Maiden Voyage (21 page)

The walls of my mother's apartment were covered with pictures of the family, the same pictures that had followed her from apartment to apartment ever since the divorce. They were happy pictures of her with my father in their early days, and countless others of Nina, Tony, Jade and me when we were children. She had enlarged the photos to poster size, mounted and framed them and, as a result, the place looked like a shrine. Everywhere were larger-than-life reminders of captured moments, treasured memories of my mother's days in the sun. I sat with her for a large part of every day, listening to her labored breathing and letting the smiling faces in all the photographs take me on a voyage of memories. It seemed hard to believe that the beautiful woman in those photographs had been bearing such a heavy burden.

I knew that everything she had done during our childhood was an attempt to force a reconciliation with my father, the only man she ever loved. From the day of the car accident until the day we began to live with him in New York, she had lashed out at everything that stood between her and her husband and, after it was too late for any reconciliation, at anything that stood between her and her children. I made sure to tell her that I knew she had never tried to do anything to intentionally hurt us as, over and over again, she repeated to me the stories of her struggle.

After my mother had spent a month in the sanitarium in Switzerland, we went back home to New Jersey with my father and, for a while, she became the kind of mother we had only dared dream about. But slowly, the effects of her treatment began to wear off and her eyes began to get that troubled look that usually signaled a volcano of problems about to erupt. Sometimes, out of nowhere during
tense moments, she would fling wide the front door and scream at the top of her lungs,
“Help! HELP me!”
Just as suddenly, she would calm down and close the door. This might have been understandable if she were trying to make it look to the neighbors that my father was abusing her, but our house in New Jersey was completely isolated. We didn't have any neighbors.

Her time of peace had been too brief an oasis for there to even have been much of a discussion about suspending the divorce proceedings and, as things deteriorated, my father reluctantly moved out again and went back to New York. The sessions with the psychiatrists recommenced, while the divorce continued to wallow through the courts.

One afternoon, when I was in the seventh grade, my mother came to pick us up after school, with another earful of luggage. She headed, just like the last time, for New York, this time ending up at Kennedy Airport. I should have called my father, but we wanted to believe that we were only going to California for two weeks, as she said. IcelandAir carried us and all our belongings to Luxembourg. My mother rented a car, we drove to Switzerland and ended up in the village of Huemoz where there was an American religious group, L'Abri.

How long we would be there and why were just two of the many things my mother chose never to divulge. For her, all truths were layered in fantasies, as if she lived in another dimension. Something could happen to all of us together and later on, when we talked about it, it was as if something altogether different had happened to her. Different story, different time, different place.

One day at L'Abri, I found her sewing name tags onto towels and clothes. “What are you doing?” I asked. She didn't answer. “Mommy, please tell me. What are you doing with these things?”

“I am preparing your clothes for boarding school,” she answered matter-of-factly. “You will all go to a boarding school until I can find a house and a job and we can live as a family again.”

The boarding school, the Château de Montcherand, was set in an old lord's castle overlooking what once were his lands and vineyards in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Now it was owned by a religious charity group that took in about forty children whose parents couldn't afford to care for them properly. The day my mother dropped us off at the Château, we cried, begging her not to leave us, and she drove away, promising to return when she could.

As desolating as the experience was when it began, it actually
turned out to be a period of calm in the turmoil that surrounded us. Suddenly, there was rhyme and reason to our days, from waking up to lights out. We were around other children and formed friendships. Being in an environment where French was the official language, we had to do some cramming with the help of the
tantes
who ran the school. Before long, we were back to our boisterous selves and all our new French-speaking friends knew at least two words in the English language: “Shut up!”

There was no word from my father during these months. He must have been crazy with worry, once again desperately trying to figure out where we were. I wrote letters to him, hoping to sneak them out to a mailbox, but they were always intercepted en route by one of the
tantes
and sent to my mother instead.

My mother had no friends other than the Intaglias, who refused to be of any help to my father, and she had precious few acquaintances, so he was left to unravel the mystery of our whereabouts by himself. It wasn't until she filed for a divorce in Switzerland and he was served the papers in New York that he was able to find us. One day, he arrived on our doorstep.

The
tantes
listened to my father's side of the story, they let him see us and, when we went out of our minds with joy at the sight of him, they were moved by the sincerity of the reunion. How could this be the same monster described by my mother? Over the months, they admitted later, they had come to doubt her stories, having witnessed firsthand her erratic behavior. Before now, they had been in no position to do anything about it.

According to American law, my mother had kidnapped us and my father automatically had a legal right to our custody. But we were in Switzerland and out of American jurisdiction; my father's hands were tied and there was nothing he could do about it. She had applied for a divorce under our Swiss citizenship. This was her last chance and she was going to make the most of it.

In Switzerland, unless it can be proven that a mother is completely unfit to care for her children, or that she is a raving maniac, she will always get custody. My mother had assembled a group of highly respected lawyers and religious people for her defense. Although none had met us or my father, a perverted enough picture of him had been painted to make any normal person shudder. The courts made the Château our legal guardians until the case was settled.

On the day of the trial, the last person my mother expected to
see was my father, and he walked into the courtroom, prepared with all the evidence needed to prove that his wife was mentally incompetent. After the accusations and evidence were all out on the table, the judge decided in his favor. Confident that he would win on the point of doubtful mental fitness, my father had also foreseen that my mother would immediately appeal the judge's decision, which would cement the whole case back into the Swiss legal system for God only knew how long. He was ready. He knew that it would take about forty-five minutes to file the appeal. For forty-five minutes, he would have legal custody and the right to take us out of the school.

That morning, there was an air of suspense around the Château. We knew that exciting things were happening, and before he left for the courthouse, my father had sworn us to secrecy about how the day would unfold. The
tantes
helped pack our belongings, our Uncle Peter arrived from Appenzell to help, and at the appointed hour we sped to a rendezvous in the forest and jumped into my father's car. The two brothers hugged each other goodbye, and we zoomed off across the border, through France and on to Luxembourg to catch an IcelandAir flight bound for New York and a new life. It would be two years before we would see or hear from my mother again. She never even had a chance to say goodbye.

•   •   •

Seven years later, as I sat on my mother's deathbed, goodbye was a sentiment with which I had become very familiar. For two weeks, I tried to devote myself to her needs and pack as much kindness as possible into the short time we had left. Mostly, she just wanted me to listen. I was with her every day, visiting, helping her to eat, bringing her little goodies. The pictures and maps of
Varuna's
progress seemed to capture her imagination more than anything else, and she made me put them up on the walls around her bed. She never complained and rarely cried out, unless it was in between the torpors induced by the painkillers administered by her nurse.

The one thing I hoped for during every visit over that Christmas holiday was that she would finally reveal to us the secrets of her past. I listened carefully as her stories rambled; I tried to read between the lines as she talked in confused riddles, but still the solution to the puzzle remained incomplete and, it seemed now, was about to die with her.

Christmas day was a bittersweet affair that came and went, signaling that the time to go back to Tahiti had arrived. I thought of my father with his Land-Rover, off somewhere in Africa, trying in his own way to avoid the painful realities of home, and felt bad for Tony
and Jade. Nina and I would be leaving them alone with my mother, and Jeri and Christian, and they were only sixteen and fifteen years old.

I watched my mother's strength ebb, and on my last evening with her forever, I sat listening, stroking her hair and etching her beautiful face in my memory. Snow whirled around outside the window and the colorful lights and decorations of her final Christmas season twinkled on the streets of the city. I clicked in the cassette of her favorite song, “Memory,” which I had first played for her two years earlier in Switzerland. She had insisted that I play it for her every day of that visit. As the music rose to the crescendo, her eyes were pools of tears struggling against sleep.

“Mommy,” I said quietly. “It's time to sleep now. I promise I'll call you every other day. And don't forget that I love you, OK?”

“Goodbye, my daughter. Remember, learn as much as you can on your voyage.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “Tania,” she said, and I leaned closer, “don't come back. Stay free from those who will hurt you. On the ocean you will always be free. You will see that Nature is the only fair one. Never forget that your mommy loves you more than anything in the world.” She could stay awake no longer and I gazed at her for the last time.

Sitting by her bedside, holding her thin hand in mine, I saw returning to my mother's sleeping face the gentleness of simpler times, now long gone by. I remembered the time in Vernon, when we were children, Tony, Nina and I incubated a quail egg, and when the furry brown bird hatched, she always favored my mother, flying to her shoulder and fluttering freely around the house. Cinderella we called her, and for a year, her songs brought a spark of joy to the day. One afternoon, we came home from school and found my mother crying. She sat down with us and said that Cinderella had broken her neck against the window glass and was dead.

“She was too delicate for this world, children. She saw the beautiful trees and the sky and the other little birds and she longed to be with them. Now I know she is happy. She is flying in freedom in heaven. She is where she belongs.”

My mother's moments of gentleness were like drops of water to parched throats and, if I tried, I thought that I could remember each one. I remembered how much she used to love to knit and crochet, and the little dolls and doilies she often made for us, and how she painstakingly guided my fingers to create my first scarf. Sometimes she even made our clothes.

When she first returned from the sanitarium, she had pulled out
of a bag the sweater that she had started knitting nine years before for my father. “I started this when you were babies. It's about time I finished it, don't you think?” she said, smiling whenever one of us would sit with her and watch her needles click away. She had filled us with hope in those days. I remembered the night she surprised my father with the sweater, made in a large green fisherman knit. He put it on and, it seemed, never took it off. “This is my favorite sweater,” he would always say. He still wears it.

When we were at the boarding school in Switzerland, she often wrote us beautiful letters trying to explain her motives, reminding us that she was only acting out of love. One letter I still have, its words thinly veiling the troubled soul that penned them: “Behind the clouds of our sorrow, my daughter, believe that the sun still shines. Soon, the wind will come and whisk away the cloud forever. Tania, who does not walk heavily through dark moments? Who does not weep alone because of an inexpressible sorrow? Nobody knows the trouble your mommy sees. Sometimes, for moments, I feel that I am out of God's presence and everything is in a strange mist. But I must learn to creep along, like a boat in fog. Sometimes, I think that to hear noise would be better than the strange silence that I hear. God is the only friend who will never betray us. He has a plan for us and nothing can stop it. My dear, always be a good team with Nina, Tony and Jade, and remember, no matter what, nobody will take away from you your Mommy's love. I have written this letter with my heart to you, my dear child and friend.”

•   •   •

As I lay on a bench in the Tahitian airport, homesickness chewed away at my stomach. I had already been stretching things by leaving
Varuna
alone in a crowded harbor for two weeks, but it seemed just as wrong to be on the other side of the world when so much was still happening at home. Thinking of the million and one questions that I still wanted to ask, I longed to talk more with my mother, tell her again that she had my love. The loudspeaker announced another incoming flight and I went to the bathroom to wash my face. Walking back to my seat, I saw Luc waiting at the arrival gate.

“Hello! Welcome back. How are things at home?” he asked, but I couldn't trust myself to form the answer to even so simple a question without crying and just shrugged my shoulders. I looked at him expectantly, half hoping, but he shook his head. “They're here, and she knows,” he said. And, before I could say anything, “I'm so sorry, Tania, but this isn't easy for any of us. Please don't be scared. You'll
see, Fabienne is a really nice person and she even feels sorry that you had to meet a creep like me,” he said, using his favorite English word that I had taught him. “She really wants to meet you.”