“I’m sorry,” she said, between sobs. “I’m so glad you and your beautiful mother got out all right. Will you sit beside me?”
It didn’t much matter to me where I sat, and if it gave this woman comfort for me to sit beside her, that was the least I could do. I nodded my head.
“Here, you sit here,” she said, pulling out a chair, “and I’ll sit here.”
I sat down. The others were still standing and talking.
“Would you like something to eat or drink? Maybe some ice cream?”
I wasn’t interested in ice cream, but even if I had been, I couldn’t take anything from this poor woman who had lost so much. “N. . . o th. . . ank y. . . ou, p. . . .lease m. . . issus,” I said. .
“Oh, you poor, poor boy!” she exclaimed. “What has happened to you? You didn’t speak like that in Warsaw. What did the Bolsheviks do to you?”
I shook my head. “It w. . . asn’t th. . . e B. . . olsh. . . eviks, p. . . lease m. . . issus. I d. . . id s. . . omething b. . . ad in H. . . ungary.”
“Something bad? What are you talking about? Who told you that you did something bad? How could you do something bad? Nonsense! I will talk with your mother.”
Mother was just starting to tell our story again, and the woman stopped talking aloud. “When she is finished,” she whispered, “I will have a talk with her.”
Mother was telling about driving out of Warsaw, during the bombing, in the back of the truck that was from my stepfather, Lolek’s factory, in the middle of the night. I felt the woman’s hand reach for mine. Of course I let her hold it, though it was a little awkward, with my arm against the wrought iron arm of her chair. She bent down to me, “Wouldn’t you like a nice cup of hot chocolate?” she whispered.
I remembered the chocolate from the other evening, and I had enjoyed it. But I couldn’t accept it. I made a huge effort to say, “No thank you,” without either stuttering, or dragging the sounds out, because of how it upset her, and pretty well succeeded.
But the woman shook her head with a sad expression on her face, and I realized that my refusal was upsetting her. Maybe I should have accepted. Maybe my accepting her offering would actually make her happy. Maybe my accepting would not be taking something away from her, but, actually, doing something
for
her. I resolved to say, yes, to her next offer.
A few minutes later, the woman leaned down to me again and whispered an offer of tea. I accepted, and soon two cups and a little pot of tea were placed in front of us. My tea needed sugar, and the sugar was out of my reach. But my table companion seemed to be quite relaxed now and involved in Mother’s story, and I wouldn’t have disturbed her for anything in the world.
I had been hoping that Irenka, preferably without Mr. K., would be at the café as well, since she was also Polish, but I did not see her. Following school, the next day, I went to tell Irenka about the cafe, and that it was a meeting place for Polish people, since she seemed to be alone a lot of the time now. There was no answer to my knock, which surprised me because that had never happened before. Irenka had been there every other time I had knocked, and, now, I was very disappointed. But as I turned to head back up the stairs, the elevator door opened, and Irenka stepped out.
“You were coming to visit me,” she said.
“Y. . . es. I w. . . anted to t. . . ell you s. . . ometh. . . .ing.”
“Oh, what would that be?” she asked, but I could tell by her tone that her mind was elsewhere.
“I’ll t. . . ell you wh. . . en we g. . . et i. . . nside.”
“Oh, I can’t let you come in. Tadek is very sick, and I wouldn’t want you to become infected. Your mother would kill me. Tell me out here or save it for another time.”
“Wh. . . at does he h. . . ave?”
“Oh, the doctor has some long name for it, that I never heard of.”
So I told her about the café being a place where Polish people went, and she might meet some friends there, the way Mother did, but I didn’t want to go into the details of Mother’s story telling, standing out there in the hall. Irenka thanked me, and then shooed me up the stairs, before she would unlock her door. If it had been all right to wish for Mr. K. to get sick enough to die, I think I would have done so.
Apparently, Sr. O’Brien, Andre, kept asking Mother to go out places with him, because she would come home, sigh, roll her eyes, and tell me that
he
had asked her out again. I didn’t see what Mother’s problem was. Sure, Andre was different from Sr. Segiera, but that did not make him bad. He took us out to eat and told funny stories, which Mother did laugh at.
Once every two weeks or so, Mother would accept his invitation, though he asked her more often than that. Each time she would tell me that it was only because she didn’t want to spoil her relationship with Andre’s mother. Then she would, always, bring me along.
Since Andre was very rich and, also, the son of her employer, I doubted that my presence was really for the purpose of guarding Mother’s diamonds. Mother would usually explain my presence, to him by saying something to the effect of my being very delicate and that, with what I had been through, I could not be left alone. She also explained my stutter to him as the result of our scary escape over the Carpathian Mountains into Hungary, evidently forgetting that, earlier, she had said it was due to malnutrition. Neither explanation was, of course, true, since I didn’t begin stuttering till we left Hungary for Yugoslavia. But accustomed, by now, to being represented as either physically or emotionally delicate, I did not raise an objection.
I had never heard Mother explaining me that way to Sr. Segiera. Of course, Mother and Sr. Segiera did a lot of talking that was out of my earshot. They went out without me a lot of the time, and, even when I was along, they would often put their heads close together and talk in low voices, I supposed about things that I would have no interest in.
It was funny, but Sr. Segiera didn’t tell jokes, the way Andre told jokes, some of which I could tell were intended to amuse me, and he didn’t allow me to call him by his first name, and he usually took us out in his old Chevrolet, rather than his chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental, but I really liked Sr. Segiera better, as, I was sure, Mother did too.
One time, I noticed, with some amusement, that Sr. Segiera’s fingernails had all grown to the length that Mother prescribed for gentlemen. On the other hand, I also realized, that Mother no longer smoked in his presence.
One time, when Sr. Segiera had to fly to the “interior” again, Mother said that Andre was taking us for a motorboat ride. Now, I knew that that should have gotten me excited. Back in Poland, last summer, Kiki and I would watch the long motorboats skimming along the water, and I would long to be in the cockpit of one of them, cutting through the water with the wind blowing around me and the waves swishing by. But, right now, nothing excited me, including the prospect of a motorboat ride.
Mother had, evidently, picked up on my mood, as we waited for Andre to arrive. “It’s a motorboat ride to an island,” she said. “You’ll love it.” And as we rode down the elevator, she coaxed, “A big smile now. You know, if you think you’re going to have fun, you will.”
That was a ridiculous thing to say, and as we bumped along the wave-tops, Mother turned in the front seat, holding the kerchief around her hair, and said in Polish, “If you embarrass me today with that long face of yours, when Sr. O’Brien is trying so hard to entertain us, you will be very sorry. Just pretend you are having a good time. Look at me—I have a smile on my face. What does a smile cost? It costs nothing.”
And, here, she was right—a smile did cost nothing—but, somehow, I could not form my face into a smile, even if I had wanted to. Instead, I pressed my lips tightly together, and Mother turned away with an angry shake of the head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” she shouted to Andre, above the noise. “He’s been like this for weeks now. I’ve taken him to the doctor, and there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just decided that he’s going to give me a hard time.”
“Well, you know, Barbara, that’s how boys are,” Andre said.
And then, I suppose maybe out of habit, and forgetting that I had learned to speak French in the last few months, she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him anymore. He’s not like other children. The school principal tells me he doesn’t play with the children in school. He’s gotten into fights, knocked another boy down, and come home with skinned knees. He has no appreciation for all I’ve done for him. And then he does this just to upset me.”
And later that day, as we sat on the island, having watched a Negro man, dressed only in shorts, tie his two ankles together and climb a palm tree, to throw coconuts down for us, and I had a little glass of cocoanut milk sitting in front of me, that I didn’t want to drink, Mother whispered to me, “Andre has just told me that the ship that picks up Jewish children to take to Palestine is in the harbor, right now. We can take you to the ship straight from here.” It was a familiar ploy, but, even though I knew she was lying, the mere idea of it had always been very painful for me. “You’ll never see me again,” she continued, as she had on other occasions, knowing how that would upset me, “but you’ll be able to play with all the other children.”
She had first said it in Budapest, where there were ships tied up in the Danube and in Dubrovnik, which was right on the Adriatic Sea and in Barcelona on the Mediterranean, and even in Madrid, where there was no harbor.
I knew how to put a stop to it. In the past, I had to put my arms around her neck and told her that I loved her and didn’t want to be away from her. Even though I knew that there was no ship, I would do that, and we would be done with it. This time, however, there was no force in the world that could make me perform that charade. “Go ahead,” I said, turning my back to her. I immediately regretted turning my back because I couldn’t see the expression on her face. But I didn’t hear her say anything more.
On the way back from the island, Andre made the boat go really fast, with its bow out of the water and banging against each wave. Mother held the kerchief around her head with one hand, clutching the side of the cockpit with the other, with her teeth clenched, but still smiling every time Andre turned to look at her. And, for the first time that day, I found something to smile about.
Sr. Segiera was away, all that next week, and I suggested to Mother that we go to that café, when she comes home from work, because she might meet more of her Warsaw friends. My real reason was that the ham sandwich I had had there the first time was a lot better than the food they served at the hotel. I could munch it, while the grownups talked, and she would not be urging me to eat. Mother agreed, and we did meet a couple there that Mother knew from Warsaw. They also had American visas and were waiting for their turn to be allowed in. The man and woman had left Poland just before the war began, because they were sure it was coming, and had arrived in Brazil some months before we did. The only news they were able to give Mother about what had become of mutual friends was the report that one of those friends had been arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. This made Mother cry, and it made me feel guilty about my ham sandwich. If I had been willing to put up with hotel food, Mother would not have learned about her friend. I did not suggest going there again.
That Saturday, Sr. Segiera was back from the interior, and Mother informed me that the following day, Sunday, the senhor would be taking us to the country to meet his mother and his son, Paolo.
I wasn’t thrilled by the news regarding his son. If he paid attention to me at all, he would want to wrestle and prove that he was stronger than me, or race, in which case I would win and he would be angry, or play some sort of game where I had to be the bad guy and get punished in the end for being bad. Or he would have some friends with him and they would make fun of the fact that I couldn’t speak much Portuguese or didn’t know any of their games. Or I might just hurt someone again.
But then, Mother sat me down on my bed and explained that I had to be very nice to Paolo because he was crippled and couldn’t walk. She said that he had been in a car accident two years ago, in which his mother was killed and his legs got all smashed up.
I had known two people who couldn’t walk. One was my grandfather, who had been very old and paralyzed from the waist down, and I always had to be very quiet around him. The other was my Uncle Mortikai, who had only one leg, and I was told to feel sorry for him and be extra nice to him, bring things to him and so on, to compensate for his loss. And, of course, you weren’t supposed to look at a crippled person’s deformity, or whatever, or to ask questions about it, but just act as though they were completely normal—but, at the same time, feel very sorry for them because they weren’t, and, of course, be extra nice to them.
The next morning, Sr. Segiera picked us up again, in his old Chevrolet, to drive into the country. On the way down to meet him, Mother asked me why I wasn’t bringing my airplane. I hadn’t brought it because I didn’t want it to get damaged and had no plans to ever fly it again, but I knew that Sr. Segiera wouldn’t approve of that, so, instead, I said that I didn’t want Paolo to feel bad by running after it, when he couldn’t, and Mother stroked my head affectionately.
It was a long and boring ride. Mother said to look at the beautiful mountains, and to think about the good time I was going to have, playing with Paolo, but mountains didn’t interest me, and I dreaded the idea of having to play with a crippled boy, whom I didn’t know, and in a language I wasn’t all that comfortable with. When Sr. Segiera finally tooted his horn as we pulled into the driveway of a small house, I felt an immediate tension at the prospect of the imminent meeting.