Our mother had found a way of reassuring herself that life was fundamentally unchanged. Jean West became our family chronicler. She made a charcoal copy of a photograph of my brother, Kem, in his British Commando uniform.
Our house in Savannah was full of pictures. The portraits hung in the living room and dining room along with the photographs of Janine and me as babies, lying naked on small fluffy rugs, not bearskin but probably props at the photography studio. I must have hinted to my neighborhood friends that we had pictures of naked babies. Of course, they wanted to see. Desperately self-conscious but pleased at the attention, I ushered them in one day when my mother was out. None of them had baby pictures like these.
Sally, Sylvia, and Janine in Savannah
I was beginning to change, to have real thoughts of my own, understanding certain things like trusting some people and not others and doing things you wanted and not telling your mother all the games you couldn’t describe when asked what you did with your friends. There seemed to be no words for what happened; the excitement deep inside you and knowing how you had to do something like winning at jacks or throwing the knife for mumbley peg and pretending you didn’t care when you got a noogie.
Gradually, my mother began to seem more different than the outside world. Instead of her, my sister, and me being normal, suddenly it became reversed: the outside world was real, and my mother became the stranger.
These were the days when the war was going badly for the Allies and there was real fear that Hitler would win after all. Sylvia invited the young English soldiers from the nearby Army base for social evenings to boost their spirits. On these evenings, they ate and drank and danced to the music of Frank Sinatra and the big bands and Vera Lynn singing “There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.”
“May I have this dance?” He was holding out his hand. I was only eleven, closer to his age than my mother was, but I was too shy to take hold of the rough khaki-covered arms.
When Sylvia got letters from Jack, she read some of them aloud to us. He sent photographs of himself and friends in the country, hiking or having a picnic. We studied them. He had on different clothes and didn’t look quite like I remembered. In one picture, he had his arm around a woman. Sylvia stared at this one a long time.
One day, Sylvia got word from Jack to meet him in New York City. She left Janine and me for the first time with Gladys. I was frightened and woke up at night. There were lions hidden in my clothes on the bedroom chair. Sometimes, I felt brave enough to reach over and turn on the light. This made them vanish. The closet was even more dangerous. If the door was left open even a crack, whatever was inside could escape.
Sylvia took a train to New York City to meet her husband. It was their first reunion since his brief Christmas visit. Perhaps she suspected the reason for his trip. The photographs might have been his way of preparing her. Perhaps he thought they would make his task easier. He had not asked her to bring us, though until they separated four years before, in Lisbon, he had been a devoted father. I did not hear the details of this meeting for some years, but later Janine and I referred to it as some families remember a summer holiday so special it becomes an emblem.
In New York, they met at the train station. He was thinner but felt and smelled the same. He was still her husband, the man she loved. At first, she forgot all her fears. At last, he was with her again and the past four years seemed to fall away. She wanted to go back to the hotel, to be alone for a little while. But he had made a reservation for lunch.
At the restaurant, Sylvia went to the ladies’ room and took off her hat and fixed her hair. She was shaking. He watched her return to the table, and she could tell he was beginning to remember. But he had already ordered lunch: oysters, then something else. Obediently, she put an oyster in her mouth. It was cold and tasted of the sea. Her teeth hit something hard. They both looked down at her hand. It was a black pearl. “Tears,” said Sylvia. “Pearls are tears.”
“This one looks valuable,” said Jack.
After the plates were cleared, he told her about the Spanish woman. They met while they were both working for the Resistance in Spain. She had been caught by the Fascists and, being Spanish, had no protection except for her lover. He could save her by marrying her and taking her out of the country.
“Live with her,” Sylvia said when he asked for a divorce. “But think of the children.” She refused the divorce.
First he cried; then he resorted to threats. If she didn’t agree to the divorce, he would simply disappear and leave her with nothing. Spain was far away and between them a war was going on. Sylvia needed none of that. She would have liked to spurn his money. If he preferred someone else, then good riddance. She would go home and lick her wounds in private. Fortunately, lawyers were consulted and agreements drawn up. We were to have $250 a month and the house in Portugal. In those days, $250 a month was more than adequate for three people to live on, including rent. This was to continue until my sister and I came of age or until Sylvia remarried.
But agreements—even those committed to print and signed and sealed—are only paper. After five years, Jack left Ingersoll-Rand and disappeared. Sylvia never remarried. Thus, we did our bit for the war effort, as the English like to say. We saved one Spanish spy.
I had not liked it when my mother left us to meet Jack in New York. When she returned, something was different. She sat on my bed one night before I went to sleep and told me Daddy was not going to live with us again. How wonderful! I was going to have my mother all to myself. After four years, I could hardly remember the man who had been my daddy when we lived in Portugal. But everything had changed. I knew we were not safe anymore.
I could no longer sleep through the night. I would lie in bed, feeling the panic mount inside me. “Are you there?” I called out to my mother.
“I’m here,” came her voice. She was not sleeping either.
A few minutes later when the pressure became too much again: “Are you there?” She never scolded me or told me to stop, only to go to sleep.
One day a telegram arrived for my mother while we were having lunch. She opened it and began to cry. My English Granny had died. For Christmas, I asked for and received a chemistry set that I was allowed to play with only in the bathroom. I cut my finger on its sharp metal shelf. Bright red blood welled up from a thin clean slice in my finger. My head spun as I tried to get up. When I woke, my head was resting against the cool white porcelain tub. There was blood on the tile floor. For years after, I fainted at the sight of blood and later carried smelling salts in my handbag along with aspirin and cigarettes.
CHAPTER 6
1944: Savannah, Hendersonville
After the divorce, Sylvia became more and more concerned with going home. Home was Portugal: Mont’Alegre, the house she and Jack had built, which she now owned. But the war was grinding on without any end in sight. In those days before air-conditioning, Savannah was almost unbearable in the summer. It was said you could fry an egg on the sidewalk, although I never saw anyone do it. Kids don’t seem to notice the heat, or at least I don’t remember it. Most of the women and children on our street left town for a while to escape if only to a relative in the country. The men, of course, stayed behind sweltering in their offices, rushing away on Friday afternoons to join the family.
The main concern was polio—or infantile paralysis, as it was commonly known. Public swimming pools were closed, sometimes for most of the summer, and parents were advised to keep their children away from crowds. No one knew where the disease came from or how it spread.
We spent part of one summer at Tybee beach near Savannah and another in the mountains near Hendersonville, North Carolina. At Camp Cayuga, owned by the Episcopal Church, we rented a cottage and ate in the communal dining room. We shared a table with another family whose son was allowed to pick up his food in his hands. My mother shuddered visibly as he consumed his greasy pork chop, sucking on the bone.
The lake was considered safe f
or swimming and there was a barn for square dancing in the evening. I do not remember having partners, only being swung around and around in a kind of wild frenzy of music and movement.
The following year, we moved from our little suburban house in Savannah on the same block as Joe and Anne to a smaller house in Hendersonville. Perhaps Sylvia needed something to occupy her until the war was over and we could return home. Savannah must have seemed used up and depressing without the prospect of her husband and their life together.
She no longer drove a car. Jack had taught her to drive, but she gave it up after a minor fender bender with a milk truck. What would happen to the children if I was killed? she reasoned. She used to walk to the nearest grocery store—many blocks away—and come home with a paper bag on each hip. We seldom took the bus anywhere and got used to walking, often long distances. We never owned another car and so never went far from home. I never traveled as a child, I only moved.
When we left Savannah, I had promised to send Joe some real lead soldiers for his collection if I could find some. Toy soldiers were no longer made out of lead during the war and therefore difficult to come by. Who knows why we thought real lead soldiers would be available in North Carolina and not in Savannah?
I remember looking out of the back window of a car at my street, where I had played with Joe and Anne. I was ashamed or embarrassed by something; probably it had to do with Joe, but its exact nature I have forgotten. I must have tried to comfort myself that I was leaving something uncomfortable behind, therefore making our departure a good rather than a tragic event. This view of flight as a remedy stayed with me well into adulthood. For my mother, it became a way of life.
This move was the end of childhood for me, if childhood means a lack of real awareness of the adult world and the ability to exist completely in moments of active and imaginative play. I had not yet become a reader, although today I still have two books that Jack gave me one year for Christmas. I wrote the name I used then, Sally Pratt, on a book plate inside the front cover. I felt possessive of them: a small piece of him that belonged to me.
In Hendersonville, I began junior high school, where I met Connie Major, a slight, dark-haired girl with a lovely smile, who became my best friend. I still wore my hair in two long blonde braids, and in 1945 I was 13 but showed no physical signs of entering puberty. In fact, I did not menstruate until I was 15.
Sally, age 13
Janine, age 9
Connie and I lived within walking distance of each other. After school, I spent most of my time at her house. Her father was a doctor and her mother a real American housewife, like in the movies. They had a big colonial house with a large kitchen and a freezer. Her mother baked layer cakes and cut up the potatoes in small squares which she explained was the way one did it up north where they came from. Connie had an older sister who was a bobbysoxer. She and her friends wore pleated skirts and saddle shoes and listened to Frank Sinatra. They ignored us, of course, but we watched them, and our doll play was modeled on how we imagined those older girls felt and behaved.
Connie and I each had a teenage doll like the Barbies that came later. In our play the dolls were us. We inhabited them as they lived out our adolescent fantasies of boys and clothes and sex. This play was fueled by our one afternoon a week in dancing school.
I have no memory of learning to dance, only of what happened after class when we went somewhere to play spin-the-bottle. When the spinning bottle stopped, pointing toward you, you went into the closet with the spinner and kissed. I cannot think of anything that has happened since that has incited that level of excitement and dread. We loathed and loved it. There was, of course, one boy, more mature than the rest of us, who was the ringleader. He understood the game, while the rest of us knew only an incomprehensible excitement.
During this first foray into boy/girl relations, we paired up. Connie paired with Boyd who became her future husband and I with a forgotten one. The boys walked us home from school, but I left mine at the corner, terrified my mother might suspect. Why was I so secretive? My mother was not strict and never showed any signs of disapproving of boys. It was not being bad I feared but being laughed at, something more common in my memory than punishment. Children were often mocked or teased, mostly in a good-natured way but it made you feel you had done something wrong or stupid. It confused and weakened you—or so I felt, being sensitive and shy and always the new kid on the block trying to figure out what to do this time.
Sally, Connie, and a friend
Our next-door neighbors were a widow named Mrs. Bull and her son, Bartlett. He was older than I was and never a real presence in my life. Mainly I remember Mrs. Bull because she gave me my first raw oyster. We were invited to dinner. My mother often served a half-grapefruit for the first course, but Mrs. Bull gave us raw oysters arranged in small glass bowls. I was desperate to appear grown-up, so I put an oyster in my mouth like my mother did. I gagged. The two women laughed.
Our little house—my mother called it a cottage—was truly tiny. My sister and I had our own rooms, with our chintz bedspreads and matching curtains. Mine had blue flowers, Janine’s pink. We had an ice box instead of the refrigerator we’d had in Savannah. Each week the iceman came with his horse-drawn wagon and brought in a huge block of ice that went into the top compartment of the icebox. All week it melted into a metal tray that had to be emptied. By week’s end, the box was no longer very cold and the milk was unpleasantly tepid. Even though I drank hot milk when we first arrived in America, I had become a cold-milk drinker by this time and was squeamish about milk that tasted more animal-like as it warmed. The other unpleasant feature of this venerated and wholesome food was its taste of garlic in spring, when the cows browsed on the new grasses.
It was during the short time (less than two years) we lived in Hendersonville, not long before the war finally ended, that we saw our divorced daddy, Jack Pratt, for the last time. We met his bus. Sylvia gripped his hand and gave him a look of anguish I have never forgotten. He took me and my sister somewhere for ice cream, and afterwards we stopped in a drugstore to buy a present for our mother—a box of talcum powder. Years later, I wrote a poem called “Sweet Dust.”
Not long after this, before the war was officially over but after the fighting in the Atlantic had stopped, Sylvia booked passage for us from New York to Lisbon on a Portuguese freighter that had been used as a cargo vessel or troop transport during the war and hastily refitted to carry passengers. Although there remained unexploded depth charges in the ocean, there must have been a demand for passage from other refugees desperate to get home because the ship was full. We packed up our belongings and prepared to finally return home.
CHAPTER 7
1945: The Crossing
We boarded the Algarve in New York Harbor in early December, 1945. It was a cold, overcast day. The ship was small and battered; it looked as though it had been through a war, which it had. We followed the porter with our luggage down into the cabins below deck. Our cabin had two bunk beds and one single cot, an old wardrobe, and a sink. There were two chamber pots under the beds. The porter stacked our trunks against the wall putting one smaller case on top of the wardrobe. Obeying directions from the freighter company, we had placed our clothes and personal items for the trip in a small suitcase. No formal attire would be expected.
A porthole gave us our only daylight, and through it we could see the ocean in its many moods—we had no idea how many there would be and what a range. I bagged the top bunk, and this set off a brief futile challenge from my sister.
“Oh, well, it’s only five days,” said my mother.
Upstairs in the dining room and lounge, the waiters were setting the tables for the next meal, laying crisp white cloths with folded dinner napkins and heavy cutlery, as well as assorted condiments and salt and pepper shakers. The waiters wore white uniforms and bowed as we walked through into the lounge. The bartender was opening champagne and pouring complimentary glasses.
“Bon voyag
e,” he smiled as he handed my mother a glass. For us, he had lemonade, decorated with a maraschino cherry and slice of orange. We stood drinking our drinks and looking around at the other passengers. There were not many of us, and most of the others were Portuguese, or so my mother thought. I listened to the language they were speaking but could no longer understand it. I had become used to hearing only American spoken and felt a sudden surge of homesickness for Hendersonville, our little house, and my friends. My mother finished her drink and, perhaps also taken aback by hearing Portuguese again, she took our hands and we started around the deck.
We passed folded deckchairs ready to be set up for the passengers. My mother wondered if it would be warm enough. We were all dressed in heavy coats and hats; my mother was wearing her Persian lamb. I was still uneasy from my first experience of homesickness. In the frenzy of the last months, getting packed, booking passage, arranging for train tickets and baggage handling, I had lost sight of what it would mean for me to leave the country that had become our home while I had gone from childhood to adolescence.
We were returning to a previous home, which in a real sense no longer existed, as least not as it had been when we left. We were returning fatherless to a country that, although remaining neutral, had nevertheless been a participant in all the activities of the war except the fighting. Most of the Europeans who had provided much of the country’s income had left, and the Portuguese themselves had undergone dramatic changes. None of this occurred to me, of course, or even to my mother. What did she think we were going back to? She clung to a life even she must have suspected had evaporated during the five years of war. All we had was a house.
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