Jewish Mothers Never Die

by Natalie David-Weill

  “Leave her alone,” Jeanne ordered, finally. “She’s following her son’s example. He writes in O Humans, My Brothers, that he would have given anything for the restroom attendant at the train station to leave him in peace to do what he had come to do there. But the woman was indignant: how long could it possibly take, she wanted to know. Would he be finished today or tomorrow? Did he think he was in church?”

  The door finally opened and Louise appeared, laughing heartily.

  “I had forgotten that scene in the restroom! That reminds me again of Sophie Portnoy, who follows her son right to the bathroom where he’s trying to masturbate. He shouts at her that he’s sick just as he is overcome by a wave of the most exalted feeling of freedom. She begs him to let her in, but he doesn’t answer. She tries a more specific line of questioning: had he eaten french fries or—horror of horrors—a hamburger? She uses the same tone of voice as if she would speak of Hitler. She forbids him to flush the toilet so she can scrutinize the contents and she makes him promise never to eat out again, doing her best to pour on guilt. His father, constipated, is the next one to seek peace and quiet in the solitude of the bathroom but Sophie is hysterical and she berates him.”

  “We could probably write an entire treatise on ‘bathrooms in literature,’” Rebecca suggested.

  She turned to Jeanne: hadn’t Proust described the “little room that smelled of iris” in Swann’s Way as a good place to masturbate? To get any privacy, Marcel had to hide in the wild-currant bushes.

  “You were always watching over his every move,” Rebecca reproached Jeanne.

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t behave exactly the same way with Nathan.”

  “Certainly not. I never paid attention to how much time he spent in the bathroom, nor did I insist, when he traveled, that he write me daily to describe every detail. He could never have written, as Marcel did to you: ‘My exquisite little Mother, let me tell you first of all that my stomach is splendid.’”

  “You can’t know how it was. My son was ill, and we wrote each other even when we lived under the same roof.”

  “It sounds to me like you were an authoritarian and a possessive tyrant.”

  “Of course, that’s what you’d like to think. In fact, it was just the opposite: Marcel exhausted me. He would throw jealous fits. Take, for example, one of his famous letters, where he beseeches me not to wait up for him to come home from his dinner party, at the same time telling me how delighted he will be to kiss me goodnight. But then he adds: ‘Don’t come for me. Alas! I saw how you ran toward my aunt with a warmth that you’ve never felt for me.’”

  “Nathan never needed me that way, thank God. On the contrary, he hated having to depend on me and was always trying to assert his independence.”

  “I suppose he was never sick, like my poor darling?”

  10

  Sick and Tired

  I always thought that as long as man is mortal, he will never be relaxed.

  Woody Allen

  “In Remembrance of Things Past,” Jeanne began, “Marcel describes his first and most terrifying asthma attack, which struck him in the Bois de Boulogne. He was ten years old and he would never forget it. I can still see him gasping for air, suffocating, waving his arms, wracked by convulsions. His father and the Professor Duplay were both there too, but neither could do a thing for him. Can you imagine what my little wolf must have been going through? He was about to die right in front of his father and his friend the surgeon? As for me, it was agonizing to discover that, far from being the all-powerful mother I had believed myself to be—I had always managed to calm his night terrors—I could lose him! It seemed like hours before he began to cough again, finally breathing and getting his color back. From then on, we lived in fear of another attack that could strike anywhere, anytime.”

  “Yet, his father always denied he suffered from asthma. Proust wrote: ‘Papa tells everyone that there is nothing wrong with me and that my asthma is a pure figment of my imagination.’”

  “There were plenty of theories about what was wrong with him. Some said he was exaggerating, that it was psychological and that I was the problem, which is completely absurd! Marcel continued to have attacks after my death. His illness consumed his entire body. Sometimes, he had difficulty recovering from his attacks, which left him trembling, sweating and out of breath. You have to remember that it was the asthma that killed him at fifty-one.”

  “So he didn’t die of complications of pneumonia?”

  “His lungs were worn out from the asthma.”

  As both the wife and the mother of doctors, Jeanne considered herself to be one too, as if she had soaked up their knowledge by osmosis. As soon as any conversation turned to illness, she adopted an authoritarian air, the better to impose her analysis. Rebecca wasn’t ready to give up yet, however:

  “I’m not inventing his reputation as a hypochondriac! Didn’t he write you in black and white: ‘I prefer to suffer from attacks and to have your favor than to have neither attacks nor your favor?’ As if he could order his body to do as he pleased!”

  “Your insinuations try my patience. I wish he had never written that for all the world to quote and comment on. My own panic over his condition had no effect on his cure. So much the worse! He would have had the health of an Olympian if I had had a say in the matter. Can any mother bear to see her own son suffer? None that I know.”

  “Nevertheless, Marcel seemed to use his asthma to get what he wanted from you. Maybe he saw that you weren’t as strict with him when he wasn’t feeling well? He wrote: ‘The truth is that, as soon as I’m better, everything in my life that makes me feel well exasperates you, and you destroy it all until I’m sick again.’ And he adds, ‘It is a sad thing not to enjoy both love and health at the same time.’ It certainly seems that his bouts of illness were designed to make you happy, so that you could coddle him as if he were still a little boy.”

  “Do you really think one can simply choose to get better? I despise this modern theory that illness is all in your head and that the sick simply don’t know how to express themselves, or how to be happy or that they lack the will to get better; that sick people are just healthy people who have allowed a virus or cancer or depression or mental illness to take root in their bodies like weeds on a lawn.”

  Jeanne let her anger fly when she felt backed into a corner. Listening to her, Rebecca realized she was probably the first person who had ever questioned her on the sensitive subject of her son’s health. She gave Jeanne some time to calm down by opening Robert Proust’s thesis on the female reproductive system. She hardly understood a thing.

  Jeanne leaned over to get a better look:

  “It’s terribly dry. I never managed to finish it and I’m his mother. No need to force yourself, Rebecca.”

  “What was Robert like with his brother?”

  “Adorable. As a doctor, he didn’t know how to help him, but there were no known treatments for asthma at the time. Nevertheless, he tried everything in his power to find a solution. He wasn’t as driven in this as Adrien was, who couldn’t forgive himself for his powerlessness: what good did it do to be a doctor if he couldn’t cure his own son? Adrien reproached himself at first, before deciding Marcel was an impossible patient: he went out too much, drank too much, slept too little and did whatever he liked. He tried indirectly to change his behavior by railing against a life of social obligations, in Hygiene for Neurasthenics, calling it a ‘possible cause of excessive fatigue.’ He even used Marcel as an example, writing: ‘Neurasthenia is often the legitimate but regrettable price to pay for inactivity, laziness and vanity.’”

  “Did Marcel have anything to say about that book?” Rebecca asked.

  “It was never published, but my little wolf was highly skeptical about the power of medicine and would take no one’s advice. He preferred to spend his father’s money, which made Adrien apoplectic with rage.”

  “What did you think?”

  “That he was a spendthrif
t? Undeniably. Why did he feel the need to give exorbitant tips to waiters? Was it to impress his friends or to get a better table in the restaurant?”

  “You can’t see the forest for the trees. Did it never occur to you that he acted from generosity and altruism?”

  “You have no right to criticize me,” Jeanne shot back. “I’m sick of being called stingy.”

  Rebecca apologized; she didn’t know why she instinctively took Marcel’s side. Jeanne was irreproachable; all she had ever tried to do was to raise him properly.

  But Jeanne was exhausted by their argument.

  “In the end, it’s true: I criticized Marcel for his lifestyle, the stink of his fumigation powders, and his homosexuality. I never said it outright because he was too sensitive and emotional. Still, he knew what I thought.”

  Jeanne picked up her book, tired of talking about her son’s illness, which still affected her keenly.

  Rebecca, leaving Jeanne alone with her thoughts, walked until she came to a bedroom draped in a bordeaux-colored toile de Jouy. Amalia Freud was there, lying in a four-poster bed covered with a thick damask bedspread. Sick and tired, she had no more strength even to move. Her hair was undone and spread out over a pile of pillows. She let her eyes close from time to time, lethargic and mournful. Louise Cohen was at her side, administering cod liver oil and enjoying “playing nurse,” as if Amalia was her little doll. Weakened by her pregnancies, she was inclined to take to her bed.

  Rebecca hesitated, not wanting to intrude. She had the feeling she was in a Woody Allen movie, with his nerve-stricken, childish, narcissistic characters obsessed by their health. She called them to mind, one by one. There’s Mickey, in Hannah and Her Sisters: a chronically depressed radio producer for whom the slightest scratch is enough to drive him to suicide. Panic ensues when he thinks he has a brain tumor but, after an initial feeling of euphoria when he learns he doesn’t, he sinks into an even deeper depression without his old existential crisis to occupy him. Worst of all is his new knowledge that a life-threatening illness could strike him down at any moment; waiting for death and its unanswered questions frighten him more than even the most terrible affliction. In Broadway Danny Rose, a luckless talent agent named Danny is a hypochondriac who is afraid of the outdoors, water and death. In Hollywood Ending, it’s Val Waxman, a film maker who had his hour of glory in the eighties but is reduced to filming TV commercials. In Hollywood, people think he’s either a maniac or a troublemaker, and anyway a self-absorbed, hopeless hypochondriac. Yet another one! And that’s not even counting Ike, in Manhattan, who thinks everything will give him cancer, or the protagonist of Whatever Works, a Russian doctor who botches his marriage, his Nobel Prize and even his own suicide. All of these characters would understand what Tolstoy meant, as cited by Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters: “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.” As for Woody Allen himself, he’s afraid of everything, never leaving the house without a box of pills for his heart, his arteries, his ulcer, his anxiety . . . He stops eating red meat for fear of having a heart attack and he can’t buy a shirt without getting his analyst’s opinion. He said that “life is divided into the horrible and the miserable”: the horrible are the terminally ill and infirm; the miserable are everyone else. He concludes that, if your lot in life is to be miserable, you’re “very lucky.”

  Louise motioned to Rebecca to sit next to the bed where Amalia was resting.

  “How are you feeling?” Rebecca felt obliged to ask.

  “Not as bad as usual. Did you know that I was never allowed to complain about my health? Sigi hated it when I was sick.”

  “That’s because he was never ill himself, except at the end of his life, with that horrible cancer of the jaw.”

  “Are you joking? He was sick all the time! He suffered depression, fatigue and apathy among other things. He was his own most important patient. When he was studying the effects of cocaine, he said it gave him an energy and a euphoria that ‘is no more than the normal state of a well-nourished cerebral cortex in a person in good health.’ In other words, he considered himself far from healthy.”

  “Your son used drugs?” Rebecca asked indignantly.

  “What a horrible story!”

  “I can imagine!”

  “You have no idea.”

  Amalia sat up abruptly, her former fragility forgotten. The fact that she was wearing only her dressing gown didn’t diminish the ardor of her passionate defense of her adored son.

  “Back then, cocaine wasn’t illegal. It was thought to be useful medicinally and was prescribed as a stimulant for the nervous system. Even Coca-Cola contained cocaine until 1903. It was in 1883 that my remarkable son first became interested in it, after reading an article by Dr. Aschenbrandt, who explained how soldiers in Bavaria who had been administered doses of the miraculous coca plant proved to be much more resistant to disease than others who hadn’t received any. He obtained a supply of it and observed that he no longer felt fatigue, hunger or pain. He hoped his discovery would bring him fame and fortune, which he needed if he wanted to marry Martha. He had to wait four years. But that’s another story.”

  “He became a cocaine addict? I can’t believe it!”

  “Absolutely not. He was convinced that it wasn’t addictive and he gave some to Martha and recommended it to all his friends, so that people started saying he was a charlatan. His friend, the ophthalmologist Karl Koller, heard about it through Sigi and used it as a local anesthetic for the eyes. Koller was the one who was credited with discovering cocaine’s therapeutic uses.”

  “Oh! That must have been a blow to Sigmund’s pride.”

  “Much worse was the loss of his friend Fleischl, a morphine addict, whom Sigi tried to cure with cocaine. But Fleischl’s condition, which was very painful, only got worse, and stronger doses of cocaine didn’t help. He finally died. Sigmund felt responsible for this catastrophe, which affected him professionally too.”

  “Did that get him depressed?”

  “Sigmund was always depressed. He was special, you know. He had to be the best at everything: he insisted on mastering even the tiniest details, like how to use a certain coffee cup. In his work, which was of supreme importance for him, he forced himself to keep to an immutably rigorous schedule. He couldn’t tolerate any unforeseen changes. Everything was a source of anxiety for him.”

  Jeanne had been listening from the other side of the room, seated at a desk. She suddenly interjected:

  “Sigmund wasn’t physically ill, though; he lived a normal life, in fact. My Marcel, on the other hand, had to keep to his room, isolated from dust, germs and flowers.”

  “The difference is that Sigmund was able to manage his illness,” Amalia retorted. “He suffered from constant migraines, which led him to theorize that, rather than fight the pain, it was better to identify with it and let it hover above him. One day when he had a terrible bout of sciatica, he noticed that his beard needed grooming. How could he have let himself go that way? He decided right then and there to give up the luxury of being a patient and to return to the ranks of civilized men.”

  “If it’s willpower you’re talking about, Marcel had plenty. Otherwise, how could he have written Remembrance of Things Past, weak as he was?”

  Seeing that the heated discussion had reinvigorated Amalia, Louise seized the opportunity to make the bed and plump the pillows, humming as she worked.

  “Albert Cohen always had his health, at least?” Rebecca asked hopefully. She was getting discouraged by Jeanne and Amalia’s rivalry over whose son was sicker.

  “On the contrary, it was abominable.”

  Louise sat on the bedcover she had just smoothed and crossed her legs, prepared to provide a full account of Albert’s physical ailments. What made these women think that sickness gave their sons a kind of moral stature?

  “I witnessed firsthand the deplorable state of his health when his wife, Elizabeth, lived with me in Marseille, waiting for Albert to sen
d her money to join him in Alexandria. She would show me his letters; they were harrowing, describing his devastated emotional state and depression.”

  “It’s completely normal for someone who is alone and far from the ones he loves to have a good case of the blues. He didn’t suffer from a chronic illness like Marcel did.”

  “And like Sigmund did,” Amalia added.

  “Albert suffered from nerves, insomnia and anxiety his whole life,” Louise declared in a loud voice, as if her son’s honor was at stake. “As a student, he had all these bizarre obsessions. One of them prevented him from chewing his food, so he could only eat a liquid diet, or purees. He felt as if using his jaws would kill him.”

  “Freud would have found his case interesting,” Rebecca mused. “I wonder what he would have thought of such a strange fear.”

  “Well, he would have detected the deleterious influence of his mother, for starters,” replied a freshly dressed and made-up Amalia.

  “I was terribly worried,” Louise remembered.

  “I was more worried for Marcel than you ever were for Albert,” Jeanne countered.

  “How do you know? Albert was as asthmatic as Marcel, and depressed on top of it. He suffered from what he called his ‘black days’ right up until his death. His daughter remembers in Book of My Father how he would go for long periods when he never came out of his room, never writing a word or seeing anyone, not even his wife and daughter. They could only talk to him through the door and leave his meals on a tray for him.”

  “I suppose it’s normal to worry, even excessively, about one’s children,” Rebecca concluded. “We do everything we can for them to be happy.”

  Louise Cohen remembered Philip Roth’s hysterically funny description of Sophie Portnoy, terrified by the unusual symptoms she has observed in Alex.

  “Let me read you a passage,” Louise insisted, pulling a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint from her pocket: “‘Open your mouth. Why is your throat red? Do you have a headache you’re not telling me about? . . . Is your neck stiff? Then why are you moving it that way? You ate like you were nauseous, are you nauseous? . . . Your throat is sore, isn’t it?’ And it goes on and on.”