nylon nightgown.
She permits us to slip our hands into the dark at the back of the secret drawer in her kidney-shaped dressing table with the triple mirror, the glass top, and the sea-green organdy skirt, where she hides her jewels. We bring forth the Craven A tin. She tips out the bright snakes of tangled necklaces and bracelets onto the blue sheets. She decks us out with her rings and brooches. She slips her brilliant diamonds, the yellow, the brown, the blue, and the blue-white, into our hair, and onto our fingers and toes. She dances us on her knees. She sings, “And she shall have music wherever she goes.”
X
PREGNANCY
WE ARE BOTH PREGNANT NOW, MY SISTER WITH HER FIRST baby boy, me with my second, fifteen months after the first. Michael hopes for a boy.
My sister, who started her university studies of languages at the University of Cape Town, graduates from Wits, the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. It is 1963.
I have a graduation photograph of her with my mother in her wide-brimmed hat and pearls and my Aunt Hazel with her dark curls, at her side. They are standing smiling proudly in the sunshine. Look how happy they seem! Maxine is pregnant, her stomach swelling in her graduation robe, as she holds a scroll in her hand, a black band around her neck.
Without any degree and dressed in a loose jacket, I slip surreptitiously into the back of darkened auditoriums at Yale. I listen to Victor Brombert and Henri Peyre lecture on French literature, and Vincent Scully, on art. With my sleeping child in her stroller, I haunt the Yale art gallery in New Haven. I read all the books Michael reads and coach him with the flash cards I have made for his exams. I coach him for his art exams. I make him identify the pictures of famous paintings, parts of famous paintings, the feet of a girl on a swing. I take notes on the books he is reading and help write his papers. He writes a paper on the mask and the mirror image in the work of Stendhal.
Graduation day.
I kneel beside the gray four-poster colonial bed to pray to God for his success during his exams.
It seems we make love in the sunny bedroom every afternoon. I sigh and make the noises I have heard in the films, though the real pleasure will not come until much later. Easily, so easily, so young, healthy, and fertile, we fall pregnant, my sister and me. Our husbands seem to prefer us pregnant. The pill is still controversial, Maxine’s gynecologist does not recommend it. It will give you varicose veins, he says.
Both our babies are expected in early May.
In New Haven it turns hot unexpectedly, and I have to buy summer clothes for the few weeks that remain of my maternity. I sit out in a loose pale green cotton dress, my stomach swelling. I sweat on a bench at the edge of the New Haven Green and watch my little girl, Sasha, play in the grass. It seems the new baby will never come.
I sit at my huband’s new Scandinavian desk in the dim light of the dawn in the living room at University Towers with the bookcases behind me. I talk to my sister in Johannesburg on the telephone in the early morning, Sasha on my lap.
“How are you? How did it go?” I inquire about the birth. Her baby has arrived earlier than expected. All has gone well, she tells me. She has a beautiful baby boy whom they will call Vaughan.
My baby, who was supposed to arrive before my sister’s, is the laggard. She is taking her sweet time, reluctant to leave me. She tarries, while my sister’s boy is in more of a hurry to come into the world. The doctor decides finally to induce the birth. Cybele, my second child, a big baby girl, arrives two weeks late. Mother sends my Aunt Pie to help with the new baby and the long flight with the two small children from New York to Milan to meet my sister and her new baby. We are on the way to Rapallo. Pie is wonderful with babies and wraps them up tightly, winding the baby blanket around the little limbs.
XI
VOYAGES
MY SISTER AND I ARE ALWAYS FLYING LONG DISTANCES BACK and forth to meet in beautiful places. We meet in South Africa, travel to the game reserve together with my new husband soon after I marry Michael, laughing at old jokes. We meet in France, and tour the countryside together to study art. We stand in stunned silence in the shadows of ancient Romanesque churches, looking up at the round stone arches with wonder. We travel to England; to Scotland, where Carl is specializing in thoracic surgery; to Switzerland to ski. We go to Greece to visit the Greek temples. We stand on the Acropolis and gaze out at the city below. We travel to Italy with our growing families. We are nomads of a kind. My mother often says, “I feel better when I am moving.”
All these visits with my sister over the years in many famous places have run together in my mind. They hardly seem real to me. They have become a song, a litany, a sung prayer, its distinct notes chiming mournfully in my mind. Like Mother’s words when she tells of her travels with our father, the places ring in my mind repeatedly. “Ah, Banff, Lake Louise,” Mother says with a sigh. Or, “Big Sur! Carmel!” reciting the litany of her voyages to people who have never been there.
I see Maxine turning to me, laughing, on a boat, the wind whipping her curls; standing clutching her Guide Bleu to her swelling stomach in the shadows of a stone church.
I remember our trips to Zermatt in Switzerland, the children standing together for a photograph with their skis at their sides like spears. I recall the long arduous voyages out to South Africa with small children to visit her in her home in Johannesburg and a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, where I stay in a hotel room where you have to put money in the meter for heat, and she does the dishes in her fur coat.
This summer, Mother rents a villa on the Ligurian coast near Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, which comes with a cook, Ines, who will remain in our lives, working for both of us at different times.
The villa is on the side of a steep hill with a view of the sea sparkling in the distance. In the early mornings you can hear the chickens clucking in the henhouse, which is halfway down the hill, far enough away so that the noise does not disturb the guests in the rented villa or on the beach. Sometimes at night, the stench rises up in the hot air.
Maxine and me skiing in Switzerland.
We all arrive in Italy in late June and meet Ines, the cook, who, we will find, has a squint in one eye and likes drama as well as food. She is always blowing up the oven. She is always trying to get Sasha to eat. Sasha seems to have decided, at the birth of her new sister, not to eat. “Mangia! Mangia!” Ines urges.
Maxine and Carl arrive with their new baby. The proud father and new mother show us their little boy. We all marvel at this miracle, whom they call “the Professor,” because he has a partially bald head. He lies naked on the bed and pees straight up into the air like a Roman fountain. The four of us stand around him and laugh.
Nights, Maxine and I stumble together through the big rooms of the old villa with our new babies in our arms. We wander through the long corridors with the sloping marble floors and the high ceilings and in the distance the soft sound of the sea. We rise in the night, both awake, breast-feeding every three or four
