It was also enough for her mother, who was never going to win a Tony for Warmest Parent and sometimes made Gypsy’s mother, Mama Rose, look like an absolute slacker when it came to stage parenting, to stop allowing dessert or chocolate in the home. She began to obsess about her daughter’s complexion and weight, and to start choosing all of her daughter’s clothing. She hired a governess for the child, a statuesque thirty-something burlesque queen whom both Billy and David thought was beautiful and, yes, insane. She was ferocious, and the teenage boys felt bad when they watched the beauty and exercise regimes to which she subjected Katie, and the way food （often terrible food） became a reward. In theory, the woman had experience as both a stylist and nutritionist, but David and Billy were sure that her “training” had been at places like Minsky’s. Makeup sat like spackle in the deeper lines and crevices of her face.
The two boys were seventeen when Katie’s first show opened in 1946. The war had ended before they were needed, and, in hindsight, the two of them had been more focused on the fact that soon they would go to college and not, thank God, to Iwo Jima. David’s father did something vague for the Office of Strategic Services and was constantly traveling to Washington, D.C., for meetings, but his precise responsibilities existed behind an opaque curtain of spy craft and bureaucracy, and that was as close as either David or Billy ever got to the war. But a kid like Katie? David had thought she was utterly oblivious to the veterans coming home without an arm or a leg, or the images that Eisenhower had filmed in color at Buchenwald. She was a sheltered child, and she had seemed too absorbed by what her mother referred to some mornings as her future and some afternoons as her career. It had seemed to him that, pure and simple, she was about as shallow and mercenary as Glenda Stepanov. Billy and he shared a lot, but Billy, back then, wasn’t capable of revealing how miserable his sister was; Billy likely feared that he had already told him too much about how secretly horrible both of his parents were.
It was only when David met Katie again in California, years later, that he understood how mistaken he’d been and how profoundly he had underestimated her. She was a good actress at least in part because of the scars and wounds from her childhood, and because, yes, she had indeed seen those World War II veterans without arms and she had wept alone in her bedroom after she had watched the footage from the death camps in a newsreel at the cinema. She’d told him on their first date in Hollywood that her parents had distant cousins—third cousins, maybe even fourth, she really didn’t understand the genealogical terminology for relatives that many persons removed—who had been killed by the Nazis in Russia. They were dining in a dim, candlelit corner of the restaurant. They had been brought there through the back alley and then through the kitchen. It was the only way that Katie Barstow could have even a semblance of privacy. The head chef and a chief waiter had bowed deferentially, despite the chaos in the kitchen, as the ma?tre d’ had escorted them through the madness. But still, Katie had warned him that their pictures would be snapped the moment they finished dinner and left the restaurant, returning to the alley, where David had surreptitiously been allowed to park. She prepared him to squint against what she called a galaxy of exploding suns: the flashbulbs.
“Why Barstow?” he asked her, after the sommelier had uncorked the second Chianti. The fellow smiled without opening his mouth as he poured, the grin all lips and no teeth. “Your parents were never blacklisted during the McCarthy hearings, despite all that hearty Russian blood coursing inside them. Inside you.”
“No,” she agreed. “They were lucky.”
“My father thought it was madness, but he’s always been very clear: don’t underestimate the Russians. Not ever. The Soviets are much better at spying than we’ll ever be. He says they’re a far more insidious foe than the Nazis, who quite literally wore their horribleness on their sleeves.”
“Really? They’re that good?”
“According to my father,” he said. He knew not to tell her any more. At least not yet. He supposed that he’d take some suspicions to his grave. “So, tell me: why?”
“Why did I change my name or why did I change it to Barstow?”
He shrugged. “Both, I guess.”
“It was the studio’s idea. When they signed me. They wanted a name that sounded more vanilla.”
“More American.”
“I suppose. And yes: less Russian. Not Russian.”
“And they came up with Barstow?”