“You had a bad dream?” Irenka said. She sat down and put her arms around me.
“Call me if you need to,” Mother said to Irenka. Irenka nodded and waved for Mother to leave.
“You have the phone number,” Mother said.
Irenka waved at her again, and Mother left.
Now I heard Irenka humming some tune I didn’t recognize. She continued holding me, and we rocked back and forth a little. I wondered what I might want to tell Irenka of last night’s experience.
And then I felt a strange calm come over me. It was like the time Kiki and I had been at that summer resort on a dull day, and watched a bank of fog sweep over us, with its moisture cooling not just our skin, but our very bones. There was nothing to see, this time, but I could actually feel the peacefulness sweep over me and settle around me.
Now, I realized, I didn’t feel the need to tell Irenka anything of what had taken place last night. And I also realized something else. Now that I had remembered what I had done to the man in Hungary, did that mean that I would no longer stutter? I had remembered it on my own, not from someone telling me about it, as Mother had done in Lisbon, so it was different. And I
was
feeling different, so maybe something had happened to take my stutter away.
I could have continued clinging to Irenka, but I had to test out my speech. “L. . . et’s go h. . . ave breakfast,” I said. I hadn’t stuttered, but I realized that I had forgotten how to speak without dragging out the words.
“All right,” Irenka said. “I’ll put some clothes on.”
It was difficult, trying to speak, again, the way I did before I learned to drag the sounds out. “I. . . .think. . . my. . . stuttering is. . . better,” I said to Irenka over breakfast. What I was doing now, I realized, was dragging out the silences between the words. Whether this was an actual improvement or just an improved technique, I couldn’t tell.
Irenka agreed that my speech was better, and suggested that we just spend a quiet day at the beach and, maybe, a walk with a stop for ice cream in the afternoon. I advocated for a movie, but she said it was best just to be very quiet today. When Mother came home, Irenka convinced her that my speech was, indeed, improved.
Then Mother said that the three of us were going to have dinner at a restaurant outside the hotel, because this was a special evening. I felt a little bit guilty, in the event that my speech “improvement” wasn’t really an improvement, but, over soup, Mother clapped her hands and said, “Yulian, we’re sailing to America next month.”
I was well aware of the pain inherent in Mother’s decision and didn’t want to voice my disappointment. Not only would my dreams of Paolo and Sr. Segiera not be coming true, but I would also be leaving Irenka.
“That’s wonderful,” Irenka said, but I could tell that she had already known about it.
“America is the strongest and the safest country in the world,” Mother went on. But we had discussed this issue already.
“You will grow up to be an American,” Irenka said to me.
“You can be a great poet, like Mr. Tuwim says,” Mother said. I didn’t believe that Mr. Tuwim had committed himself to that degree regarding my ability.
“You can become an American millionaire,” Irenka said. “Andre says that the American dollar is the strongest money in the world.” There, I had no idea what she was talking about, but I well understood that this had all been planned to assuage my disappointment, and now I didn’t want to disappoint them by beating what I knew to be a dead horse.
Nor did I want to raise the tender issue of finances. But I knew that Mother must, certainly, be aware of the predicament every time she looked at the twin diamonds on her finger, and that she must certainly be making some kind of plans.
There was a palpable sense of things winding down, now. Sr. Segiera seemed to be very busy with his work, and we did not see much of him. Each time Irenka and I went to the beach, I had the strong feeling that this might be our last time. We spoke little and of nothing of importance. On the other hand, I found that the contours of Irenka’s tanned body, as she sunned herself on the hotel blanket, now held a renewed fascination for me. I had to fight the urge to lay my hand on one of the soft convexities that she presented so generously to the world.
One evening, Sr. Segiera did come to take Mother out to dinner. There was not, on either of their faces, the smile that I was used to seeing on such occasions. They kissed only lightly on the cheek, as though they were angry with each other. The senhor had brought a bouquet for Mother and a little, square box, tied with a piece of yarn for me.
My present was from Paolo, he said, and I proceeded to open it with great surprise and curiosity.
“Oh, what is it?” Mother said, looking over my shoulder, and then, “Oh my God!” as I lifted the lid.
Sitting inside the box, nestled in a wad of cotton, was the glass eye from Paolo’s collection.
“Who gives a thing like that?” Mother said.
“Boys collect those things, Basia,” the senhor said.
“But that’s an eye.”
“It’s a glass eye.”
“Yes, I know that. Who collects glass eyes and gives them as presents?”
“Boys do, Basia. Boys do.”
Then Mother laughed. She kissed the senhor’s cheek again, but for real. “Let’s go,” she said, taking his hand.
I was racking my brain for what to give Paolo. If I gave him my airplane, Sr. Segiera might think I didn’t want it, and Paolo might have difficulty flying it. Then I thought of my cowboy outfit, and that was perfect.
“Just. . . a. . . second, Monsieur,” I said, “I have. . . something for Paolo, too.” I dashed for the bedroom door, but stopped and opened it quietly, because I knew Irenka was trying to sleep off a headache.
I came back, a few moments later, on tiptoes, my gun belt and hat in my hands. I noticed Sr. Segiera and Mother both looking intently at me, as though they had been discussing me.
“Thank you, Julien,” the senhor said. “Paolo will really like it.” But he was looking at me as though there was something funny about the way I looked. There was a silence, which I realized was an expectation for me to say something. It was my speech they wanted to hear.
“I hope so, Monsieur,” I said, making a great effort to not stutter.
“Don’t you think so?” Mother said.
“Yes, you’re right, Basia,” the senhor said.
I, of course, knew very well what they were talking about. I had learned that if I made a great effort, I,
usually
, or maybe just,
often
, could refrain from stuttering.
Then I realized that Mother had begun to cry. “Oh, my God,” she was saying under her breath, in Polish. She had her hands clasped against her mouth.
Sr. Segiera put his arm around Mother’s shoulders.
“He. . . he doesn’t stutter anymore,” Mother said, in the little-girl voice she used sometimes, “does he, Ernesto?”
“Why don’t you tell
him
that,” the senhor suggested.
Mother reached her arms out to me, in a way that I could see was uncomfortable for her. I found it awkward for me, too.
“Give your mother a hug,” the senhor said.
We hugged awkwardly.
“We should go now,” Mother said suddenly. “You won’t wake Irena up, will you Julien?”
I shook my head. But Irenka was standing in the doorway. “I am awaking. Julien and I will go look at a movie,” she said, in slightly awkward French.
“Oh, that’s good,” Mother said. “Now let’s go.”
As Mother took his arm, I saw that her ring, that had had two diamonds on it, now only had one. I hoped she had gotten a good price for the other one.
Sr. Segiera was at the dock to say goodbye. “Paolo says that when you learn to write in English, you’ll write to him,” he said. “He is learning English in school.”
I said that I would.
“And when you begin writing poems in English, you will send some to me? I read a little English, too.”
Mr. and Mrs. Tuwim were there as well. “Make him promise to keep writing poetry, Yulian,” Mother said to Mr. Tuwim.
“If he wants to write poetry, he’ll write poetry,” Mr. Tuwim said.
Irenka gave me a very big hug, then pulled the handkerchief out of Andre’s breast pocket to wipe her tears. On her left hand, I saw Mother’s missing diamond.
EPILOGUE
“Wake up, Yulian, wake up,” Mother was saying, shaking me out of a deep sleep.
I thought we had been torpedoed or something, and reached for the life preserver under my berth, as we had done in the lifeboat drill.
“Just put on your bathrobe and come up on deck. I want you to see something.”
I could see, through the porthole, that it was the middle of the night. “What?”
“Come up on deck.”
I was rubbing my eyes, as Mother’s hand, on my back, urged me down the hall.
There was a crowd of people on deck, many, like me, in bathrobe and slippers, crowding against the rail. Beyond, there was a dark gray fog. It must have been just before dawn. The air was clammy. The people were pointing something out to each other in a multitude of languages.
“Look out there,” Mother said, pushing me through the crowd, to the railing. “See that?”
I saw nothing but dark gray fog.
“See, right there, right there?”
Where Mother was pointing, there was fog of a darker gray than the rest. “That’s the Statue of Liberty,” she said.
“What?”
“The Statue of Liberty. Oh my God, Yulian,
the Statue of Liberty
. Do you see it?”
I didn’t want to argue, but I had little interest in seeing someone’s idea of what liberty was supposed to look like, so I said that I did. “N. . . ow can I go back to bed?”
My stuttering did not go away completely. When I was nervous, it would come back, and I still have vestiges of it. I continued to write poetry, switching to English, but what I really wanted to do, as I grew up, was to write prose.
It wasn’t easy to find decently paying work as a writer, when I came out of college in 1954, but I found a niche in documentary film writing and production. The poetry that I write now is, mostly, humorous and not directed to publication. Framed copies of my poems make great gifts to friends.
Mother stormed into the publishing offices of Duell, Sloan and Pearce in New York and got them to give her an advance and a collaborator to write her book.
Flight to Freedom
by Barbara Padowicz, was published in 1942 and, as the first of the WW II escape stories, enjoyed a brisk circulation. Soon after, having divorced my stepfather, she met a handsome French war hero, named Georges Pierre Gabard, who had lost a leg defending access to the Suez Canal against Erwin Rommel. After the war they married, and Pierre entered the French diplomatic service, his career culminating with the post of Consul General to Philadelphia in the 1960’s.
In Philadelphia, Beautiful Basia quickly became one of that city’s leading hostesses, entertaining luminaries of Society, the arts, government, and industry in their beautifully decorated, Spruce Street townhouse. Pearle Buck, Edith Piaf, Eugene Ormandy, John F. Kennedy, Grace Kelly, Marcel Marceau, and Spyros Skouras were only a few of the names to glitter on their guest lists.
Pierre passed away in 1967 and Mother in 1973. Because they had made numerous trips between Europe and America, not always together, there is a considerable quantity of letters, some typed, some handwritten, and all in French and tied up with a ribbon, among Mother’s papers. Because I read French with great difficulty and because they deal, mostly, with housekeeping issues, I have only passed a casual eye over the typed letters, and had not even tried to decipher the handwritten ones.
That was until my wife, Donna, alerted me to the fact that some of the latter were dated after Pierre’s death. That warranted a closer examination, which revealed the signature at the bottom of the letters to be “Ernesto.”