—
ONLY AFTER SHE’D BOUGHT her ticket had Florence told her parents she was leaving. Then she braced herself for the family volcano.
“Cleveland was not enough!” Her father’s shouts had rattled their Flatbush living room. “Russia! You want to go where they’re shooting people dead for eating their own grain?”
She’d fought back. “No one who’s traveled there ever reported seeing any such thing.”
He turned to her mother. “Never reported! They’re being duped, Florie. And you’re being duped.”
“Sure, and the factories are only burning straw to make smoke come out the chimneys?”
“You think I’m such a dummy that I don’t know what kind of hoodwinked world my own father left. A young person such as yourself, ripe for recruitment…”
“No one has recruited me!”
But his eyes were wild with lunatic distrust. “Let me see your Party card!”
“I don’t have one!” she shouted, her voice caving from tears. “For Pete’s sake, I am not a communist!”
“Then why, Florie? Just tell me why. What kind of madness is this, for a girl to want to leave her family, her home, all the people who love her? To the other end of the world!”
She could not tell him the truth. Could not show him the photograph of the dark-eyed man with the Apache cheeks, tucked in the back of her dresser drawer. Better they think her a communist than a nafka. “I am not leaving forever, Papa!” she said in a voice hoarse from shouting.
“Then tell us how long?”
“I can’t tell you. A year, maybe more.”
“And throw away another year of your life?”
“I want to live my life.”
“Go, then! I’ve had enough of you,” her father said. “May the day never come when you feel the pain we feel now.”
Despite their threats, her parents had come to see her off. Her mother gave Florence her own fur coat to brave the snowy Russian winter. Her father bought her a traveler’s trunk. They stood watching as it was tossed by a ship’s attendant into the hold, where it took on the size of a matchbox beside all the other cargo—enormous boxes and barrels, chrome automobiles, upright pianos. Her brother Sidney had given her his beloved BSA Taylor compass, whose cold beveled edges Florence now dug with torturous pleasure into the soft flesh of her thumb. She’d discovered it in her purse only after she boarded the ship. She wanted to walk off the boat and give it back to Sidney, whose muskrat’s hard hat of hair was still visible in flashes among the bodies on the dock. But it was too late; the third-class passengers were boarding, blocking the gangway with awkward bundles. Danes, Poles, Germans, stocky in their winter overcoats and rubber boots. With their American children in tow, they were returning to their homelands in search of work. Observing them trudge aboard, Florence suddenly felt she was watching an old Ellis Island film reel flipped by the Depression into reverse: masses of immigrants returning to the ship, being herded backward through that great human warehouse as Lady Liberty waved them goodbye.
Her reverie was interrupted by an argument on deck. Somebody was demanding to carry a poultry incubator aboard ship rather than abandon it to the hold. Into the fray came the noises of a hen cock crowing in defiance of the third steamer signal. Taking advantage of the clamor and tumult, one of the Poles was making the rounds with a collection box. When he saw a tall, handsome girl in a tailored green suit, he mistook Florence for a wealthy young lady and approached her with a heavily accented speech about penniless deportees. It was impossible to hear the story in the flapping of ropes and echoes from port. She thought she heard her name being called—her father’s voice a hallucination conjured by the wind’s eddies. Florence opened her purse and gave the man a coin.
She felt ready for the ship to cast off, but a fresh commotion had seized the crowd. On the gangway ramp, a girl of about eighteen had dropped her glasses and was now palming around for them, interrupting her search only to toss angry defenses at those she was holding up behind. In her myopic squint Florence recognized the feral defiance of someone who’d learned to carry her awkwardness brazenly. A girl accustomed to being out of place. But it was her physical appearance that most struck Florence. The girl might have been Florence herself—younger, shorter, and plumper, but otherwise bearing an almost familial likeness. Her skin was equally pale; her curls, only slightly darker than Florence’s, had the strong kink that Florence had learned to tame out of her own hair with relaxers and combs. Someone from the boat was sent to help the girl, and soon her spectacles were retrieved from between the gangplanks. The commotion was drowned out again by a final signal from the ship’s heights. The chimneys belched coal smoke, and the engines of the tugboats began to turn. At last the Bremen made its imperceptible slide backward into the Hudson.
A flock of gulls with black-edged wings circled the ship as it churned and split the water. Slowly by slowly the crowd on the pier receded, her family along with them. Only the gulls stayed close. Trailing the Bremen, they rose and fell on a tunnel of air which seemed to propel the ship and everyone on it down a course that stretched irreversibly into a bright, portentous sea.
—
The following morning the sun’s rays were unobstructed by any buildings or trees. An ocean chill drew bumps on Florence’s arms as she sat on a lounge chair in the scalloped shade of an awning. She drew on her round sunglasses and attempted to read a book she’d brought for the journey: Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia by Ella Winter. Winter’s prose was making it hard to get past page 2. And another human relationship was presently competing for her attention: on the top deck, in first class, a tall madam with sunken cheeks and a greyhound’s ropy body was promenading on the arm of a much younger, darker-skinned gentleman. The man’s hair was gelled back like Valentino’s. His spine stayed rigid with military aplomb even as his companion petted his shoulder and brushed his ear with her thin lips.
“So—what do you make of her?”
Florence turned to find the girl she’d seen the day before. Her tortoiseshell glasses were now affixed firmly on the short bridge of her nose. Atop her curly head a woven beret was tipped at a precarious angle.
“Pardon me?”
“Ella Winter. Your book. Another phony Margaret Mead, if you ask me.”
Florence frowned and took a glance at the cover.
“It must have been real disappointing for her to discover her Russians weren’t illiterate savages like the Samoans,” the girl resumed with no preliminaries.
“Have you read it?” Florence said mistrustfully.