“A scandal?”
“That’s what everyone was talking about, silly. You were too young to get it.”
“So who told you?”
“Nobody told me, but I heard. As our nanny Sissy used to say: A rich man can’t say sorry with daisies any more than a poor one can ask forgiveness with jewels.”
—
TODAY THEY’D MOVED PAST their favorite bench, taking care to walk slowly so that Florence could favor her good leg. She hung on to Sidney’s arm, her purse hanging between them, so no hoodlum would be tempted to snatch it, though there were no valuables in it, aside from twenty dollars and a handful of bus tokens. Nothing important, besides the letter.
Her brother was the only one who’d ever known about the original letter. The one that, after five years of writing in her head, Florence had finally committed to paper in July 1959. It was the month when Sidney had visited them in Moscow, maneuvering to arrive as a delegate for the American National Exhibition hosted by Khrushchev.
In all these years she had never forgotten her pilot, the man who’d dropped down out of the sky like an angel to give her a chance at a second life. Yet, in making the promise to tell Henry’s family of his fate, she had committed another falsehood. Years after the camps, struggling to rebuild her life and raise her son, she’d continued to tell herself that her offer could not, under the circumstances, have been binding. A promise forged in the crucible of hunger and desperation, made while one could not even intuit a future in which one was alive—surely it had to be null and void. If such a letter were mailed from the Soviet Union and opened by authorities, she could expect an immediate and unpleasant visit from the kind of people who still had the power to do her, and her son, enormous harm.
She wondered if she would have had the courage to write the letter had her daring brother not volunteered to slip it out in his briefcase. Seeing Sidney that afternoon in Sokolniki, so outwardly changed—standing at his full height in a sports jacket and sunglasses, his bristly hair now a gelled wave, on his hand a plain gold band—made her panic. How sure of himself and of life he was. How American, with his glow of health and certainty. A stranger. But she’d misjudged: The same love and loyalty burned in him as always. He’d brought along a thick stack of photographs—of their parents, of her older brother, of the nieces and nephews they knew she’d never see—and spoke to her for hours about all the life she’d missed. In the end, it was he who suggested that she sew the letter to Robbins’s family into the breast lining of his flannel suit. Sidney encouraged her to use her real name, but she was still too cautious. And it had not gratified Florence to realize, the day she and Julian saw Sidney off at the Moscow airport, that the promise she’d made in bad faith to Robbins was the one promise in her life she’d been able to keep.
Up on Albemarle Road was the Baptist church that had once been their synagogue, its Star of David still visible on the railing of the gate as the doors emptied out. The accents she heard now were Creole instead of Yiddish. These were neighborhoods into which Julian didn’t like her venturing, even with Sidney by her side. As quickly as he’d been able, her son had left New York and made the move to Westchester. What he didn’t know wouldn’t kill him. Besides, not everything had changed. Erasmus Hall was still the white Gothic fortress she remembered, the pines in front now tall enough to hide its upper windows. The Loew’s Kings Theatre still stood on Flatbush Avenue like a grand old opera palace, the dilapidated grandeur of its baroque fa?ade soot-stained and water-damaged. The post office too was exactly where she remembered it, inside a venerable old brick building that aside from some graffiti scrawl had escaped the ravages of time.
The letter she planned to send today had more details than the one she’d penned in ’59. Her real name, for instance, which she’d been too terrified to include the first time around. The details of the camp where she’d come across Henry. If they wanted to know more, they could call her. She included her telephone number.
She still felt queasy and light-headed at the thought of revealing so much information about herself, especially since Sidney had urged her to mail a second copy to the Veterans Department missing-persons office in Washington. If her years in Russia had taught her anything, it was that there would always be a dear price to pay for giving away too much.
Yet what a relief it was to ignore those lessons. To break the penitential silences.
There was no line inside the post office. The postal clerk, a heavyset woman in thick glasses, took Florence’s envelopes, stamped them, and summarily handed her a receipt.
Outside, an April wind tossed about litter of orange rind and wet newspaper. In the brightness of high noon, Florence lifted her chin and let the sun warm her face. She could still picture him—the man whose eyes, black and bruised, had shone with such constant, implausible, and incorruptible faith in her. Robbins had called her Sleeping Beauty, and she felt now that she was at long last waking up.
Sidney was waiting for her at the curb. “Ready to head home, Florie?” His dry hand was warm on her elbow.
“Yes,” she said, “let’s.”
For T. Friedman
There are people without whom this book would not exist, whose stories and insights were the soil from which my characters could grow: Timothy Friedman, Aleksandr Iyerusalimskiy, Ilya Ponorovsky—my heroes in every sense of the word. I’m grateful to my family, who never let me compromise this book’s vision: Sophia Krasikov, my mother and fellow creative seer, who read every page and let no falsehood pass her doorstep; Gregory Warner, my husband and compa?ero in life and storytelling, and my finest editor.