Loves of Yulian (18 page)

The desk clerk rang to say that Sr. O’Brien was here, and Mother said we would be right down. Then she lit a cigarette and sat down to smoke it.

“You s..... aid w..... e’d be r..... ight d..... own,” I said.

Mother smiled. “A lady never comes ‘right down,” she said. “The gentleman should always have to wait a little. If Andre doesn’t know that yet, this will be good education for him. Remember how Ernesto, I mean Sr. Segiera, didn’t know how to treat a lady until we taught him?” I remembered the lesson “we” had administered to Sr. Segiera regarding his not calling Mother, when he was someplace that he couldn’t call her from.

Then I leaned out of the window to see Sr. O’Brien’s open car down below. I had never ridden in an open car before. What I saw down below looked like a piece of white ribbon with a red pocket in the middle, laid on the pavement in front of the hotel. A man in a blue jacket and white pants was sitting within that red pocket. On the top of his head, surrounded by thick, dark, curly hair, was a bald spot.

“I s. . . ee his c. . . ar,” I said. “It’s all w. . . hite, with r. . . ed s. . . eats.”

“Don’t look,” Mother said.

“W. . .hy n. . .ot?”

“He might see you.”

“He’s g. . . oing to s. . . ee me wh. . . en we c. . . ome d. . . own.”

“I don’t want him to see you looking out the window.”

This was getting much too complicated. I pulled away from the window and waited for Mother to finish her cigarette. Then I watched her put on and adjust her kerchief, in front of a mirror.

Sr. O’Brien’s car had a tiny back seat. It was big enough for me, but I wondered how a grownup was meant to fit into it. Mother had said, “Good morning, Andre. I’m so sorry you had to wait,” and kissed him on the cheek. Sr. O’Brien had curly brown hair, in the center of which, I knew, he had a bald spot. He also had a round face, and a little bit of a belly under his double-breasted blue jacket. The jacket had brass buttons, like a military uniform.

“It was no trouble at all,” he said. His hand felt even larger than Sr. Segiera’s, when we shook hands, and he smiled at me with a big grin. “Call me Andre,” he said to me, and I felt, right away, that he was very friendly. Also, he spoke French better than Sr. Segiera. But that was because his family was very rich and he had probably had a lot of private lessons.

I was, actually, kind of pleased at having made that deduction. It was further evidence that I was smarter than other eight-year-olds, and I suddenly realized what it felt like to feel older than your age. I wondered how old I felt like. Could it be ten? I had always wanted to be ten. I sat up a little taller in the little red seat and swung my knees to the side, as though I didn’t have enough legroom, the way Kiki had always had to put her knees to the side because they didn’t fit under the little table in our room.

Then, the car, which had been rolling at city-traffic speed, reached some open road and sped up. I felt a blast of wind on the back of my head and my hair blowing forward on my face.

This was surprising—I would have expected the wind to come from the front. Why was it coming from the back? Here was a problem for my ten-year-old mind to solve. But I couldn’t get my mind around it. Well, maybe it was a fifteen or even twenty-year-old problem.

We drove for a while, over some winding, mountain roads, and finally stopped at a restaurant with tables on a second-floor deck. I waited for Mother to get out so that I could push the back of her seat forward and get out myself, but the moment he had helped Mother to stand, Andre reached both hands into the rear seat and lifted me right out of the car.

“Oh Andre, he’s heavy,” Mother protested.

“Not for me,” Andre said. “I lift twice, three times his weight every day.”

Mother laughed.

Mother laughed a lot of times during that lunch. She and Andre both laughed, because Andre told a lot of jokes, most of which I didn’t understand. But Mother also laughed when he wasn’t telling a joke, and I realized how differently she was acting than with Sr. Segiera. With Sr. Segiera they talked about serious things—or, at least, their voices were serious, while Andre told jokes and “funny” stories, all of which Mother pretended to find
very
funny.

Several times, just as Sr. Segiera had done the day before, Andre turned his attention directly to me, asking me whether I had been to such-and-such a place yet or seen such-and-such a movie. The only one I could say, yes, to was the movie that Irenka and I had seen about the Foreign Legionnaires.

“Wasn’t it great when the only man left alive in the fort puts all the dead soldiers up on the walls, so the Arabs think the fort is well defended and don’t dare attack?” Sr. Andre said.

“Ow, that’s awful,” Mother said. “You shouldn’t encourage him to see movies like that.” But I agreed with Andre.

When Mother went to the ladies’ room, Andre said to me, “Did you hear about the dog that found a glove in the pasture?”

I had no idea where I was supposed to have heard of it, or why it was newsworthy.

“He brought it to the cow,” Andre said, “and asked, ‘Madam, did you lose your brassiere?’”

I must have turned bright red, at his use of the word. I, instantly, looked around to see if anyone was within earshot. But it was a funny story.

Then, when Mother came back, she seemed to sense that Andre and I had been talking, because she immediately told him that my stammer was the result of “malnutrition,” but that the doctor that Andre’s mother had recommended was curing it. To my surprise, Andre laughed at this. “You mean Baresky?” he said.

Mother said, “Yes.”

“Baresky’s no doctor,” he said with another laugh. “He’s a tailor from St. Petersburg with a black box, with which he’ll promise to cure anything. He’s offered to grow hair on my bald spot.”

I never had to go back to that doctor.

Driving back, Mother made Andre drive slowly, because they had had a lot to drink. In the back seat, I couldn’t hear much of their conversation, but I could hear Mother laughing frequently. She kissed his cheek again, as we said goodbye, and I saw Andre try to kiss her on the mouth, but Mother slipped her face away, with a little nervous laugh.

In the elevator, I saw the smile drop from Mother’s face and her eyes close. “I have a splitting headache,” she said. “I can’t drink.”

Mother had two types of “splitting headaches.” One kind was when she wanted me to leave her alone, the other when she had had more than one glass of wine to drink. This was the second kind. I had learned to tell them apart, but this time I could well have seen it coming.

“Wh. . . .y didn’t y. . . .ou j. . . ust p. . . ut y. . . our h. . . and o. . . ver y. . . our g. . . lass?” I asked. This was something I had seen her do many times before.

Mother turned her head, very gently, from side to side. “Because,” she said through tense lips, and I realized that it hurt her to speak and was sorry that I had asked. “I was afraid that Andre would. . . .drink that whole bottle by himself. . . .and drive us off a cliff.”

Suddenly I felt a great admiration for what Mother had done. “I w. . . ill g. . . et y. . ou a wet c. . . ompress as s. . . oon as we g. . . et to our ap. . . partment,” I said.

Mother began to say, “Thank you,” but the elevator stopped on our floor with a lurch, and I saw her cringe.

“D. . . on’t o. . . pen your eyes,” I said. “G. . . ive m. . . e y. . . our h. . . and, a. . . nd I w. . . ill l. . . ead y. . . ou.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling weakly. “My knight in shining armor.”

Ordinarily that expression would make
me
cringe. Every previous time she had said that, I had found it to be a naked plea for sympathy, usually in preparation for a request. This time, however, I was certain that it was sincere, that it was my offer that had led to it. I took Mother’s hand in mine anyway, and led her into our suite. When she had lain down on her bed, I removed her shoes.

“Oh, thank you, Yulian,” she said.

Walking on tiptoe, I went to the bathroom and returned with a wet washcloth, wrung out thoroughly, the way she liked it, and laid it over her eyes and forehead. Mother thanked me again.

Then, as I began to tiptoe into the other room, Mother took my hand and, with very feeble pressure, indicated she wanted me to sit on the bed beside her. “There is something I have to tell you,” she whispered.

I sat down and waited.

“I have to tell you something,” she said again.

“Y. . . es?” I said.

“Sra. O’Brien. . . Andre’s mother. . . Sra. O’Brien says you should be in school.”

Mother could not have surprised me more, or more unpleasantly. I had known that school would eventually come back into my life, but I had not expected that to happen until we reached America. What was the use of my struggling with Portuguese reading and writing, if we would be going to America any time now? “B. . . b. . . b. . . but a. . . .a. . . aren’t w. . . w. . . we g. . . g. . . going to Am. . . m. . . merica anymore?” I blurted.

“Yes, we’re still going to America, but the senhora says it isn’t good for a boy your age to be spending so much time on the beach with Irena, and she’s right. You should be with children your own age.”

“B. . . B. . . but. . . .” I began, but realized that I had no argument against this logic. I knew very well that there was something perverse in some of my feelings towards Irenka. How Sra. O’Brien had found out, was beyond me.

“Tomorrow. . . we will go. . . and enroll you in the school her children went to.”

“A. . . a. . . andre?”

“Yes, Andre and his sister Isabella.”

The following morning, Mother’s headache continued. It was unusual that it did not disappear overnight, but I had known it to happen. As we rode to the school in a taxi, Mother kept her eyes closed and a hand to her forehead. When I tried to ask the name of the school, she shushed me.

It wasn’t till we were in the principal’s office, that Mother could muster enough energy to return to her more normal self. There, she told the principal, in French, that we were Polish on our way to America, that we had escaped over the Carpathian Mountains into Hungary, walking eleven hours in the snow after our guide had abandoned us, and that I could speak French but very little Portuguese and that I had a very bad stutter. She also said that she was a close friend of Sra. O’Brien, whom she was helping with her memoirs and would be writing her own book once we reached America.

The principal, a man with gray hair and wearing a gray suit, said that he knew both Sr. and Sra. O’Brien very well and had been very saddened by the senhor’s death, but he knew that the senhora had an exciting story to tell, and Mother’s sounded equally exciting. He and Mother smoked several cigarettes each and drank coffee, as Mother gave him more details regarding the exciting elements of our story, giving me a chance to make certain assessments of this school, based on what I could see through the office window.

Right off the bat, I realized that this school was an improvement over my old French school. Instead of the grim, multi-story, brick, factory building with steel stairs and pitted, wooden floors of the French school, this one was a series of single-story buildings of some brightly painted, cement-like material and connected by breezeways. The buildings wound their way around a courtyard, where I could see some children, apparently enjoying outdoor recess.

Another improvement was that the pupils wore a uniform. In Warsaw I had looked forward with great anticipation to wearing the blue uniform with long pants, brass buttons, and peaked, military caps that students wore. They even marched in parades, and for several years I had visualized myself marching along our street, one of hundreds of students, all dressed alike, all in step, all belonging together. It was with unimaginable disappointment that I had learned that my French school’s uniform would not be the same, military style outfit. Instead, with incredible embarrassment, I would walk to school with Kiki in the school’s black smock, white Peter Pan collar and a beret. Kiki’s explanation that, apparently, that was the way schoolchildren dressed in France, had not mended even the slightest dent in the car-wreck of my dreams.

The uniform these Brazilian children were wearing, was, in fact, a compromise between the two. Certainly not a black smock, it also lacked the brass-button panache of the Polish version. It consisted of tan shorts and jacket, a blue shirt, and an enameled badge over the left breast. While not military, it was definitely the uniform of an institution, and I felt a sudden longing to wear it and be thus made identifiable as a full fledged member of that institution. Someday, I believed, I would become a boy scout, which was a world-wide institution, and after that, I would be a soldier.

My thrill at finally fulfilling my dream of wearing a uniform I need not be ashamed of, had made me forget the one, universal negative that stained all schools. Whatever uniform a school might or might not prescribe, it was at bottom, a collection of children. And children were always trouble. Suddenly, I realized that by this time tomorrow, I would be among those pushing, shoving, and laughing children with no idea regarding what they were pushing, shoving or laughing about, or what was expected of me. Suddenly, I found myself longing for the long days of security in our hotel suite, racking my brains for something to do.