Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, which went on the radio every Saturday at eight o’clock, consisted of amateur performers whose opportunities to present their talents to the public were determined by the revolutions of an enormous wheel of fortune set in a New York radio station. The amateurs, hundreds of them—accompanied by trained dogs or ventriloquist parakeets, equipped with xylophones or electric guitars—sat in an audience hall holding numbered lottery tickets. The rotations of the wheel, which shuffled duplicates of their tickets at great speed, dictated the selection of contestants and their chances to make their marks upon the world. My grandfather paced the living room for a good half an hour before the program, in expectation. Then he sat down in his chair a few minutes before the show in order to be able to shout in unison with the announcer, at eight o’clock sharp, the leitmotif of the program: “Lady Luck, there she goes! Where she stops nobody knows!” He shouted it hoarsely, with a desperate, flailing motion of his arms, as if he were briefly greeting an old flame who had been his life’s passion, and the shout always startled me greatly, for it was the only time of the week when he raised his voice above its habitually hollow timbre, when his stooped frame showed any passion or animation.

  The show began. During the following hour, chomping on his toothpick, his eyes half closed with pleasure, Grandfather listened reverently to triplets from Nebraska singing from La Bohème, to drum majorettes performing “Yankee Doodle” with their toes. He sighed with contentment after each number, and as the wheel of fortune spun around to choose the next contestant, he loudly repeated those expressions that seemed to have been his favorites in the English language: “Put eet there, Lady Luck! Where she stops nobody knows!” Major Bowes’s wheel of fortune, I realized during my stay in Rochester, was the closest link the old gambler still had to his beloved, abandoned vice.

  On very rare occasions, and only on an evening when Major Bowes was not on the air, my grandfather might offer me some soliloquy that had to do with his Russian past. Such discourses were often interspersed with phrases spoken in the antiquated French he’d learned in the 1880s at the knee of his governesses, a French as quaint and faded as a lovely glove kept for years in a dusty drawer. One of these musings—it occurred on an evening when he’d caught me looking at the photograph of him as a cadet in St. Petersburg—went somewhat as follows:

  Stare on, chère petite, stare on! You must wonder whether that is really me, the elegant fop, the fripouille you see in this picture…. And don’t you and your mother wish I still looked like that, don’t you wish you’d found some elegant lord prancing for you at the pier when you landed in America last month…. Your mother must think my life is very boring. She’s as ambitious as she’s beautiful—I saw that from the moment she got off that ship a few weeks ago, mon Dieu comme elle me rappelle sa propre mère…. I don’t know what she thinks she’ll get out of America: Success, fame, money, where does it all lead to?? All a big bother, a big bore, all erunda! For me—equality, none of your European nonsense, none of your titles, your belles manières, your heroism, your wars…. This is what I like here—democracy! Relax! Put it there, Major Bowes, everyone an equal chance!

  He picked at his teeth again and spat into the coal grate. And for the rest of my life that double image of my grandfather—the bored young Adonis in the photograph, the inert egalitarian aging before me—led me to look on indolence as the most cardinal of sins.

  In the following years, Mother and Alex shipped me out to sleep on a few other living-room couches, but of all of these makeshift beds the Jacksons’ was by far the worst. While I was in Rochester, Mother and Alex phoned me twice each week from New York. But their most loving words did not soothe the terror of my nights, which mark the beginning of the insomnia that has plagued me much of my life. As soon as I put my head on the pillow, a flood of tears overcame me. Why, why had they sent me away? I’d be like a shadow in the house when I returned to them, I’d eat next to nothing, make not a breath of noise if only they took me back…. Moreover, the cloak of silence with which I muffled all issues concerning my father—my anxiety about his condition and his whereabouts—weighed increasingly on me day by day. There was still no one I could trust with my secret. Oh, if he could only give me a sign, a sign of life. I had promised him, and myself, to be patient, but how long could his secret mission last? Couldn’t there be any respite to it, couldn’t he take two days’ leave in Malta, say, during which he could go to a post office and mail me a letter? He did not know our precise address in the States, but he could reach us through the Dessoffys—they had not budged from their house in the Vichy Zone, Mother had communicated with them since she’d reached New York, Father could get in touch with me at any time through them…in short, the possibility of my father’s survival, over the months, was growing increasingly tenuous and more improbable and was demanding an increasingly arduous act of faith.

  Tatiana, Alex and Francine in 1941, a few months after they arrived in the United States.

  Finally, finally, in the middle of March I was called back to New York. I traveled labeled and tagged, like a package, with the help of the Travelers Aid Society, which specialized in shipping parentless children from one part of the country to another. My mother and Alex stood at the exit of the train at Grand Central Terminal, frantically waving a huge stuffed panda bear in the way of a greeting. I thought I would be joining Mother and Alex at their hotel, but once more that was not to be. Sometime in the late spring they would move into new apartments on Central Park South, they explained, but for the time being all was still “too disorganized” for me to live with them; they were too busy settling into their first American jobs. They had arranged for me to stay in Greenwich Village with their friends Justin and Patricia Greene, who had redecorated an entire room for me to live in and who had also arranged for me to go to a wonderful New York City school. Pat Greene would help me to settle at school, Mother said—she could help me with my homework, do all kinds of things for me that she, Mother, was incapable of doing.

  Although initially disconcerted that I could not be with Mother and Alex, I was intrigued by the notion of finally going to school again and overjoyed by the prospect of a room of my own. Moreover, Justin Greene, a tall, sandy-haired medical doctor and psychiatrist who had been a frequent caller of Mother’s before the war, when he had interned in a Paris hospital, was a familiar and beloved figure. So after a night spent on a folding bed in Mother’s hotel room, it was with a certain anticipation that I accompanied the Greenes downtown to my new home. This time, my mother’s choice could not have been wiser. My memory of the months spent with the Greenes are among the most radiant of my youth. Pat Greene was a soft-spoken twenty-six-year-old girl from Salt Lake City with a heart of gold and a sly sense of humor; Justin, also a merry, endlessly cheerful person, spoke fluent French and was there to help out whenever my barely nascent English or Pat’s rusty high-school French failed us. The Greenes had married the year before and had recently moved into a beautiful little brownstone at 23 West Eleventh Street. And their kindness to me was so great, the aura of happiness and serenity they created so memorable, that a decade later, upon finishing college and finally being able to move into a flat of my own, I was determined to find a lodging on that very same block. Although by that time they had moved uptown and were raising a large family of their own, I spent a blissful two years in a dank one-room cellar flat a few doors down from where I’d lived with the Greenes, reliving my happiness with them every time I passed their former house.

  My room at the Greenes’ was on the second floor of their brownstone and looked out over a quiet garden. They had painted it a ravishing hue of sky blue and refinished an iron bedstead in the same color. The fits of nightly tears that had seized me in Rochester greatly abated. And I soon knew that if I decided to break my silence and talk about my father, the Greenes would be the only persons I could turn to. My anxiety may also have been quelled by the fact that I was now kept busy at an admirable school. Pat Greene
had arranged a scholarship for me at the Spence School on East Ninety-first Street, of which she was a graduate. Every morning, my alarm clock would ring at 7:30, and by ten of eight I would be in the kitchen, putting away whatever breakfast bleary-eyed Pat, still in her night-dress, had thrown together for me—both Greenes were night owls, and had trouble keeping to any punctual early-morning schedule. Justin himself was barely dressed by 8:00 A.M., when it was time to jump into his car and race uptown, trying desperately to make it to Spence by 8:20, when assembly began. Despite the anxiety caused by these hectic mornings, the Greenes and I derived great conspiratorial merriness from our shared mayhem, and I rose every day with the most immense joy, eager to be surrounded with the extraordinary warmth and hospitality that my classmates and teachers had lavished on me from the second I had walked into the school, plunked into the second half of fifth grade.

  In March 1941, I was the first and only refugee to have been admitted to Spence, and I still spoke little English beyond the phrases I’d memorized in Rochester from listening to soap operas—“What will Nancy do? Will she tell Dr. Malone?” But lack of English was no great obstacle, for among New York’s upper classes in 1941 Francophilia reigned triumphant. Over half of the girls in my class—there were only twelve of us in the fifth grade—had French governesses. They enjoyed showing off their knowledge of my language, competed with one another as to whose pronunciation I judged best, and introduced me proudly to their mothers, many of whom were also fluent in French. I was cherished and fought over and became a mascot of sorts—when I went to classmates’ homes after school, their mothers would put little French flags on cupcakes and cookies to let me know where their hearts lay. Moreover, having been tutored at home all of my life, I found great fascination in learning about my classmates’ often colorful family lives. There was Cornelia, whose uncle, the actor Monty Wool-ley, upon staging a two-ring wedding ceremony with his boyfriend, was said to have trained his poodle to walk on his hind legs to serve as ring bearer. There was Audrey, daughter of a Greek-American businessman, a forthright, sunny girl with a dazzling smile who gave me the nickname I was to retain throughout my seven years at Spence, “Nikki”—she had initially used a Greek version of my name, “Francinikki,” as a token of her affection. There was Julia, a jovial sort with a mop of straight blond hair and a wanton, somewhat hysterical laugh who came from a terribly staid WASP family and particularly astonished me by telling me that she had had sex with her older brother. “It’s terrific,” she’d comment about the episodes with one of her wild laughs, which were accompanied by a slightly vulgar motion of her palm across her face, as if she were wiping spittle from her mouth. The tale of incest might not have been imagined: Beginning with late adolescence, Julia had her share of nervous breakdowns.

  Pat Greene, who was studying at the Art Students League, had hired a huge, slow-moving Alsatian woman, a Madame Gaspamont, to pick me up at school every day. And I must have been enjoying the athletic activities imposed on me at Spence, for I found a great source of fun in running away from Madame as fast as I could, hiding behind buildings and then pouncing on the astonished, anxious woman with a resounding yowl. Pat, who remembers me as “a gay, very stalwart child who never complained and hid her inner feelings to a worrisome degree,” would get home shortly after I did and help me with my brief fifth-grade homework. In the later afternoon, we played dominoes or cards or a simplistic game Pat had invented for me, which I particularly cherished: Sitting at the living-room window that looked out on West Eleventh Street, we piled up a heap of matches on a tray. I got a match for every man we saw walk by, Pat got a match for each of the women who passed by—and guess who won?

  And then there were the evenings, which were particularly glamorous when the Greenes entertained, which was with some frequency. It was the first time, I believe, that I was asked to attend adult dinner parties and sit at table. There was soft candlelight in the pale-green dining room overlooking the back garden, Pat’s fine family silver and china, delicious food, and gracious, animated talk. And the Greenes’ calm, fruitful lives, on the street I believed to be the finest in New York, offered me a model, for many years to come, of life-as-it-should-be.

  As for Mother and Alex, how were they faring in our first months of exile? They came to dinner every few weeks at the Greenes’ or took me out to tea, and during these reunions my mother’s gaze rested lovingly, worriedly on me—she seems to have sensed how difficult it would be for her to have me at home. And after all, without me she and Alex were prospering.

  THIRTEEN

  The Authentic Journal of Society, Fashion, and the Ceremonial Side of Life

  It had been far easier for Mother than for Alex to land a job in the United States. Contacts, how their lives thrived on contacts! Three days after arriving in New York, they met a prominent society woman named Helen Hoguet, the wife of a New York doctor; she worked on commission for Henri Bendel, persuading her acquaintances to buy their clothes there. An ardent Francophile, Helen had immediately taken up Tatiana’s cause and arranged for her to design hats at Bendel for seventy-five dollars a week. As attested by Cole Porter’s “You’re the top…you’re a Bendel bonnet,” that store seemed to have been noted for its headgear. Tatiana’s contract with Bendel stipulated that her nom de chapeau would be “Countess du Plessix”—in the tide of pro-European sentiment that swept New York during World War II, celebrities of the beauty and fashion world frequently took on exotic titles to sell their wares. Think of “Countess” Mara shirts and ties, “Countess” Alexandra de Markoff’s and “Princess” Helena Rubinstein’s cosmetics. So Mother was grateful to be making three hundred dollars a month, though even with the addition of the two hundred Simon Liberman was giving Alex each month, the salary barely sufficed for the young couple’s needs.

  The reestablishment of Alex’s career in magazine publishing was to be considerably more arduous. He knew that he had to get a job to bring Tatiana the comfort and luxury essential to her happiness. However, he also had to make peace with his parents and accustom them to the idea that he was not going to be a full-time artist. Simon and Henriette had imagined that upon moving to New York their son would continue to be an artiste peintre, the vocation they had been urging him to follow since his schooldays and which he had pursued since the mid-1930s, when he’d left his job at Vu. If it seems strange that the Libermans were so eager for their only son to devote himself to art, a calling that high-bourgeois parents in other cultures tend to disapprove of, it should be remembered that a cult of the artistic vocation is integral to the Russian tradition, particularly in the intelligentsia. Henriette, as we’ve seen, had encouraged her beloved son to be a painter since he’d been a small child. Over the years, she’d totally persuaded Simon that it was their son’s true calling, and the stipend Simon started giving Alex upon his arrival in New York was clearly intended to encourage him in his painting career. Alex, however, found this sum very modest in the light of all the luxuries Liberman père lavished on himself and his wife: the Fifth Avenue penthouse, Henriette’s furs and jewelry. Notwithstanding the fact that his father had recently lost quite a bit of money through unwise investment, might the paltriness of his two-hundred-dollar allowance have also been part of his parents’ strategy to estrange him from Tatiana? He soon realized that at some time in the near future he had to cease depending on them.

  So in order to pacify his parents, for the first weeks of his stay in New York Alex hid his true intentions. He bought himself an easel and a batch of oil paints and set them up in his tiny studio flat on Central Park South, which had a beautiful view of the park. And he shrewdly invited his father to pose for his portrait, hoping to reassure Simon about the fervor of his calling as an artist. But as he painted his father—I lived for years with this life-size, slickly realistic portrait—all kinds of emotions and schemes were going on in Alex’s mind: Of course he couldn’t meet his needs through painting; of course Tatiana’s penchants for comfort and luxury, as well as his
own, which were quite as great as hers, were the first priorities he had to attend to.

  So on the sly, Alex started looking for his first American job. Irene Lidova had given him a letter of introduction to Alexei Brodovich, the revered art director of Harper’s Bazaar. A former cavalry officer in the White Russian Army, Brodovich’s revolutionary views of design had been inspired by the Russian Constructivist avant-garde artists who immigrated to Paris after 1918. He was also an inspired teacher. He had become famous for hiring Europe’s and America’s most gifted photographers and giving them free rein in Harper’s Bazaar, the typography and layouts of which were renowned for their modernism and elegance. Brodovich asked Alex to draft some sample pages for women’s shoe designs. Alex complied, bringing in some layouts—juxtapositions of shoes and women’s faces that he was the first to describe, in later years, as perfectly awful. Understandably, Brodovich rejected Alex’s work, and the men never communicated again, nodding coolly to each other at a distance the few times they met. (Brodovich was a frugal, reclusive scholar, totally dedicated to his art and to his teaching career, who seldom ventured into the café society milieus through which Alex built his reputation.)