Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  “Oh, no. I will give it to him. It will be too much trouble for you.”

  “No trouble, Senhor.”

  “Thank you, no, Senhor. It would be very sad if you lost it.”

  “I will not lose it.”

  “You might. I will put the money on top of the wagon, here, so the man will find it when he comes back.” Mort put the two empty bottles on top of the paper money so it would not blow away.

  The policeman backed up a few paces and looked at the money with the empty bottles on top of it. Then he looked at Mort. Mort waved at him and smiled. The policeman glared at him. Mort walked back to the others on the beach and then he turned to look at the policeman. The policeman was fingering his gun and he looked as if he could not decide whether or not to arrest Mort, and if he did arrest him what he could arrest him for. Mort smiled innocently and sweetly.

  “He’s angry because I won’t let him steal the money,” he said.

  “Look at the sunrise!” Helen breathed. “Oh, Rio is so beautiful!”

  It was very quiet. The only sound was the thudding of the waves on the shore, and once the milkman’s horse stamped his hoof. The sound rang out in the quiet street like the fresh clang of a faraway triangle. Margie felt she could sit here on the sand all day, never moving, watching the white surf and listening to it. But already the sun was becoming hot. The milkman came out and drove down the street.

  “Good night,” the girl named Lucia said. She started to walk away.

  Mort jumped to his feet. “I’ll walk you home.”

  They watched Mort and the girl walking down the deserted street. The girl was walking very quickly, almost like a real tigress, her step light and silent. She looked very slim and long-legged and stealthy, an animal of the night who knew all these winding streets by heart, and to whom no real harm could ever come. Margie didn’t like her.

  “We have to go home,” Helen said. “I’m asleep.” She stood up, shaking the sand out of her shoes.

  “I guess it’s all over,” Bert said.

  Margie stood up too, holding on to Neil with one hand while she brushed the sand off her clothes. Then she brushed the sand off him. She peered into his face. “Look at my poor husband. He’s so tired he’s getting depressed. Don’t look so sad, love.”

  Neil gave her a weak smile. He did not say anything.

  “I’m going to sleep for a week,” Helen said.

  “That’s what you think,” said Bert. “Wait till the kids come in about two hours from now.”

  “I’ll bet you forgot for a while that you had them,” Margie said, smiling. “The party’s over.”

  “And the circus begins,” said Bert. He was trying to look long-suffering but he really looked proud.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night. Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Good night.”

  CHAPTER 15

  There is a grayness that settles down over a city after a holiday is over, no matter what the season of the year. In America, after New Year’s, everyone who is rich enough goes away to a sunny place for a winter vacation, to escape. Those who cannot, wait longingly for the sun to come to them. February is the shortest and the longest month in any hemisphere. In Rio, when Carnival is over the city settles down for the grayness of Lent. The people who work in São Paulo and other cities, who came to Rio for Carnival, go home again. In São Paulo the offices open at seven in the morning. It is not like Rio; it is the city of business people, of one-hour lunches, of bars and restaurants that close at ten.

  In Rio, after Carnival, the poor return to their slums and their memories. The new middle class of white-collar workers return to their offices, waiting for hours in the early mornings for overcrowded trolleys and lotaçãos. The cafegistas, who lie on the beach all day and sit in the cafés all night, call their doctors for vitamin injections or get one at the drugstore, and then they feel strong enough for the beach again. The American wives go back to the Golf Club. The Brazilian wives go back to their dressmakers, their hairdressers, their games of cards. It is very hot.

  After Carnival was over Mort Baker found a furnished apartment and moved into it. Margie and Neil Davidow decided to have separate bedrooms, as they had planned before Mort came to stay with them, and Neil moved into the vacated guestroom. Leila Silva e Costa and Helen Sinclair went back to the favellas to visit their protégée, Maria, and found themselves confronted by an angry priest. The priest told them he had discovered all about Leila’s sin of giving birth-control information to Maria, and they were never to be allowed to come to the favellas again. Leila had brought with her a large box of food and clothing for Maria and her children, including her own children’s discarded Carnival costumes (Maria could use the material to sew something else). She gave the box to the priest to give to Maria.

  She was neither ashamed nor angry nor embarrassed; she was philosophical. She shrugged and smiled. “I only wanted to help,” she said, as she steered her car down the difficult road away from the favellas. “I am sorry it’s over.”

  “I am too,” Helen said. She felt subdued. The result of the whole incident was so extreme, it wasn’t fair. She wondered what would become of Maria and her children, whether anyone else would befriend them and bring them food, whether they could get along all alone. “I need a drink,” she said. “Let’s go to the Golf Club.”

  Leila opened her purse and tossed a small package out the car window. “I think I will go home now,” she said. “Perhaps Carlos will call me. I told my maid to tell him I had gone to the favellas. Will you come with me?”

  “My children are at the Golf Club. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “All right. I’m sorry about what happened.”

  “I am too.”

  Leila drove her to the gateway of the Golf Club and they kissed each other on both cheeks, very formally but warmly. Helen waved until the car was out of sight and then she walked down the driveway that led to the clubhouse. Julie and Roger were in the swimming pool, with Mrs. Graham watching them from a canvas chair. They waved at her and splashed about vigorously, showing off for her.

  “I’ll wait for you upstairs and we’ll have lunch when you’re ready,” she said.

  Mil Burns was sitting at a table on the veranda with a middle-aged woman. Helen had not seen Mil for a long time and she found herself quite happy to see her.

  “Come over and meet my mother,” Mil said.

  Mil’s mother was a large, formidable woman, an image of what Mil would be in thirty years. There was a strong family resemblance, but next to her mother Mil looked somehow rather delicate, and much younger than usual. They were both drinking whisky sours. “My mother, Mrs. Penny. Helen Sinclair,” Mil said.

  “How do you do.”

  “How do you do,” Mrs. Penny said. “Have a whisky sour. What is it you’re not supposed to drink in this place? Ice? They have no ice in them.” She gestured at the waiter. “Well, how do you like Brazil?”

  “Very much,” Helen said, sitting down at their table.

  “You’ll change,” Mrs. Penny said. “I’ve been here only two weeks and I hate it. It feels as if it’s been two years. That Carnival—my God!”

  “It isn’t always that way,” Helen said.

  Mil’s mother drained her whisky sour. “We’re going home, thank God. I’m taking my daughter out of here.”

  Helen turned to Mil in surprise. “For a visit or for good?”

  “My mother’s a little drunk,” Mil said. She smiled weakly. “I thought I’d go home with her for a couple of months. It’ll be good for the kids.”

  “My grandchildren are going to grow up as good, wholesome, hundred per-cent Americans,” Mrs. Penny said firmly.

  The waiter brought new drinks. “It will be a relief to get home,” Mil said. “I miss it. That wonderful Chicago snow! I’ve had enough of the Good Neighbor Policy.”

  “And the cockroaches!” Mrs. Penny’s face contorted in outrage. “This big! The first nig
ht I was here there was one in my room. All those legs—you should have seen it. Disease carriers, that’s what they are. I chased it with a copy of The Ladies’ Home Journal, but it ran under an armchair and I couldn’t get at it. I was so frightened out of my wits I couldn’t sleep. Damned thing. It came back the next day. I got kind of used to it, the damned thing. I named it Hercules. But I fixed Hercules.” She smiled mirthlessly. “I used to put a little bit of food inside the waste basket every night so the cockroach would go in there instead of climbing up my arm or something while I was asleep and biting me to death.”

  Helen laughed. “Hercules!”

  Mrs. Penny drank her whisky sour. She lowered her voice and looked around carefully. “Did you ever notice those Brazilians, how sneaky they are? You can’t do business with them without a contract. In America all you have to do is shake hands. But not here. And they all have mistresses.”

  “You learned all that in two weeks?” Helen said.

  “Oh, I knew it in two minutes. I can always size up a person by looking at his face. I’ve been around, you know, fifty-seven years. I wouldn’t trust one of them. What do you expect? It’s hot all the time. Something happens to the mind when you’re in tropical heat all the time.”

  “It gets quite cool here in the winter,” Helen said.

  “I knew she was miserable,” Mrs. Penny said, ignoring her. She put her arm around Mil. “I knew it from her letters. I don’t care how old she is, she’s still my baby. Aren’t you?”

  Mil smiled shyly. “We don’t have to discuss it now,” she said softly. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Helen had never thought she would see Mil Burns so gentled and changed. It seemed as if when she was away from her mother, her mother lived on in her, but when she was face-to-face with the dynamic original the imitation simply faded away. “What about Phil?” Helen said.

  “He can just shift for himself,” Mrs. Penny said airily. “I ask you, what kind of a man brings his wife and little children out here in a barbaric country like this? There are plenty of good jobs at home. So he won’t be a millionaire. So what! A million dollars is going to do him a lot of good when he’s a hopeless invalid for the rest of his life with dysentery.”

  Mil smiled, a smile compounded of embarrassment and sympathetic approval. “Helen likes it. Don’t disillusion her, Mother. She’ll find out.”

  “I just think you’re all wrong,” Helen said.

  Mil’s mother leaned forward and touched Helen’s hand. Her voice when she spoke was kindly, in a mother-knows-best way, but there was steel underneath. “Do you think you can ever cure dysentery once you’ve got it? It stays forever in the alimentary canal. I read that in a magazine.”

  The waiter came past their table and glanced at them, but Mil shook her head. “We’re not going to have any more drinks,” she said. “We’re going to have lunch now.”

  “I haven’t felt well since I got here. I don’t know, I just don’t feel well.”

  “Would you like to have lunch with us, Helen?”

  “I have to have lunch with Julie and Roger alone today,” Helen said quickly. “I promised them.”

  “Just wait until your children stop speaking English,” Mrs. Penny said darkly. “Just wait until they’re ashamed of you because you’re the foreigner. You tell her, Mil.”

  “I’ll chance it.”

  Mrs. Penny rose heavily to her feet. “I’m going to the … what you call it … balnerio. You can order me a cheese sandwich, baby.”

  Mil looked at her mother with concern until she had disappeared into the main dining room. Then she brightened and seemed more her old self. “Don’t mind Mother. She’s a little disillusioned.”

  Helen wanted to say something about prejudice, but she was afraid of getting into an argument. What would be the use? She felt suddenly sorry for Mil, and for Phil Burns, and even for the mother. “What did you tell Phil?”

  “He thinks it’s only for a visit,” Mil said. “I had to tell him that. I might really come back in two months—I don’t know.”

  “Don’t go,” Helen said. “I know it’s none of my business, but please don’t go. If you go you’ll plan to come back but somehow you never will. I just know it. I don’t know how or why I know it, but I just do.”

  “I know,” Mil said quietly. “You’re right.” She smiled, but surprisingly there were tears in her eyes. “Listen, it’s not easy to leave your husband.”

  “And for what—for snow?”

  “For me.”

  “For you?”

  “For me,” Mil said. “For me, for me.” She was jabbing at her chest with her thumb as if the real essence of herself, whatever it was, were an organ inside her something like her heart. “It’s different for them, for the men. They have something—their work. They have friends. They do things. But what about me? I can’t sit here for the rest of my life and watch my kids starting to speak English with a foreign accent, wanting to settle down here when they’re grown because it’s all they know. We have only one life to live. I don’t want it to be here where I don’t belong. I want to be home, in my real home. I don’t want to play cards all day in a place where you can’t get an American book until it’s eight months old. I have to take care of myself and my kids. If he won’t, then I will.”

  Why, it’s almost as if she’s not talking about her husband at all, Helen thought in surprise. It’s not as if he’s someone she really knows and loves at all, but just someone she once made a bargain with: you do thus-and-such and I’ll do this-and-that. Love, honor and cherish, and a house in the suburbs. In sickness and in health till a cockroach do us part. There must be dozens of wives, Helen thought, who think all the things that are advertised in the bridal magazines are an identity. And they’re perfectly happy as long as they have everything that everyone else has, or perhaps a little better. But as soon as it’s different they feel deserted, cheated.… But maybe I’m being unfair. After all, maybe there’s something between Mil and Phil that she’d never mention to me. Maybe it’s something personal. I don’t know. We know so little about our friends’ private lives. They tell us so much, but they tell us all the wrong things. We never really know why. Maybe it’s because so many of them really don’t know why themselves.

  “I’ll sit with you until your mother comes back, but then I have to go,” she said. “Julie and Roger will be starved.”

  “We don’t see each other much lately,” Mil said. “It’s a shame. And now I’m leaving. What do you do with yourself all the time?”

  “Well, there was Carnival.”

  “Oh, before that. And lately. You haven’t been to the club for weeks.”

  “I go to the beach quite a lot. And my children like to go to the beach every few days as a change, and then they have lunch at home. The days pass.”

  “I always thought you and I would be better friends,” Mil said. “We have a lot in common. We’re certainly brighter than the average, we both went to college, we could discuss things. You go around with Margie Davidow a lot, don’t you?”

  “She’s my best friend in Brazil.”

  “Oh, she’s sweet. She’s a very sweet girl.”

  Helen smiled. “That means you don’t like her.”

  “Oh, I like her. I just don’t see you two together. Why, you two wouldn’t even have ever met if you were back home in New York.”

  “Then I’m glad we’re here,” Helen said. If there was one thing she disliked it was someone who told you that you and she ought to be good friends because you were both so much more intelligent than anyone else.

  “Well,” Mil said wryly, “nothing ever turns out the way we want it to. But we try, don’t we? We try damned hard.”

  She had that faintly superior look on her face; the Iowa State Corn Queen for ever and ever, with a sense of humor as a bonus and a diploma to go with it, and don’t you ever forget it—and yet, for the first time there was a crack in the façade, as if Mil Burns were on the verge of learning that it is
possible to laugh at oneself without having the whole room join in the chorus.

  “I guess we do try,” Helen said wistfully. “But half the time we do the wrong thing.” She was not talking about her abortive friendship with Mil now, and she knew Mil wasn’t either. For herself, she was thinking with a growing disturbance about Sergio, because lately from time to time the memory of him kept coming back whenever she was alone. It frightened her. During Carnival she had been sure he was out of her life for ever. She felt as if she had lost her mind and found it again in one climactic week. But now that Carnival was over, and she was rested, and the whole week seemed as if she had imagined it in a fever dream, she was right back where she had been before. It was Sergio she thought of, things he had said, the way he looked, and no matter how much she hated herself for it she could keep the memories away only by sheer effort. She wondered how it could be possible for a woman to be in love with two men at once in different ways. Men, of course, could manage it, and did. But women? Women weren’t supposed to be like that; it was unnatural.

  “Do you feel better, Mother?” Mil asked. Mrs. Penny sat down heavily in her chair.

  “I have to leave now,” Helen said, rising. “Goodbye, Mrs. Penny. I hope the rest of your stay is better than the beginning.”

  “I can’t wait to go, that’s all.”

  “I’ll call you before I leave,” Mil said. “So long.”

  “Thank you for the drink.”

  Mil’s mother did not seem in the least reluctant to see Helen go, in fact, she seemed rather glad. She leaned closer to Mil and took her hand. “Now when we get home …” she was saying happily. Helen did not hear any more as she walked away quickly to see the fresh, lovely faces of her two children.

  CHAPTER 16

  As February came to an end Helen Sinclair remembered the tag ends of other Februarys in other places, and how she had felt. It seemed as though every end of February was the turning point of the year, the ebb when nothing could become colder or gloomier or more miserable, and from then on everything was better. She remembered slush in Westport, dangerous roads, the children at home cranky with colds and tired of all the therapeutic educational little games she had invented for them, the floors of their rooms constantly littered with cut-out colored paper, their hands on the quilts sticky with library paste, their noses running, their voices shrill with petulance despite their hoarseness. And then she herself always caught whatever cold the children had, but much worse, and being the head of the household during the day she could not allow herself to go to bed. She would have a headache and sore throat and feel ugly, and there was always something: the oil burner broke down one February, Julie’s Siamese kitten was killed by a car driven by a twelve-year-old boy with no driving license, and one February their substitute cleaning lady (the regular one had the flu) disappeared, taking with her, of all improbable things, considering the jewelry and heirlooms in the house, their portable television set. But the children considered the loss of the TV a much greater tragedy.