He was redeployed to a tool-making factory, melting metal into screw-drivers and ratchets.
That job lasted a few weeks. Apparently it also wasn’t safe. Foreigners had been caught making knives and weapons for themselves instead of tools for the Soviet state.
He was then employed as a shoemaker, which amused Alexander (“Dad, what do you know about making shoes?”).
That job lasted only a few days. “What? Shoe-making isn’t safe either?” Alexander asked.
Apparently it wasn’t. Foreigners had been known to make galoshes and mountain boots for good Soviet citizens to escape through marshes and through mountains.
A somber Harold came home one April evening in 1935 and instead of cooking (it was Harold who cooked dinner for his family now), sat down heavily at the table and said that a Party Obkom man had come to see him at the school where he was working as a floor sweeper and asked him to find a new place to live. “They want us to find our own rooms. Be a little more independent.” He shrugged. “It’s only right. We’ve had it relatively easy the last four years. We need to give something back to the state.” He paused and lit a cigarette.
Alexander saw his father glance at him furtively. He coughed and said, “Well, Nikita has disappeared. Maybe we can take his bathtub.”
There was no room for the Barringtons in all of Moscow. After a month of looking, Harold came home from work and said, “Listen, the Obkom man came to see me again. We can’t stay here. We have to move.”
“By when?” Jane exclaimed.
“Two days from now. They want us out.”
“But we have nowhere to go!”
Harold sighed. “They offered me a transfer to Leningrad. There is more work—an industrial plant, a carpentry plant, an electricity plant.”
“What, no electricity plants in Moscow, Dad?”
Harold ignored Alexander. “We’ll go there. There’ll be more rooms available. You’ll see. Janie, you’ll get a job at the Leningrad public library.”
“Leningrad?” Alexander exclaimed. “Dad, I’m not leaving Moscow. I got friends here, school. Please.”
“Alexander, you’ll start a new school. Make new friends. We have no choice.”
“Yes,” Alexander said loudly. “But once we had a choice, didn’t we?”
“Alexander! You will not raise your voice to me,” Harold said. “Do you hear?”
“Loud and clear!” shouted Alexander. “I’m not going. Do you hear?”
Harold jumped up. Jane jumped up. Alexander jumped up.
Jane said, “No, stop it, stop it, you two!”
“You will not speak to me this way,” Harold said. “We are moving, and I don’t want to talk another minute about it.”
He turned to his wife and said, “Oh, and one more thing.” Sheepishly, he coughed. “They want us to change our name. To something more Russian.”
Alexander scoffed. “Why now? Why after all these years?”
“Because!” Harold shouted, losing control. “They want us to show our allegiance! You’re going to be sixteen next month. You’re going to register for the Red Army. You need a Russian name. The fewer questions, the better. We need to be Russians now. It will be easier for us.” He lowered his gaze.
“God, Dad,” Alexander exclaimed. “Will this ever stop? We can’t even keep our name anymore? It’s not enough to kick us out of our home, to move us to another city? We need to lose our name, too? What else have we got?”
“We are doing the right thing. Our name is an American name. We should have changed it long ago.”
“That’s right,” said Alexander. “The Frascas didn’t. The van Dorens didn’t. And look what happened to them. They’re on vacation. Extended vacation, right, Dad?”
Harold raised his hand to Alexander, who pushed him away. “Don’t touch me,” he said coldly.
Harold tried again. Alexander pushed him away again, but this time he didn’t let go of his father’s hands. He did not want his mother to see him lose his temper, his poor mother, who stood shaking and crying, clasping her hands at her two men, pleading, “Darlings, Harold, Alexander, I beg you, stop it, stop it.”
“Tell him to stop it!” Harold said. “You’ve raised him like this. No respect for anybody.”
His mother came over to Alexander and grabbed hold of his arms. “Please, son,” she said. “Calm down. It’ll be all right.”
“You think so, Mom? We’re moving cities, we’re changing our name just like this hotel. You call that all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “We still have each other. We still have our lives.”
“How the definition of being all right changes,” said Alexander, extricating himself from his mother and taking his coat.
“Alexander, don’t walk out that door,” said Harold. “I forbid you to walk out that door.”
Alexander turned to his father, looked him in the eye, and said, “Go ahead and stop me.”
He left and did not come back home for two days. And then they packed up and left the Kirov Hotel.
His mother was drunk and unable to help carry the suitcases to the train.
When did Alexander first begin to feel, to know, to sense that something was desperately wrong with his mother? That was the point: something wasn’t desperately wrong with her all at once. At first she had been slightly not herself, and it wasn’t for Alexander to say what was the matter with his adult parent. His father could have seen, but his father had no eyes. Alexander knew his father was the kind of man who simply could not keep the personal and the global in his head at the same time. But whether Harold was aware and plainly ignored it, or whether he was actually oblivious, didn’t matter, and it didn’t change the simple fact that Jane Barrington gradually, without fanfare, without much to-do, much introduction and much warning permanently ceased to be the person she once was and became the person she wasn’t.
Ellis Island, 1943
EDWARD CAME IN TO check on Tatiana in the middle of August. She’d been in America seven weeks. She was sitting in her usual place by the window, with a naked and diapered Anthony on her lap, tickling him between his toes. She had been feeling much better, her breathing was deep, she was almost not coughing. She had not seen blood in her cough for a month. The New York air was doing her good.
Edward took the stethoscope from her chest. “Listen, you are doing much better. I think I’m going to have to discharge you.”
Tatiana said nothing.
“Do you have anywhere to go?” Edward paused. “You will need to get a job.”
“Edward,” said Tatiana, “I like it here.”
“Well, I know. But you’re all better.”
“I was thinking, maybe I work here? You need more nurse.”
“You want to work at Ellis?”
“Very much.”
Edward talked to the chief surgeon at the