Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When Jennifer Gilmore’s first novel, Golden Country, was published, The New York Times Book Review called it "an ingeniously plotted family yarn" and praised her as an author who "enlivens the myth of the American Dream." Gilmore’s particular gift for distilling history into a hugely satisfying, multigenerational family story is taken to new levels in her second novel. In Washington, D.C., life inside the Goldstein home is as tumultuous as the shifting landscape of the times. It is 1979, and Benjamin is heading off to college and sixteen-year-old Vanessa is in the throes of a rocky adolescence. Sharon, a caterer for the Washington elite, ventures into a cultlike organization. And Dennis, whose government job often takes him to Moscow, tries to live up to his father’s legacy as a union organizer and community leader. The rise of communism and the execution of the Rosenbergs is history. The Cold War is waning, the soldiers who fought in Vietnam have all come home, and Carter is president. The age of protest has come and gone and yet each of the Goldsteins is forced to confront the changes the new decade will bring and explore what it really means to be a radical. Something Red is at once a poignant story of husbands and wives, parents and children, activists and spies, and a masterfully built novel that unfurls with suspense and humor.

Release date: March 18, 2010

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 320

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Not Everyone Carried Marbles

August 25, 1979

It was hot as hell and Sharon Goldstein knew everyone had to be positively sweltering out back. Her mother was especially intolerant of humidity and boastful that Los Angeles, the paradise that she and her husband had been wrested away from to come here, to Washington, did not make its inhabitants bear such humiliating conditions. (What about earthquakes, Nana? Vanessa had said yesterday, but Helen had waved her away.) It was only six o’clock and already the cicadas were screaming.

As Sharon made her way around the kitchen, she pictured each one piling paper-thin sheets of prosciutto (well, not her father, whose newly kosher regime she refused to acknowledge) on melon wedges, and spreading runny Brie on the baguette she’d baked yesterday. Imagining her family eating in the yard bordered by the lit tiki lights pleased her. More, she had to admit, than actually sitting there with them.

The neighborhood sounds of skateboards scraping asphalt and kids playing kick-the-can drifted in through the open doors, and she could see the Farrell girls across the street waving their thin arms in the air so the gnats would go to the highest point, far away from their tanned, freckled faces. As Sharon diced cucumbers and apples for her gazpacho—what made hers special was a garnish of peeled green apples and long slivers of tender basil—she wondered if her idea of an outdoor dinner had been misguided.

“To see Ben off !” she’d told Dennis last month. They’d been lying in bed watching President Carter talk about the energy crisis, and she’d opened her night-table drawer, taken out an emery board, and begun to saw at her nails. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America, Carter had said, and Sharon had turned to her husband. “Let’s have a family dinner for Ben,” she’d said. “We’ll have your parents and mine, and we’ll eat in the backyard. The night before he goes.”

“Shh,” Dennis said. “I’m listening to this.”

Sharon hadn’t been able to focus on the speech, perhaps because her son’s impending departure had caused alarm, or was it a symptom of the general malaise of the country that the president was speaking about ? Apathy was not like her; once Sharon had been a woman who had cared about politics deeply. Too deeply, perhaps, and this had led her to flee conservative Los Angeles, her parents’ Los Angeles, the one with her father’s balding B-movie cronies chewing cigars on the back deck and discussing the HUAC hearings. I don’t give one goddamn who goes down, they’d said. Communists? Just ask me. They’d spit names up at the sky, toward the fuzzy line of the San Gabriels. That Los Angeles. Sharon had come east to George Washington University, even though Helen said no one smart went to GW, ever, and at the end of her junior year Sharon had found herself sitting at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting planning the Freedom Riders’ trip from Washington to New Orleans, to register voters and fight Jim Crow in each city along the way.

By summer, Sharon and her roommate, Louise Stein, decided they wanted to accompany the hundreds of other kids, black and white, all ready to sit together at luncheonettes across the South. The Klan was rumored to be waiting in Birmingham to beat Riders, but Sharon and Louise ignored these reports, believing that being together and doing what was right would somehow arm them against terrible violence.

The night before they were to get on that Trailways bus to Mississippi, however, Sharon’s father forbade it. Don’t you so much as set foot on that bus, he’d phoned to tell her. And Sharon had listened. The next day, she stood at the door gathering her robe at her throat and watched Louise go out into the foggy Georgetown morning alone. She returned not a week later, after a night in jail in Jackson, Mississippi. Sharon had been nearly feral with envy as she’d run her hands along the white insides of Louise’s wrists, where the handcuffs had been locked too tight, the blue-black bruises flowering where the metal had pinched her skin.

But Sharon had listened to her father, and instead of fighting for civil rights, she’d dated two doctors, a lawyer, and one potter before settling on Dennis, marrying, and having children.

The night of Carter’s speech, though, she thought instead of Benjamin throwing his jockstraps and Merriweather Post concert T-shirts into a green duffel bag and heading north.

“Don’t you think a dinner will be nice, D?” Sharon had asked.

Our people are losing faith, Carter had said. The phrase had momentarily stopped her menu planning—an elegant barbecue, steak and grilled corn and cold soup and some kind of a summer cobbler. She looked up at the screen and wondered if the president had just read her mind. Lost faith. She had thought then of her father, finding God as if He were a shiny penny he’d come upon along a crowded city street.

It was 1979; only a decade and a half previously, Sharon had been pregnant with Vanessa when Louise had come to D.C. to march for jobs and freedom. As they’d entered the Mall, she handed Sharon a fistful of marbles. So horses will slip and fall and the pigs will be crushed, Louise hissed. Things could get violent, she’d said. Dennis had looked askance as he held Ben high, so he could see just how many people were standing against inequality, and Sharon remembered fingering the marbles, the feel of them pinging against one another along her hips when she moved. They’d given her a sense of reckless power, but she did not let them fall. Sharon was no revolutionary, she knew that now, but she had tried and she had cared profoundly, and she had been so furious at her father that she had fled for the East Coast, but in the end she had not defied him. Yet, she had thought that glorious day, it was not every girl who could say she carried marbles.

Now her faith in the power to make changes in the world felt like a fluid that had been drained from her.

“Okay!” Dennis said. “Please, Sharon.” His hand hovered over her wrist to stop her from filing her nails, and Sharon settled back and decided right then: gazpacho.

Now Sharon opened the fridge and lifted the large serving bowl, hugging it to her chest. As she headed out back, she thought that though the outdoor dinner may have been a flawed idea, she had known it would be perfect to have the family sitting together in the backyard, all along the large communal table, the scuffed wood illuminated by lit candles and flickering torches, before Ben became a dot on the horizon and left them all behind.

Benjamin absentmindedly carved at the wooden table with his steak knife until he saw his mother emerge from the porch with a colossal glass bowl of red soup, the screen door slapping behind her. She carried it with the same beaming pride with which she brought out her impeccably browned turkey at Thanksgiving and her tender brisket at Passover, with an air that made it impossible—and unnecessary—to compliment her.

“Borscht!” Tatiana, Dennis’s mother, threw her delicate white hands up in delight.

Sharon nudged in between Ben and her father to place the bowl on the table. “Gazpacho,” she said. She swished her long hair to one side. “Andalusian gazpacho.”

“Well, it looks delicious,” Tatti said, nearly wicked, like Natasha on Bullwinkle, her Russian accent so intense it always sounded bogus to Ben. She seemed to him to be the very embodiment of Russia; when she rose from her seat, he’d half expect her ass to leave an imprint of a hammer and sickle.

Sharon looked for a moment at the bowl, then shot up and sprinted back into the house, the porch door smacking again behind her.

“From Andalusia,” Helen said, leaning into Vanessa. “Fancy-pants.” She giggled, poking her granddaughter in the side with two of the pearly daggers she called fingernails.

Vanessa bristled, holding her stomach.

Sharon returned with a small bowl of cubed apple, and sliding in next to Benjamin, she began ladling out the deep red soup.

“Here, Dad,” she said, sprinkling the tiny cubes of apple and cucumber on the smooth surface, then a few strands of basil.

“Looks lovely, sweetheart,” Herbert said.

“It sure does,” Dennis’s father, Sigmund, said. “You won’t be eating this well in college, that’s for sure, Ben.”

Everyone laughed except Vanessa, who looked around the yard as if she were waiting for someone to pop out of the hedges that separated their property from that of Mrs. Krandle, a thick-ankled woman who lived alone and once caught an eight-year-old Vanessa picking her lilies of the valley. She’d stomped over to the house to complain. I’m sure she’ll turn into a fine young woman, Mrs. Krandle had said, but right now, she’s stealing and I can’t say that bodes well for the future. Soon after, her bushes went up, which, Dennis pointed out, didn’t bother him one bit, even if he was opposed on principle to folks being portioned off from one another. When they’d moved in, almost twelve years ago now, Sharon had wanted a fence. Dennis had argued against it first for the expense, and then against the concept altogether. We as people should not be closed off from each other, he’d argued. But now that the hedges were there, the privacy was appreciated.

“You’ll have plenty of bagels to eat, that’s for sure,” Vanessa said, taking the bowl from her mother in both hands. The hedges had concealed much over the years: her sunbathing, Ben squirming around on the hammock with some cheerleader or lacrosse player, two bodies caught in a net, and the parties her parents used to have when she and Ben were young and had to come downstairs to say good night to the red-faced, slurring guests. This summer Vanessa was grateful that her awkward first embraces had been obscured. “How much oil is in here, Mom?” she asked, looking into the bowl.

“Hardly any,” Sharon said. “It’s mostly just vegetables.” Vanessa had started a diet in early July, and at first her constant questions about nutrition had cheered Sharon, a champion of any kind of interest in vitamins, minerals, and general nourishment. She believed in the power of wheat germ; she had been thinking for years about how to extract nutrients from one food, say, sardines, and placing them in an altogether different food, say, her famous scones, to see if the nutritional benefits could be transferred. She wondered now if Vanessa’s attention to food had not become a bit obsessive. She had lost a good deal of weight, which looked lovely, as if she were hatching from the egg of her adolescence, her features now fully formed, cheekbones high, eyes pronounced in their wide sockets, the muscles in her arms and legs long and defined. But Sharon wanted it to stop now with Vanessa fixed right here in her emergent state of about-to-be-womanhood.

“Now come on,” Sigmund said, leaning over his soup. “I’d say Brandeis has a lot to offer besides bagels.”

“That’s true,” Vanessa said. “They probably have chopped liver and kugel too.”

“Where does she get this?” Herbert shook his head.

Sharon sent Dennis a sharp look.

“You really shouldn’t talk that way,” Herbert said to Vanessa, who also looked over at her father for support.

“It’s a school with a very strong history,” Sigmund said. “Benjamin is going somewhere with a history of protest. This is extremely important.”

Avoiding his wife’s and his daughter’s pointed looks, Dennis put down his spoon. “Thanks, Dad. We’re aware.” He willed his father not to start up tonight, to stay silent about the Bolsheviks, Joe Hill, and all the dead labor icons, the shit conditions of the workers, the way the corporate pigs were draining them for every goddamn penny. He knew. He knew: the workers’ bodies were not machines; they were giving out! Just like John Henry hammering down the railway spikes; industry will beat you or it will beat you. Dennis knew this, but tonight was not the night.

Dennis looked at his father, his home, framed by the hydrangea and the azalea bushes, behind him. Dennis was unable to shake his father’s look of disappointment the first time he and Tatiana had come here, when they’d just purchased the place. He’d driven his parents from the train station, Sigmund turning in the passenger seat and clicking his tongue as he watched the District recede in their wake as they headed up Sixteenth Street, toward Military Road, toward the suburbs. His mother had sat up straight in the back, her lime green beauty case in her lap. Didn’t his father realize Washington was nothing like Manhattan? Here, there were the rich neighborhoods, hardly urban hubs, on the streets above Dupont, and Foxhill and Georgetown Park—unaffordable all, Dennis worked for the government—and then there was ghetto, and it was black ghetto, not a bunch of Jewish socialists buying chickens and herring and potatoes like his old neighborhood on the Lower East Side. He remembered taking the stairs two at a time, racing his sister up to the third floor and into that railroad apartment. Outside the closed windows of the flat, shut against the cold and then the dust and the stink, Orchard Street screamed. It hollered with rage and it shit and it breathed its halitosis breath and it urinated on its own stones. It would have been one thing if there’d been no choice, but his father had decided to live where the workers lived. They could have gone west into the Village or to Stuyvesant Town like so many of their neighbors had. But not Sigmund Goldstein.

His father seemed oblivious to the way cities had changed. The public pool on Pitt Street turned overnight from Jewish and Italian girls in red lipstick and white bathing suits cutting into protuberant thighs to the lithe bodies of the Puerto Rican and Dominican women. Dennis didn’t even know who sat on those lounge chairs now. The Cantonese? Sigmund’s friends had gone, but he wouldn’t move, insisting he wanted no more—nor less—than what anyone else had.

“Absolutely,” Sharon said. “Brandeis has a history to be proud of.” She was relieved Ben had not chosen one of those schools so far south, with their emphasis on fraternities and sports.

“The spell of revolution is powerful.” Sigmund wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Right, Tatiana?”

“Well, yes, I suppose it is in this family, isn’t it?” she said.

Sharon nodded and Dennis bent his head and resumed eating.

“Hmmm,” Dennis said. “You didn’t seem to think that during Vietnam.”

“That’s simply not true,” Sigmund said. “You know I was as against the war as you were. Our methods of protest were different, absolutely. But what I’m saying here has nothing to do with Vietnam. Nothing at all. Clearly you don’t understand.”

Dennis nodded. “Well, to my generation, Vietnam defined us. But while we were rioting in the streets, your friends were inside, writing about it. It is a lot more relevant than the Bolsheviks, that’s for sure.”

“Every movement can be traced back to the Bolsheviks,” Sigmund said. “You cannot turn your back on history.”

“Well, I think I have a better understanding of Vietnam. And let me tell you something. You can’t turn away from the future either, Dad. It’s going to happen again. Because we’re giving the Soviets their Vietnam now, aren’t we? This is what will happen if—or I should say when—there’s an invasion in Afghanistan. The country will be ripped to bits. And it will never end! You know we’ve authorized funding for arming the mujahideen there, don’t you?”

“Of course this doesn’t surprise me.” Sigmund scratched his throat. “Because they are anti-communists. It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“Well, it’s true,” Dennis said. “And I’m telling you, it will be just the same as Vietnam.”

“Dennis,” Sigmund said, leaning toward his son, “why is it always this way? We are on the same side.”

Vanessa groaned. “Enough about politics!” As a child she’d wondered if little kids growing up in other cities were also stuck listening only to discussions about affairs of state or if her unfortunate proximity to the White House was to blame for the constancy of these arguments.

“It’s gonna be a problem,” Dennis said. “There’s going to be a big problem is all I have to say. Carter’s going to do something really, really stupid.”

“Let’s not forget,” Herbert said to Ben, returning to the original conversation, “that Brandeis is a Jewish institution. This is important. This is what makes it special.”

Sharon closed her eyes. She didn’t know what had happened; one day not so long ago she woke up to find her parents no longer ate oysters, and Friday evenings they went to shul instead of the Brown Derby. They were full-fledged Jews now, and tonight her father wore a colorfully embroidered yarmulke pinned to the few strands of hair he had left. It reminded her of her father’s fanatical nationalism, the way he’d go nuts when they watched the Olympics together. Goddamn Reds! he’d scream, hitting the television when the Soviets were skating. He cried every time the national anthem played and an American stood with a hand over his chest.

“Yes,” Sigmund said. “That historical aspect is interesting as well. But it is not in fact a Jewish institution, Herb. It’s not a synagogue; it’s a university.”

Herbert shrugged. “Well, I’ll tell you this, it sure as hell wasn’t built by the gentiles.”

Sharon hated it when her father spoke this way: of us and of them, especially since he had spent a large part of her youth trying so goddamn hard to be them. There had been a brief period when he’d gone by a different name—Thomas. Herbert Thomas, but then, when it had come to legally changing the entire family’s name, he had let it go. Sharon wondered, as she had many times before, exactly why Dennis was so angry at his father. Because Sigmund was so, well, cool. What would it have been like to have had him as a father? She knew Sigmund would have let her go on the Freedom Ride. He would have given her his blessing, and she would have gone down South and seen the disenfranchisement and the segregation and the sadness and the poverty firsthand. She would have had bruises of her own. Sharon looked around the table. Perhaps she wouldn’t even be here, she thought. Maybe she’d be a lesbian, as Louise turned out to be.

“Ummm, can I talk here?” Benjamin said. “Because I’m the one leaving tomorrow, right?”

“Yes, Ben,” all the adults murmured.

“Of course, darling,” Sharon said, touching his wrist.

“We know!” Vanessa said. “Ben’s going!” She set her spoon down loudly on the table. It seemed as if there had been talk of little else all month. Everyone deferred to Ben—the college boy!—and her mother must have cooked what he’d wanted for dinner each night for the entire fucking summer. Go already, she thought, just go! But she hadn’t yet processed what it would mean to have him actually leave. Because Ben was in nearly every memory she held. So many late nights they had met in this backyard and lain back on the soft grass, letting the night sky shift and twist for hours over their drunken heads. They’d make sure their mother was sound asleep before they tiptoed up the stairs—avoiding the creaking ones—together.

“She’s upset,” Sharon said.

“I am not!” Vanessa said. “I am not upset, okay?”

Ben looked down at his soup, quiet for a moment, slightly panicked to think of arriving on campus to find that Grandpa Herbert had been correct, and he’d be greeted by several men in long black cloaks, white threads at their waists, and twirls of hair emerging from tall black hats. Or worse, a long line of reform rabbis would pat him on the shoulder—What a good little bar mitzvah boy! they’d tell him—and encourage him to join Hillel, date only girls with lifetime memberships to Hadassah, and exchange some of his bar mitzvah loot for Israeli bonds.

He hadn’t thought of it much at all until last spring, when his friends got wind of his decision to go to Brandeis in the fall.

“Brandeis?” His friend and teammate Nick Papadopoulos, left forward to Ben’s right, and who was heading to Notre Dame, was most incredulous. And Jon Ratner, the goalie, who got into Columbia, the lucky shit, said, “They don’t even have a football team. And the soccer, is it even Division Three?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said. But he did know. Brandeis was hardly known for its excellence in sports. It was just that his priorities had changed, overnight it seemed, and what he’d valued so much until this point seemed saved for high school, completed. After that day something “Jewish” appeared in Ben’s locker each week: a jar of gefilte fish, the large ovals nesting in a gelatinous mass; a box of matzo, Go Brandeis Bagels! written across the label in blue pen; a massive jar of Manischewitz beet borscht that crashed to the floor and splattered along the hallway and all over Ben’s new Levi’s when he opened the locker door.

“It’s a radical place to be,” Ben had told his friends that day, and he told his family the same thing now. “The Ten Most Wanted on the FBI list of 1970 all went to Brandeis. Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies, they were all there.”

“Yes, they were,” Dennis said, pointing his spoon at his father. “Radicals come in every generation, Ben.”

“Oh my goodness, we forgot a toast!” Sharon wobbled up from the bench and lifted her glass. “To Benjamin!” she said, leaning awkwardly over the table. “At the beginning of this brand-new adventure!” Sharon choked on the last word.

“Hear, hear,” Dennis said, standing, also raising his glass, in part to save his wife from tears. “Ben, may this next chapter of your life be fulfilling and fruitful. We wish you the sweetest happiness and success.”

Sharon waited as Dennis clinked glasses with Ben.

“Wait, wait!” Tatti said after all the glasses were lowered, because they had not clinked in every conceivable combination, and she had not yet touched stemware with her son’s.

“Pust’ sbudutsya vse tvoi mechty!” she said. May all your dreams come true.

“Vashee zda-ró-vye,” Dennis said to the table. To your health.

“What?” Sharon said. “Tell us!” She disliked it when Dennis and his mother spoke in Russian together. While Dennis’s Russian was useful for his work, and while she understood that it was a gift passed from mother to son, she envied it.

“Don’t worry. It was just one of Tatti’s many toasts.” Sigmund laughed.

“In the old days, every first toast was to Stalin.” Tatti shook her head. “Well, at least when we thought the neighbors were listening. But not now.”

“I’m not worried,” Sharon said, sniffing toward Sigmund. “Though I can’t say I’ve learned the entire collection of them.” Sharon sat back. She had sat through countless long and sentimental Russian toasts: to the dead, to the newlyweds, to the soldiers who had died in the war, to those who were still fighting. But she had never heard one to Stalin. “When did you?” She smiled at her father-in-law, thin and wiry in the blue jeans he’d taken to wearing, right around when he’d started getting into disco music, odd choices both, as she had always seen him as a man steeped in the past. Sharon wondered now, if she were to shake Sigmund, would his bones break and only those ridiculous dungarees, perfectly creased and thick with Tatti’s starch, keep the rest of him intact?

“I manage in Russian,” Sigmund said. “After all these years.”

“Oh, go ahead, have some wine.” Helen reached over Vanessa for the bottle of Chianti on the table. “It’s a special occasion tonight.”

Vanessa covered the top of her glass. “I don’t drink anymore, Nana.”

“Since when?” Helen’s ash blond hair, sprayed high, was now wilting like a dying bouquet, and beads of sweat trickled down her brown, spotted chest into the deep opening of her blouse. “You don’t eat and you don’t drink. What else is there?” Helen said, turning to Sharon.

“I don’t think I want to know,” Sharon said, laughing, but she had also begun to wonder about her daughter, who seemed to be reducing herself to only the most necessary elements.

“I’m not interested in living numb,” Vanessa said. It might have been Jason’s lingo, but there was truth in it. And truth was what she was after now. Which was why she had stopped doing the empty, false activities her friends seemed to favor and that she too had once fallen prey to—drinking at country-club bonfires, smoking pot at Rachel’s beach house—stuff that led them on an endless search for comfort, for male attention, for beauty. It made them live life unaware of the larger machinery that kept them all down. When she’d met Jason this past June, she’d felt able to cut loose from what she only now realized had been an isolating experience with her friends.

“My lord, sweetie, you’re young! Have some fun while you still can!” Helen said. “Right, Herb? Tell the poor girl to have some fun. Do you dance, honey?”

“Sure,” he said. “Have a good time. Whatever you want, sweetheart.” He smiled at Vanessa.

“Yeah, Nana.” Vanessa smirked. “I dance.” In a way, though, her grandmother was not wrong. She had stripped herself of frivolity and had begun to go to shows this summer at Fort Reno and d.c. space, entering a world where kids thrashed to hard music and whipped themselves fiercely into one another. And while she couldn’t say she felt a natural connection to this world, it was new, and it felt important; the music itself was essential. It seemed to be making a case for art in general, that it was not stupid or tertiary or unnecessary, and it brought her away from her girlfriends and their beach houses and crocheted bikinis and their transistors blasting ELO and Styx.

“Oh my God, the meat!” Sharon said, standing suddenly and beginning to stack everyone’s soup bowls, Vanessa’s half-filled bowl on top.

“Let me help you,” Sigmund said, rising.

“It’s okay, Grandpa.” Vanessa stood to help her mother clear. Even though Tatti had waited on him for nearly forty years, Sigmund had recently become acquainted with women’s liberation. It was a logical extension of workers’ rights, and he seemed amazed—and a little ashamed—that he had not thought of this sooner. Now he often made huge efforts to help, getting up from the dining room table at holiday meals and clattering his own dinner plate and flatware toward the kitchen.

Tatiana rose as well. “Not tonight, my dear. Just sit.”

Helen lit a cigarette.

“Mom!” Sharon said, climbing over the bench with the enormous serving bowl. “We’re eating, for Christ sake!”

“Go on then,” Helen said, pointing her Winston, mashed between two brown fingers, at the door. “You won’t notice if you’re not here, now, will you?”

Dennis looked over at his mother-in-law and shook his head as she threw her head back, cackling with laughter.

“Oh, Dennis, relax. What are you going to do, report me? To your friends.”

“Yes,” Dennis said, bracing himself.

“