Read Online North of Boston by Elisabeth Elo - Free Book Online Page A

a family he barely mentions. As soon as he could, he went off to Moscow, hungry for the spoils of capitalism. He says he started a modeling agency; it’s more likely that he was a pimp. I’ve tried to get him to admit it, but he masterfully evades the question. In any case, one of his clients was a famous American designer, and soon he was supplying Slavic and Baltic beauties to the New York fashion world.
    My mother was one of them, a six-foot, nineteen-year-old Estonian whose parents had been deported to Siberia during the Soviet occupation. She was raised in Tallinn by a brick-laying uncle who treated her badly in ways I can only guess. Like Milosa, she fled as soon as she was able.
    They were ardent lovers from the beginning and remained so for two turbulent decades. Betting everything on her modeling career, they moved to the United States. They chose Boston, thinking they would have more peace here than in New York, but he grew bitterly jealous of her long absences, of her stratospheric rise, of so many desiring eyes upon her. The more he tried to control her, the more independent and mercurial she became, almost taunting him with her success. He wanted a traditional marriage; naturally, she refused. It wasn’t until he understood her passion for creating scents, showed her the way to make her hobby a viable and then profitable business, that she in her late twenties agreed to a legal bond, achieving with my arrival a facsimile of a stable life.
    If my mother was the heart and soul of Inessa Mark, Inc., he was the brains. He made her company happen, emphasis on
made
. His realm was in the shadows, where no one cared to look. He kept no records other than the minimum the government required, and these I suspect were mostly fictional. No one really knew what he was up to—it’s likely that he had more than one business going on. We only saw the spectacular results.
    Although my parents all but devoured each other in the realm of love, there is no doubt that their business partnership was as brilliant as they come.
    The fact is that Milosa
would
take an interest if the formula for my mother’s private fragrance was ever found. So would I. After creating L’Amour du Nord and some other perfumes for her line, Isa made a scent she never named. It was produced one bottle at a time at the factory in Grasse, according to a formula she didn’t allow to be kept on file. It was her private fragrance, worn only by her. Professionals who knew it said it was exquisite, a scent that could rival the best of what was out there. A sure moneymaker, said some. I knew it only as the smell of my mother. I couldn’t have separated the two. The fragrance belonged to her the way light belongs to a sparkling pool. The woman and the scent of the woman—both together made me feel happy, loved, and safe.
    If only a few drops of the perfume had survived, we could have subjected it to a gas chromatograph and learned the formula. But when Isa died, the women Milosa hired to clean out her room took the last remaining bottle. When accused, they flatly and volubly denied it. It still rankles me that something so precious could have been lost that way. Now whenever someone at Inessa Mark mentions Isa’s Scent, a moment of silence usually follows in honor of what might have been. It seems to me sometimes that what disappeared was not just a single perfume, but the possibility of her company someday becoming a true luxury house.
    â€”
    The ringing telephone wakes me. I grope for it.
    â€œWho hit you?” Milosa asks without preamble. Normal words such as
Excuse me for calling at two a.m., but I have something really important to say
are not in his repertoire.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWho hit you? What ship?”
    â€œOh, that. I don’t know.” I rise to one elbow, turn on the light.
    Grumbling sounds emerge from the receiver. Milosa gives a shallow cough. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 is