THE SOVIET TRADE MISSION—otherwise known as Amtorg—maintained its quarters on tony Fifth Avenue, keeping up a legal fiction as a private corporation of the State of New York. It was common wisdom in diplomatic circles that the Americans who staffed its posts, including Florence’s boss, Scoop Epstein, took their orders straight from Moscow. But if this were so, Florence wouldn’t have been able to guess it from the speeches Scoop delivered at luncheons in the Financial District to the managers of American import-export firms. He spoke not about the world proletariat but about the “Soviet awakening to the value of American technology and efficiency.” He told American businessmen of the million Russian peasants who had never heard of Rykov or Bukharin but who all knew the name of Henry Ford. It was a fact not lost on Florence that, although the American government continued to deny the U.S.S.R. official recognition, American businesses were happy to provide their newly flush Bolshevik customers with steel and lathes and roller bearings and rebar and tractors while their American clients remained cash poor.
At Amtorg she was not much more than a secretary, but the tedious work reliably filled her with excitement for its proximity to the cranking gears of power. Even modest acts felt momentous. Blue-penciling a contract for nine thousand tons of steel for export to the Ural Mountains seemed an act of more heft and consequence than all the angry noise made by a hundred cafeteria commies. In a single week she might place an order on behalf of Russia’s AMO factory with the Toledo Machine and Tool Company for a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cold-stamping presses, and another order with the Greenlee Company in Rockford, Illinois, for multi-cylinder lathes, or call up the Hamilton Foundry and Machine Company of Ohio to commence talks for a technical-assistance agreement to help the Russians produce two hundred thousand chassis for their new ZIS-model automobiles.
Now that she was free of the spell of the college dining halls, she was willing to admit how little she’d enjoyed the fulminations and rhetoric. All that talk of smashing the bourgeois machine of the state offended her values of discipline and hard work. It seemed pointless to desire to overthrow something old when you could help build something new. In the pragmatic tranquillity that underlay the chaos of the busy office, she felt the peculiar pleasure of a world shedding its bruised skin and admitting her into some inner sanctum—a chamber in which the steady whoosh and hum of typewriters and telefax machines was like the muffled murmur of a heart pumping blood through a powerful arterial system.
Scoop Epstein, a rotund, soft-featured boy in his fifties, was many things at once: generous, sly, boastful of his connections, and adoring of his young assistant, sometimes taking Florence along to his meetings with Manhattan financiers and Indiana manufacturers. But before her first luncheon on Wall Street, he had plainly addressed her legs: “We’ll need to find you something different to wear. Wool stockings won’t do.”
“But it’s still winter!” she protested.
“Is it? I must not have noticed. You have perfectly lovely legs, Florence. May I be frank with you? Wool stockings are for nuns and apple sellers. There’s no harm in making yourself attractive.” Because Scoop’s frankness felt less like a come-on and more like the confidential guidance of a mentor, she followed him that morning from Fifth Avenue to a wholesaler he knew on Seventh, who turned out to be a cousin. Atop a footstool, Florence raised her arms while this other, quieter Epstein circled her waist with tape and worked his assertive fingers under her bust and around her narrow hips, molding stiff fabrics to her body. Her new wardrobe included a felt jacket with velvet piping and a pencil skirt tailored high against her waist, a silk crepe blouse in cream, and another in apricot satin. The cost of these clothes, heavily discounted, would be deducted from her salary. At the sight of this new Florence in the mirror, she experienced the vexing pleasure of at last seeing her own true self.
“Beautiful,” Scoop reassured her.
“Hah. They’d crucify me if I showed up at campus like this.”
“The fellows we’re meeting aren’t looking to lunch with Mother Jones.”
“I feel like a banker’s moll,” she said in an anguish of self-admiration, turning sideways to an even more flattering angle.
“Florie, honey, if you’re going to wear your politics on your sleeve, you’ll get further with nicer sleeves.”
But at home, her mother said, “You think those clothes make you special? They make you as common as dirt.” Her parents knew whom she was working for and didn’t approve. Still, with her older brother Harry out of work and expecting a baby, they could hardly advise her to quit her job. Only, in the evening, she could hear her father arguing with her mother; it was Zelda, after all, who’d pushed his Florie out into the world to earn a piece of bread, out into the workplace, with all its moral dangers. And why? Were they starving? He had been against it from the beginning. With Florence, he was more careful. “Florie, why do you need these people? They’re snakes. A girl with a head like yours—you learned to read and write before you were five,” he reminded her. “And I remember in first grade, when all the parents came to school to watch the children read poems, you could recite yours and everyone else’s, too. The other kids forgot their lines and you’d whisper them. Whole verses you learned by heart.” He offered to help her find a job in his company. But at a time like this, when Metropolitan Life had recently given the axe to a quarter of its agents, they both knew that a girl—even one with a mathematics degree—would do little more than fetch coffee and take dictation. And so, in the end, it was not her mother’s scorn but her father’s unrelenting praise, his stubborn belief in her specialness, that felt the most infuriating.
Florence’s small salary was not enough to plug the hole in the dam of changes that were taking place on Beverly Road. One evening, in the kitchen, Florence was pulled from her reading by the sound of dishes being stacked in the dining room. The angry clang of her mother’s tidying made her pause, but it was her father’s voice Florence heard first: “You haven’t told her yet?”
“You said after Rosh Hashanah.”
“And after Rosh Hashanah there’s Yom Kippur, and after that…”
“Yes, Sol, I need help those weeks! You think our daughter is going to cook for all your relatives?”
“Okay, but we have to give the woman warning now. It’s only right.”
The clanging stopped. “I don’t know how I feel about this whole idea, Sol.”
“We used to get on fine without a maid. She only comes in three days a week, now that the kids are big.”
Florence set down the apple she’d been chewing. The mention of Sissy—her old nanny, who only months earlier had been willing to endure listening to her rehearse lines for the college’s production of Dido while she mopped the floor—made it painful to swallow.
“I’m not twenty.” Her mother spoke from the other side of the kitchen door. “You can’t expect me to bend on my knees and scrub those stairs.”
“Florie can help.”
“Florence? She can’t wring out a rag. Maybe if you had ever let her lift a finger around here. God forbid—‘Don’t trouble Florie, she’s reading. Let the girl study.’?”
“All right, then,” her father said in a reasoning voice. “If you don’t want to let Sissy go, we can stop the synagogue dues.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“We hardly ever go.”
“Sidney has his Bar Mitzvah in April.”
“He can have it at the Community Center. At least their rabbi doesn’t have three assistants writing his speeches while he goes off playing golf.”