The Romanian (30 page)

The article brings up the subject of my deceased father again, a self-made lawyer who worked well with clients who were criminals because he'd come close to that life himself. During a dismal, violent upbringing in Buffalo, he was expelled so many times from high school that he didn't graduate until he was twenty-one. His nose was broken twice in fights or boxing matches; and even well into his seventies, he never lost his rough-and-ready style. Valentino-swarthy with a brooding, sensitive face, he could have attracted me when he was young, but by the time I was born he was in his mid-forties, his plush lips pursed by responsibility, his wild eyes tamed by Mom into a staid, capable, care-ridden stare.

As I've already mentioned, he was Mom's only defiant gesture. Her parents thought he was a ruffian and a no-account. Far below her respectable exterior, she has to be hiding libidinal tastes similar to my own. This isn't, of course, any reflection on her judgment. Despite her family's opposition, the marriage was an ideal one for more than fifty years. Dad was successfully rehabilitated, instead of dragging her backward into a morass of poverty and crime. When it comes to my bad-boy attachments, I can't say the same. Romulus, Mom divines, is a loser, unlikely ever to leave the elements in which he flounders or add any income to mine. I'm only thankful she has the bowdlerized version of his identity. Otherwise she'd cut me out of her will.

To tell the truth, Mom's middle-class respectability irks me. Why can't she understand that the con artist doesn't always come from a street milieu? As trenchant example, the very mayor of Syracuse who named a building after her in the 1970s was subsequently fingered and sent to jail for graft. As a newly self-proclaimed expert on the Hohenzollerns, I can tell her that kings, queens and princes can be more devious than any hustler from the streets. Their betrayals and subterfuges are no less slimy, just more epic because of their positions.

It's becoming more and more obvious that History, that whore, provides a favored backdrop for my infatuation with a street hustler. I may be draining my bank account for a shady junior pimp who spends my money on a string of girlfriends, but Carol II—a king, for God's sake—threw away his future for a sauntering tart.

Slipping discreetly toward my open suitcase, I remove one of the fifteen bottles of codeine I smuggled in with the Romanian blanket. I've been swallowing the pills since my arrival to assuage the anxiety about this trip. Although my pupils may be pinpoints, Mom's eyes aren't good enough to see. I can't imagine another way of dealing with Aunt Lil's illness or Mom's bad mood; and I know I must keep my own problems undercover. How to explain to my mother that I've left Romulus just a few days after being confronted with my female rival? The understanding is that he's gone back to Sibiu to wait for me, and Elena must be working her strategies at this very moment. No matter that we parted in friendship and warmth. History has shown me the wily ways of the courtesan, as well as that figure's untenable position, her or his lack of choices.

 

 

IN THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES, scandal sheets poured a kaleidoscope of fancy about the seductress Lupescu into the minds of readers. It's almost as if the Jewess born to very little future had been asked to oversee the dreams and fears of an entire nation. Her father's name was Wolff, a sure sign of his ethnicity; but he married a good-looking Viennese who'd already renounced her Judaism for the Roman Catholic faith. Before the wedding, he was baptized as an Orthodox Christian, ostensibly to satisfy her. It was shortly after this that he Latinized “Wolff” into “Lupescu,” a reference to the same mammal.

Jews weren't allowed to own businesses in Romania in those days. Nor could they attend the same schools as non-Jewish Romanians. But her father's new identity allowed Elena Lupescu to get an education at the respectable but mediocre Pitar Moş convent in Bucharest. Years later, it was magically transformed into the high-class convent of Notre Dame de Sion, and a story was embroidered about Lupescu as a little girl meeting teenaged Prince Carol, when her mother took her to have tea with the poet queen Carmen Sylva. Historians are quick to deflate the fantasy by saying that Lupescu never met the queen in her entire life. Still, it's hard for me to let go of the sunburst of red-gold hair on the terrace of the royal country house in Sinaia. It outshines reality and makes it seem sham, like a world devoid of fantasies about Romulus.

Meeting the queen is one of the many stories told by the poor, disenfranchised Elena Lupescu in flight from a second-class identity. Just as Coco Chanel reworked her biography to hide her beginnings as a convent orphan, Lupescu allegedly went to absurd lengths to construct a respectable, aristocratic past. Her biographers mock her for changing her writing from the artless, even hand of a schoolgirl to the sweeping, pointed script she'd seen in the writing of royalty. But such scholars are only betraying their own snobbery and pretentious outrage at the usurped legitimacy of the ruling class.

With a cloth, I wipe each album carefully, while Mom irritatedly points out specks or spots I've missed. In my hands is the record of her struggles from Yiddish-speaking immigrant in a provincial upstate village to the Syracuse
Post-Standard
's “All-Time Woman of Achievement.” She is, in a sense, another answer to Lupescu's dilemma of disenfranchisement—living proof that discipline, patience and drudgery can bring at least a few of the social awards Lupescu desperately desired. But Mom's stolid march toward social acceptance provides little food for fancy and consequently has very little to do with my story. It could never be thought of as fiction.

Albums finally dusted, loose clippings reglued, I follow Mom's meticulous directions for putting them away. So detailed are they that it begins to feel as if she's seeking to control my body systems. She tells me when to lift an album, when to put it down and how to center it on the shelf. I start believing that she's hoping to decide when I inhale or exhale, even the changing circumference of my pupil dilation. Riding with me to the shopping mall an hour later, she insists on even more stringent control. I've known the route since childhood but still must drive as her robot. Like a drill sergeant, Mom calls out signs and lights, announces precisely how many feet from a turn to signal and stops short of putting her own foot on the brake. When I explode uncontrollably, she looks at me with false white-gloved astonishment, claiming innocence as to what could possibly have caused my bullish, tasteless behavior.

It's dawned on me slowly that all this insanity is merely the result of oedipal tension, which has increased tellingly since the death of my father. Something about my body unlocks impulses that frighten and annoy Mom. I know it's true, because our closeness flourishes on the telephone without a hitch; it's only when we're in the same room that she becomes irritated and resorts to obsessive critiques. “Why do you walk like that?” she might say, in imitation of Romulus. “There's a strange spot on your forehead. I sure hope it's nothing serious.” “You never used to have jowls. It must be the drinking.” Or, “That shirt makes you look even fatter. Why don't you go and change.”

As I dart into traffic at Mom's myopic order, nearly causing an accident, I consider the fact that an analogous reaction occurs whenever Romulus and I have close physical contact. It's been stupid of me never to acknowledge the incestuous parameters of a relationship with someone young enough to be my son. There's no problem during genital contact, but what is that strange fidgeting on his part before we go to sleep? What is the sense of embarrassment he projects when we're seated side by side at the movies? Certainly, it has some parallel to what happens between Mom and me, a squeamish sense of being trapped in an uncomfortable intergenerational physical intimacy, saddled with the body of the one from whom one expects protection. A fear that such intimacy threatens to breach taboos about desire. I'd almost call it a kind of incestuous repulsion.

While Mom's directions continue to reduce the world to her miniature golf course, I retreat into thoughts about Lupescu's strategies for distancing herself from her own oedipal dilemmas. Unlike me, she devised a drastic escape from the magnetic pull of family romance. She reinvented her past, thereby shedding the mantle of generation. “Dad? Oh, he was interested in chemistry,” she'd tell the few aristocratic visitors whom she could get to curtsy or kiss her hand after she became the consort of the prince about to become king. It was a revision of her father's ownership of a small notions shop in the city of Iaşi. This in itself was a miracle, since Jews normally couldn't own businesses. In fact, by the middle of World War I, few people of any kind were able to make a living in Iaşi. A large percentage were dying of infection or starvation.

The grotesque deprivations of life in wartime only exacerbated Lupescu's taste for glamour. I can understand this principle completely: the worse the conditions, the more urgent the need for fantasy. Disadvantaged people penalized by normal rules often flourish in chaos. I like to think of her trudging through the frozen streets in the winter of 1916-1917, the coldest in half a century, past houses stripped bare by renegade soldiers or emptied by robbers. She must have passed some of the thousands of war refugees swarming the streets, many half dead from typhoid or smallpox, others clattering by as corpses in horse-drawn carts.

Within this setting of want, the fledgling temptress managed to hook a lieutenant in Prince Carol's regiment named Tîmpeanu. The name was close enough to the Romanian word
tîmpit,
or “idiot,” to lead to jokes among the soldiers about his stupidity in marrying her. The relationship was, as predicted, short-lived because of Lupescu's promiscuity. A few years after the war ended, the gay divorcée moved to Bucharest.

 

 

MOM HOBBLES through a shop at the mall, instructing me to hold up bargain dresses for her perusal. She scowls at the prices, standing straighter than usual in the face of curious onlookers. They're surprised to see such a decrepit lady on the loose and in control of her own life. If such judges of others—including the historians who sort out villains and heroes—could live one day in the life of the people they portrayed, I bet they'd rearrange their score sheets. They might even find a way to reinterpret Lupescu as something other than a poisonous femme fatale or Jewish scourge.

It was the street life of Calea Victoriei and Bulevardul Kiseleff in Bucharest that finally granted Lupescu's desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness. Among the promenading dandies and ostentatious women, she was able to walk right past the locus of her most visceral fantasy, the palace. Or she hung from a balcony overlooking the street in an apartment that belonged to three former school chums and coyly called down to the young cruisers below, sifting through the crowd of eligible men for one who might have a distant connection to the prince.

By 1925, gossip had it that Carol was already tired of his three-year marriage to Princess Helen of Greece. The whole affair had been arranged by Missy as a way of making Carol forget about Zizi Lambrino. Publicly, Missy patted herself on the back for having turned her son's life around. “I fought a mighty battle for you to put you back on the straight road,” she loftily admonished in a letter that has become a public document. “Now it lies before you to walk straight upon it.”

The marriage that Missy had brokered between her son and Princess Helen was also supposed to strengthen the royal network that controlled the Balkans. Unfortunately, the two young people couldn't have been more ill-matched. Within a year of the wedding, Helen loudly declared herself appalled by Carol's pop taste, his poorly cut uniforms and his lack of interest in interior decorating. His table manners were a source of constant irritation as well; but he countered all her criticisms with the remark that he found her refinements deadly boring. In fact, even Missy mocked the princess's regal propriety and coolness, her perfect hairdos and overly cultured conversation. It was common knowledge that after the birth of their son, the married couple had begun to sleep separately.

If Carol needed a model for infidelity, his mother was, as always, a convenient case. By now, Missy had dropped all subterfuge in her affair with Barbo Ştirbey. They carried on right in front of the palace staff.

Marie's affair with Ştirbey had never stopped piquing Carol's resentment, but there were other reasons for his increasing rage against his mother and her consort. The fact that Ştirbey and the other Liberals in the government dictated policy with the help of Missy infuriated him. All of it smelled of corruption and went against his youthful fantasies of populism and democracy, instilled in him by his homosexual tutor Mohrlen.

The time would come, however, when Carol would far outdo both his mother's infidelities and her reliance on camarillas. If what happens next titillates me, it's probably because I know how much my infatuation with Romulus irks my mother. Like Carol's, it's a descent from her notion of respectability, despite the chances she took in marrying my problem-ridden father.

 

 

BACK AT THE HOUSE, I help Mom try on the royal-blue budget dress she purchased. It brings out her intense blue eyes, still sparkling with their enormous energy. An argument follows over my suggestion that we now have cocktails. Mom finally agrees to a small glass of wine. I pour a larger one for myself and surreptitiously use it to swallow another two tablets of codeine.

The wine soothes Mom's concealed worries about her sister. Her attempts to control my every move vanish. A sweet Mom takes the fore, eagerly asking me about my trip to Maramureş, the houses, peasants and animals I saw. Astonishingly, admiration for my love of adventure and travel are beginning to leak slyly from her often critical features. A strange absorption floods her face like a remembrance. She left her Russian shtetl at two, so she can't be reacting to memories; but my descriptions must still strike her as familiar, like something hidden in a collective unconscious imported from rural Russia.