Written on the Wind, page 23
After concluding the distasteful telephone call, Dimitri took a carriage to the bank and headed up to Natalia’s office. He was surprised to see several unfamiliar men boxing up papers from the delicate rolltop desk that once belonged to Galina.
“Where is Miss Blackstone?” he asked a man wearing coveralls.
“She doesn’t work here anymore,” the man replied. “She wants this desk sent to her house.”
His spirit sagged, and he didn’t even respond before racing back downstairs. When Natalia claimed she would be cut out of the bank should she ever visibly place a foot wrong, Dimitri hadn’t believed her. Now the proof was before his eyes.
The drizzle from earlier in the day had turned into a steady rain, and there were no cabs in sight, but it didn’t matter. Natalia lived only a few blocks away, and he strode toward her house. He darted around puddles and dashed across the street to stand on her tiny front porch, banging on the door as the rain poured down. There was no overhang, and soon water dribbled from the brim of his hat.
She didn’t answer the door. Inside, music was blasting from the phonograph, and she probably couldn’t hear. He pounded with the side of his fist hard enough to rattle the door.
“Natalia!” he yelled. “Natalia, open up, it’s me.”
At last he heard footsteps thudding down the stairs. The music stopped, and the door flung open.
“Dimitri!” Natalia gasped. “Heavens, get inside, I didn’t know you were coming.”
He took off his hat and held it outside to shake water from the brim.
“Let me take your coat,” she fussed. “You poor dear, how long were you out there?” She looked tragic as she took his coat. He was dry underneath but didn’t mind accepting her pity for his drenching.
“Too long,” he said. “I’ll probably get pneumonia.”
She rolled her eyes. “Dimitri, you’re healthy as an ox.”
“A very sad ox,” he said. “Natalia, I’ve seen the newspapers. And your empty office.” He held his breath, hoping she might shrug this off with cocksure aplomb, but it didn’t happen.
Her eyes were full of anguish as she looked up at him. “My father already appointed someone else to the railroad account.”
It wasn’t fair. There were no words to express his regret. All he could do was hold his arms wide, and she immediately stepped into them. He rocked her from side to side.
“There, there,” he soothed, wishing he could say something to minimize the situation, but he would not belittle her anguish with empty platitudes.
“I’ve been ripping out the ruined floor upstairs,” she said. “It gave me something to do, and it felt good to hit things.”
Her entire townhouse was a dreary, depressing sight. Strips of wallpaper curled from the plaster, and the cracked mantel lay tucked against the wall. Not only had she lost her job because of him, but the state of this wretched townhouse was his fault too. The damage wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t gone to San Francisco.
“It seems it is your fate to suffer on my behalf.”
He held her as he recounted the telephone call with Count Cassini. Thanks to Natalia’s insight into Cassini’s relationship with his housekeeper, the ambassador had now been neutralized, but much of the damage to Natalia was already done.
“Everything is over,” she said. “The life I thought I was going to have is gone.”
He stroked her shoulders and her back, wishing he could solve this for her, but it was something she would have to do on her own. “The last chapter of your life hasn’t been written. What do you want it to be? You have the freedom to choose almost anything, and that is a rare gift in this world.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I have been blessed beyond all reason, but I’m still mourning. I think this is going to hurt for a long time.” She suddenly brightened and looked up at him with the eager, curious expression he knew so well. “How was the concert? Did Mr. Tachenko play the song?”
“He did, and received a standing ovation for it.” He relayed how the violinist stood on the center of the stage and recognized Dimitri in the audience, which caused a thundering round of applause. He could still hear it echoing in his ears.
“I’m so proud of you,” Natalia said. “You earned it.”
Had he? The months following the disaster at the Amur had been harrowing, but now he garnered accolades and acclaim from it. As soon as he got official word from the embassy, he would return to Russia, but he didn’t want to leave Natalia behind, especially not after her dreams had been stolen because of her association with him.
“Natalia, marry me. We could elope right now and start a new life together. I would gladly introduce you to the world as Countess Sokolova, and no one would dare cast aspersions on you.”
She startled and looked at him with such hope in her eyes that it made his spirit soar. “Are you going to stay in America?”
He looked away. Staying in America was not a possibility. He was a misfit in New York and would never belong. With every beat of his heart, he longed for home.
“I can’t stay,” he said gently, hating the way disillusionment took root in her face again. They could be happy in Russia. She could be happy in Russia. He just had to make her believe it. “Natalia, you could come with me. As my wife, you could be whatever you wanted, and I would make it happen for you. If you want a bank, I will buy you a bank.”
Her smile was sad. “No one in Russia would patronize a bank run by a woman.”
It was probably true. Russia was even more conservative than America.
She continued to rattle off the reasons she couldn’t move to Russia. “Dimitri, I love you, but my entire world is here. My father. Alexander. I want to be a part of his life as he grows up. I love that boy as if he were my own.”
And he could never give her a child. The fever had robbed him of that possibility forever.
“We could adopt children,” he said. “Natalia, I want us to walk into the future side-by-side. Come with me to Russia.”
Her look was part hurt, part curiosity, and his heart ached because he suspected what she was about to say.
“Can’t you stay here? Has it been that awful?”
Noise from the street leaked into her house. Even in her father’s mansion, the noise was ever-present. The city felt tight and congested and, yes, awful. He could never be at home here, but he had other reasons for needing to go back to Russia.
“If the czar restores my land and titles, I can use my influence to make sure the treaties are honored. I will need to be in Russia to ensure that happens. I shall stay in New York until I receive official word about the restoration of my title and estates, but then I must return home.” He cupped her cheeks between his palms, trying to memorize every facet of her face. It didn’t seem possible that this could be the end. “I don’t know what is ahead for us.”
“I don’t either.” Then she brightened and pulled away. “But I know what will happen for the next few minutes.” She crossed the room to the table that held her bell-shaped phonograph and began cranking the lever. “Brahms,” she said with satisfaction, and moments later, she placed the needle on the rotating disc, filling the dreary room with symphonic magic.
“Isn’t it a miracle that so much joy can be immortalized on that little bit of pressed wax?”
“Indeed it is, dearest Natalia.”
He moved to stand behind her, and they held each other, listening to Brahms in the rain.
Natalia snapped awake in the middle of the night with the perfect idea to capitalize on Dimitri’s triumph at Carnegie Hall.
Music could move the human soul. The few moments while Maxim Tachenko serenaded the elite audience at Carnegie Hall had been powerful, but it was already fading from the collective imagination of sympathetic New Yorkers. That emotion could be stoked again. Why not commission a recording of the song and distribute it all over the city? All over the country?
She rolled from bed, yanked on a robe, and darted down the steps to her phonograph and the stack of records beside it.
Natalia understood how musical recordings were made because she once considered investing in a record company for the bank. She rejected the proposal because the process was expensive, risky, and had a slow rate of return.
She hugged herself in the chilly night air and smiled. What was the point of being born with a fortune if it couldn’t be deployed to do something good? A shaft of bright hope pierced her veil of despondency. Commissioning a recording of “Waves of the Amur” would use her talents as a businesswoman and Dimitri’s budding appeal with the public. It would keep the pressure on the czar to deliver on his promise to reaffirm the 1858 treaty.
All she had to do now was track down the notoriously fickle Maxim Tachenko and convince him to cooperate in the recording.
28
Dimitri was gratified at how quickly Natalia’s mood lifted now that they had a mission. Her idea to make a recording of “Waves of the Amur” was excellent, provided they could get Tachenko’s cooperation. The reclusive violinist had retreated to his lake house for the rest of the summer, where he lived like a hermit when he wasn’t on tour. Luckily, Natalia’s cousin had a summer cabin on the same lake and was friendly with the difficult violinist.
One week after the concert at Carnegie Hall, Natalia made arrangements to visit Gwen and her husband at their lake house. They used Oscar’s carriage for the one-hour drive north of the city. The windows of the carriage were open, and the peaty, green scent of the deeply wooded forest permeated the air as they neared their destination.
“I like this place,” Dimitri said. Sunlight filtered through the green canopy of foliage, and the twisty paths cutting through the woods reminded him of home. “I can see why your cousin would prefer to live here rather than in the city. The air smells good.”
Natalia shook her head. “They live in downtown Manhattan,” she said. “Gwen is working on a doctorate at New York University, and Patrick is a lawyer in one of the rougher parts of the city. They only come to their cabin for a few weeks a year.”
The carriage lurched as it turned onto a graveled path so narrow that tree branches scraped the outside of the coach, but soon they arrived at a wide clearing before the cabin. Dimitri handed Natalia down from the carriage and marveled at the home. It was no humble cabin but was more like one of the chalets of Switzerland, a multistory home of wood with peaked rooflines, balconies, and stone chimneys.
The rustle of leaves mingled with the warble of birdsong, and a surge of well-being filled him. He propped his hands on his hips and looked up at a patch of shockingly blue sky overhead.
“What a glorious day the Lord has sent to us!” he boomed. “Look, the cherry plum trees have begun to bloom. Does anything smell more heavenly than the first cherry plum flowers of summer?”
“Good afternoon, Count Sokolov,” a wry voice said, and he turned to greet Natalia’s cousin Gwen, who wore a long braid of blond hair over her shoulder. She looked too delicate for her rugged husband, who towered well over six feet.
“I once promised you a bottle of perfume, didn’t I, Gwendolyn?”
It seemed like another lifetime, but it had only been a year ago when he conversed with Natalia’s cousin during one of their marathon wire exchanges. He had teased Gwen about her blunt, unappealing nickname and insisted on calling her Gwendolyn. She sent him a recipe to distill the fragrant juniper berries that grew near his outpost into a perfume, and he had managed to produce it during the long, dark Siberian nights. That bottle of perfume, along with everything else he’d owned, was abandoned after he was arrested at the Amur River.
She smiled at him. “I thought you had forgotten that.”
“I have forgotten nothing of my conversations with Natalia,” he said. “They were happier times.”
“Happy?” Gwen asked in surprise. “We were given to understand that you were lonely and miserable in Siberia.”
Had he been miserable? It was a more innocent time, when all he worried about was how to fill the hours while battling loneliness and cold, but pride in what he had accomplished during those years was a form of joy too.
“Sometimes our best memories are born during our harshest trials,” he said. “They become happy only in hindsight.”
Gwen sent him a smile of bittersweet understanding before gesturing him toward the house. “Come out to the back porch and tell us about it,” Gwen said. “We’re about to have lunch.”
Dimitri followed her through the house to a porch overlooking the lake. A luncheon had been set out on the picnic table, but he had no interest in it. All he wanted to do was wrangle an introduction to Maxim Tachenko and persuade him to record “Waves of the Amur,” but Gwen was adamant that it was impossible.
“He’ll never agree to do it,” she said as she poured lemonade into glasses. “Once he retreats to his lake house for the summer, he turns away all guests. He battens down the hatches, takes in his welcome mat, and lives like a monk. He is a complete recluse.”
Her husband was equally adamant. “Old Mrs. Johnson learned that the hard way last summer when she put a cherry pie on his doorstep in honor of the Fourth of July, and he blasted it to pieces with a shotgun. He’s a fussy artist with an insanely irrational streak.”
“He is a patriot,” Dimitri insisted. “That man was driven out of Russia because he couldn’t resist stoking the revolutionary fire. A man like that might like to start a little conflagration over here as well. Which house is his?”
He scanned the opposite side of the lake and identified Tachenko’s house even before Gwen pointed to the gabled roof peeking through the woods. It was a classic Russian dacha, painted pale blue with white gingerbread trim. A rickety wooden fence surrounded an overgrown garden and a profusion of wildflowers.
“We should go over there,” he said. “We are accomplishing nothing sitting here, discussing why he will not cooperate. I shall go ask him.”
Patrick stood. “Not without backup. I’m serious about that man’s irrationality.” He looked at Gwen. “We’ll need you to come with us to soothe his ire. Let’s go.”
Natalia was surprised by the shabby condition of the famous violinist’s house and garden. The picket fence needed a coat of paint, and the eaves on one side of the porch listed at a dangerous angle. The garden was a mess, full of unkempt wildflowers and vines crawling along the fence. She hoisted her skirts to hop along the stepping-stones barely visible in the overgrown grass. Gwen pointed out the lilac shrubs she had saved last year, but it was impossible to pay attention because a violin solo coming from an open window held Natalia captivated. It was a Mendelssohn solo but heavily embellished with improvisational riffs and cadenzas that felt like joy itself shaking off its cocoon and coming to life.
She looked at Dimitri, who stilled and placed his hand over his heart, equally moved. They stood in wonder, for such music deserved complete reverence. Oh yes, she must convince Mr. Tachenko to record his music for posterity.
Gwen and Patrick had gone ahead to stand on the back porch, preparing to knock. “Are you coming?” Gwen called back to them.
The music screeched to a halt. “Go away!” a voice hollered from inside. It was followed by a string of curses in Russian, along with the sound of window sashes slamming down, one after another in rapid succession.
Dimitri raced to the one remaining window still open and leaned inside. “Mr. Tachenko, we have come to pay homage!” he announced in Russian.
Another string of curses came as the violinist stomped toward the final window, preparing to slam it down on Dimitri’s outstretched arm. Good heavens, Tachenko was wielding a baseball bat!
“Wait!” Natalia implored. “This is Count Sokolov, the hero of the Amur River.”
Tachenko reared back in surprise. He dropped the bat and held his arms wide. “Comrade!” he boomed. “Welcome to my home!”
He threw open the back door and beckoned them inside. Natalia craned her neck to admire the dacha. It wasn’t a splendid craftsman’s house like Gwen’s but like her mother always described Russian country dachas. The cedar plank walls were unpainted except for some folk patterns along the edges. Carpets in tribal patterns covered the floors, and lacy curtains framed the windows. Jugs of wildflowers sat beside a priceless Meissen figurine; a chipped mirror hung beside an oil painting framed in gilt. It was a curious mix of grandiosity and humble folk art, and she loved it.
Tachenko insisted they call him Maxim and was apologetic as he set out a paltry tea served in mismatched china.
“All I can offer is cheese and apples,” he said. “I dislike having servants underfoot and am too engrossed learning new music to bother with nonsense such as food.” Nevertheless, he did not decline Gwen’s offer to send over a few loaves of bread and a side of ham.
His jovial mood cooled when Natalia proposed a recording of “Waves of the Amur.” He wasn’t rude, but he wasn’t polite either.
“I refuse to submit to the horror of a phonograph recording. They can never capture the depth and volume and vibrations of a live performance. My music must be heard live or not at all.”
“What about people who don’t have a chance to come to a big city?” Natalia asked, but Maxim shrugged.
“This is not my concern. I cannot be a hero to the entire world.”
She was no poet, but she tried to describe the feeling she had just experienced in the overgrown garden when she caught a few passages of his music. “It was like stumbling into an enchanted glade. I felt like I didn’t need air or water, just the chance to listen and let my mind follow where that violin led me.”
He preened at her admiring words but remained adamantly opposed to letting himself be recorded. “I won’t let my music be reduced to an inferior recording. Those tinny records will never rival the sound of the real thing.”
She persisted. “But if you won’t let yourself be recorded, when you die, your music will die with you.”
