Away from Home (9 page)

In those first months of their marriage Bert had liked to sleep late on Sundays, and Helen, who had never liked to sleep late, had found herself filled with a pleasant drowsiness as she lay beside him, feeling completely secure. She would doze and wake, and turn to look at this newness and wonder of a man who wanted to live with her forever and lie beside her for Sunday mornings for ever and ever too; and then she would doze again, content, until he awoke and they would make love. That winter, before she conceived Julie, was a period completely separated from any other time in Helen’s life. It was the first time she had really felt herself to be a woman; not a girl, not a mother, not a hostess-partner-helpmeet, but a
woman
. Under the sheet and blanket, closed in with the man she loved, surrounded by nothing but the fabric that sheltered them together and isolated them from alarm clocks, telephones, voices, all the demands of the world, Helen was happier than she had ever been before or since.

When Julie began to move and show life inside Helen’s body, Helen began to feel as if her mind had separated into two minds, her own and the one that had to think for the child’s future. She always thought of her babies as people, even before they themselves knew they were babies. When Julie, a few weeks old, lay helpless in her crib in Helen’s and Bert’s bedroom, Helen felt there was a person in the room. Julie had colic when she was very young and cried at night for hours. When she was older and no longer had colic she had become even more of a person, a person who could wake to the sound of stifled noises from a nearby bed, who might wake silently and not cry but only listen and not understand. Helen adored the baby, but there were moments when she resented her presence, because she herself was still very young and so was Bert and they had been alone together for so short a time.

As the years went by, Bert’s morning habits changed; he no longer stayed in bed until noon on Sundays. Often he would wake up and go into the living room, still in his pajamas and bathrobe, to do work he had brought home from the office. Helen had to get up too and attend to Julie, and then later both Julie and Roger.

Now in Rio she could sleep as long as she liked, but it was too late. The children would be off to school or now in summer to the beach or the club with Mrs. Graham. Bert would be at the office if it were a weekday. Helen would awaken alone in the double bed and she would stretch out her hand to touch the wrinkled sheet where Bert had lain. She would close her eyes for a moment and pretend he was still there, that they were still very young and alone together on a Sunday morning. Those mornings were very far away now and idyllic, totally out of reach again for the rest of their lives until they were old, and the children were grown, and Bert was retired.
What was the use?
Bert had changed, she had changed, so that even in Rio, living like millionaires on the American dollar, their private hours were different anyway and their idyllic mornings lost forever.

Bert went away to a mine somewhere at least once a month, to Rio Grande do Sul, to Minas Gerais, to the State of Bahia. They were all only names to her. She thought how funny it was that all she knew about the Interior was learned from travel books of photographs, while her husband went there all the time. She had two maids and a governess for the children. One of the maids did all the shopping and the cooking, the other cleaned, sewed, polished the silver and waxed the furniture. Helen took care of her appearance, took naps, read. She wrote many letters home to friends, not because she had any news but because she was homesick. They wrote back that they were envious. She bought material, she went to the dressmaker, she lay on the beach on a straw mat with her eyes shut behind dark glasses and she imagined her brains turning into white bleached fluff and blowing away. If she sat up and looked around she could always see the same women—and men—whom she had seen on that same beach for ten months. She often wondered who supported those men who lay so bronzed and casual under the sun every day from ten until two and then repaired to the swimming pool at the Copacabana Palace for lunch.

Margie Davidow dropped in to see her nearly every day, or she would go to see Margie. An unimportant thing like going to the dressmaker they would do together, making an appointment for it, because that would make it seem important. She knew there had been one time, a few years ago, when Margie had gone to the movies every afternoon for three months, sometimes even seeing the same picture two and three times rather than see nothing.

Sometimes Helen felt panic, as if she had actually lost something tangible, or as if some harm had come to someone she loved. Was it to the children? She was losing them, she was losing their childhood to a kindly employee. But it wasn’t only the children, because they loved her; they ran to her and she to them with joy; they got along with her much better than they had when she took care of them all the time. They seemed to have grown up, become independent, although she knew they were still almost babies. It was such a quiet, well-ordered household, filled with people, filled with living, never empty. Why, then, this feeling of loss … for what?

She remembered, at times, the way Bert had looked when she had first seen him, and the way she had looked and thought; both of them so young they would be strangers to themselves now. She was nineteen and a sophomore at Pembroke, and she had gone to New York for a football weekend with a dull boy whose name she only remembered later because it had been that weekend she had met Bert. She had gone to a cocktail party at the Biltmore Hotel after the game, a party held in one of those small rooms five college boys crowd themselves into even though it was rented only for two. Her date was already half drunk, from a pocket flask he had carried in his overcoat pocket. It was cold out and beginning to snow. When she walked into the crowded hotel room full of post-game revelers the first thing she had thought was that every boy there was six feet tall, with a blond crewcut and a thick neck and big shoulders and no face. Every one of them wore a dark gray flannel suit, and she couldn’t even decide which one she wanted to talk to first because they all looked alike. On a littered table in the corner of the room there was a punch bowl filled with Purple Passion. Standing alone next to the punch bowl was a boy who looked so extraordinarily different from all the others that she couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was tall and thin, and he didn’t have a blond crewcut or a thick football neck, but black hair, slightly wavy, worn rather long for a college boy. His face had a look of miserable intensity, all the thoughts inward, and he wasn’t drinking anything, nor was he talking to a girl.

“Who’s that?” she had asked. “Who’s that?”

“Bert Sinclair. He goes to Columbia. A member of the enemy. Why? You like him?”

“He looks … so sad.”

“I don’t know why he should. The bastards won today.”

“Introduce me. Please.”

“Ah, wait. Have a drink. Kiss me. I love you. Do you know that? I think I love you.”

“Today you do,” she had answered, laughing and escaping his encircling arm. At nineteen she had already learned that a nineteen-year-old boy can love a girl very much on Friday and be just as surprised as she is on Monday when somehow the love just isn’t there any more. Knowing that, and having been the recipient of several bewildered apologies (“I just wanted to tell you that I don’t love you any more.… I’m terribly sorry”), Helen was more surprised than ever when a year later she found herself married to Bert Sinclair.

And here they were in Rio. What had she lost—the past? But you always lost the past. Herself? Bert?
What?

In the morning at the Gavea Golf Club the air buzzed with heat, as if it were a living thing. The pool was full of children, shrieking, splashing, jumping in and clambering out to jump in again, holding their noses, holding hands, showing off for one another. They were thin and shapeless, sleek with water, their wet bathing suits plastered to their bodies and showing only that they were children. On the faces of the very young ones was the sign of beauty that is evident in all the very young. The older ones, preadolescents, were in the awkward and ugly stage, with features growing out of proportion to one another, but some of them were already showing promise of a much greater and dangerous beauty. All of them seemed to have an inexhaustible, terrifying energy to repeat and repeat the monotonous acts of leaping, climbing, leaping, and climbing again. Helen arrived with Julie and Roger at ten-thirty.

It was already too late to find any more of the adult-size canvas chairs, so she took three of the children’s chairs, the miniatures that everyone left for the unfortunate latecomers, and she put them side by side beside the pool.

“Julie,
please
wear your glasses.”

“I don’t like them.”

“If you wear them now, you won’t have to wear them when you’re grown up. And besides, you look cute in them.”

Julie looked exactly as Helen had when she was young, with honey-colored sun-streaked hair cropped short for the heat. She really looked sweet in the glasses, little pink harlequin spectacles, and she needed them. It was strange, Helen thought, how you always felt more tender toward a small child who wore glasses; she looked so much like a tiny adult, and yet you knew she could be hurt like a child.

“Look how cute you look in them.”

“She looks beautiful,” Roger said loyally.

“You think so?” Julie asked, wrinkling up her nose.

“Not making that face. You look like a monkey. Your face will freeze that way.”

“It will not,” Julie said calmly. She crossed her eyes and jumped up and down like a monkey, making chattering noises.

“
Please
don’t do that!” Helen begged, but she couldn’t help laughing. Even imitating a monkey, Julie couldn’t look unpretty; she had a delicacy and sweetness of features that Helen couldn’t imagine she herself had ever had to that extent. Her skin was deep golden tan and silky, her large-pupiled myopic eyes could change from a mischievous glitter to sympathy in an instant. She was only eight, but so reasonable it sometimes hurt to think that Julie already understood much of the private sensitivity of other people that children usually ignored.

Her two children: they seemed at that moment, laughing beside the pool, so alive and precious and beautiful that she reached out for both of them. She kissed Roger first because he was closer, feeling the delicacy of his cheekbone beneath the taut, elastic skin. He was all energy and tiny bones, throbbing in her arms like a captive. She wanted to protect him from everything, never let anything bad happen to him, not even a cut or a bruise.… She opened her arms reluctantly and let him go.

Julie took off her glasses and folded them almost prissily, holding them out to Helen. “I can’t wear them in the water. Please hold them.”

“And please hold my candy.” Roger gave her a paper roll of sticky Drops.

“And my pack of gum, please.”

“And
my
gum!”

“That’s my towel.”

“That one’s mine.”

They were off into the water, leaving Helen surrounded by towels and beach things, all the minutiae of their travels. The cement around her feet was wet from splashed pool water, and the back of her child’s chair was so low that she had to sit bolt upright. She had brought a book to read, but she was too nervous to take her eyes off her children for long, even though she knew they were both good swimmers. Julie had pulled on a bathing cap with great care, as if she were preserving an elaborate beauty-salon set instead of hair chopped off almost like a boy’s. She already knew how to dive off the diving board and did it well. Roger swam with his face in the water for so long Helen wondered if his swimming instructor had mentioned to him you had to breathe. He was as fast as a newt.

She had not come to the club for a long time and she did not know many people. No one spoke to her. To the left were the golf links, permanently green, dotted with bright-shirted players, mostly women because today was a weekday. There were also some teen-aged boys who were on vacation from school. Beyond the golf course were the mountains, encircling everything, green and purple and blue in the heat, and above them the bright blue sky. The view was so beautiful Helen never tired of looking at it. She could not understand how people could look down at a golf ball when they could look up at such mountains; but perhaps they could do both.

She had sent Mrs. Graham to town for the day with an excuse so she could take care of the children herself. This would be the new regime: the pool and beach alternately, governess only at night; Helen would set the rules. She would spend all her time with Roger and Julie. Things would be different from now on, she would have the children, and eventually she would make friends with other women who had children, and her life would be quieter perhaps, different, but filled with love.…

A young mother with dark hair and a striped bathing suit with a longish skirt was lying in a beach chair beside one of Helen’s empty ones. Helen moved the towels and moved over beside her. “The pool is crowded, isn’t it!”

“Yes.
Look out, Timmy! Don’t you go in there!
Just your feet, Mother told you.”

“Is that your little boy?” Helen asked. She gestured at the fat, petulant-faced little boy perched on the edge of the pool, wearing blue bathing trunks and a rubber tube shaped like a swan.

“Yes. That’s Timmy.”

“He’s sweet. How old is he?”

“Going on four. Even with his tube on I worry about him.”

“Those two are mine.” Helen noticed that Julie had found two little girls her age whom she seemed to know, and that Roger was playing with a boy who seemed at least a year older than he was and who didn’t seem to notice the age and size difference at all. “I should introduce myself. My name is Helen Sinclair.”

“I’m Ann. You have two children?”

“Yes.” There was a silence. Ann waved and blew a kiss at Timmy. “How many do you have?” Helen asked finally.

“Just this one so far. I’m expecting another one in six months.”

“How nice.”