Yet his quandary was very real: Alex, the maestro of outward appearances and impeccable decorum, suddenly found himself with a wife who was often making an ugly spectacle of herself. His entire sense of self must have been turned topsy-turvy by Mother’s metamorphoses. For the first time in his life, he was ashamed of her, and his archaic reaction to it was to deny that any problem existed. It would be charitable to say that his secrecy was just another instance of that protect-Tatiana-from-reality strategy which was at the heart of their marriage: Nothing would have embarrassed a person as hermetically private as Mother, so it could be argued, than to have her behavior become a topic of medical or even family discourse. But it is more realistic to see Alex’s tactic in the context of his appetite for total control: It was essential to their marital dynamic that Tatiana remain exclusively in his sway—not I nor her closest friends nor even a doctor could interfere with any detail of their marriage’s functioning. As long as Tiffeau was in the house with her, keeping her from falling down, Alex could peacefully work away in his welding studio, which, those days, seemed to be his principal concern. So life proceeded at Hillside through 1969, 1970, and 1971. Mother continued to glower at us over her drinks when Cleve and I came home from antiwar demonstrations, at which we were more than once arrested and jailed overnight. “You are for Com-intern?” she muttered. “You still help Hanoi?” Alex, who did not join in Mother’s confrontations but had often taken us aside to criticize our “appalling” political activities, expressed his disapproval through what we called “his mustache language.” Tiffeau, whose sympathies were squarely with ours, winked at us across the table, planted wisteria, and continued to make succulent boeuf bourguignon on weekends.
But he was a restless man and something of an egomaniac. In 1972—by this time he had easily made a million—Tiffeau suddenly closed his New York house, feeling too threatened by his three principal competitors, Blass, Halston, and de la Renta, who had considerably more financial backing than he did. He moved to Paris, worked for a year at St. Laurent but had a falling out with its directors and drifted into a series of less satisfying jobs on both sides of the ocean. And by the mid-1970s, when it was clear that Tiffeau’s success story had come to an end, the Libermans had ceased to see him. Throughout their stays in Paris or during his visits to New York, his phone calls to them went unanswered: He now belonged to the scrap heap of the Libermans’ no-longer-useful friends. He was to die in 1989 in his native village—of lung cancer and not from AIDS—leaving all his possessions to a childhood acquaintance who had nursed him selflessly throughout his last years.
After Tiffeau’s departure, the Libermans were bereft of a helpful friend who could entertain Mother and cook. But such gaps in the Libermans’ lives never stayed unfilled for very long. Barely one month passed before another permanent houseguest appeared at Hillside—the distinguished composer and musical impresario Nicolas Nabokov, first cousin of the writer. He, too, was a wonderful cook, and moreover Mother could now boast that her domestic aide-de-camp came from one of Russia’s most distinguished families.
My parents had known Nicolas Nabokov as a man-about-town for many years, and upon being wined and dined by him in the early 1970s in his apartment in the West Twenties, had witnessed his potential as a gifted houseguest. At the time he entered my parents’ circle, he was a tall, dynamic, handsome man just seventy years of age with blazing, mischievous blue eyes and a shock of thick white hair. His face was made a bit eerie by its asymmetry: a severe neuralgia incurred while he was serving in the American military in World War II had altered motion in his right cheek, giving him an expression of slightly leering malice, which was in perfect keeping with his mordant, scathing wit. Nicolas was then married to his fifth wife, Dominique, a very bright, pretty French woman forty years his junior who was head over heels in love with him. My family and I frequently strolled down to my parents’ house for a Saturday-night dinner or a Sunday lunch. And as Nicolas and Dominique became the Libermans’ regular guests we marveled at the abundance of beef Stroganoff, cutlets Pozharski, and steaming pots of kasha that came to the table. Mother, who as she grew older sought greater than ever refuge in Russianness—Russian friends, Russian food, the Russian language—was most truly in her element with Nicolas: He was cooking the food she loved best, and with him she could also discuss every possible fine point of Russian literature. She took equally to Dominique, who became like a second daughter to her. Another benefit of the Nabokovs’ presence was that Mother, fearful of ruffling the sensitivities of the elegantly abstemious Nicolas, tried to moderate her alcohol intake.
As for Alex, during the Nabokov era he went through a period in which he spoke very little. He had recently begun to suffer from a severe tremor of the hand. Obsessed as he was by appearances, he detested any outwardly visible sign of infirmity. He found a neurologist who prescribed a powerful medication that controlled the tremor to a degree, but with severe side effects of sedation and depression. After silently eating his meal, answering any questions put to him gruffly and monosyllabically, he retired to his studio, where he was making maquettes for the monumental welded sculptures being executed by the Layman family. Otherwise all went serenely at Hillside under the Nabokovs’ reign, which only lasted, alas, three years. For in late 1975 Nicolas had a mild heart attack and was not well enough to travel to Connecticut every weekend. Alex started phoning all his Russian friends. “Quick, quick, find someone,” he pleaded, “someone who cooks well and can keep Tatiana company!” The fellow materialized some two months after the Nabokovs’ departure. His name was Gennady (“Genna”) Smakov, and he remained with the Libermans for most of the years Mother still had to live. I shall discuss him further below; my present task is to document another important turning point in Mother’s life.
Notwithstanding the comfort and serenity of her life—Alex’s impeccable stewardship of both their town and country houses, the loving Russian friends who attended her, her closeness to her grandsons, in whom she took increasing pride—throughout the years after her 1965 retirement Mother’s energies and morale had deteriorated. She had steadily lost the marvelous dynamism that characterized her when she was still Tatiana of Saks. A great change in her very glance is manifest in photos taken of her from the 1970s on. Her former éclat and self-assurance, or appearance thereof, is replaced by a sad, lost, yearning stare, as if she were looking back nostalgically to a lost treasure, lost power—her work. As for her true physical decline, it began in 1976. Having abused drugs much of her life and alcohol for the past decade, in the spring of that year she had a mild heart attack and was diagnosed as suffering from congenital heart failure. She had a good scare. Alex decided that during their yearly summer trip to Europe he and Mother should spend a longer time doing the cure in Ischia and then go on to Venice, which they both loved. (They had sold Va-et-Vient in the midsixties, complaining that the Riviera had been overrun by tourists.) And Mother’s doctors persuaded her to limit her drinking to red wine, a limitation which kept her quieter and more subdued, but also more melancholy.
Was it a coincidence that she had that heart attack while my husband and I were taking our first trip to the Soviet Union? I doubt it. Most any recollection or association with the Soviet Union seemed to be traumatic to her. The prospect of our voyaging to her homeland had utterly terrified her, and she’d spent months trying to talk us out of the trip. “It’s very dangerous there!” she’d warned us. “Don’t go, you’ll be followed everywhere by the KGB!” But what a sneak she was: Once she realized she couldn’t dissuade us and was reassured that we’d cable her every other day, she prepared a curious surprise: She decided that we must finally become acquainted with the Mayakovsky saga that had so marked her life yet which she had seldom mentioned to us. For as we arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport, we were greeted effusively by an obsequious little man, one Vladimir Makarov, who announced himself to be the director of the Mayakovsky Museum. Handing me a huge bouquet of flowers and weeping with emotion (�
�Tatiana Iakovleva’s daughter returned to us! Who would hope to see such a marvel!”), he told us that he had received a cable from my mother the previous day and was determined “to help us, to serve us” for the duration of our stay.
Thankfully, we had long been booked on one of those unchangeable In tourist trips, which dictated that we spend only five days in Moscow before going on to Kiev, Odessa, Leningrad. But during our stay in Moscow, tovarishch Makarov, a seedy apparatchik with deep halitosis and a carpet of dandruff on his shoulders, remained attached to us from morning to night. Obviously well connected to Soviet officialdom, he whisked us away with no problem whatever from our Intourist group and proceeded to give us his own tour of Moscow. It focused mostly on lengthy visits to the Mayakovsky Museum, which was then located in the very house on Dzerzhinsky Square in which the poet committed suicide. Great was our shock when, in the museum’s first room, we came upon a series of vitrines containing more than four decades’ worth of family photographs: pictures of my mother’s and father’s marriage in 1929, of various stages of my infancy and childhood, even photos of my American family, of my husband, of our children when they were infants and toddlers. I was immediately swamped with paranoid thoughts about the KGB’s role in assembling this collection (the organization was notoriously possessive about the Mayakovsky legacy). But my fears were calmed when Makarov informed me that the photographs had come from my maternal grandmother. Throughout the decades that followed her immigration to France, he told us, Tatiana had sporadically sent her mother photos of herself, of her husbands, of her growing family. And a few years after my grandmother’s death in 1963, her widower, Nikolai Alexandrovich Orlov, having heard that documents concerning the poet’s muse were eagerly being sought by the Mayakovsky Museum, had considered it his “citizenly duty” to send on all these photographs.
We only had one final night in Moscow at the end of our trip to Russia, and on that occasion Makarov ferreted us out again, wined and dined us tearfully, and swore his eternal friendship to us.
We left Moscow on a morning flight and arrived in New York that night. We were totally surprised, upon our return, to see Alex at Kennedy Airport. “Mother’s had a mild heart attack,” he said to us shortly after we embraced. I suspect he wanted to prepare us as gently as possible for the news. But he also looked perplexed, fragile—he seems to have been shaken by the realization that he and Tatiana had entered a new, very vulnerable stage of their lives. “We got all your cables,” he said. “But she was still very worried about you—she’s terrified of anything that has to do with the Soviet Union.” We told him about the curious ambassador Mother had sent us from her past. “She seems to have cabled him the day before we left!” I said. Alex’s mustache twitched imperceptibly. “She didn’t tell me anything about it, she never talks to me about Mayakovsky,” he said, “we never speak about her past.” Even with her loved ones, I then realized, my mother was continuing to maintain a chill silence about her life’s principal tragedy and grief.
After her 1976 heart attack, Mother began to capitulate, looking on herself as an invalid and asking others to treat her as such, abandoning many tasks she’d usually been able to do herself and finding her principal solace in the company of Genna Smakov. A multilingual Russian classicist, ballet historian, film critic, and belle-lettrist who had recently immigrated to the United States, he was a dark-haired man in his middle thirties with a bushy mustache, large melancholy eyes, and a manner that could be—depending on how he felt about you—exuberantly affectionate, coolly formal, or icily brusque. Coming from a generation of Soviet intellectuals who were trying to recapture the broad humanistic culture of prerevolutionary Russian scholars, he was brilliant, arrogant, conceited, devoted to his friends, and suffered no fools. And he relished showing off his truly immense knowledge of literature, which enabled him to recite, from memory and in the original, hundreds of lines of Virgil, Homer, Leopardi, Heine, and Rimbaud as fluently as he recited Pushkin and Lermontov. (Joseph Brodsky, his closest friend, referred to Genna as “my personal university.”) From the moment they had met, upon a visit arranged by Brodsky, Genna and Mother had felt an instant kinship, and she had immediately invited him to Connecticut for weekends. Mealtimes at Hillside now turned into veritable poetry marathons as Mother, who knew even more Russian poetry by heart than Genna, alternated stanzas of verse with him by the hour. Need I say that the Libermans had also encouraged Genna to join the family because he was as gifted a cook as Tiffeau and Nabokov? Food retains a lifelong importance for survivors of famines, and it had been one of my parents’ central fixations. Alex, in fact, found Genna to be so capable for the role of country companion/chef that he began to support him financially, even renting a flat for him in a fashionable district of the Village. “Isn’t he brilliant?” Mother would ask when Genna was out of earshot. “Have you ever known such culture? He will soon write a masterpiece.”
Gennady Smakov, Tatiana’s closest friend in her last ten years, in 1984.
Tatiana and her grandsons, Luke and Thaddeus, late 1970s.
A homosexual who, like Tiffeau, had indulged in some risky cruising, Genna would begin to restrict his activities when the AIDS crisis came to the fore in the early 1980s. This may have deepened Mother’s attachment to him. What dominating woman hasn’t delighted in her sway over a docile, symbolic son who has been somewhat castrated by social or medical circumstances? I, too, was devoted to Genna, with whom I spent many a happy hour reading Russian poetry I hadn’t studied since my adolescence. He reminded me of those melancholy, impoverished aunts or cousins one finds at dinner tables in nineteenth-century Russian fiction—Turgenev particularly comes to mind. He was constantly forecasting a pessimistic future for every possible situation: the horrors of the next fortnight’s weather, a typhoid epidemic about to sweep the West, the demise of democracy throughout the world. But Mother relished indulging in her own innate pessimism with him, and in his presence she enjoyed her last relatively happy years. So enamored was she of Genna that he was able to readily convert the Libermans to his own proclivities—he was a passionate Wagner fan, and though they had always detested Wagner, now Wagner blared through the house at all times of day.
Genna also gave himself airs of great importance by declaring that he was writing a biography of Tatiana. “We must work now,” he would announce as he sat Mother down on the living-room couch and turned on, or pretended to turn on, his tape recorder. (Any book that dealt with one of Mayakovsky’s two muses was a potential bestseller in Russia, and Genna was one of many Soviet literati who looked on Tatiana Iakovleva as a gold mine.) Throughout his friendship with Mother, however, Genna remained extremely evasive about how readily she opened her past to him. “It is most difficult to make her talk about personal matters,” he admitted, holding a finger on his lips. “As for anything related to sex,” he added, “she is a total cipher!”
By that time, Alex, his tremor abated, had stopped the medication that had so depressed him and had snapped out of his silent phase. But he tended to be in somber moods when in Genna’s presence, in part because Genna’s precious manner irritated him; in part because he felt ill at ease with true intellectuals; and in part because his interest in poetry was nil and his concern for literature was minimal—he was the first to boast that he had not read a book cover to cover since Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle had come out in 1968. So his conversation with his perpetual Russian guest consisted mostly of barbed exchanges. Moreover, in those years Alex’s somberness might also have been provoked by me, for the simple reason that I had become a writer, a vocation that I owe almost entirely to the encouragement offered me by Cleve Gray.
My first two books—both nonfiction, one on the Catholic left and one on Hawaii—had left my parents unperturbed and only mildly proud: Nothing short of a bestseller would have satisfied the two success freaks, who reproached me for failing to promote these books vigorously enough. More complex problems arose when I published my first novel, Lovers and Tyrant
s, whose French-born heroine, Stephanie, arrives in New York in wartime after her father’s death in the Free French. Like much first fiction, it was very autobiographical, and the wry, often satirical manner in which it dealt with parental figures somewhat similar to mine greatly perturbed the Libermans. I described the success-driven mother floating through Stephanie’s childhood as “an industrious, aloof…much courted beauty” who totally invents her titles of nobility. The protagonist’s power-hungry, “brilliant, staggeringly successful…silver-haired” stepfather is a devoted family man, much downtrodden by his wife; his mustache “trembles with emotion” when he gets all his family into the car to drive to his favorite beach in the south of France. On this beach, which Stephanie loathes, “the expanse of oiled flesh gleams in the sun with the sad splendor of quartered meat” and resembles “an estuary gleaming with fish at mating time.”
But notwithstanding my generally clement tone, I committed the unpardonable sin of having Stephanie dwell at some length on her father’s death and on her mother’s cowardly mishandling of that loss. What affected my own mother most deeply, in fact, was my description of the manner in which Stephanie finally puts closure to her many decades of unresolved sorrow by summoning the courage to visit her father’s grave. This closely paralleled the process I myself undertook in my forties: Almost thirty years after my father’s death, I had suddenly felt an urgent, unprecedented need to learn all there was to know about him, and I finally acquired the courage to visit, for the very first time, the family vault in Brittany where he is buried. There is a passage in Lovers and Tyrants in which I describe Stephanie’s first visit to her father’s tomb:
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