“Understand what?”
“About you.” She sighed, almost inaudibly. “Why so angry.”
The cafe was opposite the Siberian Fur Shop and it had only just opened. Behind the counter, a grumpy, overweight Frenchman with a long gray mustache eyed Natasha in a manner that irritated Field.
They sat in the corner, at a small round wooden table, and watched the dawn gathering beyond the window, a red sky chasing away the remnants of yesterday’s storm. Field ordered coffee and a croissant and Natasha borscht and black bread.
“What kind of man was he?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
“To know you—” she shrugged—“it matters.”
Field thought for a moment. He looked out of the window again. “He wanted me to be an accountant or a missionary and he was the worst combination of both.”
“And you are neither.”
“His father was a shoeshine boy, and for him, there was no margin of error.” Field held up thumb and forefinger so that they were almost touching. “One mistake, no matter how tiny . . .”
“He was a missionary?”
“He acted like one. My mother came from a well-to-do family, and her parents believed she had married beneath herself. She grew up in a big house with plenty of servants, and they didn’t think my father was worthy of her.” Field sighed. “He was an accountant, but he was ambitious and he started a business selling hosiery. The shops always struggled and I don’t remember . . .” She leaned forward to touch his hand. “Neither of them ever smiled. I don’t recall them appearing to be anything other than miserable.” Field withdrew his hand and leaned back, not wanting the intimacy of someone else’s touch as he recalled the past. “Sometimes my father would come home in a terrible temper and we would be sent out of the room and then he would push Mother until they began to argue. He would shout louder and louder.” Field could hear their raised voices as if they were in the next room, and he wanted to put his hands to his ears as he had done so often as a boy. “The next morning my mother would have bruises on her face.”
Natasha looked at him with concern in her eyes.
“What about
Natasha shrugged. “He died of a disease . . . something . . . we never quite knew.” She waved her hand. “It was a long time ago.”
“But it doesn’t feel like it.”
She shrugged. “Life is sometimes sad.”
“And sometimes happy.”
She smiled. “Sometimes.”
Thirty
How old were you when your mother died?” he asked.
“Seven.”
“Do you remember her well?”
“Remember, but not so well.”
“She was beautiful.”
“I’m not beautiful.”
Field did not dignify this with a response.
“Tell me more about your father,” she said quickly, as if trying to move him away from her own past.
Field felt that there was something stilted about their conversation that was not present in their lovemaking, as if only in bed could they shed the thousands of barriers, seen and unseen, that separated them. And yet, he reflected, the purity of emotion was the same. Here he felt as he had all night. He wanted to know about her and perhaps she him, but their questions were oblique, their answers wary. He looked out of the window. “He’s dead.”
“Was he like you? Not the cruelty, I mean but—”
“Albert Field had a platitude for every occasion.”
“Tell me one.”
“Honesty is a cloak to keep out the chill of loneliness.”
She frowned.
“In his eyes, if you’re honest, you’ll always have something to hold on to, no matter what the world chooses to strip from you. You will always have your integrity and a sense of self-worth and value.”
As he watched the color draining from her cheeks and realized what he’d said, Field wondered if, subconsciously, he had chosen the quote deliberately.
“So part of him was a good man?”
Field did not answer.
