So the three of us trooped toward the bulrushes, and Alex loaded his film as I took off my bathing suit, feeling, at that particular moment, vaguely offended. Was this right? Was it honorable of any mom and dad to photograph their daughter stark naked on the beach? What would Aunt Nada and Uncle Pat think of this? What if someone outside of the family were to see these shots, someone at Alex’s office? Alex never developed his own film—what would the guys in the darkroom think? Once my clothes were off and Alex started shooting, my parents grew particularly solicitous and tender. “Are you all right, darling, are you comfortable?” Alex asked. “You look ravishing!” Mother exclaimed. Alex believed passionately in waste (“American civilization is built on waste,” he’d say grandly, “on glorious, glorious waste”), and he always used numerous rolls of film for any picture he ever shot. As his camera clicked through dozens of rolls, I stood there in the bulrushes, turning my head this way and that, attempting to look both languid and regal, feeling both embarrassed and proud. And then to my relief it was all over, and we went back to the house, where Uncle Pat and Aunt Nada were reading The New York Times on the terrace. The pose was never mentioned again, the pictures never discussed—in fact, I seem to have repressed the memory so efficiently that years later it never even surfaced in any conversations with my shrink.
So upon first seeing the pictures in 1991, I began to wonder what light this incident shed upon my parents’ characters. Were they being sentimental, attempting to preserve a trace of my childhood before it was totally swamped by womanhood? Or did these two persons of minimal libido look on the session as a sexual stimulant of sorts? This was the first inkling I had of my parents’ strong streak of voyeurism; to what degree, I mused, was this a deviant act? Alex would live on for eight years after I discovered these pictures, and it is a reflection on both of our characters that I would never have dreamed of mentioning them to him. When in a jocular mood, however, I have often thought with bemusement of all the contemporary women who, coming upon such family mementoes, might have sued their aging stepfathers for a handsome sum on grounds of sexual misconduct.
Marlene Dietrich portrait autographed to Francine, 1948.
How volatile my parents’ world was! In the summer of 1947—the year we all returned to Europe for our vacations, the first year we did not share a summer home with the Patcevitches—Pat and Nada separated. Pat had fallen in love with Marlene Dietrich, who swiftly replaced Nada as Alex and Mother’s best friend. For the following two decades, Nada went on to live in innumerable warm climes—Corsica, Sardinia, Mexico, the Dordogne, a score of Greek islands—perennially dissatisfied, never staying put for more than a year or two. During those years, I kept up with her through Christmas cards and called her or lunched with her on the infrequent occasions she visited whatever city I was living in, Paris or New York. Nada had been a most difficult woman, and I was the first to have been harassed by her neuroses. But I was grateful for her demanding generosity and for the motherly role she had tried to play (however awkwardly) during some crucial years of my adolescence.
Yet I noticed that from the time Nada was officially separated from Pat, my parents never once returned her calls. Throughout most of those post-Nada years, I was kept too busy by college, jobs, and romances to fully plumb the extent of the Libermans’ betrayal: In their brutally pragmatic ethic, the woman whom my mother had looked on as her “twin sister” had lost all meaning in their lives once she ceased to be the boss’s wife. As I grew older, I realized that I had witnessed, through Nada, one of many similar acts of abandonment that marked the Libermans’ careers.
On the occasions we met after her divorce, Nada proved to be far too proud to hold forth on my parents’ disloyalty. “How are they?” she’d ask knowingly, with a sad smile. “I often think of them, of my so-called sister.” She’d add in a wry, ironic tone, “Is she happy enough?” Nada died in Greece in the 1960s after a long illness, leaving me in her will whatever little jewelry she had left—much of it dismantled amethysts and tourmalines—from Pat’s dowry of guilt.
In the following years, Mother was indeed happy enough in the company of the friend she grew to love, for some years, above all others, Marlene Dietrich. I first met Marlene at a beachside cottage on the north shore of Long Island, which Pat had rented in the fall of 1948, a few months after his divorce from Nada came through. In my first sighting of the star, she stood barefoot at the stove, cooking an elaborate dinner. Her blond hair was tousled with studied casualness, her makeup so artfully applied as to be invisible, and her naked legs were topped by one of Pat’s impeccably tailored Sulka shirts. It was Marlene’s habit, when cooking for friends, to elaborate on the ingredients essential to the dish she was making. Discussing the half cup of brandy she considered essential to a proper boeuf bourguignon, she bent over toward a low shelf to reach the bottle and revealed the only fabric, other than her cotton shirt, that adorned her nakedness that day: the string of a hygienic tampon, dangling demurely between the legendary legs.
Holy mackerel, I said to myself, no underpants! This woman is so glamorous that she can get away with anything! Eager, like any self-respecting teenager, to hone my own potential for glam, I instantly disposed of all former icons of female allure. Into the wastebasket went photos of the unambiguously female sex goddess Rita Hayworth, my screen idol since age twelve. I now thrilled to Marlene’s dusky temptress roles in films such as Shanghai Express, to her Blue Angel’s Lola Lola, who drives men equally batty as tuxedo-clad cross-dresser and glitzy, garter-baring vamp; and above all, to live footage of her career’s most heroic incarnation: Marlene in U.S. Army uniform, taking huge risks to boost our soldiers’ morale by belting out “Boys in the Back-room” near the front lines. My parents, needless to say, were equally stricken. They marveled at the manner in which she blended the personae of bisexual adventuress and devoted down-to-earth grandmother. They dined out for years on accounts of the way Marlene repaired her fragile glass-beaded cabaret dresses herself on an ancient sewing machine, and of the manner in which, when cooking a meal for friends, she insisted on serving them in a white apron, refusing to sit down with them at table. For the following two decades, Marlene fulfilled—spectacularly so—the Libermans’ deep need to be steeped in fame and glamour.
Such were the principal happenings at our summer home. My own room on Seventieth Street, which I described earlier in this chapter, is bound to be linked to the tenuous relationship I maintained with my mother during my growth into womanhood. And within this complex process, one moment in the fall of 1946 is particularly significant—the time I told my mother I was having my first period.
I did not menstruate until the age of sixteen. For some three years, as my classmates, one after the other, periodically hosted the “visitor,” as we daintily called it at Spence, I played a delicate make-believe game, every four weeks punctually dropping the excuse card into the little black box at the gym, savvily chatting about tampons, pads, cramps, oooooh, pass me the Midol, I have the worst cramps. I had no one with whom to share my dreadful secret: Mother had never approached the issue; Alex had proffered some vague information, but this was one set of worries I could not bring myself to share with him—worries that my period might never come, that I could never have children, that I was doomed to be barren and useless to society…and then one day, late in the fall of my junior year, the period arrived. I welcomed it directly after basketball practice and rushed home to Seventieth Street. I ran into my bathroom, pulled down my pants, and sat on the toilet, admiring at leisure the longed-for streak of pink. It must have been just before six, for Mother came in from Saks and opened the bathroom door, staring at me, as she occasionally did upon returning from work, with that shy, inquisitive glance that was meant to ask, “Is everything okay?” “Maman, I have the period!!” I exclaimed. But I don’t know how to handle it, I added, most of the girls use pads, some use tampons, but that idea kind of scares me, do you, have you, ever used tampons, is that what I should try to use�
�. She stared at me, deadpan, and said, “Oh, sure, I can put anything up there—tennis balls, anything!” And then she fled the bathroom, my chaste blond goddess, utter terror in her eyes.
So I was again left, in my new happiness, with the task of decoding her complex messages. By now I was a precociously literary, symbol-savvy teenager beginning to look at colleges. What was that business about “balls”? Men have balls—was she trying to tell me how many men could get in there, or, conversely, was she intimating that she was the one in the family who had the balls? Or was she trying to prove how “modern” and “progressive” she was, prodding me to accept my sexuality forthrightly and have fewer hang-ups about it than she did? If so, she succeeded. But this was the weirdest one she’d pulled on me yet.
EIGHTEEN
Remaining in Fashion
It was in my bedroom at Seventieth Street, at our summer house in Stony Brook, and most particularly from her workroom at Saks Fifth Avenue, that Tatiana waged a battle familiar to all mothers but particularly arduous in our case: the struggle over her daughter’s adolescent body.
As a tot, I’d felt painfully unnoticed, but as I came to puberty I grew to know the opposite misery: Mother’s constant observation of my bodily surface. Her criticisms were all too biased by the numerous hang-ups she had about her own body, particularly about her breasts, which had been direly misshapen—so she never tired repeating—by nine months of nursing me. (“What else could I do, in Warsaw?”) So from my thirteenth year on, her sartorial commandments went somewhat like this: “You and I can’t wear belts, chérie, our breasts are too big” “We can’t wear red shoes, our feet are too wide” “Can’t you always keep that curl in your hair? It’s so much more becoming than when it’s straight.” Such scrutinies reached their critical mass at those longed-for and dreaded moments when we had to shop for my clothes, which due to our limited finances we bought exclusively at Saks because of Mother’s large discount.
The first years after we’d moved to Seventieth Street—1942–1944, when I was twelve and thirteen—had passed without any major sartorial tensions. I had been in seventh and eighth grades, living in an exclusively female world, going through crushes on older girls, learning to handle the crushes even younger girls had on me. I had three close friends in those years, who each fulfilled a different range of emotional needs: the exquisitely pretty, highly popular Nadine was half-French and half-Russian and understood me in every possible way; Jeannette was a wiry vixen with savagely gleaming braces who was the class’s outstanding athlete and whose support was essential to my being included in the class’s inner circle of power; Jane was a heavyset girl with large breasts and big, dreamy blue eyes who was obsessed with the notion of being “creative.” With Jeannette and Nadine I indulged in trading cards, a pastime taken up by only a chosen few. With Jane, I read Kahlil Gibran and went compulsively to the opera every Saturday afternoon of the season, paying fifty cents for standing room, clutching a little red volume entitled The Story of a Hundred Operas, which Jane and I consulted with the fervor with which young Red Guards later memorized the sayings of Chairman Mao.
But there came that time when we had all turned fourteen, and Spence decreed that all members of our freshman class must acquire a long evening frock for the occasion of our rite of passage into East Coast preppie puberty, the Groton–St. Mark’s Christmas dance. Nadine’s and Jane’s mothers had done their duty months ahead of time, and since October I’d been admiring the gowns in their closets, scrumptious visions of pink organza ruffles and sherbet-hued tulles. I, too, had been asking Mother since the beginning of the term to go shopping for the dress, but week after week she’d put it off, saying she was too busy. Finally, on a Thursday in late November, she consented to the expedition and asked me to meet her at Saks after school.
Every normal child is a conformist, and as I get to Mother’s workroom I’ve already created the dress of my dreams, pink or blue and very flounced, a skirt perhaps scattered, like Jane’s, with a few multicolored paillettes. I’m not ready for the following scenario. Looking at the clock, leaving orders with her assistants to page her instantly if a customer should appear—“We be back in twenty-five minutes!”—Mother clutches my hand as she pulls me headlong down Saks’s grim, gray service stairs toward the junior misses’ department two floors below. “Pssst! Pssst!” she whistles as we emerge onto the floor, her impatience, her frantic pace, created, I realized only years later, by her daily dose of Benzedrine. “Salesgirl! Queeck!” she cries out. She is known throughout the store, so help instantly arrives—Countess du Plessix, what can we do for you? “She must have dress for evening, long, black!!” she commands. “But Maman, I don’t want black,” I gasp. “I want pink or blue—I hate black.” “Ridiculous!” she answers. “Black is only color for evening.” “But Maman….”
Alas, she is already at the junior misses’ evening wear rack, going speedily through the garments, pushing back a half dozen dresses I crave, crave to try on—to see how they feel, to try out their flowers and flounces on my detestable body, to compare them to Jeannette’s and Jane’s gowns, to at least describe them to my chums—but Mother is already way ahead of me, triumphantly holding up her definitive choice. It minimizes the bosom all right—bodice of stark black velvet, sad little skirt of black-and-white plaid organdy, cap sleeves to match. It is mannish, it is nunnish—in sum, it’s a lemon. “We try on!” she orders. And she rushes me into a dressing room, undoes my belt, helps me to whip off my sweater, and now it is on, this dud of a dress. As she exclaims “Quelle élégance! Divin! Un rêve!!” I stare at myself dejectedly in the mirror. I loathe this dress. I’m ashamed of it. I’m still too young to return to this delectable floor without an adult, and I long to linger here another half hour to try on the pink and powder-blue possibilities on the rack. “Maman, can’t I try this—” “There you go again, you want to try on the whole store!” She is running out of the dressing room, black-and-white monstrosity in hand, and I don’t persist, I pliantly acquiesce, for her love has been so hard-won that the smallest confrontation could destroy it.
The working day is over, and we go home to Seventieth Street, Mother triumphant about the day’s purchase. “We must show Alex!” she exclaims when we hear his key turning in the front door. The three of us assemble in my room, where there are full-length mirrors on both doors, and while they whisper about the day’s events at their respective offices I go into my bathroom to try on the monstrosity. “How elegant! How very perfect, darling,” Alex exclaims as I emerge, having been thoroughly briefed, I imagine, on the opposition I put up. “Your mother is always right!” So I am stuck with the lemon of a dress. And a few weeks later, when the famous Christmas dance takes place, I am stranded for the entire evening with an acne-ridden Groton ninth-grader who may be too shy to approach any of the prettily flounced babes on the floor and bores me throughout with detailed descriptions of his chemistry experiments. That very Christmas, Pat and Nada, sensing my loathing for the black rag, came to the rescue by offering me a sequined turquoise number with which I sailed into self-assured stardom at several ensuing festivities. Over time, however, I have often puzzled over Mother’s imposition of her own stark blackness on my first evening frock: Was she denying my sexuality because it made me into a rival? Or was she, however unwittingly, imposing her own deep sexual hang-ups on me?
This reminds me of another fashion expedition of my youth, one that was relatively peaceful but equally filled with sexual ambiguity: It was when Mother bought me my first pair of trousers. Pants were a big issue for her. She’d always looked at herself as “emancipated” because she had started wearing trousers in the 1920s, when they were indeed bold symbols of women’s sexual liberation. And just as her fashion sense had been arrested somewhere between the Riviera thirties and the wartime forties, so her notion of chicly liberated women was frozen around the notion that “they wear pants.” So as I stood in the dressing room a year or so after “the visitor” arrived, trying on my f
irst pair of slacks, Mother stared at me with that gaze of admiration which it was my highest goal in life to glean and said, “Divine! You must always wear pants!” And she carried on about my skinny hips, so much more elegant than her size sixteen; why ever bother with a skirt? From then on, for the next half century, “You must always wear pants” became mother’s most often repeated sartorial refrain—her way of saying, so I decoded it, that it was I who must wear the pants in my family, just the way she had in hers. “You must wear pants,” I later realized, was Tatiana’s version of that central talismanic phrase with which every mother attempts to retain some control over her daughter, be it through verbal symbols such as “You’re killing me” or “I won’t argue any more” or by the Queen of the Night’s high-F aria in The Magic Flute, which, in my feminist reading of the opera, is the hypnotic refrain that keeps her daughter Tamina under her spell.
But, ah, we did have some good times, Mother and I. The best moments we shared were on those days when I was on a school vacation from Spence and picked her up at Saks to go to lunch at the Hamburger Heaven on Fifty-first Street between Madison and Fifth, across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “Thirty-five minutes!” she would proclaim, looking at the clock, as we once more rushed from her workroom down the gray service stairs. We sat on the childlike high chairs and winked at each other conspiratorially as the waitresses snapped the little trays over our knees. Food was very important to Mother, as it is to most survivors of famines, and unlike Nada and many other fashion plates she was not that concerned about remaining svelte. She ate heartily and lustily, and in the prime of her health she continued to relish basic American food: steak and hamburgers ultrarare, corn on the cob, apple pie (apple “pee,” she called it, deliberately retaining her amusing mauling of the language). We both ordered our meat extrarare and lathered it with all the wonderful American junk—pickles, ketchup—that still symbolized the paradise of our adopted country, topping it all off with lemon-meringue pie. And I won my victories by trying to be interesting, forcing Mother to stretch out our time to forty, forty-five minutes. I reached that goal by questioning her about who was coming for hat fittings that afternoon—Very important, she’d answer, looking at her watch, Irene Dunne and Claudette! And she would expound on what “look” she was trying to impose on each of those clients. We never discussed school, for she always feared that such talk would reveal her profound ignorance of all educational matters, and throughout the seven years I was at Spence she never visited it until my graduation day. Yet admixed with my great awe and dread of her, the sense of chosenness I enjoyed during those times together—Mother is giving me thirty-five minutes of her precious time!—gave me the greatest happiness I knew in my adolescence. Indeed, those moments we shared were all the more luminous because they were rare and hard-won, because she imbued them with her own special radiance of warmth and wit. They made me strive all the harder for Mother’s love and led me to overlook, rather breezily, her busyness and occasional negligence.
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