“Yes,” said her mother. A look of evasiveness crossed her face.
It was not going right between her and Rosa at all, Eleanor thought. She wished Aaron were here. Without him she felt unanchored, adrift in an Arctic sea. Her thoughts kept escaping her, dissolving like moths into a mist.
If only she did not have to look at her daughter’s accusing eyes. Rosa must sense what had happened. Eleanor felt chilled, feverish, faint. If only she could be alone for a few days, begin the journey all over again.
Several days passed. Eleanor was walking along the street. It was cold. She was going to meet Antonio at the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, where they were going to shop for the crib and a baby carriage as well as pajamas and diapers for Isabel. She would stop for a cognac to warm herself, as Antonio did. How she loved Paris. She loved watching people pass by as she sat at the little round table next to the window. The cognac relaxed her. She felt as if she knew Paris well—she had been here, of course, as a young girl on well-chaperoned vacations—but this was a deeper knowledge—she felt at home with the people. They did not treat her with the traditional hostility Parisians demonstrate towards Americans. The concierge at her small hotel would invite her down in the evening for a tisane or a glass of wine and would talk over her tribulations while Eleanor nodded drowsily and talked about her own family. The old woman seemed charmed by Eleanor. Right now the elderly gentleman opposite her was smiling and lifting his glass. She smiled back and lifted hers.
At the hospital they were so nice to her, and they did not seem to think it at all odd that Rosa was on public assistance while her mother came over from America to visit. They asked no prying questions.
She thought back to that other hospital on Long Island.
“Your daughter is schizophrenic,” the psychiatrist had said. He was a slight man with a strong German accent and an angry way of speaking.
“What does that mean?” Eleanor asked. A terrible blackness was enveloping her beloved child. She recalled that a speck of cigarette ash fell on her suit jacket as she asked the question and that one of her gloves fell on the floor.
“Briefly, it is a loss of contact with the environment,” the psychiatrist said. His bushy white brows rose to emphasize his words.
“What is the prognosis?” asked Aaron.
“We don’t know. She needs help. She can’t take care of herself right now. She must be in an institution for a while.”
The knowledge that Rosa was in a mental hospital was unendurable for Eleanor. During Rosa’s stay there, Eleanor lived in a daze. It was a nightmare to think about, a nightmare to visit her there. Only Heinrich’s presence during that dreadful time sustained her. Heinrich seemed to understand her daughter better than she or Aaron did. He comforted Eleanor and assured her that Rosa would eventually be all right.
Of all her three children, she had always felt the strongest emotions for Rosa.
Howard was a senior in high school that dreadful year. Howard, tall, stocky, seemed to attune himself to his mother. In his gruff way he was thoughtful, even tender with her. Howard was more like her than either Jesse or Rosa. There was no need for words with him. She and Howard understood each other instinctively.
Jesse was more like his sister, more like Aaron, with their intensity. Jesse played the piano for hours each day, shutting himself up in the world of his music as Aaron did with his sculpture.
She shook herself as if to shake off all the thoughts that ate into her like corrosive acid. She drank the rest of her cognac and ordered another.
Three weeks passed.
Rosa stayed in the hospital to be with the baby.
Friends of Antonio’s came to visit—Elena, Françoise, and others. Even Jean came once. Rosa passed the days knitting, reading, trying to write, pacing the corridors.
Her milk decreased. She asked Antonio to bring extra bottles of beer, but that didn’t help. She began to fall into fits of weeping. Post-partum depression, the nurses called it. But her grief had nothing to do with that. It was the way Antonio and her mother pressed in on her, tormented her. There were subtle interactions between them she could not clearly label. She was disturbed by the familiarity between them. It was nothing she could put her finger on.
When Eleanor visited, she would tell Rosa how she spent time with Antonio and his friends—she apparently did not alienate them; she had no attacks of hystérie. “You and he seem awfully close,” Rosa ventured. “Ah, not at all . . .” said Eleanor, with that almost intangible glaze coming over her eyes. If only she and her mother could communicate honestly, Rosa thought in despair.
When Antonio visited her alone, he told her intimate details of her mother’s life she had never known. “Do you know Eleanor has had lovers?” he might say. “Did you know that Heinrich has been her lover for many years?”
“No,” said Rosa, shocked. Then memories would come to her of fragments of conversation she’d had years ago with her mother, disquieting hints her mother had dropped with regard to sex.
She pictured Heinrich, a large man, his thick hair streaked with grey. Heinrich had been a close friend of her family’s ever since she could remember. She had always been fond of Heinrich.
“Aren’t you too friendly with her, Antonio?”
“Don’t be jealous, Petite,” he would say, smoothing her hair. “I’m friendly for your sake and the baby’s.”
Another time he remarked, “Your mother has the perceptions of an artist—she notices the most interesting details. She is a born raconteuse.”
He spoke of her father, however, with increasing virulence. Antonio had never met Aaron, yet now he blamed him for all of Rosa’s troubles as well as Eleanor’s. Aaron had deformed her character, as well as her mother’s. Her mother was like a lost child, he said.
Upon occasion he would present more disquieting information. “Eleanor has not respected you in the past,” he said. “She respects you now that you are with me. I’ll help you win her respect. I’ll make her see that you’re not the fool she believes you to be.” Tapping the ash from his cigarette onto the floor, sipping from the beer he had brought her, he would give her a cold farewell kiss on the lips before he left.
She found herself clinging to him, crying for him to hold her close, to tell her that he loved her.
Somehow it was not permitted to put pieces of the puzzle together that obviously fit. It seemed to Rosa that ever since she could remember her parents sent out invisible barriers that limited her perceptions. To go beyond these boundaries took an immense effort, because she was violating what they had told her not to think and not to feel.
When she was in the mental hospital on Long Island she had pondered this with her therapist. Words and words and more words. The words themselves kept her from a direct perception of what was real.
Rosa’s milk stopped flowing.
They began to feed Isabel baby formula.
Rosa wept a lot, helpless, enraged, heedless of the reactions this aroused in the people around her. They hardly seemed to exist. Only the baby, Antonio, and her mother existed.
Her father wired her a dozen red roses.
“I miss him,” she said to Antonio.
“Your father is an idiot.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“I know you. I know your mother.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Everything,” he said. “Because he is a selfish bastard who only cares about himself, you and your mother are bien foutues.”
Beneath the tears and grief, the apparent helplessness, her rage built like a deep undertow into a tidal wave. Rosa plotted escapes. Weren’t there some young Americans near Clichy who had once been friendly to her? Perhaps she could live with them. Perhaps she could find a French home for unwed mothers. She had heard of one where mothers left their infants all day while they went out to work. Rows of infants in white beds, all somewhat neglected. Barrack-like surroundings. The idea terrified her. Perhaps she could fly back to
the States, begin her life over again in California. The condescension she felt both from Antonio and her mother was unendurable. She had thought Antonio cared for her. What a fool she was. He was insane; so was her mother. She would leave them both.
But her first concern was the baby’s safety, the baby’s health. She vowed that the baby would never be wronged as she had been. She would avenge herself through Isabel. She would raise Isabel to be strong, cunning, wise, and respected. She would become the mother she longed to have herself.
But she was unable even to suckle Isabel.
CHAPTER FOUR
The photographs were Eleanor’s idea. It was her desire to make some permanent record of a situation that could not last, Antonio thought.
Jean, the photographer across the courtyard who came to their wedding, had set up bright electric bulbs that made everything seem harsh. He was aiming his camera on its tripod at their faces: Eleanor’s, Rosa’s, and Antonio’s. Rosa held Isabel in her arms.
“Smile,” said Jean. He snapped the shutter.
“Now,” he said. “Let me shoot you and Rosa together, Antonio.”
Antonio glanced at Eleanor. He believed she was half in love with him. Her skin was the color of bone, soft to the touch. Yet there was the curious removal of her mind from physical passion.
“A little closer. Put your arm around Rosa,” said Jean. He winked. How aware was he of the drama that was living itself out before his eyes? With his pale round face and steel-rimmed glasses, Jean was enclosed in a world where everything had Gallic precision. Couldn’t Jean sense the conflicting needs of the two women? Antonio felt as if his brain were being spewed out into a thin layer like dough and stretched to where it would break. When he put his hand on Rosa’s shoulder, it was cold. She wore a black sleeveless wool dress with a strand of pearls.
There . . . that was your Daddy, Rosa might say to the baby when she had grown into a serious girl of fifteen with long silken hair like his.
The shutter snapped again.
Rosa shifted towards Antonio and smiled uncertainly. The baby, wrapped in her white blanket, slept with her face turned up in the air.
“Now one of Rosa with Eleanor.”
The baby began to whimper. Rosa went into the front room to get her bottle. Its cries subsided. Antonio could hear her walking back and forth in her high heels and humming to the infant as she held her. She opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle, and stuck it in the electric warmer.
Antonio poured himself another glass of burgundy.
Rosa came back into the main room with the baby, who was sucking on her bottle.
Eleanor and Rosa moved their two chairs together, with the front wall as a backdrop. As Eleanor sat beside her daughter, a wistful expression came over her face. She resembled a French nobleman of the ancien régime, Antonio thought. There was something masculine about Eleanor’s face, despite her air of being such a lady in her tweed and cashmere, her sensible walking shoes. She had a way of seeming to say without words, “But physical relations, my dear friend, are entirely beside the point. You have not seduced me at all. What happened was merely an accident. A fitful happening between our bodies . . .”
He thought of how he and Eleanor would walk through the streets and wander from café to café, talking to friends of his whom they met. One night she scribbled out a chant in French on the back of a napkin that was lyrical and haunting. She had the sensitivity of a poet. She was une poetesse manquée. She brought him riches of the personality that she could share with no one else. Eleanor had a quality of listening, of compassion that made him yearn for all the love he had been starving for. She revived memories of Alma Iñez. Alma Iñez had loved him in the way he longed to be loved. But Alma Iñez was married; divorce for her was out of the question. Her husband was wealthy and she had three children by him. Alma Iñez bore a fourth child, Antonio’s, a son named Ricardo, who must be five years old now. Antonio had never seen Ricardo, except in a photo.
“Smile,” said Jean. “You each look so serious.”
Rosa and her mother were gazing at the baby, who slept. Her miniature face was like a piglet’s, he thought. There was something very powerful about that tiny infant. At times she seemed like the mother of them all, although she was only four weeks old. “She has incarnated to help us grow with her,” Rosa, who believed in reincarnation, mused one night.
“We are only sacks of skin,” Antonio said to Rosa. “And I do not know about reincarnation.”
“Voilà,” said Jean. “I’ve got three generations of women. Now let me have Eleanor alone with the baby.”
Eleanor took Isabel from Rosa, and as she held her an unusual softness suffused her features. She will love me in loving the baby, Antonio thought.
He drained his glass, poured himself another, and put “Rhapsody in Blue” on the stereo. He danced a little to loosen up his nerves. The others stared. He began to mime a conductor with an orchestra. A gnome inside him, a shrunken mannikin, began to jump up and down inside his brain. So you’ve had both mother and daughter, eh? The mannikin laughed with glee.
He was an adventurer. He was a solitary man, in spite of the countless women he knew. Perhaps he had made love to a thousand women. “Antonio is a madman,” some said, and he swallowed that in bitterness, choking on it, spitting it out. Rosa’s wedding ring flashed. Marriage—bah! The license took the savor out of making love.
He waltzed over to the dining table and picked up a chicken bone left over from dinner. After gnawing on it, still dancing in rhythm to the music, he threw it on the floor.
“Antonio!” cried Rosa.
“Never mind . . .” Antonio said. “It can be cleaned up later.”
Around this time of night he starts to act irrational, Rosa thought. It was all her fault, she believed. It was the pressures she and the baby brought to bear on him. She feared him when he was in a mood like this. He was at his best in the morning. The night air seemed filled with invisible germs that infected him—it wasn’t only the alcohol.
Jean said, “Antonio, how about one of you and the baby?”
Antonio hesitated.
“Oh, please!” cried Eleanor. “Please do.”
The gnome cackled. Antonio took the warm bundle that was Isabel and sat down on a chair. Again he thought of Ricardo whom he had never seen, whom Alma Iñez described in her letters. The brightness of the lights half-blinded him at first. Then things became clearer. The baby’s skin was so pink and fresh, her tiny hands so perfectly formed as they clutched at her bottle. Her miniature fingers. That mouth, greedy and moist. That fierce taking-in of nourishment. That mottled pink mass of flesh was responsible for the no-man’s-land of self-abasement in which he found himself. He was imprisoned by this tiny creature.
Married. A father. No work. No money.
Surely, said the gnome, he could glean some money from his belle-mére. She would not want to reveal the true nature of what had transpired between them.
Money—a golden shimmer that turned into a mirage.
“One more,” said Jean. He adjusted an electric bulb, checked his light meter, adjusted the lens.
Only last night Antonio had given two hundred francs to an Algerian because the poor devil had nothing with which to pay his hotel bill. The money weighed him down like an unclean substance. He gave with a certain vindictiveness—it was money Eleanor had given him. Wasn’t it enough that he had married her pregnant daughter? Wasn’t that enough to ask of a gifted and sensitive man? asked a Spanish grandee inside him, displacing the gnome. The grandee flicked the edges of his nails as he strode in a black velvet cloak in front of an abandoned castle. Damn, if Rosa and Isabel starved it would be on his belle-mére’s conscience.
“There,” said Jean. “I think I’ve got some good shots of you.”
Antonio handed the baby back to Rosa and poured himself another glass of burgundy.
“What will you do to earn a living?” asked Eleanor. She stood very close. He could see the rise and
fall of her bosom as she breathed, the granular texture of her cheeks. She smelled fragrant. He could also feel Rosa’s eyes boring into his back; he could feel sobs welling up in Rosa’s throat. Yet Eleanor complained that her daughter did not love her. The woman was unconscious, lost in interior forests of her own mind and sensations.
“I always wanted to be a conductor,” he said. “I do not understand money. It is a medium that escapes me.”
“What about your book? Could you write for a living? What about the article on Kennedy’s assassination? Have you heard anything about it yet?”
“I can write only if the conditions are correct. I concentrate absolutely when I write. I’m no good for anything else. Rosa knows. She’s been here when I wrote articles. But articles pay very little.” He lit a cigarette, offered her one, and lit hers too.
“I have thought of starting a photography business—somewhat different from Jean’s,” he said. “Portraits—weddings—artists—that sort of thing . . . if I had money to start such a business.”
Eleanor blew out a puff of smoke. “Yes, I imagine you would need capital,” she said. “It might be good if . . .” Her words trailed off. “If . . . it were successful,” she added in a lower voice.
“Jean earns good money,” said Antonio.
“Sometimes,” said Jean. “When things get tight I work in the darkroom of a commercial film company.”
Eleanor wandered over to the bookcase. She picked up a mahogany crucifix, half hidden by a pile of papers.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Rosa’s gift to me,” said Antonio. He took it from her and fingered it.
“I thought it was beautiful,” said Rosa. “I bought it from a second-hand dealer along the Quais.”
Crucify him. At times she seemed to be crucifying him. The situation was crucifying him. She cringed at the thought.
“But Eleanor, you are Jewish, and so this must seem strange to you,” Antonio said.
“Not really.” A look of suffering passed over her face. “We are of Jewish origin, but we are not Jewish by religion.”
Longing Page 5
