“How about you? Any plans to return to Moscow?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. “I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. The joint venture had been put into motion; I’d done my part, such as it was. And then I told him my other news: I’d gotten back in touch with my colleagues at Herbert Engineering, where I’d worked before I’d been poached by Continental Oil. The news was that in six months an icebreaker I had worked on would be sailing from New Zealand to Antarctica to escort supply vessels to the McMurdo polar station, a trip that happened only once a year. The NSF was, as usual, sponsoring this science mission, and this year the project’s manager had called to ask if I wanted to be on board with the other researchers and eccentrics. It was an opportunity to test the ship in real conditions. The only hitch, of course, was that I’d need to go in the capacity of an independent engineer, not as an executive on the payroll of a big oil company.
“So you want to cut your paycheck in half for a chance to see some polar bears?” Sidney said.
“There’re no polar bears, but…” I could hear my voice growing high with excitement. “It’s a whole other world down there, Uncle Sid.” I told him I’d been reading about the professional dreamers and oddballs who worked in Antarctica for months at a time. They seemed like my kind of people. I would go see the outposts of the great explorers, Scott and Shackleton, the hero-adventurers whose stories I’d devoured as a boy. Everything in their huts had been left just as it was a hundred years ago—all preserved forever in the perfect cold. “It’s the very bottom of the world,” I said, trying not to sound too adolescent. “A place where time stands still.”
Sidney nodded sympathetically. “And your own explorations? Did you find what you went for?”
I knew he was talking about our last conversation, when I’d called him at three in the morning. “Not everything,” I said.
Somebody on the second floor switched on the radio to a local jazz-and-blues hour, and for a few moments Sidney and I were both quiet while dissonant and tender piano chords finally resolved themselves into a silvery downtempo melody.
“Uncle Sidney, when exactly did you know that she tried to escape the country?”
“I knew.” Sidney closed his eyes. “By ’47, I knew. Maybe even before the war happened, only I was too young to understand then. She wrote to the family.”
I stared at him. “She put her intention in letters?”
“The language was very Aesopian. You had to read between the lines, which was something my parents were not experts at doing.”
“What do you mean?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Well, there’d be hints. She wrote me a letter once where she talked about a time when we were kids on the farm and she fell down a well, and I ran to town to get help and rescue her, and that she always knew I’d do that again for her.”
“Did that really happen?”
“What are you talking about? What fucking farm? We lived in Brooklyn!”
“You mean it was code?”
“Well, that’s what I realized after I went through the war and got some brains in me. It was encrypted. She knew the censors read all the letters.” Sidney breathed hard. The labor of remembering seemed to take some strength out of him. “Then, after the war, I wrote to Secretary of State Byrnes, then Marshall. I wrote a handwritten letter stating that my sister, Florence Fein Brink, who had lived in Russia since 1934, was being held in the Soviet Union against her will. I asked could the State Department please look into the matter through our embassy in Moscow.”
“Did you get a response?”
“After the second letter, yes.”
“What was it?”
“It was very curt. It said, ‘Since your sister no longer has the status of an American citizen, the Department of State is not able to take any steps to assist in obtaining information with respect to her.’ I still remember the wording.”
“That’s it?”
“Yup.”
Now it was my turn to exhale. “You couldn’t have done anything more.” It seemed to be the least fraught thing I could say given the enervated tone of Sidney’s voice.
“Maybe I couldn’t, maybe I could.”
He paused, as if to listen to a few more chords of the music. “Anyway,” he said a moment later, “that was my failure of courage. I got their response and I didn’t pursue it further. I was twenty-nine years old, starting a career, starting a family—in the thick of my own life. The American government said to lay off, so I did.
“I knew a fellow at the State Department, a friend from school. I could have called him, pressed the subject. But it was 1948. McCarthy already had his fingers in everything. The whole country was watching Alger Hiss on TV, testifying before Congress that he wasn’t a communist. This was a man who’d been very high in Roosevelt’s administration. Nobody was untouchable. The blacklisting had started. My firm had big contracts with the government. Everybody had to take loyalty oaths. What did I need the trouble for? Making phone calls blabbing about my pinko sister over there in the Soviet Union…They wrote me that letter and I let it go.”
“It wouldn’t have changed things,” I said, and knew instantly that it was the wrong thing to have said, to try to assuage whatever storms had brewed in his heart all those years.
“The point, my friend,” Sidney said sharply, “is we’re all leashed pretty tightly to the era we’re living through. To the tyranny of our time. Even me. Even you. We’re none of us as free as we’d like to think. I’m not saying it as an excuse. But very few of us can push up against the weight of all that probability. And those that do—who’s to say their lives are any better for it?”
I knew he meant Florence—unpinning herself from one set of circumstances, only to be pinned down by another.
“But enough…,” he said. He was exhausted from wading into these philosophical depths and wished, I sensed, to move on to something else.
Only I couldn’t. “Leashed is right,” I said. “When she finally had a chance to leave, she was so goddamn intractable.”
“You’ve been bludgeoning your poor dead mother with that for years. It’s not such an interesting question. She had her life there! Her theaters, her students. More interesting is why she finally agreed.”
“That’s easy,” I said. “She was fragile. She’d had that accident. She didn’t want to be left to care for herself on her own.”
“Is that what you think—us old people, we’re all frightened of having no one to bury us? Come on. After all she’d been through, being left alone was the last thing she was worried about.”
“Then why?”
“For you, dummy! Because you’d never have forgiven her if she didn’t go.”