A handsome, suntanned man came to retrieve the
pateka
, apologized profusely, and invited Mother to join their game. Mother answered in a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish, saying that this was her first day on his beautiful beach and that she had no idea how the game was played. The man said that it would be his very great pleasure to teach her, and he helped Mother to her feet and then demonstrated how the
pateka
was put into motion by a slap with the palm.
I was immediately concerned about Mother’s diamond ring which, I feared, might come flying off during the game and be, immediately, swallowed up by the sand. I debated suggesting that she let me hold it, but, noticing how she was smiling at the man, decided that she would find any suggestion from me to be annoying and settled on just watching carefully for it to fly off. I saw Mother follow the man’s directions, giving the
pateka
a blow with her palm. But instead of the usual
smack
, I heard Mother give a squeal of pain and immediately cover her face in embarrassment as the feathered projectile flew at a right angle to its intended path and landed against a small stack of papers in the hand of a very hairy-chested man, reading from the papers in a beach chair, under an umbrella. The papers flew in all directions, and the stunned man jumped to his feet and began chasing the escaping pages.
After clamping her hand to her mouth in embarrassment for a moment, Mother joined in the chase that she had caused, as, after another moment, did her
pateka
instructor. I joined in the chase as well, and did, indeed, recover what looked like two typed carbon copies on that very thin paper that they used for multiple copies, just before they blew into the ocean.
When I returned to the man’s blanket with the pages, Mother was apologizing in her Franco-Spanish Portuguese, and the hairy-chested man, who, I now realized had a bush of thick, black hair above his longish face, was assembling his papers. “It’s nothing, Madame,” he said in French, then went on to explain that having a pateka knock the papers out of your hand was a hazard that any Copacabana beachgoer was prepared for.
Mother thanked him for his kindness over her clumsiness, then apologized to the first man for being so inept a pupil. It would be dangerous for everybody, she said, if she were to try playing the game with them, but thanked him for his invitation. Then she sat back down on our blanket.
A few minutes later, as Mother was beginning to apply suntan oil to my back, the hairy man came over and said, still in French, that if Madame and her son cared to join him on his blanket, he had a thermos of hot coffee, which was the best drink against the day’s heat.
As Mother hesitated, he said that his name was Ernesto Segiera, that he worked for some ministry of the government, that he had just come back from the “interior”—whatever that was—that he was a widower, and that he had a son just about my age. This seemed to convince my mother, and in a moment she was settling herself in the beach chair that he had vacated for her, while I busied myself with the task of digging a hole in the ever-sifting sand.
“Unfortunately,” the man apologized, his thermos bottle only had one extra cup, but Mother might want to share hers with me. Mother explained that I didn’t drink coffee, but Sr. Segiera said that it wouldn’t hurt me. His own son, who was my age, he said, had coffee every day.
I had had a taste of Kiki’s coffee on occasion, coffee into which she put three spoons of sugar and a lot of cream. I had liked it, all right, since it reminded me of coffee ice cream, which I loved. Now I wasn’t too happy about drinking from Mother’s lipstick-stained thermos cup, but I knew that refusing to even taste the man’s coffee would have been rude. Turning the cup to where it was free of lipstick, I took the obligatory sip. It was scalding hot, and it was bitter.
“Oh, it is too hot for him,” Mother said, reaching for the cup.
I resented this. While it certainly was very hot, I was sure that I had given no outward sign of my discomfort, and Mother’s assuming it to be too hot for me was an expression of her total disregard for my maturity. I deliberately took a second sip of the bitter and burning stuff.
“Why don’t you go for a swim,
Julien
,” Mother said to me in French.
I understood this as well. She didn’t want me stuttering in front of Sr. Segiera.
“He needs to be very careful,” the man said. Then he added, “I should go down and watch him.” He began to get up.
“Oh, he’s a very good swimmer, Monsieur,” Mother said. I knew that the statement wasn’t intended to compliment me as much as save Sr. Segiera the trouble of going down to the water with me.
“The undertow is tricky, Madame. Eventually he will become accustomed to it the way all the children do, but I will watch him until he gets used to it.”
I remembered now how the water had tugged at my legs the last time. The hairy man stood up.
“Then I will come too,” Mother said. The man reached for Mother’s hand and helped her to her feet. Then, he and Mother stood with the water washing over their feet, holding their coffee cups and Mother smoking a cigarette, while I dove into the waves and let them tumble me back onto the beach.
After a few minutes, I saw that Mother and Sr. Segiera were no longer standing there, and later, when I returned to the blanket, they were lying on their sides, facing each other, and Mother was telling him about our escape from the Bolsheviks.
When we were back at the hotel, and Mother was shaking the sand out of our blanket, outside the bedroom window, over the hotel lobby, she was humming some tune. Mother had difficulty carrying a tune, and this one was unrecognizable. But I had never heard her humming to herself before.
That evening Sr. Segiera picked us up in a car that I recognized as an American Chevrolet, which had a dented front fender and torn seat covers. When he saw Mother hesitate before getting in, Sr. Segiera apologized for the car’s condition, explaining that this was his own car, and that he had an “official” car which was in better condition. This seemed to make perfect sense to Mother and was something which I could ask her to explain to me later. Wearing a suit and with his black, wavy hair held down with some hair stuff and quite shiny, Sr. Segiera was actually quite good-looking.
We went to a little restaurant with fishing nets on the walls. It was there that I was introduced to a kind of seafood that I had no idea existed. It wasn’t fish, but meaty and delicious with a dipping sauce. Sr. Segiera was particularly interested in what it had been like living under Soviet occupation, before our escape, and I heard Mother tell him things that made it sound even worse than it had really been. But I was accustomed to that by now, and did not try to correct her, as I might have earlier. Sr. Segiera marveled at Mother’s courage in her determination to escape in the winter snow, when everyone told her she was crazy to even consider it, and then he said, “You make me feel as though I’m right there in Poland with you, and my heart is beating with the excitement. May I please call you, Barbara?”
“Of course you may. . . .
Ernesto
,” she said. Then they picked up their wine glasses and clinked them together.
Then Mother went on to tell him the story about her letter of introduction to Sr. O’Brien, and they both laughed at our blundering into Sr. O’Brien’s funeral. Mother also told him about the long talk she had had with Sra. O’Brien, who was Russian like my grandmother and who wanted Mother to come back in a few days and talk about doing work for her.
My ears pricked up at this last piece of information, since working for someone meant getting paid, though I had no idea what Mother could do for the senhora, since she couldn’t cook or sew or type or even write in any language but Polish. Sr. Segiera said that he knew about Sra. O’Brien, though he hadn’t met her, and called her “that crazy Russian,” at which they both laughed.
Also that evening, Sr. Segiera said that this was the first time, since his wife’s death, that he had wanted to go to dinner with a woman and that the only thing that had made it possible for him was my being along. Mother laughed a little and said that she would not have been able to go to dinner with him either, except for my presence, and then they both smiled at each other while I tried to figure out what my presence had to do with anything regarding this situation. I knew that it had nothing to do with guarding her diamonds.
The following morning, Mother settled down to solitaire and cigarettes and showed no inclination towards leaving our suite for any reason. “I’m waiting for an important telephone call,” she explained. Since Irenka and Mr. K. lived just below us, and since Mother never wanted to hear from M. Gordet again, that just left Sra. O’Brien and Sr. Segiera. My hope was that it would be the senhora in regard to Mother’s job, but my fear was that it would be Sr. Segiera.
I had seen Mother with many men, these few months, but there was something different when she was around him. For one, she didn’t immediately explain to me that he could, maybe, buy a diamond or put her in touch with somebody who could. I was afraid that Mother was beginning to like Sr. Segiera. And if she liked him, and he qualified in her judgement as a gentleman, then the diamonds that were our bread and butter, as well as our passage to America, were no longer safe.
This, I was now realizing, was what women were all about. It was what made them different from us men, and that was why men were soldiers and doctors and lawyers and engineers and policemen, while women were only wives, mothers, governesses, and cooks. As Mother had explained, when a woman liked someone, she was likely to give him anything he wanted. If they were married to each other, that was all right because it still stayed in the same family. But if they weren’t. . . .
Of course, if Sr. Segiera was a gentleman, then he probably wouldn’t ask Mother for her diamonds, which made me feel somewhat better. But what if she thought he was a gentleman, as she had thought M. Gordet to be, and didn’t realize that he wasn’t till too late?
But there was nothing more I could do about it now except be concerned, so I suggested that we contact Irenka to ask if she wanted to go to the beach with me, while Mother waited for her call. But Mother said that she might need me right after the call, when it came. This sounded ominously as though my fears regarding the senhor had proven correct.
Then, as though she had been reading my mind, though I knew that Mother did not have that power, and without looking up from her solitaire, Mother said, “You did like Sr. Segiera, didn’t you?” She had said it in that way she had of saying something that I wasn’t sure she even realized that she was saying it. Then, in a much more definite tone, she added, “You remember that he has a son your age, don’t you?”
If this was supposed to make me look more favorably on the senhor, it wasn’t working. My experiences with boys my age had not been successful. And it wasn’t that I disliked the senhor. If he and Mother were to get married and keep the diamonds in the family, even though we wouldn’t really need them anymore, since he would be supporting us with his earnings, that would be perfectly all right.
“H. . . e s. . . eems v. . . ery n. . . ice,” I said. I hoped that Mother noticed that by dragging my words out, I wasn’t actually stuttering. But I wasn’t sure Mother had even heard me, because she was slapping the cards down hard, which meant that the solitaire wasn’t going well.
I had become pretty accustomed to spending long hours in a hotel room, but that didn’t mean that I enjoyed it. Now I tried keeping busy by practicing making my brass washer appear and disappear, but I had become so good at it, that that got old very quickly. I tried explaining to Meesh how different women were from men, but I had found that, since Meesh did not usually contribute to the conversation, talking to him was only fun when I felt a real need to talk to him, and not when I needed something to do. I even tried writing a poem, but, as with Meesh, with no inner need to write a poem at that point, that didn’t go anywhere either. Finally, I did wrest from Mother permission to go into the bathroom, which was on the other side of the bedroom, and, closing both doors behind me, play my harmonica very quietly. Since the toilet did not have a lid that I could sit on, I dragged a chair in from the living room and passed several hours alternating between picking out tunes on the shiny instrument and remembering my beach experience with Irenka.
At lunch time I was dispatched to a little place across the street to bring back some sandwiches, and instructed to look both ways before crossing the thoroughfare. Then, in the afternoon, Mother allowed me to go down to the street again and walk around the block, as long as I didn’t cross any streets, didn’t dally, and came back up immediately. I was allowed to repeat this as many times as I wanted, so long as I checked in after each circuit. The phone call, however, did not come.
Then, on the day that she was supposed to do it, Mother called Sra. O’Brien, and they made an appointment for the next day, when the senhora would send a car to bring Mother to her house.
This time, Mother arranged for me to spend the day with Irenka, and I couldn’t have been more delighted. Apparently, Mr. K. also had a meeting to go to, because, when Mother dropped me off at their suite on the floor below ours, he was tying his tie in the mirror in the bedroom, while Irenka, still in her bathrobe, was ironing his tan suit jacket in the front room. Over this, they carried on a conversation in very slow and labored Portuguese. From the fact that he was addressing her as
Senhora
and she addressed him a
Senhor
, I understood that they must be practicing the language and immediately realized that this was something that Mother and I could be doing as well.