Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  But the following week I fainted again during morning study period in the library. This time, the concerned nurse was finishing a phone call to Mother at Bendel just as I came to. “Your mother didn’t understand the word ‘faint,’” she reported, perplexed by Mother’s very minimal grasp of the English language. “Is there anyone else I can call?” Immensely relieved that Mother hadn’t gotten the gist of it—Alex and I were still perfecting our strategy of protecting Mother from anything that would disturb her—I gave the nurse Alex’s number: “My mother’s friend,” I said, moving my eyebrows expressively to communicate my sense of that word. So the nurse called Alex at Vogue to say, “Francine has fainted for the second time this week,” and Alex, abiding to our tactics, said, “Don’t let her mother know, I’ll be right over.” He indeed arrived twenty minutes later, expressing immense love and concern, as he did upon any crisis I faced. He took me home, saw me into bed, and spent an hour with me until Magda arrived. “Be sure she has a good lunch,” he said to Magda as he was preparing to leave. “She just loves her school lunches.” He came in to give me a hug. “I’ve made an appointment with Dr. Kling, darling,” he said. “I’m sure you’re fine—you’re just growing so fast.” “Don’t tell Mother!” I begged. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll just tell her you’ve had dizzy spells.”

  I read with delight throughout that day as Magda brought me trays of soup and sandwiches. Made to feel important and interesting by Alex’s devotion and love, I dozed on and off, enchanted by the prospect of an appointment with wonderful Dr. Kling.

  Dr. André Kling, who was to remain our family doctor for the next two decades, was a genial, handsome Viennese Jew with the most suave bedside manner in town. A twice-divorced, childless bachelor with a roving eye, he treated me with great deference and affection, as if I were the child he’d most love to have as his own. And as the three of us came into his office—it was 10:00 A.M., and Mother was glancing nervously at her watch, terrified that she’d miss a customer at Bendel—he insisted on taking me alone into his examining room, where he proceeded to question me at length about my schedule and my eating habits.

  “You’re very skinny again,” he commented as he bumped around my chest and stomach. “Could you give me a precise rundown of your diet?” This is a question I had to answer most cautiously. For I was so happy to be living with Mother and Alex again, so dreading the prospect of being sent off to yet other strangers’ couches, that I’d rather have disappeared into the wall than have the doctor accuse them of any negligence. I needed to put the blame squarely on my own shoulders, then and there. So I told the doctor that I’d been a very bad girl, that I’d lied to Mother and Alex, that a delicious dinner was always left on top of the stove for me but that it had been my habit to throw half of it away and open a can of fruit. “What about breakfast?” he asked impassively. Well, no, there was no breakfast at home, I said. Alex brought Mother her coffee at nine, and by that time I was already at school. “So in fact you do not eat anything but canned fruit between lunch on a Tuesday and lunch on the following day?” he persisted. “I guess not,” I said. “But I’m never hungry.” “Incredible,” he murmured. “You must have breakfast, sveetheart,” he said in his lilting, Viennese-accented English, “you’re suffering from malnutrition. Breakfast is very important for a growing girl.” “Well, maybe something can be left for me in the icebox. Please, please don’t let Alex and Mother get up any earlier to take care of me,” I pleaded. “Promise, Doctor, promise?” “Promees Tohmees,” he repeated, attempting to mimic American schoolgirl talk.

  After drawing blood from my arm, the doctor went back into his office to rejoin Mother and Alex, and as I got dressed I caught peeks of the three of them through a crack in the door. Watching Alex and Mother listening to the doctor’s urbane remonstrances (“a high-strung eleven-year-old with a record of frail childhood health who has recently lived through a severe emotional upheaval cannot be left on her own like this”), I saw an expression come upon their faces that I would observe innumerable times over the following half century whenever their conduct was in the least way faulted. It was an air of charmed agreement, as if to say, “Why, you’re reading our minds—this is exactly what we were just about to do!” “This is precisely what we were about to arrange,” Mother said excitedly to the doctor. “We were about to ask Magda to stay until seven-thirty to give Frosinka her dinner.” “This has gone on for five months,” Doctor Kling said a little sternly. “But we’re just beginning to get organized, cher André!” my mother moaned, with that gesture of both her hands to her brow (“It’s all too much for me”), which intimated that reality was getting uncomfortably close to her.

  So the good doctor went about fulfilling his goal. In a consummately diplomatic way that put my guardians into a state of mild alarm yet did not let them feel guilty of any major negligence, he succeeded in communicating his message: Someone had to be there to supervise my evening meal. The upshot of our visit was that Magda, who was delighted to earn a little additional income and be fed dinner, was hired to stay for an extra three hours into the evening. And before she left for the night, she was on orders to fix me some instant breakfast—glasses of freshly squeezed juice and milk-shake that I, in turn, was requested to consume before going to school in the morning.

  Doctor Kling had his own suave methods of blackmailing me and had made me promise that in exchange for his not upsetting my guardians’ schedule, I’d turn my light out promptly at ten every night. What with Magda there every evening and my new early-to-bed regime, within a month I’d put on a few pounds and bounced out of my room every morning with unprecedented energy, scooting past my mother’s bed and running over to Park Avenue to catch the 8:00 A.M. Spence bus. Within two months of our first visit to Dr. Kling, I received the finest report card I’d yet had at school, and a month later still, barely a year after I’d arrived to the United States not speaking a word of English, I found myself to be the winner of Spence’s lower-school spelling bee. (I was still on scholarship, as I’d remain for years, and a group of Spence mothers, certain that we’d invented our émigré credentials to have access to financial aid, descended on Mother at Bendel to check her out. They found a shy blond woman in a dim, cramped workroom who spoke barely a word of English, and decamped with profound apologies.)

  One of my most vivid memories of Seventy-third Street, where we lived between the fall of 1941 and the winter of 1942, through my sixth grade and into the beginning of my seventh, is of watching a spectacular fight between Alex and Mother.

  It must be her birthday, May 7, 1942. We are standing in Alex’s little studio flat at the back of our floor-through, giving Mother her presents. I have just offered her a pair of bookends I’ve made for her in arts-and-crafts class, triangular blocks of wood that I’d painted a bright hue of shocking pink modeled on the packaging of Schiaparelli’s perfume Shocking, Mother’s favorite scent that year. She has accepted this gift with pride and emotion—“You made this yourself! How did you know shocking pink was my favorite color? I adore them!” So I breathe with relief, basking in her pleasure.

  Now it’s Alex’s turn. Clearly terrified, his mustache trembling, he is holding a little black jewelry box in his hand. She frowns suspiciously even as he hands it to her. Alex and I know her to have extremely finicky tastes in jewelry. I, too, hold my breath, panicked for my beloved Alex.

  She opens the box, and frowns even more ferociously as the gift comes into view. “Mais c’est minable!” she exclaims. “It is pathetic!” I rush over to her side to examine the contested object. It’s a very pretty, rather conventional brooch—an aquamarine of rectangular shape, about an inch by an inch and a half, embedded in a very pretty setting of gold lace filigree. But Mother does not even take the pin out of its box. She snaps the box shut, and with a stream of imprecations hurls it across the room, aiming at Alex’s face. I watch the flying object, poignantly recalling that earlier tantrum of hers when she had thrown a telephone book across t
he room at my father in our Paris flat. “How could you not know that this is just the kind of object I detest?” she shouts at Alex in our familiar blend of French and Russian. “Have you even looked at it carefully? I bet you didn’t even buy it yourself! I bet you asked someone else’s secretary to buy it for you!!” Alex has sought refuge in an armchair in a corner of the room and is looking like a contrite, punished child. “I did buy it myself,” he says. “I thought it was beautiful.” “You can’t possibly think it’s beautiful,” Mother cries. “It looks, it looks…”—she searches for the proper word, “Indian, that’s what it looks like!” And she marches out of the room, toward her own quarters a few yards away from his. In keeping with her distaste for any culture not safely grounded in the European West, “Indian” is as negative an epithet as she can summon.

  I run up to Alex to embrace him, putting my head on his chest. He is so angelic to us, and he must be so hurt! Moreover, he’s spent money on that brooch, and we’re so broke! He pats my cheek, picks up the rejected item off the floor. “These moods don’t last long with her,” he whispers. A few minutes later, we tiptoe fearfully into her room. She is lying on top of her bed, reading Chekhov’s short stories. “Admirable!” she exclaims, pointing to the book. “Utterly admirable!” She goes on to suggest that we celebrate by all going to the Automat together. The brooch is not alluded to until the end of the dinner, when, as we sit contentedly over our apple pies and coconut layer cakes, she turns to him wistfully and says, “All I ever want from you for my birthday is a dozen red roses…. Remember the red roses you used to send me in Paris?” Not too long after this incident, I began to understand that red roses had played the same role in Mother and Alex’s erotic lexicon, ever since the beginning of their liaison, as the cattleyas that Swann sends Odette, in Proust’s Swann’s Way, after each of their trysts. And from that year on, for the following half century, a dozen red roses appeared at Mother’s bedside on the mornings of her every birthday. Decades later I realized that red roses had also been the flowers that Mayakovsky had arranged to send her weekly after his departure from Paris.

  I have equally vivid recollections of Seventy-third Street that have to do with my own emotional upheavals. Memory one: It is evening, and Mother and I are in the cubbyhole dressing room that stands between my bedroom and our shared bathroom, a space with walls that my mother has totally covered with mirrors. She is observing herself carefully in them, as usual, as she gets dressed to go out for dinner. As is often my habit, while leafing through a book I should be reading for school I’m sitting on the dressing room’s one chair, watching her fix her hair and her face and choose items from her little collection of costume jewelry. With no warning, as she puts on an earring and continues to stare at herself in the mirror, she suddenly says, “Alex and I are thinking of having a baby, wouldn’t you like that?” I break out into a tempest of tears, which lasts well into the evening, letting tears replace the words I do not dare to speak, which would go something like this: I insist on remaining the single, adored daughter, I refuse having anyone share that privilege, I want to remain The One! And the word “baby” is never mentioned again.

  Years later, I learned that Mother did not particularly want another child, that she had dutifully asked me the question upon Alex’s and Gitta Sereny’s insistence. Gitta, who seems to have served as a minister of communication in our family, reports that earlier that very year Alex had approached her in the following manner: “Gitta, dear, could you please ask Tatiana if we can have a baby together?” “But how can I ask her that, Alex?” Gitta demurred. “It’s up to you to ask her that.” “I can’t,” Alex said sheepishly. “I just can’t talk to her about such things.” “Well if you can’t, no one else can,” Gitta said. “Please, Gitta, you have no idea how hard it is to speak to her about anything,” Alex pleaded. (He would later tell Gitta that whenever he wanted to discuss any issue of substance with Tatiana, she would snap at him, saying, “So you want to have another of your Jewish conversations?” Part of their great happiness together, so Alex would later rationalize it, is that they never shared serious talk.)

  So once again Gitta reluctantly agreed to do liaison duty in our family. She reports that when she broached the issue with my mother, asking her whether she was thinking of having another child, my mother came back at her with this bizarre response: “And why should I have another child? To bring another Jew into the world?” “We all know she was the opposite of an anti-Semite,” Gitta commented recently as she recalled the episode. “Making a brazen, offensive statement—sexual, racial—was often her weird way of terminating a conversation she found too intimate.”

  Memory two of our days at Seventy-third Street is from a few weeks or months later: It is a Sunday afternoon, and I’m being taken for one of my favorite treats: hot chocolate at Rumpelmayer’s on Central Park South, our first refuge from the war, a site past which we still walk with a certain triumphant nostalgia. Throughout our walk toward Rumpelmayer’s, I’ve been holding Alex’s hand rather than Mother’s, telling him about some details of my English and history classes that are particularly intriguing and whose substance only he can grasp; whereas Mother seems very bored with anything that has to do with my schooling, he always has a way of making me feel delectably important, whatever issue we’re discussing. I glow with pleasure as we sit down at Rumpelmayer’s—red velvet seats and draperies, walls upholstered in dark lush fabrics, a treasured setting I shall search for in other cities throughout my life. The steaming chocolate is brought in, topped by its mound of whipped cream. Mother stares at me with her shy, loving eyes; she suddenly clears her throat and says, in Russian, “We have something to ask you.” And Alex adds, in French, “We wonder what you’d think if maman and I were to get married.” I drop my spoon and start weeping. I sob uncontrollably, the tears flooding and ruining my hot chocolate. The tears are all the more painful because I cannot figure out why I am weeping—I love this man, he has become an even more stalwart center of my life than Mother, so why am I crying? I am a didactically logical, Cartesian child—“she always wants to know all the reasons,” people say. I weep all the harder because I cannot stand my confusion, my lack of clarity. To the pain and astonishment of my guardians, I weep into the night and, secretly, for weeks to come whenever I recall that conversation. The true source of that particular upheaval became clear only many years later, when, rereading Hamlet with a fastidiousness that can come only in adult years, I lingered on the following line: “The funeral bak’d meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” Meaning: My guardians’ purported remarriage was uncomfortably close to my father’s death; the deep love I had so hastily transferred to Alex implicated me in the guilt of their union; their wedding news confirmed a death that I was decades away from totally accepting. But it might be that my Cartesian streak also deepened my crisis that day: How screwed up could their sense of sequence get? I might well have wondered. First they ask me whether they should have a baby, and then they ask me whether they should get married? That may have been too much for a severely rational eleven-year-old to handle.

  But life on Seventy-third Street had its joyful moments, too. Of particular pleasure to me—even more, ironically, than to Mother and Alex—was the custom we began, that year, of sharing weekly dinners at the home of Alex’s father. The visits occurred on Thursday evenings, when our housekeeper, Magda, was off. Shortly after our arrival in New York, Simon Liberman had lost a considerable part of his fortune through an ill-advised investment and had moved to a smaller flat on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks uptown from Spence. Every Thursday after school I gleefully walked up to his home, did my homework as quickly as I could, and then settled down to a long talk with this gentle, contemplative scholar for whom I’d had a surge of tenderness and sympathy from the instant we’d met. Mother and Alex wouldn’t get to his house until six-thirty or so, so the afternoons Simon and I spent together were wonderfully serene and unhurried, steeped in the timelessness of mutual unders
tanding. Beyond his exotic history as a fearless revolutionary, as a prominent economist, as an adventurous traveler who umpteen times had crossed the steppes of Russia, the reason Simon Liberman wove a particular spell on me in the early 1940s was this: He was finishing a book that was to be called Building Lenin’s Russia, and he was perhaps the first person I’d known whom I thought of as a writer. Every one of his words was to be treasured, scrutinized, remembered. I’d always been attracted to philosophy and religion, and Simon had been an intimate friend of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, to whom he had offered considerable material support after Berdyaev’s emigration from the Soviet Union in 1927. Simon began to expound Berdyaev’s ideas to me when I turned thirteen or so, and they carried a greater ring of truth, in my Utopian adolescent years, than any other view of life I’d been presented thus far.

  The Berdyaevian philosophy proposed by Simon was a brand of Christian personalism, which had immeasurable influence on his son, Alex (or, let’s say, on Alex’s earlier incarnations), and has remained part of my credo to this day. Berdyaev believed in a benevolent Divine Will, immanent rather than transcendent, which demands each of us to strive for the greatest possible fulfillment of our innate potential. Evil and all forms of social ills are always the result of potential that remains unfulfilled. In Berdyaev’s religious existentialist view, we can realize ourselves only through interdependence and communion with other humans, and the only good society is an egalitarian one that fosters compassionate relationships among all its individual members. Such were some of the views propounded by Simon Liberman as he sat in his study overlooking Central Park, talking in his gentle, almost whispering voice, his hands crossed over his knees, occasionally cocking his head from side to side, owl-like, to emphasize a point. Later, as I approached my fourteenth year, he frequently stood up as he talked and went to his shelf to pull out books for me—one particularly affecting work was Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which eventually became the subject of my senior thesis at Barnard College. My readings of Berdyaev and Kierkegaard and my weekly talks with Simon were my principal spiritual training, my only way of continuing the religious education I’d begun as a child with my Roman Catholic father and my Russian Orthodox Babushka.