Or else—one more memory of him—Father takes me stunt flying at Le Bourget. Whoopee! It is a Sunday, and we are in a tiny two-seater plane he has rented for the afternoon, this is the happiest Sunday of the year. He is talking about the principles of stunt flying and shows me how the plane can fly on its side, wings perpendicular to ground, how it can somersault and cut zigzags like a fancy diver plunging into a pool, and all that without falling to your death. There is a strap of khaki webbing about my waist, while feeling faintly nauseous, I yell with joy at every swoop and swerve, crying out, More! More! “Good little soldier!” he shouts back, and he tries it again, more dangerously this time; at a flick of his wrist, the plane can do a triple somersault, can twist and turn like a piece of spaghetti in boiling water…. Father is all the more brave and smart because he obtained his piloting license against the law. He is color-blind, and it is illegal to obtain a piloting license if you have faulty vision. As many of his friends put it, he is all the more brave because he fooled, tricked, outwitted the dunces who make those stupid laws about who should fly or not!
He was a loyal patriot of the world’s most anarchic people. An idealist and a fighter through and through, he was ever ready to take on the enemy and risk his life in an honorable war. He belonged to that small, maverick sector of the French right wing which although anti-Semitic was ardently Anglophile; which began to see the threat of Nazism from the very beginning of the movement; which deplored France’s lack of military preparedness, its fatal reluctance to rearm in the face of the Nazi threat. Like General de Gaulle, whose Free French movement he joined in the first days of its existence, Father early perceived the moral corruption that pervaded the French government, the delusions and cynicism that suffused its General Staff, the tragic ineptitude of a High Command that was to allow Germany to overrun France in a mere five weeks. Lieutenant Bertrand du Plessix died over the Mediterranean in the summer of 1940, his plane shot down by fascist artillery, and became one of the first four Frenchmen to be honored with the Croix de la Libération, de Gaulle’s highest award. The paragraph dedicated to him in the Mémorial des Compagnons, available to this day in Paris at the Compagnons de la Libération headquarters on avenue de la Tour-Maubourg, reads thus:
Lieutenant du Plessix, refined, distinguished, cultivated, was posted at the French Embassy in Warsaw before the war. When mobilized, he served as liaison officer to the Polish Army during the Polish campaign. Today [June 18, 1940], he does not hesitate to follow the call of his conscience.
My prewar memories of my mother are far gentler, fewer, and more discreet. The most haunting one concerns a morning vision of her at her dressing table. I am seven years old, and we have settled into a new apartment, many steps up the hierarchy of chic, moving from the Tour Eiffel area to the rue de Longchamp, two steps from the Place d’Iéna. Mother has designed a bathroom in which every accessory is le dernier cri. Particularly magical details—the floor, covered in a new brand of linoleum, electric-blue in color and wondrous in its cushiness, and the mirrored dressing table, on top of which is displayed the sterling-silver toiletry set engraved with my father’s alleged viscountal crest and my mother’s initials: T. I. P. I watch her smooth her marcelled golden hair with the silver brushes. I study her from a corner of her bathroom, terrified that any movement of mine might trigger her to annoyance and dismissal. Every one of her gestures to me has always been utterly gentle, yet there is a certain harshness about the silence she maintains with me, all the more so because with the rest of the world she is notoriously loquacious, exuberant. After I come in for my almost daily crouch (arms about my legs, head on my knees to make myself as unobtrusive as possible), every few minutes she blows me a kiss with her fingers and then returns full attention to the image in the mirror, to the buffing and polishing of that marvelous face. Not a word is exchanged. The silence of that bathroom is a kind of chastisement to which I return almost every day. (And yet, perhaps it was much finer, this silence, than the hapless babble with which other fashionable women insult their children—“how are you, baby doll, hootsie-koo.” As I look back on it, the silence was pure and principled, it had no pretense; it may have been a lesser violence. I’d learn later that she was deeply shy, that much of her garrulousness and bravado were masks for her great timidity; that she had not evolved a language to communicate with a child often set against her by a father who excelled at verbiage; that perhaps she had not dared to compete with him.)
Whatever blown kisses and sparse words she offers me, I follow her like a puppy as she gets up from her dressing table, ready to start work, and goes to a small atelier right off her bedroom where she crafts her hats with the aid of her assistant, a melancholy, round-faced fellow emigré with the difficult name of Nadezhda Romanovna Preobrazhenskaia. Nadezhda Romanovna, yet another member of the proper Russian gentry whose husband now helps support his family as a taxi driver, often kisses and hugs me during her bouts of émigré tears, her sobbingly whispered recitatives—Ah, dushenka, the beloved country we left behind, the dachas and the meadows and our own staff of servants, and now reduced to this! Often weeping, Nadezhda Romanovna sits at one end of the table, which is heaped high with rolls of felt, with reams of tulle and veiling and lamé, with gorgeous spools of grosgrain, with velvet and satin ribbons, with bouquets of aigrette and peacock feathers and lavish pink cloth roses, the whole lovely heap surmounted by the large round steam press that will force felt and straw to take on their ultimate shape of bretons, boaters, casques, berets. And at the head of the table mother sits, again, in front of a large oval mirror, sculpting velours, draping organza or satin onto her head, using her own reflected face as the medium of creation.
Upon my eccentric father’s wishes, I do not go to a regular school. I am instructed at home by my possessive, hypochondriacal Russian governess, Maria Nikolaevna Chimanskaia, under the supervision of a tutoring establishment, Cours Hattemer, which I attend one day a week. Throughout the day, in between my lessons, I take every opportunity to continue spying on my idol, Mother. I peek through the keyhole of her bedroom–fitting room, where, standing at yet another mirrored dressing table, she holds a bunch of globe-domed pins in her mouth as she adjusts jerseys and moirés to the head of Madame de Rosières, the comtesse Dessoffy, the duchesse de Gramont. And in the evenings, after she has exited for yet another client-hunting trek in the haut monde, I continue to seek out Mother in her closets, studying and caressing her cashmeres and velvet and silks. I recall feeling an especially exquisite sensation—as closely akin as I remember to childhood masturbation—from stroking a particular evening dress of brilliant, electric-blue satin, inevitably of Piguet design, and scented with his dry, terse Bandit. Fondling it at length, I felt a powerful sensual consolation from its texture, as if the cloth that had lain against Mother’s skin was the only replacement I had for her longed-for embrace, her longed-for nuzzling, for the lost breast of my infancy.
I never realized the measure of my idolization of Tatiana or the magnitude of the spell which her sorcerous, silent presence wielded over me until decades later, when I found, in a school notebook of the 1930s, the very first artifacts I ever made. They were not, to my dismay, poems or prose pieces or any other signs of an emerging literary talent. They were, quite the contrary, fashion designs, drawings of imaginary day dresses and evening gowns and at-home peignoirs, all worn by blond ladies bearing a strong resemblance—as close a resemblance as an eight-year-old draftsman could achieve—to Mother. And it is evident that they were created with one single purpose in mind: finally to glean her love by saying, “I’m joining you, I’ll do what you do when I grow up! Now will you pay attention to me?”
So how treasurable, how cherished those rare occasions—governess’s day off, father traveling, Babushka ill—when Mother and I go out together on the town. How shyly yet tenderly she takes my hand, with a fond look, as we step out of the apartment. We often go to visit the exotic friend from whom she had learned her trade a decade ago, Fat’ma Han
oum Samoilenko. (“The widow of a very noble Ukrainian,” Mother explains the picturesque name.) Fat’ma, who is still a popular Paris hatmaker, tells terrific jokes and has a large brown beauty mark on her left cheek and chain-smokes pungent Black Sobranies and offers me a Turkish sweet, rahat loukoum, the rose-scented variety of which I’d still walk miles to get my hands on. Sometimes Fat’ma, Mother, and I hire a cab for a few hours and go on a tour of wholesale stores to stock up on the materials from which their exquisite creations are made—specialty shops that offer one hundred hues of grosgrain ribbon or dozens of varieties of aigrettes, or scores of variously textured voilettes, the flirtatious kind with little dots all over it or the opaque kind used for the chapeaus of widows or the sequined variety set upon a velvet skullcap for evening wear.
Tatiana in her Paris apartment in 1940, a few weeks before the German invasion of France.
Mother is loyal about visiting old friends. We go with equal frequency—certainly once per month—to the music store of one Monsieur Graff, on avenue Victor Hugo, to listen to recordings of the classics. He is a lively, dapper Jewish gentleman (destined to die at Auschwitz) who puts me into a listening booth with a new disk of the Brandenburg Concertos, and I’m out of the adults’ way for hours, in a trance, while Monsieur Graff and Mother exchange the mundanities of their trade: the duchesse de Gramont came in yesterday to buy the new recording of Parsifal, Madame de Rosières was in last week to order a cocktail hat of tulle and aigrettes. Or else we go out to the Bois with a young American doctor, Justin Greene, who is studying medicine in Paris and has a big crush on Mother and particularly loves playing with children; he bounces me in the air and catches me or gives me a strenuous calisthenic routine. (He eventually became one of New York’s eminent child psychiatrists.) Or else on yet other afternoons—these moments are particularly mysterious and entrancing—Mother and I post ourselves at the entrance to our building to wait for a very special friend of hers, Monsieur Wormser.
Monsieur Wormser is very rich and has a long, black, gleaming car and a liveried chauffeur. Monsieur Wormser is tall, silver haired, and, like all men to whom my mother would condescend to give the time of day, exquisitely mannered. I think of Monsieur Wormser as the bestower of a great many luxuries in my early life: my first pair of white kid gloves, unctuously soft, offered when I was five or six and kept in a special drawer long after they’d ceased to fit me, until our hasty flight from Nazi troops a few years later. My first outing to the circus, during which Monsieur Wormser called the clown over to our ringside seats to shake hands with me and I, a very formal child, burst into tears, saying, “We haven’t been introduced!” My first taste of ice cream, a delicacy which my governess forbade and which Monsieur Wormser and my mother watched me savor, at Savarin’s on the Champs Elysées, with that same conspiratorial glance of shared contentment I’d noticed in my parents’ eyes when I ate an apple. I do believe that André Wormser (“a very distinguished banker,” my mother explained later) was the only lover my mother had until she reencountered Alex Liberman. I know from the one cousin still alive who knew my mother well and loved her, Claude de Laromiguière, now eighty-six, that Monsieur Wormser offered Tatiana superb vacations and sumptuous presents—no more than two or three pieces of jewelry, but very fine. I sense that she must have kept him at arm’s length, resorting to all kinds of subterfuges, pretenses of illness to indulge as little as possible in the carnal act. And I suspect that his elegance, kindness, delicacy, and thoughtfulness were balms in my mother’s hardworking life, which, until the Alex era, was assuaged solely by the keen pleasure she took in her own beauty, her marvelous capacity for friendship, and, to a lesser extent, by her deep, timid love for me.
But by the autumn of 1938 I sensed, with that shrewd sixth sense unique to estranged children, that Monsieur Wormser was being replaced as the center of my mother’s attention. In the new flat on the rue de Longchamps that we had moved into that fall, my room adjoined my mother’s, and my bed was separated from hers by one thin wall. (As is habitual among families in which the parents lead totally separate lives, my father’s quarters were at the other end of the apartment.) Every morning, at about 8:00 A.M., I heard Mother pick up the phone and talk to someone in Russian in tender, confidential tones—in a loving tone of voice I’d never heard her assume with anyone. It was during that very span of months—in October or so of 1938, so I would piece it together later—that Mother started an affair with Alex Liberman. I also sensed that there was a trait mutual to Monsieur Graff, Monsieur Wormser, and the mustached friend in the white convertible—Alex Liberman—to whose studio I would go with my governess with enormous pleasure, throughout the winter of 1938–1939, to pose for my portrait: All three were Jewish. And because most of Mother’s close friends seemed to be Jewish, I instinctively took exception, with an uneasy sense of disloyalty, to my father’s singling out of Jews as “detestable.”
I do not want to make it sound as if there was constant, audible warfare between my parents, Tatiana and Bertrand. Far from it: There was a fresh, cool friendship between them, a highly structured separateness, rather than a series of upheavals. There was even considerable mutual devotion, exemplified by the swift, dedicated way in which my father saved Tatiana’s life right after her car accident, an act of characteristic decisiveness she always spoke of with lavish gratitude and praise. There were to be those taxing wartime days in the spring of 1940 when he lay for a month in a military hospital with a terrible case of jaundice and she went to his bedside daily with magazines, books, his mail, a freshly cooked meal. And for years before that, there were the evening outings with a few friends and relatives for whom they both had special affection.
The Monestiers were such a couple. Simone Monestier was a second cousin of my father, an expansive, sophisticated woman of considerable wit and erudition who had studied music with Vincent d’Indy. As a young bride, she and her husband, André, a genial graduate of Polytechnique who ran a chain of prosperous paper factories in Picardy, had given my father a second home when he was a graduate student in Paris; cosmopolitan and multilingual, far closer to him in their tastes and intellectual formation than his own provincial siblings, the Monestiers had immediately adored, and charmed, Tatiana. They were close friends and confidants of both my parents and had again saved the day in the 1930s, a few years after the du Plessix’ return from Warsaw, when Uncle André offered my father a job running his Paris office, a position my father retained until World War II. My mother and Simone had forged particularly close bonds. Simone would inevitably protect my mother’s interests throughout my father’s dalliances, warning or reassuring her: “Don’t worry about this one, she won’t last a month,” or “Watch out for the redhead, she’s seriously trying to get her claws on him.”
The Monestiers were both adventurous, romantic, fearless. They enjoyed skiing in the Carpathians and trekking mountains in Tibet. Deeply religious but always reaching out to whatever was most progressive in Catholicism, as early as the 1930s they had taken part in ecumenical seminars in Indian ashrams and crossed stretches of the African desert in the company of missionaries. And throughout thirty years they had remained deeply in love, constantly bickering about domestic details but concurring on all major issues, so used to each other’s presence that they seized each other for an embrace when they had been apart for a few hours. “Ah there you are, my darling,” Uncle André would cry out, “how I’ve missed you!” “But where were you all morning, my treasure?” she would reply.
Simone was an indefatigable redhead with a violent need to shelter, nurture, and share—a variety of atypical French impulses caused by her unfulfilled yearning for ten children of her own. Part of these impulses were redirected to me and to the tending of her two country houses—a manor in Picardy she had inherited from her family and an eccentrically secluded estate in the Gorges du Tarn—where I spent most school breaks and vacations throughout the year. I was a sickly child, often underweight, prone to bronchitis and chronic anem
ia. Aunt Simone, who had earned a degree in nursing during World War I, believed that my feeble health was due to the archaic ministrations of my hypochondriacal governess, and that only her own methods would restore me to health. And, indeed, I always thrived in her care. When the Monestiers’ boundless hospitality ran riot while I was staying with them, I was put to sleep on a cot at the foot of their bed. I listened with wonder to their whispered endearments—how much I love you, my life, my treasure—the first intimations ever offered me that violence between men and women could be avoided, that love could endure even what seemed an infinity of thirty years. Seeing the circumstances of my own parents’ marriage, the Monestiers brought me far more than joy and physical health. They were the only reassurance, throughout my childhood, that a man and a woman could love each other serenely throughout a lifetime.
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