Debra Dean: The Madonnas Of Leningrad

Even now, she can still recall her shock, how shallow and fast her breath came, as she first walked through these gilt rooms, how each new hall opened dreamlike onto still another room. The walls were crowded with the faces of stern old men and the nude figures of young women, their bodies a hot shock of flesh. Her uncle seemed not to notice what she saw-he droned on about acquisitions and restorations and who knows what else, while around them angels fluttered in turbulent skies and serene Madonnas gazed down as they passed. And the landscapes, one after another, shimmering with light, each frame a portal into a fresh world. Her head swam, dizzy, ecstatic, saturated with color. She was twelve years old, and this was her first taste of passion.

The gallery is nearly bare now, but she hardly notices. She is trotting through the silent, formal rooms, her low heels clicking on parquet floors. The ghostly court recedes into the shadows.

She is already in the future, somewhere she can only dimly imagine, but it is very different from what she has known.

Helen has been tracing a six-block radius around her parents’ house for the last half hour, looking for a place to park. Every time she passes their house, she is reminded again of the phone conversation she had with her brother. “It’s getting to be too much for them to handle,” he said, and she has to agree that the house is starting to resemble the student rentals in the neighborhood, the lawn scrubby with dandelions, the hedge in need of pruning.

She’s passed only one open parking space, which looked to be the exact length of the Chevy Malibu she is driving. She can’t remember the last time she had to parallel park, and she doesn’t feel up to an extra challenge this morning, but on the fifth loop she finally relents. What the hell, it’s a rental car, she reasons. She cranks the wheel and backs slowly into the space, then realizes that she’s cut it too tight and pulls back out. Behind her, a kid in a jeep hits his horn in frustration. Back and forth she maneuvers, cranking the wheel one way and creeping forward, then the other way and rolling back, until she taps the bumper of the car behind her and sets its alarm shrieking and caterwauling. Thoroughly shaken, she leaves her car hanging at an angle into the street and flees.

The plan was to get here yesterday afternoon and have a little time with her parents before they all headed up to Andrei’s this morning. But all it takes to shut down a major airport these days is one hophead who panics and bolts for the gates when the screener asks a few questions. She doesn’t know for a fact that’s what happened; this was only the rumor that later circulated around the baggage claim carousel. What she does know is that they hung over LAX for almost an hour before the pilot came on and said something vague about a security breach. And next thing you know, they’re diverting the flight to San Diego and then lining up on the tarmac behind dozens of similarly diverted planes stacked up to approach the terminal. Then there were the refugee-length lines snaking up to every ticket counter, and the smiling, dead-eyed ticket agent at the front of her line who happily informed Helen that there was a seat on a flight to Portland that left in an hour and she could connect to Seattle from there. Past midnight, too late to barge in on her elderly parents, Helen finally dragged herself to the Holiday Inn Express at Sea- Tac Airport. She spent a few fruitless hours trying to shut out the din of traffic and the thunder of engines overhead before emerging into a pink, diesel-fueled dawn, renting a car, and taking her life in her hands driving up I-5 during rush hour. She’s frazzled and weak-kneed, she feels about ten years older than she did yesterday morning, and she hasn’t even seen her parents yet.

So she’s almost too tired to notice, when she knocks at her parents’ front door, that the knob rattles and the dead bolt clicks back and forth before she hears her father calling from somewhere in the back of the house that he is coming. Eventually, the door swings open. A split second passes before she reconciles the two elderly people in the foyer with her parents. She visits at least once and usually twice a year, but every time, it comes as a surprise that they are getting old. Not getting, are. Helen notes the towel tucked around her father’s withered neck and the dollop of shaving cream in his left ear.

“Lenochka,” Dmitri murmurs, as he squeezes her and pecks each cheek. He turns to his wife and announces, “Elena’s here.” Marina ’s face brightens and she chirps, “Well, hello there,” looking for all the world as though Helen’s arrival is a surprise. A pleasant surprise, but a surprise nevertheless. Marina steps forward and looks up expectantly. As Helen embraces her, she is struck afresh by the oddness of being able to see over the top of her mother’s head. She seems even shorter than eight months ago, as though she is plotting to slip out of the world under the bar.

“Come in, come in,” Dmitri says, ushering Helen through the living room, Marina trailing behind.

So far as she can tell, very little has changed since her last visit. In fact, very little has changed since her childhood, beyond the glacial accumulation that comes of years spent in the same place. When she grew up, the house, predictably, got smaller and, though there were fewer occupants, more crowded. Now, every surface is layered: an old brocade sofa is festooned with crocheted antimacassars and buried under a drift of decorative throw pillows; a pair of recliners is draped in afghans. The top of the enormous old Admiral television cabinet, as well as every other horizontal surface, is crowded with framed photographs of the grandkids and knickknacks and cut-glass candy dishes. But the house still looks clean. There are no empty tuna cans or piles of newspapers.

The thought of sorting through and packing up all of this overwhelms Helen, and she can see why her parents would be so resistant. But Andrei is adamant that the time has come to get them set up in a retirement village with an assisted living facility. “Of course, they don’t like the idea,” he said when she last spoke with him. “Who would? But they’re getting up there, Helen, and frankly, we probably should have pushed this a few years ago.” He’s asked her to stay on for a few days after the wedding. Get that behind them and then sit down with the folks for a little powwow. See if between the two of them, they can’t make their parents see reason. It’s a perfectly normal request, or it would be in some other family, but she is younger than Andrei by eight years and is the eternal baby sister, rarely informed, much less consulted. It’s almost silly how flattered she feels to be approached as an equal, how eager to be an ally in what has the potential to be an unpleasant battle.

In the dining alcove, Dmitri pulls out a chair in the dinette set for his wife, another for Helen. Helen remembers doing homework at this table, the aluminum edge and boomerang-patterned surface imprinted in her brain alongside Ovaltine, Little Debbie snack cakes, and the Pythagorean triangle.

“You look tired, Elena.”

“I didn’t get much sleep.” She looks at her father. “You look a little tired yourself.” In fact, he looks more than a little tired. He looks haggard.

“Well, we can all maybe have a nap in the ferry line. But first, you should have some coffee for the drive.”

“No, Papa. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

He checks the wall clock. “Well, then, I better get moving. Mama’s ready, but I still have to finish.”

Marina pipes in, “I’ve been ready for hours.”

“Naureen said we should leave by eight-thirty so we can catch the one o’clock ferry.”