And he had surprised us by arriving exactly on time. Mother had told me, that morning, that he would probably be late, since it was customary in Brazil to be late, but the senhor had been right on time.
And he had also brought me a present. As I got into the back seat, I saw an airplane sitting there. It wasn’t the same kind of airplane as the one in the photograph that he had given me, but a sleek fighter plane, about thirty inches long, with green and brown camouflage markings and the target-like insignia of the British Royal Air Force, which was, at that time fighting German bombers over London. . “That’s for you, Julien,” he said, over his shoulder, as he started the car.
“Oh my God, it’s an airplane,” Mother exclaimed, turning around. “You shouldn’t have, Ernesto. Julien, say thank you.”
Ordinarily, Mother’s prompting would have been totally superfluous, but this time the gift had, literally, taken my breath away. “Th. . . th. . . thank y. . . y. . . you, M. . . m. . . monsieur,” I stammered.
“Every boy needs an airplane,” the senhor said to Mother.
“Oh, but Ernesto. . . ”
“It isn’t expensive, Barbara. It’s cardboard, and if it crashes, he needn’t worry about it.”
“You mean it actually flies?”
“Oh, yes. You’ll see when we get to the beach.”
“Oh my God. Did you hear that, Julien, when we get to the beach, Sr. Segiera will show you how it flies.” Then, in Polish, she added, “You should kiss him.”
That was a command that I had no intention of following, but, since we were under way, at that point, and some time would elapse before it would even be possible to do what Mother had said, I was sure the directive would be forgotten. In the meanwhile, I held the beautiful plane carefully in my hands visualizing myself throwing it into the air and watching it glide to the ground, like the paper airplanes I had seen the older boys fold and fly in Poland. Except that this one was much bigger and actually looked like an airplane.
With my attention on the airplane, it took me some time to notice that the back of Sr. Segiera’s head looked very different now. Instead of his hair being cut off in a straight line at his neck, it had been tapered gradually, just the way Mother had told him. I wondered what his nails looked like.
When Sr. Segiera finally stopped the car on a road with a nearly-empty beach on one side and some houses on the other, I carefully extracted the airplane from the back seat and waited patiently by the side of the road, while the senhor opened the trunk and began to remove some beach things, including a wicker picnic basket.
“Julien, don’t just stand there. Help Sr. Segiera,” Mother said, but the senhor said, “He has to hold the airplane. That’s his job. I can handle the rest.”
“Well, here, let me,” Mother said, taking the basket from him. “Oh, what do you have in here?” she exclaimed, apparently surprised by the weight. Then we made our way over some grass and, finally, onto the sand.
“Help Sr. Segiera,” Mother said to me, as he laid out the blanket, and began to open the beach chairs.
“It’s all right, Barbara. It’s all right. Let him hold on to his airplane,” he said, and, suddenly, I was aware of a feeling that I had not experienced before. Sr. Segiera was telling my mother not to tell me to do things. I had had people telling me to be nice to my mother, to be obedient, to not bother her when she said she had a headache, to help her because she didn’t have a husband taking care of her, and one man in Spain had even grabbed me by the elbow and marched me to the bathroom, when Mother told me to go wash my hands, but no one had ever told Mother not to tell me to do something. And I suddenly had a great feeling of affection for this man.
Mother laughed and sat down again, though I doubted the sincerity of her laugh.
“Let’s go, Julien,” Sr. Segiera said, starting back up to the street. “Bring your airplane.”
“Oh, you’re going to make it fly,” Mother said, standing up.
“Just Julien,” the senhor said.
“I can’t come?” she said, very surprised.
“Just us men. You’ll see it when it’s up in the air.”
Mother sat down again with another laugh that didn’t sound totally sincere.
I had been standing there watching the exchange, and now ran to catch up to the senhor. As I ran, I could actually feel the airplane in my hand already wanting to fly. Then Sr. Segiera stopped, turned to me, and said, “Go ahead, wind up the motor.”
“M. . . m. . . motor?” I said.
Sr. Segiera now laid his hand on my shoulder and, with the other, turned his finger in a circle, indicating, I thought, that I should turn the propeller. “The rubber band,” he said. “The rubber band inside.” He said it, as though expecting me to know what he was talking about. Then, I guess seeing the expression on my face, he explained, “The propeller is attached to a rubber band. You can wind it up.”
Suddenly I grasped the situation. I had seen other rubber band-powered toys before and understood the principle. If you wound the propeller one way and let go, it would turn the other way by itself. I had just never imagined that rubber bands big enough to handle this job existed. I began winding.
“No Julien, the other way.”
“I’m s. . . .s. . . orry, M. . . .m. . . monsieur,” I said, embarrassed at my mistake. I wound the other way. “H. . . ow m. . . uch do I w. . . ind it, M. . . onsieur?” I asked, gaining control of my stuttering. I was afraid of winding the rubber band too tight and breaking it.
“More,” he said.
I continued winding until he said to stop. “Now set it down on the road,” he said.
Holding the propeller so that it didn’t unwind, I set the airplane down on the paved street and looked at my mentor.
Sr. Segiera now raised both thumbs. I didn’t understand his signal.
“That’s a signal to pull the wood blocks from under the wheels,” he said. “Let it go.”
With trepidation, I let go of the propeller. It began to spin. I felt it pulling forward against my hand. Then I released the airplane.
The plane began to roll forward along the pavement, gathering speed. Then I saw it lift about a foot off the ground and, when the propeller stopped spinning, settle back to the pavement.
I ran after the airplane, as it rolled to a stop. I picked it up and brought it back to where Sr. Segiera was standing. “It f. . . lew!” I said.
“Yes. Now if you wind it a little tighter and then launch it from your hand, it will fly even further. A lot of the energy is spent just getting off the ground, you know.”
I began winding the propeller again. I could feel the resistance building to the point at which I had stopped the last time, and kept winding beyond it.
“That’s good,” Sr. Segiera said. “Now just. . . .” and he mimed throwing the airplane lightly.
I did as instructed, and the plane took off into the air. It climbed quite high above the ground, but then I watched in horror as its right wing dipped and it banked toward the beach and the water.
I ran after it, ready to dive into the water after it. The plane crossed the strip of beach, but out over the water a breeze seemed to blow it back, just as the propeller stopped and the plane began its descent. One landing gear and one wingtip hit the sand, and the plane nosed over, with its tail up in the air, practically at my feet.
Picking it up with a heavy heart, I was relieved to find that the only damage was a little nick out of the wingtip. Sr. Segiera was jogging towards me now, and I covered the injured wingtip with my hand. “N. . . n. . . no d. . . d. . . damage, M. . . m. . . monsieur,” I said, stammering furiously. It wasn’t the injury to the plane, which was only cosmetic, that I didn’t want him to see, but the blemish that it seemed to imply in our relationship.
I did not fly my airplane again that day, fearing for its safety. As Sr. Segiera and Mother sat in their beach chairs and talked, I ran along the empty beach, holding the plane overhead and f
eeling its wanting to fly.
Sitting again in the back seat of Sr. Segiera’s Chevrolet and holding the airplane in my lap, as we drove home, with the light growing dim outside, I, once more, played in my mind the scene of the senhor telling Mother that she couldn’t come with us to fly the airplane. “Just us men,” he had said, and Mother had gotten that surprised look on her face and then sat back down. Just us men—Julien and me. And then he had laid his large hand over my shoulder.
But neither was I totally unaware of the fact that this had not upset Mother very much, that she had spent the whole afternoon talking, and laughing with Sr. Segiera, and, that she was, quite clearly, getting to like him, as I had feared earlier. But the emotions that I, myself, was now feeling towards Sr. Segiera kept that fear in a back corner of my mind, where it could not interfere. My feelings were reaching out to this very nice man to the extent that those diamonds on Mother’s hand did not seem to matter anymore. What mattered was that we should see him again soon, that he should lay his hand over my shoulder again, and that he should have that us men expression on his face once more.
When the senhor stopped the car in front of our hotel, he and Mother whispered something to each other and then touched their puckered lips together. It was the first time that I had seen Mother do that with anyone, and it gave me a strange feeling.
CHAPTER VIII
The following day, Sr. Segiera had to work, even though it was Sunday. So I was surprised to see Mother putting on one of the dresses that she wore around company. “Sr. O’Brien is taking us out for lunch, in the mountains,” she said. Sr. O’Brien I took to be the man who had brought Mother home in his open car, with the kerchief on her head, some days earlier.
“W....ill w... e be g...oing in his o....pen c....ar?” I asked hopefully.
“I don’t know,” Mother said. “But I’m not taking any chances,” she added laughing, as I saw her take one of her large kerchiefs out of a drawer.
“I th... ought he d... idn’t w... ant me c... oming al....ong,” I said.
“I told him that the only way I would go with him would be if you came along as well. I don’t really want to go with him at all, but he is Sra. O’Brien’s son, and she is important to me.”
“Isn’t he nice? Is he a gentleman?”
“Oh, he’s quite nice and seems to be a gentleman, but he’s very young.”
“H..... ow y..... oung is h..... e?”
“He’s probably my own age, but I feel a lot older than him.”
This was a new concept for me, the idea that people could feel older or, I supposed, younger than their actual age. Mother, I knew, was just twenty years older than me, which made her twenty-eight. I wondered what twenty-eight felt like in comparison to, say, thirty. I wondered what seventy felt like, and a hundred, which was what people were supposed to live to if nothing happened to them along the way. What did it feel like to be a hundred and know that you’re not going to live another year? I felt a shiver go through me at the suggestion, and decided to think about something else.
The desk clerk rang to say that Sr. O’Brien was here, and Mother said we would be right down. Then she lit a cigarette and sat down to smoke it.
“You s..... aid w..... e’d be r..... ight d..... own,” I said.
Mother smiled. “A lady never comes ‘right down,” she said. “The gentleman should always have to wait a little. If Andre doesn’t know that yet, this will be good education for him. Remember how Ernesto, I mean Sr. Segiera, didn’t know how to treat a lady until we taught him?” I remembered the lesson “we” had administered to Sr. Segiera regarding his not calling Mother, when he was someplace that he couldn’t call her from.
Then I leaned out of the window to see Sr. O’Brien’s open car down below. I had never ridden in an open car before. What I saw down below looked like a piece of white ribbon with a red pocket in the middle, laid on the pavement in front of the hotel. A man in a blue jacket and white pants was sitting within that red pocket. On the top of his head, surrounded by thick, dark, curly hair, was a bald spot.
“I s. . . ee his c. . . ar,” I said. “It’s all w. . . hite, with r. . . ed s. . . eats.”
“Don’t look,” Mother said.
“W. . .hy n. . .ot?”
“He might see you.”
“He’s g. . . oing to s. . . ee me wh. . . en we c. . . ome d. . . own.”
“I don’t want him to see you looking out the window.”
This was getting much too complicated. I pulled away from the window and waited for Mother to finish her cigarette. Then I watched her put on and adjust her kerchief, in front of a mirror.
Sr. O’Brien’s car had a tiny back seat. It was big enough for me, but I wondered how a grownup was meant to fit into it. Mother had said, “Good morning, Andre. I’m so sorry you had to wait,” and kissed him on the cheek. Sr. O’Brien had curly brown hair, in the center of which, I knew, he had a bald spot. He also had a round face, and a little bit of a belly under his double-breasted blue jacket. The jacket had brass buttons, like a military uniform.
“It was no trouble at all,” he said. His hand felt even larger than Sr. Segiera’s, when we shook hands, and he smiled at me with a big grin. “Call me Andre,” he said to me, and I felt, right away, that he was very friendly. Also, he spoke French better than Sr. Segiera. But that was because his family was very rich and he had probably had a lot of private lessons.
I was, actually, kind of pleased at having made that deduction. It was further evidence that I was smarter than other eight-year-olds, and I suddenly realized what it felt like to feel older than your age. I wondered how old I felt like. Could it be ten? I had always wanted to be ten. I sat up a little taller in the little red seat and swung my knees to the side, as though I didn’t have enough legroom, the way Kiki had always had to put her knees to the side because they didn’t fit under the little table in our room.
Then, the car, which had been rolling at city-traffic speed, reached some open road and sped up. I felt a blast of wind on the back of my head and my hair blowing forward on my face.
This was surprising—I would have expected the wind to come from the front. Why was it coming from the back? Here was a problem for my ten-year-old mind to solve. But I couldn’t get my mind around it. Well, maybe it was a fifteen or even twenty-year-old problem.
We drove for a while, over some winding, mountain roads, and finally stopped at a restaurant with tables on a second-floor deck. I waited for Mother to get out so that I could push the back of her seat forward and get out myself, but the moment he had helped Mother to stand, Andre reached both hands into the rear seat and lifted me right out of the car.
“Oh Andre, he’s heavy,” Mother protested.
“Not for me,” Andre said. “I lift twice, three times his weight every day.”
Mother laughed.
Mother laughed a lot of times during that lunch. She and Andre both laughed, because Andre told a lot of jokes, most of which I didn’t understand. But Mother also laughed when he wasn’t telling a joke, and I realized how differently she was acting than with Sr. Segiera. With Sr. Segiera they talked about serious things—or, at least, their voices were serious, while Andre told jokes and “funny” stories, all of which Mother pretended to find very funny.
Several times, just as Sr. Segiera had done the day before, Andre turned his attention directly to me, asking me whether I had been to such-and-such a place yet or seen such-and-such a movie. The only one I could say, yes, to was the movie that Irenka and I had seen about the Foreign Legionnaires.
“Wasn’t it great when the only man left alive in the fort puts all the dead soldiers up on the walls, so the Arabs think the fort is well defended and don’t dare attack?” Sr. Andre said.
“Ow, that’s awful,” Mother said. “You shouldn’t encourage him to see movies like that.” But I agreed with Andre.
When Mother went to the ladies’ room, Andre said to me, “Did you h
ear about the dog that found a glove in the pasture?”
I had no idea where I was supposed to have heard of it, or why it was newsworthy.
“He brought it to the cow,” Andre said, “and asked, ‘Madam, did you lose your brassiere?’”
I must have turned bright red, at his use of the word. I, instantly, looked around to see if anyone was within earshot. But it was a funny story.
Then, when Mother came back, she seemed to sense that Andre and I had been talking, because she immediately told him that my stammer was the result of “malnutrition,” but that the doctor that Andre’s mother had recommended was curing it. To my surprise, Andre laughed at this. “You mean Baresky?” he said.
Mother said, “Yes.”
“Baresky’s no doctor,” he said with another laugh. “He’s a tailor from St. Petersburg with a black box, with which he’ll promise to cure anything. He’s offered to grow hair on my bald spot.”
I never had to go back to that doctor.
Driving back, Mother made Andre drive slowly, because they had had a lot to drink. In the back seat, I couldn’t hear much of their conversation, but I could hear Mother laughing frequently. She kissed his cheek again, as we said goodbye, and I saw Andre try to kiss her on the mouth, but Mother slipped her face away, with a little nervous laugh.
In the elevator, I saw the smile drop from Mother’s face and her eyes close. “I have a splitting headache,” she said. “I can’t drink.”
Mother had two types of “splitting headaches.” One kind was when she wanted me to leave her alone, the other when she had had more than one glass of wine to drink. This was the second kind. I had learned to tell them apart, but this time I could well have seen it coming.
“Wh. . . .y didn’t y. . . .ou j. . . ust p. . . ut y. . . our h. . . and o. . . ver y. . . our g. . . lass?” I asked. This was something I had seen her do many times before.
Loves of Yulian Page 13