I had never seen my mother cry. What would happen next?
“Now, don’t you worry,” said Mr. Pete, when he heard the words ‘bank draft.’ “You just make yourself comfortable upstairs, and we’ll hold off on the rent until your check comes.”
Mummy looked up at him with what I later called her gratefulvictim look. “Thank you. What would I have done without your kindness?”
Janine and I were eating our first peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and found we could not open our mouths. After a minute, we began to giggle, and then I could not control myself. The tension of the last three days turned to hysteria, and we held onto each other, peanut butter and jelly oozing down our chins.
Finally, Mummy said in her sternest voice. “Stop it this minute,” and pulled us apart. She found a lace handkerchief in her bag and tried to wipe us off. Mrs. Pete went for a dishcloth and cleaned us up in no time. Then we went upstairs, carrying borrowed sheets and towels.
We made the beds, a little frightened when the Murphy swung down from the wall with a sigh at being disturbed. “Ugly old thing,” said Mummy. “But it really is a bed.”
Then we went back outside and down the block to the grocery store Mrs. Pete had told us about. “Eggs, milk, sugar, salt, bread, and tea,” said Mummy. I looked around. It was a small store with old-fashioned wooden counters and shelves and a refrigerator for the meat and dairy products. There were bins of dried vegetables and grains and a few cartons of fresh greens, lettuce and oranges, lemons and bananas. In Portugal, when I had gone to the market with Adelia carrying a straw basket on her head, we had walked along the dusty road to a crossroads where vendors were selling fruits, vegetables, live chickens, and grains. Mummy had ordered European food from the grocer, who delivered boxes of biscuits, tins, bottled juice, alcohol, and other imports.
“This is like England,” said Mummy to the grocer, who was adding up her bill. “It makes me feel at home.” She was looking in her purse, trying to recognize the coins.
Janine put three bananas on the counter in front of her mother. We had eaten bananas at June’s for the first time and she had loved them.
“The kid likes bananas,” said the grocer. “What kid doesn’t?”
“Are they expensive?” asked Mummy. She was counting out her money.
“Take them,” said the grocer. “It’s a welcome to the neighborhood.”
“You’re too kind,” said Mummy. “Everyone is so nice.” She sounded again like she might cry.
After supper, we unpacked a little and took baths. Later, we sat by one of the windows and watched heat lightning flicker over the skyline. It was still very hot, but in between far-off rumbles of thunder there was an occasional movement of air. I thought: We are finally in America. I didn’t know what that meant, except that it was different but no longer so scary.
Our apartment block was built around a large park, available to all the residents. It was here that we spent most of our time that summer. There were trees and benches and grass to play on. I discovered other children and for the first time began to come and go on my own.
We waited for word from Jack, which finally came. He did not seem very surprised we were no longer with his mother, and told the company to send monthly checks to us at our new address. But he never appeared. We began to resign ourselves to being another wartime family whose father was away for the duration.
In September, it was time to start school. We had to go to the local primary school and register. We had no idea what grade I should be in as I had never been to a real school. Janine was put into nursery school or pre-kindergarten. The principal had taught school in New York City and was used to immigrants, but they had been mostly poor Eastern Europeans. Mummy, with her English accent and well-dressed children, was a new experience. “What are you doing in Jackson Heights?” the principal asked.
“Waiting for my husband to join us,” said Mummy, as if Jackson Heights was a normal rendezvous point.
“Do you have family here?”
Mummy was used to this question by now. “No,” she said firmly. “My family is all in England.”
“My family was from England originally,” said the principal. “It’s a shame you couldn’t get home in time. Still, they’re evacuating children from London, so perhaps you are one of the lucky ones.” She enrolled us without further questions.
Much to everyone’s surprise, I took to it at once. I liked the school, the routine, the teachers, the subjects—except for arithmetic. I also won my first prize, a small black stuffed dog. We went to the World’s Fair with a woman Mummy had hired to do some cleaning.
In December, we saw our first snow. We had to buy gloves and hats and galoshes and scarves. Mummy mourned this drain on our resources, since we never needed these things in the mild climate of Portugal. But I loved waking up to the white stuff swirling down past the window and piling up on the roof. I learned to make snowballs and hurl them at the other kids. Then a really bad thing happened to me. The game was to hide when you saw someone coming and let them have it as they passed.
Janine, Sally, and friend in Jackson Heights
One very cold day, I waited until I spotted one of the neighborhood boys coming home and then threw two quick snowballs the way I had seen others do it and the way I had been pelted. One of them caught Peter above the right eye. He immediately let out a howl and clutched his head. When I saw the blood running down his face, my heart started pounding and I ran home crying. I was terrified I would be arrested.
Mummy was reading the newspaper. Her first reaction was irritation that I had done something like that. If I hadn’t behaved like those American children with no manners, this would not have happened.
The next day, we bought a box of lollipops and took them to Peter, who had a cut that had needed several stitches. The snowball had apparently contained a stone. His parents were fortunately not inclined to call the police, as I had feared; instead, they treated it all like a joke. Peter had a large white Band-Aid on his forehead and looked spitefully at me when I handed him the candy. After that, we carefully avoided each other. I felt chastened. How could I have done that?
By spring, Mummy was getting restless. Almost a year had passed since we had left Lisbon, and Jack still said he could not leave. For the first time in her life, Mummy had her own bank account with sufficient if not lavish amounts of money being regularly deposited. She had always practiced economy and had been putting money aside for six months. She told Jack she could not face another New York summer and was going to take us to a more comfortable spot—the South.
She had been told that Southerners were English. The pace of life was slower, cities were smaller, and you could have a house with a garden. Georgia was recommended, particularly Savannah. It was near the original English settlement in Jamestown, and people were proud of this heritage. Mummy would feel at home. Jack did not protest. He sent money to cover the train tickets and a week in a hotel. They no longer discussed his arrival date.
In early summer, after school was over, we said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Pete, our friends at school, and the Murphy bed, and took a train to Savannah. We went straight from the train to the Oglethorpe Hotel in downtown Savannah. Compared to our arrival in Jackson Heights, this move was done in style.
CHAPTER 5
1941: Savannah
I was nine when we moved to Savannah in the summer of 1941, and Janine was not yet five. Tom Green had given us the name of Maude Hayward, whose family went back to the early settlers and who was delighted to welcome an Englishwoman, a refugee from Europe married to an American. The Georgians we met from old families were very pro-British and in some cases identified more with their ancestors across the Atlantic than with the Americans who lived in the same town. We benefited from this attitude throughout our wartime stay in the South and even after the war, when we returned to settle permanently in Virginia. Unlike most immigrants or refugees who are often seen as interlopers, we were taken in as if we were family by
people eager to be hospitable and helpful to an Englishwoman with two small children.
We rented a small brick house in a quiet neighborhood. Mummy bought some second-hand furniture and had drapes made for the living room and chintz bed covers and curtains for our bedrooms. She even bought a used piano on which she planned to give us lessons. We each had our own room, the larger doubling as a nursery or playroom with a table and chairs. It was here we ate our meals, not in the dining room, where Mummy entertained her friends and occasionally gave parties for some of the British soldiers stationed at the nearby Army base.
The kitchen was modern, with a refrigerator, an electric stove, and an ironing board that came out of the wall like the Murphy bed. There was a screened-in porch off the living room with blinds and porch furniture. After a time it became the home of two squirrels Janine and I rescued from a fallen chimney.
Our living room in Savannah
Sally and Janine in Savannah
Sylvia and Gladys, Janine and Sally
Mummy was always very good about taking in small animals, and she could not resist the baby squirrels we brought home. Perhaps it was the homeless aspect that made them irresistible even after they chewed up the furniture and the blinds. One got part of his tail chopped off as he went through the closing door and the other fell into the sink. Mummy put some brandy on her finger for him to lick, thinking it would cure him; he promptly died.
We had a maid—Gladys—a tall, handsome black woman—who wore a black uniform, white apron, and cap and came three days a week to clean and wash and iron. I liked to sit in the kitchen while she ironed and listen to Gene Autry on the radio. I remember her only from photographs in which she looks like a woman of dignity and intelligence. When we left she went to work for a hotel, which in those days was a step up to better wages and working conditions.
Mummy found a community of women who played bridge and lunched together. Some had husbands, some were widows. She became a kind of star of the group, being a genuine Englishwoman, not merely a descendent, and exotic for having lived on the continent with her second husband. It was here that she forged her identity as an expatriate—never giving up her Englishness, yet never becoming an American. “Of course, I am an outsider…,” she would preface any opinion on local matters. She liked life in Savannah and shared the colonial, paternalistic attitudes of her friends. Had things turned out differently, she could have lived there comfortably for the rest of her life.
I was getting older and beginning to forge a new identity, that of an American. Janine and I went to Pape School, a small private school, which generously forgave the tuition as a gesture of good will toward an ally.
I did not like school much and learned what it was to be excluded. In fifth grade, I was shy and got teased because of my accent and my European clothes. We wore the clothes we brought with us and some of them were nothing like those worn by the other students. We had velvet dresses with lace collars, which had been made for us before we left Portugal. After we had studio photographs taken in these dresses, there was no occasion to wear them, so Mummy decided they should be worn to school in order to get some use from them before they were outgrown. That they were all wrong did not occur to her.
One day, I wore my coat all day, even when I played kickball. The gym teacher asked if I wanted to take it off. I refused. When I got home, the dress was as damp and slick as a wet cat.
“What happened to your dress?” asked my mother.
“We played kickball,” I said, from under the bed covers.
Mummy had no idea what the school day was like. She left school to the school. It was not part of her world. But she must have understood something, because I have no further memories of that kind of humiliation—other kinds, yes. At this time, I stopped thinking of her as Mummy and started calling her Mum or Mums. To my friends, I referred to her as my mother. Here, I will refer to her by the name she preferred, Sylvia.
Jack came to visit once when we lived in Savannah. It was Christmas; we had a tree and stockings, and we all exchanged gifts. I only had money saved from my allowance but I remember buying some hairpins for my mother. Like many women, she wore her hair in a roll at the back of her head secured with hairpins. She and Jack laughed when I gave her the hairpins. Did they think I did not understand or would not be hurt? I felt the poverty of the gift, which I had thought would please her.
Though I had some friends from school, my best friends lived in my neighborhood and went to public school. I wanted to go to school with Squirt and Pest, nicknames given to Anne and Joe who lived on my block. We all met in the street after school and played Kick the Can and Jacks and mumbley peg and, on rainy days, Monopoly on Joe’s side porch. Sometimes Sylvia made me take my sister, even though I thought she was too young to play our games.
While the war raged, Pearl Harbor was bombed, Europe burned, and thousands died, I played with my friends on the smooth blacktop, perfect for roller skating and hopscotch. We clustered in Joe’s backyard and climbed the big mulberry tree that left purple splotches all over the ground when the berries ripened and the birds ate them. Summer evenings, we played hide and seek until the huge, pale-green Luna moths appeared and we were all called home to bed.
I loved Joe but had to share him with Anne, who had been his friend longer. She was tall for her age and had a father whose right hand was missing a finger. He was a stern man who was said to whip his children with a belt. Anne never talked of this, but Joe did, and said that he too was whipped occasionally by his father. I said I was too, which was a lie, but I didn’t want to be left out.
The thought of being whipped with a belt was both exciting and disturbing. Why was he missing a finger? The thought of having a man at home who was also a disciplinarian worked on my emotions in unfamiliar ways. What would it be like? I was so attached to my mother that the thought of any competition was unbearable. That one day we would be reunited as a family seemed unreal.
In the park, the lake was shaped like a map of the United States, and under the bushes were what looked like old balloons. Joe explained these were rubbers. He said they were used for fucking, a word I did not know and he would not explain except to say it was a word you never said to anyone.
One day, I said it out loud behind Joe’s house. He said stop, and I said it again, louder, and he said please stop, my mother will hear you. I said it again louder and said tell me what it means and I’ll stop. I felt powerful; it was wonderful. Joe picked up a stick and drew a picture in the driveway gravel. On one side was a figure with something sticking straight out below his stomach and facing him was another figure with breasts and long hair.
I recognized the figures right away. The two of us stared at the picture without saying anything and after a little while, Joe erased it with his foot. I felt funny inside: excited but kind of scared.
Later, Anne came by my house and stood outside, calling my name. This was how we communicated with each other. You went to the door or window and said, “Yeah?”
“Can you play?”
And you went out unless you were being punished or eating dinner or doing a chore. You might go next door to Joe’s house or walk down to the shopping street three blocks away, where there was a dime store we often robbed of packets of chewing gum or pieces of loose candy. If you had a nickel you could go into the ice cream store and buy one scoop of rainbow sherbet. There was an empty lot with a large tree with a long rope with a knot on the end. You had to start by holding the knot near the sidewalk, then jump onto it and swing out over the low part of the lot and back again to jump off at just the right moment. I never had the nerve but we would stand and watch mostly older boys vying with each other to swing the furthest out and closest to the tree. Once I saw a boy crash into the tree and fall off the rope. He lay there while we all stared. Finally, he got up and hobbled off.
We roamed the nearby neighborhoods, dry and dusty at the end of the hot summer. Once, we came upon a grass fire, little flames licking up the brown s
tubble that someone must have set to clear the lot or field. We took it upon ourselves to put it out, beating the flames with our shirts, stamping them out. We were firefighters, saving the neighborhood. It didn’t take long. Then we left, our job done, not waiting around for thanks.
I was not closely supervised by my mother. We had no car and I don’t remember doing things with her. She had a social life and must have assumed the neighborhood was a safe place and that we would not stray outside it.I loved the movies, especially musicals with singing and dancing. One afternoon, I went alone to see the old version of Cat People with Simone Simon. Perhaps I thought the movie really was about cats. But it was about a beautiful woman descended from an ancient people, half-human, half-leopard, who could change her form when emotionally or sexually aroused. By the time the movie was over, it was dark outside and I had to walk some distance home. I was terrified, seeing black leopards in every shadow. For years, I was fearful of any hint of the supernatural and would not even walk past a theater showing movies such as Frankenstein’s Monster or I Married a Werewolf.
In 1943, when I was eleven, Sylvia met a woman named Jean Dayton West, who was a painter married to a military man living on the nearby Army base. My mother commissioned her to do portraits of my sister and me in oil. I wore a red dress and a gold pin my English father had given me. Janine wore a Portuguese peasant blouse. We both wore our long hair loose, falling over our shoulders: hers brown, mine blonde. Normally, we wore braids, unlike the other children, who all seemed to have shoulder-length or short hair.
Janine’s portrait won a prize—it showed a smiling girl with deep dimples, holding her white stuffed monkey, Tishi. I liked her portrait better than mine, which I did not think really looked like me, but the likeness increased as I got older. The artist had anticipated something in my face that was still below the surface.
Sylvia had two portraits of herself done in charcoal: in one, which showed her from the waist up, she wore a summer dress with a scoop neck and short sleeves; the other was a three-quarter-length portrait in which she was painted turning to look over her shoulder to show off her back and her black chiffon dress.
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