Alex Liberman shortly after arriving in the United States, 1941.
Looking at picture albums of that first American summer, two photos stand out. In one, my mother is pointing, laughing, to a barbecue pit on which a piece of meat is cooking. And this ushers in a recollection that is all the more charged because it is beset with tastes and smells as well as sounds: Making one of her frequent lewd puns, my mother is saying, “Barbe-au-cu,” “bearded ass,” and the phrase is accompanied by the pungent smell of charcoal-grilled steak. “I like my steak au bleu,” I also hear her saying, by which she meant ultrarare: Barbecued steak was the first Yankee culinary custom she adopted, so it became a standard Saturday-night treat at Sands Point. And when I recall that summer, the taste of my mother’s “barbe-au-cu”—my first American madeleine—comes poignantly back to me: smoking-hot coal-black grit of the meat’s surface on my tongue, followed quickly by the cool, dank, near rawness of the meat inside, pursued in turn by the violent sting of Gulden’s dry mustard, mixed into a paste with a bit of water, a condiment which for decades accompanied any beef that Mother and Alex ever ate.
Another shot that particularly strikes me: As Lucien Vogel bends deeply over his Leica, and his wife Cosette holds her pendulum over a dish of food, and a dozen exiles mill about them, glasses in hand, talking and laughing, I sit on the edge of a chaise longue, quite away from the rest of the crowd, away and very separate. There is a book on my lap, as usual, but in this photo I’m not even reading it. My arms rest on my knees, my shoulders are hunched, my eyes are cast down to the ground. I’m looking, in fact, ever so isolated, even in despair—as I might well have been, for it was in that month of August 1941, more than one year after the fact, that I finally learned about my father’s death.
Soon after we had moved into the Sands Point house, my mother seemed to have been seized by one of her sudden panics concerning me—“Mon Dieu!” so this panic attack seems to have gone, “that child does not yet know about her father’s death!” I suspect this concern came to her at that particular moment because it was the first time since we’d stepped off the boat that she and I were spending time together round the clock. There followed a confused series of actions, the substance of which varies a bit from witness to witness, that brought my childhood innocence to an end. For the sake of chronology, I’ll begin with Pat Greene’s.
“As soon as she got to Sands Point, Tatiana realized that someone had to tell you the truth,” Pat Greene, now a very spry ninety, said to me in 2003. She was absolutely incapable of telling you about your father’s death herself, so she started looking right and left for people who might tell you instead. The way she went about it was rather disorganized and hysterical, she’d grab Beatrice Leval and say, “Would you tell her, please?” and Beatrice, terrified, would demur, and then she’d say, “I’ll ask Gitta, where’s Gitta?” Well, Gitta wasn’t there that first week in Long Island, so she asked me to talk to you. I didn’t want to either. But Justin, all along, had been appalled that notwithstanding his prodding Tatiana hadn’t told you anything.
Tatiana and Francine in August 1941 at the summer cottage in Sands Point, Long Island.
He’d begun to realize that she was so terrified she would never do it herself…. His instinct as a psychiatrist was that it would be better if a woman spoke to you, so then he persuaded me to tell you.
Pat offered me these recollections as we sat in her living room in Houston, where she had recently moved to live near the oldest of her four sons.
I remember breaking the news to you on the beach, soon after we’d come out of the water. It was a hot sunny day, we’d taken a swim together, and as we came out of the water I said something like, “I’m so, so sorry that you lost your father in this terrible war.” And you know what? You pretended not to have heard. You didn’t say a word, you just went back towards your mother and her friends, she was having one of her beach parties, and before I knew it you were absorbed in her crowd. Then that evening, Tatiana turned to me and asked me, “Did you tell her?” And I said, “Yes, but it didn’t register.” And she grew very annoyed, she said, “Why didn’t Justin report that to me?” And then she put her head into her hands and said, “I can’t do it myself, I just can’t.” Gitta was arriving the following day, so I guess she decided to wait for Gitta, for that’s the last I heard of it until the storm was over.
Then there’s Gitta’s version. Upon arriving from Europe earlier that summer, Gitta had been appalled to learn that I had not yet been told the truth about my father, which she had heard the previous summer at Villandry. “I told Tatiana repeatedly, ‘You can’t do this, you must tell her,’ but she kept saying ‘I can’t, I can’t hurt her that way.’ ‘But you’re hurting her far more this way,’ I told her, ‘somewhere inside she knows he’s dead, but she’s fighting to keep him alive.’”
Speaking to me in 2003 in London, Gitta Sereny, O.B.E., now in her early eighties and one of Europe’s most distinguished journalists, told me that when she came to stay with us at Sands Point in the second week of August, Mother said to her, “Could you do it? Please tell her.” Gitta kept reiterating that this was Tatiana’s job, but one morning, after an hour or so of heated argument, she reluctantly agreed to do it that evening. “I don’t want to be here when it happens,” Mother said. So she called the Levals and arranged for her and Alex to have dinner and spend the night at their summer home, ten minutes away.
Alone with me, soon after supper, Gitta told me about my father’s death. “I tried to do it as gently as possible, but I didn’t hedge,” she recalls today. My reaction, as Gitta tells it, was far less violent than my mother had feared. “It was as if deep down you knew all about it, but didn’t want to admit it,” she told me. “Perhaps it was even a relief for you to hear it…you cried, but not uncontrollably. I put you to bed. You went to sleep by eleven, after a final bout of crying. I sat up in a chair next to your bed for a while to be sure that you’d be all right, but to my amazement you slept very deeply, peacefully.” As Gitta remembers it, Tatiana and Alex reappeared shortly after 8:00 A.M. the following morning. I jumped out of my chair and flew into my mother’s arms, according to Gitta, and Tatiana held me and cried, sobbing, “Ma chérie, ma chérie,” and we went off by ourselves for a while while Alex sat down and had coffee with Gitta. “Alors, ça va?” he asked Gitta. “Ça n’a pas été trop terrible?”
My own memory adheres quite closely to the two women’s accounts. I recollect some confrontation with Pat Greene shortly after we had come out of the water on a bright, sunny summer day—her phrase of condolence, and the sun sparkling on the water as she spoke it, and the grit of coarse sand under my feet, and the deep, rich green of the pines overhead, and my retreat into sullen silence. And I recall Gitta, a few evenings later—I know it was after dark—giving me the same information, but more directly, bluntly; and I recollect as if it had occurred yesterday the storm of tears that overcame me and that also overwhelmed Mother as she ran to me the following morning and wrapped me in her arms. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I remember sobbing, repeating the word “you,” “why didn’t you, you, you tell me?” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t know how,” she wept. We sobbed like equals that morning, like the two lost children we both were. The terrifying thing is that from then on Mother was seldom able to recapture my trust. And we spent the rest of our lives—she lived on for another half century—not ever having any kind of a true emotional encounter again. We would continue to skirt each other, rather, like two wary lionesses, occasionally pawing or nuzzling each other in token of affection but rigorously avoiding any confrontation that would even begin to approach in intensity the one we had shared that summer day in Long Island.
Seeing how completely he had taken over our lives by then, Alex’s total absence from these events of August 1941 may be striking; but there’s no way he could have played a role in them, seeing that they had to do with the death of a man he hated but barely knew. And I imagine him staying carefully on
the sidelines, urging Mother to find some messenger to do the dirty work for her. For from the moment his fate was permanently linked to ours, one of Alex’s central goals in life was to protect Mother from any harsh crises that came our way, to shelter her from reality as assiduously as he satisfied her most outlandish whims. From that day on, any unpleasant task that had to do with me—be it caring for my illnesses, scolding me for poor grades, expressing criticism of an indecorous boyfriend, or censoring the use of lipstick—was taken on exclusively by Alex. Tatiana was his idol, the princess in the ivory tower who must at all costs be protected from all human concerns or pain, and this strategy of protection, which I happily participated in, would be a principal dynamic of our family life for the following half century.
However, I should also give Alex’s secondhand version of the August 1941 events. He was forced to confront them in the years following my mother’s death, when one of his recent biographers, Dodie Kazanjian, reported to him at length on her own conversations with Gitta Sereny. When confronted with Gitta’s version of the Sands Point episode, Alex vigorously denied that Gitta had ever been delegated to act as the news bearer of my father’s death. My mother wanted to eventually do it herself, he said, in her own due time. (One wonders how many years she might have allowed me to retain my illusions.) And both she and Alex were “surprised and quite annoyed,” in Alex’s words, to learn that Gitta had taken the task upon herself.
What is unfortunate is that for many decades my diplomatic need for constantly accommodating Mother and Alex, my dread of alienating their love in any way, led me blindly to accept their version. I blamed Gitta Sereny for being a meddler and interloper in this situation and dealt most unfairly with her in my first, fictional rendering of the events. Only recently have I begun to understand that I owe her immense gratitude for sharing news with me that Mother and Alex might have broken to me with far less diplomacy or psychological grace. I might have been a considerably more confused, wounded woman without Gitta Sereny’s help. And I have tried to apologize to her for any kind of pain I might have caused her by a rendering that was clearly molded by Mother’s and Alex’s cowardice and evolved during those years when I still remained, emotionally, their slave.
FOURTEEN
In the East Seventies
In the autumn of 1941, as I was beginning sixth grade, we had to leave Central Park South, where we’d had only a six-month lease. I suspect Mother and Alex wanted to live at closer quarters to each other, so we moved on to a floor-through in a brownstone on Seventy-third Street, between Lexington and Park. Here Mother and I had a little three-room flat on the front of the building. Alex’s one-room studio, which had a separate entrance but was on the same landing, looked out on the back garden.
Before we moved into the new flat, I had to go into exile once more. The apartments have to be totally repainted! It will take us at least a month and a half! I was sent to lodge, this time, with a couple I barely knew named Eugene and Marguerite Leytess, who lived in the east eighties. Eugene was a short, genial, bespectacled Russian Jew who had made good money in the copper trade. His wife was a stout, highly painted Romanian with a short temper and frequent fits of melancholy. She had a son from an earlier marriage, Jerome, who was a year or so older than I and attended the Lycée Français. Theirs was a two-bedroom flat, and for the second time in six months I was forced to sleep on a living-room couch. At 10:00 P.M., when everyone had retired for the night, I made up my bed with sheets and blankets kept in the coat closet, and at 7:15 A.M., as I was getting ready to go to Spence, I unmade it and stored the sheets away again. The Leytesses’ attitude toward me was one of benign tolerance. Jerome and I were at an age when boys and girls are very shy toward the opposite gender, and we barely addressed a word to each other during the months I lived with his parents. I spent most of my time hovering on a little chair behind a Chinese screen in the living room, attempting to read and do my homework without disturbing my hosts, and was called in, rather coolly, when meals were ready. I was treated with greater deference than the man/insect in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” but with not much greater warmth. It was a period when most members of the émigré community traded favors with one another: The Leytesses seemed to sense that Mother and Alex were about to become an important couple on the New York scene and were getting insurance on the glamorous pair’s goodwill by inviting me to stay.
As I went to bed on the Leytesses’ living-room couch, the nightly fits of tears that had beset me in Rochester resumed. Now that I was in full knowledge of his death, I cried for my father, of course, my emotions all the rawer because they had to be nursed in isolation, away from all close friends and loved ones. But I also cried for reasons that I didn’t then begin to understand: The week my birthday came around—I turned eleven that September—I woke several times in fits of tears that verged on hysteria, filled with the anxiety that I was growing very old. “I’m decaying with time,” my reasoning seems to have gone. “I’m eleven now. I’m growing so old that I can die any time.” At times of self-reflection—as close as an eleven-year-old can get to self-reflection—I asked myself whether I was afraid of dying or actually contemplating an act of self-destruction. It’s only decades later, upon rereading Sigmund Freud’s epochal essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” that I realized the link between my unresolved mourning for my father and my obsessions with death. During those months at the Leytesses’, my only way to allay my depressions was to harbor illusions about my father’s survival. As soon as I went to bed, I pressed to my ear a little wireless radio that Simon Liberman had given me, and I listened to news of the war. Perhaps Gitta Sereny and Pat Greene and Mother had all been wrong; perhaps my father’s mission was so secret that he wouldn’t be allowed to write anyone for years, in the fall of 1941 the Allies were fighting it out in many regions of North Africa—my father was a specialist in that area, he might still be among them…. So I continued secretly to dream and lie.
My exile at the Leytesses’ finally came to an end. I moved into Mother’s freshly painted flat at 125 East Seventy-third Street. What a joy, when I tiptoed out of my room at 8:00 A.M. to take myself to Spence, to see Mother asleep in the room next to mine! She would be snoring lightly, her baby pillow nested on top of her blond hair, her long, red-nailed fingers resting on top of the coverlet. I had no need to muffle my footsteps, for she took very strong sleeping pills and would not wake until her alarm clock rang at 9:00 A.M. Upon the dot of that hour, Alex, who had set his clock to quarter of, would rush to her side with her little breakfast tray; this consisted of a pint-size cup of very strong instant Nescafé lightly dosed with milk—she would always spurn the freshly brewed kind—and a “biscotte” with jam, which she barely touched. (This breakfast ritual continued, unchanged, for half a century.) In part for reasons of frail health—his ulcers, her migraines—Alex and Mother were finicky about getting every second of sleep they could have after their evenings on the town. They still went out five nights out of six—“It is absolutely essential to our careers, darling”—and grew cross if their morning schedules, which were geared to dressing at top speed and getting to their offices by ten, were in the least bit disturbed. So my principal way of communicating with my sleeping mother was to stand in front of her bed and stare at her with the same kind of wordless reverence that had swept over me when I was a much smaller girl in Paris and had crouched in her mirrored bathroom as she sat at her vanity, occasionally blowing me cool, distant kisses.
I was often reprimanded for being late to school, but I found it hard, having just turned eleven, to pull myself together in the morning. For one thing, I stayed up late all the nights Mother and Alex were out for dinner. I had a wonderful time reading, listening to music, and practicing my ballet steps by the hour to Karl Maria von Weber’s “The Specter of the Rose”—piano and ballet lessons were de rigueur in my family, whatever our penury. I was very proud of being the only girl in my class allowed to stay home by herself at night, and I didn’t go to bed unt
il I heard Alex and Mother entering the front door, when I slid quickly into bed, pretending to have been asleep for hours. I was equally proud of being the only one among my friends whose mother had a full-time job, and I looked on Alex and Mother’s hectic social schedule as another part of their hardworking lives. But since I’d seldom had much to eat since noon the day before—needless to say, my guardians’ schedule did not include any breakfast ritual for me—I woke up in a state of great exhaustion each morning and took a taxi to school, thus using up all my allowance by midweek.
It was during those months at Seventy-third Street that the embarrassing issue of nourishment first came up in our fledgling family. Sally had taken the winter off to be with her aging sister in the Midwest. Mother had hired a part-time housekeeper named Magda, a cheerful red-haired Romanian in her middle years who came at noon and left at five, leaving dinner for me on the stove. But I had no inclination to heat up a meal and sit down to it all by myself, preferring to nibble on cheese and crackers or open cans of my favorite food, canned fruit. As for the dinner left for me on the stove, I threw part of it away so as to pretend I’d eaten some of it and left the rest in the icebox for Magda to take home. Mother and Alex, to whom the kitchen was unknown territory, were oblivious to my ruse, and Magda, if she noticed, didn’t say anything. Thus it was that at the age of eleven and a half, I came down with a severe case of anemia and malnutrition.
By February 1942, I was feeling increasingly listless in the mornings. But I had an iron will and a fairly manic reserve of nervous energy and no other premonitions of ill health, until the day I began fainting in school. The first time was in math class, when I went to the blackboard to do a five-figure addition. Everything before me suddenly started spinning around before turning totally dark, and I came to in the school nurse’s office, smelling lavender-scented salts. “Shouldn’t you go home?” Nurse asked. “Is there anything wrong with your health?” “Oh, I’m just fine, I’ll go right back to class. I’m just growing very fast,” I said cheerfully. “Yes,” she agreed, “it may just be growing pains.” “It’s just growing pains,” I parroted gleefully to my classmates. “I’m growing so fast.”
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