CHAPTER 15
Fraulein
One day the doorbell rang again. We had had no visitors since the two maids. I looked over the side of the balcony and saw a young woman with short, curly brown hair, dressed neatly in a suit. She looked familiar. The small boy standing next to her was younger than my sister. When the gate buzzed, they started up the steps to the house. Excited at the prospect of a visitor, I ran downstairs. I found my mother and the woman shaking hands in the hall.
“You remember Fraulein?” My mother’s voice was tense.
Fraulein, my German nurse! The woman turned to face me, smiling. She seemed to be trying to decide whether to give me a hug. I could not move. She used to help me dress and braid my hair. But since then, I had seen newsreels of bombs blowing up England, trains full of starving people, and at the end, hideous pictures of concentration camps. The woman put out her hand and said something in German. I looked at my mother.
“I’m afraid she’s forgotten the German you taught her,” my mother said coldly.
Fraulein put her arm around the boy next to her. “My son, Stefan,” she said in English with a heavy accent. The child clicked his heels together and flung up his arm in a Nazi salute. I felt my mouth open and saw my mother’s lips tighten. Fraulein gently pushed his arm down. She lifted her shoulders. “He cannot remember.”
“I will not have it in this house!” My mother’s voice rose at the end like Winston Churchill’s.
Stefan stared impassively at her. Raised voices were nothing to him. Fraulein flushed and said something sharply to him in German. The boy’s face twisted. He hissed at his mother. She hit him hard on the side of his head. He staggered back, then opened his mouth and howled. I felt the hair on my arms stand up. I had never heard a sound like that. It was not an animal’s sound or a child’s.
Fortunately, at that moment, his nose started to bleed. Both women were united by the sight of blood. My mother went to the kitchen for some cold water, and Fraulein made him lie down. When the bleeding stopped, he was wiped off and the drops of blood cleaned off the floor.
“We could all use a cup of tea,” said Sylvia. She sounded very cheerful, very British.
I put on the kettle and opened a new tin of Favorita chocolatecovered biscuits. Sylvia carried the tray upstairs to the small table by the window. Fraulein and Stefan followed. Janine was playing when we all came in, and Fraulein took her in her arms. Janine looked surprised but didn’t resist.
“You are not a baby anymore,” Fraulein said and released her. I could not tell if Janine remembered her nurse; she had been only three when we left. No one said anything while the tea was poured and the biscuits handed around. Fraulein, reassured by Sylvia’s cheerful tone, was examining her surroundings.
“Everything is just the same,” she said in her halting English. “Even the little window between the rooms.” She pointed this out to her son, talking to him in German. He ignored her.
I glanced at the little window. I knew it was there so our nurse could look in on us without having to disturb us by opening the door. I had never seen one anywhere else. I hadn’t liked being spied on, I had told my mother one day, although I couldn’t remember feeling anything about the window when I was little.
Spied on? Sylvia lifted her plucked brows. I didn’t like it when my mother did that; it looked fake and old-fashioned.
“Why don’t you have any eyebrows?” I once demanded.
“When I was young, it was fashionable to pluck them out, and they never grew back.”
I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing.
Fraulein was telling us about Germany. She had a husband, she said, but he was killed and left nothing to provide for her and the boy. Now there was no work. Could she stay here? She would do anything—clean the house, cook, give us lessons. She wanted only food for herself and her son.
I stared at the blond child. There was a red welt in front of his left ear and there were bloodstains on his jacket. I had never seen anyone hit a child like that before. I offered him the chocolate biscuits. He glanced quickly at me, then turned away. I didn’t want him to live with us.
“We might not stay,” said Sylvia. “I might sell the house and return to England.”
Fraulein looked down at her hands. “We used to be valuable,” she said. “Now we are garbage.” She raised her eyes. “It happened so fast.”
I caught myself holding my breath and stopped.
“England! I don’t want to go there.” I stood up, feeling my breath racing inside my chest. “I want to go back to America.”
“That’s enough. Now you’re being rude.”
I rushed out the door into the dressing room and curled up in the old chair. In a little while I heard the front door close. When I looked over the balcony, Fraulein and the boy were walking down the road toward the sea, just as the two maids had done. A lot of people had left. I wished some replacements would show up. Parts of our old life kept reappearing, then disappearing again. It was like being on a boat. You drifted near to shore and, just when you thought the tide was going to carry you in, the current took you back out to sea, and all you could do was watch the beach get further and further away.
When Mummy came in and stroked my hair, I asked her if we had to go to England.
“We can’t stay here, dearest. We have family in England.” She pulled me up and sat down, then pulled me back down on her lap. “We belong there now.”
I let myself lean into my mother’s neck even though I did not usually tolerate being hugged or kissed. I breathed in her distinctive smell underneath the warmth and the perfume. This was how animals found their mothers in the herd; your own smelled like no one else.
“Why can’t we go back to America?”
“We don’t have anywhere to go.”
“We could go back to Asheville. Connie’s there, and Mrs. Bull.”
“We were only there for the war,” said Sylvia. “We don’t really belong; it’s Jack’s country.” She sounded tired and sad.
“We’ve never been to England—not to live.”
“I grew up there, remember?” Sylvia smiled. “But I liked Europe better—or I did. Now everything is different.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“It’s your country,” said Sylvia. She leaned down to kiss me.
I turned my head. The hairs that now grew around my mother’s mouth tickled, and I didn’t like the feeling.
CHAPTER 16
Goodbye, Portugal
I didn’t think I had a country. When we went into Lisbon to see the lawyer, there were lots of people and cars, like in America, but it still seemed very different from American cities. Black-shawled women hawked oranges and fish and cakes. Knife grinders were common and boys or old men herded turkeys through the streets. If anything— anything—out of the ordinary happened, a crowd immediately gathered. Once, Sylvia slipped on a wet pavement and fell, tearing her stockings and losing a heel from her shoe. While I helped her up, ten people stopped to watch. They stared silently while I tried to put the heel back on the shoe. A man came over, took it from me and motioned us to sit on a curb. He left with the shoe.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” I asked.
“I hope so,” said Sylvia. “What would he want with one old shoe?” She laughed, but looked worried. Half an hour passed. Finally, the man reappeared. He handed Sylvia the shoe, its heel restored. Obrigado, muy obrigado, said Sylvia, clutching her shoe. She opened her purse for money but he waved it off and left. Our little crowd melted away. “Simple people,” said Sylvia. “It warms the heart.” She looked happier than she had for weeks, and I felt the tightness loosen inside my chest.
We went to a chocolate shop to celebrate. Inside, you were cocooned in the smell of cocoa. I ordered hot chocolate, closed my eyes, and sucked it in. Sucking food was another bad habit my mother hated.
Meanwhile, Sylvia ordered hot tea. “I used to get my Jordon almonds here,” she said, “and your Easter eggs. D
o you remember the chocolate eggs filled with sugar babies?”
At the beginning of spring term, Janine and I were enrolled in an English school in Carcavellos, a small town on the coast between Estoril and Lisbon. All the students wore green skirts or trousers, blazers, and a striped tie. Boys wore caps, girls brimmed hats. We took the train every morning from Estoril to Carcavellos, and then back at the end of the school day. I remember buying chocolate bars from a machine in the station (I was a fool for chocolate in those days) and memorizing poems by John Masefield—“Cargoes” and “West Wind”—that I can recite to this day. I was there too short a time to make friends, or if I did, that memory has disappeared. School was one short episode in the brief but turbulent period we spend in Portugal.
When the winter was at its coldest and the only warm place was bed, Sylvia woke one morning with a headache and sore throat. She wrapped a scarf around her neck and drank a lot of hot tea. The next day she felt worse. Her temperature was over 100 degrees. It rose to 102 by evening. She took aspirin and slept. I made her tea and brought cold cloths for her head. The next day she started coughing. Then she became delirious and muttered names I did not recognize. Sometimes she laughed and seemed to be having a conversation, but the words were never clear. On the fourth day, I got frightened. I had no idea what to do. We had not called a doctor since I had chicken pox in Savannah. I must have helped Sylvia to the bathroom and brought her water, but those details have left me.
One evening, my mother lifted up her head and looked straight at me. “Take care of Janine.” Then she lay back down and closed her eyes.
I fixed some scrambled eggs for Janine and a pot of tea for Sylvia when she woke up. Then I put Janine to bed. She went right to sleep as if she knew better than to stay awake. I opened the front door and stood outside. The air was wet and cold. There were no lights anywhere and no stars, only a faint glow in the sky above Estoril. In America there were streetlights even in the small towns. Here they stopped at the park before the road started to wind up the hill. I saw a dark shape by the gate. Two yellow eyes looked up. One of the cats. Their eyes reflected the light even when there wasn’t any. The shape slipped away. I turned and went back into the house and locked the door. Inside, the air smelled stale, of cold plaster and cooking oil. Upstairs, Sylvia coughed.
The bedroom was warmer because of the electric fire, but didn’t smell any better than the hall. I put down the tray and went to look at my mother. I felt her head. It was hot. Her breathing had gotten noisy because her mouth was now open. I lifted her head off the pillow and tried to plump it up, but the pillow was wet. I took the pillow off my bed and stuck it under my mother’s head, raising her up. She opened her eyes.
“Mama?”
She took a sharp breath and coughed. Some yellow stuff came out of her mouth. Her eyes lost their focus and then closed.
I wiped my mother’s mouth. I was determined to be cheerful. Sylvia had no patience with being miserable, and this was no time to make her angry. And I had to take care of Janine. I ate my scrambled eggs and poured a cup of tea. Sylvia’s mouth was open again and she was breathing heavily. I touched her cheek. It was very soft. She always had the softest skin. I don’t want you to die, I thought; I want you to be happy.
Sylvia gave a terrible cough and groaned. “I’m not mad at you anymore,” I said. “I love you.” I had not told her that since we left America.
I went into the cold hall, through my mother’s old bedroom and into the dressing room. There must have been a hundred books on the shelves—some of them stacked on the floor. I had read them all, many more than once. Starting at the top shelf, I scanned every title one at a time, looking for help. Some of the novels had doctors in them. I took down one or two and read a little. There was description, but no practical information. I was afraid to go back into the bedroom. Some things might not be in books. Things you needed to know. This thought surprised and disappointed me. If life outside books was so unpredictable and books did not tell you either, how could you ever know what to do? What could you believe? I heard a sound from the other room and rushed toward it. Sylvia had fallen sideways over the side of the bed. Her breathing was faster and more ragged. I took my mother’s hand. I felt a terrible loneliness and started to cry.
Sometime during the night I fell asleep. When I woke, a faint light was coming in the window. I heard the cocks crowing at a nearby farm. A dog barked. I had let go of my mother’s hand and slid down onto the floor, leaning against the side of the bed. I could no longer hear her breathing. She was lying on her back quite still. Her eyes were closed. How do you know when someone’s dead? I touched my mother’s hand. It was cool. Then I remembered reading about the mirror. It was difficult to hold her hand mirror under her nostrils because it had a silver back. Then I saw two little spots of mist form on the very edge. “Mama!” I shouted.
Sylvia’s eyes opened. She blinked. “Hello darling,” she said. “What time is it?” Her voice was very faint.
I held my breath, then remembered to let it out. “Early,” I said. “But it’s morning.”
CHAPTER 17
1946: England
Sylvia’s illness was the final proof she needed to convince her that there could be no life for us any longer in Portugal. It was still a country where a single woman was at a disadvantage, and being a foreigner with no family or friends and two young children to raise was too difficult. She decided we would return to England—our country, after all.
I did not want to go to England. I said I wanted to return to America. My mother tightened her lips and told me not to be rude. She notified the lawyer, and the house was put on the market. It must have sold right away because we were soon on our way to England.
It was early summer when we arrived. Aunt Jesse, Sylvia’s oldest sister, and Uncle Harold met us at the airport and drove us to their home, Coombe Down House, in the village of Ditchling in Sussex. London was in shambles with gaping holes everywhere and piles of rubble. The countryside, however, showed little sign of war damage. Birds sang from the hedgerows; all nature was green and gold. Coombe Down House was a country dream with its rose garden, green lawns, and rabbits diving into the hedgerows as we passed.
Uncle Harold had made his fortune in London real estate and he and my aunt lived a modified prewar life. They had servants and still dressed for dinner. The gardener grew their vegetables and they kept chickens and ducks beyond the hedge: “the ‘edge—the ‘edge,” said the cook crossly, when I was sent to find eggs for breakfast.
One of their two sons, Ashleigh, was educated at Oxford where he had been a star athlete at the 1932 Olympic Games in Munich when the British team refused to salute Hitler. I remember Ashleigh and Pam, his wife, as an elegant and kind couple living in beautiful surroundings on the edge of the New Forest in a retirement village where the wild ponies visited the garden to eat the flowers.
John, Aunt Jesse’s youngest son, was devious and unkind but adored by his mother. He had been injured in a motorcycle accident, and this was the excuse given for his bad behavior and general failures.
Uncle Harold lived up to his reputation as a diamond in the rough when, one night at dinner, he heaved a tomato at my sister, then ten years old. Nothing was said. Father was just being father.
A diamond he was in all but manners. He supported my grandfather and grandmother in their old age. He was generous to his wife and her family and tolerated his feckless younger son.
As a young adolescent, I was always on the lookout for information on sex. One day in the car, passing a field full of cows and one bull, I noticed the bull mounting a heifer. What is he doing, I asked? Was it like the cats but larger? Just playing, muttered Uncle Harold. He bought his wife a fancy new car, and I saw them exchange a passionate kiss in the driveway. I was not used to seeing adults in intimate moments.
While living at Coombe Down House, I discovered Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, and fell in love—not with the handsome hero, Rhett Butler, but wi
th Scarlett. Like the younger heroines of books like Green Mansions and Girl of the Limberlost, she was independent and tough. Scarlett was a new woman, out of step with her time but beautiful and intelligent and determined to survive.
My mother kept pressing on me the 19th-century novels of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, which I would later come to love. But then I had eyes only for Scarlett. Like her, I was angry at my helplessness. I did not want to be in England. I wanted to be in America again, and I wanted to be grown up.
Meanwhile, my mother found a semi-detached house in Hassocks the next village. Its long lawn bordered with lavender bushes ended in a small orchard of overgrown apple trees.
We had always had dogs, usually cocker spaniels, usually black. The last one was “Blackie” (a name we reused several times). During the war we forewent dogs in favor of the two wild squirrels that chewed up the sun porch. Now, “home” once more, we acquired two cocker spaniel puppies: one black, one golden, named Fifi and Kiki. These were names fashionable at the time because of two French actresses or models Sylvia must have admired. Sadly, both puppies got distemper, and, after foaming at the mouth and running in circles, they died. I was as fascinated by this as I had been by the squirrel expiring after its drop of medicinal brandy. Next came Tiger, a full-grown Golden Retriever who threw up whenever he got in a car.
Eventually, our furniture arrived from Portugal, and I was enrolled in Merton House School, a local private day school, owned and run by two women, Miss Merton and Miss Warburton, who divided up the teaching. This school required blue uniforms. The other girls teased me, calling me “celery” instead of “Sally.”
“They wouldn’t tease you if they didn’t like you,” said Miss Merton.
She might have been right, but it didn’t matter. I had experienced the American school system, and nothing else would satisfy me. There had been boys and kissing games, and here there were ugly school uniforms and nothing but girls. We played field hockey, and I acquired my first tennis racquet: a small wooden one in a square press. I kept it for years, although I did not play again for a long time.
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