In 2013, Irina privately celebrated her third anniversary of working for Alma Belasco by gorging on cream cakes and drinking two cups of hot cocoa. Over that period she had come to know Alma very well, although there were secrets in the old woman’s life that neither she nor Seth had managed to uncover, partly because they had not yet seriously set about doing so. As she sorted through Alma’s boxes, Irina had been gradually discovering the Belasco family. She became acquainted with Isaac, with his stern prominent nose and kindly eyes; Lillian, who was short, ample bosomed, and had a beautiful face; their daughters, Sarah and Martha, homely but extremely well dressed; Nathaniel as a boy, skinny and lost looking, and then as a young man, slender and very handsome, and at the end of his life, his features ravaged by illness. She saw Alma as a child, newly arrived in America; as a twenty-one-year-old, studying art in Boston; in a black beret and a detective’s trench coat, a masculine fashion she adopted after liberating herself from her aunt Lillian’s choice of wardrobe, which she had never liked; Alma as a mother, seated in the pergola of the garden at Sea Cliff, with her three-month-old son, Larry, on her lap and her husband standing behind her with one hand on her shoulder, posing as if for a royal portrait. Even as a girl, there were telltale signs of the woman she would grow up to become: she looked imposing, with the white stripe of hair across her brow, her slightly crooked mouth, and the dark circles under her eyes. Irina was supposed to arrange the photographs in chronological order in the albums following Alma’s instructions, but she didn’t always remember where or when they had been taken. Apart from Ichimei Fukuda’s portrait, there was only one other framed photograph in her apartment: the family in the main room at Sea Cliff when Alma was celebrating her fiftieth birthday. The men were in tuxedos, and the women wore long dresses. Alma was in black satin, as haughty as a dowager empress; her daughter-in-law, Doris, looked pale and tired in a gray silk dress pleated at the front to conceal her second pregnancy: she was expecting her daughter, Pauline. Seth, eighteen months old, was standing, clutching his grandmother’s dress with one hand and the ear of a cocker spaniel with the other.
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As time went by, the relationship between Alma and Irina became increasingly like that of aunt and niece. Their routines were so settled that they could spend hours together in the cramped apartment without talking or even glancing each other’s way, both of them caught up in their own activity. They needed each other. Besides sorting through the boxes from Sea Cliff, Irina was also responsible for filing Alma’s papers, taking dictation, going to the shops or the laundry, accompanying Alma on her errands, taking care of her cat, and organizing her minimal social life. Irina considered it a privilege to be able to count on Alma’s trust and support, whereas the older woman was thankful for the young woman’s loyalty. She was flattered by Irina’s interest in her past, and she depended on her for practical matters as well as for maintaining her independence and autonomy. Seth had told Alma that when the time came that she needed more help, she ought to either return to the family home at Sea Cliff or take on someone to assist her full-time in her apartment, since money would be no problem. Alma, who was about to turn eighty-two, planned to live another ten years before she needed that kind of support: she did not want anybody to feel they had the right to decide on her behalf.
“I was terrified of being dependent too, Alma,” Dr. Catherine Hope told her one day. “But I’ve realized it’s not such a big deal. You get used to it, and are grateful for the assistance. I can’t dress or take a shower on my own, I have problems brushing my teeth and cutting the chicken on my plate, but I’ve never been more contented than I am now.”