Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  It was a strange place this. Not a chapel. Yet built to resemble one. Like a theatre-set. Yes. In which they were all spectators of the drama of death. God was absent, yet the trappings of his churches were in place. The mock Gothic arch. The purples and burgundies. The pulpit from which he had spoken his set text in memory of Sylvie; and Jacques, his friend, Jacques, had evoked in mellifluent French a Sylvie of old. The hush was there, despite the music he had chosen. Music to evoke her, music she might have favoured. Raucous, black. And Gershwin’s Rhapsody, the one that had started them off on this road together.

  Sylvie had no taste for the funerary. If anything, the Sylvie of old would have preferred a noisy wake, frenetic dancing, a bacchic rite. But that was impossible, here. Now.

  He had spent his grief in the day and night he had sat at her bedside. Gazing at her. In her death, she was very young. Young in her frailty, her pallor, her flowing blonde hair. A mere girl draped in her favourite nightgown of black silk sprawled luxuriantly on white sheets. A girl playacting.

  She had created her own mise-en-scene. A dusky rose in the bedside vase. A copy of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal on the pillow by her side. A bookmark showed the page, ‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans’ - ‘I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.’ And the note. To him. Perched on the table beneath a bright green apple and a bottle of pills. A single word, ‘Assez’. Enough. Beneath it, one of her fantastic beasts, a scorpion with a Medusa’s head. He had pondered the drawing, its cold angry gaze, the intricacy of the creature’s skeletal limbs. Her parting gesture, almost a battle cry.

  He had read the poem over and over again, though he knew it well. Yes, it was pure Sylvie. It captured her state: the limping weariness of her days, her sense of abandonment. She was that cemetery abhorred by the moon, that old sphinx, ignored, forgotten by a careless world. Yet still an enigma. Her countless memories, her secrets, her store of billets doux and romances, gone with her.

  There had always been men and once he had cared a great deal about that. He remembered their last jealous scene, all those years ago, in Paris, some time after her return from Poland, a journey she had always refused to talk about. He had confronted her, ‘It won’t make any difference Sylvie, but I just want to know, want to know whether this child is mine or someone else’s, Andrzej’s perhaps.’

  She had looked at him for a long time, at first solemnly and then with mounting anger. ‘What does it matter what I say? You won’t believe me. Yes. No. What does it matter? You love your suspicion.’ Then raging, she had added, ‘Men, men can never know who their children are. A B C D or E, any one could be my children’s father.’

  And, of course, she had been right. On both counts.

  What he had loved about Sylvie had always in part been his inability to pin her down, to capture her. To know her. She was the very embodiment of his desire for the unknown, the unknowable, the other. In death, she had returned to that and returned his desire.

  Jacob had sat by her bedside and cried. He remembered the many faces of Sylvie, the child-woman with the mischievous glance who had stolen apples in the Paris market, the girl he had obsessively trailed, the passionate transgressive creature who had boldly come to his flat and pleasured him to the point of pain, the frightened child who pushed him away and clung to him simultaneously. He remembered the proud, fearless Sylvie of the war years, the seductive Sylvie on her many stages, feeding off her music and the eyes directed at her, and giving back amply in return.

  He grieved for what was lost and what had never come to be. In himself as well as in her. The maimed Sylvie of the post-war years, receding ever further into a life he couldn’t penetrate. The Sylvie he had failed to help or to come to terms with. A Sylvie for whom the promise of America with him had not borne fruit. For whom its freedoms had proved stifling. A Sylvie who abhorred her ageing image in the mirror. The cruel Sylvie, the Sylvie of the drinking and drug bouts. The Sylvie who couldn’t contend with motherhood, with the loss of her youth.

  He knew that he had failed her. He had ceased wanting her. And then ceased trying to erase the distance between them. He had stopped caring and replaced feeling with form, the patterned semblance of a twosome, of family life.

  Grief gave way to a guilt which gnawed at him.

  Her suicide was a reproach.

  It was also something else. He must try to communicate that to the children who were filled with evident self-recrimination, Katherine particularly.

  He must try to explain to them that Sylvie’s suicide was above all an appropriate finale to her life. A brave transgressive choice for a woman who felt she had reached her end. ‘Enough’. She had struggled to shape the messiness of life into a whole, like an artist. And like an artist, she had chosen the moment, the scene of the full stop.

  Sylvie’s coffin slid away, swallowed up by flames they couldn’t see. He couldn’t link that final event with Sylvie. It was no longer a part of life. She lived on in them, in their memories, not in the ashes he knew he would soon be given.

  Jacob squeezed Katherine’s hand, urged her up. How tall she had grown, and beautiful. Almost a woman in her simple black dress beneath the auburn sheen of her hair. And his son, his golden son, so like his mother. Sylvie had left him these two. He had a great deal to be grateful for. He ushered them to the door. It was time for leave-takings. They formed a little row. The three of them. The survivors. Murmured condolences were offered, accepted.

  Katherine was trembling. He caught Princesse Mathilde’s eye. She was already at Katherine’s side, embracing her, leading her to a corner. Mat. Mat had a genius for sensitivity. His debts to her were never-ending and yet she had never once made him feel that he owed her anything. Her tact always and ever gave him back his freedom. He would willingly, he suddenly thought, die for her.

  The crowd was thinning. Only a small cluster remained. Jacob embraced Mat, his daughter, his son, Violette, Jacques. What remained of his family.

  ‘Shall we go?’ he said softly.

  The long black limousine drove them through the wintry city. The Princesse had insisted that they gather at the Waldorf for a light lunch. Insisted that Katherine’s friend, Antonia, join them.

  They sat round a quiet corner table. Food arrived. Katherine unable to swallow listened and watched. Everyone was talking, reminiscing, laughing. The laughter shocked her. Antonia was asking Leo about medical school, hanging on his words. Katherine half overheard. She realised that she didn’t know this young man who was her brother. She had rarely seen him outside the context of the family. Despite the letters, he was a stranger. They had barely spoken for what seemed like years.

  Katherine sat shrouded in silence. Her mouth wouldn’t form syllables, wouldn’t open. It quivered.

  She remembered the note she had penned to her mother after their last meeting. ‘You’re a vile, stupid woman. I wish you were dead.’ She had felt wonderful after she had written it, as if at long last, rather than simply running away, she had struck a blow for herself.

  She had left the note in an addressed envelope on her desk and it had vanished. Had the maid picked it up, had it posted? She was too afraid to ask. And then, back at Madame Chardin’s, she had forgotten about it.

  ‘Don’t you want your pâté, Kat?’ Leo asked her for the second time.

  Katherine shook her head.

  ‘I’m ravenous. They don’t feed us at med school.’ He took her plate.

  Why wasn’t he more upset? He loved Sylvie, was her favourite.

  Leo read her mind. ‘Cheer up, Kat. Sylvie hated long faces. She wouldn’t have wanted you to be miserable,’ He bit his lip as he said it, for of course in the past Sylvie had often wanted Katherine to be miserable. He put his arm round her for a moment, ‘Am I being callous? The way I put it to myself is that Sylvie made a choice. The people I deal with in the hospital everyday aren’t usually in a position to make choices.’ He squeezed her shoulder, shrugged.

  ‘Yes, and forty-si
x is quite old enough to die,’ Violette murmured. ‘After that, what’s a woman good for?’

  Katherine’s eyes flew to the Princesse. She hadn’t heard. But her father had. There was an odd expression on his face. He was looking wistfully at the Princesse. He pecked her lightly on the cheek. Jacques did the same now, but with exaggerated fervour. The Princesse, her face glowing, caught Katherine’s gaze. She smiled a benevolent smile.

  That night her father sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair. As if she were still a little girl. She asked him, ‘Will you marry Princesse Mathilde now?’

  Jacob looked at her in surprise. ‘Why no, it hadn’t occurred to me to propose.’ He hesitated, wondered if he should tell her. But no. The moment wasn’t right. ‘Not that she would have me in any event,’ he laughed the matter away.

  Katherine’s wide grey eyes quizzed him.

  ‘Would you like to have the Princesse as a mother?’ he asked her softly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Katherine mused. Her glance played over a room which was no longer her own. ‘I’ve sometimes thought she was perhaps my mother,’ she suddenly said in a rush and then paused, turning the statement into a question.

  Jacob forced her eyes to his. ‘No, Katherine,’ he said evenly but with an undertow of insistence. ‘Sylvie was your mother.’ He stroked her hair again, lightened his voice. ‘Though I know the Princesse loves you as if you were her own child. You are happy in Switzerland with her, aren’t you?,’ he murmured, hesitated. ‘I wish you had known your mother in her youth, before we moved to New York. She was quite different. She…’

  Katherine cut him off.

  ‘I want to come back here. Come back to live with you in New York.’

  The note of determination in her voice was not one Jacob wished to dispute.

  Katherine moved into the spacious apartment on New York’s upper East Side, overlooking Central Park and at a stone’s throw from the Metropolitan Museum. It was the place that Sylvie had insisted on buying once both Katherine and Leo were no longer at home. For Katherine, the place held no memories, yet she disliked it intensely. It was so obviously Sylvie’s lair. It reeked of her. Smelled of her depressions, her movie queen tastes, from the satin-clad bed refracted in a multitude of mirrors to the living room chaise longue where she had lain curled for hours.

  She returned to her old school. Academically, there were no problems. American history aside, Madame Chardin’s had more than adequately prepared her and Katherine set her sights on university, on Columbia, or Radcliffe or Sarah Laurence. She worked hard and enjoyed it. She also began to read her father’s books, Freud, Jung, Melanie Klein, the psychoanalytic canon, which became the subject of endless conversations between them across a dinner table which most often they shared alone. She loved these evenings with her father, was constantly aware that Sylvie’s absence had the benefit of bringing the two of them closer. And she treasured that closeness above all else. She invented a hundred little things to make him happy, to bring a smile to his face. To obliterate the memory of Sylvie.

  In other ways, Katherine’s life was less pleasurable. Her friendship with Antonia apart, she had always been something of a loner and her peers now looked at her slightly askance. She could read the gossip in their eyes, see the speculations about her absence in Switzerland, her mother’s suicide. They considered her strange, standoffish. Katherine was indeed aloof, but out of reticence rather than intent. She was also a little out of step with her schoolmates. She did not share Antonia’s interest in dissecting last week’s date and plotting the next. She had hated the one double date Antonia had talked her into, hated the squirming disaster of the back seat of the car, the searching hands, the prescribed wet good night kiss. Nor did she manage to swoon at the sound of Elvis’s voice or at the mention of Big Bopper. She sometimes thought that Madame Chardin’s school had succeeded in turning her, despite herself, into what that portentous lady called a ‘European’.

  Increasingly she felt, without putting it into so many words, that all she wanted was to read, to paint, and to make her father into that person she had seen with the Princesse: a light, carefree, witty, happy Jacob.

  As the weeks grew into months, a plan took hold of her. She would redesign the apartment, transform it so that it became a proper home, a space where friends could come, a place for gatherings, a home like the Princesse’s which always hummed. Katherine took to her plan with her customary thoroughness. She read interior design magazines, browsed for hours in department stores comparing the textures and colours of fabrics. She wanted to do sketches, prepare everything, and then surprise Jacob with her scheme.

  It was to Thomas that Katherine turned for help. Thomas, whom she met once every week or two, for dinner, or a trip to the theatre, or, if it was the weekend, a forage round the upper East Side galleries or a visit to the Whitney or the newly opened Guggenheim Museum. It was Thomas who had on their many rambles first made her see the city in all its architectural wonder, distinguishing between facades, pointing out detail.

  So she told Thomas about her plans, one Saturday in the Russian Tea Rooms. Told him with great enthusiasm.

  ‘Already a homemaker.’ he chuckled, ‘A young Jacqueline Kennedy.’

  She was aware of his implied criticism. It confused her. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked, bristling a little.

  ‘Now, now Schätzchen, you mustn’t be so quick to take offence,’ he patted her hand.

  If he had chosen to, Thomas might have told her in no uncertain terms what was wrong. He might have said to her that sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century a cult had grown up around the idea of the home. A safe private oasis far from the madding crowd, a sphere where calm and all the virtues flourished. A beautiful place over which a feminine angel presided, soothing the weary brows of males tossed in the storms of the big bad world.

  He might have told her that in the United States for over a decade now, the journals and magazines and guide-to-life books, aided and abetted by manufacturers, traders, and advertisers had sung the song of the perfect home and the perfect homemaker. And that now at last, they had found their perfect heroine, Jacqueline Kennedy. That most glamorous of all the angels of the hearth, who had come in her little pillbox hat to preside over the purest and most gracious of all houses, the White House.

  He might have told her that she, Katherine, had fallen under the spell of all this, but with a difference. The difference being that Katherine was doing it all in the name of another who was not her husband, but her father.

  As it was, Thomas merely patted her hand and said, ‘This is a very good idea of yours, Schätzchen, and of course, I shall help you in any way I can.’ He had no desire to put an old man’s damper on her youthful excitement.

  He began to take her to antique shops, sought out trade exhibitions of fabrics and contemporary furniture, bought her books on design - on Bauhaus, which brought him back to his own youth, on the Viennese Secession with its decorative flights and insistence on utility.

  Katherine was an able and eager pupil.

  He loved her eagerness, her hunger for knowledge. He loved the way her eyes, fixed in an intensity of concentration, widened as he spoke.

  Sometimes her beauty so took him by surprise, that he lost the thread of his speech. There was a quiet wistfulness about her, a reticence, a grace which reminded him of one of Leonardo’s Madonnas. She held him completely.

  He also worried about her. Worried about her attachment to her project which he read correctly as not only her desire to make Jacob happy, but to replace and improve upon her mother. He worried about her lack of friends of her own age, yes, even male friends.

  Often, after he had left her at the door of her apartment, he would ridicule himself. An old man with a Pygmalion fantasy. An old man, who had lived too much, striving to create the perfect woman. It would lead to no good. Yet she compelled him. One of the few women over time who had done so without the complement of sexual gratification. He made no
approaches to her of that kind. He laughed at himself. He was like an enamoured father, an old fool. Too often after he had seen her, he felt restless, driven to correct this unhappy image of himself in the arms of another. He would ring up one of the women in his little black book and pay for his excesses. Thomas had the vitality of a far younger man.

  Katherine knew none of this. All she knew was that she counted on Thomas. He was one of the still points in her sparsely peopled universe. She didn’t think about it, but in her mental geography, the vivid world consisted of herself and her father at the centre; Thomas and Leo, a short distance away; then a little further, the Princesse and Violette and Portia whom she still corresponded with regularly. Antonia, as the year pressed on, was gradually dropping off the map.

  It was the end of May when Katherine put her plan to Jacob. Three sketchbooks full of it.

  They were sitting opposite each other in their usual places at the rectangular dinner table Katherine always set with tablecloth and candles and fresh flowers.

  ‘Pappy,’ Katherine began, ‘Pappy, I think we should have the apartment done over. Look, I’ve planned it all.’ Her excitement shone in her eyes as she showed him her sketches.

  ‘These are wonderful, Kat.’ He turned the pages slowly as she evoked her dreamscapes for him. He saw that through them she was imagining a new life. A new life filled with friends and dinners and parties. A new life with him, before the old had been properly buried. Displacing Sylvie before she had come to terms with her. He didn’t want to destroy her pleasure, but its implications worried him. She needed to understand what she was doing.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Jacob murmured. ‘You’ve worked very hard.’ He looked at her. ‘We’ll do it. We’ll get the decorators in and do it.’