Away from Home (32 page)

Helen laughed. “Hercules!”

Mrs. Penny drank her whisky sour. She lowered her voice and looked around carefully. “Did you ever notice those Brazilians, how sneaky they are? You can’t do business with them without a contract. In America all you have to do is shake hands. But not here. And they all have mistresses.”

“You learned all that in two weeks?” Helen said.

“Oh, I knew it in two minutes. I can always size up a person by looking at his face. I’ve been around, you know, fifty-seven years. I wouldn’t trust one of them. What do you expect? It’s hot all the time. Something happens to the mind when you’re in tropical heat all the time.”

“It gets quite cool here in the winter,” Helen said.

“I knew she was miserable,” Mrs. Penny said, ignoring her. She put her arm around Mil. “I knew it from her letters. I don’t care how old she is, she’s still my baby. Aren’t you?”

Mil smiled shyly. “We don’t have to discuss it now,” she said softly. “We’ll talk about it later.”

Helen had never thought she would see Mil Burns so gentled and changed. It seemed as if when she was away from her mother, her mother lived on in her, but when she was face-to-face with the dynamic original the imitation simply faded away. “What about Phil?” Helen said.

“He can just shift for himself,” Mrs. Penny said airily. “I ask you, what kind of a man brings his wife and little children out here in a barbaric country like this? There are plenty of good jobs at home. So he won’t be a millionaire. So what! A million dollars is going to do him a lot of good when he’s a hopeless invalid for the rest of his life with dysentery.”

Mil smiled, a smile compounded of embarrassment and sympathetic approval. “Helen likes it. Don’t disillusion her, Mother. She’ll find out.”

“I just think you’re all wrong,” Helen said.

Mil’s mother leaned forward and touched Helen’s hand. Her voice when she spoke was kindly, in a mother-knows-best way, but there was steel underneath. “Do you think you can ever cure dysentery once you’ve got it? It stays forever in the alimentary canal. I read that in a magazine.”

The waiter came past their table and glanced at them, but Mil shook her head. “We’re not going to have any more drinks,” she said. “We’re going to have lunch now.”

“I haven’t felt well since I got here. I don’t know, I just don’t feel well.”

“Would you like to have lunch with us, Helen?”

“I have to have lunch with Julie and Roger alone today,” Helen said quickly. “I promised them.”

“Just wait until your children stop speaking English,” Mrs. Penny said darkly. “Just wait until they’re ashamed of you because
you’re
the foreigner. You tell her, Mil.”

“I’ll chance it.”

Mrs. Penny rose heavily to her feet. “I’m going to the … what you call it …
balnerio
. You can order me a cheese sandwich, baby.”

Mil looked at her mother with concern until she had disappeared into the main dining room. Then she brightened and seemed more her old self. “Don’t mind Mother. She’s a little disillusioned.”

Helen wanted to say something about prejudice, but she was afraid of getting into an argument. What would be the use? She felt suddenly sorry for Mil, and for Phil Burns, and even for the mother. “What did you tell Phil?”

“He thinks it’s only for a visit,” Mil said. “I had to tell him that. I might really come back in two months—I don’t know.”

“Don’t go,” Helen said. “I know it’s none of my business, but please don’t go. If you go you’ll plan to come back but somehow you never will. I just know it. I don’t know how or why I know it, but I just do.”

“I know,” Mil said quietly. “You’re right.” She smiled, but surprisingly there were tears in her eyes. “Listen, it’s not easy to leave your husband.”

“And for what—for
snow?
”

“For me.”

“For you?”

“For
me
,” Mil said. “For
me
, for
me
.” She was jabbing at her chest with her thumb as if the real essence of herself, whatever it was, were an organ inside her something like her heart. “It’s different for them, for the men. They have something—their work. They have friends. They
do
things. But what about me? I can’t sit here for the rest of my life and watch my kids starting to speak English with a foreign accent, wanting to settle down here when they’re grown because it’s all they know. We have only one life to live. I don’t want it to be here where I don’t belong. I want to be home, in my
real
home. I don’t want to play cards all day in a place where you can’t get an American book until it’s eight months old. I have to take care of myself and my kids. If he won’t, then I will.”

Why, it’s almost as if she’s not talking about her husband at all, Helen thought in surprise. It’s not as if he’s someone she really knows and loves at all, but just someone she once made a bargain with: you do thus-and-such and I’ll do this-and-that. Love, honor and cherish, and a house in the suburbs. In sickness and in health till a cockroach do us part. There must be dozens of wives, Helen thought, who think all the things that are advertised in the bridal magazines are an identity. And they’re perfectly happy as long as they have everything that everyone else has, or perhaps a little better. But as soon as it’s different they feel deserted, cheated.… But maybe I’m being unfair. After all, maybe there’s something between Mil and Phil that she’d never mention to me. Maybe it’s something personal. I don’t know. We know so little about our friends’ private lives. They tell us so much, but they tell us all the wrong things. We never really know
why
. Maybe it’s because so many of them really don’t know why themselves.

“I’ll sit with you until your mother comes back, but then I have to go,” she said. “Julie and Roger will be starved.”

“We don’t see each other much lately,” Mil said. “It’s a shame. And now I’m leaving. What do you do with yourself all the time?”

“Well, there was Carnival.”

“Oh, before that. And lately. You haven’t been to the club for weeks.”

“I go to the beach quite a lot. And my children like to go to the beach every few days as a change, and then they have lunch at home. The days pass.”

“I always thought you and I would be better friends,” Mil said. “We have a lot in common. We’re certainly brighter than the average, we both went to college, we could discuss things. You go around with Margie Davidow a lot, don’t you?”

“She’s my best friend in Brazil.”

“Oh, she’s sweet. She’s a very sweet girl.”

Helen smiled. “That means you don’t like her.”

“Oh, I like her. I just don’t see you two together. Why, you two wouldn’t even have ever met if you were back home in New York.”

“Then I’m glad we’re here,” Helen said. If there was one thing she disliked it was someone who told you that you and she ought to be good friends because you were both so much more intelligent than anyone else.

“Well,” Mil said wryly, “nothing ever turns out the way we want it to. But we try, don’t we? We try damned hard.”

She had that faintly superior look on her face; the Iowa State Corn Queen for ever and ever, with a sense of humor as a bonus and a diploma to go with it, and don’t you ever forget it—and yet, for the first time there was a crack in the façade, as if Mil Burns were on the verge of learning that it is possible to laugh at oneself without having the whole room join in the chorus.

“I guess we do try,” Helen said wistfully. “But half the time we do the wrong thing.” She was not talking about her abortive friendship with Mil now, and she knew Mil wasn’t either. For herself, she was thinking with a growing disturbance about Sergio, because lately from time to time the memory of him kept coming back whenever she was alone. It frightened her. During Carnival she had been sure he was out of her life for ever. She felt as if she had lost her mind and found it again in one climactic week. But now that Carnival was over, and she was rested, and the whole week seemed as if she had imagined it in a fever dream, she was right back where she had been before. It was Sergio she thought of, things he had said, the way he looked, and no matter how much she hated herself for it she could keep the memories away only by sheer effort. She wondered how it could be possible for a woman to be in love with two men at once in different ways. Men, of course, could manage it, and did. But women? Women weren’t supposed to be like that; it was unnatural.

“Do you feel better, Mother?” Mil asked. Mrs. Penny sat down heavily in her chair.

“I have to leave now,” Helen said, rising. “Goodbye, Mrs. Penny. I hope the rest of your stay is better than the beginning.”

“I can’t wait to go, that’s all.”

“I’ll call you before I leave,” Mil said. “So long.”

“Thank you for the drink.”

Mil’s mother did not seem in the least reluctant to see Helen go, in fact, she seemed rather glad. She leaned closer to Mil and took her hand. “Now when we get home …” she was saying happily. Helen did not hear any more as she walked away quickly to see the fresh, lovely faces of her two children.

CHAPTER 16

As February came to an end Helen Sinclair remembered the tag ends of other Februarys in other places, and how she had felt. It seemed as though every end of February was the turning point of the year, the ebb when nothing could become colder or gloomier or more miserable, and from then on everything was better. She remembered slush in Westport, dangerous roads, the children at home cranky with colds and tired of all the therapeutic educational little games she had invented for them, the floors of their rooms constantly littered with cut-out colored paper, their hands on the quilts sticky with library paste, their noses running, their voices shrill with petulance despite their hoarseness. And then she herself always caught whatever cold the children had, but much worse, and being the head of the household during the day she could not allow herself to go to bed. She would have a headache and sore throat and feel ugly, and there was always something: the oil burner broke down one February, Julie’s Siamese kitten was killed by a car driven by a twelve-year-old boy with no driving license, and one February their substitute cleaning lady (the regular one had the flu) disappeared, taking with her, of all improbable things, considering the jewelry and heirlooms in the house, their portable television set. But the children considered the loss of the TV a much greater tragedy.

It seemed as if every February Helen had offered up a little prayer to no one in particular, to herself perhaps. “If I can just get through
February
everything will be all right.” Then small green shoots would appear through the frozen crust of earth, and the deathly silence that held the land would be broken by the music of water running in brooks and children shouting at play in front and back yards all over the farm country of Connecticut; the barns that were decorated now with nonobjective art and rewired antique lamps and Swedish-glass martini pitchers.

In Rio Helen did not have that late-February feeling at all. How could you? The sun was hot, the beach was crowded, every day was exactly like every other day. Her friends and family at home sent her envious letters. She sent them cheerful ones. But she had a strange feeling inside, as if something were going to happen, and although she knew it was she who could prevent it she was not at all sure she wanted to.

She had taken Julie to the dressmaker to have two new bathing suits made. She had finally persuaded Julie that little girls
had
to wear bathing suits with tops, even if on top they weren’t different from little boys. It was funny, because Julie genuinely liked to dress up in full-skirted flowered dresses with crinolines and sashes with bows. Helen thought she still might be a little jealous of Roger. To compromise and make the entire prospect more glamorous she told Julie she could have a bikini, and had a matching one made for herself. Children, she thought secretly, were really the only people who could wear bikinis without looking dreadful, and yet she remembered the way she had felt in the swimming pool that night of Baby Amaral’s party, when she had worn the borrowed bikini and had met Sergio. It was really Sergio she was thinking of when she had the bikini made, because for some reason now she wanted to do and wear everything that reminded her of the times with him. Surely there wasn’t much harm in that—it was a small, private aberration. But when she came home from the dressmaker the maid said a man had telephoned and left no name.

“He called for Senhor Bert, you mean.”

“No, Dona Helen, he called for you.”

It could have been anybody. Or, more likely, the maid had made a mistake. But Helen knew it had been Sergio, and she could not help her feeling of excitement that overrode the resentment she felt at his having been reckless enough to intrude on her home. She had a strange double feeling about him. He was unfair, he was too confident, he did not care if he caused trouble and embarrassment if the maid had told her about the phone call in front of Bert. And yet she was sure he must miss her a great deal if he took the chance, and knowing that made her feel a wave of tenderness toward him.

“He was Brazilian, not American,” the maid went on helpfully.

“Thank you.”

“Is nothing.”

Helen started to walk away.

“All your friends who telephone, I can not understand them when they speak. Their accents are too bad. But this man spoke very well. He was Brazilian.”

“Thank you.”

“Is nothing,” the maid said, pleased. Sergio had evidently made a great ally out of her.

“Please write messages
down
,” Helen said. “Don’t
tell
me.”

“You
know
I cannot write, Senhora. It is not necessary to write. I remember everything.”

“I’m happy.”

“Is nothing.”

Helen went into Julie’s room. Julie was sitting at the small table next to the window working on an enormous jigsaw puzzle from America. Helen’s mother had sent one for each of the children as one of their Christmas presents, but between Helen’s parents and Bert’s parents, all of whom evidently thought they were doing missionary work among the natives, there had been so many Christmas presents that Julie and Roger were just now getting to use the last of them.