“So you studied drama in college?” I asked.
“I went to Cal and majored in economics. Kind of practical, it suited Mom and gave me plenty of time for acting. I worked my way from Chekhov to Blanche Dubois.” She grinned. “Put me in a slip, with a blonde wig and a glass of bourbon—instant Southern neurotic.”
“Then what happened?”
“I wanted to go to acting school in New York but got talked out of it and got an MBA instead. My mother and my boyfriend argued for B-school. Daddy, God bless him, told me to go with my heart, my real passion.” She shrugged her shoulders. “One of those things I wish I could take back. You know?”
“I do.”
“Tell me.”
“I started out with art history but ended up as an econ major like you. A victory of practicality over dreams, but sometimes I wonder.”
“Who talked you out of it?” she asked.
“I did, all by myself. I had to learn something useful.”
“Any resentment?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Some, I guess. How about you?”
“I was Daddy’s girl and should have listened, but…” Helen trailed off. “I can’t blame Mom. She was born practical. But my boyfriend, Ed, him I resent. Ended up marrying him.”
She tried catching the bartender’s eye, then took a deep breath. “Shouldn’t drink and think about Ed. So what do you say? Let’s bust out of here.” We left the bar and ate two stale turkey sandwiches from a vending machine and washed them down with warm Hawaiian Punch.
Helen asked, “Home for the holidays?”
“First I’ve got to go to a memorial service tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She stood up. We had been on the same flight from New York and were on the same flight to San Francisco that might leave early the next morning. “We might as well go down to the gate.”
CHAPTER 6
DECEMBER 1986
SAN FRANCISCO
On the flight home early that morning, Helen and I managed to sit next to each other. We slept for most of the trip and woke up as the plane descended over the Stanford campus before banking north for the final approach over the rain-swept bay. Helen’s apartment was in Pacific Heights, up the hill from the Marina, where I lived. We shared a cab.
Settling into the back seat, Helen lit a cigarette I gave her. The driver tapped the No Smoking sign. She tossed out the cigarette and leaned her head against the window, gazing at the squalling rain. The driver turned on the radio to an oldies station playing “Last Kiss,” a song from the ’50s about a boy who crashed his father’s car and killed his girlfriend. I sang along at the chorus:
Oh, where oh or where can my baby be?
The Lord took her away from me.
Helen perked up. “I don’t know why I remember crap like this, but that’s J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers. How did you learn the lyrics?”
“The song was popular when my mother and I watched American Bandstand. For a couple of weeks, we never missed it.”
“You’re the only person I know who watched Bandstand with his mother.”
“Well, it didn’t work. A few years after we arrived here, I was still trying to become an American teenager without much luck. When we got a television, my mother saw Bandstand one day and decided it was the answer to my problems. We missed one crucial thing: Bandstand was shot in Philadelphia, and California teenagers were a lot different. When I got that figured out, we stopped watching. But afterwards, when we heard music, like Mozart, my mother would ask me about it, and I was supposed to say, in Russian, ‘Gee, Tatiana, I’d dance to it, but I wouldn’t buy it.’ Like some of the kids told Dick Clark when he asked them about new records.”
Helen leaned back as we climbed the long hill by Candlestick Stadium. She seemed lost in herself and closed her eyes as the radio played an agonizing song about a teenager who had run away from home. The cab driver hunched over the wheel and cut off another driver who made a rude gesture. He snapped off the radio, and I listened to the wet cadence of the windshield wipers as we traversed the rolling hills of South San Francisco.
Driving into one of the world’s most beautiful cities, I was uneasy. Coming into view, San Francisco was wary as well, biding its time behind the looming clouds and gray rain. Turning off the elevated freeway down onto the city’s slick streets, the tires were sibilant on the pavement. I thought of the day before me.
Fred’s memorial service worried me. Having been to only one other such service—my mother’s, which I scarcely remembered at the time—I didn’t know what to expect. All I had to do was sit through it, but I wondered if repressed memories of my mother’s service might come flooding back. Annoyed with myself for fretting, I turned to Helen as she sat up and looked at the city with eyes flickering between resolute and morose. Feeling somewhat the same, I thought of asking what was troubling her but didn’t.
As the cab climbed the hill to her apartment, Helen turned back toward downtown. “Funny, I grew up just miles from here, in Marin County, and went to Cal. Always lived in the Bay Area.”
I thought she was talking to me. “We lived up in the hills behind the Cal campus.”
She continued, “Every time I leave and come back here, I realize how much I’ve fallen apart. Worse, I’m still falling and don’t know if I’ll ever stop.”
Approaching her apartment building, Helen emerged. “Sorry, feeling sorry for myself, been doing too much.” Buttoning her coat, she said, “Well, nice spending last evening and part of this morning with you. Oh, and have a cool Yule.”
“Cool Yule?”
“My ex-husband could do a perfect impersonation of Hugh Hefner. Hef, he’s called, the Playboy guy. Hef says things like that.” She laughed a little. “Sorry, rambling. My divorce is driving me crazy, literally. Actually, a judge helped me out with that.”
“The final divorce decree?”
“The nice judge did that,” she said. “The not-so-nice judge put me under a restraining order to stay away from Ed, my ex.” She shuddered. “About six months ago, I attacked him in Golden Gate Park. Pretty serious, very complicated, and talk about embarrassing. But enough of that.” She opened the door as the cab stopped in front of her building.
I asked the driver to pop the trunk, then got out. I grabbed Helen’s luggage and carried it to the building’s entrance. “I could have done that,” she said, extending her hand. “Now you’re wet.” Helen left her hand in mine for a small eternity. “You’re a nice man, Alexander Romanovsky, and I enjoyed meeting you. Hopefully we’ll see each other again. Take care of yourself in the meantime.”
“You too.”
“Doing my damnedest,” she said.
CHAPTER 7
DECEMBER 1986
SAN FRANCISCO
I took a cab to Fred’s memorial service at a large funeral home out on California Street near Fiona’s. Somber chamber music was playing when I arrived; an usher directed me to a pew’s end seat. Looking around, I saw Fiona on the other side of the crowded, twilit room. I tried staring to get her attention, but she looked straight ahead as a man appeared at the podium and began remembering Fred with amusing anecdotes.
The remembering turned solemn with a poem by Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poetess. I had heard the poem before: it was about loved ones, their deaths, and ensuing emptiness. Translations seldom capture a poem’s soul, and I repeated the first verse to myself in Russian. In its original the poem was