Chapter 7 - 4
“The Pillsbury Bake-Off?”
Crossly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lina, you’re not going to New York , it’s completely out of the question.”
Pete went red as a fire truck, clearly about to detonate like the shells Grace had watched German Junkers drop down the center of the Nevsky Prospect like a string of exploding pearls. She touched his arm and cut in quickly: “Mrs.Nilsson, have you thought about the advantages here? Our Lina in the Bake-Off, only one hundred competitors chosen from everyone who applied all over the country! You know the first place winner among the juniors stands to win three thousand dollars?”
Mrs.Nilsson’s nose twitched, but she continued to look fretful. “Lina won’t win , she never wins anything.”
Grace could have cheerfully stuffed the bitch in her own icebox and sunk it into the Volga. Where were the secret police with their pliers and cement blocks when you needed them? “Even if she doesn’t place, Mrs.Nilsson, all the entrants win prizes just for competing. A hundred dollars cash—”
“A Hamilton Beach mixer,”
Nora said.
“And a brand-new Stratoliner push-button range,”
Bea finished. The whole house was expert by now in the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition rules. “Didn’t you say you wanted to update the old kitchen range here?”
That nose twitch again. “A Stratoliner?”
“You can update this entire kitchen on your daughter’s back!”
Grace cooed, holding her smile steady as Doilies blinked. And later that night Lina tiptoed up to Grace’s room, jubilant.
“She says I can go!”
Grace kissed the top of her head. “Of course she did.”
Kitty, you’d be proud—you never made it to New York, but your cake is going...
And then it was October again, bluster in the air and leaves starting to scamper down the street like dried flakes of gold, and half a year had gone and Grace sat in her windowsill with Red in her lap, every bit as fascinated as her first day here by what she could see out her window. She’d never intended to stay so long, not in a bilious lime-green room the size of a coat closet with a landlady who snooped. Grace had assumed she’d move on to somewhere bigger, more anonymous—Washington had just been the first and farthest train ticket available from the San Diego depot when she packed her things (including a certain manila folder) and shed Kirill and her mission and her whole espionage-constructed life.
But here she still was, and the Briar Club was coming in an hour: Reka’s turn to cook, and she was making paprikas on the hot plate and talking lately about a new set of abstract portraits she was sketching out for a series. Wasn’t she good enough for a show of her own? Reka didn’t think so, but maybe she could be encouraged just a little, to think bigger for her work. Not that Grace liked to nudge—
You do too like to nudge , she scolded herself with an inward laugh. You love to nudge! She sometimes thought of moving on, finding new horizons, but if she wasn’t here, who was going to feed and fix this lunatic grab bag of friends she’d somehow collected? Maybe that was the other side effect of having survived starvation: it left you wanting to feed people, feed everyone , feed them and fix them. She hadn’t even realized it was what she was craving, back when she walked into a houseful of people who had nothing in common but an address, but who all needed feeding and fixing.
“The way Mom’s haranguing Lina now about the Bake-Off, I could just kill her.”
Pete sighed, first up the stairs as usual. “She’s got Lina practicing that dratted cake every other day now, going on and on about how she’d at least better place third and nab the thousand-dollar prize if she can’t manage first place. Lina’s worrying about it now and I want her to enjoy that dratted contest, not go to pieces over it! Mom’s going to have her in shreds by the time we’re all in New York.”
Grace beamed as she passed him a plate of sandwiches, loving the dear sweet earnest kid to bits, loving them all. “Leave everything to me.”
Poisons hadn’t been a large part of Grace’s training as a mole—she hadn’t been sent to murder anyone at Edwards Air Force Base, after all, just inveigle diagnostics and logistics out of them for the Bell X-2. But the use of certain quick compounds to gripe the guts, that was a standard tool of the trade. What better way to get access to a man’s office or a woman’s handbag than if they had to suddenly excuse themselves to the bathroom with a churning stomach?
Simplicity itself to drop a double dose into Mrs.Nilsson’s orange juice at breakfast, the morning she was supposed to take Lina to New York.
“We can’t miss that train,”
the horrid woman wailed through the door of the downstairs bathroom, the one she refused to let any of the boarders use even if the line upstairs was five-deep. Grace smiled at the sound of retching, not feeling one drop of guilt. Doilies had already made Lina cry that morning, scolding her not to frown when she mixed her cake because judges wouldn’t award anything to a cross-eyed little girl who scowled. “If Lina misses registration today she won’t be allowed to compete! I won’t get that Stratoliner—”
“Sugar pie, don’t you fret a moment,”
Grace cooed. “Pete and I will take Lina.”
“He doesn’t need to go to New York! He has work to do—”
Words cut off by the sound of more vomiting. Claire and Bea peeked around the corner with How’s it going? expressions.
“Then Pete will stay here and take care of you,”
Grace lied. “You rest up and let me handle everything in New York!”
Some more token harping from the other side of the door but really, Doilies wasn’t going anywhere when she was vomiting like this, and she knew it. Besides, as Grace pointed out, the train ticket was covered by Pillsbury so she wouldn’t lose money by staying behind.
“Quick, before she changes her mind—”
And they were all piling out the door, Grace pausing to scoop Mrs.Nilsson’s address book off her bedside table and stuff it in her handbag, Pete tossing Lina’s traveling case over one shoulder and running down the steps to hail a cab. It was going to take at least three cabs to get them all to Union Station: the entire Briar Club (minus Arlene) was escorting Lina to the Bake-Off. Even Harland and Joe were coming along. “You don’t all have to come,”
Pete had protested at first, even though his face flushed with pleasure. “It’s such a long way.”
“Nonsense, of course we’re coming.”
All the contestants would have cheering sections of devoted family and Lina needed one, too, especially if her cheering section largely wasn’t composed of blood relatives. Blood was overrated, anyway, Grace mused, helping Reka along with a hand to the old woman’s elbow as they spilled out of the cabs onto the steps of Union Station. The only blood relative she had left after the Leningrad siege lifted and the war was over was Uncle Tolya, who was something very high up in the NKVD (the KGB now, Grace reminded herself), far too high up to have anything to do with her side of the family... Except when he realized Grace spoke near-perfect English and might possibly be useful.
“It must be from your mother,”
he’d said carelessly, dropping in without warning shortly after the war was over, not bothering to offer any condolences. “She was an interpreter of some sort, wasn’t she? Useful, very useful. I’ve put your name in for screening, language skills like that are much needed.”
Grace, still struggling back from a bout of pneumonia that nearly killed her and only up to ninety-eight pounds from her siege days’ worst of eighty-seven, had thought he meant she’d end up an interpreter herself. Fine—better than working in an ammunition factory the rest of her life. She’d never thought in a thousand years that a year of screening and interviews would lead to being selected for the deep-cover program. Such an invitation had no possible answer, Uncle Tolya had made it clear, except I would be delighted to serve .
“Reflect well on me, Galina,”
he’d said before Grace was shipped off, a glint of warning in his eye. “You reflect well on me, I reflect well on you. It’s the Soviet way.”
I’m half Ukrainian, you bastard , Grace thought but didn’t say, and that’s the only half worth counting . Uncle Tolya had already condescended to say she was very lucky her Ukrainian side hadn’t disqualified her from the start. Just think, he’d probably be hauled out and shot if it got back to her superiors that she’d defected... frankly, that didn’t bother Grace one bit.
“What are you thinking about?”
Nora asked as they settled into their compartment, barely in time to grab their seats before the train began to rumble down the tracks.
“Family.”
Grace smiled. “The acquired kind.”
“My favorite kind,”
Nora agreed with feeling, and Grace sat back in her seat as the train left the station, watching America roll past.
Thank goodness Reka knew New York City like the back of her hand, or else the Briarwood contingent would have been entirely lost. “Follow me,”
the old woman barked as they piled off the train into the chaos of Grand Central, laying about her with the cane she’d recently begun using (less because she needed the support, Grace thought, and more because she liked having something to jab people with). “If anyone gets in your way, use your elbows. Don’t make eye contact; New Yorkers hate eye contact. Last ditch, shout move . MOVE,”
she snapped at the man in her path, whacking his shin with her stick until he skittered out of their way. None of the Briarwood ladies listened; they were all too busy gaping, Grace included. Washington was a sleepy little burg compared to this glittering metropolis stacked with skyscrapers and teeming with life.
“MissLina Nilsson?”
A balding man in a smart suit held up a sign with the Pillsbury logo, and they made their way toward him. “Welcome to New York. If you will follow me, we’ll escort your party to the Waldorf...”
“Get used to the high life, sis,”
Pete said, seeing his sister look petrified. “You’re living it up now!”
A couple of taxis took them all through the city, and Grace could hardly peel her nose off the glass, seeing those towers of stone glide past one after the other. Everything so new , so undamaged—it gave her a twinge of sadness to imagine how the city of her birth compared: tragic, destroyed Leningrad with its sacked palaces, its crumbling tenement blocks. A kind of grim optimism was baked into Soviet society; as long as Grace could remember she’d been told, Look at the world around you not as it is, but as it will be—as we will make it! But as she looked at New York City all she could think was how far, how goddamn far Leningrad still had to go.
It could be like this someday , she thought, staring up at the gleaming castle of the Waldorf-Astoria as they all piled out of their cabs. Leningrad could be beautiful and modern and shining. So could starved, downtrodden Kharkiv, the other half of her heritage that she’d never seen—and never would. She knew she’d never go, even if everything east of the Berlin Wall became a paradise. She’d given too much blood, shed too many tears, buried too many ghosts to ever go back east again.
A flurry of activity at the long, gleaming hotel desk as they checked in, the Briar Club ladies arguing who would share rooms with whom: Joe and Pete and Harland were bunking together, but Claire refused to bunk with Reka because she snored, and while they scrapped that out Lina stood looking utterly overwhelmed at the huge bustling lobby, the enormous vases of flowers, the Pillsbury logo prominently displayed everywhere. Grace saw a telephone and veered off to make a certain call—pulling Mrs.Nilsson’s address book out of her handbag, she flipped through until she found the number she wanted, a New Jersey number. “Mr.John Nilsson, please,”
she said crisply as a woman’s voice answered.
“He’s not in at the moment—he rents my upstairs apartment. I can take a message—”
“Yes. Please inform Mr. Nilsson that both his children are just across the river, in New York City. His daughter is, in fact, competing in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. At her age, it’s a real achievement. It would be a nice gesture on Mr. Nilsson’s part if he were to turn up and show a little fatherly support.”
Grace hung up and went back to Lina, who stood looking intimidated as the man who’d met them at the station checked his way down a clipboard. “—opportunity this afternoon, MissNilsson, to begin meeting your fellow contestants. A gala dinner this evening will kick things off—”
“Gala?”
Lina whispered.
“—and after breakfast tomorrow, orientation. You will be allowed to see the ballroom where the competition will take place and make any final requests as to your mise en place —”
“My what?”
“—dinner tomorrow evening as well as entertainment, though I advise an early night as the bakers are expected outside the ballroom the following morning at the stroke of eight—”
Lina was shutting down; Grace could feel it. Pete stepped in and took the clipboard. “Just give me the rest of the itinerary,”
he said firmly as Grace bent down to Lina.
“What is it?”
she whispered, looking around the lobby. Where had Fliss gone off to...
“A gala?”
Lina whispered. “A dinner ? I don’t have anything to wear. Mom said my old dimity would be just fine, no need to buy anything new...”
“I know she did.”
Of course Mrs.Nilsson had thought it just fine to send her twelve-year-old daughter to New York City for the biggest event of her life in a too-short hand-me-down frock. You cheap cow, I hope you’re still hunched over the toilet vomiting , Grace thought. “About the dress—”
she began.
“The dress matter is dealt with!”
Fliss wriggled past a cluster of excited bakers exclaiming over the hotel in Georgia drawls, managing not to drop the bulging garment bag she’d hauled all the way from Washington. Pete had asked her what was in it, and she and Grace had exchanged conspiratorial glances. Now she turned to Lina with a beam. “Grace got me your measurements on the sly, and I did a whip-round through all Dan’s cousins who have daughters when we visited his family in Boston two weeks ago—”
“Knew I could count on you, Bubble and Squeak,”
Grace approved.
“—so I have quite the selection for you, Lina,”
Fliss finished with a flash of dimples.
“Selection?”
Lina whispered, a smile starting to creep back over her face.
Fliss unfolded the garment bag. “Pink satin, blue taffeta, or yellow organdy?”