Ten Girls to Watch by Charity Shumway Page A

will take me home.”
    “I better let you go so you can watch out for traffic then!” he said.
    We’d reached seven minutes.
    “All right, Dad. Glad to catch up a little.”
    “Dawn,” he said, then paused, as if he were working himself up to say something big. “You know, I’m proud of you.”
    It was the first time he’d said that since I’d moved to New York.
    That one sentence meant more to me than my whole gushing love fest with Kathy Knowlton.
    “Thanks, Dad,” I said.
    “Love you, sweetie.”
    “Love you too.”

Jean Danton,
    Radcliffe College, 1960
    _________
    THE ELEGANT ORIENTALIST
A true world traveler, Jean has visited more than 30 countries. Growing up in Hong Kong helped (her father is in international business). A political science major, she has a keen interest in international relations. This summer, she will study painting and language in France. Free-time pursuits: art, poetry, and sewing. “I was wholly unprepared for Massachusetts weather.” She quickly adapted, sewing herself an enviable collection of conservative wool dresses and tweedy British jackets, spiced with Oriental silks and real jewelry. In sum, her style is both artistic and mature. Above all, Jean impresses with a real womanliness —at only 20, she seems truly wise beyond her years.



Chapter Four
    T he next day, working away in the little circle of light from my desk lamp, I tracked down three winners, including Jean Danton from 1960. She’d grown up to be just about as worldly and sophisticated as Charm had expected.
    I found her at home, in Washington, D.C. She and her husband had moved back in 1990 after spending twenty-plus years off and on stationed in Russia with the foreign service. At first she hated Russia, or the USSR, as it was back then. “All I wanted was to get back to East Asia,” she said, laughing at the memory. “I actually fought learning the language and refused to remember even the simplest words. But bit by bit the country wore me down. And my children too, I suppose. They were all speaking Russian by then.” She took her first baby steps by reading Russian poets in translation. “Anna Akhmatova, Sophia Parnok . . . they were wonderful,” Jean reminisced. “As I became better with the language, I began to read their poems in the original Russian, and that’s how I first began to translate—painstakingly poring through my dictionary.” After their return to the States, Jean translated Anna Akhmatova’s collected works, the publication released to great fanfare in the poetry community. She told me about her current project, collecting and translating works written under Stalin by female Russian poets.
    I typed fast as she spoke, trying to capture every word for my profile and hoping I’d somehow be able to interpret the gibberish of typos later. “Three of my children now live in Russia, and the oldest is here in D.C. but works on Russia-related issues with the State Department. I would never have predicted it. In our early years in Russia I would have cried if you’d told me. Russia? What an insidious love! It took root against my will, and now its vines are in and around my heart and the hearts of my family. What you grow to love . . .” She drifted off, as if she were reflecting on this all for the very first time. “That might be one of life’s biggest surprises.”
    _________
    That great, life-changing happiness could come from something you started out thinking was terrible was a pretty comforting idea. The words “you never know what you’ll grow to love” echoed in my head as I walked uptown in the cloudy August heat that night for dinner with Robert, Lily, and Ms. Rachel Link, matchmaker to millions. Of course I’d looked up Rachel’s Ten Girls to Watch profile in advance of this get-together: “Rachel Link, Rice University, ‘The Computer Whiz.’” She’d been programming since age thirteen, and by the time she hit college in the mid-nineties, Charm reported that