51 pages • 1 hour read
The Secrets We Kept
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Symbols & Motifs
Clothes
The importance of clothing appears throughout the story, not only as an element of spy-craft but also as a signal of who one is. In the first chapter for Irina, her choice of a wool skirt versus linen brings her grief as she tries to prevent sweat marks with paper towels. Once she begins fieldwork lessons, she learns the principles for evading attention, such as avoiding excessive makeup and conspicuous clothes and accessories: “[Her] instructions were to dress well but not too well, to look nice but not too nice” (113). Being “nondescript” is the goal, though she struggles a bit when the venue for her test, the Mayflower Hotel, is posher than most of her clothing. The Agency provides her with a Chanel bag to do her carrier work, and she grips it “like a talisman” (114). It is a symbol of her assuming a new identity, one more stylish than what she’s used to.
While clothing does not make someone a new person, it can act like a new feathers or a costume, something that signals a class, profession, or even a story. Irina’s nun outfit is an obvious example, but so, too, is the clip-on tie that Sally and Irina spot on a man in the park. It’s not just a simple accessory; it’s potentially a signifier of the man’s not having a spouse or a connection to his father. Right after Irina meets Sally, she buys an expensive blouse, “something that looked like something Sally Forrester might wear” (164), to be seen as someone on Sally’s level, thus worthy of her attention, or to make herself more like the beautiful, confident person that she yearns to be. In one scene, Irina is wearing “new long camel-hair coat with the brown collar and the red leather gloves Teddy had given her” (222). We learn that the coat was a gift from Sally; thus she is wearing gifts from both of her lovers.
Sally derides the gloves as knockoffs, an insult aimed more at Teddy than the actual gloves. Under the gloves is the engagement ring from his grandmother, which is beautiful but “two sizes too big, and [she] hadn’t gotten around to having it properly fitted” (216). The wrong size is a symbol for the poor fit of them as a married couple, and the engagement slips off Irina almost as easily as the ring. That it hasn’t been resized symbolizes the limits of Teddy’s knowledge of Irina’s body (their lack of physical intimacy) as well as Irina’s reluctance to plan for or think about the wedding. The Pool’s gift of a black lace negligee causes Irina to cry, not out of gratitude for the gift but out of her conflicted feelings toward Teddy and the marriage.
Tangentially related to the symbol of clothing are Irina’s mother’s profession as a seamstress of lovely dresses and the Soviet agent’s front as a dry cleaner. In essence, Irina’s mother is sewing her version of America with beaded prom dresses and bridal gowns. Through her work, she becomes part of the community, even though both she and Irina mostly wear homemade, plain clothes. The fake dry cleaner, who can “get any spot out, […] Ink, wine, blood” (188), gives Sally the opportunity to remove the stain of Henry from her mind. She defects, thus cleansing herself of the old boys’ club that so disrespected her. As one of the novel’s core symbols, clothing helps develop two of its key themes: Clothing is another form of gendered Female Soft Power and Hidden Talent and can embody Private and Public Loyalty and Betrayal.
Hidden Identities
A novel about spies is sure to involve secret identities, but there is another layer of the motif of hiding in this book. Not only does Irina learn to assume an identity to do her job as a carrier, but she gradually learns who she really is and that the real Irina needs to hide an important part of herself.
For her test at the Mayflower, Irina tells herself “to project confidence, to become someone who belonged with the well-heeled set—to become my cover, to become Nancy” (114). When she receives lessons from Sally, Sally chides her for thinking that she could just change her outfit to become someone new. She reminds her that the change comes from within. Sally, who started life as “a poor kid from Pittsburgh,” was successfully “a zookeeper’s assistant, the second cousin of the Duchess of Aosta, an appraiser of Tang Dynasty porcelain, the heiress to the Wrigley’s gum empire, a receptionist” (174). Part of the secret to success is knowing the cover identity in a detailed way: “whether she ate toast or eggs for breakfast, whether she took her coffee black or with milk, whether she was the type of woman to stop in the street to admire a crossing pigeon or shoo one away in disgust, whether she slept nude or in a nightgown” (186). The other part of the secret, according to Sally, is that to “become someone else, you have to want to lose yourself in the first place” (186). This raises the question of why Sally wants to lose herself.
A probable answer is that, as a lesbian in the 1950s, Sally yearns for a life that society makes very difficult to attain. She knows of other homosexual people “who’d gotten engaged and married and even had children to cover their tracks, to avoid arrest, to live a ‘normal’ life” (204), but she can’t tolerate the idea of Irina doing the same. Instead of giving in to the hidden identity, Sally opts for the safer choice of breaking off the relationship. The stories of people who were arrested, fired, or died by suicide because of their sexuality haunt Sally, who observes that the “Red Scare had dwindled, but a new one had taken its place” (185). She is eventually outed and fired, and Irina narrowly avoids a similar fate, but at the end it is possible that both found a new life, under new names, where they could live together openly.
Birds
Birds frequently appear in literature because they carry many possible meanings as symbols. For Olga in the Gulag, birds appear in her dream the night before Stalin dies. They aren’t “the white doves I’d been longing for—which the women of the camp believed signaled one’s imminent release—but […] black crows, thousands sitting in rows like chess pawns in an empty concrete lot” (85). The birds thus also symbolize the power of many individuals living freely, whether to escape Soviet Russia or gender or sexuality oppression. They are pawns—weak when they obey but strong when they fly freely. Olga’s dream-self claps her hands to scatter them to no avail until something causes them to take flight and they “swar[m] into a beating cloud that cover[s] the moon” (85). The white doves, beautiful and often a symbol of peace, here are associated with release, whether from the Gulag or from a life of suffering. The black crows, however, are pawns when they refuse to live freely. Coming on the eve of Stalin’s death, Olga may view them as oppressed citizens of Stalinism and the Communist Party.
Sally’s moniker “the Swallow” is a term for a seductive female agent. The male equivalent is known as a “raven.” The choice of bird terminology relates to birds as communicators or messengers. Sending and receiving messages and gathering secret information is the work of a spy. The drunken men who taunt Olga from the street, likely instigated by the KGB, sing a folk tune called “Black Raven.” Olga is again confronted with dark bird imagery.
Around Boris, there are happier-seeming birds. He seeks the chattering magpies and would miss them if he left Russia. He contemplates an old man tossing seeds to pigeons and notes that when “the man ran out of seeds, he threw torn bits of newspaper, hoping the birds wouldn’t know the difference and stay near him just a while longer” (96). This speaks to the loneliness of his situation before Olga returns from Potma. He regards the pigeon-feeding as somewhat pathetic, as the man runs out of good and proper things to feed them. Perhaps Boris feels that way about Olga, who has suffered greatly because of him, yet he can’t or won’t give her everything she needs from him.
Finally, Irina spots an owl while she waits for Chaucer in the churchyard. She observes, “She was a regal bird, there on her throne, poised to pass judgment and carry out the sentence herself. […] To operate fully under instinct was a gift given to the animals; how much simpler life would be if humans did the same” (215). An owl is a symbol of wisdom, and here Irina links the wisdom to acting instinctually. Her instincts lead her to a romantic relationship with Sally, but unlike the owl, humans have social strictures that prevent them from acting in their nature. Humans are more akin to pawn-like crows in this case.
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