Away from Home (2 page)

Margie and Neil Davidow came at seven, wearing that polished, brushed look of people who have just dressed for a party. She was a smallish, dark girl, with an excellent figure and an even more spectacular clothes sense, and an incredible neatness and femininity of person that passed for beauty and actually managed to substitute very well for it. Many people said she was beautiful. Very quietly, Margie was a typical product of the twentieth century. She had had her teeth straightened while she was in high school, and her nose shortened a year later, and she wore invisible contact lenses for her nearsightedness. She had no children, and her husband had money, so she spent most of her time taking care of herself and her husband; choosing soft material to have his suits made, finding an obscure Italian tailor to cut them better than anybody else. She was twenty-five and Neil was thirty-one, the same age as Bert Sinclair. But Neil Davidow looked much older than Bert, not because of his features but because he had a kind of settled look. He was tall, with large features and dark straight hair. Until Margie had told her, Helen had never been able to guess how old Neil actually was. Neil and Margie had been married for five years, three of them spent in Brazil, and Margie Davidow was Helen Sinclair’s best friend.

As soon as greetings had been exchanged the two couples separated; the men to the bar to make fresh drinks, the women to the corner of the sofa.

“Look at us,” Helen said, laughing. “The men on one side of the room and the women on the other. God forbid someone should flirt with someone else’s wife.”

“I’ll tell Neil to come over and flirt with you,” Margie said cozily. “He’ll love it.” She waved at her husband. “Come here, darling, we need you.”

“What are you talking about anyway?” Helen said. “Money or women?”

“Money,” said Neil.

“Women,” said Bert. “Be quiet, you’ll have them too sure of us.”

“Well, at least give Bert some good tips on the market, Neil,” Helen said.

“That’s what I’m doing,” said Neil.

How he lights up when he talks about business, Helen thought. And look at my husband. They look as if they’re off on a treasure hunt. “Don’t you want a drink, Margie?”

“No. No, thank you. We’ll have to drink at the party, and it’s too hot tonight.”

“Listen,” Helen said, “Roger is going to flip tomorrow when he sees that train you and Neil gave him. You shouldn’t have spent so much money. I never saw a train like that in Brazil.”

“I sent to F.A.O. Schwarz for it,” Margie said. “Why not, anyway? By the time you all go back to live in the States he’ll be too old for trains. And I adore him.”

“Oh, how he adores you, too!”

“I really ought to have children,” Margie said vaguely. She turned her gold bracelet around on her wrist and looked at it as if she had never seen it before. “I can, you know. There’s nothing wrong with me. I just … never decided to.” She lowered her voice. “I had two martinis in the kitchen before we came here. You might have gathered.”

“You look fine,” Helen said.

“Neil got a letter from his mother today and she made another one of those awful coy remarks about how nice it would be to be a grandmother. I hate it.”

“I hate it too. Luckily for me I had Julie right away, so all I had to put up with was ‘Oh, you’re too young, too young, what a
shame!
’” She and Margie grinned at each other companionably. Then Margie’s smile faded.

“There are limits to everything,” she whispered vehemently. “I don’t care what anyone tells me. You can tell me my shoes clash with my dress, or my new tablecloth is ugly, or I ought to learn more about politics. All right. Okay. I’m not a brilliant person, I’m just an ordinary person, and I’ll thank anyone who wants to tell me something if it’s going to help me improve. But there’s one thing I can’t stand. Nobody is going to tell me when I’m going to do my screwing with my husband,
nobody!
”

Helen looked at Margie, troubled. She had never seen her so excited. She covered Margie’s hand, where it lay on the couch, with her own. “Of course not.”

“I’m just drunk,” Margie said lightly. She smiled, and she looked the same as before her outburst—unruffled, serene, ladylike, not even a bit of face powder beginning to wear off. “You know,” she said quietly, “Sometimes, like this evening before we got here, I wish I were dead.”

Neil Davidow was looking at his watch. He came over to the sofa and smiled at Margie, reaching out to pull her to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go. We’ll be late.”

“We’ll all take our car,” Margie said. “All right?”

Helen looked at both of them, Margie encircled lightly by her husband’s arm, looking up at him with an expression that could only be honest affection, warmth and pleasure, Neil with his before-party look that showed he
knew
he was going to have a good time no matter what happened. In many ways, except for being childless, they were the most conventional couple Helen knew. And yet there was sorrow there, and suffering, and something worse, she suddenly realized, some kind of secret that one held away from the other. “Come and say goodnight to your brats,” Helen said, taking Bert by the hand. “I promised them.”

Margie and Neil came too, and as she watched Margie kissing Roger and Julie, Helen wondered briefly if she herself were the kind of unpleasant mother who showed off the delights of motherhood to her less fortunate friends. She hoped it wouldn’t look that way to Margie. She felt a kind of wariness for a moment in the presence of her friend who was dear to her and could be hurt by something completely unwitting and innocent. But Margie seemed perfectly happy, and when they all went down in the elevator she was already fussing with the back of her hair to be sure the humidity had not spoiled her set and you would not think she had another thought in her head. God, Helen thought, I’m glad I have a happy marriage. I’m glad I can know that it’s always going to be there, that it’s always going to be the same.

The party they went to was given by an American couple named Mildred and Phil Burns, who were both in their mid-thirties and came from Chicago. They were known to their friends as Mil and Phil. Mil was the sort of woman, as Margie Davidow had once put it, who always walked into a room where there were strangers and said, “I’m Mil Burns and this is my husband.” When she was eighteen years old she had been Corn Queen at Iowa State College, and she had been allowed to sit on a float surrounded by her handmaidens in white dresses. Her husband sometimes mentioned this when talking about old times back in the States, but Mil never talked about it. She had gained twenty pounds and a husband and three children, and the past was rather silly, but when she walked she held her head up stiffly, partly to show her handsome profile, partly to minimize her double chin, and partly so that her invisible crown would not slide off.

Phil Burns had arrived in Rio six months before his wife, and had rented their apartment, arranged for the necessities, set up his business, and then sent for his family. Mil had arrived protestingly, hating the apartment, hating the climate, hating the cockroaches, hating the telephone system, hating the tan bath water. They had been in Brazil now for more than a year, and Phil loved it as much as Mil did not. He was one of those enthusiastically overassimilated Americans who say things like “I know a wonderful little bar where you can go if you don’t want to meet anyone you know—because only American tourists go there.” He always carried a copy of the South American edition of
Time
magazine, and he said, “No?” at the end of questions that he asked in English.

Mildred met them at the door. The living room was already filled with people, talking and smoking, and a white-coated butler walked about with a tray of highballs. “You don’t mind if you have to introduce yourselves?” Mil said. “I’m hoarse. I’ve been yelling at the maids all day. They’re so stupid. I tried to tell them how to make a decent-looking
hors d’oeuvre
, but they can’t learn.”

“I think they look beautiful,” Helen said, taking an infinitesimal pie filled with hot-flavored shrimps from a tray on the coffee table.

“You’re crazy, Mil,” Margie said. “You always worry too much.”

“Heleninha!” Phil Burns said, putting an arm around Helen’s waist. He pronounced it
Eleneenya
. He was a little shorter than his wife, and he had a boyish, Ivy League look, a crewcut graying at the temples, and earnest, sad eyes. Helen liked him. “There are some people here you don’t know,” Phil said. “There’s a Brazilian—see—over by the window talking to the woman in the flowered dress. His name is Nestor and he’s extremely interesting, you ought to talk to him. And there’s Trainer Wilkes, from the Embassy. He’s not really
with
the Embassy; he’s just here on a temporary exchange mission to bring Little League Baseball to Brazil. The gal in the flowered dress is his wife.” Phil had his other arm around Bert’s shoulders, Brazilian style, and he patted Bert’s upper arm as he spoke.

“I’d like a drink,” Bert said. “Do you want one, Helen?”

“Yes, please, darling.”

Phil waved at the butler, who came over immediately with his tray of drinks. “Here. Scotch, gin, or rye. I didn’t want to make martinis; it’s too hot. But if you want one, I’ll sneak you one in the kitchen.”

“No, no,” said Bert. “Scotch is fine, thank you.”

“I found the first Carnival records for fifty-nine,” Phil said happily. “I’ll play them later and we can dance. Maybe things will get wild.”

“Somebody will drop dead of a heat stroke,” Mil said. “That’s the wild thing that will happen.”

“I’ve got all the windows open,” Phil said, beginning to look less happy. “It will get cooler later. Do you want me to bring the fan in from our room?”

“It doesn’t do any good in
our
room,” Mil said, “so what makes you think it will help with this mob in here?” She walked to the front door to greet other arriving guests, holding her head high, her emerald pendant earrings swinging against her tanned neck.

“She hates the heat,” Phil murmured apologetically.

“Don’t we all,” said Helen. “The front of our apartment is unbearable during the day. I have to stay in the back when I’m home. But at night it’s cool.”

“It’s only the crowd,” said Phil. “This is a very cool apartment. Listen, this is Trainer Wilkes. Trainer, Helen and Bert Sinclair.”

Trainer Wilkes was a tall, good-looking man in his late thirties. He had curly brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses and a suntan. When he shook hands with Helen he took her hand gently, almost gingerly, as if for years his forceful handshake had made ladies wince and he had finally learned. He was wearing a black silk suit and he looked hot. “How do you do,” he said.

“I’m glad to meet you,” Helen said. Phil Burns had pulled Bert away to meet someone else, and she found herself alone with Trainer Wilkes. They looked at each other for a minute, trying to think of something to say, and Helen smiled. “Have you been in Brazil long?”

“Few weeks.”

“How long are you staying?”

“A year.”

“Do you like it? I guess everybody asks you that and you must be sick of hearing it.”

“Oh, I like it,” Trainer Wilkes said, not too enthusiastically. “Getting to like it. It’s interesting. Wouldn’t like to live here, but it’s all right.”

“Where are you from in the States?”

“Garnerville College in Pennsylvania. It’s a small school; you’ve probably never heard of it. But we have one of the best baseball teams in the country.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about baseball,” Helen admitted. “My son was too young to play when we left the States. Is that what you do there, teach baseball?” She smiled at him. “I guess that’s why they call you ‘Trainer.’”

“I teach English history,” he said. “English history and baseball.”

“And Phil said you’re here for the government.”

“More or less. I’m with the Cultural Division. We bring our ideas, our culture, over here, and it makes friends. I’m here to teach Little League Baseball. That’s my job. And I’ll tell you something.” He raised his glass and drank thirstily, as if the effort of such a long speech were too much. But his eyes were sparkling and for the first time he looked animated. “It was the best idea they ever had, to bring me over for the Cultural Division. The Brazilians want to know America; let them know baseball. Baseball is
really
America. I don’t care about books, music, theater, art, all that junk. I’m going to give ’em baseball, and they’re going to love me.”

“I hope so,” Helen said.

Trainer Wilkes took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face and neck thoroughly, as if it were a hand towel. He looked at it and put it back into his pocket. “You bring your boy over when we get started, and we’ll let him join a team,” he said. “How old is he?”

“Six. That’s a little too young, I think.”

“All right. We’re going to have a team for five-year-olds. Can’t start too young. It must be pretty tough for the American parents here, so far away, trying to keep all the things we have at home.”

“But there are certain compensations to travel,” Helen said mildly.

Trainer Wilkes looked down into her face seriously. “You be careful,” he said. “Just don’t get into trouble. You don’t know these people.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll know when you get into trouble,” Trainer said. “You’ll remember I told you.”

Someone had put a record of American Christmas carols on the phonograph, and it sounded strange to hear them, almost as if it were really summer and someone were trying to be Bohemian. It was terribly hot. The men were beginning to wipe their foreheads and move closer to the opened windows, and the waiter walked about quickly with ice-filled drinks. The alcohol was only making everyone hotter. “God rest ye merry, gentlemen,” the chorus sang in wondrously muted harmony. “Let nothing ye dismay.” It brought memories of Westport in winter, of wreaths hung at windows with sloppily tied red bows attached by Julie, and of the smell of a fir tree and the crackle and heat of a hot fire when you sat too close to it in order to roast apples on long pointed sticks. Lately, more and more often, Helen had been dreaming at night of snow, of wide white fields turning blue at twilight, of window sills piled high with the powdery fresh snowfall and herself safe inside the room looking out at the white stillness and beauty. All the inconvenience of a Connecticut winter—the icy roads that made driving the children to nursery school a hazard, the biting wind that made you feel you never would get warm again, the ache of wet feet and the beautiful white snow that turned so quickly into brown mud and gray slush—all these things seemed to recede. She remembered winter in Connecticut as if it were a Christmas card.