“Why must Louise Cohen always bring the conversation back to anti-Semitism?” Mina was asking Rebecca. “Was Albert particularly bothered by it? He must have had a depressive nature. My Romain, on the other hand, was the most carefree child, despite all we endured. All the pogroms in Poland alone! I can give you figures . . .”
Louise interrupted her: “Do you really believe that Romain was happy?”
“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life. If you want to carry the worries of the world on your shoulders, go right ahead. It all depends on how you look at things.”
“I don’t know why I bother to talk to you, Mina. You think you’re the only person who has ever known what it’s like to work hard for something. And evidently, you’ve never felt the slightest doubt, either. I can’t say the same. I was never sure my son would be successful, and I sometimes felt powerless to fight off life’s unexpected turns. I forced myself to be a good little soldier, though: I did what I had to so that Albert would have a better life than mine, and I tried to give him what he didn’t have. But I knew I couldn’t work miracles, either.”
“You’re right,” Mina conceded. “The difference between you and me is that I always believed in miracles, in large part because I could never tolerate complainers, whiners or cry-babies. God gives us a life; it’s up to us to make something of it. It took a lot of work to hide our difficulties from Romain so he wouldn’t have to worry. I wanted him to have a better life, just like you, Louise, and he did. Things weren’t always rosy at the Mermonts, but we had a roof over our heads and our clients often became our friends. And however bad things were, I always made him believe that ours was the most wonderful life. We were different and we were proud of it: we were Russians in Nice, Jews in Russia, atheists among Jews. We had no allegiances, belonged to no clan; we lived for each other, by ourselves, on the outside. We weren’t unlucky. It was just the way we wanted to live.”
Mina’s words had a humbling effect on Louise Cohen. She drew her hand across her forehead, patted her chignon in place and sank a bit more deeply into her armchair.
“I was mistaken, perhaps. Maybe you really were happy.”
“I think Romain was,” Mina replied with a victorious smile.
She began to animatedly paint a scene of their domestic bliss: picnics of rustic bread and Malossol pickles at the beach and how she would hold her son close to her in those tranquil moments at the seaside that filled her with happiness.
Louise excused herself:
“It’s natural to judge from one’s own experiences, so it seemed to me our situations were similar. But I was thinking about Albert, as usual, not about myself,” she added wearily.
Rebecca was worried again for Nathan. Like Louise, she couldn’t get her mind off her son, and she was sure he was grieving for her. There’s no shame in showing one’s pain, but eventually that has to end. She was afraid he would tire his best friend, even though Arthur would certainly have tried to shake him out of his depression and get him back in the swing of his daily activities. What was Nathan doing now? What was Nathan doing now? Had he returned to his classes at the university? Or was he home alone, grief-stricken and shut off from the world? What if he couldn’t get over her death? Her son seemed to have none of the emotional strength of Romain Gary or Albert Cohen, who had weathered so many storms. Nathan had never had the time or the occasion to become famous; why was Rebecca in this place anyway?
5
Playing Favorites
A man who has been his mother’s indisputable favorite never loses that feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.
Sigmund Freud
Amalia Freud was seated at her damask-draped dressing table, applying red polish to her nails. Rebecca was watching her, uncomfortable with her sudden proximity to this grande dame, whose authoritativeness intimidated her but whose opinions seemed invaluable. Perched erectly like a school-girl on a chair in the corner of the bathroom, she observed her surroundings, from the clawfoot bathtub in the middle of the room to the gilt mirror hanging above matching sinks.
“You never talk about your daughters,” Rebecca said. “Didn’t you have five girls?”
“Daughters are the future mothers of boys; it would be wrong to treat them as children. As soon as they are able, they must learn to help their mother and at times fill in for them.”
“You asked your daughters to help with the housework, but never your sons?”
“What’s wrong with that? My golden Sigi was a special breed of human being. Is that why he was my favorite, or did he become a genius because I was more attentive to him? I can’t say. No one contested his preeminence in the family, however. His sisters owed him their respect and obedience.”
Reaching into a cupboard, Amalia pulled out an oil portrait of Sigmund with his sisters. He must have been twelve at the time. In the picture, Anna, the eldest daughter, was holding a garland of roses, Mitzi, a basket of flowers, Rosa, a delicate branch, and the two others, Dolfi and Paula, were standing on either side of the youngest child, Alexander, who was holding a whip and a puppet. Sigmund had a book in his hand.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” Amalia remarked. “And Sigi was aware of his importance, even if he wrote to Alexander once that they were like book covers containing the story of their weaker sisters. He knew he was the head of the family.”
“And that he was your favorite?”
“Of course; it was obvious. Besides, he had the largest bedroom to himself.”
“You mean, his sisters were crowded together somewhere else in the house?” Rebecca asked, unwilling to believe that such a blatant injustice could be dealt in such an offhand manner.
“Exactly. They shared a single room. Nothing was more important than Sigi’s comfort; he needed absolute calm to be able to work. When I learned that he was upset by his sisters practicing the same pieces of music over and over at the piano, I didn’t waste a minute in getting rid of that infernal machine. Moreover, when he became a father, he forbade his own children to play an instrument. He said it was because he hated music, but I think it was because he was always wary of exposing his emotions. Silence was safer.”
“That’s a psychological explanation. I thought he just didn’t have an ear for music.”
“How could he have been able to read peoples’ souls if he knew nothing about music?”
Her tone of voice was unequivocal; it was clear that Amalia would entertain no more discussion of the matter. Her attention had turned to her image in the mirror as she powdered her already pale face. The two women remained silent.
“What if one of your daughters had shown talent for the piano?”
“I don’t see what you’re driving at, Rebecca. None of them could hold a candle to Sigi; he was a brilliant student. I realized, when he was only five years old and I was teaching him to read, that he was very quick to understand and was curious about everything. At that point, his father took over the responsibility of his lessons. He was always the top student in his class at school and he scored brilliantly on his Matura at the end of secondary school.”
Amalia ran her fingers through her long braid to undo it and began brushing her hair.
“That’s not how things are done anymore.”
“No more teacher’s pets?” Amalia interrupted, leaving Rebecca no time to explain her point.
“I mean that spoiling children is a taboo subject. People prefer not to discuss it.”
“Then you’re a generation of hypocrites.”
“Sigmund was the prince of the family, and no one was jealous?”
“Yes, Anna, who was born just after him. She was outraged that he forbade her to read Balzac and Dumas. She used to hide in the linen closet with her books.”
“And you did nothing to stop the little tyrant? You could have taken Anna’s side and told Sigmund that he had no right to dictate to his sisters.”
“He had a natural and indisputable aura of a
uthority. I never questioned it because he was right about most things. I pampered him and made a fuss over him; he was so fragile, my golden Sigi!”
“More so than his sisters?”
“His brother, Julius, was the exception. He was born just after Sigmund also, but he died of an intestinal infection.”
“Oh! I’m so sorry,” Rebecca cried. “I had no idea.”
“You can’t know everything.”
“How did Sigmund handle it, when you told him that Julius was dead?”
“We never spoke of it.”
“I had forgotten that before Freud, no one explained anything to children,” Rebecca remarked.
“That has nothing to do with it. From one day to the next, Julius was suddenly gone. What more can I say? He was only 18 months old. How could I ever have guessed that he might have wanted to get rid of his younger brother so he could have all my attention to himself? I never suspected how much his death affected Sigmund. It was only later that I learned he felt that he’d killed him. All his ideas about sibling rivalry and the Oedipus Complex stem from that experience.”
“Sigmund never acted differently?”
“My own brother had just died of tuberculosis. The two deaths became rolled into one. I had named my baby after my brother; it brought him bad luck. I should have been more careful.”
“You couldn’t have predicted any such thing. Julius was probably a fashionable name in your day. Groucho Marx was named Julius, too.”
“I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and I was alone. I couldn’t count on Jacob; he spent half the year away from home, selling his merchandise in Spain, Hungary, Germany and Austria, and my brothers lived far away too. I never saw Sigi’s distress and I never forgave myself for it.”
“But then, how do you explain the idealized vision he kept of his early childhood, before you moved to Vienna? I remember he wrote in one of his letters that ‘the happy child’ that he had been in Freiberg ‘continued to live’ in him. Why would he have remained so attached to that city?” Rebecca asked.
“My son was a genius, but there were things about him even I didn’t understand. What could he love so much about a village of five thousand people surrounded by flat, grey plains? Everyone seemed alike, whether they were merchants or shopkeepers or brokers or door-to-door salesmen, and they all spoke Yiddish. The textile trade was flourishing, and Moravia was a prosperous region, but it was a miserable, provincial life we had there compared to Vienna.”
“Maybe he liked the house you lived in?”
“It was a fairly large house we had, at 117 Schossergasse, but it wasn’t very comfortable.”
Amalia pulled a photo from her pocket and showed it to Rebecca. The house looked as if a child had meticulously drawn it, with two floors and two large windows and a square, stone roof. The owner’s name, J. Zajic, could be seen clearly on the facade.
“Freud never liked Vienna, but he couldn’t leave it either.”
“I thought he fled to London, in 1938, a year before his death?”
“That was thanks to Marie Bonaparte, one of his wealthy patients, who exerted all her energy and influence on him to leave. Even the war and the painful cancer in his jaw couldn’t make him leave. I’m still angry at him for his stubbornness: if he had left earlier, he could have saved his sisters. Or tried to at least. Four of them died in concentration camps. Luckily, Anna, the eldest, was in New York already, and Alexander was in Canada.”
“Where were you living?”
“I died in 1930, before any of that. Sigi never understood the danger. When Martha, his wife, mentioned his sisters, it was already too late.”
“Had they remained close?”
“Only he and Rosa, who was his favorite. Between his books and his patients, he had time for little else.”
“And yet you still defend him?”
Rebecca was convinced that, if he hadn’t been taught to put his own interests before everyone else’s, he could have helped his sisters leave Vienna when he did. She didn’t dare say this, but Amalia guessed her thoughts and stood up.
“Rebecca, you had just one son. You can’t understand. Sigi was my golden boy and he still is. He needed constant attention, which is why he managed to surround himself with three mother figures. Did you ever think of that?”
She explained the family structure: Jacob had had two sons with his first wife, Sally. He then married Rebecca, who never bore him any children, and this second marriage remained a mystery to Amalia; Jacob never spoke of it and she didn’t even know if his second wife had left him or had died. Perhaps she had committed suicide. Amalia never found out. Neither could she have imagined, when she married Jacob, that she would become the head of the family for his two grown sons, who were as old as she was. But it seemed natural that Emmanuel, his wife, Maria, and their children should have lunch with them every day. She loved John, their son, and so did Sigi: The two boys were inseparable.
“Maria was like another mother for Sigi, as was Monica, his governess. He wore out those who loved him the most,” Amalia remembered. “I was amazed to learn that at the end of his life, he had surrounded himself with another trio of surrogate mothers: His wife, Martha, his sister-in-law, Minna, and his daughter, Anna.”
“Did you prefer him over your other children because of a rivalry with the other two women? Because you wanted to be his favorite among the three? Or was he just the oldest child who gets all the attention?”
“I don’t know,” Amalia shrugged. Rebecca’s questioning had tired her. “Ask Jeanne: she neglected Robert and devoted herself to Marcel.”
Amalia and Rebecca had been walking for some time, passing from one room to another.
“Should we look in the library?” Rebecca suggested.
“How can she continue to read Proust all the time?” Amalia wondered in return.
“Maybe she reads to learn more about him,” Rebecca offered. “Marcel Proust is still a subject of many books.”
“As is Sigi, but I’m not as zealous as Jeanne. When I read what psychoanalysts have written about him, I feel like it’s a foreign language.”
Jeanne was indeed deep in an obscure treatise on her son when Amalia and Rebecca opened the large doors of the library. She put the book down regretfully.
Amalia didn’t waste a moment telling her what they had come for: “Rebecca wants to know why Marcel was your favorite son.”
Rebecca began to cough, embarrassed by Amalia’s directness. It had not been her intention to question Jeanne’s judgment, and even less to be manipulated by Amalia.
“Yes, I paid far more attention to Marcel than to Robert,” she began, settling herself into a chair with the contented look of a mother who has been asked to talk about her children. “But I didn’t favor him over his brother. Robert was two years younger than Marcel and he learned immediately to take care of himself. I had an easier pregnancy the second time and I think that this had something to do with his development. He never needed me. Confident and strong, he took after his father, whereas Marcel almost died at birth. Their lives were like their childhoods. Robert followed in Adrien’s footsteps and became a famous surgeon. He was the first to ever perform an ablation of the prostate, and he successfully achieved the first open-heart surgery, in 1910. Marcel, on the other hand, depended on me to support him his whole life.”
“You mean to say that your second son was a genius too?”
“Yes, but no one would know much about Robert if not for Marcel.”
“Wasn’t he jealous?”
“As soon as he was old enough, he made it a point to protect Marcel,” Jeanne explained. “He knew his older brother was different: more sensitive and delicate, more complicated than he was. So he understood instinctively that I couldn’t raise the two of them the same way, and he never took it the wrong way.”
“I seem to remember, though, something Georges Duhamel wrote about how much alike they were,” Rebecca countered. “Duhamel was a surgeon as well as a
writer and he noticed, watching Robert operate, that he had the same slowness, the same languor as Marcel. Also that they shared an almost obsessive faith in good breeding and an uncommon ability to listen to people.”
“He’s entitled to his own opinion,” Jeanne retorted.
“But isn’t there a photo of Marcel and Robert, looking perfectly elegant in their grey suits and smart little boots, where Marcel has his arm around Robert’s shoulders in a protective gesture, looking just like a concerned older brother?”
“They were still young then. I think they switched roles in the end. Robert, my other wolf, eventually became the older brother, quite naturally.”
“You didn’t actually call him that, did you?” Rebecca asked, surprised by the term of endearment.
“Marcel was ‘my wolf’ and Robert was ‘my other wolf,’” Jeanne admitted with a peal of laughter.
Robert de Saint-Loup’s name was no coincidence then: a fusion of both the brother’s name and the mother’s nickname for her sons (from the French ‘loup’). Brilliant and cultivated, elegant, terribly handsome, impertinent and individualistic, Robert de Saint-Loup cuts a dashing figure as the best friend of the Narrator of Remembrance of Things Past, and dies a war hero at the novel’s end. He is also an introvert who keeps a mistress although he loves his wife. Could he have been modeled on Marcel’s brother?
“Ridiculous,” Jeanne declared, losing her temper. “How could he have thought of Robert when he created that character? Marcel liked to have fun with names, that’s all. But you will have noticed, surely, that there are no brothers in any of Marcel’s novels. He thought of himself as an only child, because that’s the way I raised him, I suppose.”
Jeanne Proust was speaking now of Marcel’s notebook from 1908. In it, he relates the end of his summer holidays that year: Marcel was to stay in Illiers while his mother and Robert were to return to Paris. He was beside himself at the idea of being separated from his mother. Robert, on the other hand, was furious that he had to leave the baby goat he had adopted, and ran off, hoping to delay their departure. Jeanne caught up with him as he was setting off down the railroad tracks. Terrified, she tried to pull him off but he grabbed hold of the tracks. Adrien arrived and slapped the disobedient child. Jeanne, meanwhile, was explaining the situation to Marcel, who understood everything already: his father was upset that she was leaving and if Marcel made a scene about her leaving, too, Adrien would be out of patience with both mother and son. Proust was conscious of the inseparable couple that he formed with his mother; he was nothing at all like his rebellious and immature younger brother.
Jewish Mothers Never Die Page 7
