He seemed to have misunderstood my question, and I felt somehow that I had lost my chance. To go back to the sensitive matter seemed impossible.
“Whatever or whoever she got involved with, she went into it all the way,” Sid said. “Everybody in the family said it was that job at the Trade Mission that screwed her up. That it was all the Russians she got involved with. That she had some lover she followed there. In those days it wasn’t nothing, you know. Not like today, a woman jumping into bed with any man like it’s hopscotch. Everything done out in the open, like in a Macy’s window. They talked about free love and all of that in my day, too. But I’m talking about among respectable people. Proper young women. It was a shandeh un a charpeh. You know what that means?”
I nodded sagely.
“A shame and a disgrace. A Pah-zor!”
“Pozor,” I corrected.
The Yiddish Sidney and my mother had picked up growing up in Brooklyn was so mixed in with Russian, likely because of their grandparents’ Litvak roots, that Sid sometimes mistook one for the other.
“She always had to be ahead of the train, your mother. And you know what happens to people who are ahead of the train?” He steadied his eyes on me once more. “They get run over!”
Uncle Sidney was not one for being figurative.
“But you’re sure she wasn’t a communist herself?” I asked.
“Nah! Look—all those people she knew were a little screwy in that respect. They had Sacco and Vanzetti’s birthdays marked up on their calendars along with Christmas and New Year’s. But, no, she wasn’t a communist. Just restless. Wanted to do something grand with her life. She was always rubbing elbows with important people, politicians and so on. She met Senator Borah once—a big shot, head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. You know what he said about her?”
“What?”
“?‘It’s gals like Florence Fein who make the world go round.’ What do you think of that?”
I tried to look impressed. I’d heard it before.
A grimace passed across Sidney’s face. “Eh,” he said, swiping a hand. “All those fools are in the ground now.”
She stepped off the train in Cleveland into a wall of 101-degree heat. The sun had seared the crops and cooked the gardens. The air smelled of cement and smashed tomatoes. The apartment Florence was promised turned out to be a boarder’s room off an elevated porch in a house belonging to a retired couple named Shulte. Nothing had been fixed before her arrival. Three days into her sojourn, the collar around her shower head came loose, falling in a cascade of rust mixed with a miserly stream of water. It was 8:00 A.M., and she was late for work.
In her damp housecoat, Florence marched around to the Shultes’ front door. Her loud knocking brought forth no response. Through the door she could hear the loud asthmatic voice of Father Coughlin on the radio barking about Jewish Bolshevism. Florence took a calming breath and knocked more insistently. After a moment, Alva Shulte opened the door and offered Florence her pinched, inhospitable smile.
“Is Mr. Shulte in? The shower’s broken, and there’s no pressure again.” Florence tried to peek into the darkened hall, but her landlady’s broad back blocked the view. “I have to be at work in twenty minutes.”
Alva Shulte made no motion to summon her husband. She continued studying Florence, and finally called back into the house without turning around, “Mr. Shulte, we got a water problem!”
“Getting my tools, Mrs. Shulte!” Florence heard from within the bleak interior. The two women stood waiting, Alva wearing an odd grin that suggested she half-expected Florence to pick her pocket. Old Shulte finally appeared in the light, holding his toolbox. “Don’t know if I can do much, with the whole neighborhood keeping its water on,” he spoke while Florence followed him up the back stairway to her quarters. “The fire siren’s been going all morning, and when that fire department comes with its hose, nobody can get any pressure at all.”
Alva, who’d followed them, now stood watching Florence in the little green-painted room while Dwayne Shulte went down the hall to fix the shower. “You a secretary up there at McKee?”
“Not exactly.” Florence peered down the hall. Let the old cat stew in her curiosity.
“Dwayne said you do some bookkeeping.”
Florence turned to her. “I’m a liaison, actually. For a group of foreign business clients.” She sounded idiotic to herself. Who was she showing off to?
“Lays-on,” said Alva. “Heavens, me. Sounds awfully important.”
Florence shrugged. “It just means I’m an intermediary. Like an arbiter.”
“I know the word, hon. Didn’t know they had such big titles for young girls nowadays, with so many of our boys out of work.”
Dwayne Shulte shuffled out of the bathroom, wiping a hand on his pants. “I tightened that neck, so it’s got more force, but I wouldn’t run that shower too long now.” He glanced at Florence’s face, then at her hair, and his eyes seemed to dim at the thought of the water required to wash it. He looked disappointed, for reasons entirely different from his wife’s, that the tenant they’d been sent wasn’t a man.
—
INSIDE THE SIXTH-FLOOR CONFERENCE ROOM of the McKee building, a Midwestern sun cut through the blinds and fell in penal bars on the oak conference table. In New York, the canyons of high-rises had offered Florence some protection against the summer heat, but here there was no such cover. A stalemate was in progress among the Russians and McKee’s engineers. The Soviets claimed that the blueprints McKee had drawn for their rolling mill in Magnitogorsk were unusable. Moscow was refusing to sign off on any construction requiring so much iron and concrete.
“Hold on, now, we worked all this out three months ago,” said Kyle Clement, a dimpled Minnesotan. “You said you wanted a mill like the one in Gary, and that’s what we’ve given you.”
“You promise us mill ‘modified for Magnitostroy,’?” said a Russian named Fyodor Zimin.
“A modified floor plan, not a plan that called for wood and brick!”
“Bricks and wood is what we have in Magnitogorsk. If we had iron, we would not need iron mill, yes?”
On her steno pad Florence tried hastily to give some order to the crossfire. She’d been sent to make sure the two sides got along, but was failing remarkably at this task. The McKee men, distrustful of the Russians and concerned about litigation, insisted she record every word of their meeting.