The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JUNE 9, 1985 I must boldly say that [Cousin] Martin died this morning. When I heard, I suddenly was suffused with the sharp, autumn fragrance of apples, those apples that lurked in the back-porch barrel. Apples store up in their cold, red-blush skins Augusts and Septembers, all the long winter. This was the fragrance of long ago, when we were all young in Lakewood, and we each went our own private ways, loving one another rambunctiously, raging and laughing.

  At night, in Lakewood, Marty and I, in bed together, became one experiment—secret, apart from the others, exploring together future possibilities through pleasure and trepidation, which neither of us understood. We became adolescents together. Then we became young men. We were one, seemingly dissimilar but one, and some part of this oneness became the lost physical intimacy—no matter what other intimacies we each formed—of seventeen or eighteen years. We never questioned this. We did not even acknowledge it. We were this hidden secret. Our terrible grandpa stumbled on our secret when we lived with him and tried to separate us, but he never did—only life did that. However, the oneness survived—not the physical manifestation, but the more important loving, admiring regard, the understanding which needed no words.

  Martin had an affair with a nurse when I lived in [the rooming house] on East Seventy-first Street. She shouted “Whoopee!” when she had an orgasm. We heard this through the heavy, locked door of the room, and we teased him…. I never thought that any of the cousinage would die. Now I am relieved that he did die; his last months were so terrible. Martin, my dear, darling, lovely, loving cousin … He will have a military funeral in the national cemetery near San Diego. For some reason this amuses me: One of us lowered with full military honors—guns cracking, flags waving, trumpets cutting the air. How very unexpected at the other end of the street.

  NOTE: In June 1985 a civil suit for defamation brought against Condé Nast by the writer Renata Adler required that Leo give a deposition. During his many hours of testimony, Leo learned that private journals may be considered evidence. Although the lawsuit was settled without Leo surrendering his notebooks, the prospect had horrified him. The result in his daily writing was first silence and then circumspection. That year their European summer began with a visit to London.

  JOURNAL • june 30, 1985 • london I've only written scraps in my accounts book. I can't force-feed these pages. I'll make myself write in Venice. But I will be adamant in August. I cannot measure the [psychological] injury or its permanence. Sudden weeping—very like precipitous showers.

  JULY 8, 1985 “No human can guarantee their future, but we will manage our past.” Reading Natalia [Murray]'s book of letters, Oarlinghissima.40 Janet Flan-ner is writing about the two parts of Barbette's face, the upper Victorian, prettily feminine, the lower a dreadful gash, a horrific male brute.41 I think of Little T's body: The lower half was male and violently tough; from the hips up he was hermaphroditic; the lower half hairy, the upper half smooth; his self-mesmerized, semi-dazed, almost wholly absorbed upper half, feminine wiles and looks, his lower half a truck driver.

  JULY 9, 1985 • VENICE Nico Passante [manager of the Gritti] asked that I please “let a photographer take your picture for a magazine that is doing a story on the Gritti.” I did. The photographer, a genial, tall, cropped and curly-head, blue-eyed American, asked Joel [Kaye], Lloyd [Williams], and Puss to move away. So—instant scene, most unpleasant, observed by all. Later, explanation: “I was never chosen for any team, when sides were being picked. I was always left to the last… rejected. The feeling is even stronger than I knew.” So, almost sixty years later, we continue to pay for the horrors of childhood.

  Maebelle traumatics—possible pneumonia reported, but then nothing wrong except age. But this Maebelle performance definitely has put paid to any moving-to-London plans for her duration. We couldn't indulge ourselves in such selfishness. Here, then, is one of the problems—not the moving, but how to cope with what must be an increasing problem—Maebelle's aging.

  JULY 13, 1985 • VENICE

  TO MINA CURTISS • weston, connecticut

  Plunging through the proof of Janet Flanner's and Natalia's love letters and life, I came upon this in the 1947 section: “Mina Curtiss … drove down from Mentone to Alessio and up to Cuneo: She has never been to Venice or Rome. I dined tonight with her and she is ‘so in love with Italy' (her phrase!) that she lands in Naples on her next visit to Europe. She compared the French so unfavorably with the Italians in kindness and charm and good nature as to make it painful to hear for me: I was never sentimental about the French.” But as the years accumulated dear Janet's despair over the French grew, as did her loathing of “modern” life, until she had (and I did not know this) a “little” nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in Paris a few days. So there you are (truthfully reported or not) in 1947, and here I am somewhat visible, locally, in 1985. If Janet lived now she would possibly be beyond despair.

  So many Italians, English think Reagan marvelous. I now avoid arguments. I always did (political arguments), but seethe with anger. Here the Canal seethes with its own peculiar vivid life, such a mixture of antique commercial enterprise, contemporary sordidness, and sometimes unexpected hilarities, unwittingly contributed by American females with country-club assurance. A superb collector's example held forth yesterday to a gape-mouthed circle. She said, “And then we went to this castle and there were these curtains, hanging in the same place, in the very same place, since the twelfth century!” Her circle gasped with awe. First the curtains, then the windows invented because of the curtains? Another (they are inevitably Southern) asked, “How do you get around here?” Her vis-à-vis: “You take a Tintoretto.” This is as good as the creature who rushed to the edge of the terrace, screeching: “Look! Look! A granola!” But Venice is impervious to all. At this moment, the waters, the palazzi are all milky opaline, glinting with midday sun.

  Some nights ago, for House & Garden to photograph, I had the Palazzo Pisani Moretta ballroom candlelighted—nine tremendous, jungle-vine Venetian chandeliers, six sconces springing like crazed thoughts from a trompe l'oeil painting, and mirrored vast walls. Great, sheer white curtains streamed into this shimmering room, and for a transfixed moment I could hear the sound of that room, a reward for a week of House & Gardening.

  Life here, in Venice, is a mixture of Proust and E. F. Benson (the Lucia books), while the cinemas here, and in the Veneto, show more pornographic movies than I ever knew were made, and everywhere—from Evangeline Bruce's luncheons to dinner in English country houses to “cocktails” in palazzi here, what is most talked about is Dynasty!!!

  Gray's mother went on a hunger strike. She said, “I will not eat until my son comes home.” A nurse has been installed. We get encouraging reports via telephone. She eats—but she has had a “moderate” stroke.

  JOURNAL • july 14, 1985 Listening to Verdi's Falstaff. I think of [Perrier heir] Alain Coblence's uncle, with his ancient appearance, his sexual curiosity, and sexually nourished wit. He is one year younger than I am. I suddenly feel myself a part of the community of old men. I have never before felt this, but I like the feeling, despite a shadow fear for loved ones in my heart. Falstaff gives me hope and confidence. As does Maestro. I see Ela, on a deep-snow day, trying to give [him] her birthday silver tray, at Lake Mohonk. Wanda, blacker than black in a mountain of blinding snow, intercepting her. Her harsh Italian words falling like cudgels on Ela's shawled head and shoulders. Later, invisibly bleeding, Ela leaning against the kitchen sink drinking milk, her smile a blue wound in her gone-gaunt face, in which her sea-green eyes seemed scooped out, the look of Oedipus after he had been blinded.

  JULY 15, 1985 The maid put one foot and her face in—to come upon me naked, but I remained unembarrassed, having, with a urinary affliction this year, lost that “sense,” for which I am grateful. If only I had not had that sense throughout my blighted, wet-pants, wet-bed (until I was eight) childhood. If only my embarrassment had left me then, how much happier my young life would have been
.

  JULY 16, 1985 The secret of glamour is to give a sense of occasion. Legend helps, sometimes it is Presence, sometimes it is Beauty, but Beauty alone, unless fortified by Celebrity or Legend (e.g., The Jersey Lily) can give only a comparatively brief sense of occasion.

  Some experiences are imagined and then lived so strongly that they become real, imagined into truthfulness, an intellectual thread in the fabric of one's life. I was sure that I saw Duse, but did I? Or was our house so full of talk about it that my experience was made real?

  DUSE I believe that my father took me to see Eleonora Duse. I think I was about eight years old, and I did not understand one word of Italian. I do not think my father understood much Italian—maybe a few curse words, neighborhood words. He held my hand, and we both sat there, tears running down our faces. I don't know why he was crying, but I was crying because, in what I now know was Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, I saw this woman, far off, remote in a haze of light, a pale wisp of woman—all love-brimming eyes, all-embracing— holding out her hungry arms to me and I thought: She is my grandmother….

  Poppa first gave me a hunger for a rich, glittering life, a life of glamour, a life born of and appropriate to golden-paved streets of the immigrant imagination. Momma was the ambitious one; Poppa, I believe was a private dreamer. I had thought that my mother was the principal family influence in my whole life, but I now realize that my father was the predominant force in shaping or pointing the way I would go. Even as he lay dying, four long cancerous years, he said to me, sitting by his bedside and reading the collected works of George Meredith (for I thought him the most difficult writer, and so I read Meredith scrupulously day after day during these awful times), he said, peering at me, “Baby, what's doing outside?” I think that in those last years he continued to see me as that little boy he took to movies, theaters, even burlesque shows.42 (1993)

  JOURNAL • July 17, 1985 Randy [Michaelson] spoke volubly on the Viardots, Pasta, Malibran (his passion). He's read through the Pasta archive, in the house of her posterity, and says she never did sing a whole Norma; that she never could. She mimed Act I and sometimes only sang Act II. There is no resemblance between Pasta and Maria. He says that Malibran was the Janis Joplin of her day—wild, probably taking some sort of drugs, spoke (and wrote many letters to Pasta in) five languages, was prodigal with her talents. He went to visit one who may be Pauline Viardot's last living descendant—Alice?—on the Riviera, and taped his visit. Alice, very old, but fully assembled, told him that Pauline had a big, metallic voice, that she burned all of Turgenev's letters the night she learned that he was dead—so much more. Randy's point: When Manuel García [II, brother of Pauline Viardot] was born Haydn was still alive; when García died, Aaron Copland was already born! He poured this and so much more out as we walked a two-bridge walk. He should write a little book about continuity. He is a prodigious monster of musical and Venetian knowledge and has a certain wry humor about his riches.

  JULY 18, 1985 Memory is a cat, playing with its own special mouse, then apparently losing all interest in its plaything (or victim) and becoming totally (can we trust that?) preoccupied in cleaning its most private parts…. As a cat concentrates on a moth high above it, finally luring that creature to its doom — but how?—somewhere a cat is playing with me.

  JULY 25, 1985 Our apartment was a refuge; my scribblings were a refuge: These are now threatened. Only our love is a refuge—solid, built over the years—I was about to say like a bird's nest, but how fragile—yet withstanding violent storms.

  JULY 27, 1985 Lunch with Mary [Martin], Hal Prince, Bubbles [Sills]. Mary: “I felt it wasn't fair.” She gave a look as if she felt that she had betrayed her “gift,” and obviously loved proving that she could play again. “Six thousand people!” she crowed. Mary has incredible verve, a husky, just-grew spirit, is the real level-eyed optimist who flew, at seventy-one, from box to balcony in the original, unpadded, Peter Foy [aerial] harnesses: “Oh!” she spreads her arms table-wide, “It's, it's flying!”—all soaring exultation and Peter Pan's cracked voice. When she laughs, she is completely laughter. Mary adores children. She has a deep sense of obligation.

  Hal is the eternal “Oh gosh” kid, with his open-faced honesty, his Peter Rabbit smile. Beverly and Hal are like two kids playing hooky from school. B: “Must we go to this dinner? Must we sit through the whole opera?” H: “Yes…” B: “But we're too old to have to do all that.” She was, typically, carrying a paper bag with fabric in it to the dinner at the Barbaro. “I don't miss the audiences, or performing. I miss singing.” Beverly's smile was the smile of Rembrandt's Saskia—life realized, wise, contemplative, all-womanliness (mother, artist, woman). Her speaking voice is slightly shocking: “I barely got out of high school!” Beverly booms, with that special singer's diction sometimes taking over from the natural Brooklynese.

  Mary on Garbo: “Oh—so stingy, the stingiest woman in the world.” When Mary and [her husband Richard] Halliday lived in River House, with Valentina below “Miss Brown” (as Garbo was called)—a ménage à trois: “We all gathered for drinks at Valentina's. I had this [exercise] machine I had bought at Hammacher Schlemmer.” (She mixed up the syllables, dyslexia being the one audible sign of deterioration.) “It whirled you around and turned you upside down. Garbo wanted me to strap her in. I wasn't going to be responsible for killing Greta Garbo, but one day I finally gave in, and there she was, upside down in that wheel, and when she came off it, she looked at me and she said: ‘You must be crazy!' “ Mary rolls on in the most exhilarated way, using the full range of her huskiness, her breathlessness, her baritones, her shouty laugh, her delight in life—Venus Rising Perpetually from Public Applause.

  AUGUST 3, 1985 • PARIS We went to visit Colette's apartment, 9 rue Beaujo-lais, now lived in by [decorator] Jacques Granges, who is off in Tangiers. We looked out through the windows she had looked from. Maria, on the cover of an album of Norma, watched from a low table. The apartment stretched across the whole depth from the rue Beaujolais to the center [courtyard]. The bedroom is where I felt her most. The inner Palais Royal was a photograph as I sat looking out at it, the trees all so precise, light aslant on their tilting trunks. [Colette's] rooms now filled with greed-and-envy objects of furniture;43 objects recalling Pavlik [Tchelitchew], Baudelaire, George Sand; a life of Marie Bashkirtseff44 next to a book on Luchino Visconti; on the bedroom shelves Pléaide editions of Proust, Colette, et al.; a Burne-Jones study on one dining room wall; a Second Empire sculpture of a woman; the colors and designs of the draperies and carpets are related to those in Ingres pictures. I also felt Little T in her bedroom, as he was before the rot took over… and Marlene … and Cocteau (a superb Cocteau in the bathroom). I asked Puss what he had to say: “It's a modest, middle-class apartment that's been taken over by a person who has very fashionable instincts. It has a kind of serenity about it, but that's the building itself.” Yes, but remember her paperweights, her play pretties—some of which were the roots of today's decorating fashionabilities.

  NOTE: On returning to America in August, Leo found a notice from the Social Security Administration stating that checks would no longer be delivered, because he was dead.

  JOURNAL • August 17, 1985 • new York city As of Thursday last, I am one of three Jewish boys resurrected: Lazarus, Jesus, and Label. One morning, the phone rang, and a woman said to Puss: “This is Social Security. What are we going to do about Mr. Lerman?” Puss said: “Oh, yes, Mr. Lerman is very eager to have a few words with you.” A horrified silence. Then: “But Mr. Lerman is deceased!” “Nevertheless, he wants to have a word with you.” Then he gave the woman my office number. I heard Stephen say: “Oh … but he does want to talk with you….” I picked up the phone, intending to sound as from the sepul-cher, but a mighty roar came out—all my anger against the incompetence of computers in the “modern” life: “What are you going to do about this?” I bellowed. A stunned silence. Then she said: “Is… this… Leo … Lerman?” “Yes!” Silence. “Th
ere's some mistake.” “Yes!” “We've been sending checks to 205 East Fifty-seventh Street, but there's no such address. There's a mistake in the computer. The computer figured you were dead.” Only now do I wonder how the communication that told me I was dead came to 205 West Fifty-seventh Street. “What is the next step?” I asked. She promptly answered: “Resurrection.” I was flabbergasted. “Is that the official designation?” “Yes,” she said, still shaken, but more in control. “Come in as soon as you can with two pieces of evidence that you are you, and we will start the resurrection proceeding.” Social Security is now God? Telling this to all who have phoned brings gaiety to nations. Also, I will now have two birthdays. Born dead, dead quite a few times—lost during operations, nearly drowned, smashed into oblivion [in a taxi] against Grand Central Station … and now officially dead by government computer and in a state of Resurrection. I conclude that I have had a charmed life.

  I finished reading The Vicar of Tours, in which Balzac shows that evil is victorious over good, especially when good is innocent. That Balzac permitted the Abbé Troubert and Mlle Gamard to triumph over poor Vicar Birotteau, leaving Birotteau nothing save old age, infirmity, and poverty, is another evidence of Balzac's genius. His villains may kill one another off and even become, in a sense, respectable (i.e., Vautrin). A prodigious cynic deals, as all cynics must, in ironies. He is a great peak above most of the “eminences” of nineteenth-century literature, as Beethoven is above those of music. Balzac is vast, a worldly writer who gets in from the outside. Proust gets out from the inside.