Winter Eyes

by Lev Raphael

  “Can’t we just sit for a while?” his mother wished, pushing at her hair.

  His father snorted. “You came out here to sit?”

  “Oh, please.” His mother rose, the magazine hanging open from one hand. “It’s too hot.” She trailed from the room, her thin green dress rustling, and for some reason, Stefan thought of Mrs. Mannion.

  “Where are you going?” his father called in Polish; his mother didn’t answer. Stefan heard her on the staircase, and then the screen door whined open and closed.

  “She is impossible,” his father began, but Sasha coughed and his father said nothing more.

  Later, when they were trailing back from the jammed frantic beach (Stefan hadn’t even tried to get to the water), their beach chairs trickling sand and sometimes scraping the sidewalk, Stefan noticed Sasha and his father talking very quiet—really his father talked and Sasha nodded. It looked like something important. His mother walked ahead of them, the white beach jacket blowing around her; the white suit was new and kind of tight, Stefan thought, but he liked the big straw hat and dark glasses. She was very beautiful today, not like a mother much—maybe that was what made things funny and different. When he caught up with her she was climbing the porch steps.

  “We’ll both be in school,” he said.

  She turned. “School?” Then she smiled and crossed to the door; he rushed to hold it open for her. “School” she said again, real soft, like it was a dream.

  “Do you mind if Stefan plays for us?” his mother asked Mrs. Mannion in the kitchen after they’d all showered.

  “No,” Mrs. Mannion slid a heap of sliced carrots off a cutting board into a pot. “Why should I?”

  So Stefan sat down to play a new little Bach piece Sasha was teaching him, but instead of sitting across in the kitchen like everyone always did, she followed him into the large pink room.

  “How lovely,” she said, perching on the edge of the bed, legs crossed, arms out and back to hold her up. It made him nervous for her to be right behind him almost. Also he heard Mrs. Mannion in the kitchen and for some reason saw in his head Sasha and his father talking, so he made lots of mistakes playing.

  “Lovely,” his mother said, stroking her hair, and he hated that she lied: he knew it was bad, he wasn’t a baby.

  “Can I help?” his mother asked, joining Mrs. Mannion.

  “Why yes.” Mrs. Mannion rinsed her hands.

  Stefan drifted out to the porch where his father was talking to Sasha in Russian, and Stefan remembered in a hot way how the bad things were always in Russian. Something bad was going to come, but there was no place he could run—he didn’t have any friends here. He pulled the screen door shut when he went inside so it wouldn’t make all that noise and tramped upstairs to listen to the radio until dinner.

  “I like my own bed,” his mother repeated after dinner; Sasha had suggested they stay the night.

  “I’m tired,” his father said.

  “And where would we sleep?”

  “My room,” Sasha said. “I can put a cot in Stefan’s room.”

  “It’s too much trouble,” his mother sighed. She sat all stretched out on the porch swing like she was going to sleep there. “Let’s go home.”

  “Well, if we’re going, let’s go.” His father stood.

  Mrs. Mannion came out then with a small foil-wrapped package which she handed to his mother: “Some brownies for the ride home.” She and his mother stood smiling at each other.

  “Come on,” his father ordered, and they all said good-bye at once. His father looked impatient, and muttered something to Sasha Stefan couldn’t hear. When his mother kissed him good-bye and followed his father down the steps into the night-quiet street, Stefan felt very sad.

  “She gets more and more beautiful,” Mrs. Mannion said, sinking into a chair to knit and rock. “Your mother.”

  Sasha came back from walking them to the car. “It’s warm tonight,” he said, taking a seat.

  A few days later Stefan got his first mail of the summer: a postcard of the Empire State Building. On the back his mother had written “I don’t know why I have never been here before,” signing it “All my love.” He didn’t show it to Sasha, he didn’t know why; it made him feel wonderful to get mail from his mother but also funny, like she wasn’t supposed to write him or something.

  “What a pretty card,” Mrs. Mannion said, finding him on the top porch step. “From a friend?”

  “My mother.”

  “It’s fun,” Mrs. Mannion said, straightening the row of chairs, “It’s fun to sightsee in your own city.”

  His mother had seen the State Building before, a long time ago, Stefan remembered Sasha telling him about it. Why did she forget? And why did she go again? It must’ve been for fun, grown-up fun, the kind he didn’t understand.

  He didn’t think about it much more that day because one of Sasha’s students called after dinner to find out when Sasha was coming back to New York.

  “You’ve had a good time, haven’t you?” Sasha asked before he went off to sleep.

  “Real good.” But that wasn’t enough, especially now that they’d be going home in a few weeks. “The best time.”

  Sasha smiled good night.

  A week after, Stefan was getting ready to go back to the beach when he heard a familiar-sounding car drive up. He stopped changing and moved to his door. Sasha was out on the porch talking to someone. A man. His father. Stefan couldn’t mistake the low voice under Sasha’s. He was suddenly real afraid; it was the middle of the week and his parents hadn’t called they were coming. He crossed to the top of the stairs and listened; he couldn’t hear his mother’s voice. Stefan edged down the stairs, from just inside the door he could see his father sitting on the steps all hunched over. Sasha stood two steps down; something was wrong in his face.

  They weren’t talking, not even in Russian.

  Stefan opened the door and they both looked up at him. The door creaked shut as he stepped out onto the porch, terrified by he didn’t know what.

  “Where’s Mommy?” He advanced to the edge of the porch; his father’s face was as white as Sasha’s used to be.

  “She had work to do,” Sasha began, “She’s—”

  “Your mother and I have decided to live apart,” his father said, clearing his throat.

  Part Two

  Separate Lives

  5

  “I don’t understand how you can watch so much television and do well at school.” This was as close as Sasha ever came to criticizing, but it was close enough for Stefan.

  Standing behind him, Sasha was peering at the TV screen where Jethro of the Beverly Hillbillies was trying to impress a girl with how smart and brave he was, while he was dressed as a pirate. Sasha didn’t watch this or any of Stefan’s favorites—“I Dream of Jeannie,” “Bewitched,” “Get Smart,” “Lost in Space.”

  “It’s so vulgar,” Sasha added, as if he hadn’t said it before.

  “Vulgar,” meant “American,” of course. And vulgar was everything that Poland, that Europe was not. When Sasha talked like that, it made America seem like a very small and ugly place. And because Sasha was always so vague and unrevealing about his life before America, the label “vulgar” had even more power.

  Stefan’s mother’s approach was a little different. When she was over here, she would ask, “Isn’t there something else you’d rather watch?”

  It came out sounding very polite, like his mother was at some kind of tea party, but it was a dumb question, Stefan thought. Once he’d said, “If I wanted to watch something else, I’d watch it,” but she almost slapped him she was so angry. “Don’t ever talk to me like that!” she stormed, and he realized he was crossing a line that was very clear to her, but not to him. He was supposed to treat her the way she had been supposed to treat her parents, the grandparents he didn’t know, had never seen a picture of, and couldn’t ask questions about. As if they were criminals, and had done something so shameful that their names
and faces were blotted out forever. “I’m not your servant!” his mother had added, and he thought later, they had servants, or they knew people who did. It seemed an important piece of information.

  “Don’t you have homework?” Sasha asked him now.

  Stefan shrugged and drank some milk. “Did it already.”

  He didn’t turn from the screen because he knew what Sasha’s expression would be. It was the same look his teachers mostly had. They said they couldn’t figure him out, because he didn’t seem to care much about his work, sometimes didn’t even seem to pay attention in class—yet he maintained a 95 average in all his classes, making him one of the stars of Junior High School 152’s accelerated two-year special sequence.

  “It must be because you read so much,” Sasha concluded, going off to the kitchen.

  Was that it? Was that why his grades were so high? Or did he just not care enough to fight school, to fight giving himself to other people’s unimportant demands, since he had gotten what he wanted.

  When his parents finally divorced after three miserable years of separation, Stefan had said it over and over: “I want to live with Uncle Sasha.”

  All through his mother’s and father’s angry and pleading conversations with him, with each other, with Sasha, that was all Stefan had cared about. It didn’t matter to him that his mother and father couldn’t live with each other. It didn’t matter that his father now had a beautiful faculty apartment near where he taught at Columbia, or that his mother promised to buy him his own piano now that she had a job in a publishing company, where all the languages she knew were useful. He wanted to live with Sasha. Sasha would not leave him, or ever be strange and distant. Sasha could be trusted.

  His father had shouted: “But you’re my son. Our son! You have to live with one of us!”

  His parents had given him a choice, without expecting that he would choose something they didn’t like. Too bad for them.

  “And Sasha’s apartment is too small,” his mother had added more reasonably. “There’s not much room.”

  Even at 11, Stefan knew that wasn’t really true. His uncle could get a Castro convertible for the little room that was his study—Stefan had seen the advertisements on TV—and Stefan could sleep there. But he knew something more important. There was room for him with his uncle in ways there could never be with his mother or father, not anymore. They weren’t the same and everything was messed up. It was like the clown marionette he got for one birthday. Packing up to move to Sasha’s, he had found it forgotten at the bottom of a toy box. The hands and feet were so tangled in string that he couldn’t fix it. He threw it out.

  “I want to live with Sasha.” He said that so many times they had to give in.

  “I didn’t know you could be so stubborn,” Sasha said to him when it was all over, when his parents were finally divorced, and Stefan felt released into a different life.

  Was he really stubborn? Or was it being quiet, and waiting because he didn’t care what anyone else said to him, he could keep looking at them but feel protected by music inside of him, music that drowned everything else out—the glorious full sound of a triumphal piano and orchestra filling the world with noise like in Liszt’s orchestral transcription of The Wanderer Fantasy. He had first heard it in its original piano version with Sasha. It was music that made him feel defiant and safe.

  Like in his first year of junior high, at 152, when other seventh grade kids, kids he didn’t know, made fun of his name, and called him “Steffy” and “Stephanie.” He never winced, or shouted back at them, or even looked like he’d avoid a fight if it came to that—and eventually they gave up, because it wasn’t interesting enough. He understood that reacting in any way would have given them the power to torture him until he escaped to high school. He had already seen kids beaten up, pushed into lockers, tripped in the gym showers, smacked hard with school books on the clangy gray metal stairs. He had discovered a whole world of cruelty existing beyond the reach of teachers and parents. It was like quicksand in movies, trapping you, drawing you under. Slowly.

  And just a nickname could stay with you forever—like poor Elizabeth in grade school, who made the mistake of bringing a week’s worth of tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. She was still, five years later, in a new school, often taunted with the name “Tuna Face,” even though she was pretty and did not smell like her Flintstones lunch box had.

  “Are you hungry?” Sasha called from the kitchen. “No?”

  They had eaten dinner just a few hours ago, at 6:00, which was when they ate dinner every evening, watching the CBS news on the small TV in the kitchen. But Sasha seemed to think that part of taking care of him was always asking if he was hungry. It was strange.

  His mother, and sometimes his father, at first had suggested to Sasha that they move to a larger apartment, but Sasha said he didn’t mind sleeping in the study and letting Stefan have the larger bedroom, that there was more than enough closet space, that the apartment was rent-controlled and very cheap—so why move? Sasha said lots of things, mostly because he wanted to calm everyone down, Stefan decided.

  Stefan just said, “I like it here.” This was where he had first learned to play the piano, this was where he had discovered he had an aunt who was dead. Even having been hurt here when he fell and hit the piano made him feel it was a place he couldn’t give up.

  “Do you have a lot of homework?” Sasha called from the kitchen.

  “I told you—I did it.”

  Sasha was always expressing amazement that Stefan had so little to do for school, unlike himself back in Poland. But Stefan didn’t care, because it gave him plenty of time for what he really loved: reading. Every week he went to the library and came back with a pile of books—mysteries, science fiction, history books about French kings or long-ago European wars, books on dolphins, lost civilizations, magic tricks, UFOs, secret codes, ESP.

  Sasha sometimes said, “Maybe you read too much?” But he never sounded that convinced. The reading didn’t affect Stefan’s grades, and when Sasha wondered if he should try to make more friends, Stefan just shrugged. He didn’t hate the kids at school, he just didn’t like anyone too much, and didn’t want to have to talk to people about his parents, and why he lived with his uncle.

  Stefan didn’t like talking about himself, and even more, he didn’t like it when English teachers asked for autobiographical narratives or anything like that. He wanted then to invent things, and sometimes he did, imagining himself a Polish count, defending his castle against invaders—hairy Mongols with cruel eyes and wild armor, or endless marching ugly Teutonic Knights. He would be noble and brave, fighting despite terrible wounds, waving his flag and wielding his sword without ever falling from his horse.

  The phone rang, and from the way Sasha lowered his voice, Stefan knew it was probably his mother. His father hardly called now that he had given up Columbia to take a teaching job at the University of Michigan.

  Soon Sasha would get off the phone, come in, sit down, and pretend to watch the television, waiting for Stefan to ask who had called, which Stefan usually did, eventually, after he got tired of waiting for Sasha to just say it. Though sometimes Sasha would wait a day or so before telling him his mother or his father had called. She was calling more often now that she had moved to Brooklyn and came to see them less than when she had lived at their old apartment here in Washington Heights. Or see him. Because he figured that she and Sasha probably got together a lot, and Sasha didn’t talk about it.

  He turned off the TV and went to his room, shut the door, turned on the radio, which was usually tuned to WQXR. Stefan liked listening to rock stations, but not at night, not in his room. He couldn’t fall asleep with Cream, Jefferson Airplane, or even the Beatles—the music kids at school listened to and talked about—no matter how low the volume was.

  He lay down and stared at his Abbott and Costello poster with the “Who’s On First?” routine that always reminded him of a dog chasing its tail. And sometimes reminded
him of himself.

  The last movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was playing, and Stefan lay back, letting the music take over, take him away. Briefly, he thought of reading something, but decided not to. He hoped Sasha wouldn’t knock on his door to see how he was doing, or ask if he wanted to play chess. After his mother’s calls, Sasha was sometimes too attentive, as if he felt guilty or something, felt like he wasn’t doing enough.

  Sasha did plenty. Stefan knew that his parents paid for clothes and other stuff, and that the allowance he got came from them too, but Sasha added to that, and cooked for him, gave him lessons whenever he wanted them, took him to concerts and museums, to Rockaway every summer, and—this was the best part—mostly acted like they were having a quiet kind of adventure that would have a happy ending.

  Stefan didn’t want more attention from anyone.

  At school it embarrassed him that one teacher had called him a walking encyclopedia, because he was afraid the name might stick. It was in social studies and the teacher had jokingly asked if anyone knew who the Brazilian president was.

  “Costa e Silva,” Stefan said, without raising his hand. It just popped out, but Mr. Fischer didn’t mind. Everyone turned to look at Stefan and he blushed, which made some kids start to laugh. But what could he do? He always knew the social studies answers, especially if they were about current events. He read the New York Times every morning. Was that such a big deal?

  He sometimes made himself not answer questions in class, just on tests, to avoid being looked at. That was why he hated gym class. He could climb up the thick rope suspended from the gym ceiling, win for his team at volleyball, outrace other kids (Mr. Hessman said he had “natural ability”)—he was basically good at all that stuff. He was skinny, he was fast. None of it mattered any more to him than schoolwork did. When he was playing basketball or passing a football, the coach would shout at him, “Get excited! It’s not a job, boy—it’s life!” But he never passed into that realm of commitment and freedom.