But perhaps not in Montreal, and not this week.
At the hotel that first night, Mom sat down to dash off a letter to Suzette to say we had arrived safely and were getting settled. Montreal, she scribbled enthusiastically, “a le charme de Paris et la modernité de New York.” The city had the charm of Paris and the efficiency of New York.
Since her childhood with Alexandra, Mom had always been superstitious about running into priests. “Un prêtre ça porte malheur,” she would tell me—priests bring bad luck—then she’d take me by the hand and we’d cross the street to avoid them, exactly as my grandmother had done with her back in Sakakini. But we were now in a city of priests, a city of four hundred churches, of crucifixes and shrines and votive candles and modern-day pilgrims who prayed with abandon. We hadn’t come to find God in Montreal, yet God was finding us, God was everywhere around us, and somehow that reassured us, made us more hopeful.
I was hungry again: that was the first sign. There were creperies on Saint Catherine that sold wafer-thin pancakes sprinkled with sugar or jam. I’d devour several of them at once while Edith watched delighted.
They tasted delicious, and nothing had tasted delicious of late.
Shortly after we arrived, Mom telephoned the Habouchas and we were invited to come over. We made our way to a modern building in Côte-St. Luke, one of Montreal’s tonier neighborhoods. In his apartment perched high up in the sky, my father’s friend, one of his closest companions from Cairo, greeted us like a lord of the manor. Victor Haboucha had traded his white sharkskin suit for an elegant double-breasted navy blue blazer with gold buttons, tailored slacks, and sleek, expensive shoes. He looked jaunty and debonair—as if being uprooted and transported thousands of miles to a land of cold and snow hadn’t fazed him one bit. He and his wife gave us a tour of their home, which struck us as the height of luxury, a far cry from our modest ground-floor digs in Brooklyn.
Mrs. Haboucha motioned us to a door that led to a sunroom filled with plants and flowers.
This was “le terrarium,” she declared. Mom looked momentarily stunned.
“Le terrarium?” she repeated, and Mrs. Haboucha nodded, her superior social status established beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Victor was my father’s age; his wife wasn’t much younger than Mom. Both had been forced to reinvent themselves in a culture that was alien and foreign. Yet they seemed to have found their way. Victor, for example, was still a boulevardier; he simply frequented different boulevards than the ones he’d loved in Cairo.
Edith, I discovered, was a methodical traveler. She wasn’t content as I was simply to stroll up and down Saint Catherine poking my head into the fashionable boutiques; Mom wanted to consult guide books, to explore, to take in as many of the sights as we could handle. Commanding in her pantsuit, she would lead me by the hand to the city’s center where the tour buses gathered.
We took guided tours constantly, obsessively. There were two-hour tours and four-hour tours, tours with multiple stops at shopping venues and tours without any stops at all, where a large bus simply whisked us from one tourist destination to another, and a guide kept up a loud stream of chatter as Montreal dissolved into a blur of churches and more churches. It was a city that believed in miracles.
And we were in the market for a miracle.
Each one of our tour buses began with a visit to the Old City, and then, after a requisite stop at Expo 67, the site of the old world’s fair, they’d begin the climb up and around Mount Royal for a closer look at the luminous steel cross that dominated the city, the cross that we could never seem to escape.
The tours all ended on a high slope of Mount Royal, the grounds of a sprawling modern-day shrine called Saint Joseph’s. We were in the Lourdes of Montreal, our guides informed us, where thousands of desperate travelers—the sick, the infirm, the disabled—journeyed each year. They would climb on their hands and knees up the hard stone steps to the shrine in hopes of finding a cure. No disease was so virulent, no condition so crippling as to be beyond the healing powers of the Shrine on the Mountain.
I noticed that no matter when we arrived—early in the morning, late in the afternoon—the church was thronged. Inside a small chapel, thousands of red votive candles were burning, and there was an overpowering smell of incense, incense so thick it was difficult to breathe. In a small crypt behind the chapel, Brother André, the oratory’s founder, lay buried; a glass case nearby contained his heart.
There was also tangible proof that miracles had taken place. Tucked away in discreet alcoves were hundreds of ancient canes, decaying crutches, tarnished steel braces, walking sticks. They had been left behind years, even decades, earlier by invalids who had made the journey to the shrine on the mountain. In some corners there were so many of them they reached all the way to the ceiling. I leaned over to touch a cane, as if that would dispel any doubt I still harbored about the possibility of a godly intervention.
We had spent months hoping for a miracle, Mom and I, only to hear there were no miracles to be found. We’d had no choice but to put our faith entirely in science and medicine. Doctors, hospitals, tests, procedures, oncologists, radiation machines, radiotherapy sessions—those were our salvation, we were told. There were no shrines in New York and no one left who believed in them anyway.
Standing there, looking at the altar with its ten thousand red candles, we were believers once more, every bit as much as the pilgrims who wept at Brother André’s grave, or the visitors who kissed the glass case that held his heart, or the Christian soldiers who crawled up the one hundred steps leading to the oratory on their hands and knees in supplication.
At night the city changed. God went home and his churches were locked shut; the memorial candles flickered out and were replaced by the lights of a thousand restaurants and cafés and nightclubs. Saint Catherine, the saint of martyrs, now presided over a crowded streetscape of tourists and summer revelers.
Our last night in Montreal, we didn’t want to go to sleep. We wandered restlessly from one café to another, one creperie to the next. Neither of us could bear the idea of going home to New York City.
Neither of us wanted to consider what awaited us once we got there.
A theater on Saint Catherine Street beckoned; ticket buyers were queuing up to see the new 007 film, Live and Let Die.
I was hesitant at first. Back in New York, my family had tried taking me to the movies, but I couldn’t sit still. Instead of the images on the screen, my mind would drift to my treatment, and I wanted only to flee the theater. Besides, neither Mom nor I were great James Bond fans. But the theater was crowded, it was a lovely, balmy night, and we were still in the same state of exhilaration that had overtaken us from the time our Air Canada flight had left New York, even now that we knew we were heading back.
At some point halfway through the film Edith leaned over in the dark. “This should be your motto,” she whispered.
I looked at her not quite understanding.
“Live and let die,” she repeated, and she was smiling, yet I could tell she was serious.
“Loulou, that has to be your philosophy from now on.”
And that was how my mom addressed the darkness of the prior months, by urging me to heed James Bond.
She didn’t elaborate, not then and not later, when we returned to our hotel room. She was, I realized, telling me that I had to change—that if I had any hope of surviving, I couldn’t grow up to be like her, timid and meek and passive.
My mother had led a life of sacrifice. She had sacrificed herself for my father, had abandoned her dreams to marry him, had given up the key the pasha’s wife had handed her and all the doors it would have opened. She had gone on to devote herself to us, her children. But as far as she was concerned, my illness was enough of a sacrifice and she was telling me not to be like her, not to give up my hopes and ambitions. I had to become tough and even ruthless—I had to live and let die.
She packed silently, neatly folding her pantsuit and
putting it away at the bottom of the suitcase.
We woke up the next morning and caught our scheduled flight back to New York.
· 15 ·
The Fall of Afterward
At last, the summer of 1973 was over and I was supposed to start college. Back in the spring, when I had settled on Vassar, I wasn’t convinced I would actually be able to attend—I felt too weak and too sick, and my treatment seemed endless. I was sure the doctors were lying to me. I had a feeling I would be there at Memorial for years, submitting to the unrelenting daily regimen of blood tests and radiation, blood tests and then more radiation.
Suddenly late in August, I was told I was free to go: I had completed my therapy, the doctors declared. I weighed ninety-eight pounds—twenty pounds less than I had a year earlier, and I was crushingly tired. I could barely walk a block or climb a flight of stairs without feeling that I would collapse. How was I going to manage on my own at school, without Edith helping me?
Besides, I wasn’t ready.
I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to dress or prepare for Vassar. My fashion consultant was my brother Isaac, who felt the only store that sold appropriate clothes was B. Altman’s. Off we went together to the cavernous building on Thirty-Fourth Street. I was a stranger to the great Fifth Avenue department stores—when Mom and I shopped, we favored discount outlets.
As I walked with Isaac up and down Altman’s elegant and largely deserted floors, I realized that I could afford nothing—not the wool crew neck sweaters he seemed to think were essential to my wardrobe, or the cotton turtlenecks that went with them, or the corduroy jeans, or the one accessory he pointed out in a hushed tone as the most important of all: Pappagallo shoes.
My brother fancied himself a connoisseur of high prep.
As far as he was concerned, I had to have a pair of Pappagallos.
They were located in a special corner of Altman’s called the Shop for Pappagallos. This small fanciful universe had the look and feel of an exclusive private boutique. There, all along the floor and on small shelves, were little felt handbags with wooden handles, belts that had gold buckles in the shape of seashells, silk scarves, as well as the famed signature Pappagallo loafers. Made of soft Italian kidskin, they came in every color scheme imaginable—pink and mustard yellow and lime green and navy blue and crimson red.
I stared at them at first slightly disoriented, not quite understanding all the fuss. They looked nothing like the shoes my friends and I were used to wearing in Brooklyn—chunky, clunky, aggressive high-heeled numbers that were either brown or black. We didn’t wear flats at New Utrecht High, and we certainly, certainly didn’t wear pastel pink flats.
Besides, I didn’t have enough money to buy the simplest pair. My brother seemed impatient. If I was really going to attend Vassar, I needed to wear Pappagallos.
I pictured an armed guard standing at Main Gate, peering at my feet to see if I was wearing my usual budget shoes from Miles on Eighteenth Avenue, and frowning; I didn’t really understand high prep and its meticulous, ironclad rules—not yet—but I knew instinctively that I should heed my brother.
I finally purchased one navy blue wool crew neck Isaac assured me would at least pass muster. And that, along with careworn jeans now a couple of sizes too big and some blouses bought on our trip to Montreal, made up my college wardrobe. I packed to leave for Poughkeepsie.
When I went back to Memorial for one final checkup, I ran into Elena Barnet, my social worker. She and I were very close: She had sat with me day after day as I awaited my treatments. I decided to confide in her my angst over the Pappagallos. She seemed both amused and sympathetic and urged me to buy at least one pair. I nodded but I knew I couldn’t swing it. I would have to start Vassar without Pappagallos.
Then it was time to go. We went to Grand Central and boarded the train to Poughkeepsie, Mom and Isaac and I. Each of us was holding a piece of luggage or a parcel. We took a taxi to the campus and made our way to my dormitory.
I had been assigned a room in Noyes, a low-lying modern structure built in the late 1950s that was nothing like the gracious nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Tudor-style buildings on the rest of the campus.
It certainly wasn’t the living arrangement I had envisioned. Isaac had taken me to visit Vassar one day in the summer, a day when I’d been granted a rare reprieve from my radiation treatment. We had passed through stately Main Gate and walked onto a lush, verdant green campus with massive fir trees, towering pines, and flowering bushes. A few stray students were lounging on the grass, reading. The library looked almost like a cathedral with its vaulted ceilings and massive stained-glass window.
I thought that it was the most beautiful place on earth.
I had actually fallen in love with Vassar before I ever stepped foot in it, a captive of its mystique. This was, after all, Jackie Kennedy’s Vassar I would be attending, Jane Fonda’s Vassar, the Vassar of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Vassar that had shaped and nurtured Mary McCarthy. On my first visit, I’d wandered into the library and asked for the yearbook of the Class of ’33, McCarthy’s class, and sat there staring and staring at the photo of the pretty young woman with the slight ironic smile. I couldn’t wait to sip sherry with my professors and nibble on Vassar Devils, the chocolate dessert smothered in vanilla ice cream, marshmallows, and fudge sauce that was served exclusively at Alumnae House. I was all set to dress in pink and gray—the school colors that symbolized the “rosy dawn of women’s education piercing through the gray clouds of ignorance.” These were all pleasures that awaited me, according to the mounds of college literature postmarked Poughkeepsie that kept descending on Sixty-Fifth Street.
Reading McCarthy’s The Group in high school had given me a sense of a charmed, almost magical environment where elegant young women shared rooms in the Main Tower, then came together every afternoon to mingle over sherry and biscuits in the beautifully apportioned Rose Parlor.
Noyes—modern, functional, deeply antiseptic—didn’t have a Rose Parlor and didn’t, to my knowledge, serve sherry. I had been assigned a single room upstairs, in the back of the second floor; my window, I noticed to my shock and dismay, overlooked a small cemetery.
Unlike my classmates who were moving in with enormous trunks and open crates overflowing with rugs, bedspreads, stereos, curtains, even small refrigerators and TV sets, and whose parents were helping them unload their belongings, I had brought nothing except what we could carry—my clothes, two sheets, a blanket, and a pillow. I had a portable manual typewriter, an Olivetti, that was my prized possession, and I thought it very wonderful until I noticed that everyone around me was lugging massive electric and Selectric typewriters.
I looked at my little blue-green Olivetti; suddenly it didn’t seem quite so formidable.
Then I sunk down on the bed, not much larger than a cot. My room struck me as impossibly bleak and bare.
“Tu est sûr que tu veux rester?” Edith asked, sensing my dismay. Are you sure you want to stay?
Did I have a choice? I shrugged. She and my brother left and I was alone.
I wandered downstairs to the lobby. I was suddenly starving, but I had no idea where to eat. I asked the lone person I spotted outside, a boy, a freshman like me, resplendent in white tennis shorts and polo shirt, with black sunglasses. He amiably pointed me in the direction of the central dining hall.
Vassar had a long tradition of dining rooms in every dorm, each with its own special culture and personality. The dining rooms were part of the school’s charm and had figured prominently in McCarthy’s novel. I imagined them as cozy and intimate, where I’d wander down to breakfast in pajamas and a bathrobe. I had no idea they had been abolished in a cost-cutting move the year before to make way for the stark efficiencies of “ACDC”—the All-College Dining Center.
I arrived at a large, imposing building with white columns. Inside, it was sheer chaos—crowds of students with trays in their hands, queuing up on long lines that fanned out in different directions
.
“Where is the kosher section?” I asked a woman who appeared to be in charge.
I had assumed there’d be a special place for me to eat, stocked with the kind of food I liked.
Loulou as a freshman at Vassar; dining card for the college’s central dining hall, fall 1973.
The woman seemed taken aback. Perhaps no one had ever asked her this question.
“We don’t have kosher food,” she replied, eyeing me curiously as if I were a visitor from another planet. Suddenly I felt like one. I was completely stunned. I had been adhering to a kosher diet as far back as I could remember. When I’d picked Vassar, it never occurred to me I wouldn’t be able to eat my normal fare. I was used to having kosher food around me everywhere I went.
I hadn’t figured out yet that the rest of the world wasn’t like my little corner of Sixty-Fifth Street.
“There is cottage cheese and salads over there,” she said helpfully, pointing to an area off to the side.
My first night at Vassar I dined alone on a bowl of cottage cheese and wondered what I had done and how I would survive.
As I sat surveying the scene, I realized that many of the freshmen seemed to know each other—no doubt graduates of the same upscale suburban high schools and boarding schools.
Some of the Vassar women were very striking, with shoulder-length sandy hair they wore swept back with a headband. They sat at large tables, seven or eight of them, speaking intently with one another. Most wore polo shirts or white turtlenecks tucked under a sweater.
There they were, the living embodiments of the Group. But I didn’t feel especially happy to have found them.
Breakfast, at least, felt hopeful.
The Arrogant Years Page 21
