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He nodded, writing something down in his book. “And the name you want to go by? I saw on the documents you brought with you that you got out of the Soviet Union as a Red Cross nurse named Jane Barrington.”
“Yes.”
“How fake are those documents?”
“I do not understand what you mean.”
Tom fell silent. “Who is Jane Barrington?”
Now Tatiana was silent. “My husband’s mother,” she said at last.
Tom sighed. “Barrington? Not very Russian.”
“My husband was American.” She lowered her gaze.
Tom opened the door. “Is that the name you want to use to get your permanent residency card?”
“Yes.”
“No Russian name for you?”
She thought about it.
Tom came closer to her. “Sometimes refugees who come here like to cling to a little bit of their past. Maybe they leave just the first name the same. Change the last name. Think about it.”
“Not me,” she replied. “Change all. I don’t want to—how you put it? Cling to anything.”
He wrote something down in his book. “Jane Barrington it is, then.”
When he left, Tatiana opened her Bronze Horseman book as she sat once more by the window, looking out onto the New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty. She touched the picture of Alexander she had kept in there; without looking at it she touched his face and his uniformed body, and she whispered small short words in Russian to comfort herself this time, not Alexander, not his child, but herself. Shura, Shura, Shura, whispered Jane Barrington, once known as Tatiana Metanova.
Tatiana’s days consisted of feeding Anthony and changing Anthony and washing Anthony’s few nightgowns and cloth diapers in the bathroom sink and going on short, fragrant walks outside the hospital and sitting on benches with Anthony wrapped in blankets in her arms. Brenda brought her breakfast to her room. Tatiana ate lunch and dinner in her room. Unless Anthony was sleeping, Tatiana had him in her arms. She looked at only two things: the New York harbor and her son. But whatever comfort she received from holding her baby was dissipated from being alone day in and day out. Brenda and Dr. Ludlow called it convalescing. Tatiana called it solitary confinement.
One morning at the end of July, tired of herself, of sitting in her room, Tatiana decided to take a walk down the corridor while Anthony was sleeping.
She heard groans from the corridor and followed the groans into a ward filled with wounded men. Brenda was on duty—the only one on duty—looking less than pleased with her lot and showing the wounded men exactly how she felt. Grumbling, curt, displeasingly surly, she was washing out a wound on a soldier’s leg despite repeated and loud pleas from the soldier to either do it more gently or to shoot him.
Tatiana walked over and asked Brenda if she needed help, to which Brenda replied that she certainly didn’t need a sick girl making her prisoners sicker, and could Tatiana immediately go back to her room. Not moving, Tatiana stood, stared at Brenda, stared at the raw hole in the soldier’s thigh, at the soldier’s eyes, and said, “Let me bandage leg, let me help you. Look, I have mask over my nose and mouth. You got four men screaming for you on other side of hospital. One just lose a tooth in his morning coffee. One have raging fever. One is oozing blood through his ear.”
Brenda let go of the bucket and the soldier’s leg and left, though Tatiana could see that for a moment Brenda had struggled with what actually gave her more displeasure: taking care of the soldiers or letting Tatiana have her way.
Tatiana finished washing out the wound; the soldier never peeped, looking soothed and asleep; either asleep or dead, Tatiana concluded as she bandaged his leg, still without motion from him, and moved on.
She disinfected an arm wound and a head wound, started an IV, and administered morphine, wishing for a bit of morphine for herself to dull her inner aching, at the same time thinking how lucky the German submarine men were to have had the luck to be brought to American shores for imprisonment and convalescence.
Suddenly Brenda appeared and, as if surprised that Tatiana was still in the ward, asked her to immediately go back to her room before she infected all her patients with TB, sounding almost as if she cared what happened to the patients.
As Tatiana was heading back, out in the corridor by the water fountain, she saw a tall, slim girl in a nurse’s uniform standing and crying. Long-haired and long-legged, she was quite beautiful; if you didn’t look at her mascara-streaked, tear-streaked, swollen eyes and cheeks. Tatiana needed a drink of water, and so with great discomfort she proceeded past the girl, stopping just half a foot away from her to get to the fountain. The girl sobbed loudly. Tatiana put her hand on the girl’s elbow and said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” the girl sobbed.
“Oh.”
The girl continued to cry. She held a slightly moist cigarette in her hands. “If you only knew how freakishly miserable I am at the moment.”
“Can I do anything?”
The girl looked out of her wet hands at Tatiana. “Who are you?”
“You can call me Tania.”
“Aren’t you the TB stowaway?”
“I am better now,” Tatiana said quietly.
“You’re not Tania. I processed your documents myself. Tom gave them to me. You’re Jane Barrington. Oh, what do I care? My life is in shambles and we’re talking about your name. I wish I had your problems.”
Trying quickly to find the words to say something comforting in English, Tatiana said, “It could be worse.”
“That’s where you’re so wrong, missy. It’s as bad as can be. Nothing worse can happen. Nothing.”
Tatiana noticed the wedding band on the girl’s finger, and her sympathy flowed. “I am sorry.” She paused. “Is it about your husband?”
Without looking away from her hands, the girl nodded.
“It is terrible thing,” said Tatiana. “I know. This war …”
The girl nodded. “It’s the pits.”
“Your husband … he is not coming back?”
“Isn’t coming back?” the girl exclaimed. “That’s the whole point! He is very much coming back. Very much so. Next week.”
Tatiana took a puzzled step away.
“Where are you going? You look like you’re ready to fall down. It’s not your fault he is coming back. Don’t look so upset. I guess worse things have happened to girls at war, I just don’t know of any. You want to go grab a coffee? Want a cigarette?”
Tatiana paused. “I have coffee with you.”
They sat down in the long dining room at one of the rectangular tables. Tatiana sat across from the girl who introduced herself as Viktoria Sabatella (“But call me Vikki.”), shook Tatiana’s hand vigorously and said, “You here with your parents? I haven’t seen any immigrants come this way in months. The boats are not bringing them in. So few—what? You’re sick?”
“I am better now,” said Tatiana. “I am here with myself.” She paused. “With my son.”
“Get out!” Viktoria slammed her coffee cup on the table. “You don’t have a son.”
“He almost month old.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“God, they start early where you’re from. Where are you from?”
“Soviet Union.”
“Wow. How’d you get this baby anyway? You have a husband?”
Tatiana opened her mouth, but Vikki went on as if the question had not been asked. Before she drew her next breath, she told Tatiana that she herself had never known her father (“Dead, or gone, all the same”) and barely knew her mother (“Had me too young”) who was in San Francisco, living with two men (“Not in the same apartment”) and pretending to be either sick (“Yes, mentally”) or dying (“From all that passion”). Vikki had been raised by her maternal grandparents (“They love Mumsy but they don’t approve of her”) and was living with them still (“Less fun than you might think”). She had originally wanted to be a journalist, then a manicurist (“In both professions you work with your hands; I thought it was a natural progression”) and finally decided (“Was forced to, more like it,”) to go into nursing when the European war looked like it would suck the United States into it. Tatiana was listening quietly and attentively when Vikki suddenly looked at her and said, “Got a husband?”
“Once.”
“Yeah?” Vikki sighed. “Once. Would that I had a husband once—”
At that moment their conversation was interrupted by a painfully angular, very tall, immaculately dressed woman in a white brim hat, walking briskly through the dining hall, swinging her white purse and yelling, “Vikki! I’m talking to you! Vikki! Have you seen him?”
Vikki sighed and rolled her eyes at Tatiana. “No, Mrs. Ludlow. I haven’t seen him today. I think he is still cross-town at NYU. He is here on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.”
“Afternoons? He’s not at NYU! And how do you know his schedule so well?”
“I’ve worked with him for two years.”
“Well, I’ve been married to him for eight and I still don’t know where the hell he is.” She came up to the table and towered over the two girls. She eyed Tatiana suspiciously. “Who are you?”
Tatiana pulled up her cloth mask from her neck to her mouth. Vikki stepped in. “She is from the Soviet Union. She barely speaks English.”
“Well, she should learn, shouldn’t she, if she expects to earn her keep in this country. We’re at war, we have no business supporting wards.” And swinging her purse, nearly hitting Tatiana on the head, the woman swept from the dining room.
“Who she?” asked Tatiana.
Vikki waved her hand. “Never mind her. The less you know about her, the better. That’s Dr. Ludlow’s crazy wife. She storms in here once a week looking for her husband.”
“Why she keep losing him?”
Vikki laughed. “The question I think should be why does Dr. Ludlow let himself be lost so often.”
“All right, why?”
Vikki waved Tatiana off. Tatiana understood. Vikki did not want to be talking about Dr. Ludlow. With a small smile, Tatiana appraised Vikki. Now that she had stopped crying, Tatiana could see that Vikki was a striking girl, a proper girl who was pretty and knew it and did everything to make sure everyone knew it. Her hair was shiny and long and swept over her face and shoulders, her eyes were outlined in black eyeliner and runny mascara, and her full lips had traces of bright red lipstick. Her white uniform was tight on her long-limbed figure and came just a touch too high above the knee. Tatiana wondered how the wounded men responded to so much … Vikki.
“Vikki, why you cry? You not love your husband?”
“Oh, I love him, all right. I love him.” She sighed. “I just wish I could love him from five thousand miles away.” Lowering her voice, she continued. “This is really not a good time for him to come back.”
“For husband to come back to his wife?” When was not a good time for that?
“I wasn’t expecting him.” She started to cry again, into her coffee. Tatiana moved the cup away slightly so Vikki could finish the coffee later if she wanted to.
“When were you …?” What was the word? Expecting?
“At Christmas!”
“Oh. Why he coming home so soon?”
“Can you believe it? He was shot down over the Pacific.”
Tatiana stared.
“Oh, he’s fine,” Viktoria said dismissively. “It’s a scrape. A little superficial shoulder wound. He flew the plane ninety miles after he was shot. How bad could it be?”
Tatiana stood from the table. “I think I go feed my son.”
“Yes, but Chris is going to be miserable.”
“Who is Chris?”
“Dr. Pandolfi. You haven’t met him? He comes here with Dr. Ludlow.”
Chris Pandolfi. That’s right. “Oh, I met him.” Dr. Pandolfi was the doctor who had come aboard the ship she was on and decided he was not going to help to deliver her baby on U.S… . soil. He wanted to send her back to the Soviet Union, broken amniotic waters, TB and all. It was Edward Ludlow who had said no and made Dr. Pandolfi help get Tatiana to the hospital on Ellis Island. Tatiana patted Vikki on the shoulder. She wasn’t sure Chris Pandolfi was such a great catch. “You be fine, Viktoria. Maybe stay away from Dr. Pandolfi. Your husband is coming home. You are so lucky.”
Viktoria got up and followed Tatiana down the hall to her room. “Call me Vikki,” she said. “Can I call you Jane?”
“Who?”
“Isn’t your name Jane?”
“You call me Tania.”
“Why would I call you Tania when your name is Jane?”
“Tania my name. Jane just on documents.” She saw Vikki’s uninterested and confused face. “Call me what you like.”
“When are you getting out?”
“Getting out?”
“Out of Ellis.”
Tatiana thought about it. “I do not think I am getting out,” she said. “I have nowhere to go.”
Vikki followed Tatiana into her room and glanced at her son sleeping in his bassinet. “He’s kind of little,” she said absent-mindedly, touching Tatiana’s blonde hair. “His father was dark-haired?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s it like being a mother?”
“It’s—”
“Well, when you’re all better, I want you to come home with me. Meet Grammy and Grampa. They love little babies. They keep wanting me to have one.” Vikki shook her head. “God help me.” She glanced again at Anthony. “He’s sort of cute. Too bad his father has never seen him.”
