“I read all I needed to in the essay they printed in The American. They’ll print any so-called scholarship as long as it’s penned by Mrs. Lincoln Steffens. You like it?”
It wasn’t a question so much as a preemptive dismissal of her tastes, and therefore, Florence decided, undeserving of a response. In fact, the book was astonishingly dull. Yet this odd girl’s exuberant abrasiveness now compelled Florence to defend it. “And what about Dorothy Thompson—you won’t read her, either, ’cause she’s Mrs. Sinclair Lewis?”
“What kind of false comparison is that?” The girl plopped down on the neighboring lounge chair. “Thompson’s queen of the press corps. Winter is just another suffragette born twenty years too late.”
The girl’s eyes—as blue as Florence’s own—glowed with a lust for debate that Florence found all the more irritating having once had it in good measure. She sensed that entering into a conversation with this creature would return her to a version of herself that she had struggled to shed. In high school and college Florence had earned good marks but a part of her knew that the educators she admired did not admire her back. Her history teacher once applauded her to other students as being the kind of girl “who could chop down an oak with a baseball bat.” She cringed to think how tone deaf she’d been to this double-edged praise.
“Why a suffragette?” she now inquired with careful nonchalance.
“The place of the working-class woman is beside the men of her class, not beside women of other classes. It’s basic Marx, if she’d ever bothered to crack him.”
“If you’d bothered to crack her, you’d see she acknowledges that Marx claims it’s only true for societies that haven’t eliminated class. Anyway, I’m not reading it for the theory.”
“I knew it! You’re heading to Russia, like me.” The girl jutted out her hand. “Essie Frank.”
“Florence Fein.”
In less than a minute, Florence was assailed by an artillery of questions. Which class was she traveling? Where was she from? Where had she gone to school? Where did she plan to stay once she arrived in Moscow?
“The Intourist Hotel?” Essie sounded horrified. “They’ll fleece you. They overcharge all foreigners.” Essie, evidently, would be lodging at a workers’ dormitory at the Foreign Language Institute, where she already had a job lined up.
“I’m only staying in Moscow till I can get a ticket for Magnitogorsk,” Florence said, in a way she hoped both sounded mysterious and discouraging of further inquiry. The Bremen was making stops in Copenhagen, Danzig, and Libau, and Florence had yet to meet anyone who, like her, was disembarking in Latvia and taking the train to Moscow. Judging by her talk, Essie had undertaken the journey with more preparation, carrying extra passport photographs as well as items to trade or gift. Her preparedness felt like a challenge to Florence’s faith in the future. “Magnitogorsk, all the way out in the Urals!” Essie said, either impressed by Florence’s bravery or stunned by her foolhardiness. “Have you got a job there or something?”
Florence was uncertain how to answer. She was hardly sure herself what dream she was pursuing: one of Soviet Mankind, or of one particular dark-eyed Soviet man.
At that moment, a coterie of passengers from steerage emerged on deck. One of the men waved to Essie.
“Is that your group over there?” Florence said.
Essie seemed embarrassed. “No, no, I’m not really with them….” Having intruded on Florence’s privacy, Essie now seemed to be jealously patrolling her own. “See, there was a vacancy, and, last minute, I got the ticket on the cheap….They’re all getting off at Danzig.”
“Oh.” Florence turned her gaze back to the couple in first class. The greyhound in her silk pajamas was arching her long torso in a swooning laugh, while her tanned and ascotted paramour clutched her waist as if to keep her from throwing out her back. “It’s like they’re posing for pictures,” Florence remarked.
“And wouldn’t you know it’s the press she’s trying to escape,” Essie said unexpectedly.
“You know who she is?”
“Everyone on this steamer knows it. It’s Mary Woolford, the utilities heiress, and that’s her new Alfonse, an Argentine polo player of legendary prowess. Oh, don’t look so shocked; he’s far too dark to be American. He’s husband número tres for her.”
Florence was shocked, not at the shade of the new husband’s skin but at Essie’s superior command of ship gossip. “Look, she just fixed his shirt again.”
“I hope she doesn’t get it greasy after touching his hair,” Essie quipped.
“Ick!” they sang in unison, and nearly choked laughing.
“You know what they say,” Essie said. “?‘From the back a damsel fair, from the front a wrinkled mare.’?”
“Well, he does like ponies,” Florence said, before a second convulsion of laughter made the two of them collapse, red-faced, in their chairs. Essie removed her glasses and wiped her eyes, and Florence now found herself battling the powerful sensation of feeling won over by this girl, whose dimples looked like they’d been poked out with a gimlet.
“Don’t look now,” Essie said, grabbing Florence’s wrist, “but there’s a couple of Joe Colleges about to waltz over.”
Florence glanced back and recognized two young men in cable sweaters who’d been circling the deck since breakfast time. “More like Joe Grammar School,” she said, then stretched her legs for an extra precious inch of sun, letting the boys get a good look. The two young men consulted each other quietly before making their approach.
“We don’t mean to lean into your conversation, girls,” said the shorter of the two. He had a large-eared, cheerful face. “But my friend was convinced you were Norma Shearer.”
It wasn’t the first time a boy had made the comparison. On her good days, Florence could notice the similarity in the mirror: her deep-set blue-gray eyes, the aquiline profile people called “regal,” features that hovered somewhere between innocence and arrogance. “I’ll be Al Jolson if you want, darling,” she said, “as long as you have a Lucky. We’re all out of smokes, as you see.” On the courage of the sea air, she sounded like a hardened flirt.
The young man turned out his pockets. “Sorry, Miss Shearer, no gaspers before tournaments, coach’s orders. But we could bring you some desert horses from the restaurant….”
And so they did. They said their names were Jack and Brian and they were traveling to Germany with the New Haven Tennis Club, as guests of the Rot-Weiss Tennis Club. With her nail, Florence opened the pack of Camels they’d brought and shared one with Essie.
“Russia! That’s really jumping the blinds,” said Brian when they told him where they were heading. “Off to build the Red Paradise?”