The Summer Garden (67 page)

It takes Alexander two hours of stilted beginnings and many cigarettes to get his idea for himself out to Tatiana.

To his surprise, she doesn’t just approve. She joyously, whole-heartedly, completely approves. They take out a mortgage on twenty acres, a fifth of their land, for eighty thousand dollars. He rents a tiny storefront on Scottsdale’s Main Street, gets community association approvals to build in several upscale Scottsdale subdivisions, advertises in the paper, incorporates as Barrington Custom Homes and starts his own business. This is what Pushkin’s
Bronze Horseman
buys for Alexander.

In between working at the hospital, Tatiana consumes herself with helping him. She combs through the finances, organizes the books, pays the bills, buys the office supplies, the furniture, the phones, the drafting table. Both she and Anthony help him paint, decorate.

“With no offending pictures anywhere,” Tatiana says happily.

“Oh, I take them down before you come,” says Alexander.

Free Market Forces

They both thought the business would start slow.
They prepared for that. In the beginning Alexander planned to do everything himself because there would be only one or two houses to build. He would continue going to school to finish his degree, and meanwhile they would be looking to hire and train the right people and adjust to the demands of owning a small business. She would keep the books, he would do everything else.

But what happened was not in their plan. Alexander got two phone calls the first week, seventeen the second, fifty-four the third.

“Are you
the
Alexander Barrington, the army captain who was all over the papers a few months ago?”

“I am, yes.”

When they came, the wives gaped, and the men, after talking for a few minutes about building the house, would say, “So tell us what really happened that night. What a story!”

News of Alexander’s feat had swept the cities of Phoenix, Tempe and Scottsdale like brushfire.

In Scottsdale every person knew about him.

Here goes Alexander, who, to protect his wife,
keeled
a man and got away with it, they whispered, as Alexander, Tatiana, and Anthony strolled down Main Street. They studied Tatiana surreptitiously, but no man so much as openly
glanced
at her. She became invisible to most men. Her invisibility was in inverse proportion to Alexander’s visibility. All the girls—single, married, widowed—in Maricopa County came past his office to take a look at the architect, home builder, prisoner of war, commissioned officer, a man who loved his wife so much he
keeled
for her.

After advertising for staff, Alexander received five hundred applications, nearly all from women. He made Tatiana interview them. To say that the girls were disappointed in being interviewed by the rescued wife would have been an understatement. Tatiana recommended Linda Collier as an office manager, the most proficient, organized and brisk woman—in her early fifties—she could find, and gave Francesca the cleaning account.

Both Alexander and Tatiana—and G.G. Cain, much to his detriment —grossly underestimated the free market phenomenon known as “a temporary demand spike,” brought on by forces outside the control of the marketplace, such as umbrella sales during rain, lumber sales during tornado season—or shooting a man dead for your wife’s honor in your own mobile home.

Alexander had to hire an architect and a foreman right away. Skip was his architect, Phil his foreman. Skip was doughy and sparkless, but Alexander had seen Skip’s portfolio; his work was good. Phil, in his late forties, wiry like a winter twig, always in old jeans and plaid shirts, didn’t say much, but he played guitar—which Anthony liked—had been living with the same woman for twenty years—which Tatiana liked—and boy, did he know a remarkable amount about building—which Alexander liked. Alexander couldn’t have built more than one house a year without Phil’s unflappable efficiency. With his new title as project manager, Phil took on four houses, while Alexander kept his hands firmly on two, and ran the rest of his business: hired contractors, met with clients—which took up a tremendous amount of his time—and helped Skip with home design. Linda scheduled him. Tatiana counted his money.

The subcontractors and suppliers whom he hired talked about their kids and wives, about birthdays and holidays, about the money they were making and spending, about sports and politics. It was a different world, but even with monks for roofers, with one hand on the rosary, the other on the clay tiles, Tatiana no longer came to his construction sites. Instead, on the days she was off, Alexander went home for lunch. He was the boss now, he could do as he pleased. It worked out much better. They were home, they were alone, and lunch often included some sweet afternoon love for Alexander, after which he wanted nothing but a nap. He returned to work as happy as if he had his senses. The smile never left his face.

Richter called Thanksgiving of 1952 from Korea, mutely listened to the story of Dudley from Montana. When Alexander finished telling him, he said, “Tom, it’s what any man would do for his wife, right?”

And Tom Richter said after a beat, “Well, I think that depends on the wife.”

He asked Alexander for a small favor. One of his young sergeants had been wounded and was coming back stateside; he was originally from San Diego, but was willing to work anywhere; would Alexander have a position for him? As it happened, Alexander had signed contracts to build four more homes, and even before that he’d known Phil had too much work, with all the houses going up nearly simultaneously. He readily agreed to help his friend, and that’s how he met Shannon Clay.

Shannon, barely twenty-two, went into combat in Korea on May 9, 1952 and went MIA three days later. His recon patrol team was ambushed, they lost contact with headquarters, and while waiting for a helicopter extraction were engaged in a firefight that left all of Shannon’s team dead and him with a round in his leg. He was in enemy territory for four weeks, living in the woods, before he was picked up by another chopper passing through the area. Alexander and Tatiana thought any man who could be wounded and survive by himself for a month in the mountains of Korea would do well in anything. Shannon walked with a slight limp from the round that was still lodged in his thigh, but was mild-faced, well-presented, polite to a fault, eager to please, and incredibly hard-working.

Alexander liked Shannon instantly, and liked him even more after Tatiana said, “He is
wonderful
,” when they came home after having a drink with him. “But lonely. Do we know any single girls?”

A smiling Alexander wanted to know if Tatiana was really asking him if he knew any single girls.

“I said we, Shura.
We
.”

One afternoon when Alexander and Shannon were both in the office, Tatiana stopped by to say hello. She had just run into Amanda while shopping in Scottsdale.

No sooner had she walked through Alexander’s office door, than Shannon stood up and said, “Tania, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

With unsuppressed reluctance, Tatiana introduced a smiling Shannon to a smiling Amanda. Two days later, the four of them went out to dinner at Bobo’s. Amanda
quite
liked Shannon—who wouldn’t like him, said Tatiana, with his polite face and innocent blue eyes—but Shannon
extremely
liked Amanda.

“So what do you think of our adorable Shannon with her?” Tatiana asked Alexander that night as they were brushing their teeth before bed.

“Hmm,” he said, rinsing his mouth.

“What, you have reservations, too?”

He spat into the sink. “I have none. But I think Amanda does.
He
seemed quite taken with her. She less so with him.” He shrugged. “Women.”

Tatiana studied her face in the bathroom mirror. “Where’s the surprise? Shannon is a decent young man. And Amanda likes bad boys.”

“Does she indeed?” Alexander looked at Tatiana sideways. “And what kind does my own wife like?”

“I like,” she said, grinning back through the mirror, “the baddest boy of all.”

Shannon and Amanda didn’t need Tatiana and Alexander after the first outing. They got engaged two months later, in March 1953, right around the time of Stalin’s death (though Shannon maintained the events were concomitant, not consequent—unlike, say, the arrest and execution of Lavrenti Beria), married in June and the following March had their first baby.

Baby Baby Baby

And it wasn’t just Amanda
who was having a baby.

What in heaven’s name was going on in Phoenix? Alexander could not walk through the Indian School Road market, to the drive-in, for ice cream, to the Apache Trail in the Superstitions without seeing strollers, babies, twins, toddlers everywhere. He played ball with Anthony in the Scottsdale Commons—babies all over, arrayed like lilies in the fields, baby boys, baby girls, pink blue yellow green, chubby, white, dark, brown, and all the colors in between. The Yuma married barracks, where they stayed once a month, had twelve carriages all in a row on the decks outside. Ghost towns in the Superstitions? Babies. Pueblo Grande Museum? Babies. Why did babies need to go to the Indian Museum? Or the Sonoran Desert National Monument? Alexander couldn’t see the giant saguaros for all the tiny babies in his way. It was the first topic of every conversation, and the last. Who was pregnant again? Who just had a baby, who was having a third? When were they moving to a bigger house, and how many more children were they planning on having? Alexander even made it a motto of his business efficiency. He told all the crews he hired and all the prospective homeowners he talked to that his goal was to have their house built to the same high standards but in less time than it took one woman to grow one human being.

To the one unpregnant woman, he said, “That’s it. I’m taking charge. I obviously need to take matters into my own hands.”

She smiled. “Hands? Perhaps it’s this small mistake in anatomy that’s been the problem all along.”

He applied himself to the business of making a baby the same way he applied himself to everything—dutifully, tirelessly, and conscientiously. For a year his spawn went nowhere but over the redd. He even stopped smoking in the house, saying the nicotine was not good for her once tubercular lungs.

“It’s your house,” Tatiana said. “You smoke where you want. And I’m not growing the baby in my lungs.”

They waited noisily; Alexander held his breath around the days when they would know, and when one more month brought no baby, he breathed out and went on and worked and built another month. There were no babies, but there was swimming in December! Plunging into the heated pool at night under the desert stars. And sometimes not heating it, and plunging in stark naked—oh, the ice, the numbing squealing joy of it.

There were no babies, but there was Rosemary Clooney
wanting a piece of his heart
, and the Andrews Sisters, who
wanted to be loved
, and Alexander making love to Tatiana in the night on one of their deck lounge chairs and humming, “If I Knew You Were Coming, I Would Have Baked You a Cake,” and Tatiana, holding his head, murmuring, “Shh. Shh!”

Humming “The Song of the Volga Boatmen” he had sung when he plowed through Byelorussia, Alexander put in a pebbled driveway for the house, poured a cement basketball court for him and Anthony, and built a flat roof sun cover for their cars.

Armed with “The Russian Sailors’ Dance” he had hummed on the approach to Majdanek death camp in Poland, he tried to get rid of the cholla. The cholla cactus penetrates anything that comes near it—leather, rubber, gloves, the soles of Alexander’s boots—penetrates to pollinate; jumps and germinates; imbued with evil spirits, cholla.

“Dad,” said Anthony, who was helping him, “you’re in America now. You’re an officer. Here we sing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ when we conquer cholla. You don’t know the words to it? Want me to teach you?”

With “Varshavyanka” at his lips, Alexander planted palm trees and agaves, built masonry walls for Tatiana’s flower garden—which she found “endearing
and
symbolic”—and laid terra cotta winding walkways around the yuccas and the palo verdes. After dinner they would amble down the paths Alexander set down amid lush desert foliage. The ocotillos, the prickly pears, the velvet mesquites, the purple lupines, the desert poppies all bloomed in their landscaped summer garden by the mountains. And below them through the towering saguaros, the lights in the valley twinkled and multiplied, the farmland was long gone, the communities sprang up, and had streetlights and residential associations and pools and golf courses and baby carriages, and homes Alexander built for the newly pregnant women and their anxiously waiting husbands.

Tatiana had her arm through his, gazing up at him when he talked about building houses, about Shannon, about Richter still in Korea, and the French fighting to their death in Dien Bien Phu—and sometimes Alexander could swear she wasn’t listening to a word he was saying, her mouth was just dropping open and her eyes were unblinking, as if…almost as if…he was in uniform and she was in factory clothes, and the rifle was slung on his shoulder, and her hair was down, and they were ambling through Leningrad, through the streets and the boulevards, past the canals and the train stations in the first summer of their life when the war first cleaved them together before it rent them apart.

Meanwhile, the one great boy they managed to have played his guitar on the deck, learning Francesca’s Mexican songs, and his own mother’s Russian ones. Tatiana would hum them, and Anthony would strum them, and she would cry when she heard them. And he serenaded his father and mother with “Corazon Magico” and “Moscow Nights,” as they strolled and smoked and chatted in the fond falling evening.

And then at night—love.

And then—another month.

Anthony sees Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

Tatiana had just come out of the bath
, and was perched on their bed, brushing out her hair and leaning in as Alexander spread out the final version of the blueprints for their new house. With a pencil in his hand, he led her down the driveway, showing her the plan: first the elevation, then the inside of the house, then the back elevation, and then the artist’s rendering of the kitchen.