“Not a bit,” Fox says. “Smooth as butter. I couldn’t believe it myself. Once the wheels went in motion, why, there was no stopping them rolling forward.”
For some reason, we still stand outside the apartment door. I suppose we’re all a little nervous of going in to face what’s inside. But a space falls after Fox’s last words, in which there is nothing else to say, so we all turn to the apartment’s interior and perform the exact same pantomime as downstairs at the elevator a moment ago—Digby waving us both in, Fox urging me a half step forward with a hand that just caresses the curve of my spine.
Then I’m inside the foyer, and a small, delicate woman appears—heavily pregnant, dark hair, anxious face—Iris.
“Ruth? Thank you so much for coming.”
I don’t know how it is. I don’t know why I do it, what force urges me forward. Something primeval, I imagine. My feet move by themselves. I open my arms at the last instant and cradle her shoulders and head—my stomach rams the mountain of hers—her dark hair fills my mouth. I have to spit it out to speak.
“Of course I came, pumpkin.”
I would like to say that we then settle down on a sofa somewhere and trade tender reminiscences until the cows come home, but an instant later the children tumble down the hall and that’s that. I mean, the noise alone. The kids fire questions at me, Iris asks if I want tea or coffee—vodka, I call out—Digby tells Fox what a fan he was, something about a game against Harvard—there’s no time at all for awkwardness. We wind up on a sofa fully half an hour later. The children get bored and wander off to somebody’s room to play a game.
“Not Monopoly, I presume?”
Digby laughs. “No.”
Now, the first thing I notice about Digby, once we’re all arranged in this shabby living room of theirs, is that he drinks coffee instead of vodka, and he smokes a pipe instead of a cigarette. The second thing I notice is that he actually looks remarkably well, for a traitor—older, like I said, but still pink and healthy, not even so much as a fatherly paunch. The room in which we sit is lined with books. Digby’s talking with Fox about his work, how he’s writing a comprehensive study of American foreign policy since the First World War, teaching a class or two at Moscow University—that kind of thing, he says.
That kind of thing. Doesn’t that kind of thing include delivering lectures to intelligence officers at the KGB? The nerve of him! But of course he spoke—like we all do—to the microphones listening silently in their hidden corners. Back in Rome, Fox had assured me that Digby wanted out of the Soviet Union. But as I sit and listen to Sasha rattle on about his life in the Soviet Union, it seems to me he’s awfully cool. He’s as cool as ice. Probably you have to be, doing what he did. But the Digby of Rome—the ardent Bolshevist delivering secrets to the Soviet Union because he believed so passionately in world communism—wasn’t cool at all. He was a drunk. He argued his politics out loud, where anyone could hear them. He spilled his secrets to women, just to get them into bed. He’d only gotten worse after the war, by all accounts.
This Digby seems . . . well, happy.
I turn back to Iris and ask how she’s feeling. How much longer until the baby flies the coop? She puts her hand on her belly, the way expectant women do, and says any day now.
“You look well. You look exactly like one of those women who gives birth in the hayfield and gets right back up again.”
“Well, I’m not,” she says, a little cold. “I’m not at all. God knows, I wish I were.”
I open my mouth to ask what seems to me a logical question—namely, why she keeps having them, in that case. But Digby rises from his chair and wanders over to put his hand on her shoulder, and I suppose he knows what I’m thinking.
“The trouble is, she forgets. They get to be a couple of years old and she wants another one, and I haven’t got the heart to say no.”
“I don’t think it’s your heart that can’t say no,” I tell him crisply, and for an instant nobody says anything. Then Digby bursts out laughing.
“They’re a lot of trouble, all right, but they have a way of reminding you of the future, and what’s important. And they’re a hell of a lot of fun, too. Why—”
As if on cue, the youngest—her name is Claire, I’ve been told—toddles charmingly into the room in her yellow dress and makes straight for her daddy’s leg. He bends down so she can whisper in his ear. The expression on his face is so earnest, so devoted to what she’s telling him, it stops my heart. Then he rises and takes her hand. He says solemnly, “If you’ll excuse me a moment. Claire and I have something important to attend to.”
Then he walks away, hand in hand with his adorable daughter, and I think maybe that was it. Maybe that’s what focuses his mind and makes him so cool when an absolute ice calm is called for—he has his daughter to think about, her safety and her future, and his only true loyalty is to her and her brothers and the woman who’s given them to him.
After lunch we take the elevator downstairs and visit the park across the street. The day’s turned so sunny and warm, a perfect summer afternoon. I ask Iris if she’s up to walking so far, and she says of course she is. In fact, exercise is absolutely vital to a healthy pregnancy, and anyway a good long walk might bring on her labor.
“But don’t you want to wait until the last possible minute? Since it’s such a trial to you?”
“The opposite. I want it over with. I want to look the dragon in the face so I can stop dreading him.”
She gives me a particular look when she says this, which no microphone could have picked up, and turns to help little Claire with her shoes.
“And no more after that, I hope?” I ask.
She’s busy with shoelaces and doesn’t answer. But when she climbs to her feet, wincing, she says quietly, “Honestly, I’d hand you the gun myself.”
And I am left wondering on which Digby I’m supposed to fire it.
The men tramp on ahead with the boys, while Iris and I walk with Claire. To my surprise, the little tyke picks up my hand and swings along next to me. She calls me Auntie Wuth as if she’s known me all her life.
“Well, of course she does,” Iris says. “I talk about you all the time. The trouble we used to get into when we were little. You would always take the blame for me.”
“That’s because nobody would have believed you’d caused the trouble yourself. That innocent face of yours.”
She cuts off a laugh. I look at her face and notice she’s wincing, though she keeps on walking in that rolling waddle of pregnant women.
“Everything all right?” I ask.
“Just the usual. I don’t think it will be long.”
“Good, because I don’t think I can hold out much longer.” I cast a glance around us and see nobody near, except for a man in a dark suit who lingers on the path behind us, about thirty yards away. I speak in a soft voice. “I don’t know how you could stand it, all these years. The listening ears.”
She laughs gently. “I do appreciate your coming, Ruth. I mean that. After all these years, out of the blue. I don’t know how we’d manage without you.”
Without warning, Claire wheels in front of me and holds up her hands. I stare at her, perplexed. She gazes up soulfully with her mother’s face, shaped like a heart, fringed with her mother’s dark hair, and waggles her fingers.
“My God, she looks exactly like you,” I tell my sister.
“That’s a blessing, anyway. Are you going to pick her up, or not?”
“Pick me up!” Claire says, right on cue.
“Oh, that’s what this means.” I waggle my fingers back at her and bend down to hoist her on my hip. She’s lighter than I thought, as if her bones are hollow, like a bird’s. She snuggles her arms and legs around me and rests her warm head in the hollow of my shoulder. Her hair smells of honeysuckle and childhood.
“Tank you, Auntie Wuth,” she says.
So distracted am I by the unfamiliar sweet warmth of Claire’s body, I don’t think to ask Iris what she meant. Why it should be a blessing that a child looks like her mother instead of her handsome father.