At home, we faced hostilities of our own. The Washington rumor mill had once again turned on us, with the club gossips and newspapers salivating over a rumored feud between my husband and the leadership in the State Department. There were whispers that Joe had gotten his post only because of my money, that the president was favoring him as a friend over many other career diplomats who were better suited and more deserving. I frowned as I read it all, sick in bed. Columns claiming that Joe and I saw the ambassadorship as a chance to frolic across Europe, attending coronations and luxuriating aboard our yacht. They blamed me for the fact that Joe and I were at home in Washington, painting me as a coddled and domineering wife, a dilettante who had wanted the prestige of a Parisian assignment but refused to take up the Russian post I had been given.
“With friends like these, who needs enemies?” I grumbled, throwing down the morning’s newspapers. “I’m starting to wonder whether the Commies like us more than the Americans.” I felt dizzy, as was so often the case when I tried to rise from bed in the morning, but I knew I had to get up. There were too many things to do: Prepare for the upcoming Christmas holiday, during which time Deenie would be coming home. Wrap the presents I was planning to send up to Adelaide and Eleanor in New York. And pack; I needed to start packing my trunks.
The truth was that Joe and I were remaining at home in Washington for the holidays, but we knew we had to return to Russia after the New Year. Ill or not, I was not going to supply more fodder for the papers that were claiming we had abandoned our post. That we’d bought ourselves the position and therefore didn’t feel compelled to actually do the work. Even though I was still as sick as I’d been when I’d arrived back home for treatment, even though Joe’s stomach still roiled with pain, we needed to get back to the Soviet Union. No one would accuse me of shirking my duty.
* * *
We arrived in the dead of winter, February, to a new chill in both weather and relations. “Roosevelt warned me things would be different,” Joe said, speaking to me outside of the car but before we crossed the threshold of Spazzo House, knowing that the instant we set foot back inside, our every word would be recorded. “Before, it was just the fear of a possible war. Now it is the inevitability of an armed conflict. Germany won’t be stopped. But we have one important mission: keep Russia away from friendship with Germany. Russia should be our ally against Hitler, if only we can convince them to trust us.”
It came as no small relief that, with time, the symptoms of my illness had in fact lessened. And when I did still feel discomfort, I did my best to channel Papa’s old determination and push my way through. But elsewhere, Joe was finding that his own determination was running into resistance. After several weeks back in the Russian capital, my husband confided to me that Litvinov, such a warm friend during our previous stay, was proving aloof this time around. Now the foreign minister was declining Joe’s invitations to lunch and failing to return his calls. Always civil enough when they happened to meet in crowds, but entirely inaccessible.
“I’ll call on Ivy,” I suggested, running the bathwater on a cold night. “I’ll invite her and Maxim to the ballet with us.”
“Good,” Joe said, nodding. “Yes, a night at the ballet with my lovely wife…who could turn that down?”
And so I made the arrangements. The show we settled on was Flames of the Revolution, and Max and Ivy arrived at the Bolshoi bundled in sable, their faces pale and subdued. We greeted them in the lobby, escorting them to the box we had taken for the evening, but the Litvinovs did not return our easy, friendly chatter as we settled into our seats. Nor did they soften as the instruments in the orchestra pit completed their warm-ups and the theatergoers trickled in, all of them stealing glances upward toward us, the infamous Americans and our guests, the revered Commissar Litvinov and his British-born wife.
When the curtains lifted and we had no choice but to sit in silence and watch the dancers as they leapt across the stage, I breathed a sigh of relief to feel the awkwardness disperse. I knew why Ivy and Maxim were holding us at such a distance, of course: Stalin had just started another round of his dreaded purges. As with his previous liquidations, nobody knew where it would lead, or when it would end. No one was safe, not even longtime friends of Stalin’s from within his own government, or their innocent family members. Max and Ivy could not trust us because, well, nobody in the Soviet Union could trust anyone.
Several days later, Joe came home from meetings at the Kremlin with a grim face, pale as parchment. I retreated into our bathroom to run the water, and Joe followed me in. “More trials today,” he whispered. “Puppet trials, of course. Dr. Pletnev was among the accused.”