Swans Are Fat Too (24 page)

I am obliged to set a good example of happy maturity for the children, she chided herself, and I can't control my own emotions. She wanted to help them and perhaps they were less in need of help than she herself. Perhaps Kalina had been right in commenting on her size, and what did she know about relationships? She had never had a successful one in her life. Kalina had gone seeking love––never mind if it was also lust––after her own manner and seemed content enough with the outcome.

Kalina, actually, didn't seem unhappy at all. In fact, having got over her disappointment in her lover, her sense of betrayal, she seemed, if anything, relieved. Her ideas were all concentrated on the coming baby. The baby was to her, Hania thought, what the dog was for Maks: They needed affection and had enough sense to try for it by giving. In the face of their possibly greater wisdom, she felt uncomfortable that practical questions kept occurring to her. How would Kalina raise a child? How would she support it? But when Hania asked her what she intended to do about school she averred that she still intended to go, why shouldn't she? And when Hania mentioned the fact that there would be the birth six months into the year, and the baby to nurse, and the impossibility of leaving it to its own devices while she sat at school…Kalina had serenely replied that she was sure it would work out somehow, and what did Hania think of the name "Julia?"

Hania put aside her worries for her.

"'Julia's a nice name, but what if it's a boy?" And she couldn't resist adding, "like Maks?"

"No!" Kalina seemed truly taken aback. Obviously the thought had never occurred to her. "Hania," she said in a tone of horror, "do you think it's a…boy?"

"Could be."

"
Jejku
!"

A while later, Kalina asked her, "If it's a boy, what do you think of the name 'Mścigniew'?"

"Mścigniew? You wouldn't give the poor thing a name meaning 'Vengeful Anger'––Kalino, you couldn't do it!"

"Why not? I found it in a list of names. It even has a saint's day. See? December 19."

"A saint's day for Vengeful Anger? Still…"

"Okay, then, how about 'Igor?'"

"Igor…Igor…Igor Beavor. Why not?"

And one day, looking at Kalina full of her coming motherhood, Hania had a flash––of envy, of longing: She will have a baby, and I will grow into an eccentric piano teacher, with my hair in a wops on my head and strange clothing. I will be barren and childless, develop uterine cancer at fifty, and die early and unloved. She gave herself a shake. There were, as her grandmother said, no excuses; there was certainly no excuse for mourning over herself. She had work to do, and she rose with her usual determination and went to the piano room. 

If she was going to be a piano teacher, she had better get at it. If she was going to stay then she had to make money.

It was after a phone call from Wiktor two days previously that she had finally made up her mind. He had called, just like that, out of the blue, when she had entirely given up the idea that he might phone.

"Haniu,
kochanie
, how are you?" She had been expecting a call from Konstanty; Wiktor's voice had taken her by surprise.

"Um...I'm…fine." She had such a mix of images in her mind, she didn't know what to start with first. But she made a stab at it. "Um...uh...um..."

"Good. Good. Listen,
kochanie
, I've just had this offer to stay and work here so we won't be back when we thought we would."

He didn't hear Hania's gasp but continued, "So since I know you have to be back in New York, we're trying to arrange for someone to come stay with the kids. But at the moment we haven't had any luck. There's an acquaintance of Ania's who knows someone who had a woman from some place in the countryside doing cleaning for her and she's going to try and get a number for us––but we don't know yet if she'll be willing to stay with the kids. If that doesn't work out we'll have to try something..."

"But...Don't you think you should be here––because of the children's schooling and...and…" Hania hadn't expected to have to tell them about Kalina over the phone. She had imagined telling Ania, one on one; still, she had to do it. But Wiktor was saying, with a tone of rather smug amusement:

"But after all, they're the ones that have to go to school, not us."

"Yes, but, but, I really think Kalina needs––needs her mother."

"Kalina needs her mother? She's a big girl."

"Yes, well, that's rather the point. She's..."

His tone was dismissive. "Now, listen, I don't know when we'll be able...

But Hania broke in on him, fiercely. "Wiktor, is Ania there?"

"Ania? She's fine. Now, what I wanted––"

"Wiktor! You should come home because Kalina is expecting." There, she'd said it. She held her breath waiting for his shocked reaction. But he swept on.

"Well, we were expecting to be home too, but this is a very interesting offer and I really think it would be irresponsible of me to pass it up and––"

"She's expecting a baby."

But he was talking across her, over her, about a possible babysitter.

"Kalina is expecting a
baby
and Maks needs his parents too!" She said it loudly and firmly. He couldn't not have heard. It was only, as she heard him saying good-bye, that she realized how protected he was against hearing anything he didn't want to hear. Would he know, deep down in his subconscious, what she had just told him, or was it completely blocked out? She didn't know, and it didn't matter. Kalina and Maks had no one but herself. She found she was trembling.

The children at the private school in New York would never miss her. She picked up the phone and dialled a number. The principal was not pleased with her. In fact, although the school advertised itself as nurturing and supportive, she didn't feel supported at all. She felt like she'd had an earful and would never find employment in New York again. When the call was over she was free and unemployed and had an empty apartment in New York which she very much hoped someone would want to sub-let.

Then she called her father and asked him to call Gerhardt or Szopinski or whoever else he thought might be able to get a message to Wiktor to tell him she was willing to stay with the children.

Maks was watching her as she put down the phone.

"You're staying?"

"Yes."

"Good." Somehow he didn't seem very pleased. His tone was listless. "Mama and Tata aren't coming back?"

"Not right away."

He nodded, and turning, went away. She found him later sitting on his bed, with all the dogs beside him. He didn't look up when she opened the door. So it did matter to him then. She felt full of pity, but there was nothing she could do.

"I'm sure they wish they could be here," she said to his bent head. He shrugged.

Kalina shrugged too when she told her, but somehow Hania didn't feel that she was pleased either. Whatever they might say, however much they might protest, she realized, they wanted their parents and they had been expecting them back at the start of the year.

She felt so flattened by their reaction that she almost wished she could go back on her decision. But, she told herself, she had decided to stay for their sakes, not for her own, so what was she unhappy about? Because she too needed someone to want her, came the unbidden thought, and since she knew that she wasn't, really, going to receive anything from Konstanty, she had desired the children as substitutes.

She had to put these thoughts away. Perhaps the children would eventually give her what affection they could spare from elsewhere; in the mean time, she had practical matters to attend to––like how to make money. 

The only thing she knew how to do really well was play the piano. She had a mental block about it, but that could be overcome. She had overcome many things to become as good as she was: she had practiced through fatigue––the endless hours––and boredom with some of the drudgery of the mechanics, and despair, when nothing would go right or some piece seemed impossible to master. She had learned one just went on. She got up, went into the piano room, and sat down at a bench. Once it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world to start playing; now, after over a year's break, it seemed strange. She decided on a Chopin mazurka––his most nocturne-like and not a very difficult piece, because she was out of practice, and also, because she was fond of it. She put her hands forward. How nervous she felt; suppose she had forgotten too much? She played. She imagined she was playing for Konstanty, who understood everything, too quickly, but wouldn't understand this––neither the music nor her pain, and so she put it all in, transformed it. Stopped. So, actually, she could still play. That is, she had played this piece far more accurately in the past, but not, surely, with deeper feeling.

Maks was standing in the doorway. "Babcia used to play that," he said. "She played it differently. You made a lot of mistakes."

She was torn between a sort of wry amusement at his thinking he knew enough to criticize, and being impressed that he had sufficient musical memory to tell the difference between her rendition and his grandmother's.

"Thank you for those kind words, Maks. Maybe if I practice more, I'll do better."

"Yes. Do. I like it."

He sat down to listen; pushing up his glasses, he pulled his legs onto the bench and wrapped his arms around them. She took his presence as a compliment. She selected some music, put it on the stand, and began to work in earnest.

She would put an advertisement in the paper, she thought, and perhaps visit some music schools to ask if she could put her name up for private lessons. Would they allow it? She didn't know. If her grandmother had been here, all would have been so easy––well, logistically speaking, anyway.

After she had won her last competition, in Toronto, she had sent her grandmother a recording of her performance––and got back a letter beginning, '
I suppose you're expecting congratulations, but what can I say? I suppose the judges were rather deaf...Beethoven would be turning in his grave at your use of rubato in the
...' And only at the end, the little note, '
however much I deprecate your abuse of emotion, it at least makes a change from the mechanical perfection of too much of today's playing. If you keep working you may make a pianist someday
...' And that she had taken as high praise, because her grandmother rarely accorded anyone the honor of really playing the piano: "Rubinstein?––not a pianist. Horowitz?––hmpf." (On the other hand, she had been just as likely, for a younger pupil, to reach into the past for some previously disdained model of the art, to be held up as a pinnacle never to be attained: "ah, if you had heard Horowitz now...")

However, pianist or not, Hania wasn't so well known that she could expect pupils to line up for her at a moment's notice. And in the meantime, how did one make money quickly? She would have to buy books for the children when school started, and many other things. The apartment fees were unpaid and several other bills she guessed. They would shortly have nothing even to buy groceries with.

The line from the Scottish poet kept running through her head: '
Is there for honest poverty
?' Not amongst those who've tried it, she thought, as she considered their financial position. Could she sell something? What did she have to sell? She didn't think the puppies, in spite of Maks' hopes, were going to be worth their weight in
złoty
, so that left...

"Kalino," she said later, "what could we sell, and how?"

"Why?" Kalina looked surprised; obviously the thought that they might run out of money had never occurred to her.

"We need money."

"Haven't Mama and Tata sent you any all this time?"

Hania shook her head, and was about to say that she was sure they'd pay her back when they returned, but Kalina was already raising her voice in indignation: "Oh, that is so like them, so..."

Hania cut her short. "Yes. But that won't help. We need a practical solution here..."

"I know! We can sell Tato's piano on Allegro."

"Sell his piano!? We couldn't."

"Sure we could. We have to eat. You'd still have the other two."

"What's Allegro?"

"Oh, it's like e-Bay. I can show you how it works."

"Yes. Would you, please? I could sell some of my dresses perhaps––some of them haven't been worn much. My new one, for instance. It cost a lot. Maybe someone in the country is in need of a size-umpteen dress. It won't bring much, of course, but even fifty dollars would help. I'm sure there must be lots of women my size who have trouble finding things."

Kalina gave her a dubious look but refrained from saying anything, and soon they were seated together in front of the computer.

"So you see," said Kalina, "you'll have to get a Polish bank account first."

She had done that in the morning, and then she had gone to the park with Maks. It was one of the last hot days of summer, one of the final days for shorts and tee shirts and bare legs and little flirty dresses. She looked down the line of benches surrounding the playground, at the ranks of waiting mothers. Every woman had one hand up, holding a cell phone, talking, talking; each had one leg tossed over the other. They were bare legs, tanned, with polished toenails and little ankle bracelets. The playground was surrounded by lines of legs in thin strappy sandals.

There were only a few days left before school started, and as she watched Maks playing, she thought that she didn't know how he was going to stand the discipline. Neither he nor Kalina had ever suggested that he'd had problems at his former school, but she could see that he was a social misfit. Someone––stout older ladies, prim younger ones––were always telling him he was playing the wrong way, that he shouldn't go up the slide, or sit crossways on the swing, or go over the bars instead of across. Rebuffed by the Polish crowd, he tried the foreigners––and there were many at this park––and had no better luck. A woman with a big smile on her face and 'Colorado' in large letters across the seat of her trousers was engrossed in her own small child. Maks tried his few words of English on her, but she ignored him entirely. Hania was amazed at her own sense of wrath, her sudden surge of protectiveness for her cousin.