Still she was glad when, after the flurry of morning activity, the hair brushing and feeding and getting-the-kids-ready-for-school, they finally hurried off and left her alone. Through the kitchen window, sipping her tea, Florence watched autumn dissolve the last of the summer warmth with endless rains. A moist haze covered the towering buildings in this featureless new neighborhood. The rain washed the potholed streets while the new metro, nine stories below, swallowed and disgorged commuters. With her fractured ankle healing in its cast, she’d been obliged to cancel most of her lessons. For a time, some of her students agreed to come to Julian’s apartment, to be tutored at the tiny laminate table in the minuscule kitchen where she now sat alone. But in the permanent disorder of a home teeming with two small children, it was impossible for her to do her work properly.
All her life she had managed to keep herself busy, to stay one pace ahead of unwanted thoughts. But now, with no responsibilities aside from recuperating, Florence was left with little else besides her ruminations. Her frailty and the pain pills made her tired in the afternoons. In those dead hours she welcomed the ablutions of synthetic sleep. But the enforced rest also did something strange to her. Sometimes, coming out of the mists of a chemical nap, she would experience an unmoored sensation in her throat or stomach, as if she’d just been standing at the railing of an undulating ship. Other times, she would wake with a start, hearing a voice in her dreams. “How can a girl leave her family?” it asked her. “Who in their right mind would do such a thing?” It had been a long time since she’d had such a powerful memory of her father’s voice. In the apartment’s failing afternoon light it was not her son’s but her father’s disappointment that she felt most keenly.
But she’d had to leave. In that place, so long ago, fettered by all the ancestral guilt, she’d refused to let her own desires be cramped by all that mindless rectitude. It was not that she hadn’t believed things would change in America—they were changing, even then, all around her. But who could have foreseen what was bound to come: the schisms, the wars, the race struggle, the whole age of “sexual politics” they wrote about nowadays. The women libbers. Who could have predicted the Pill—unburdening girls from the weight of millennia. Yes, she could have stayed and waited for all the changes to happen—the decades-long march toward progress. She could have stayed and become part of that march. But she’d had no patience for all that. She had wanted to skip past all those prohibitions and obstructions, all the prejudice and correctness, and leap straight into the future. That’s what the Soviet Union had meant to her back then—a place where the future was already being lived. And so she had fled the Land of the Free to feel free. She’d had to make the decision unilaterally or she would never have made it at all.
How can a girl leave her family? She hadn’t given thought, back then, to what it meant to have a child of your own. Or what it meant to lose your child. She would learn all that later.
More and more she thought about Leon. Had she known how little time they’d have together, would she still have been so restless, so penny-pinching with her affections? A poor wife she had been to him, who was so steadfast with his love, who forgave her the unforgivable, justified the mess she got herself into with the secret police, entanglements she could hardly find the strength anymore to justify to herself. They’d had no peace in those days, those years of humiliations and terrors. But how much more terrible would they have been without Leon by her side? Would he still have perished had she been wiser? Had not spoken to Subotin about the rally for Meyerson, said nothing of their friend Seldon? Yes, sometimes she wondered about this too. Had her embroilments delayed their fates or sped them all faster to the season of their deaths?
It was impossible to know. Old age made you discover that it wasn’t the big mistakes but the small ones that laid claim to your regrets. That she had not brought more pleasure into Leon’s life—this now caused her more heartache than anything she could or could not have done to save his life. How stingy she’d been to rush off somewhere when he wanted her to sit and listen to a joke. How she’d rolled her eyes at his entertainments, his “frivolity,” when all along it was only her he wanted to make laugh. How parsimonious not to make love more often, to turn away from his desire because she was too tired, not to tell him at every opportunity how much he meant to her.
For all her misfortunes, life had done right by her in some ways—it had given her, above all else, a good child. When she came back from the camps, without Leon, she’d longed for nothing so much as to make up for lost time, to raise and protect Julian as she knew a mother ought to. Only, by then, he didn’t need her protection. He was used to taking care of himself. He made his own bed in the mornings, sewed buttons on his shirts, polished his own shoes like a soldier. Already like a little man—all elbows and knees—cooking macaroni for himself after school. All those years she had missed had made of him a contained and self-sufficient boy. At thirteen, he was cordial to her, addressing her as “Mama” out of respect, though the word fell so awkwardly from his lips. And on her part, it had not been easy to be a mother again after those solitary years. Some of his memories of her had remained intact. But it would take time for any affection to grow again naturally. Still, he didn’t seem to hold anything against her. Not for a while, at least. The friction would erupt later, in his final year of high school, when the Great Reaction set in, camouflaged in his political and philosophical opinions, rhetorical challenges, a contempt for anything she dared to defend or even treat neutrally. Whatever hurts had taken root during those missing years had finally broken earth.