I remember walking in line with a group on a gorgeous winter day with the snow falling lightly, surrounded by pines and mountains. It was the kind of day that makes kids want to throw snowballs and cavort in the snow. And they couldn’t, at least not spontaneously. And I knew it was like this every day, all day. It felt like an actual weight on me, a lead suit. Yes, they did fun things, they earned trips home, but how she got through twenty months there, I’ll never know. Neither Mia nor I regret my sending her, but I’ve always been aware of the price she paid, of the downsides.
I hope she’s enjoying Brno with Peter; it’s not as big or spiffed up as Prague but equally beautiful. I don’t know how I survived the time I spent there after leaving her at the school. I’d stayed a week thinking I’d be able to visit her, only to learn they wouldn’t allow it; too many kids manipulate and guilt their parents into taking them home, where they’d get into even worse trouble. I wandered around bereft and lost, in a sleep- and food-deprived haze, both on foot and, miraculously, in a rental car, which always seemed to elicit terrible yelling in other drivers. On my last day I learned that what I thought were stop signs were NO STOPPING HERE signs on what I thought was a two-lane road but was really a freeway. And those friendly police officers standing on the shoulder waving at me every time I passed weren’t being friendly—that’s how they tell you to pull over to be ticketed. I was a complete mess for a long time, in every way. I ultimately came out a better mother and human being, but initially the terrible sorrow, anger, fear, and self-recrimination just about did me in.
I’m strolling along the Danube, which is not particularly beautiful today, just a wide, brown, muddy river. I’m at roughly the same spot where my mother used to see Jews and intellectuals shot and dumped in the river during the war. “You had to just keep walking along. You couldn’t show any fear—the Nazis could smell fear.”
Most of what she’s shared about Budapest over the years has been positive, however. How sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and lively it was, how beautiful the architecture and museums were.
I step onto the Liberty Bridge to walk to Margaret Island, another place she loved. The Liberty is, in my opinion, the most beautiful of Budapest’s famous seven bridges (all of which were blown up by the retreating Germans in World War II, since restored)—a grand and graceful Art Nouveau chain bridge, painted a pale jade, with huge bronze falcons atop ornate pinnacles.
Just as it must for my mother, this part of the world holds both beauty and suffering for me. For her, the happiness of her youth in a city she loved and the horror of war. For me, there is the shadow of that history, and coming here to leave behind my only child when I couldn’t save her myself. Thinking of this as I leave the bridge to wander up the stairs to the hilltop on Margaret Island, I’m struck by something so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.
When I first read of Vigee Le Brun’s history I was captivated, by the woman herself and by her talent. I read her memoir, all the biographies on her, visited any museum I could that exhibited her work. It only now strikes me that she resonated with me for another reason. As drastically different as our lives are, they’re almost exactly alike in one significant way—as mothers. Both of us devoted our lives to our only children, who were both daughters who chose to self-destruct before our eyes, both in extreme ways; and we both left our girls in this part of the world when we could do no more, with our hearts completely shattered.
After fleeing the revolution, Le Brun and Julie lived all over Europe, and Le Brun wasted no expense to develop her daughter’s talents. Both because she wanted Julie to know the pleasure of her own accomplishments—something Le Brun deeply understood—and because she herself was proof that a poor match could lead to financial and social ruin. But Le Brun was truly one in a million in her talent and ability to generate great wealth of her own in an era when women of her class depended upon men or inheritance to survive.
Though Julie did show literary inclination, which Le Brun encouraged, she lacked her mother’s talent and ambition. Given that so did 99 percent of the female population in the eighteenth century, Le Brun was probably unfair, and certainly unrealistic, in her disappointment. I have to think that Julie must have felt that keenly, because she began to rebel against her mother. At twenty, she took up with a partying, reputation-ruining crowd that included Gaétan Nigris; secretary to a Russian nobleman, Nigris was a handsome aesthete with no money, no title, and little ambition.
Le Brun was understandably distressed; herself aside, in that era a reputation and prospects were all a woman had. She also saw what her love-struck daughter was blind to: he was arrogant, petty, and selfish. But, because reverse psychology is so hard for a mother, she did what so many mothers do, and God knows I certainly did—protest and forbid. And the more she denounced, the more Julie defied, soon becoming engaged to Nigris.
One has to wonder if this was Julie’s power play, her way of stepping out of Le Brun’s shadow, of gaining freedom from her. Le Brun begged and wept, but Julie held her ground. Le Brun attended (and paid for) the wedding, then waited for the train wreck.
I have to admit, I know the anguish and anger she felt. It’s the kind of fury only a mother helpless against her own child’s self-destruction can understand, even if she is partially to blame for it, perhaps especially so. Le Brun’s spirit was so badly broken she fell into a profound depression:
The whole charm of my life seemed to be irretrievably destroyed. I even felt no joy in loving my daughter, though God knows how much I still did love her, in spite of all her wrongdoing. Only mothers will fully understand me.
During a visit to her daughter soon after the marriage, Le Brun could see that Julie was already becoming disaffected with Nigris. She also saw Julie wouldn’t leave him, so she bit her tongue and soon left Russia. A few years later, Nigris dumped Julie after a move to Paris, leaving her in great debt. Le Brun continually rescued Julie financially, but despite repeated invitations, and the fact that they saw each other almost daily, Julie refused to live with her mother, preferring an increasingly wanton life with a very low crowd (to use the parlance of the day). How well I know how Le Brun felt; I wanted to pull my hair out and scream to the heavens when Mia ran away to live in a truck with druggies; it was beyond comprehension to me then. I can still feel the frustration behind Le Brun’s words:
Whether it is through my fault or not, her power over my mind was great, and I had none over hers; it is therefore understandable that she so often made me shed bitter tears.
Sadly, Julie died of pneumonia at forty-two, with her mother at her side.
Le Brun’s life parallels those of so many modern mothers, it’s uncanny: working, successful, single mom, overparenting—and overshadowing—her daughter. But while it would be easy to see Julie’s behavior as simply rebelling against a powerful mother, and it may well have been true, that is seeing her through modern eyes. It can’t have been the only reason. For a young woman to be a party animal now is hardly unusual; it’s practically a rite of passage at college. Back then, however, there were only two sides of the tracks—and once you were on the wrong side, you could never go back. You didn’t go on Oprah with your tale of triumph; you didn’t get a second chance at a good life. Your teeth rotted, you had no heat, you got third-world diseases, you almost never bathed, you went hungry, you were scorned, seen as a disgrace. Life at court wasn’t just about eating bonbons; it gave a woman literal, physical safety and health. What Julie did was extreme in a way we can’t even imagine.
I have to wonder if her lifelong impulsiveness and wild behavior were also biologically driven; it certainly is typical behavior for a young person with depression or bipolar disorder. Or perhaps she suffered some kind of trauma or abuse as a child; it was no less common then than now, one in three girls, and, again, her behavior is so typical it’s almost textbook. How sad that we have no record from Julie, no journal or diary to understand her unhappy,
too-short life.
I cannot even imagine the pain of mothers whose daughters don’t recover the way Mia did, mothers whose children continue to self-destruct into adulthood. This is where I struggle with the advice given mothers of addicts, as does my friend Maureen, who’s written extensively and eloquently about her struggle with her adult son’s debilitating, decades-long drug addiction. Mothers are told not to give their adult children money or assistance when they’re in the gutter, to let them hit rock bottom. As if hitting rock bottom always does the trick. Often we’re the only thing standing between life and the rock bottom a mother fears most: death. It’s true the addict needs to make the choice to change. I think it’s our job as mothers to keep them alive till they do, no matter how old they get. We’re not their drug counselor, or probation officer, or shrink. Le Brun did what I and most other moms I know would do: use our instincts, our hearts, our resources, everything we’ve got, to save our children.
Our daughters can break our hearts a hundred different ways. One of the most memorable e-mails I received from a reader was one that contained a haunting, uncredited quote: “A daughter cuts her teeth on her mother’s bones.” That may be true, but, as Chrystelle would say, the thing of eet ees this—a mother doesn’t much care. We would give up none of it, no pain our daughters cause us, to have our bones whole again.
The train carrying me back to Budapest hums and squeaks as it chugs along through the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and eventually Hungary. I watch the land fly by, soil from the same region of the world that my grandmother and her family are from.
There’s a strange symbiosis between life and death, crisis and opportunity, death and rebirth. In nature, death and destruction nourish new life; one animal eats the dead flesh of another, and what’s not consumed by fauna is consumed by flora as carcasses sink into the earth. Decaying and moss-covered trunks of fallen trees are where new seedlings grow quickest.
My family’s ashes are scattered throughout this part of the world, the same area that, metaphorically and perhaps literally, gave me new life. Sometimes I still can’t believe how callously I treated what so many people tried, and failed, to cling to. I’m not sure I’d say I was ever suicidal but I was reckless enough not to care that I was playing Russian roulette.
Until about thirteen, I was happy and vibrant, and it’s remarkable how quickly that vivacity was leeched away and replaced with a violent self-destruction. Child abuse isn’t child abuse; it’s people abuse, because children grow up. No matter how many years pass, or how much or little you consciously remember, history like that is akin to a forgotten landmine that sends shrapnel tearing from within once triggered.
I’ve never told my mother or grandmother this, but Bubbie actually helped me through it. My grandmother endured a hell that only genocide survivors can truly understand, and, strange as it may sound, I took comfort in her experiences. It would be wrong and disrespectful to compare our situations, because the scope was vastly different; I was a single person, she was part of a mass extermination that was far more brutal, bloody, and devastating.
A similarity, however, is that we both experienced a very dark side of humanity unusually young. My biological father taught me that people you trusted could turn on you, that the world could be dangerous and illogical and cruel. And because I didn’t realize how many other kids had been abused, I often felt different and emotionally isolated from my friends. Knowing what happened to my grandmother made me feel less alone, and I must have seen her as a guide of sorts, because she used to show up in my dreams.
Growing up, I had terrible nightmares of being chased and hunted, sometimes by my dad, sometimes by Nazis, other times by someone I couldn’t see or name but knew wanted to hurt me. Perhaps because in real life Bubbie successfully navigated dangerous and frightening territory, she often appeared in my dreams, pulling me behind an alley or revealing a secret hiding place just in the nick of time. Sometimes she’d wait with me until the danger passed, other times she’d appear long enough to stash me away someplace safe, and then vanish.
There was always a subtle defiance in her eyes, and she was watchful and calm, never nervous or scared. In real life my grandmother is often worried and anxious, yet growing up I only ever saw her as a fighter as wise and brave as Minerva.
Hát nézzenek ide, csak ötig tud számolni! Ha egyenként adnánk a szilvát akkor Amerikával is tudnánk üzletelni. Mennyi eszük van ezeknek a buziknak . . .” (Well, lookie here, she can only count to five! If we sold the plums one by one we could make business with America! How “smart” these cretins are . . .)
If it’s not tomatoes, it’s plums. How was I to know you can’t buy five plums because he’d rather sell you half a kilo. Or it’s train tickets. When I gently pointed out to the guy who sold us Mia’s ticket that he was overcharging us double, he stood up to his full six-foot-six height and shrieked at us to leave, GO! GO!! GET OUT!!! because he was the best ticket-seller in Budapest!! I thought Mia would faint dead away.
Although of course there are kind, helpful clerks in Budapest, there are so many who aren’t that I’ve gotten used to anything involving purchases as being hit or miss. I just think of it like opera—getting yelled at with no idea why. I’ve also gotten used to being followed in stores, because they think I’m a Gypsy. I mean, they don’t even try to hide it—no, they want me to know they’re watching me, no doubt because they think it’ll prevent me from stealing. Sometimes I mess with them and try to look shifty.
But I’ll be damned if I’ll get yelled at while I’m stark naked. So before we get in line in the famous Gellert Baths, we study the long menu very carefully. The less you say the better. It ain’t easy. We’re contending with a menu that wishes us a pleasant relaxation to this fundamentally refreshing service of Swedish. I see the word therapeutic and assume it’ll be deep-tissue and Mia chooses refreshing massage, hoping for a light touch.
We line up behind a bunch of tourists. It’s not looking good. Each one in the group of tall, handsome Australian fellows in front of us leaves the cashier looking more stricken than the last. When I reach the counter, I point, say two words, hold out exact change, and get blasted anyway, for no reason I can see. This time I just mutter along with her, yeah yeah yeah right sure yeah sure. I don’t even care if she understands me.
Once in the women’s spa, it’s another world. Soft robes and white fluffy towels, hushed voices, sweet smiles, madame this madame that, follow me to massage place madame, smile smile, sweet sweet. They escort us to a big room of white subway-tiled walls from the Gilded Age and blessed silence, then they help us lay our naked selves down in separate, partitioned-off massage areas. Ahhhhhhh . . .
Then Prince’s “1999” BLASTS out of speakers above us. Très relaxing! A huge woman walks into Mia’s area and a teeny one walks into mine. Therapeutic must mean “hothouse orchid” here, because she proceeds to do nothing more than press me lightly hither and thither like she’s testing me for doneness.
Then comes the sound of a water hose blasting from Mia’s area, followed by loud clapping sounds, more fire-hose sounds, then wet, whacking sounds, flopping sounds, more blasts, and cupping sounds. No sounds from Mia at all, which is alarming.
This goes on for half an hour. I’m ready to jump out of my skin and Mia must have grown fins by now. Incredibly (well, maybe not), the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Torture Me” comes on as I’m led out. Mia’s standing there, bright red, wide-eyed, swaddled in a wet white sheet, and shaking her head to say, Don’t even ask.
Thank God the bathing pools make up for it all. Two pools under a dome of ornate Nouveau tiling and dim, twinkly light create an almost magical feel. The water is scorching in one, just pretty damn hot in the other, but after you sink in slowly, it’s heavenly.
There’s a beautiful blue-tiled fountain against one wall, with water cascading down from the ceiling above it feeding the pool. A nude, Rubenesque young woman with long,
blond hair and big, pendulous breasts hikes herself up on the edge of the fountain. She leans her head back to let the water fall onto her head and run down her body. She’s magnificent, utterly at home in her body, letting the hot water take her cares away.
Women of all ages talk and laugh softly. All are nude, most are Hungarians. Some are obviously mothers and daughters, displaying the same figures thirty years apart. There is an ease and closeness between generations here that’s really wonderful. Mothers have never been seen as “uncool” in this part of the world. Even when I dropped Mia off in the Czech Republic ten years ago, pink-haired, pierced teens held their mother’s hand and Sunday is held sacred as family day in Eastern and Western Europe. Your role as the matriarch and emotional rock of the family endures until you die and forms what is hopefully the core of a close relationship with your adult daughter; however, being “best friends” with her is neither common nor desired. There’s a sanctity to the mother-daughter relationship that precludes it.
It’s seen as equally inappropriate in France, according to my French friend, the photographer Nathalie.
“If you were trying to be your daughter’s best friend, you would be seen as quite off track. Your job is to be her mother. I don’t want to know about my daughter’s dating life—she has her peers for that. Nor would I talk to her about mine. And I certainly don’t want to know about my own mum’s private life.”
She thinks that’s part of why American kids aren’t as respectful to their parents—a line is crossed. I turn to talk about this to Mia. Her head is back, resting on the lip of the pool, her eyes closed, her limbs relaxed and floating.
“Hey, Mia, I’ve been thinking.”
Have Mother, Will Travel Page 30
