Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  At this point, Alex was being briefly hospitalized every few weeks for cardiac symptoms and also for a chronic anemia, occasioned by his radiation treatments, which required frequent transfusions. This did not deter him from attempting to run Seventieth Street and from taking care of Mother in his habitually dutiful way. I sat by his bed during one of his hospital stays while he offered me a peroration on what he called “the fall of the House of Usher.” “What do we do? How do we live now?” he asked. Propped up on pillows, needles in his arms, he spoke with a new kind of bitterness about the fact that both Hillside and Seventieth Street were getting to be too much for him. “I can’t make it work anymore,” he burst out, his mustache trembling. “I dream of being able to move into a nice hassle-free apartment where I could just pick up the phone to get the plumbing fixed, or a light bulb changed…. It’s all beginning to destroy me,” he added, “but it’s hopeless—Mother would rather die than move out of Seventieth Street.” Nostalgically looking back to the days when Seventieth Street had been a haven of efficiency, he went on to discuss the ideal staff he could find for the house: a Mabel-type cook/housekeeper, a José-type houseman to take care of the physical details of the house…. I gave Alexa good-night kiss and told him I’d do all I could to help out. “Pick up the phone whenever you’re in the house so Mother doesn’t have to answer,” he called out to me as I left his hospital room. “Au fond, l’Anglais la fatigue,” he added—“English tires her.”

  After nearly fifty years, English still tires Mother, I reflected as I walked home, but otherwise we’ve become a truly American family, decimated by AIDS and drugs.

  A short while later, after he’d resumed his office schedule, Alex’s spirits rallied a bit. He had hired a bright, competent twenty-six-year-old butler, Lance Houston, to replace José. He had found a gifted aspiring artist, Crosby Coughlin, to take on Bob Lehmann’s job as head of his office staff. Equally important, he announced, an acquaintance of Joseph Brodsky and Misha Baryshnikov was on his way from Moscow to replace Genna as Mother’s companion.

  The new Russian friend who had been programmed for Mother, one Yuri Tyurin, was hardly a Genna: Of far shallower mind and considerably more limited culture than his predecessor, he was a small, gay man in his late forties with dark little teeth, nicotine halitosis, and a mincing, obsequiously polite ballet-master manner. He claimed to have been, in turn, a dentist, a dancer, and a television anchorman and did not speak a word of any language beyond Russian. But we didn’t care what kind of Soviet corruption he’d lived on as long as he could raise Mother’s spirits by spouting Russian poetry and making decent Stroganoff. And upon his first weekend at Hillside, we knew we had a winner: “He is a master chef!” Tatiana declared solemnly upon feasting—however slowly, however sparsely—on his borshch and pirozhki. After a few meals, both Libermans took me aside to sing the praises of the new Russian friend. “How do you like our wonderful new Gennochka?” Mother said dreamily. “What an angel he is, how lucky we are,” Alex whispered to me as Yuri dashed upstairs to help Mother ride down in her chairlift. “I’ve gotten him an apartment in the Village.” (Alex managed to put Yuri on the Condé Nast payroll as a “consultant,” the way he had for a decade of Genna’s services.) Mother slowly began to rally, suggesting kisel for Saturday lunch, shchi for Sunday dinner. Alex was thrilled to spend more time in his studio, which increasingly played the role of mistress in his life—a source of relaxation, joy, and escape.

  As Mother regained a bit of strength, Yuri, visions of rubles dancing in his head, announced that he, too, would write a book about her. But he needed to get hold of the tapes Genna had recorded of his conversations with Mother—tapes in which, Yuri suspected correctly, there would be some mention of Mayakovsky. He had gone through Genna’s documents, which were kept in the Seventieth Street cellar, and found nothing beyond a few pages of notes on which Genna had scribbled a list of questions and answers. (“How large was Mayakovsky’s prick?” Genna asks in one such exchange. “How should I know?” Mother rages in reply. “I’m telling you for the thousandth time I never slept with him!”) So Yuri started to pester Alex about Genna’s tapes, and Alex remained a master of evasiveness, just as he would be, a decade later, on the issue of Mayakovsky’s letters. “Perhaps my secretaries put them in a bank vault,” he’d reply to Yuri’s queries. “Are you sure such tapes even exist?” “Maybe Genna destroyed them before he died.” So poor Yuri had to interview Mother from scratch and seems to have encountered difficulties equal to Genna’s: Never a competent researcher or a fluent writer, Yuri was still trying to do a book on Mother thirteen years after her death, when he wrote me to ask for any family documents that could help him in his task.

  (Only after Alex’s death did Genna’s tapes resurface: They’d been in Alex’s office desk all the time, in a clearly marked envelope, and were sent to me along with other contents of his office files. They helped me to understand the difficulties Genna had faced as he had “worked” with Mother in the 1980s: His entire body of research—the only result of those years of “interviewing” her—consisted of some three and a half hours of conversation. They are often made unintelligible by the muddling effect of drugs on Mother’s mind and moreover are filled with her amazing lies. Trying to hone an ultrachaste self-portrait for posterity, one of the many falsehoods she puts forward is her assertion that she and Alex had not become lovers until the summer of 1940, after my father’s death. Notwithstanding the fact that her last will and testament was to leave me all of her “personal possessions,” which included a prewar correspondence studded with her passionate exchanges with Alex, she was attempting, with touching naïveté, to remake herself into an impeccably Puritanical heroine.)

  Now totally homebound, Mother still spent much time at her multi-mirrored dressing table, every afternoon carefully painting her face, arranging her hair, and getting into a satin pantsuit before emerging from her room. And each time I came into town, the same stylistic critiques took place. “Come close so I can see you better,” Mother would say, reaching for her blue-tinted bifocals. “I haven’t changed,” I’d tease. “All right, you haven’t changed,” she’d mutter, scrutinizing me with her habitually critical gaze, “someday before I die I’d like to see your eyebrows under those blasted bangs.”

  In February 1991, Alex was hospitalized again when he had his first massive heart attack, which was aggravated by his severe diabetes and the havoc already wrought on his health by prostate cancer. I rushed back from Florida, where I’d been visiting my ailing mother-in-law. Mother was in and out of hospital because of failing kidneys, and even after Alex had come home there followed a period of weeks when both my parents were hospitalized, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes overlapping by a few days. I felt a sorrowful ache of separation, sensing that I was going to lose one of them soon, dreading to speculate on which of them would be the first to go. (“Be a gentleman—ladies always first,” Mother had joked to Alex for many years, dreading the prospect of surviving him.) When Mother was alone at home she grew barely manageable, refusing to get out of bed, refusing to see doctors, refusing to eat Yuri’s delicacies. “I can’t bear to look at her this way, she looks like something out of Buchenwald, it’s all so complicated,” Alex complained to me during one of my visits to New York. “I worry so about who’s going to take care of all her needs if I’m not there to direct everything…. Seventieth Street is becoming a madhouse, it’s all very complicated.” “Complicated” is a word I’d simply never heard Alex Liberman use. So far everything, for Mother’s Superman, had been flexible, doable, manageable. Through the use of that novel word I was beginning to hear him say, “I’m trapped. This is ghastly. She’s killing me.”

  Our worst flaws and our grandest qualities, so I’ve observed, tend to be intensified by the weight of time. As if it were too fatiguing to carry the burden of all our attributes, with the advance of age we shed most moderation, pare down to essentials, become in every way more extreme. Colette grows both kinder a
nd more voracious, Isak Dinesen more anorexic yet more clement, you, dear reader, may see an increase in both your altruism and your hypochondria. My mother, alas, was an exception to this rule: Shedding all her legendary generosity, her capricious but often extravagant kindness, in her last years she grew only more devious, more intractably selfish, more self-absorbed. There was the inevitable ravage wrought on her psyche by the Demerol addiction. What struck me as most painful in this last phase of my parents’ lives was Mother’s impulse to totally deny that Alex, too, was ill. Both his prostate cancer and his heart attack had seemed to fill her with jealousy and anger: Through his new illnesses, he was threatening to become a greater center of attention than she was, and this, for her, was beyond the pale. Deprived of her life’s central dynamic—to remain the principal focus of Superman’s concern—she resorted increasingly to the only weapon she could manipulate him with, food. She turned into the hunger artist and starved herself for everyone to heed; her diet became the central topic at Seventieth Street, her blackmail was now carried out through the primal orality of the infant. In the space of eighteen months, Alex hired and fired thirty-four cooks in a vain attempt to get her to eat. He would send all over for the delicacies she had loved in the past—Menshikoff chocolates, a sweet that could only be found in Chartres, France; quenelles de brochet and chocolate mousse from La Grenouille; white truffles and Calissons d’Aix from Fauchon in Paris. She would pretend to be pleased by the sight of these old favorites, take one tiny taste of them, and push them away, saying they were not as good as they used to be.

  Whereas Alex’s first query to me, during the room-to-room shuttling I engaged in when they were both hospitalized, was to ask how Mother was, she never once asked me about Alex’s condition. “She was so devoid of any concern for Alex,” Dr. Rosenfeld recalls, “that I couldn’t detect her love for him.” Her principal distraction, in those last months, was to probe the degree of control she still maintained over the family. I particularly remember an episode some five weeks before she died when she was lying in her hospital bed, looking frail, tidy, and conniving. I brought her greetings from Cleve. “He sends kisses,” I said. “He loves you very much.” “Everyone loves me, except you,” she retorted. Before I could counter with some denial, she sat bolt upright in bed, raised her wasted arm and pointed an accusing finger at me. “You don’t love me, you’re just afraid of me,” she said loudly. Then she fell back onto her bed, looking very pleased, and added, “I’m just kidding.” Oy, I thought to myself; ace, set, match.

  Beyond Alex taking center stage as the gravely ill patient, there were several aspects of his behavior that had alarmed and irritated Mother in their last few years together. He was making new friends, engaging in novel ventures, without her advice. Alex’s central project in those years was a biography of himself being written by a young author, Dodie Kazanjian, who quickly became his closest friend. Mother was too smart not to realize that the choice of Dodie, a petite, dark-haired, vivacious woman who adulated Alex, signaled his rebellion against the tall, blond, aloof Valkyries (Hilda, Mother, me) who had heretofore dominated his life. “Alex and Dodie had a passionate relationship,” says Anna Wintour. “He had a huge impulse to self-promotion, and here was a woman who admired him unreservedly, praised him constantly.”

  Mother was dismayed by the gentle, docile Dodie and appalled by the prospect of such a book. Did Alex really think any honest, decent biography could be written during one’s lifetime? she repeatedly asked him. And was he really important enough to deserve a biography? “Tu vas te couvrir de ridicule,” “You will be an object of ridicule,” she warned him again and again when deriding the project. “Who is that woman?” she would ask me about Dodie Kazanjian, miffed because he had never before made a close friend on his own. “That girl is simply not our kind, she doesn’t even speak a word of French—how can she expect to understand us?” (Indeed, even I, who liked Dodie very much, once asked Alex why he had not chosen a multilingual Condé Nast writer such as Joan Juliet Buck. “She knows too much,” Alex quickly replied. “I want a tabula rasa.”)

  In sum, Mother remained, until her end, a court jester of sorts, pricking at Alex’s inflated ego, relentlessly prodding him to remain more modest, curbing both the wild child and the gypsy in him. But what invoked her greatest fury, I suspect, was her sense that in this biographical project, in his friendship with doting Dodie, Alex might be preparing a new, post-Tatiana life for himself. For Mother was far too possessive to wish for Alex’s extended survival. Well might she say, “Be a gentleman—ladies first” but in her mind’s eye she saw him walking right behind her in that revolving door to the beyond, and she was furious to see the arch survivor balking at her scheme.

  I particularly think back to the time when Mother had returned from a stay at New York Hospital on the same day Alex had been readmitted to it with a new rash of cardiac symptoms. It was shortly after dinnertime, and I found her all dressed up in her satin pantsuit, lavishly made up and manicured, watching television with Melinda. She seemed to have been eagerly waiting for me, for she even rose to greet me, leaning on her cane, and then motioned to me, with her familiar beckoning—“Psst psst!”—to come into the adjoining room. She cornered me in the living room and whispered, with great urgency: “About Alex, those doctors are barking up the wrong tree. He does not have any heart problem—that’s all foolish gossip! He’s just at the hospital for a diabetic checkup!” She straightened herself up with whatever majesty she could summon and added imperiously: “So he’s not at all as sick as I. I’m the only one who’s really sick.”

  The oracle had spoken. She returned to the library and resumed watching TV. I went upstairs for a bath and before going to bed dropped into her room to say good-night. Her body, whenever the elaborate finery came off, looked piteous. By this time, she was taking only tiny batches of liquefied foods—spoonfuls of mashed potato and broth, Yuri’s kisel, and oatmeal if it was made by Alex himself. Her weight was down to ninety pounds and her thin-as-sticks thighs were totally covered with boils and lacerations, caused in some part by protein deprivation, in greater part by the Demerol shots, which had penetrated every available inch of her limbs. There were threats of infection, and the nurses had carefully treated the wounds with antibiotics. She may have noticed me looking at her legs, and to veer my mind away from the injections, said, “You remember Aunt Sandra’s legs in her last years…. They were always bandaged, it’s genetic.”

  Alex came back from the hospital a few days later, and then family dynamics grew even more complex. The day after he came home, Melinda phoned me to say that Mother had awakened Alex several times during the night, calling out to him or throwing magazines onto his bed. Moreover, at 5:00 A.M. she’d tried to persuade him to go downstairs and make her some oatmeal—his oatmeal, she said, was the only thing she could still eat. “But Boubous, I’ve just had a heart attack,” Melinda quoted Alex as saying. “I’m not allowed to go downstairs yet.” By this time, Mother’s retort could have been expected: “But I’m sicker than you are.” The following day, I heard that Mother had asked Alex to find her some oysters and a special kind of mocha ice cream she craved: It was midnight, most stores were closed, and he’d complied by going to the Waldorf-Astoria for these goodies, which after sampling Mother declared worthless. Upon hearing these reports, I left for New York and called Isadore Rosenfeld, asking him to lay down the law and have Alex and Mother sleep in separate rooms: Alex should have my old room across the landing from theirs; I could stay with a friend a few blocks away.

  Dr. Rosenfeld grasped the problem immediately and appeared at Seventieth Street, dictating the separation. “I can’t assure his survival if he doesn’t have a quiet room of his own!” he commanded over Mother’s virulent protests. But Mother’s ever-powerful instinct told her that it was I who had initiated the new sleeping arrangements, and she was furious at me. As soon as the doctor was out of the house, she shouted down to the library, where I’d been reading: “Francin
e!” I always knew I was in hot water with my parents when they called me by my French name rather than the russified “Frosinka.” I walked up to her room and saw her standing up, which she’d refused to do for weeks, leaning on her chest of drawers. “It’s up to us and us only to decide where we’re going to sleep in this house!” she tried to shout, emitting a thin, hoarse whimper. “Don’t you ever meddle in such things again! I’ve never done anything to keep him up! He’s getting plenty of sleep!” And she slammed the door in my face harder than she’d ever slammed it.

  I walked across the landing, shaking, into Alex’s new room. He lay on my old bed as he’d lain for fifty years on his own bed at evening rest time, his arms folded behind his head. “Thank you for being here, darling,” he said. “I’ve just called the carpenters and painters to fix up a room for you upstairs, in my old studio.” And indeed, two weeks later—this was the old Liberman magic—his fourth-floor studio had been remodeled into a room and bath for Cleve and me. I spent as much time as I could at Seventieth Street, observing the tragic aura that marked this late, demented phase of my parents’ mutual lifetime passion. What tolls hadn’t drugs and illness taken on this legendary marriage? Alex the tough exile, the self-preserving survivor, had started to withdraw from his great love as soon as he’d sensed that she wished to lure him into her self-destructive path. And when she’d realized that her Superman couldn’t dance his subservience to her anymore, that her magic spell on him was waning, Mother had seen no more reason to live.