Mother and Me

by Julian Padowicz

  Unlike our Durnoval apartment, this one had several more rooms, radiators, and, as Miss Vanda had said, a bathroom and carpets on the floor. On the living room carpet we discovered what I recognized as a large dog mess. “He gets very upset when we’re both away overnight,” Miss Vanda said, using a newspaper to clean up.

  One door of the bathroom opened onto the hall, the other into her bedroom. Miss Vanda proudly pointed out the richly embroidered canopy over the bed she and Mr. Lupicki slept in, as well as over the bed that comprised the total furnishings of the “guest room” that Mother and I would share. They had come, she said, from the house of a Count. The crates with the chickens went into a smaller room, filled with boxes and crates of various descriptions and a very bad smell.

  Mr. Lupicki had introduced Miss Vanda as his “partner,” which I had understood to be a business relationship. The idea of business partners sleeping in the same bed was an idea that had never occurred to me before.

  What impressed Mother the most was the bathtub in the bathroom. It had a gas hot water heater over it, just like the one in Warsaw, and Mother quickly asked if we could bathe in it. Miss Vanda said that of course we could, but first we might want something to eat—she had some stew in the frigider.

  A frigider turned out to be a yellow metal icebox, but without ice, because it kept food cold electrically. I had never seen such a thing, though Mother had. It hummed and had a light inside that Miss Vanda said shut off by itself when you closed the door. I found this hard to believe and watched carefully each time she opened and closed it, but as far as I could tell, she was fibbing. Apparently, the frigider had also belonged to a Count. Whether it was the same count as the one who had slept in the canopy bed or a different one, I couldn’t tell, but she was probably fibbing there too.

  Mr. Lupicki wasn’t home for supper, and Miss Vanda said that he’d be quite late. After we had eaten, Mother gave me my bath, for which Miss Vanda, fortunately, gave us privacy after leaving a stack of towels that she said came from a hotel that had closed. I have to admit that after the sink baths of the farm and the sponge baths of Durnoval, sitting in the warm and soapy water was a pleasure I had never appreciated before. When I was out of the tub and the water had begun to drain, we could see a ring of dirt around the white enamel tub. Mother burst out laughing, and I could not help joining in. Even before the water was all out, Mother was wiping down the tub so that she could refill it.

  “A snowman!” Miss Vanda said laughing, when she saw me in the hall, wrapped in the thick white towel, and struggling to keep it from unwinding. “Here, this will make it stay around you,” and she handed me a patent leather belt. “But we’ve got to get your hair drier than that, or you’ll catch cold!” she sang out. “Come with me.” I followed her into her bedroom. The carpet felt luxurious against my bare feet. Miss Vanda produced another towel from a cupboard and, draping it over my head, began to rub. As she rubbed, she sang a song about an old woman who had a rooster which she put into a boot and then asked how he was doing in that boot. It didn’t make any more sense than a lot of songs, but it made me laugh.

  “Now let’s comb it before it sets that way for the rest of your life,” she said after removing the towel. In the mirror over her dressing table, I could see my hair sticking out in all directions and found the idea of it’s setting that way for the rest of my life, hilarious. Miss Vanda took a comb from the dressing table and proceeded to comb my hair.

  “Hmmm,” Miss Vanda said, when she had combed it down on both sides, “that’s pretty long, isn’t it.”

  I had to agree that it was. Not given to looking into mirrors over the past months, I had not been aware, until now, of how un-masculine my appearance had actually become.

  “Would you like me to trim it a little? I cut my little brother’s hair—the one that’s a year younger than you.”

  I nodded my head enthusiastically, delighted at being asked permission. Actually, Miss Vanda was a little nice in some ways.

  “Sit here,” she said, indicating an upholstered stool in front of her dressing table. “An actress in the theater sat at this makeup table in her dressing room,” she said. “Now there are several ways we could to this,” she said changing to a tone that I knew was mock serious. “We could part it here,” and she parted my still-damp hair in the middle and combed it down both sides. I laughed at the girlish face in the mirror.

  “Or we could part it on the side here and …” In a few strokes she moved the part to one side, presenting another silly image in the actress’s mirror. I wondered what interesting faces that mirror had seen. “Of course, we could always comb it forward like this,” and again she had me laughing as I peered at what looked like the back of my head. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’d like the part here, please,” I answered sheepishly, indicating where my part had always been. I was well aware of how prosaic my response had been in terms of the game we were playing. Miss Vanda complied without comment. I hoped her silence didn’t indicate disappointment.

  Now she had a long pair of scissors in her hand and had begun cutting. As I followed a snippet of hair to the floor with my eyes, I realized that someone else had had his or her hair cut there recently. Or, maybe, not so recently—a closer look revealed clumps of dust distributed liberally over the carpet.

  When she had finished, I could tell that Miss Vanda hadn’t done as good a job as my mother’s hairdresser used to do on me in Warsaw. But what I was seeing in the mirror was, at the least, a boy again. “I hope your mother doesn’t get angry at us,” Miss Vanda said conspiratorially, biting her lower lip and shrugging her shoulders.

  “I don’t care!” I burst out in what I hoped was the appropriate spirit and relieved to still be in her favor. Miss Vanda rewarded me with a laugh.

  “Want a chocolate?” she suddenly asked. I nodded my head eagerly. I decided that the restriction on accepting food from strangers could no longer reasonably apply to Miss Vanda, and I followed her down the hall.

  When Mother came out of the bathroom, a long time later, wrapped in a towel and quite red from her long soak, she found Miss Vanda and me in the kitchen drinking tea—tea with both sugar and milk. An open box of chocolates, half empty, lay on the table between us. “Ah, Miss cut his hair. Thank you,” she said.

  “I’d be glad to trim Missus’s hair, if she would like,” Miss Vanda said.

  “Thank Miss very much, but I’m much too tired and too relaxed to sit still that long,” Mother said. “Maybe tomorrow, if Miss has the time.” Then she told me to say goodnight to Miss Vanda and go to bed.

  This was going to be women-talk from now on, I knew, and I might as well go to bed—though there had been no reason to tell me to say goodnight to Miss Vanda.

  On the other hand, it did give me a certain opportunity. I slid down from my chair, stood as straight as I could, with my bare heels together, and gave the little bow with my head that Kiki had taught me. “Good night, Miss Vanda,” I enunciated. Then, turning my shoulders slightly toward Mother, I repeated the bow. “Goodnight, Mother,” I said, adlibbing a military about-face at the end. My bare feet, sticking to the floor, presented an unexpected obstacle and almost an accident.

  “Bravo, Yulian!” I heard Miss Vanda exclaim and clap her hands as I marched triumphantly out of the kitchen. Elated, I continued marching down the hall, even though I knew Miss Vanda could no longer see me, the tune of the First Brigade marching song ringing in my head. At the door to the guest room, I halted and executed a left-face before reaching for the door knob.

  Under the maroon bedspread, embroidered and fringed to match the canopy, there were no sheets or blankets on the bed. But that didn’t matter because the bare, musty-smelling mattress was far more comfortable than my hay-stuffed pallet. I had exchanged the bath towel for my nightshirt, and I was quite warm under the surprisingly heavy bedspread.

  Then, as I relived the high points of the evening, I became aware that the painted woman had gotten me to l
ike her. She had gotten me to like her by cutting my hair, by joking with me, and by giving me chocolates. She had made me forget that she was like the painted women in Kiki’s picture, and she had made me forget that I might never see Miss Bronia again.

  And now the full force of Miss Bronia’s passing from my life along with Kiki, hit me, and I again felt the agony that I had known those Sundays in Warsaw. I cried uncontrollably under the bedspread.

  I was asleep by the time Mother came to bed, and, the next morning she was up when I woke up. The only sign that she had been there was the scent of bath salts added to the musty smell of the bed. It had been some time since I had smelled bath salts.

  Through the door Mother had left open, I could also smell butter frying and visualized eggs for breakfast. Dressing quickly, I hurried to the kitchen where Mother, Miss Vanda, and Mr. Lupicki all sat around the kitchen table smoking cigarettes. Mother and Miss Vanda were in bathrobes. Through a closed door, I could hear Burek pleading to be let in.

  “Ah, Yulian, good morning. How do you like your eggs?” Miss Vanda sang out.

  “Say good morning,” Mother said.

  “Good morning, Miss Vanda. Good morning, Mother. Good morning, Mr. Lupicki,” I said with all the formality I could muster. I did not want to be charmed by Miss Vanda again.

  “Yulian had an excellent governess in Warsaw,” Mother said.

  “You’ve grown since I saw you before,” Mr. Lupicki said to me across the table.

  In my fantasy, I walked up to him and pretended to pull my washer out of his ear, but I didn’t have the nerve. “Thank you,” I said quickly, heading Mother off. I hoped I would get the chance to show Mr. Lupicki how good I was getting at that trick. “Scrambled please, Miss Vanda,” I said.

  Mother was looking at something Mr. Lupicki was writing on a piece of paper. “Her husband,” he was saying, “was president of the bank, but when the Russians came, he kind of went crazy. She has to keep him locked in the bedroom, and rents out several of the other rooms.”

  “Missus should tell her that I sent Missus,” Miss Vanda said. “She doesn’t like Herman very much, but she knows she has to deal with me for supplies. She’ll make room for Missus, if she can.” Miss Vanda was standing by the stove with an egg in her hand. Mother nodded her head.

  Then Mr. Lupicki had to leave for the bus terminal to drive back to Durnoval. Mother, I learned, was going out to find us lodgings, and I would be staying with Miss Vanda—and Burek.

  “Are you afraid of Burek?” Miss Vanda asked me after Mother had gone out.

  “No,” I said emphatically, shaking my head. And in a moment, I was immersed in a wet frenzy of doggie affection. As my hands and face mixed with the fuzzy paws, the soft ears, and the wet nose and tongue, I felt more loved than I could remember ever having felt before.

  “He likes you to roll the ball, and he’ll bring it back,” Miss Vanda said. And as I fed his endless desire for having the wet, rubber ball rolled down the hall and under furniture and for having his ears scratched, which made him immediately roll on his back, I spent the morning as close to heaven as I had ever been.

  While Burek and I rolled, hugging and licking, over the floor, Miss Vanda entertained a parade of visitors. Some carried baskets, some came with packages, some left with packages. Out of one corner of my eye, I watched for other painted women, but only one fit the description, and she wore no more makeup than Mother’s friends in Warsaw. Even Miss Vanda, who was now in a pink flowered dress, had no makeup on today, other than her lipstick. I wondered if yesterday had been a mistake of some sort. I couldn’t imagine what mistake that might have been, but in the possibility, I saw a ray of hope.

  Chapter Seven

  Mrs. Potkanskova, the woman with the husband locked up in the bedroom, who had a room for us in her apartment, wasn’t a painted woman either. She had gray hair pulled back into a bun and glasses with one lens dark, like in sunglasses, and one regular glass. She had a funny way of looking at you, a little sideways.

  Our room was the third door on the right when you came in. It was a pretty big room with one wall lined with books and a large, carved-wood desk pushed into one corner. Mrs. Potkanskova spread a white tablecloth over the desk when we arrived, and Mother told me that I shouldn’t ever touch it—a statement meant, I thought, as much for Mrs. Potkanskova’s benefit as mine. Mrs. Potkanskova, in turn, promised to have the maid bring a table for “the boy” to draw on. There was also an armoire for our clothes, four chairs, and, thankfully, two separate beds, against two walls.

  The bathroom was two more doors down the hall, and Mrs. Potkanskova told Mother that “the boy” should be admonished not to loiter, since numerous others, including a professor, had to use it. In the room next to ours, our landlady said, there was a young couple from Lodz with a baby. The baby cried sometimes and you could hear it in the hall, but the walls were thick and we wouldn’t hear it in our room. I looked forward to seeing the baby. Then, for some reason, Mother told Mrs. Potkanskova that she must have been very beautiful when she was young, which made the landlady blush. The kitchen, where Mother could cook our meals or make arrangements for the maid to do it, was at the end of the corridor. I wondered behind which door the crazy husband lurked.

  Later that day, I did see my second painted woman. She had thin yellow-white hair, a flowered hat that only partially covered a bald spot on top of her head, and skin that hung down well below her thin face. For eyebrows, she had only black, painted lines plus blue eyelids and heavily rouged lips and cheeks against a very white skin. She sat at a table, in a café that we went to, with a younger woman, dressed in a man’s brown suit with gray hair cut almost as short as a man’s. Neither of them seemed to deserve being turned into pillars of salt.

  We did, however, run into a couple that Mother knew from Warsaw, whom she had apparently met here on her previous visit. Mrs. Gnimar wore a long woolen skirt with men’s work boots and a man’s jacket, fitting Mother’s earlier description. She had black hair that I could tell was gathered somehow on top of her head under her cap and billowed out all around. But she had no makeup that I could see, besides some rather ordinary lipstick.

  The man, who turned out to be her husband, was thin, mostly bald, and sat very straight in a sheepskin jacket far too large for him. Two other men and a woman sat at their table.

  “Basienka!” Mrs. Gnimar cried out, using the diminutive of the diminutive of Mother’s name. “And that’s Yulek?” The surprise in her tone was one with which I was familiar. It would usually be followed by, He’s grown so big!

  “He’s grown so big!” Mrs. Gnimar said.

  “I’ll have to start introducing him as my brother,” Mother said, at which everyone laughed. Then she explained where we were now living and that we had come alone from Durnoval.

  “Yes, Edna is like that,” Mrs. Gnimar said, “and Paula, of course, wouldn’t move without her.”

  Mr. Gnimar got two chairs, and I drank tea with milk, but there was no sugar. The grownups talked and did a lot of laughing, though, as far as I could tell, not about anyone being dead.

  The following morning, Mrs. Potkanskova’s maid Bogda brought us breakfast on a tray. Mother had a soft-boiled egg, but I, Mother said, could not have eggs again because I had had them the day before and would get a rash. I had toast and cheese instead. For my tea, I had a lump of sugar, but there was no milk.

  Then, just before lunchtime, Bogda brought a tray with sandwiches, a pot of tea, and three plates and three cups. The extra plate suggested a visitor, and I found myself intrigued by who our lunch guest might be. Having brought no reading or drawing materials from Durnoval, I had spent most of the morning reading book titles off the many volumes that I wasn’t to touch on our book-lined wall, under instructions not to leave the room or let anyone in. Mother had spent a good part of her morning in the bath.

  “We’re going to have a guest for lunch,” Mother finally volunteered. Her name was Mlle, de Kessenholtz, and she would be
taking care of me for the near future. I was to address her as Mademoiselle. I, of course, knew what this meant in French. Mademoiselle would tutor me in reading, writing, arithmetic, and French, as well as introduce me to some boys of my age whom she knew.

  The last item was the most disturbing. While reading, writing, arithmetic, and French were chores to which I didn’t look forward, the last boys of my age that I had been introduced to were my classmates back in Warsaw. And that had been an experience I did not care to go through again.

  Mademoiselle was of noble French blood, Mother went on to explain, and not just a simple governess like Kiki and Miss Bronia, but, until very recently, the long-time companion of a Countess Valoska. The elderly Countess’s constitution had proven too delicate for the demands of wartime, and she had died from overexposure to the autumn sun in her open carriage on the congested road leading out of Warsaw. A devoted companion, Mademoiselle apparently had not fully recovered from her loss, and I must be on my best behavior.

  I now knew a great deal about Mlle de Kessenholtz, but had not the slightest idea what to expect, other than a French accent … attached to a German-sounding name. This, regarding the woman who would be successor to Kiki and Miss Bronia, to say nothing of the enigmatic Miss Vanda.

  It was only after Mother had checked her wristwatch several times, that there was a knock on our door. Opening the door at Mother’s instruction, I felt myself brushed by the folds of a black veil as a very tall lady rushed into our room with, “Oh, Madame, I am so sorry to be late. They have closed off one of the streets, and I had to go several streets out of the way to get here.”

  I had, of course, been right about the French accent, though it was fainter than I had imagined. To my relief, Mademoiselle spoke Polish almost like a native.

  Much taller than Mother, she was also very thin, dressed in a gray coat topped by the kind of black hat and veil that women in mourning wore. I remembered that the Countess she had worked for had died at the beginning of the war.