The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  It was thoroughly nerve-racking, this commute.

  Edith at first insisted on taking me to school each morning, which she hadn’t done in years. She wouldn’t let go of my hand until we arrived at the door of 181 Lincoln Place, the small faded brick building that housed Berkeley. I balked, anxious about what my classmates would say, and begged her to let me proceed on my own to the school door. “Mais j’ai treize ans—je suis grande maintenant,” I told her indignantly. There she was clutching my hand and treating me as if I were still a child, when I was old enough to take care of myself.

  I could tell she wasn’t convinced; what I couldn’t predict was her dramatic course of action.

  Shortly after I started Berkeley, Mom announced to us that she had found herself a job: She was going to be working at Grand Army Plaza, the flagship branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

  We were all stunned—each and every one of us, including Dad, who wasn’t even consulted. We had no idea she had even applied for a position, let alone said yes. One day after dropping me off at Berkeley, she had trudged across the expanse of Prospect Park West and interviewed for a job at the imposing library with the big bronze entranceway. And though she didn’t have any of the classic credentials—a college degree or even a high school equivalency diploma—she was able to draw on her vast store of knowledge and her literary sensibility to persuade the library to hire her practically on the spot.

  My father was upset, but powerless to stop her; he couldn’t even voice any serious objections. These days, Leon seemed so much weaker and less consequential to the running of our household. He was completely dependent on César, who gave him small sums from his earnings that Dad would then dole out to Mom. We were still struggling financially and Edith had to beg for every dollar to manage, so how could he possibly object to the idea of more cash for the family?

  And then there was me. Loulou, cette petite diable, Mom would say fondly; “Loulou, that little devil.” Now that I was attending a fancy school, I kept pressuring her for expensive clothes as well as more pocket money so I could keep up with my chic classmates.

  It made eminent sense, her going back to work. Yet my father couldn’t make his peace with it. Edith was changing before his eyes, and it was as if America had delivered one injury after another.

  A year or so earlier Mom had gone to be fitted for new dentures; the first set, obtained with the help of a social worker shortly after our arrival in New York, had been so painful and ill-fitting that she simply never wore them. But the new ones, made at a free clinic in Brooklyn, were more comfortable and she forced herself to get used to them. She looked so much more attractive: She could flash her lovely Ava Gardner smile again.

  With a few tweaks to her wardrobe, thirty years after her post at L’École Cattaui, my mother was ready to return to work at a library.

  It was a part-time job and she was only a clerk. Her pay was a pittance—barely above minimum wage. But no matter, to her mind she was going back to those halcyon days working with the pasha’s wife. She would be her own woman again, and more important still, she would be surrounded by books.

  She was so devout, she viewed this in near-mystical terms—as if God were giving her another chance. And, of course, since Grand Army Plaza was close to Berkeley, she would be able to accompany me every morning. I hadn’t banked on her indomitable will.

  We reached a compromise. We’d set out together in the morning, first by subway to DeKalb Avenue, then changing trains to Seventh Avenue and the long dark station that led out to Park Slope, an area that veered between faded elegance and decrepitude. Mom would walk me to the corner of Lincoln Place and, reassured that I was only a block or so from school, she’d finally let go of my hand and begin the uphill march by herself to the library.

  Edith surrounded by books at her desk at the Brooklyn Public Library, Grand Army Plaza, circa 1970.

  It was an enormous trek, and I would find myself worrying about her as she sprinted toward Grand Army Plaza. She had a choice of routes, but none was especially pleasant; and they all required her to cross the biggest, most dangerous traffic circle in New York. Grand Army Plaza was a maze of converging streets and dizzying thoroughfares—Flatbush Avenue, Prospect Park West, Eastern Parkway, Vanderbilt Avenue, Plaza Street, Union Street—and crossing it meant taking your life into your hands.

  The walk was arduous even in the best of circumstances. Occasionally, she’d cut through a small park that led directly to the archway at Grand Army Plaza, but it, too, had its drawbacks. One day, she was accosted and knocked to the ground by one of the young thugs who lay claim to this deserted patch of grass. She learned to simply run, run through it to get to work.

  Once she made it to the stately old building shaped like an open book, she could breathe again. She loved the grand entrance with its shiny bronze statuettes of literary icons—Tom Sawyer, Rip Van Winkle, Hester Prynne, even Moby Dick and the Raven.

  From the start, she found the library embracing and safe, a world unto itself, a family even as ours was crumbling. Suzette had taken several trips to Miami and was hoping to settle there, despite Mom’s entreaties that she stay close to home. Isaac had left us a couple of years earlier, first to attend a state university in Memphis, then transferring to Bowdoin, at that time a Waspy, preppy men’s college nearly four hundred miles away in Maine. Every once in a while César spoke of moving out as well. He was barely around, always off with some girlfriend or attending night school or working late.

  That left Dad and Mom and me in our vast new apartment, hanging on to each other for dear life.

  Ed Kozdrajski, Edith’s colleague at the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalog department; she referred to him as “le gentil petit Ed,” sweet little Ed.

  The library offered Edith a home that seemed far more hopeful. She was brimming over with stories about her colorful colleagues. She couldn’t wait to tell me about the mysterious Ukrainian exile and former lawyer, Alex Sokolyszyn, whom she always addressed by the honorific “Docteur Alexis”; he was her favorite. He had a Ph.D.—it was unclear in what field—and he, too, had suffered a fall in the move to America and was forced to reinvent himself and start again. Offered a job as a cataloger at Grand Army Plaza, he acquired a reputation as the ultimate authority on foreign-language books. Erudite, courtly, and thoroughly old-world, Mom idolized Docteur Alexis.

  She found another kindred soul in Fawzia El-Araby, a cataloger from Cairo. The two were constantly chatting and joking, switching back and forth between Arabic and English. When Fawzia brought a Middle Eastern lunch—falafel in pita, which Edith favored above all other foods—she’d share it with Mom. Fawzia was a Muslim, and their friendship reminded Mom of the old days in Egypt, when her social circle had included Muslims and Christians and Jews, and those differences simply didn’t matter. There was also tender Jean Nason who was handicapped and struggled to do her work despite a severe case of scoliosis, and she had trouble speaking. Mom found her so moving; Jean, she’d tell me, managed to be a superb cataloger despite her physical impairments. She also developed a bond with Ed Kozdrajski, a handsome young catalog trainee with a serious manner about him. He wore thick black-rimmed glasses that made him look stern, when he was actually very gentle and especially solicitous of her. Ed was of Polish descent but born here in New York, and he and the other Americans were in the minority. Her closest companion was Mudit Strasdins, a honey-blond refugee from Latvia by way of Canada whom Mom called Madame Mudit.

  Alex Sokolyszyn—Docteur Alexis, as Edith liked to call him—was a Ukrainian exile who reinvented himself as a cataloger of foreign-language books at the Brooklyn Public Library.

  She felt at home among these exiles—expatriates and émigrés and loners every bit as lost and diminished as she was in America. They banded together in a crowded corner of the third floor of Grand Army Plaza and there, amid carts bulging with books in every language on earth and rickety steel shelves crammed with the thick reference volumes of the Library of Co
ngress and the stacks of beige catalog cards that Mom and other clerks typed up throughout the day, they rebuilt the hearth.

  There were constant parties and café klatsches and get-togethers. Any occasion—a birthday, a wedding, an anniversary, a holiday—called for a cake and cookies and steaming cups of coffee or my mother’s favorite, chocolat chaud, which she believed offered her all the nutrients she needed to survive.

  Docteur Alexis, Madame Mudit, pauvre Jean, La Fawziah, le gentil petit Ed Kozdrajski, “sweet little Ed Kozdrajski,” who she always called by his first and last name: Her colleagues were her favorite topic of conversation. Through her telling they emerged as larger than life, major characters in the novels Mom was always beginning in her mind and could never quite put on paper save for some random jottings here and there.

  Then there was the paycheck. For the first time in years, she wasn’t dependent on my father or César to live. Mom now had a little money to spare, a little money to spoil me, more money than she’d had since the years with the pasha’s wife because for all her married life, even the period of relative ease and comfort in Egypt, she had been at Dad’s mercy, relying on his beneficence—or lack of it—to make ends meet.

  The library had changed all of that—it had restored her sense of self, it had made her independent. Edith’s transformation from Levantine housewife into career woman extraordinaire was in keeping with the changes sweeping America, and at breakneck speed. The feminist movement had gone from an imploring whimper to a raucous and angry call to arms and Mom, the delicate porcelain doll who for years couldn’t stand up to my father, who consistently sacrificed herself to his needs and ours, now had that most wondrous of possessions—a disposable income.

  As the 1960s came to a close, my mother emerged as a small, unlikely, thoroughly unheralded emblem of women’s liberation.

  My life had also changed. Berkeley was a cloister—a secluded and largely female universe where the outside world didn’t seem all that relevant. My entire freshman class consisted of twenty girls

  In the years before I arrived, my classmates—who had been attending Berkeley since they were small children—learned how to curtsy and the proper etiquette for serving tea. The school emphasized quiet and decorum—in its hallways and careworn library and wide staircase with its gleaming old wooden banisters.

  Even gym was different—gentler, more graceful than I’d known it.

  I wore a stylish dark green tunic over a white shirt and studied fencing, archery, and badminton—sports where I actually showed promise. Fencing, in particular, reminded me of Emma Peel. I never thought about her much these days; my obsession with her had faded with the passing of my childhood. But donning the white protective garb, steel foil in hand, took me back to those years when I’d loved to watch her thrust and parry and prayed I would grow up as fearless and talented as she.

  I bonded with my teachers in a way I never could at Seth Low; Berkeley was simply a different world. I had a crush on Mr. Gardine, the elegant southern gentleman who taught us English and came to class dressed in exquisite blazers, silk ties, and two-toned shoes. I found him deeply exotic—his accent, his manner, and his assignments, which were always somewhat out of the ordinary.

  But he was often stern with me; his notes to my mother warned that I was “solipsistic” and measured life “by the yardstick ‘I.’ ”

  One day, instead of giving our class one book to read and discuss, he selected a different novel for each of us—works he thought we would enjoy because they suited our individual temperaments. “The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen,” he said, pointing to me.

  It was about a young girl of about my age who is always an outsider, who never feels at home anywhere.

  Islay Benson, the aging spinster who ran the theater department, was perhaps my favorite among all the teachers. With her British accent, accent, 1940s hairdo, and severe clothes out of another era, she was a definite eccentric, an oddball in this fashion-conscious Brooklyn girls’ school. Miss Benson favored shirts with big pointed collars and long pencil skirts that brought to mind Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. She had studied drama with Frances Robinson-Duff, “the acting coach to the stars” who had taught Katharine Hepburn and Clark Gable. A quarter of a century earlier, in 1944, she’d had a starring role in a Broadway thriller, Hand in Glove, directed by the same man who discovered Boris Karloff and cast him as Frankenstein. Her theatrical past could have made her haughty or superior, but I found her, on the contrary, accessible and kind; and I felt more energized by her drama workshop than by my other courses.

  Loulou, the year she attended the Berkeley Institute, Brooklyn, 1969.

  We practiced Twelve Angry Women, an adaptation of the Reginald Rose play, and I was asked to read a small part, playing one of the minor jurors. I hadn’t acted since my long-ago stint as Haman, but I still had a passion for the spotlight—I loved showing off, reciting out loud, being on a stage.

  I was already a seasoned actress in my own way. I was still pretending to be French—a little Parisian girl, not a Cairene. It was a role I’d assumed at Mom’s suggestion in our early years in New York, when she thought it would be hurtful to say I was Egyptian. It was easy since I spoke with a heavy French accent then, and I was said to “look French.”

  Even now, in high school, I was still pretending. I didn’t tell my Berkeley classmates very much about my Cairo origins. Nobody needs to know, I thought, recalling my mother’s warnings that Americans simply wouldn’t understand our background, that they’d have no sense what it meant to be from Egypt. Americans had such loopy notions of Egypt, she’d say. She worried that they would dismiss me as coming from a backward and primitive country.

  Besides, being French carried so much more cachet at Berkeley.

  Freshman class at the Berkeley Institute, 1969/70; Loulou, standing a bit apart from her classmates, is in the front row on the left.

  The first jarring note in high school came at assembly one day, when a senior, a daughter of a rabbi, recalled going to Woodstock in the summer. I heard about flower children and the hippie movement for the first time in the auditorium of the Berkeley Institute in the fall of 1969. But that was the exception: Our lives, complete with Latin classes and dress codes, had nothing in common with the furious goings-on outside. Our teachers were clean-cut and conservative in the extreme, and life was staid—not at all about the abandon and recklessness that Woodstock and the sixties had come to emblemize.

  Mom noticed a change in my friends—they were so polite, these Berkeley girls. She simply melted when Wendy Gold called and asked her in French, and with such refined manners, whether I was home: “Est-ce-que Lucette est la?” That was exactly the sort of friend she hoped I would have.

  When Berkeley announced its first dance of the year—an old-fashioned “mixer” with the boys of Poly Prep Country Day School, an elite Brooklyn private school—there were so many rules and restrictions in place that having fun seemed almost beside the point. First and foremost, a strict dress code was put in place. Dresses and skirts had to be of a certain dignified length, and pants were off-limits. Jeans, of course, were thoroughly out-of-bounds. Some of my more fashion-conscious classmates were dismayed; they argued for permission to at least wear the sleek pantsuits that were all the rage.

  Weeks of deliberation and planning ensued. The dance was going to be chaperoned, our parents were assured. There was to be no alcohol, and drugs were quite unknown. The mother of my classmate Kim had volunteered to drive both of us to Berkeley and planned to take me home later that night; with that guarantee, off I went to my first dance.

  Yet for all the build-up and worry, it was an awfully tame affair. I walked upstairs to the assembly hall, which had been decorated and transformed into an elegant ballroom. There were the boys of Poly Prep in jackets and ties, eyeing us as we came in. Several of my classmates had dressed up as if they were going to a wedding; one student wore a striking, formal red chiffon dress. I wore a pale pink bro
cade sheath I had purchased the year before at Stern’s, the grand old Manhattan department store, as it was going out of business. I had worn it only once, to the Newark wedding of one of César’s boyhood friends. When I’d gone out on the dance floor, the band struck up, “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” as the conductor smiled and waved at me. I never felt quite as wonderful or grown-up as that night in Newark, and I figured it would bring me good luck to wear it again. It fell chastely past my knee so I easily passed muster with Berkeley’s dress code police.

  An earnest, quiet boy about my height came over to introduce himself and ask me to dance. His name was Henry Finkelstein, and I was too taken aback to say yes or no—to say much at all—but I spent the evening only with him, dancing and listening to him chat about “Poly” as he airily called his school. He struck me as sweet and unassuming—in no way a snob. I noticed that he had wonderful green eyes—Maurice’s eyes.

  He phoned a few days later: Did I want to go to a dance at Poly?

  Henry came from an entirely different background—a different world really—than mine. His father was a surgeon, and his family lived in a brownstone in Park Slope, by Prospect Park. His mom volunteered at the Brooklyn Museum, and his two younger sisters were also enrolled at Berkeley. One, Susan, was only a grade below mine. She seemed to be eyeing me curiously in the days after the dance, and I wondered what on earth her brother could have told her about me.

  “Loulou, tu va sortir avec un garçon?” my mother asked me, sounding an awful lot like Dad in his stern Old Syrian mode—Are you planning to go out with a boy? I argued that a dance at Poly Prep wasn’t really a date—though, of course, that is exactly what it was.

  Henry was un garçon de bonne famille, a boy from a good family: I figured that Mom would like that. But my efforts to soothe and reassure her failed. I couldn’t appeal to my father, of course, who would have been even more intransigent. Strangely, he didn’t even figure into these discussions. He was so withdrawn that the task of bringing me up as I edged into my teenage years was left entirely to Mom and César.