“I can make some calls to old friends after the New Year,” he told her when she’d reached him on the phone in Washington.
She didn’t remind him that he’d twice pledged to do this.
“I’m starting to think I might have an easier time finding work in Russia,” she suggested, expecting him to contradict her.
Instead, he said, “You might. Moscow’s swarming with Americans.”
“The new Paris,” she said in a tone between wistful and sardonic.
“Better than Paris if you can get them to pay you in dollars. You got to be firm—tell them you won’t accept anything but legal tender.” And his voice filled again like a sail with the instructive rhapsodizing that never cost him a penny.
—
TO ESSIE, ON THE BREMEN, Florence left out most of these details of her failures and said only that she was traveling to Magnitogorsk to meet the man who’d opened her eyes to the opportunities in Russia.
“Does he know you’re coming?”
“I wrote to him, but I didn’t hear back before I left.”
“Hmm. The mail can be quite unreliable in that part of the country. Maybe you oughta telegraph first.” They were in their nightgowns. Essie had relocated her meager suitcase to Florence’s second-class cabin. Florence waved off Essie’s practical suggestion, but this simple idea, for reasons she couldn’t explain to herself, stirred more dread in her than the thought of boarding a train and riding it for a thousand six hundred kilometers to the Urals. “Magnitogorsk is a small pond,” she said to Essie. “I don’t think he’d want me to draw attention with a wire. I’ll find him once I get there.”
“Well, that’s also a plan,” said Essie with worrisome geniality.
—
IN THE WEEKS OF TRAVEL, Essie told Florence her story. While Florence had attended Sunday school at Midwood Synagogue, Essie had spent her Saturday mornings at the Workmen’s Circle in the Bronx, studying the lives of the patriarchs Marx and Trotsky. In the mildewed, newsprint-smelling milieu of the Frank apartment, the only holidays observed were the Seventh of November (anniversary of the October Revolution) and the First of May (International Workers Day), when Essie and her little sister joined their parents in taking to the streets and singing “The Internationale” at the tops of their voices, together with other Socialist Youths, whose ranks Essie had joined by the time she was eleven. Summers were spent at Camp Kinderland in Massachusetts, the “Summer Camp with a Conscience.” True to the Soviet model, the campers adopted the semi-autonomous role of the proletariat, while their adult counselors assumed the guiding role of the Party.
During the school year, however, things were different. “I always thought it was okay, you know, being poor and having no smart clothes, and gum being stuck in my hair ’cause I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance,” Essie said. “And the other kids calling me a bastard on account of how my parents didn’t properly marry till I was six. I could endure it because I knew my mother and father had more guts and principles in their pinkie fingers than any of those pishers had in their whole body.”
It seemed that Max Frank’s employers, however, saw things differently; after being fired from several factory jobs “on account of his spotless convictions,” and certain that the workers’ government would never be established in the United States, Essie’s father had decided to scrape together money and take his family to Russia. The family had been all set to make the move when Essie’s mother fell ill with a harmless tooth infection that rapidly spread to her heart. The trip was delayed and the money used on “fool doctors” and, later, on a cremation. But the plan was still on, with Max again professing to save money for their journey.
A year went by. Then another. Essie worked in a dog-collar factory while taking night classes in Russian. One day, she fell asleep on the factory floor and almost had her thumb chewed off by a leather punch. She came home hysterical after being docked by the boss for jamming the machine, and demanded to know when the family was leaving for Russia.
“And that’s when my father says to me: Essie, I wanted to wait until you were ready to hear this, but I’ll just come out with it—I’m getting married. Who to? I say. Melmy Skolnik from the fourth floor, he says. My heart falls to my stomach, Florence. She’s not seven years older than me! A real cooking spoon, mixes into everybody’s business. Started coming by with meals for us when my mother fell ill, making with the tears like a finger wringer.
“I say to him: What about everything you and Mama used to talk about, our dream? He says, Nit mit sheltn un nit mit lakhn ken men di velt ibermakhn—‘Neither with curses nor with laughter can you change the world, Essie.’ Gives me a shrug and a half. Why go to the end of the world? Let’s us make the best of it here, he says. He has a nerve to tell me, ‘You know Lilly needs a mother,’ when I’m the one who’s been mothering her all this time!
“So I say, to hell with you, I’m going. I already had a visa, just needed the ticket. Before I left, I told him I knew all along it was my mother who had the principles and guts, and never him. He was just going along, like he was going along with that tsatske. Mankind doesn’t come any weaker or stupider, I told him. Oh, I said so many horrible things, Florence. I told him not to bother seeing me off, and he just hung his head like a child and said he was going to respect my wishes. But I never wanted him to respect them, I wanted him to fight, Florence, to fight for me.”
Florence sat nodding attentively. Essie’s tears and misery had the agreeable effect of making Florence feel kindhearted and serene. She said, “I’m sure he knows you love him, and so does Lilly.” She enveloped the girl in her arms, inhaling a whiff of the bodily sourness that bespoke Essie’s torment. And then, suddenly, the feeling she’d had the day before—that she’d been mistaken to leave her family, who had fought for her, and mistaken about so much else—returned with a nausealike force so powerful that she had to lie back on the bed to alleviate it.
“Are you ill?” Essie looked worried.
“I think it’s just the ocean.” Florence sat up and glanced at the porthole. A frothy green-and-black curtain of foam was slapping against the glass. In her throat she recognized the taste of that evening’s Stroganoff, and felt herself pitch forward. “Wait!” Essie cried helplessly. “I’ll fetch the pan!”