Mother moves into a comfortable cottage in the grounds of the couple’s big house on Valley Road. Roses grow outside her bay window, and there is an extra bedroom for my Aunt Pie, who moves in with her.
Carl will work as a doctor in Johannesburg: an esteemed and energetic young man with a finely chiseled face, a hard knotty body, the sudden flash of an unexpected white smile. He is tall, blond, and athletic. His nurses adore him, Maxine tells me; his grateful patients speak highly of his postoperative care, he does pro bono work on the weekends, even flies to Lesotho to operate there. His large family—several brothers and sisters; an intelligent mother, despite the hats, who is of distinguished French Huguenot stock; a father who, though not wealthy, seems responsible and kind—all look up to him, the brilliant boetie, the one who has passed his matriculation at sixteen, the one who will go on to Edinburgh to do his special training in heart surgery, the one who works with Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur, though not on the first famous heart transplant, but later and, particularly, on a difficult operation with a man whose heart seems to stop completely before starting up again.
Maxine and Carl’s wedding with Ouma and Oupa and my mother in the wide-brimmed hat.
My sister will soon fill the rooms of her big house with babies. She tells me her South African gynecologist encourages her in this endeavor. “We need more white babies,” he says.
IX
NAMES
OUR MOTHER HAS HER TWO WHITE BABIES, HER TWO LITTLE girls, one named after my father, Max, and one after her, Sheila May. I understand that my father loves my sister more. She is older and knows more than I do and can talk with my brilliant father during his brief appearances. Maxine knows how to read and write, how to add, subtract, and multiply, and how to file his papers. She is his preferred one. In a photo of the four of us on the beach she sits at his feet and leans longingly up against his legs. Because of her name, Maxine, I feel she is part of him, a little Max. They belong together.
Once, we are taken to the timber yard to see our father and tumble around in the sawdust, which goes down the backs of our dresses and pricks our necks. We are introduced to one of Father’s employees, who tells us that when Maxine was born, he put a gold coin in her hand, which she grasped greedily.
As sometimes happens in families, there is a pairing here; my sister is my father’s “Pet,” as I am my mother’s, or so I understand. Later, my sister’s children will tell me Maxine thought she was Mother’s “Pet.”
Sometimes, in the mornings, when our father has left the house, Mother allows both her little pets to enter her big bedroom, the lined curtains drawn on the bright light. We climb up into her wide, soft bed with the initialed blue linen sheets. She gathers us up to her bosom, almost visible through the sheer pink 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