Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Life was more cheerful on those rare occasions when Mother and Alex stayed home for dinner—well, not exactly stayed home, they hated staying home; it was more cheerful on those rare nights when they were not engaged and took me out to dinner. That was a cause for great celebration, for we always went to the Automat, the treasured Automat on Fifty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, which was perhaps my favorite place in New York along with the Greenes’ house. Hurray, Mother and Alex are all mine tonight! Before we left home, Alex would ready the quarters and nickels needed to acquire the goodies of our choice and give each of us a handful of coins. We’d leave our bleached little flats at 230 Central Park South and walk arm in arm down Seventh Avenue, acting out our rarely played script of Loving Little Family. Still remembering the hunger we’d experienced a few months before, we always chose a table splunk in the middle of the room, better to examine that sumptuous wall of living food—the iceberg-and-Jell-O salads glimmering in their glass cages, the dozens of cream of broccoli soups and apple cobblers, the coquettish chicken potpies with little emerald peas twinkling behind the doors of their vitrines. Sharp clink of our coins going into the slots, soft whirr of the little glass doors as they magically opened to yield their treasures. I have no memory of what we ever chose as our main course. I only recall beginnings and endings: chicken noodle soups, apple and cherry pies, and particularly the hunks of coconut cakes with acres of gooey white icing, which I carefully consumed before the cake itself, pleading, after I’d finished the icing, that I was full. I remember, too, the few friends who occasionally joined us at the Automat, such as Yvonne Alberti, a spinsterish lady, cousin of Irena Wiley and therefore cherished by Mother. She had late in life married a mustached Spanish equestrian named Manolo, who could even make a horse walk up long flights of steps and was said to be a bit of a sponger. But mostly it was just the three of us at the Automat, the tenderly smiling Us. “Boubous,” my mother would say to Alex, “look how she’s eating!” And my guardians would exchange their glances of new world, bright world happiness, recording the pride and pleasure and amusement they took in the happily growing child.

  Only a few weeks after I’d returned from the Greenes’ and had begun to spend my days moping at home, with nothing much to look forward to beyond another installment of Scarlett O’Hara, Gitta Sereny, the eighteen-year-old Hungarian girl who had been with us at Villandry, arrived dramatically from Europe—someone always seemed to come to Mother’s rescue. Mother eagerly invited her to stay with us for as long as she wished in exchange for helping Sally, who did all the cooking and cleaning, to take care of me. For the next months, Gitta, who had recently defied fascist border police to walk across the Pyrenees into Spain and had hitchhiked much of the way to Lisbon, could do no wrong in my mother’s eyes. (“She is a heroine!”) Gitta at eighteen was a robust, awesomely precocious brunette with dark hair, blazing eyes, and a very ringing laugh that exhibited her uneven but sparklingly white teeth. Her manner was aggressively forthright; she was quadrilingual and had a distinct interest in playing an active role in other people’s lives. She also had a special sense of mission about children—about rescuing them, counseling them, figuring them out: Decades later, upon becoming a celebrated journalist, she would do groundbreaking research on the fate of children in Nazi concentration camps. And in June 1941 it somehow dawned on her that I sorely needed her help. I had liked her at Villandry, and as she began to share my room at Central Park South I started looking on her as an older sister—very powerful and wise and a potential dispenser of that forbidden knowledge that precocious ten-year-olds are eager to acquire or at least be exposed to. “Too bad I’m not married when I smell so good!” she would say to me as she lay in her bubble bath, eyeing me carefully to see how much I knew about the basics of life.

  So during those summer weeks, Gitta and I went to the planetarium and the Frick Museum and the Bronx Zoo and the movies. On hot days, we took the train to Jones Beach, and she helped me to perfect the swimming strokes I had learned with Alex the previous summer. When we stayed home in the evenings—Mother and Alex went out more often than ever after Gitta’s arrival—we played gin rummy, and I read aloud to her from Gone with the Wind to improve my pronunciation, or else we prepared for one of Mother’s wonderful parties.

  For by the time I came back to live with Mother in June 1941, she had already started holding her noted soirees. As much as she loathed crowds in public places, pleading that they caused her to suffer panic attacks, like most Russians she dreaded, above all else, to be alone. And she simply did not understand the meaning of the phrase “too many people,” as long as they were all under her roof. At her own parties, no crowd was ever too vast, no table ever too full. “La Formule,” as she referred to her recipe for a successful social gathering, was to invite as many people as possible for 8:30 or 9:00 P.M., so as to make sure that they had already had dinner and wouldn’t expect more than a drink and a cheese plate, then simply let them loose upon one another. “Of course, of course,” her voice would trill for a few days before each event, “bring all the friends you want.” Neither Alex nor Mother touched a drop of liquor—his ulcer diet forbade it, and at that time Mother was indifferent to it. But even in those first American months of very straitened finances—Alex’s letter to his father attests to our penury, and our prodigal hospitality could not have escaped his parents’ attention—champagne and Scotch flowed freely on those evenings, Gitta and I were ordered to get into our best clothes in order to open the door, and Sally had been retained after-hours to keep rinsing the glasses.

  In 1941 and 1942, our first year in the United States, Mother’s party list inevitably included the diaphanous blond beauty Claude Alphand, whose husband, Hervé, would later serve as France’s ambassador to Washington. A great patriot and an ardent proselytizer for the Free French, Mme Alphand brought her guitar to all gatherings, and one particular song in her repertoire inevitably brought tears to the eyes of homesick émigré guests: “Je tire ma révérence, et m’en vais au hasard, sur les routes de France, de France et de Navarre.” Alternating with her as provider of musical entertainment was a hugely tall, wheezing Franco-Russian exile named Georges de Svirsky, “Zizi” for short. A close friend of Uncle Sasha who made a vague living as an interior decorator, he had met Mother in Paris just after she’d arrived from Russia. Like many Russians who dabble in music, he played the piano at many soirees in exchange for booze and meals. He was particularly fascinating to me because he had lived for two decades, and was to continue to do so for several more, with two women at once. They were sisters—a wispy, simpering blonde named Mout and a sharp-witted, Cupid-mouthed brunette named Follette—and for years this intriguing triad made other émigré New Yorkers’ living arrangements seem morbidly dull. “But it’s the happiest family I know of,” Mother exclaimed when anyone questioned her about Zizi’s ménage à trois. “The two girls take turns with him, and everyone is absolutely satisfied!”

  Zizi seemed to have only three numbers in his piano repertoire, and he played all of them in his own highly idiosyncratic arrangements: Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” the march from Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, and the coronation scene from Boris Godunov. He played very stooped over, breathing heavily, his eyes twelve inches from the keys. And even as a ten-year-old I had trouble concentrating on the music because Zizi’s loud, gruff wheezing interrupted it dreadfully, while his long, unkempt gray hair often obscured the keys, causing him to strike many wrong notes. Yet Mother sat rapt through his performances, loyally maintaining that her friend’s arrangements of those three pieces were unequaled in power and beauty.

  There were many other Russians in attendance. In 1941, our closest friend in the Russian émigré community was Countess Elena Shuvalov, whose hard-drinking, chronically unemployed husband, Peter, was a direct descendant of the Shuvalovs who for centuries had served the czars as high-ranking government officials. “Aunt” Elena was a sharp-featured woman with
keen blue eyes and blond hair in a stark bun; she supported her family by running Saks Fifth Avenue’s ready-to-wear hat salon, and in the next years her son, Andrew (“Andriusha”), two years younger than I, would be a close friend. There was also Sasha de Manziarly, a half-Russian, half-French diplomat who had lost a leg in World War I, was currently serving at Free French headquarters in New York, and, like Claude Alphand, was a gifted guitarist, singer, and seducer. And there was the half-Russian, half-German Countess Ada Mohl, a stately, alabaster-skinned beauty whose blond hair was done into a hugely tall beehive and who had special cachet in our eyes because she was said to be the mistress of Anthony Eden, whom my mother and I considered to be the world’s handsomest man.

  It was among such people, at moments of maximum mayhem—Sasha de Manziarly or Claude Alphand belting out their songs among a group of fellow exiles who sat pell-mell on the floor of our tiny living room or huddled by the dozen on the couch—that Mother was most truly in her element. Unsure as she was of her talents or even of her powers of seduction, she knew for certain that no one could gather other human beings more gaily, skillfully, and economically than she. As she sat in a corner of the room, usually on a high upholstered stool so as to show off her long, beautiful legs and better survey her gathering, the satisfaction of success glowed in her eyes. And the happy commotion she instinctively brought to our frugal little flat—the noise, the music, the smoke, the clinking glasses, the animated talk and laughter—created an aura of Homeric hospitality that I long for to this day.

  Tatiana and Salvador Dalí out on the town in the late 1940s.

  It must be emphasized that entertaining, to my mother, was far more than a mere amusement. It was a civic duty of sorts born out of the venerable, parareligious Russian tradition of communality—however little I have, the gods will punish me if I do not share my roof, my food with others. This proclivity to largesse seems to have been traditional in Russia for centuries. “Numbers of families, lately prosperous and wealthy, are yearly reduced to beggary by hospitality as ruinous and meaningless as that of Timon of Athens in his unregenerate days,” the author E. B. Lanin, author of the wonderful book Russian Characteristics, wrote in 1892. “Every Russian, whatever his social position, his means, or his needs…deems it a sacred duty to entertain his friends and relations…. [M]any spend their last borrowed coin upon these ruinous merry-makings…filling whole streets with impatient creditors.”

  But Mother’s innate impulse toward lavish hospitality and her keen interest in others were certainly not traits Alex shared. He looked on entertaining exclusively as an important career move. His guest list came solely from two groups: those members of the Condé Nast staff who could assist his career, and those acquaintances made since his arrival in the United States who might eventually be of aid in the rescue of his often disastrous finances. Prominent among Alex’s favorites was a genial, very wealthy Franco-American couple named Beatrice and Fernand Leval, whom he and Mother met at a dinner party a few weeks after their arrival in New York. Beatrice was a pert, fine-boned woman from a prominent Jewish family who had been schooled in France, had taken her college degree in art history, and had already started a beautiful collection of French Impressionist paintings. Fernand, half Swiss and half French, a tall, hulking man with red hair and shy, kind eyes, headed the Dreyfus Frères office in New York. Both Levals, upon first impression, had thoroughly disliked Tatiana and Alex, finding them intolerably pushy. (In the next decades, this opinion was to be shared by many prominent members of New York society, including the William Paleys, whose opprobrium would much vex Alex.)

  But a few weeks after their first meeting in February 1941, Tatiana and Beatrice had tea alone. This time, Beatrice was totally charmed by Mother’s generosity, culture, and what she called “her wonderfully uninhibited Russian stream of consciousness.” Since then, the four had grown to be close friends, the Levals had become steadies at all of the Libermans’ gatherings, and for the next two decades Fernand was often called on to loan Alex money when our family finances skirted yet another catastrophe. Yet however useful guests such as the Levals proved to be, I don’t recall Alex having a good time at his own parties. He simply hovered dutifully in the background with his charming, inscrutable smile, making sure that guests were properly introduced and had their glasses filled, remaining affable yet totally aloof.

  I return to the summer of 1941.

  At the end of July, it was time to take our summer vacation, on Long Island, where Mother, Alex, and the Vogels had rented a cottage together for the month of August; Gitta was to join us later in the month. Our first summer home in the United States was at Sands Point, a few miles from Port Washington, and cost $550 for the month—$275 for each of the couples. A plain white cottage with green trimming, surrounded by a large lawn, it had the advantage of being a few hundred yards from the beach and only a few miles away from the expansive estate Beatrice and Fernand Leval had rented for the summer. It must have had six small bedrooms: the Vogels occupied one; Gitta and I another; some weekend guests, usually Pat and Justin Greene, the third; Sally the fourth; and due to Mother’s sense of propriety, she and Alex occupied the other two rooms, for until their official marriage in November 1942 they always slept in separate rooms.

  During our weekends on Long Island, Mother created outdoor versions of the soirees she’d had at Central Park South. When I look at photographs of our Sands Point house, I see dozens of French and Russian refugees and a smattering of Francophile Americans—the Levals, the Greenes—sitting about a sunny lawn, glasses in hand, huddled in conversation, I suspect, about the course of the war. I see radiantly affable, mustached Peter Hoguet, our first American doctor, who had lost an arm in a car accident and whose wife had arranged for Mother’s job at Bendel. I inevitably see Simon and Henriette, whose own summer house was a half hour away and who had now become more or less resigned to Alex’s job at Condé Nast and to the permanence of Mother in Alex’s life: Simon sits lordly and pensive in a lawn chair, Henriette reclines kittenishly on the grass, her thighs as provocatively bared as those of a teenager on the make. Also in evidence is one of Henriette’s many former lovers, tall, imposing Lucien Vogel, now balding, dandyish, a pipe inevitably clenched in his mouth, and his big, noisy wife, Cosette, who always became the center of attention at mealtimes because of her predilection for the science of pendulums. All food, she believed, had to pass the pendulum test before it could be safely consumed. As tall and majestic as her husband, with graying blond hair in a tight bun, yellowish teeth, and a huge masculine laugh, she stood over the dish of food to be tested, holding a long metal chain at the end of which a small globe was attached. If the pendulum swung clockwise, the food was fit to eat. If it swung counterclockwise, she advised that it be thrown out. No one dared contradict her, for she had been, for decades, one of her country’s most prominent culinary authorities—her series of books, Les Recettes de Cosette, had more or less the same standing in France as Julia Child’s do on these shores.

  Also frequently seen in these summer photos are Eugene (“Jika” ) Jackson, my mother’s half brother. So fervent was Mother’s sense of family that notwithstanding her father’s decades of negligence, she had instantly taken his entire American clan under her wing. She particularly adored her stepmother, Zina, whom she declared to be “a true saint,” and had embarked on the difficult mission of making Jika’s manners “more European” and eventually getting him into a fine college. Whom else do I see among the guests spread out on the lawn, lounging in chaise longues, in that green uncertain void that was the second summer of the war? Spectacled, chain-smoking Jacques Lebeau, a French brain surgeon who had been Justin Greene’s closest friend during their student days in Paris and who a few months later would recross the Atlantic to join de Gaulle’s headquarters in London; Marcel Vertès and René Bouché, fashion artists who would have great vogue into the 1950s. There’s a curious sense of suspension about this crowd, of both anxiety and expectation: In August 1941
, who knew when the war in Europe would end? Who could even be sure that the Allies would prevail? How many of these friends spread out on a Long Island lawn knew whether they could ever in their lifetimes return to France?