Fear of Fifty (5 page)

“By the time you were pretty, I didn't even care,” she says, “because I'd had to love you so just to keep you alive.”

My older sister, Suzanna (Shoshana Miriam, nicknamed “Nana” after some baby mispronunciation), had been sheer perfection at birth: round, auburn-haired, bright-eyed. I was the designated ugly duckling—but more loved for all that—or so the story went.

I always used to scoff at that story when I was younger, but now I believe it. The rage to keep a child alive is seismic. It overwhelms all other considerations. My mother's passion and my father's midnight milk runs kept me breathing. That—and the luck of my parents having found an iconoclastic pediatrician.

Dr. Aubrey McLean was a fierce Scotsman who dared to take on the milk lobby. Fifty years ahead of his time, he pronounced me allergic to cow's milk, and had me fed on acidophilus milk and raw scraped liver. No matter how much I shat, I was to be fed and fed: some nourishment would have to stick. Every day he came, examined me, and sat with my mother discussing babies, life, fate, and how he hated the medical establishment—which had cast him out for his radical views. He was also a drunk.

“He saved your life,” my father says. “He's a big part of the story. Or maybe he was just in love with your mother.” How will we ever know? Dr. McLean, wherever you are: Thanks.

Born in wartime to a big European-style family—my parents, my sister, my Russian-speaking maternal grandparents (who never taught us Russian so that they could have a secret language)—I remember early games like “running away from the Nazis” or my grandmother lathering my hands with Ivory soap to wash away “the Germans.” Thus did the war enter my childhood. I remember deliberately wetting my bed at night so as to be taken to my parents' bed, to sleep between them in that safest of all places—both dividing and joining them. I remember looking up at the ceiling of their room to see kaleidoscopic light shows—“peas and carrots” I called them, meaning the fragments of green and red on the insides of my lids when I closed my eyes again in their big warm bed.

“The tempter under the eyelid,” Dylan Thomas names this flickering creature. Is it that tempter who makes a poet?

My memories of early days are few, and all of them are visual. I may even remember being in a carriage, rolling through a park, and looking up at myriad green leaves fracturing the light. Never am I happier than looking up at leaves, so I imagine this relates to some early infantile euphoria. The leaves in the park, the optical illusion created by small octagonal bathroom tiles, which seemed to form a funnel into another world as I leaned over my seat on the bathroom throne and stared at their changing configurations on the floor—these are the most vivid memories I have.

By the time I was two, we lived in the apartment I re-create in all my dreams—a rambling neo-Gothic affair occupying the top three floors of a building at 44 West Seventy-seventh Street, opposite the Museum of Natural History. We moved there from Castle Village in Washington Heights in 1944, and stayed until 1959, when we moved to another prewar palazzo, the Beresford, on the north side of the museum.

My childhood memories of home are at once spooky and grand. The building on Seventy-seventh Street had been built for artists at the beginning of the century, and the studio had north light. We were always seeking north light, it seemed, like some strange plant life growing twisted to reach the sun.

The apartment I remember is probably not the apartment that exists today—now far more elegant than in my forties childhood. Lions' heads framed the living room fireplace; the dining room had dark wood paneling and Gothic moldings and faced a court; the kitchen had an ancient hooded gas stove and a zinc sink; the bedrooms were spaced along down a crooked hall; and a stony foyer, with Gothic wood trim, opened out into a stony hall where you summoned a mirrored, paneled elevator whose whorled wood looked like midnight owls half-hidden in midnight trees.

The living room ceiling was double-height and covered with something called “gold leaf.” (In my child's mind, I imagined these harvested from golden trees.) Four Venetian-looking lanterns swayed from its darkened golden squares. The front windows faced the museum with its brownstone facade and green conical turrets; the back windows saw the sunny courtyard and the leafy gardens of the New-York Historical Society and the row of limestone mansions on Seventy-sixth Street. Above the living room was a balcony, its rail hung with a Balinese batik on which evil demons danced in profile. And up two flights of stairs was Papa's (my grandfather's) studio, with a trapdoor, a ceiling that pointed up like a witch's hat, and two huge windows—one facing north (that unchanging light that artists seek), the other south (too mutable, thus often darkened with double green shades manipulated by pulleys).

Papa's studio, filled with artists' accoutrements—plaster masks (of Beethoven, Keats, Voltaire), a real skull, a real skeleton, reproductions of T'ang dynasty horses—was both a place of refuge and a place of fear. It smelled deliciously of turpentine and oil paint, like some enchanted wood. But the death masks of Beethoven and Keats, and the skeleton and skull, gave the place a creepy air. You would not want to be there alone at night.

Every Halloween, the studio became the site of ghost and vampire storytelling. A candle would illuminate the skull, and the skeleton and death masks would wear white sheet shrouds like KKK members. Papa would set a painting of another skull (Yorick's perhaps?) on his old paint-encrusted easel (which had traveled with him from Edinburgh, Bristol, and London many years ago when he first migrated to the New World, again escaping the draft in England as he had the Russian draft as a teenage boy in Odessa). We think our lives so singular, but historical forces lift us up and fling us down. My grandfather (like yours and yours) fled Europe and its wars.

My mother told the story of Dracula—embellishing it bloodily—and the children shrieked in fear and pleasure to hear of the undead, of fangs, of maidens pale and anemic from their nighttime trysts.

On normal workdays, I was always welcome to paint beside my grandfather. He would prepare me a little canvas (he always proudly stretched his own), give me an extra palette filled with such mellifluous colors as alizarin crimson, rose madder, viridian, cobalt blue, chrome yellow, raw umber, Chinese white, and he would place two little metal clip-on cups, one for linseed oil and one for turpentine, in the thumb-hole of the palette. “Don't muddy the colors,” Papa would say, giving me both sable and pig bristle brushes. Then I would paint away at my grandfather's side, in utter bliss, stoned on the smell of the turps and the sound of brushstrokes. Papa whistled Russian folk ballads and Red Army songs as he worked. Seventy-seventh Street might as well have been the banks of the Dnieper.

Papa was a tough taskmaster. If I “muddied colors” or failed to take my painting seriously, he would rage and chase me down the stairs with his maulstick, whipping the air. He never had to hit me. His roar was enough to terrorize me. I have read with amazement all these books about childhood incest and abuse, and I know that my grandfather's roar was abuse enough. How unstylish to have to report that no one molested me in childhood. Except psychologically. It was enough.

My grandfather had a studio, my father had an office, but my mother set up a folding easel when and where she could and resented this bitterly. My grandmother meanwhile ruled the house, chasing after our Jamaican maid, Ivy, to make sure she did things right.

Iviana Banton was the feisty West Indian woman who ran our household (when my grandmother would let her). Her hands were leathery and black on the outside and marvelously pink on the inside. I loved her accent, and West Indian speech patterns still seduce my ear.

Ivy was ugly, with a huge wen on her nose, sprouting a hair, but she was alive and strong. I learned early that being alive and strong were far more important than being beautiful.

Despite enough analysis to support a small country, I have repressed all early childhood memories of my mother. I know she both adored me and resented adoring me, and her extreme volatility had to be filtered out like poisons from a household tap. I loved her more than life and I was also terrified of her mutability. My older sister was often physically violent to me, twisting my arm till I fell to the floor writhing in pain; she also tormented me by “winning” my gold watch in fixed crap and card games, embarrassing me in front of friends. Two women tyrannized me for much of my childhood, but my memory is blank for most of it. Still, I conclude that my conciliatory temperament, my tendency to hide my anger even from myself, then explode years later, or use my pen to poison relatives, must stem from years of forgotten emotional tyranny.

No complaints. Everyone needs something to shape a complicated character. Tyranny was the force that created my love of liberty, my identification with the underdog, my passion for the rights of man—and woman.

When my sister Claudia was born in 1947, the whole family constellation shifted. Suddenly there was “the baby.” Suddenly it was the postwar boom and my father was rich—or so it seemed. Suddenly my parents did things like fly to Havana or Jamaica for winter holidays or to London and Paris for summer ones. Suddenly there was a baby nurse who wouldn't let me touch the baby because I had caught ringworm from my best friend's cat.

Home from kindergarten for what seemed like an eternity, I was banished by the baby nurse from the baby's room. The little redheaded interloper—my sister—ruined my life. Everyone fussed over her. My mother lay in bed like a lady of leisure; my grandparents moved out to a nearby apartment (banished at last because my parents had now been analyzed and had outgrown such retrograde Mitteleuropa notions as extended families). Life changed dramatically. And mostly I remember standing in a tub, holding my gauze-swathed arm above my head and being hosed down by my mother, who wanted to make short work of me so she could run to “the baby.” That damn baby—how Nana and I made her suffer. We bundled her in suffocating clothes and made her sit in the doll carriage. We dragged her into the linen closet, which was still our running-away-from-the-Nazis cave, because even though the war was over, it wasn't over in our heads. There, we would eat butter-and-applesauce-and-powdered-sugar sandwiches (based on a recipe in a Booth Tarkington novel my big sister was reading). There we would hide and whisper, running out to the kitchen for more supplies when the coast was clear.

Claudia smiled sweatily and put up with all our mishandling. She was “the baby.” She knew her place. Today she tells me how much she resented us. That was nothing to how much we resented her merely for being born. While we went to school, she got taken to Caribbean islands in the sun. While we were left with Mama and Papa, she was with Eda and Seymour. Of the three of us, she is the only one who calls our parents Mommy and Daddy. And we also resented her for that. My parents seemed mysteriously like siblings to me and my older sister. And my grandparents seemed the real parents. Maybe that was why they had to be banished.

When I was eight, my older sister thirteen, and my younger sister three, my grandparents set sail for Paris, hoping to find the artists' Paris of Papa's youth. He had sojourned there as a poor Russian art student before he married, subsisting on bananas donated by some art-loving Jewish philanthropist—possibly a Rothschild—or so it went in family myth.

“Mirsky wanted to go without her,” my father says. “He thought he could dump Mama with us.”

“But I refused,” my mother says. “How dare he have the delusion he could recapture his youth?”

Mama and Papa sailed on the
Mauretania.
Little black-and-white square glossies record that fateful day: Claudia and I racing around the decks in our English chesterfield coats, matching bonnets, and kid gloves; Nana a sullen, sulky, Elizabeth Taylor clone of a teenager, draping herself on assorted deck chairs and smokestacks and flaring her nostrils for the camera.

My parents must have felt as liberated as we felt bereft. And as for Papa and Mama, what on earth could they have been thinking? How could the Paris of 1951 fail to disappoint an artist who left Montparnasse in 1901? He was no longer young, no longer single, no longer in love with bananas. The Russian-Jewish boy from Odessa had become a man of the world (or at least a man of Manhattan). How could he go back? It turned out he couldn't. He and my grandmother missed their grandchildren too much. Paris proved no substitute for us. In six months, Papa and Mama sailed back.

A donnybrook ensued. Papa and Mama wanted to move back in with us, and my parents (and their analysts) would not let them. Papa and Mama were too pre-Freudian to understand all this, and they never got over the hurt. My mother found them another West Side palace (with north light), a short walk away, but Papa and Mama refused to forgive her. Nor did they forgive Paris for having changed in fifty years. Time was supposed to stand still. Alas, it never does.

So I am fifty and Papa and Mama are dead. Tomorrow I am going to lunch with my father to see how much I got wrong in this opening chapter.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.

—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Fortunate are those of us who are daughters born into knowledgeable, ambitious families where no sons are born...

—Tithe Olsen,
Silences

 

 

It's Thursday and I've made a date for lunch with my father to verify “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.”