The Romanian (29 page)

Farther down the road in Giuleşti, we gawk at the biggest gate, a rustic Arc de Triomphe. The massive structure is supported by thick columns decorated with the Tree of Life, rosettes, star petals and crosses enclosed in circles. Its large main doors, meant to give passage to horses or oxen, have semicircles cut out of the top, under which is a line of little fleurs-de-lis. On the right, a newer-looking door under an archway is meant for less majestic traffic—that of humans. Although the gate looks over-decorated, there's nothing oppressive about it, perhaps because of its pleasing proportions. I doubt it was designed from blue-print; it probably grew from the dimensions of the wood that was available. As Brancusi said, “Measurements are harmful.” He thought that all measurements had already been taken by Nature. The question he never answered is whether Nature is not only balanced but also avaricious, the source of a primal appetite that leads inevitably to the greed and commerce that, in my world, will destroy Nature itself.

Back in our taxi, we have to wait several minutes as another farmer lumbers down the road. This one is wearing mud-caked pants with an improvised slit for a fly, and a bedraggled peaked hat. Wooden staff in hand, he leads a horse with a frayed canvas bridle, pulling a wooden cart piled with twigs, obviously his only source for cooking and heating. Surprisingly, this man stares us down, a determined, wily stare full of stubborn presence. There's also a tinge of Romulus's accusatory look, a challenge to my polluting presence.

We drive back toward Mara, feeling elated. Romulus's usual catlike crouch has softened into a kind of proud relaxation, revealing his satisfaction with my finding something interesting about his country. A few miles down the road, we pick up a hitchhiker, a gangly blond farmer with a strong-boned face, tired eyes and one hand wrapped in a thick white bandage. Two weeks ago, he lost a finger while sawing a tree. He managed to get to the hospital in Baia Mare on horseback without bleeding to death. However, the lost finger, which he forgot to collect, arrived after him, too late to be grafted on.

At the foot of a mountain, Emil spots a husky peasant woman selling mushrooms by the side of the road. Having made more than three days' pay chauffeuring us, he decides to treat himself. The mushrooms are laid out in rust, white and brown piles on a blanket, and the woman has a stubborn look of pride on her face. Emil strides toward her like a gladiator ready for combat, but she fixes his face with shrewd, narrowed eyes and a sly, toothless smile. She demands 200,000 lei, about six dollars, for a large grocery-sized bag full of the mushrooms, and Emil shows how absurd he considers the price by turning his back to her and moving toward the car. The woman shrugs imperturbably, waits until his hand is on the door handle and calls out a lower price. The pantomime recurs several times, until Emil has talked her down to 30,000 lei, about a dollar. As the woman is scooping the mushrooms into a bag, the mood between the two mutates abruptly. Raucous chuckles pass between them, a rascally twinkle bouncing off both sets of eyes. Then Emil climbs into the car and tosses the bag onto the backseat with a macho flourish, and we head back up the mountain, which is now fog-free.

After dropping the hitchhiker at the hospital clinic, Emil takes us back to our hotel. He's hoping, he admits, that we're planning to stay for a while and that we'll use him as chauffeur every day. But when Romulus explains that we expect to leave early the next morning, Emil's face sinks into a disappointed frown and he hugs us farewell like a brother. The gesture produces a sentimental feeling in me. “He was cute. I hope we run into him again.”

“Don't bet. Every day paper has story about somebody poisoned by wild mushrooms.”

The drive back to Bucharest the next day is accomplished in only nine hours, once we determine a much more efficient route. During it, I try to broach the subject of our relationship by telling Romulus, “I think I'm learning to love you in a different way.” He puts a finger to his pursed lips, like a sorcerer worried about releasing someone from a spell. He turns up the radio, which blasts more Romanian rap. We pull into a wild, honking traffic jam in Bucharest just as the sun is setting, and get the car back to the Marriott fifteen minutes before the rental place closes.

Romulus admits that this is the hotel where he once had a bellboy connection. He'd bring three girls to the casino to find tricks, and the bellboy would lend them his room for the purpose in return for forty percent of the take. The story clothes the ostentatious curving staircase, crystal chandeliers and respectable gleaming floor with a lack of authenticity, as our rental agent, a genteel, chubby woman with carefully manicured nails and a sensibly chic suit, fastidiously figures the charges by hand. She looks up only for a moment to call our attention to a lavish wedding party moving up the staircase. “It's gorgeous, isn't it,” she gushes, pointing to the bourgeois-looking older groom and young white-clad bride. “She's too fucking young,” Romulus blurts out in English, adding, as the agent gasps and pales, “Must be for the money.”

The uncouth remark makes the pen in her fingers slip, and she breaks a glued-on nail. Gazing at the padded bill, I feel like lecturing her with a maxim of Brancusi's: “Beauty is absolute equity.”

XXII

Carol is in the hands of an attractive, redheaded little
Jewess of the most scandalous reputation.

—MISSY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LU-PES-CU.
The name rolls off my tongue in all its contorted sensuality. Ever since I read the biography of Carol's last, permanent mistress, it has become an emblem of all the delicious peaks and deadly troughs of passion I've been enduring.

Lupescu:
the woman who thought love could rule the world. If there's anything more improbable than the union of a Jewish intellectual from New York and a Romanian street hustler, it has to be the shocking liaison between Prince Carol—a member of the royal Hohenzollerns and the future king of Romania—and Lupescu, a Jewish shopkeeper's daughter with a promiscuous past.

Maybe it's grandiose of me to inject a relationship that changed the political destiny of a country into my own abject narrative. But sitting in my mother's well-appointed living room as I wait for her gay home health aide to arrange a week's worth of pills, it occurs to me that history follows a trail of sputtering desire, often calling on a delusional pair of lovers to generate the sparks. Its greatest dupes are those who think this time will be different; but if it weren't for us, the world would suffer from a dismal lack of stories.

I can picture Lupescu in 1925, in Bucharest, mincing toward a military parade ground in a black crêpe Chanel dress with a shockingly green waistband and knife-pleated skirt. She has put all her bets on an impossible prize, a romance with royalty. Prince Carol will be at the parade ground. She's determined that he'll notice her.

Today Lupescu could easily be mistaken for any high-end Parisian drag queen; but in 1925, her Cupid's-bow mouth, pancake-white face and flaming red hair were a repository for male fantasy. No matter that the black crêpe Chanel was last year's Paris fashion—all she could muster from her small nest egg as the ex-wife of a petty officer. Libido is no impotent tool. It zooms past every limitation.

Lupescu was, according to the history books, a poisonous femme fatale, one of bohemia's grasping opportunists. Born in the Moldovan town of Herţa to a father whom writers portray with the clichéd, hook-nosed images of the Jew, she decided early in life that the only barrier to identity was a lack of imagination. For this I'm rather fond of her. Like me, she actually believed that identity could be transformed—or at least defined—by the power of love. Incredibly, she accomplished her fantastic goals, going from demimonde flirt to the most powerful woman in Romania.

As Mom, Lupescu's contemporary, now confined to a walker, hobbles into the living room, I try to picture her in 1925 in a similar flapper-style Chanel dress. If only she hadn't thrown out all her old clothes; I'd probably be rummaging through her closet this very moment.

Carol's Titian-haired temptress, Lupescu, who was blamed for the fall of Romania to the Nazis.
AP / WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

As always, my own fatal lady has put on makeup in my honor. In an exhausted, powdered face discolored by a poor heart and many medications, her vivid blue eyes scrutinize me hawkishly. She's trying to pinpoint any flaws in my grooming or the dark circles under my eyes as proof of her position that it's time to forget about that Romanian boy and stay home. From the kitchen wafts a mixture of odors of the welcome feast she's been preparing: a large pot roast, potato pancakes, a marble layer cake and other high-calorie treats. Alert to any foolish waste of money, she inspects the gift for her that I've unrolled on the floor: a brown-and-white-striped woolen blanket with its long, matted sheep's wool and fragments of twigs from the fields. I'm rather proud of the import, having smuggled it past U.S. Customs. At any rate, discussing it provides a welcome distraction from one of the reasons for my visit. Mom's ninety-two-year-old sister, my aunt Lil, is in intensive care. Mom's curtness about Lil's illness is a cover for her distress. It lurks behind her few words on the subject in a kind of agony. Strangely, grief comes out as anger in her case; sensing her raw nerves, I'm walking on tiptoe.

Blanket rolled and plastic-bagged, Mom announces the task we're to complete. She wants me to help her go through all the family scrapbooks and put them in order under her command. It's a daunting task. Aside from the seven albums of photos documenting family life from the '30s through the '90s, there are twelve scrapbooks containing curling news clippings that my father fastidiously collected whenever he or my mother made the papers. Hundreds are about her, starting with her promotion to head of Syracuse University's research library in the early '30s and running through the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s as she climbed the ranks as a Democratic politician and community activist.

Using a brass-tipped cane to imperially point out objects and shelves, Mom directs me to haul and rearrange the heavy, dust-laden albums. Her face betrays no sentimentality about the lost prizes of the past, only a stern, managerial authority about getting them all in order.

We stack the albums on the kitchen table, and I open the one on top, leaf through the brownish crumbling pages. Mom's trajectory is a mini-version of Queen Marie's—from innocent country girl to power-wielding politician. It starts with the minor PTA presidencies of a bored housewife, then gradually blossoms into all-consuming directorships in the state Democratic Party and the National Council of Jewish Women. There are exhausting campaigns for board of education or state assembly and a short stint as the county's election commissioner, followed by directorship of the Jewish Community Center. By the 1970s appears a long bio in
Who's Who of American Women
; and as with Queen Marie, the images of her harden with age and accomplishment. She goes from a beaming, busty white-gloved fifties housewife holding a plate of cookies at a bake sale into an authoritative, overweight matron at an election headquarters, with a sober steel trap of an expression.

I can't help thinking of Lupescu's very different journey. The pictures in biographies show the expensively gowned self-styled Madame Pompadour rapidly mutating into an overweight, middle-aged harpy with the squinting eyes of a bookkeeper, the king's chief advisor and dominatrix. Yet as her torso swells, she never abandons her designer gowns and rather vulgar glamour, often photographed at casinos or in the back of limousines.

Essentially, my mother's roots and hers don't differ by much. Neither does their need for power and influence. Lupescu, however, had a taste for adventure and luxury, and played with fire at a time when her life was constantly in jeopardy. Mom's greatest needs were for security and respectability. She always played by the rules.

Tanklike images of Mom in seal coat and lampshade hats begin to dominate by the early ‘60s, when she'd reached her heaviest weight and my father had made enough money to dress her in furs. There's something implacable, forbidding and all-knowing about her during this stage, a painful contrast to the frail image across from me now with shriveled arms and stooped back. I look up at her with a pleading expression of exhaustion, hoping that she'll say we can put off the rest of this task until tomorrow. But Mom's not the type to let a job overwhelm her. A running joke between my brother and me is that she'll jump out of the coffin to dig her own plot at the graveyard, just to demonstrate how it should be done.

Near the end of one album, a clipping startles me. Five very handsome teenaged hoodlums with Elvis haircuts, one of whom has the dazed look of a blond Billy Budd, are being booked at the police station for sixteen shocking thefts in one night. The article says that my dad, their court-appointed lawyer, later got them off the hook by pointing out a loophole in their arrest.