to his construction sites. Instead, on the days she was off, Alexander went home for lunch. He was the boss now, he could do as he pleased. It worked out much better. They were home, they were alone, and lunch often included some sweet afternoon love for Alexander, after which he wanted nothing but a nap. He returned to work as happy as if he had his senses. The smile never left his face.
Richter called Thanksgiving of 1952 from Korea, mutely listened to the story of Dudley from Montana. When Alexander finished telling him, he said, “Tom, it’s what any man would do for his wife, right?”
And Tom Richter said after a beat, “Well, I think that depends on the wife.”
He asked Alexander for a small favor. One of his young sergeants had been wounded and was coming back stateside; he was originally from San Diego, but was willing to work anywhere; would Alexander have a position for him? As it happened, Alexander had signed contracts to build four more homes, and even before that he’d known Phil had too much work, with all the houses going up nearly simultaneously. He readily agreed to help his friend, and that’s how he met Shannon Clay.
Shannon, barely twenty-two, went into combat in Korea on May 9, 1952 and went MIA three days later. His recon patrol team was ambushed, they lost contact with headquarters, and while waiting for a helicopter extraction were engaged in a firefight that left all of Shannon’s team dead and him with a round in his leg. He was in enemy territory for four weeks, living in the woods, before he was picked up by another chopper passing through the area. Alexander and Tatiana thought any man who could be wounded and survive by himself for a month in the mountains of Korea would do well in anything. Shannon walked with a slight limp from the round that was still lodged in his thigh, but was mild-faced, well-presented, polite to a fault, eager to please, and incredibly hard-working.
Alexander liked Shannon instantly, and liked him even more after Tatiana said, “He is wonderful,” when they came home after having a drink with him. “But lonely. Do we know any single girls?”
A smiling Alexander wanted to know if Tatiana was really asking him if he knew any single girls.
“I said we, Shura. We.”
One afternoon when Alexander and Shannon were both in the office, Tatiana stopped by to say hello. She had just run into Amanda while shopping in Scottsdale.
No sooner had she walked through Alexander’s office door, than Shannon stood up and said, “Tania, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
With unsuppressed reluctance, Tatiana introduced a smiling Shannon to a smiling Amanda. Two days later, the four of them went out to dinner at Bobo’s. Amanda quite liked Shannon—who wouldn’t like him, said Tatiana, with his polite face and innocent blue eyes—but Shannon extremely liked Amanda.
“So what do you think of our adorable Shannon with her?” Tatiana asked Alexander that night as they were brushing their teeth before bed.
“Hmm,” he said, rinsing his mouth.
“What, you have reservations, too?”
He spat into the sink. “I have none. But I think Amanda does. He seemed quite taken with her. She less so with him.” He shrugged. “Women.”
Tatiana studied her face in the bathroom mirror. “Where’s the surprise? Shannon is a decent young man. And Amanda likes bad boys.”
“Does she indeed?” Alexander looked at Tatiana sideways. “And what kind does my own wife like?”
“I like,” she said, grinning back through the mirror, “the baddest boy of all.”
Shannon and Amanda didn’t need Tatiana and Alexander after the first outing. They got engaged two months later, in March 1953, right around the time of Stalin’s death (though Shannon maintained the events were concomitant, not consequent—unlike, say, the arrest and execution of Lavrenti Beria), married in June and the following March had their first baby.
Baby Baby Baby
And it wasn’t just Amanda who was having a baby.
What in heaven’s name was going on in Phoenix? Alexander could not walk through the Indian School Road market, to the drive-in, for ice cream, to the Apache Trail in the Superstitions without seeing strollers, babies, twins, toddlers everywhere. He played ball with Anthony in the Scottsdale Commons—babies all over, arrayed like lilies in the fields, baby boys, baby girls, pink blue yellow green, chubby, white, dark, brown, and all the colors in between. The Yuma married barracks, where they stayed once a month, had twelve carriages all in a row on the decks outside. Ghost towns in the Superstitions? Babies. Pueblo Grande Museum? Babies. Why did babies need to go to the Indian Museum? Or the Sonoran Desert National Monument? Alexander couldn’t see the giant saguaros for all the tiny babies in his way. It was the first topic of every conversation, and the last. Who was pregnant again? Who just had a baby, who was having a third? When were they moving to a bigger house, and how many more children were they planning on having? Alexander even made it a motto of his business efficiency. He told all the crews he hired and all the prospective homeowners he talked to that his goal was to have their house built to the same high standards but in less time than it took one woman to grow one human being.
To the one unpregnant woman, he said, “That’s it. I’m taking charge. I obviously need to take matters into my own hands.”
She smiled. “Hands? Perhaps it’s this small mistake in anatomy that’s been the problem all along.”
He applied himself to the business of making a baby the same way he applied himself to everything—dutifully, tirelessly, and conscientiously. For a year his spawn went nowhere but over the redd. He even stopped smoking in the house, saying the nicotine was not good for her once tubercular lungs.
“It’s your house,” Tatiana said. “You smoke where you want. And I’m not growing the baby in my lungs.”
They waited noisily; Alexander held his breath around the days when they would know, and when one more month brought no baby, he breathed out and went on and worked and built another month. There were no babies, but there was swimming in December! Plunging into the heated pool at night under the desert stars. And sometimes not heating it, and plunging in stark naked—oh, the ice, the numbing squealing joy of it.
There were no babies, but there was Rosemary Clooney wanting a piece of his heart, and the Andrews Sisters, who wanted to be loved, and Alexander making love to Tatiana in the night on one of their deck lounge chairs and humming, “If I Knew You Were Coming, I Would Have Baked You a Cake,” and Tatiana, holding his head, murmuring, “Shh. Shh!”
Humming “The Song of the Volga Boatmen” he had sung when he plowed through Byelorussia, Alexander put in a pebbled driveway for the house, poured a cement basketball court for him and Anthony, and built a flat roof sun cover for their cars.
Armed with “The Russian Sailors’ Dance” he had hummed on the approach to Majdanek death camp in Poland, he tried to get rid of the cholla. The cholla cactus penetrates anything that comes near it—leather, rubber, gloves, the soles of Alexander’s boots—penetrates to pollinate; jumps and germinates; imbued with evil spirits, cholla.
“Dad,” said Anthony, who was helping him, “you’re in America now. You’re an officer. Here we sing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ when we conquer cholla. You don’t know the words to it? Want me to teach you?”
With “Varshavyanka” at his lips, Alexander planted palm trees and agaves, built masonry walls for Tatiana’s flower garden—which she found “endearing and symbolic”—and laid terra cotta winding walkways around the yuccas and the palo verdes. After dinner they would amble down the paths Alexander set down amid lush desert foliage. The ocotillos, the prickly pears, the velvet mesquites, the purple lupines, the desert poppies all bloomed in their landscaped summer garden by the mountains. And below them through the towering saguaros, the lights in the valley twinkled and multiplied, the farmland was long gone, the communities sprang up, and had streetlights and residential associations and pools and golf courses and baby carriages, and homes Alexander built for the newly pregnant women and their anxiously waiting husbands.
Tatiana had her arm through his, gazing up at him when he talked about building houses, about Shannon, about Richter still in Korea, and the French fighting to their death in Dien Bien Phu—and sometimes Alexander could swear she wasn’t listening to a word he was saying, her mouth was just dropping open and her eyes were unblinking, as if…almost as if…he was in uniform and she was in factory clothes, and the rifle was slung on his shoulder, and her hair was down, and they were ambling through Leningrad, through the streets and the boulevards, past the canals and the train stations in the first summer of their life when the war first cleaved them together before it rent them apart.
Meanwhile, the one great boy they managed to have played his guitar on the deck, learning Francesca’s Mexican songs, and his own mother’s Russian ones. Tatiana would hum them, and Anthony would strum them, and she would cry when she heard them. And he serenaded his father and mother with “Corazon Magico” and “Moscow Nights,” as they strolled and smoked and chatted in the fond falling evening.
And then at night—love.
And then—another month.
Anthony sees Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
Tatiana had just come out of the bath, and was perched on their bed, brushing out her hair and leaning in as Alexander spread out the final version of the blueprints for their new house. With a pencil in his hand, he led her down the driveway, showing her the plan: first the elevation, then the inside of the house, then the back elevation, and then the artist’s rendering of the kitchen.
“It’s so sprawling,” said Tatiana.
“Yes. Our sprawling adobe house is in the shape of a crescent Lazarevo moon,” said Alexander, “curving out to the meandering driveway, the basketball courts and the garages.”
“I love how that looks.”
“You walk in through faux-gilded gates”—Alexander lifted his eyes to Tatiana, hoping she’d remember the reference to the other—not faux—gilded gates, ones that opened a certain elm-filled garden onto a certain white night river. By the dreamy look of her on his bed, she remembered. The blueprints as foreplay. Nodding his head in tacit approval of himself, Alexander continued. “Through these gates you walk into a tumbled travertine square courtyard with palo de fierros around a circular fountain, and then proceed into the heart of the house—the kitchen, gallery, family room, playroom, library, and the long, wide dining room through the butler’s pantry. Nice, right?”
“How big is this dining room?” She peered closer.
“Twenty-four feet by fifteen. With a fireplace.”
“That’s big,” she said.
“I’m thinking generationally,” he said cheerfully. “As in, three generations down, there will be a lot of children. Look—the kitchen connects to the den by a gallery, with wall to ceiling windows for plants and the long wall across for photographs and memories. And here on the left are the children’s bedrooms. And here on the right wing is our secluded master suite…”
“Is that what you call it? A master suite?”
“I don’t call it that. That’s what it is. Are you listening, or are you being saucy?”
“Why can’t I listen and be saucy? All right, all right, I’m listening.” Tatiana made a serious face. “What’s this?”
“A fireplace that faces both the bedroom and the en suite bath,” said Alexander. “And this just outside is a private stone garden that faces both the mountains and the valley. I’m going to build us an enclosure for an outside fire.”
“I like the fireplace in the bedroom,” she said quietly, still brushing out her hair, but quicker. “I’d love to have one here.”
“Yes, well. They don’t put fireplaces in trailers,” Alexander said. “The house is all limestone and flagstone and terra cotta, and hardwood plank floors. Except our bedroom—that’s wall-to-wall carpet.” He grinned from ear to ear. “Where was I? Oh, yes. A covered porch runs the length of the inward curve of the back of the house. Over here is a patio and a walkway that leads to the pool.”
“It’s all extraordinary,” she said.
“The bathrooms are white,” he said, “just like you like. The kitchen is white. But look here, see this island? This is one of the most important features of the whole place.”
“Even more important than the fireplace between the bed and the whirlpool tub?”
“Almost,” Alexander said. “Imagine this black granite island, like Vishnu schist, in the middle of your kitchen as the heartbeat of your house. On this island you prepare food and make your dough. It’s where your children and your husband sit on cushioned barstools and eat your bread and drink your coffee and shout and argue and read the paper and talk about their day, and move earth and heaven. It’s the beginning and middle and end of every day. The music plays and your kitchen is never quiet.”
“All isolated and alone in the mountains,” Tatiana murmured.
“Yes,” Alexander said. “Privacy to yell, to weep, to swim, to sleep. Privacy for everything.”
“Shura,” Tatiana said caressingly. “It’s a beautiful dream. I see it. I see it all. I feel it. As soon as I get pregnant, we’ll build our house.”
Pointing out the increasing need for privacy now, with Anthony growing up and becoming more aware of things in their little home, Alexander, who had spent four years changing and adjusting and tinkering with the blueprints, carefully suggested building the house anyway. Tatiana gently declined.
“Who is going to manage the floorboards and the crown molding and the paint colors and the door handles? It’s a full time job. Amanda can do it, but she doesn’t work. I can’t. My two plates are full.”
Alexander was quiet, it seemed to him for, like, an hour, staring into the blueprints lying on their cream-and-crimson bedspread. “So make one of your plates less full,” he finally said, raising his eyes to her.
From across the bed she gazed mildly and affectionately at him. “Shura,” she said, “as soon as I get pregnant, I’ll leave work. We’ll build our house. What’s the hurry?” She smiled. “We have everything we need for now. Everything,” she whispered. “And we have plenty of privacy.” Putting the hairbrush down, Tatiana took off her robe and flung herself onto the bed, right on top of the house plans. Tilting her head back and stretching out her arms, she murmured, “Here on your bed, on her back, lies a naked young woman with her hair down, just as you like it, just as you like her. And to this you say…”
“Um, can you just ease up off the blueprints, please.”
Another year passed. They paid off the note on the land, gave everyone raises, hired new people, for the holidays flew in Esther and Rosa, a miserable Vikki and a sullen Richter, just back from Korea, gave lavish Christmas gifts and parties, had loud Sunday barbecues, went out to dinner every Saturday night, and traveled far and wide on their Sundays together, transsecting Arizona, riding horses in the mountains.
They remodeled the kitchen, bought new appliances. Alexander finished his degree, became an architect.
In the winter of 1954 they started watching television. Tatiana allowed Alexander to spare no expense in buying her one of the new color sets, on which they watched The Singing Cowboy and Death Valley Days, I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. Sometimes when they watched TV Alexander lay down in her lap—as if they were still in front of the fire in Lazarevo. Sometimes Tatiana lay down in his lap.
And sometimes…as Marlene Dietrich would say, she had, mmm, mmm, kisses sweeter than wine.
Around Christmas season 1955, they forgot to lock their bedroom door and Anthony opened it late one night. He came in perhaps because of a nightmare, perhaps because the Christmas music was too loud on their radio, and so while “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” played on, twelve-year-old Anthony saw his naked mother underneath his upraised naked father, he saw gripped legs and small white hands clutching large arms, and he saw unspeakable motion, and he heard his mother making noises as if she were in pain but yet not in pain. He made a noise himself, and Alexander, without even turning around, stopped moving, lay down on top of Tatiana to cover her, and said, “Anthony—”
The boy was out, vanished, the door open wide.
They tried to imagine the things he may have seen. They tried to feel grateful for the other—completely unexplainable—things that he could have seen and blessedly had not.
“Should we build a house now?” Alexander asked.
“Why?” Tatiana said. “You can leave the door unlocked in a brand new house just as well as in our mobile home. But now you better go talk to your son, Shura.”
“Oh suddenly it’s a mobile home, not a trailer—and what am I supposed to say to him?”
“I don’t know, Alexander Barrington, but you’re going to have to think of something, or do you want me to talk to him the way your mother talked to you?”
“All right, let’s just take one small step back toward reality,” said Alexander. “My family and I were living in a communal apartment where the man in the next room kept bringing in whores he picked up at the train station. My mother had a responsibility. She was trying to scare me off with nightmarish stories of French disease. I don’t need to scare my boy off; I think what he’s seen tonight will put him off sex for life.”
The next day Anthony squirreled away in his room with the door closed instead of sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework and chatting with Alexander. Tatiana came home; they ate. Unable to look at his mother, Anthony disappeared into his bedroom immediately after cleaning up; he didn’t even want to play basketball, despite Tatiana’s offer of a ten-point handicap.
“Has this been the order of things this morning and evening?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” Alexander replied. “He wouldn’t speak to me at breakfast either. And I’m beginning to understand my own father’s predicament. My mother pushed him on me: go talk to him, go talk to him. At the time I thought it was hilarious. Why don’t I think so anymore?”
Tatiana pushed him toward Anthony’s bedroom. “I still think it’s hilarious. Go talk to him, go talk to him.”
Alexander didn’t budge. “It occurs to me—suddenly—that I didn’t need the talk from my parents. Why does Ant?”
“Because he does. Stop with your excuses. You keep telling me how you’re the one in charge of him. So go be in charge. Go.”
Reluctantly Alexander knocked on the door. After coming in, he sat by a quiet Anthony on the bed, and taking a deep breath asked, “Bud, is there anything you want to talk to me about?”
“NO!” Anthony said.
“Hmm. You sure?” He patted his leg, prodded him.
Anthony didn’t say anything.
Alexander talked to him anyway. He explained that adults every once in a while wanted to have a baby. The men had this, and the women had that, and to make a baby there needed to be some conjoining, much like a tight connection of mortise and tenon between two pieces of wood. For the conjoining to be effective, there needed to be movement (which is where the mortise and tenon analogy broke down but Anthony thankfully didn’t question it), which is probably the thing that frightened Anthony, but really it was nothing to be afraid of, it was just the essence of the grand design.
To reward Alexander’s valiant efforts, Anthony stared at his father as if he had just been told his parents drank the cold blood of vampires every night before bed. “You were doing what?” And then he said, after a considerable pause, “You and Mom were trying to have a—baby?”
“Um—yes.”
“Did you have to do that once before—to make me?”
“Um—yes.”
“This is what all adults have to do to make a baby?”
“Yes.”
“So, Sergio’s mom has three children. Does that mean his parents had to do that…three times?”
Alexander bit his lip. “Yes,” he said.
“Dad,” said Anthony, “I don’t think Mom wants to have any more children. Didn’t you hear her?”
“Son…”
“Didn’t you hear her? Please, Dad.”
Alexander stood up. “All righty then. Well, I’m glad we had this talk.”
“Not me.”
When he came outside, Tatiana was waiting at the table. “How did it go?”
“Pretty much,” said Alexander, “like my father’s conversation went with me.”
Tatiana laughed. “You better hope it went better than that. Your father wasn’t very effective.”
“Your son is reading Wonder Woman comics, Tatia,” said Alexander. “I don’t know how effective anything I say is going to be very shortly.”
“Wonder Woman?”
“Have you seen Wonder Woman?” Alexander shook his head and went to get his cigarettes. “Never mind. Soon it’ll all become clear. So yes for building the house, or no?”
“No, Shura. Just lock the door next time.”
So the house went unbuilt. Wonder Woman got read, Anthony’s voice changed, he started barricading his bedroom door at night, while across the mobile home, across the kitchen and the living room, behind a locked door, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” played on and on and on.
Though Alexander was almost certain that every once in a while he heard Rosemary Clooney croon to him that his mother was right, there were blues in the night.
Tatiana and Alexander were sitting by their pool. The transistor radio was playing, he was smoking, she was sipping her tea, the dim yellow lights by the pool were on. They had been quietly chatting. There is rarely any wind in the desert at night and there wasn’t any now. A song came on that Alexander loved, a slow sad favorite song of his, and he stood and took a step to her. Tatiana looked up at him uncertainly, put her tea down. He pulled her up, he pulled her close. His hand went around her back, their fingers entwined, and on the stone deck they swirled to Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy,” and Tatiana pressed into him as they glided in slow rivulets, in small circles by the blue ripples of their lit-up pool under the December southwestern stars. She put her head on his chest while Nat King Cole and Alexander sang to her about the magic day he passed her way, and when Alexander looked up toward the house, he saw himself, a fourteen-year-old, standing in adolescent embarrassment, watching his own father dance close with his mother near a hammock in Krasnaya Polyana, twenty years ago, in 1935—at the beginning of the end. It had been the last time he saw his parents touching gently, touching in love, and when Alexander blinked himself away, he saw his son, Anthony, standing on the deck of the house, in adolescent embarrassment watching his father dance close with his mother.
For the last time?
No matter how close Alexander and Tatiana danced—and they danced pretty darn close—there was still no child, and the relentless tick tock of the clock was heard louder and louder in all the rooms of their home, in the expanse of the plans for a pueblo mansion lying on their table. It lived with them—this white elephant in their just the right size double wide trailer—the white elephant that pored over the blueprints with them and whispered, why do we need a custom-made castle with courtyards and fountains and dining rooms and playrooms and six bedrooms if there are going to be no more children?