We left in fog and rain that shrouded the ocean. The journey was supposed to take five days, but we bucked and rolled for 14. The sea became so rough that nothing remained on any surface. The beautifully laid tables were quickly wiped clean of their cloths, their china and glass sliding, often violently, onto the floor. At first, as if refusing to submit to the will of the ocean, the waiters picked up, washed, and reset. Soon, it was clear this was hopeless: a sudden pitch would send everything off the tables into a heap of crockery, pickles, salt, pepper, butter, all wetted down by the overturned water glasses. The rolling of the boat made it impossible to keep anything horizontal. We learned to drink our soup by holding the bowl in one hand close to our mouths and either tossing it in with a spoon or drinking it from the bowl. By the second week, nothing was put on the tables until we sat down, and then we were issued a plate and glass and cutlery. People gave up table manners and reverted to more primitive ways of protecting their food. We cradled our plates on our laps or held the plate firmly on the table encircling it with the left arm and leaning protectively over the top. The dining room took on the appearance of a school cafeteria or, I imagined, a prison.
Clothing in the 1940s was much more formal than today. To be seen in public meant, for men and boys, wearing shirts, ties, trousers, and jackets—for women, dresses, stockings, and often hats. By the end of the second week, many of us appeared in our pajamas and bathrobes. Of the perhaps twelve passengers, there were never many together in the dining room, and often there was no one.
There was no purser or doctor on board. There was one Portuguese woman, Fatima, hired to make the beds and clean the rooms, who became our nurse and caretaker. She wore slippers without heels and you could hear her approach by their slap-slap on the floor. Everyone was seasick; some recovered after a few days, some remained in their bunks the whole trip. I think my mother was one of those. But we all spent the first few days vomiting into our chamber pots or whatever pan or basin she brought us. During the first storm, our suitcase fell off the top of the wardrobe, crashing onto the floor; the other trunks fell and slid across the room, temporarily trapping us inside.
One day, an American ship appeared like a ghost out of the fog and rain to escort us the rest of the way. I stopped thinking we were going to die. Only much later did we learn about the mines and depth charges. That this voyage was undertaken at this particular time, in winter, over the weapons of war rolling at random through the ocean can only be understood by knowing that refugees are a desperate lot. They will risk anything to return home.
Finally, the voyage was over; we arrived in Lisbon shaken but alive.
CHAPTER 8
Portugal Redux
The taxi that took us from Lisbon to the hotel in Estoril could have been the same one we had taken five years earlier. When we arrived at the hotel, a light rain was falling. The air was soft and warm with the memory of flowers, very different from the cold Atlantic. Across the street, the ocean crashed against the sea wall in front of the train station. I looked up above the park to where our house was waiting in the hills beyond the old casino. The brutal ocean voyage had severed my connection to America. Happiness washed over me. We were home.
Before we could move back into our house, the keys had to be secured from the attorney and arrangements made to turn on the water, etc. Meanwhile, it was almost Christmas.
The hotel was nearly empty. It smelled musty and felt colder than outdoors as we checked in. The euphoria I had felt standing between the ocean and the park, playgrounds of my childhood, had dissolved. The dining room was dark, formal, and quiet. No one said much, and the chinking of silverware and muffled voices sounded not loud but unnaturally clear, the sound of a single stone dropped in a canyon.
The day after we arrived the rain stopped, but the wind was up and it was cold. But I was excited. The shop windows, festively decorated for Christmas, were much more interesting now that I was 13 than they had been when I was eight. I bought a small wooden box, painted with flowers and the greeting Buon Natale. A pair of white shoes had also caught my eye, and I proposed them as a Christmas present. Too expensive, said my mother, but she finally gave in. I must have known she could not refuse me anything within reason. Christmas had always meant presents, but this year her urgency to return home by sea in the middle of winter had swept all other considerations aside.
Our timing could not have been worse. Even on our first day back, among once-familiar surroundings, it must have occurred to Sylvia that we had carried Home with us, and that small part remaining was packed up in our suitcases and boxes, not waiting to welcome us on a hill in Estoril. However, in the first days, we were pinning our hopes on the house, Mont’Alegre—happy mount—where we believed we would find something of the life we had left behind.
I wore my new white shoes only once or twice. We had nowhere to go except our house and the roads were muddy and wet at this time of the year. Those ugly white shoes and my need for them have stayed in my memory and become emblems—pathetic stand-ins—for what they were not: father, friend, or home.
The smart shops under the arcades were unchanged but now almost empty. You could still buy embroidered table clothes from Madeira (made before the war) and tinned white asparagus and foie gras, but there were no people around. Elderly Portuguese women sat behind the counters, opening late and closing early. The delivery bicycle remained barely used outside the provisions store, the outdoor cafe was closed for the season. We turned to the park, holding each other’s hands and trying to keep up our spirits.
“Remember how glorious it is in summer?” Sylvia said, “Roses and geraniums and water lilies in the ponds to shade the goldfish.”
I remembered the nursemaids sitting together with their large wheeled prams. Being very shy, I’d had few friends. One of them had been a boy named Robin who let me help him sail his boat. We pushed and poked at it with sticks until, unexpectedly, the wind caught the sail and in one glorious rush, it headed straight for the bushes and disappeared. A gardener was found who pulled the bushes apart and dipped his net many times into the water without finding any trace of it. Robin, who had a temper, got red in the face, the nurse started shouting at the gardener in Portuguese, and I began to cry. Where had it gone? I was terrified by things that disappeared.
We had the hotel to ourselves. The desk clerk was only occasionally at his post, and the staff consisted of one chambermaid, a part-time cook, and a combination waiter and dishwasher. They made us our meals—usually something with eggs and rice. Choices were not available. On Christmas day, we had chicken and rice. Afterwards, the waiter brought us a tiny English Christmas pudding—Crosse & Blackwell’s—from a tin. We had seen them in the fancy grocery story in the arcade. The cook had put a sprig of evergreen on top and doused it with brandy. Before he divided it carefully into three portions, the waiter ceremoniously put a match to it and a blue aura sprang up.
“Buon Natale,” murmured the waiter.
“Buon Natale,” we murmured back.
My mother looked as though she might cry as we received our small portions. My sister took a bite and immediately spit it out. “You got the lucky piece of silver,” said Sylvia. She took the tiny silver ring from my sister. My mother was superstitious and all her life depended on a variety of charms designed to ward off bad luck. We turned over a piece of silver under a new moon, never opened an umbrella in the house or put a pair of shoes on the table, threw any carelessly spilled salt over our left shoulders, and embedded small silver bells, rings, four leaf clovers, and horseshoes in our Christmas pudding every year. This one came at a good time, and it lifted her spirits to think one of her children was to be happily married.
The waiter looked impressed. They both beamed at Janine, who smiled obligingly back and tried to put the ring on her finger. It was much too small.
Finally, our house was ready—cleaned, electricity and water turned on, the beds made. The furniture was as I remembered it: the dark dining room with heavy Jac
obean furniture, high-backed chairs upholstered in red, the refectory table, the heavy sideboard, the chandelier with small red lampshades on each bulb. The living room, which we called the drawing room, had a fireplace at one end and a writing table on which lay a soft Italian leather case tooled in gold.
This writing case stayed with my mother until the end of her life, and I have it now, discolored and no longer soft. Like her, it endured all the changes, bearing the marks of what it passed through. There is a large stain from spilled ink, a hardened circle from a too-hot cup or ashtray and numerous cigarette burns. The folder is dirty and the gold tooling faint. It does not encourage or comfort me as do the pair of Portuguese tiles that hang in my kitchen: in one, a baker in a straw hat strips the grain; in the other, he wears a white apron and is removing round, flat loaves from an oven on a wooden paddle. These are still clean and whole, their message enduring and optimistic. The old leather case represents something darker. It was one of my mother’s last possessions, of no value and therefore never sold. It is my memento mori.
Now we could not afford the oil needed to fill the large underground tank, and so the beautiful American furnace remained unused, a monument to someone else’s dream, someone no longer present. We used the gas stove for heat as well as cooking. Fortunately, natural gas was not expensive although the ordinary wood or coal stove found in most kitchens would have been more practical. The refrigerator had its coils on the top and at times was not as cold as the outside air temperature. It did not know how to make ice. We filled the tiny cubed trays with water and every few days I stuck my finger into one of the cubes, hoping to find it solid. Never. In fact, the water was not as cold as the water from the tap, which came from deep underground and which we could not drink. Our drinking water came in large wickercovered demijohns, delivered once a week by a man driving a very old truck from a bottling plant in the hills near Sintra, a nearby mountain town with a famous castle.
None of these inconveniences troubled us except for the cold. We should have waited until spring, my mother admitted, as we huddled over the gas jets in the kitchen. Still, it was never cold enough to freeze, and in the evening we spent a lot of time under our blankets.
We ordered our food from the store in Estoril. It was delivered on the same bicycle we had seen propped idly by the door. Sometimes we splurged and bought a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, outrageously expensive and always disappointingly soft. I can taste them still. We also bought tins of Favorita chocolate-covered biscuits and were rationed to two a day. They kept up our spirits and gave us something to look forward to. Most mornings we made porridge from Quaker Oats. Before the war, one of our maids used to shop at the outdoor market, where local foods must have been very cheap. Now it was winter, and we had to buy everything from the store in town.
In our old nursery, with the table by the window where Janine and Fraulein and I had eaten our meals, was our wind-up RCA Victrola and collection of records. Before the war, the Victrola had stood in the drawing room where Sylvia and Jack and their friends had danced to “Red Sails in the Sunset” and Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald singing “The Indian Love Call.” The renter, who had occupied the house during the early days of the war, must have moved it.
Now we played the Frank Sinatra recordings of “Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week” and “All of Me” that Sylvia had played for the British soldiers she had entertained in Savannah as her contribution to the war effort.
I think it rained for the first few months in Estoril, and I don’t remember ever seeing another person. There were a few houses nearby, mostly built like ours by British or American expatriates, now standing empty. Only one family remained from those we had known, living in an old house further up in the hills, called Casa Senora de Fatima after the famous saint whose shrine was nearby. We were invited one day for tea by Rebecca Bucknall, my first teacher and the mother of my friend Henrietta.
An elderly Portuguese maid opened the door. The hall was as cold as all interiors were at this time of the year. She showed us into the living room, where a fire burned in the grate. The room was cozy but shabby and sparsely furnished. It all looked familiar but foreign— smaller than it should have been. Through the window, I could see the garden where Henrietta and I had played.
The door opened and in came a woman with short, straight gray hair. She smiled and held out her hand. “Mrs. Pratt,” she said. “How good to see you.”
My mother took Rebecca’s hand but said nothing. The two women stood, hand in hand, without speaking. Janine and I watched. We were looking for clues—anything to help us understand. Then Rebecca turned toward me.
“Sally, my dear,” she said. “You’ve grown up.” She pulled me to her and hugged me.
Her heavy sweater scratched my face, and I pulled back. I did not like being hugged. Then she turned to my sister, who smiled at her, too young to be caught in the chains of memory. We finally sat down, and tea and cakes and bread and butter were brought in. We learned that Henrietta was in school in England. Rebecca’s husband had died of a heart attack during the war, and she was preparing to sell her house and move back to England to be near her daughter. I wondered what Henrietta was like now and wished she were there. I gave Mrs. Bucknall the present I had bought for Henrietta, a round leather purse with her name on it. Like everything else, it seemed wrong.
CHAPTER 9
1945: Mont’Alegre
We had not been in Portugal long before I knew I wanted to go back to America, but I couldn’t tell my mother. This was supposed to be home, the place where you knew what to do, where people were glad to see you because they knew you, like the girls who were glad to see their friends every morning, who whispered together in the cloakroom, made plans. Connie and I had been like that, but now Connie was there and I was here. And here wasn’t home anymore.
My mother didn’t like America. You could hardly blame her, considering the way my stepfather had treated her. Actually, he didn’t seem to like America very much either. None of his wives had been American. His first was Swiss, his second—Sylvia—was English, and now there was this Spanish person.
“I was a fool to leave,” my mother said. “He was a man who had to have a woman.” This became a kind of litany, repeated over and over during her lifetime. She was right, but she had been brought up to obey and endure. Other families had stayed on and were quite safe. Portugal had remained neutral, and the Germans never came.
I was beginning to remember what it had been like before. I thought I had forgotten—I actually had forgotten—until we got there and then it all started to come back. The house and furniture were the same, but the air had changed. It used to smell good—of food and Sylvia’s perfume and Jack’s cigarettes. Now it just smelled cold—even when it was hot outside, when we would have got ready to go to the beach after breakfast to the smell of Eduarda’s soup on the stove and clothes being ironed with the old-fashioned irons, while the two maids laughed together and men selling vegetables or sharpening knives called up from the street. Now the street was empty, and the house smelled of emptiness, of things put away, of people gone.
We lit the electric heater in our bedroom and lived there, eating from the same table we had with Fraulein before the war. Sylvia moved into the second small bedroom (once Fraulein’s) giving up her own large one with the verandah. We did not use the dining room; like the drawing room, it was designed to be cool in summer and centrally heated in winter. Now both rooms seemed cavernous and uninviting. Sometimes I touched the cold radiators, imagining what it would be like if they were warm and all the doors were open and the rooms occupied.
While we made porridge in the morning, we watched the cats outside the windows. They had taken up residence in our back yard while the house was empty and, now that it was early spring, the females came into heat. At night they yowled and fought.
“They’re starving,” said Sylvia. She shuddered. “We can’t feed them or they’ll never leave.”
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sp; I thought they made a lot of noise for starving animals and stared at them while waiting for the water to boil. They were all thin and some had clumps of fur, ears or eyes missing. When they weren’t staring in the window, hoping for food, they were fighting, or what I thought was fighting. The females yowled when the males pinned them down, growling, their ears laid back. When they stopped pumping in and out, they grabbed the female by the back of the neck, dismounted, and then shot off into the bushes.
Although the cats repelled and frightened me, I couldn’t stop watching. When Janine climbed up on a stool to see what I was looking at, I lifted her down. She didn’t have to watch it. After a while the kittens began. Sometimes the mothers dropped them anywhere. One morning there were six tiny creatures, barely moving on the brick walk. Soon there seemed to be litters everywhere, most of them dead. The ants quickly began doing their work. If it didn’t rain and the sun came out, the cats went off to hunt. Sylvia and I began to bury the dead kittens. Otherwise they got eaten, sometimes still alive, eyes still closed. Sylvia finally forbade me to watch. “It’s disgusting,” she said.
At this time, I got a letter from my father telling me he had married a woman named Barbara Batley—an old friend—and they were expecting a child. I remember reading his letter in the cold kitchen and starting to cry. We had left him, of course, but I believed he remained steadfast, living in Leyland House, waiting for the war to be over when he and I could be reunited. Now he, too, had left me for someone else.
In Daddy’s old dressing room, I studied myself in the long mirror. There was almost nothing about my appearance that pleased me. My skin was too white and thin, covered with my spring crop of freckles, making me look rather sickly. I hated my freckles. Sylvia said they were the sign of a good skin but to me, they were blemishes. I knew exactly the skin I wanted; it was pale gold with no freckles. My hair was long and braided. As I studied my body in the mirror I thought of my friend Connie, who was thin and often sick. The image staring with irritation back at me was sturdy and not yet feminine except for two slight swellings on my chest. I turned away before something else happened. As desperate as I was to grow up, I did not like surprises.
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